White and Other Tales of Ruin (43 page)

It was night-time, but he could still see, courtesy of a full yellow moon. It hung above the sea, its light shimmering from the surface of the water. Wisps of cloud passed across its face. Stars speckled the rest of the sky. Moonlight played around the edges of the pit, giving it the appearance of a pouting wound, pale and bloodless.

Roddy felt cold, but it was merely one more discomfort to add to the list. His bones ached, his arms were bruised and heavy, his legs sang with pins and needles. When he moved, everything hurt. Muscles cried out against the aggravation.

A moderate breeze was drifting across the island, carrying the tang of brine and seaweed, and other less readily identified smells. Decay, perhaps, death and putrescence. But subtle, like perfume for a murderer. The weather played games with his senses, while his own body sought to confuse him more. He was weak, so weak. His stomach rumbled angrily, calling for food. His gullet felt parched and rough, and the thought of water sent his throat into dry convulsions. Then he noticed that the dew decorating his body was thicker than water. He smeared his hand across his torn shirt and bare neck, and it came away sticky with blood. He must have been rolling around, striking himself on the ground, opening himself up so that his jaded blood seeped down between the rocks. Yet again, the island had drawn its fill.

Norris. His shout when he fell had been part scream, part laugh. Roddy had not even been conscious to bear witness the ceasing of the echoes. And Max had gone too, shouting incoherently, raging and raving into the night even before Norris had fallen. Had he seen the woman? Did the sight of her tortured body, floating in the darkness and gesticulating uselessly, finally drive him to distraction? He’d been shouting for God when he went, and Roddy was not sure whether he even believed in God. But faith was a fickle thing, and Roddy had often seen a sudden resurgence of belief when situations arose to encouraged it. Times when simple logic explained nothing.

He felt so weak. In the dark the ground beneath him was even stronger than before, full of power, vibrating with the life it seemed so hell bent on stealing. Perhaps it had begun sucking their energy from the moment they left the boat, finishing with some before others. Now, maybe Roddy was the only one left. Max had gone, and try as he might Roddy could not bring himself to believe in his survival. There were too many holes up here, too many sharp edges to fall victim to.

The sense of being unutterably alone — not just here, but in the whole world — fell upon him. He cried out with the hopelessness of it all, tried to picture people dying across the globe at that moment in the name of freedom and justice, but their plight did not touch him. Instead he mourned his own torpid, deserted soul, pleading for something to fill it, opening his heart up to enlightenment as he had inadvertently offered his flesh to the island. He waited for the light, yearned the warmth or whisper that would tell him God had found him. Had, in fact, never been away. He recalled his mother’s voice as she explained why he should say his prayers every night before bed. “God always knows you’re here, but it’s best to keep in touch, just in case,” she would say. As a lad, he had often wondered what the ‘just in case’ could entail. A slightly muddled God, perhaps, with a memory faded and fuddled with immense age? Now, he knew the case in ‘just in case’. He knew it, but however much he tried he just could not bring himself to believe that he had doomed himself simply by not believing. The God he was aware of from other people was not like that. He forgave, He loved everyone. He was everywhere, all the time, guiding fate. Steering torpedoes into engine rooms. Urging the cold glint of steel along wrist veins. Blowing sudden surges into streams, smashing heads open and laying pagan brains out to view.

But there was nothing other than the island, and the strange, inbred mutated things living here. Survival of the fittest, Max had said. Perhaps God had been here and found himself severely wanting. Here, something else reigned supreme.

Roddy raged and cursed. He shouted at the dark to keep it, and the things it contained, at bay. His wounds were one big agony, but individual pains made themselves known every time he moved. His agnosticism felt obvious to him now, but he knew also that he would have humbly and willingly admitted his mistake if comfort and peace would come to him from the dark.

But the dark gave up nothing. No comforting hand, no whisper of belonging. No animals either. No pig-faced monstrosities crawling from the pit to join their petrified cousins. Nothing.

Roddy suffered his pain and inevitable loss alone.

The night came to life. Sounds came from all around, some of them blatant, the more frightening ones secretive and covert. For long minutes Roddy sat still, certain that his fear would give him away, as something breathed heavily nearby. He could not move. Like the rocks around him, he thought that stillness would fool whatever was there. Then he slowly came to recognise a pattern in the breathing, and realised that he was hearing the sea, a mile or two away, as it broke onto the reef.

Something sent a shower of stones into the ravine. Claws snickered on rock as whatever it was scrabbled to safety. It trotted away from him, whining and growling.

There was a sound which could have been a shout in the distance, or a groan from nearby. Either way, he did not want to sit here and take any more. He was shaking with fear, recalling childhood days exploring woodland hollows and old deserted mills, the feeling of terror slowly taking hold until rational thought gave way to shouting and headlong flight. He could not afford to do that here, he knew, but still he felt the panic taking a firm grip. The same childhood fears reared their heads again. Things in the dark with him, things he could not see, reaching out to touch.

Roddy stood and began walking parallel to the ravine. He headed in the same direction Max had taken, half hoping through all his despised certainty that he would find him sitting on a rock, smiling sheepishly and running his hand across his bald head. Max would come out with some dry witticism, all the while taking charge of the situation and deciding what to do next. Now that there were only two of them, he would say, they had a better chance. Food, water, shelter for two is much easier to find than for four, or five. And for two who were friends, things were that much easier. So Norris was dead, he would say. So what? So who’s going to mourn the death of a Jonah? He would smile as he spoke, but somehow Roddy could not fit the words into his friend’s mouth.

Roddy stopped and looked around, vaguely shocked by his train of thought. From the ravine to his left, a sigh rose from darkness into silvery light. He wondered whether it was Norris finally striking bottom. It seemed all too possible. The landscape appeared even more alien at night, throwing up flashes of light here and there where luminous creatures darted or crawled, shadows darkening as animals passed by. The mountain seemed much higher than it had before, and suddenly Roddy knew that he had to make it to the top. From there, as Max had said, he would see everything. Whether he really wanted to do so was a moot point. For now it was a purpose.

The dark felt heavy, the presence of something thick and gelatinous instead of the absence of light. His going was hard, pushing through the night, hands heavy on the ends of his arms, feet blocks of rock dangling from his ankles. He was weak, hungry and empty. His mind felt drained, picked over by whatever they had offended by landing here and then discarded, thrown back into his skull like the mess of organs after an autopsy.

The ravine opened up next to him. Dark and deep and cool, inviting, urging him to enter, forget the hardships of aching muscles and swollen tongue. Another sulphuric sigh, volcanic or organic, neither seemed too difficult to believe.

He thought of Butch and Ernie resting in the ground, where grubs made use of them and the cool earth kissed their skin. He imagined the comfort of lying down, shedding all fears and concerns.

He kept walking.

Each sound moved him closer to the edge. Every screech or growl or cry of feeding animals sapped him some more. His shoulders hung lower, his eyelids dipped shut. Pain merged, physical discomfort and mental anguish metamorphosing into something far more affecting; an agony of the soul, blazing white but invisible in the night. Burning in a vacuum, because Roddy was as drained of faith as any human being had ever been. The worst thing was not his spiritual emptiness; it was the fact that none of it was through his own choice. He felt mentally raped, but his rage at this was tempered by what he had seen over the past couple of years. The men and women he had watched die. The ships, burning fiercely as flesh melted and merged into their lower decks. The bobbing bodies of drowned men, eyes picked out by fortuitous fish. Blazing seas of oil. Lands scoured by war, until the virgin rock of the Earth showed through in supplication.

This island had changed him. Now, it intended to destroy him. Roddy was unable to avoid such intent.

Somehow, he survived the night.

There was nothing on top of the mountain. Roddy was not sure exactly what he had been expecting, but the mountain-top was bare, swept free of soil and plants by whatever winds blew at this altitude.

Day dawned surprisingly; light was something he had not expected to see ever again. Shocked into alertness, Roddy looked down at himself. Blood had dried and patterned his shirt with dark streaks, and his skin was still assaulted by the cruel sun. He looked worse than he ever had. His hands were slashed to scabby ribbons, his knees and stomach cut and ripped by the falls he had so obviously suffered on his climb during the night. Below him, further down the mountainside, the great slash of the ravine headed down towards the sea miles in the distance. The jungle was there, too, a sprawling green border between the mountain and the beach. It looked so alive and lush from up here. So friendly.

Roddy began to cry. If the ravine had been close by he would have gladly stepped into it, revelling in the cool rush of air as he let the island imbibe him. It seemed that the island was holding its breath, and had been doing so from the moment they had landed, yearning for the time when it would once more be free of their taint. Finishing himself now would do that. The view from here was wonderful, the island was raw and beautiful, but it was a vision never intended for the enjoyment of Man. He was stealing it merely by looking. Even from here, he could see shadows moving beneath the trees at the edge of the jungle, like tigers pacing their cage.

He wiped tears from his face with the backs of his hands. He wanted to feel a sense of rebellion against the terrible power of the island, but the emotions necessary to do so were hidden from him. Bitterness manifested itself as desperation; anger brought new tears; defiance ricocheted and struck him as dread. It was hopeless. Perhaps, he mused, it always had been. Maybe they should have listened to Ernie and stayed on the boat. Behind him, Ernie, Butch and Norris were already blending into the memory of the landscape.

Roddy stood and turned his back on the way he had come. He walked across the plateau of the mountain-top, and if there had been a hole he would have slipped into it. A steady breeze blew, cooling him where he still bled. He looked at the bruise on his elbow, the result of his leap from the stricken ship. Now it was surrounded by other wounds, all of them combining to wear him down, drop him down, ease him eventually earthward.

He remembered another mountain walk. Years ago in the valleys of Monmouthshire, following in the footsteps of a man called Machen. His parents had pointed out invisible landmarks and left Roddy to feel the majesty of the place privately. He had been eleven then, just beginning to find his own mind. Looking back now, he thought maybe that was the last time he ever truly, whole-heartedly believed in God. Since then, he had seen cruelties and sadism beyond nightmare. Bravery too, and compassion. But bad weighed heavier on his soul.

As the mountain began to slope down towards the opposite side of the island, Roddy saw the cove. It was at least a mile away, still enveloped in the shadow of the mountain. But the cove and surrounding area were different to the rest of the landscape, marked somehow. Tainted.

In the centre of the bay, obviously foundered, sat a sailing ship. Even from this distance Roddy could see that it was wrecked.

There was a moment of shock at the realisation that others had been here before them, but it was short-lived. It was obvious from what he could see that no one was alive down there. The area around the cove was dead, a blank spot on a painting where the colours of life were absent, and sea birds were using the wreck as a roost.

Like an animal seeking food, Roddy had suddenly been given a blind purpose. If one group of people would land, so could others. Rescue did not cross his mind, because he knew he was already lost. But if he did nothing else before the island finished him, he had to leave a message for any future visitors.

A warning.

* * *

5. HELL HATH NO LIMITS

Once, Roddy had been part of a cleaning out crew on a bombed ship. The effect of an explosion in an enclosed space was dreadful, and he thought he would never really get over the terrible things he saw in that tangled mess. In a way, the worst sights were those bodies still recognisable as such. The rest — the mess on the floors, the splashes across shattered bulkheads — could have been anything.

This was worse.

What Roddy saw scattered around the small cove sent him into deep shock. The more he saw, the worse he felt, and the more he was duty-bound to see. It was as if beholding the sights gave them weight, making them real and significant. He wandered from scene to scene, an observer in the most gruesome and perverted museum ever conceived.