White and Other Tales of Ruin (42 page)

He looked at his fingertips, where grime from the rock markings clung to his sweat. He had left something of himself on the rock, both physically and mentally. Most dust is human skin, he thought. In decades and centuries to come, he wondered how much of the dust coating the monstrous monolith would consist of Butch, or Ernie. Or any of them. And where would their souls be residing? In the hands of God, becalmed and soothed by the promise of salvation and goodness in the life everafter? Or in the rock? Buried in blackness. Trapped forever within sight of life. Teased and tortured by purely human needs.

The island seemed to be changing, becoming even further removed from the outside world. It was as though by discovering this place they had driven it further into itself, allowing greater disassociation with the world at large. A world of people and machines and war, where pride-scars marred every real achievement and genocide was considered fair sport.

Roddy looked up towards the head of the mountain, then back at the receding rock and the jungles beyond. Further down, across the slowly waving heads of trees and through spiralling flocks of birds, the sea stretched out, past the reef and on towards civilisation. A timeless power, pounding itself to pieces on the sharp shores of the island.

They needed food, water, rest and shelter. They craved all the basics, even while immersed in the extraordinary. There was a sense now, between the three men, that they had to reach the top of the mountain, to see whether there was anything else on the other side. To see, simply, whether there was any hope at all.

But hope too needs feeding. It fled, once and for all, before they even got there.

* * *

4. NOT QUITE ALONE

The three survivors, hardly talking in an effort to conserve their meagre energy, worked their way up the steep incline. The pinnacle of the mountain still lay above and ahead, perhaps only three hundred feet higher. The slopes here were pierced by dark holes, small in diameter but disappearing into invisible depths. Max threw stones into the first few and listened to the rattle and echo of their descent. He soon stopped, because they could not hear them striking bottom. He said they were volcanic, but to Roddy they looked more like throats.

The landscape had changed drastically from the grasslands around the black rock. Instead of bushes and undergrowth, rocks of strangely twisted formations grew from the ground, with a low, loamy grass coating the intervening spaces. Its blades looked sharp. The rocks were shattered into points, shining with oily colours, changing texture and shade depending upon which angle they were viewed from. Heathers sprouted intermittently, strange, sick-looking plants which gave off a stale stench.

It was late afternoon and the sun was dipping towards the horizon behind the men. They were following their own shadows. Roddy found it agreeable. That way, he would be able to tell when something rushed him from behind.

Norris walked on ahead. He had begun mumbling to himself, his words bitter without managing to make any sense. He glanced around continuously, staring past Roddy and Max as though they weren’t there, gaze fixed on the pointed black rock receding below and behind them. His eyes were wide, but drained of their constant state of defiance, a defence mechanism against those who mocked or feared the cook as a Jonah. Without that familiar expression, he was even more disturbing. And disturbed.

They came to a ravine and stopped for a rest. Max wandered off along the gash in the land, towards where he said he could hear water cascading into the dark depths. He suggested they should have a drink. Roddy agreed, but at the same time he was simply too exhausted to go looking for one. Far better to curl up here, lick the dew from the ground in the morning. Norris simply failed to answer.

The sun was low down to the sea, bleeding across the horizon and throwing the ravine into shadow. Roddy sat on a rock shaped vaguely like a pig, facing away from the sunset, watching the dividing line between light and dark creep slowly up the ravine wall. Joan had loved to watch sunsets arrayed across the South Wales mountains, he remembered; but at the same time, he realised that her face escaped him. He had kissed her so much, but when he tried to recall her features, there was nothing there. No voice, no smell, no image of the woman he thought he loved. It scared him, but it was also a comfort. He could not wish Joan here with him; bad enough that he was here alone.

The pending darkness tapped into new realms of disquiet. Roddy supposed that this was where the beach stream originated, and he imagined the slit in the earth to be inhabited by spiders as big as his head, snakes ready to eat each other to survive. There must be nooks and crannies down there, home to bats, scorpions, insects. There could even be people, strange half-blind albinos who had never even seen the sea and who had only a vague, mythological sense of the world outside the canyon. Next to him, another rock hunched low in the attitude of a fat-bellied sow. Roddy wondered whether they were wild boar, caught in some ancient volcanic action. Or perhaps they had once been the more adventurous dwellers of the pit, petrified by their sudden exposure to sunlight.

Norris remained standing behind him, still staring back the way they had come. His long shadow gave him all the attributes of a clumsy scarecrow.

When he laughed, that impression vanished. Only a human could laugh like that. Roddy could not remember hearing such a sound for a long time, certainly since before their ship was sunk six days previously. But here it was twisted into something grim and foreboding, caught by the ravine and distorted into an echoing snigger. Here, it was a laugh mad with something.

Norris was pointing back down the slope towards the jungle, giggling and sobbing. He backed up, slipped on flat ground and slid slowly over the edge. He cried out as darkness tugged at his legs.

“
Max! Max!” Roddy leapt to his feet and collapsed with leg cramps. As his muscles knotted and writhed he crawled to the drop. His hands left blood smeared across sharpened stones. He was becoming one big wound.

Norris was pawing at a slowly moving slope of scree. Lying at about thirty degrees, his feet hung over a sheer drop into impenetrable darkness. No hope, Roddy thought, but he was determined not believe that, not even here, after everything that had happened. Best for him if he goes, crossed his mind, and the idea felt horribly true. Norris suddenly quietened and grinned up at him, and Roddy realised with a sickening certainty that he thought so, too.

The pit was becoming darker by the minute. The sun was not halting its descent simply to watch the unfolding of this pitiful human tragedy. Roddy reached out his hand, lying as near to the drop as he dared, terrified that he too would be dragged over the edge. “Grab my hand!” he shouted, his voice echoing back seconds later. “Grab it, Norris!”

Norris was swimming in scree. For each handful he grabbed, two slipped past him and spun out over nothing. Their fall into the ravine, a collection of minor collisions with the sides, echoed as a sibilant whisper from the dark. The dark, now approaching from all sides as the sun steamed into the sea.

“
Norris!” Roddy shouted, suddenly terrified, petrified that they were all being sucked down, finally, into the island. Butch and Ernie were already there, held below its misleading surface; now, it wanted the rest of them.

Roddy edged himself forward. Only a few more inches, but enough to grasp onto one of Norris’s flailing hands. The cook’s reaction was not what Roddy had expected; he was silent and still for the briefest instant, then he began to shout. The more Roddy pulled, the more Norris squirmed and wriggled, in an apparent effort to dislodge his would-be rescuer’s grip.

The pit yawned wide, dark and silent.

Just as he began to slide, Roddy felt a weight land on his legs. Mumbled words accompanied the impact, spat from a red raw throat, rich in blood and confusion. The sound was horrible, the words worse, because they were utterly without hope. Max was sat astride his knees, hands curling into his belt and hauling back with all his might. It was not enough. “He’s still slipping!” Roddy said. “Norris, you’re still slipping!” Max uttered something between a laugh and a sob. Roddy could not see him, of which he was glad.

“
It’s so cold,” Norris shouted, eyes flickering up into his head to show only the whites, as if there was much more to see in there. “So cold, so helpless, so hopeless. Where’s the point now? Where’s the purpose?”

“
Pull me up, Max!” Roddy shouted, but the big man was working to his own agenda. He was hauling on Roddy’s belt, sobbing, and even in the riot of movement Roddy could feel him shaking. With terror, anguish or elation, he could not tell.

“
Oh God,” Max began to whisper, his voice curiously louder than before, words carrying the weight of a lifetime. “Oh God, help us, oh God, help us ... for fuck’s sake, help us!”

Roddy felt his fingers beginning to stiffen and burn with pain. When he was a boy he had always wondered why people hanging onto a precipice in films let go. He thought them foolish; to know that to let go was death and still to do so. Certainly their fingers may begin to hurt, the cramps and pain may become almost unbearable. But when it was a matter of will — when they knew that they could either put up with the pain and live, or relinquish their hold and die — there should really have been no choice.

His grip was slipping. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, willing his muscles to hold, cursing them as they ignored his call. Behind him, Max was shaking even more, and his muttered prayers were increasing in volume. He was begging God for mercy, or maybe shouting at him, apportioning blame as he asked forgiveness. But from all Roddy had learnt, he knew that God would never be shamed into anything.

Norris was still shouting, words veering in and out of focus, coherent one second, meaningless gibberish the next. His right hand, until now pawing at loose rock to save himself from the pit, began to push, instantly increasing the pressure on Roddy’s grip. He’s letting go, Roddy thought. Letting go, in every way he can. What pain is he going through?

“
Pull, Max! I can’t hold him —”

Everything happened at once. Everything bad. In those few seconds any semblance of control fled into the twilight, and panic found its place and made itself forever comfortable.

First, Max screamed. The sound was terrifying. Roddy’s scalp tingled and tightened, and a shiver grabbed hold of his limbs and would not let go. He sensed Max standing up behind him, letting go of his belt in the process. The big man ran, still screaming, across the broken stones and weirdly twisted heathers of the hillside. Roddy turned his head for a moment, watched as Max ran from light to dark. He passed from day to night with the look of someone who could never return.

Then Roddy began to slip forward across the sharp stones. He was fast approaching what he perceived to be the point of no return.

He saw the ghost. The woman did not appear, as though she had never been there, but made herself apparent. She was floating in the darkness near the centre of the ravine, slightly lower down than Roddy and the still struggling Norris. She was naked of clothes and flesh, bones glimmering in the failing light, hair sprouting wildly from her patchwork scalp. Her hands were held out, palms up. Her mouth hung open in a forlorn scream, but she uttered no sound. Her eyes were the brightest points in the dark pit, but they gleamed with madness, not intellect.

Norris brought up his right hand, clawed frantically at Roddy’s fingers, then slipped free. He raised his hands gleefully, mouth wide open and emitting a high, keening laugh as he slid slowly back on the moving scree. With a shout, he disappeared over the edge. His call continued for a long time, and Roddy could not properly discern the point at which it turned into an echo of its former self. Even the echoes had echoes.

From the pit, a smell rose up. Something dead, something unwelcome. A warning, or a gasp, or the glory in a death.

“
Where are you now?” Roddy asked hopelessly, expecting no answer.

The world began to spin. His guts churned and he vomited, stomach acids burning into the raw flesh of his fingers where Norris had peeled away streaks of skin.

My skin, Roddy thought, down there now, under a dead man’s nails. I wonder if he’s hit bottom yet.

The woman was still there, but fading, pleading with him to reach out and touch her. But somehow he knew it was a deceit, she only wanted him to tumble over the edge after Norris, so he pushed himself back until he was cutting his knees and elbows on solid, flat rock. The woman disappeared, hands held out in a warding off gesture.

He began to shake. The sky was dark, as though the episode had lasted for hours instead of minutes. His limbs jerked and his head began to pound the rock, his nerves pirouetting him into unconsciousness.

He was trying desperately to identify a constellation in the night sky. In some vague way he thought God may send him a sign of comfort, something familiar to hang onto. But as he frothed at the mouth and passed out, everything was alien. Even the stars showed no sign of friendship. They stared down as he battered himself to pieces on the island.

When he came to it was dark. The sun had truly set.

Moisture had settled on him, like tiny glimmering insects mistaking him for the ground. His limbs ached, his mouth was dry, tongue swollen. His neck felt ready to snap if he moved, but slowly he raised himself up onto one elbow. His back, cut and crispy with dried blood, ripped free of the spiky rocks beneath him. Hauling himself from a bed of knife blades would have felt much the same.