White and Other Tales of Ruin (41 page)

“
A walk will do you good then.” Butch should be saying this, Roddy thought. He should be the one having a go at Norris. But Butch was dead.

“
This way,” Max pointed. Roddy trusted him. Norris merely followed on behind.

After an hour of walking up a slow incline the trees ended abruptly, and they faced up the gentle slope towards the top of the mountain. And on the slope, catching the high sun and reflecting nothing, like a hole in the world, sat the tomb.

Roddy was eighteen the first time he had seen Stonehenge. After the initial shock it had preyed on his mind, its sheer immensity belittling his own existence. He had never been able to come to terms with the time and effort spent on its construction. History sat huddled within and around the stone circle, and in a way it was truly timeless, an immortal artefact of mankind’s short life. But it was also a folly, massive and utterly impressive, but a work of affected minds nonetheless.

His shock now was infinitely greater.

The three men stood speechless, looking up at the rock. It sprouted from the ground half a mile away, rising fifty feet into the sky. It was a featureless black obsidian, reflecting little, revealing no discernible surface irregularities. It appeared to be roughly circular in shape, rising to a blunt point. Around its girth grasses and a kind of curving, pleasingly aesthetic bramble formed a natural skirt, bed in dust and soil blown against its base by aeons of sea breezes. It was a marker of some kind, obviously, and the only thing the ancients usually found worthy of such a grandiose statement was the corpse of a king, or a sleeping god.

It was not the appearance of the monument that sent the men into a stunned, contemplative silence. It was impressive, but no more so than a warship cutting the sea with the sinking sun throwing it into bloody silhouette. The reaction came from the undeniable solidness of this thing, the suddenness of its existence before them. Realisation that this place was or had been inhabited, by whatever strange people had built it, sent cracks of doubt through the fragmented image the men had built up in their own minds.

Roddy despised the island, and he hated this thing. He could see the beauty in it, the history and dedication contained within its strange geometry. But the idea of meeting the people who had carved or constructed it, the race who could exist here on the island in peace and apparent prosperity, filled him with a dread he had never thought possible. It made him feel sick.

“
Oh my God,” Norris gasped at last.

“
I think not,” Max said.

“
It’s huge,” Roddy said. “Massive. I mean, how? It must weigh five hundred tons. It’s huge. Massive.” He was aware that he was repeating himself, but the words felt right. Huge. Massive.

After spending several minutes standing and staring, the men urged themselves onward. From the jungle behind them erupted a raucous explosion of bird calls, and as Roddy turned a cloud of gaily coloured birds lifted and headed back towards the sea. He wondered whether something had startled them. He thought of the vision he had experienced before his collapse, the woman’s shredded skin and bare muscles, the way she had motioned, the wide eyes and frustrated, silent scream.

He hoped they had left all that behind, rid themselves of worry by leaving the jungle. But he berated himself for entertaining such foolishness. The whole island lay beneath them, even though the jungle no longer surrounded them. They still breathed the air above the island, still saw fleeting glimpses of the place’s fauna. Much remained hidden, Roddy knew, but whatever haunted them would surely drag itself out of the trees, like an echo of themselves.

It took them a few silent minutes to reach to rock. Max hurried on ahead. Norris walked at Roddy’s side, glancing continuously over his shoulder.

“
More unusual than it seems,” Max said as they arrived. He leant against the stone, dwarfed by its size. His hand was flat and his fingers splayed across its smooth surface, and Roddy expected them to sink in at any moment, subsumed into the sick fleshy reality of whatever it was they were seeing. But nothing happened. Max ran his hand across the rock, palm pressed flat. “Much stranger.” His skin made a soft whispering sound as it passed over the surface, audible above the background noise of the island. He took it away, blowing into his open palm and watching the subtle layer of dust cloud into the air.

“
How so?” Norris asked. He approached the stone nervously.

Roddy stood back, unable to move nearer, experiencing a peculiarly linear vertigo as he looked up towards the top of the landmark. It felt like he and the stone were growing, expanding into the pointless surroundings, while everything else shrank back to reveal the skeleton of the world underneath. He expected at any time to strike his head on the ground, but his fall seemed to last forever.

“
It’s so smooth!” Norris gasped, drawing Roddy’s attention back to eye level. “Like glass.” He swept his hand across the surface, mimicking Max’s earlier movements as he blew dust from his fingertips. “This dust is gritty. Sand. Finer, though.”

“
Most dust is human skin,” Max said. Roddy wondered why the hell he chose to come out with his facts at the most inopportune of moments. Encouraged by Max’s comment, he could not help but imagine the rock as a giant altar to some malign deity, sucking to itself the flayed skin of its victims. They petrified and disintegrated, sticking to their god, merging into one, clothing it with themselves in eternal, unavoidable worship.

“
Yeah, thanks Max,” Norris said. Roddy and Max glanced at each other, eyebrows raised, at the cook’s use of the familiar. “That’s just the sort of useless fucking comment we fucking need right now. Butch would have come up with something like that, if he hadn’t drowned himself.”

“
What do you mean, drowned himself?” Roddy shouted angrily. His voice sounded muted here, as if tempered, or swallowed, by the huge rock.

Norris did not respond. He kept his hands spread on the rock, leaning there, eventually resting his forehead between them. “Come on. You saw his face.”

“
Ernie killed himself,” Roddy said, “Butch was killed. A world of difference, let me tell you. There’s no way —”

“
Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Norris sighed. He sounded muffled.

“
Sorry I said anything,” Max said. “Can’t help saying what I think.”

“
The sort of junk that flows into your head, you should just shut up all the time,” Norris said. “Just leave us to it. Just let us get on with things.” He stared back down the hill at the jungle, an expectant look in his eyes.

The three men fell silent, each for different reasons, each mulling over their own confused thoughts.

Roddy approached the rock but could not touch it. It seemed distasteful, like a huge living thing, standing there inviting and expecting their attentions. Max walked around its girth, taking a minute to describe a full circuit. Then he did it again, left hand in constant contact with the rock, left foot kicking at the plants growing around its base. Once or twice before he passed out of sight he paused, knelt closer to the ground to examine something in detail. Roddy was curious, but too on edge to ask him what he was looking at. In many ways, he didn’t want to know. To some extent, for the first time ever, he agreed with Norris. Max just had the habit of saying the wrong thing.

Or the right thing. And maybe that’s why it was so frightening.

“
I don’t think it’s man-made,” Max said as he completed his second circuit.

“
How do you know?” Roddy was intrigued, even though his heart told him to leave here as quickly as possible. The rock seemed to focus all his bad thoughts, nurturing them and giving them life. For the past few minutes he had been thinking about Norris’s words:
You saw his face
. Butch, standing in the stream, staring at the wall of water bearing down on him. There had been no time. No hope. Had there?

“
Too smooth, for a start,” Max said. “It’s been here for a long time — far too long for it to be man-made. It’s been scoured smooth by the wind, formed into this peculiar shape by ... I don’t know. The way the wind blows down from the mountain. Or up from the sea.”

“
But it’s so regular.”

Max shrugged. He looked almost embarrassed. “I know. But I’m certain it’s natural. There’s more. Take a look.” He walked some way around the rock, and Roddy followed. They left Norris sitting with his back against its black surface, nervously watching their progress. He kept glancing at the jungle they had just left, Roddy noticed. Waiting for something else to leave it, following them.

Max knelt and pulled back the skirt of grasses and bramble, wincing as thorns pricked at his already bloodied hands. “It dips into the ground,” he said. “Curves down. Like it’s not planted here, but was always here.”

“
How long’s always?”

Max did not answer. Instead, he stood and glanced over Roddy’s shoulder at Norris. From where they stood, Norris was mostly hidden. Only his feet and legs were visible, but there was always the chance that he could still hear. So Max’s voice was low.

“
There’s something else,” he said. “Follow me.” As he walked, he talked. “I can’t find any tool marks anywhere. Even on what I’m going to show you. It’s just a freak of nature, I reckon.”

“
Like this island,” Roddy said.

“
This island’s no freak,” Max replied eventually. “In fact, I think it’s pretty pure.”

“
Pure?”

“
Pure nature.” Again, Max had come out with something that sent a cold twinge into Roddy’s bones, nudged his imagination into overdrive. You’re a good friend, Max, he thought, but I wish you weren’t here. Sometimes, ignorance may be better.

“
Here,” Max said. He pointed.

There was something marring the smooth surface of the rock. At first it looked damaged, struck by a tumbling boulder from above, perhaps, or fragmented by frost over the centuries. But on closer inspection, Roddy saw that this was far from the truth. This small scar on the huge expanse of rock had a purpose to it. A design. Several rows of designs, in fact, running left to right or right to left, each of them strange in the extreme. Roddy reached out and felt the ridged reality of them. He withdrew his hand quickly, because they seemed to move under his touch, communicating their corrupted message through contact as well as sight. There was no sense to be made from them: some were shaped like bastardised letters from an unknowable language; others seemed to have sprouted from the rock, dictated by whatever was inside. They were knotted diagrams, random weatherings. Archaic language, or representations of things too alien to even try to comprehend.

Here, as elsewhere, there was no hint of tools having been used. No scratches, chips or runnels in the rock. If these markings were hand carved, then it was indeed a work of art, though an art as dark and disturbing as any Roddy had ever imagined. If they were naturally formed ... in a way, that was worse. It would be an evocation of Nature’s darkest side.

“
What the hell is this?” he said. “They’re horrible.”

“
My thoughts exactly,” Max whispered. “I really think we should go.”

“
Are you scared, Max?” Roddy asked. He thought he knew the answer and, if he was right, he did not want to hear it verbalised. Not by Max.

“
I’ve been scared ever since we got here,” Max said. “From the moment I stepped onto the beach, I’ve wanted to leave. And if the boat hadn’t been smashed up, I’m certain I’d have gone by now.”

“
You’d be dead.”

Max shrugged. “Tell that to Ernie or Butch.”

“
You think Butch let himself drown?”

Max frowned, chewed his lip, fighting with contradictory thoughts. He scratched his bald head, peeling scabs to reveal fresh ones beneath. If there was pain he seemed not to notice. “I think he had more of a chance than we like to let ourselves believe,” he said, finally. Then, as though reading Roddy’s mind: “It wasn’t hopeless.”

A sense of futility grabbed at Roddy, dragging any hidden hopes he may have had out into the open and butchering them. The black rock stood before him, soaking up his fears, reflecting only the weirdness the scarred area imparted. He turned to Max for comfort, but the big man looked as frightened as he felt. More so, if anything. To see a face usually so full of intelligence and good humour reduced to this — wan, pale, bloodied and empty of hope — was soul-shattering.

“
If Ernie was here he’d pray to God,” Roddy said, and Max nodded.

“
I reckon that’s why he’s not with us.”

They left the markings to fulfil whatever purpose they had been created for. Norris asked what they had found, and Max told him that the rock was naturally formed, not artificial as they had first thought. The cook seemed disappointed by this, and Roddy was tempted to show him the markings. To show him that if the rock was not natural, then whatever had made it was way removed from the human Norris may have hoped for.

They headed on up the mountain. The further they moved away from the rock, the more Roddy felt watched. And the more he thought about the processes which must have conspired to carve the rock out of the land, the more feeble and insignificant he became. If it had been formed by nature, then it was never intended for the likes of man. It was a secret thing nature had done, for its own inconceivable purposes. Now it had been seen, touched, mused upon. Roddy wondered just what must become of those who viewed something never meant to be seen, touched something intended only to be kissed by the wind, scoured by dust.