White and Other Tales of Ruin

1. THE DEVIL’S CHAPLAIN

On their fifth day adrift at sea, they saw an island.

At first, there were only teasing hints of land: a twisted clump of palm fronds; darting specks in the sky which may have been birds; a greenish tinge to the underside of the soft clouds in the north, just above the horizon. They should have felt impelled to paddle towards it, but five days of sun, thirst and heat had drained them of hope. They lay slumped in the boat, their skin red and blistered, tongues swollen, lips split and black with dried blood.

Their ship had been torpedoed and sunk five days earlier. So far as they knew, they were the only survivors. They had begun to feel cursed, not blessed.

“I think there’s an island there,” Butch said, “unless the clouds are green with envy.” He was small, normally chipper, and one side of his face was badly bruised from the sinking. He knelt at the front of the lifeboat and stared out across the sea, a grotesque figurehead.

Roddy closed his eyes against the blazing sun, but still it found its way through. It was as though his eyelids were turning transparent through lack of sustenance. The lifeboat had been capsized when they found it, and any supplies previously stored on board had been swallowed by the sea. On the third day it had rained, and they had managed to trap enough water in cupped hands and bundled clothes for a few mouthfuls each. Since then, they had gone thirsty. Roddy felt life seeping from his body with every drop of sweat.

Ernie was the only officer with them, but thankfully he had refused to pull rank. He seemed to acknowledge, as they all did, that their position levelled anything so fleeting as grade. They had all been thrown together by the disaster of war, into the same class; that of survivor. So he prayed out loud instead, and at first his praying had helped, until Roddy had commented on how prayers had not aided the other three hundred of the ship’s crew. Since then Ernie had been sitting at the stern, spouting occasional brief outbursts of worship as if to goad the others into violence.

It was not that Roddy had no sense of religion. It simply felt redundant out here, in the middle of the ocean. Today, he thought, God was indifferent.

“Definitely an island,” Butch said. “Look. Leaves, or something. Covered in bird shit, too.”

Roddy managed to raise his head and upper body until he was sitting up. Joints creaked in protest, he moaned in sympathy. His stomach felt huge and heavy and swollen. Ironic, seeing as he had not eaten for days. The sun beat at his forehead like a white-hot sledgehammer, trying to mould him all out of shape. He followed the direction Butch was indicating and saw an island of dead things floating by. But among the brown leaves, several huge egg shapes clung on with wispy tenacity.

“Coconuts,” he said.

“Must be migrating,” Butch commented.

Norris, apparently asleep until now, raised his hairy head. “Do they migrate?”

“Stupid bastard,” Butch muttered, but it was to himself more than Norris. Survival may have thrown them together, but it could not change the way they all thought of the cook. He was unliked and unlikeable. He had been on three ships which had been sunk in the past year, and if anyone attracted the badge of Jonah, it was Norris. He took any such suggestion to heart and fought the man who made it, which only drove the gossip underground and made it harsher.

“Shut your mouth, Norris,” Ernie said. “Of all the people God would choose to put on our boat of survivors — ”

“I put myself here, mate,” Butch cut in.

“Of all the people,” Ernie continued, unabated, “we get you.”

Norris sat up and winced. “What do you mean by that, you trumped up shit?” His lips were bleeding. Skin had sloughed from his burnt forehead, and now hung down over his eyes. Roddy wondered vaguely whether it helped to keep the sun at bay, and almost put his hand up to his own forehead to see whether he was in the same state.

“He means,” said Max, “that you’re a Jonah. A curse, a bad omen. You’re the ancient mariner, and you wear our lives around your scrawny neck.”

“Ancient! You’re the ancient one, you old bastard. Look at you, big and bald…”

Norris trailed off when he saw that nobody was paying him any attention. Max did not bother to fill him in on the significance of what he had said. Butch was banging on the gunwale with the palm of his hand, trying to attract their attention. Max stood in the centre of the boat, and Roddy marvelled once again at his resilience. He was over six feet tall, big without being fat, bald as a baby and about as mild-mannered. The wrong man for a war, Roddy had always maintained. Max was intelligent, educated and sensitive, and Roddy had seen him cry more than once. He was also one of the bravest men Roddy knew. But his was a bravery gained by confronting his fears and grabbing them by the throat, not the blind boldness of rushing a machine-gun emplacement without a second thought. That bordered more on foolishness in Roddy’s book. Max was brave because he would never let his fears defeat him.

“Now I see it,” Max said.

Butch stood as well, but became annoyed when he could not see the island.

“Sit down, shorty,” Max growled. “I’m lookout for the next couple of hours.”

“All heart, you are.” Butch sat but remained staring forward, as if willing the island into view.

By now it was obvious that the tides, winds and fate were carrying them towards the land hidden below the horizon. The ceiling of clouds reflected dull green, giving them a tantalising glimpse of what the island may contain. Hours passed. The sea lifted, tilted and dipped them closer. Ernie sat at the stern and said thanks to God. Hope had begun to bleed into their thoughts, reviving them, aggravating their hunger and thirst with possible assuagement on the island. Ernie prayed, and they all heard and wanted to believe him. Maybe God had been watching them, guiding them on their way with a wave of his hand, steering them towards the island, and salvation.

As darkness began to fall and the land slowly emerged out of the sea, Roddy felt an emptiness inside. It was as though he were looking at a nothing, a physical manifestation of the void in his beliefs. He tried to thank God, but found his thoughts as cold and as empty as the island before him appeared.

He looked around at his companions. None of them seemed inclined to paddle to reach land any quicker. It was as if they were all enjoying these final, brief moments cast aimlessly adrift.

The sounds from the island hurt their senses.

After five days at sea, with little more than the soporific waves and their own voices to listen to, the cacophony of the breaking waters was almost unbearable. Half a mile out from the island the sea smashed into a barely visible reef, turning white and violent. Their boat nudged its way through a toothless gap, as though guided in by a helping hand, and Ernie sat with his eyes closed and his mouth working, prayers tumbling forth like bodies from a sinking ship. Spray from the disturbed sea swept across the boat and soaked them. Roddy could not help opening his mouth and tasting the water; salt stung his dried and split lips, and the bitter tang of the sea drained once more into his throat.

“Thank God,” Norris said, and Ernie agreed.

“Can’t wait to meet the native women,” Butch called dryly.

“Thought you had a missus at home,” Max said.

“At home, yes.” Butch nodded, and Roddy could not help but laugh at his semi-serious expression. His laughter was short-lived. It was not the place for it, and they all felt that; silence reigned once more. Merriment did not sit right with the roar of the surf behind them.

When the boat nudged onto the beach, Roddy felt a sick lurch in his guts. Everything was suddenly real, solid, and he noticed the pattern of grain in the wood of the boat for the first time. He saw how some of the oar mountings had begun to rust and dribble a red stain onto the timber. He could feel the tightness of his shoes, the abrasiveness of their insides as though they were already full of sand. He was even aware of his own body, in more detail than at any time during the past five days. His bruised left elbow, where he had struck it jumping from the burning and sinking ship. The splinters in his hands and forearms, from his struggle to turn the capsized lifeboat upright. His memories held weight, too. He thought of Joan, his girlfriend back home, and realised that she had barely entered his mind since the sinking. Now, with the possibility of survival clear again, images of Joan were flashing back. Her willing smile, bottle-green eyes, generous nature. A hard, bitter kiss on the day he had left her to go to war. For a while he had thought that she was blaming him, but he knew now that her anger was directed elsewhere, at an unfairness impossible to personify. Her bitterness had stayed with him, transferred in the kiss.

The island was reminding him of who he was.

Butch climbed from the boat and fell drunkenly to his knees on the wet sand. Max followed, then Norris, who staggered further along the beach. He was staring beneath the palm trees skirting the sands.

“Come on,” Roddy said to Ernie. The officer remained at the stern of the boat, unresponsive, rocking with the gentle movements of the lagoon. “Ernie!”

Ernie’s eyes blinked to life. Moisture replaced their dark sheen. “God brought us here,” he said, but it sounded more like a challenge than a statement.

“Yes, sir, He did,” Roddy said, though he doubted any truth in his words. He would like to think it was the case, but his faith said no. His faith, drummed into him by his parents and peers, hanging in a void in his heart where truth ached to penetrate. “God brought us here.”

“But why?” Ernie stood and walked unsteadily along the boat, pausing at the grounded bow. He looked down at the sand, staring at the smudged footprints of the others already on the beach. Then he glanced back at Roddy, and his voice was distorted. “Why?”

“Why what?” Roddy asked, but the officer was climbing from the boat, stepping gingerly as if afraid that he would sink at any moment.

Roddy followed. He felt a moment of disorientation, so used was he to the constant movement of the boat. His stomach lurched as it tried to maintain the motion, then settled again. The sand was warm, even through his shoes.

Norris had wandered along the beach, the others waited in the shadow of palm trees. Leaves hung from the high branches, pointing down at the men like the wings of great sleeping bats.

Roddy fell to his knees with the others, wondering why he did not feel at all liberated. “At least it seems pretty verdant,” he said. “Where there are palms, there’s water, and birds, and animals. Fruit too. Food and water. Safety.”

Butch frowned past his normally busy eyes. He was staring out to sea, apparently coveting the terrible five days just gone by. His face was bleeding again but he seemed not to notice. Flies began to buzz him, thinking him already dead.

“Butch?” Roddy said. He did not like seeing the little man so quiet. It was unnatural, disconcerting in the extreme. “Butch? What say we go and find the native women?”

“Doubt there are any,” Butch said. His gaze never faltered; he wanted to avoid looking back at the island for as long as possible. “This place feels dead.”

Roddy shivered, aggravating his sunburn. It was a strange statement, especially from Butch, but it seemed so right. Roddy tried to shake the words but they were spoken now, and they held power. “Max?” he said, searching for something. Comfort, perhaps.

Max looked at him long and hard. Roddy had known him for a long time and he had never seen a look like this. He knew that Max was vaguely superstitious, but he had never actually seen him afraid of something he could not see. Max’s superstition was like the trace of his own religion, in that it was inbred rather than self-propagated, handed down through generations instead of defined and created through personal experience. Even though Max was a thinker, some things were planted too deep to think around.

“We make our own Hell,” Max said.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Butch exploded, digging his hands into the sand.

Max shrugged. “It just seemed to sound right. This place feels all wrong. We’ll have to be careful.”

“How can a place be wrong?” Roddy asked. Max was frightening him, badly.

“It’s God’s place,” Butch said, imploring Ernie to back him up. “Isn’t it, sir? God’s own place, and He’s saved us from dying on the sea.” His hands had closed tight, and sand flowed between his fingers like sacrificial blood.

“I’m sure God doesn’t know a thing about this place,” Ernie said. He turned and looked past the palm trees, to the rich wall of foliage hiding any view further inland.

“Bollocks!” Roddy said. Hiding his fear. Becoming angry so that he could not dwell on what he was really feeling, the jaws of doubt even now gnawing at his bones. “Crap. Get your act together, you lot. We’ve got to find water, food and shelter. Norris!” He stood and called along the beach to where the cook was rooting around by a fallen tree.

“There’s something blowing bubbles in the sand,” Norris shouted back.

“Come here, we’ve got to start getting ourselves together,” Roddy said, but then he felt his knees beginning to betray him, and he fell onto his rump in the sand. He slumped slowly onto his back, a hand catching his head and easing it down. Nausea overtook him, then a swimming fatigue that worked to swallow him whole. As his eyelids took on a terrible weight he tried to see the first stars, dreading that he would not recognise any of the constellations. But the palm trees hid them from view, and darkness blanked his mind.

He was not really unconscious. Everything moved away for a while; noises coming from an echoing distance, sensations of heat and pain niggling like bad memories. Voices mumbled dimly, words unknown. He felt the cool kiss of water on his lips, sudden and sweet, and he opened his mouth and glugged greedily.

“Steady,” Max said. “Not too much.” He was kneeling above him, twisting his shirt so that drops fell into Roddy’s mouth.

“Fresh?” Roddy asked.

Max nodded. “There’s a stream further along the beach.” His face was grim and he said no more, but Roddy felt too tired to pursue it.

The five of them sat where they had landed for an hour, taking turns to walk to the stream and soak their shirts in fresh water. Max had made a half-hearted search for a smashed coconut to use as a cup, but found none. There was little talk, but their attitude spoke volumes. Ernie had stopped praying.

When Roddy’s turn came to fetch the water he relished the time alone. He realised that he had experienced no privacy for five whole days, even performing his toilet in front of the other men. The sea roared at the reef to his left, the silent shadowy island was a massive weight to his right, threatening at any moment to bear down and crush him into the sand. He tried not to look into the jungle, averting his gaze from darkness as he had as a child, struggling to convince himself that what he could not see would not exist. Even the silence seemed wrong. Where were the animals? Away from the attention of his fellow survivors, the feeling of being watched was almost overwhelming.

When he reached the stream he eased himself to his knees and leant over the running waters. In the vague light of the clear night sky, he was a shadow. The water spilled and splashed past rocks holding out against time.

The banks were scattered with things carried down from further inland, and he tried to see what they were in the moonlight. A huge feather, tattered by whatever had torn it from its owner. A dead thing with many legs, as big as his hand and hairier. Something long and slinky, with oily scales glimmering in the silvery light and a pasty smudge where a chunk had been taken from the body.

All bad things, Roddy thought. All dead. But was dead necessarily bad?

He soaked the shirts, stood and made his way back to his companions. They were silent, as before, but there was a tension between them which was almost visible. If he could see it, Roddy thought, it would be black and dead as the things in the stream. He wondered whether his brief absence had allowed him to register it more certainly, like leaving a room and then noticing its smell upon re-entering.

“At least there are animals,” he said. “Something we can eat.” Nobody answered. Max looked at him, but in the dark Roddy could not read his expression. He was glad.

They each took another drink, but the water tasted different now. Roddy thought of the dead things as he drank and it was all he could do to keep it down. It no longer smelt fresh, but rancid. It soothed his dried throat, however, and for tonight at least he did not care what harm it may do him.

They agreed to spend the night on the beach. They all lay out in the open, in case something fell on them from the palm trees. Their breathing slowed and deepened until a sudden grinding, rasping sound jerked them all from the verge of sleep.

“What the hell?” Butch called.

“His demons are come!” Ernie yelled.

“All mutations,” Max said.

Roddy sat up and saw their lifeboat being sucked back out to sea. Whatever minimal currents there were had now turned, and the boat was drifting further and further away from the beach. In the moonlight, it was a nonchalant sea monster.

Shorn of their dreams, the men sat silently and watched.

“We could swim out and get it,” Norris suggested. “It’s our only hope.”

“Go on then,” said Butch. “Just tell us how to cook what’s left of you when you wash up on the beach.”

“Could be anything in there,” Max said. “Sharks. Jellyfish. Octopus.”

“Creating your own hell?” Roddy asked, but regretted it at once. He was scaring himself as much as the others. Max stared at him darkly, as if trying to share a secret or steal one back.

So they all sat and watched the boat bob closer to one of the gaps in the reef. Roddy felt helpless and exposed. He recalled a time in his childhood when his mother had seen him away on a bus for a school trip. He had not wanted to go on his own, he so wanted her to come, but control was snatched from him totally the instant he boarded the bus. His mother waved and he wanted to wave back, but his arm seemed not to work. He could only cry as the bus pulled off, taking him further away from comfort and safety, hauling him towards whatever imagined doom those in charge deemed suitable for him. He had sensed the vicarious running of his life even then — his mother, the teachers, the bus driver with his mass of hair yellowed by cigarettes — and he had felt it again throughout his time in the navy. Sent here, ordered there, guided not by the hand of fate, but by the sadistic whims of war.

Never had the feeling of impotency been so strong as when he watched their boat drift away.

He felt an incredible emptiness inside as the boat was dashed to shadowy shards on the reef. Their last tenuous link with the outside world had been broken. Or cut.

There was nothing they could do. The darkness seemed to inhibit conversation, so they soon slept again. As he finally drifted off, Roddy realised that he had not slept properly for over five days. The haunted silence of the island gave them the sensory peace they needed to sleep, if not rest.

Crazy ideas juggled around in the nether regions of sleep. Like maybe the island wanted them gone for a while, so that it could do whatever it had to do. All mutations, Max had muttered. Even mutants had need of food.

Sleep was wet and waterlogged with dreams. Twisted images of violent waters corrupted with oil and refuse and blood, grumbling torpedoes slamming in to finish the job, limbs floating past fins, cries drowned out half-called, hope sinking away beneath them, pulling them down, sucking them into the dark. Roddy thrashed in the sand, working it into skin split by five days of sun, choking on it as he dreamt of teeth shattered by the pressures of deep water.

A voice came from the void, clear and high above the tormented sounds of hot metal warping and snapping. Its words were hidden but its meaning clear, the panic evident in its troubled tone. Thoughts, ideas and sentences flowed together into a collage of desperation. God was mentioned, prayed for and then discarded, with an outpouring of tears greater than the troubled world should ever allow.

Roddy surfaced from sleep like a submarine heading for the light. He saw a twitching shape along the beach. Ernie, jerking in his sleep as jumbled catechisms fell from his mouth to be muffled forever in the ageless sand. Pleas to God and denials of Him in the same sentence. Faith in salvation and a piteous, hopeless resignation. It was horrible to hear because there was no sense, and Roddy thought he should go and wake Ernie, drag him from whatever depths of nightmare he had sunken to.

But he was afraid. Scared that once he reached him, Ernie would already be awake.

There were other noises around them in the dark, a background mumble and chitter from the island that had not been there when they first arrived. Secret things were happening. The whole place had been waiting for them to sleep before coming back to life.

Roddy glanced towards the jungle and saw a shape under the trees, a shadow within deeper shadows. It was a woman, naked and flayed by disease, and she was holding out her hands, her mouth open in a silent scream. Joan, he thought, but it was not her. The tortured woman wanted to tell them something, but she could make no sound. As the palm fronds moved in the sea breeze so her arms wavered, drifting in time to the shadows. Her jaw worked in synchronicity with the sea, and sighing waves mimicked the voice she could not utter.

Then a cloud covered the moon and the image vanished into leaves and shadow.

Ernie muttered on. The sea stroked the land. More clouds passed overhead and clotted the moonlight, and as total darkness fell Roddy closed his eyes to hide from it all.

“Get away! Get it away! Oh God, help him!”

“Kick it! Use a rock or something, kill it!”

Roddy was woken from monotone dreams to a bloody red nightmare. Max and Butch were standing next to him, looking along the beach, stepping back and forth and shouting. He leapt to his feet and cringed as his wounds and burns reminded him of their existence.

Then all pain went. Feeling fled, replaced by a numbness of mind rather than body.

Ernie was lying in wet sand, but it was not wet from the sea. It was dark and cloggy, lumpy and glistening. A layer of flies flickered across its surface like a black sheet caught in a breeze; lifting, landing, lifting again. Ernie twitched redly in the morning sun. Something was eating him.

“Uh!” Roddy could not talk. He could hardly move, and he stood there as his legs cramped beneath him, oblivious to the pain, hardly conscious of his spasming muscles.

The thing was huge and grey, its head darting in to snap delicate mouthfuls of flesh from Ernie’s throat and face. Its body was almost as long as Ernie, where he lay in a smear of his own blood. It glanced at them as it did so, expressing no fear or trepidation. It’s eyes were lifeless black pearls in the thick probe of its head. It wore a shell, scraped and scarred, patterned with smears of its breakfast’s blood. The beach stank of aged dead things.

A series of thumps came from behind. Roddy spun around in terror. Norris dashed past him with a length of wood held high, rusted iron fitting still visible on one edge. He hit the creature and fell back as the vibration jarred his arms.

“Come on!” Max shouted, running forward to help. He grabbed the length of splintered wood from the stunned Norris and smashed it down on the shell, careful not to strike the giant tortoise’s head in case he drove it deeper into Ernie’s face. It had no apparent effect. He turned the board over so that the iron fitting faced down, and brought it arcing over his head once more. It left a bright splash of scarred shell, urging Max into greater effort.

Butch had found a rounded stone the size of his hand and he threw it at the tortoise, retrieved it when it rebounded, threw it again.

The tortoise snapped another mouthful of raw flesh from Ernie’s face. Roddy thought it may have been his nose.

He looked around for something to use as a weapon, but could see nothing. His heart was thumping in his chest, his tongue sandy and swollen and raw. He needed a piss.

Ernie was dead.

He stumbled next to Max and kicked sand at the creature’s head, spraying it across Ernie’s open face in the process.

“Careful!” Norris shouted at him.

Roddy almost laughed. “He’s dead,” he said, still kicking, dodging away when Max brought the board down on the shell once more. The wood splintered and cracked, the heavy end dropping next to the tortoise’s front legs.

The thing turned and left. They were all surprised at its speed as it hauled its weight up the beach and disappeared into the foliage beneath the trees.

“Bastard!” Butch shouted after it. Roddy had an unsettling feeling that it had left because it was full, not as a result of their ineffective attack. The way it had looked at them, as though they were little more than the trees it rubbed against as it retreated back inland, turned Roddy cold.

“Oh Jesus, where the hell have we ended up?” Butch gasped, stumbling backwards until he tripped over his own feet and fell onto his back. Humour was his defence mechanism, but sometimes even that could not work. Sometimes, things were beyond a joke. Butch’s hands were bleeding.

“Big tortoise,” Norris remarked. “Make a hell of an ashtray.”

“Shut up,” Butch said, “just shut up, you bloody jinx. It’s your fault we’re here anyway, if you hadn’t — ”

“What?” Norris demanded.

Butch did not reply. He turned and stared out to sea, shaking, his grubby shirt pasted to his body with sweat. He licked blood from his hands and spat it at the sand. The movement was animal, Roddy thought.

“Take a look,” Max said, nodding at Ernie’s ruined body.

Roddy shook his head, started to walk away. He had seen enough. He was not yet twenty-five, and he had seen a thousand dead men. Max grabbed his arm, and Roddy wondered once again what he had meant last night, what were all mutations.

“Roddy, take a look,” Max said again. His bald head was blistered and crazed from the sun. His confidence was still there in his voice, camouflaged beneath dull shock.

Ernie was a mess. Where his blood had not been disturbed, it still speckled the sand with spray patterns. He tried to avoid looking at the face because there was little left to see. He noticed a pulped book lying at the dead man’s side, and wondered how the hell Ernie had kept his Bible through everything that had happened.

He saw the officer’s left hand. Wounded and cut, the blood already dried and caked into a black mess. He looked at the right hand, bent and lifted the cool arm, just to make sure that what he was seeing was not imagination.

“Cut his wrists,” Roddy said.

“What?” Norris asked. Butch looked up.

Max turned and walked a few steps before sitting down, facing away.

“He slit his wrists,” Roddy said. “In the night. Must have done it a while ago, the blood’s already clotted.” He spotted something glinting on the blood-soaked sand by Ernie’s hip. He knew how useful a knife would be, but he could not bring himself to pick it up.

“God-fearing fool decides to off himself instead of facing up to what God had given him,” Norris muttered. “We could live here for years, and he tops himself as soon as we’re out of the sea.”

“I heard him, I think,” Roddy continued, trying to ignore Norris’s dismissive tone of voice. “I woke up in the night. Half woke, anyway. He was mumbling, moaning. It wasn’t very nice.”

“What was he saying?” Butch asked. He was staring wide-eyed at the corpse now, as if he could accept death dished out by a victim’s own hand above that caused by something unknown. In a way, Roddy admitted to himself, it wasn’t so bad. It displayed a weakness in Ernie, not a strength in this unknown place.

“I didn’t listen for long. I can’t remember. I was tired. I was dreaming. I went back to sleep.” Did I? Roddy thought quickly. Straight back to sleep? He glanced at where he had seen the shape beneath the trees, but there was nothing there.

Nobody said anything. Even Norris turned away and walked off towards the stream.

Roddy sat next to Max where he was making vague shapes in the sand.

“I think we should go inland,” Max said sullenly. “See if there’s any sign of life here. Any inhabitants.”

“I don’t think there will be,” Roddy said, and Max did not argue. They both knew what he meant. This was the most inhuman place either of them had ever seen.

“Still, I think we should move. Don’t you? Don’t you think we should move?”

Roddy nodded. “We’ve no supplies, no cover, no weapons. No radio. No hope, unless we find something we can use.”

“Weapons against what? Use for what?” Max looked up at him, and Roddy felt his heart sink. He’d always regarded Max as educated, wise in the ways of the world, if not academically. Now he just looked confused and lost. And maybe scared.

But Roddy did not want to see that, so he turned away and blanked it from his mind.

“What did you mean about mutations?”

“Sorry?”

“Yesterday, just before the boat went. You said ‘all mutations,’ or words to that effect.”

Max shrugged, then smiled. The expression was so unexpected that Roddy found himself smiling along with him, though he didn’t know why. “It’s a thing Darwin said. When we landed here it reminded me of what the Galapagos are supposed to be like.”

“Isolated,” Roddy said.

Max nodded. “When he and his colleague came up with the theory of evolution, they said it all depended on variation in a species, caused by mutation. So, by definition, we’re all descended from mutants. And the stronger ones among us…”

“All mutations,” Roddy finished. Max nodded and Roddy shook his head. “Max, you have a way of losing me and scaring me at the same time.”

Max shrugged. “It’s not relevant. Just the idle ways my mind chooses to occupy itself, I suppose. My warped sense of the interesting.” He stood. “Maybe we should bury Ernie. Before this place eats him.”

The four of them buried Ernie on the beach, his bible on his chest. Max pocketed the knife after wiping it in the sand. Butch was silent and intense, trying to catch their eyes to take comfort in contact, but hardly succeeding. Norris was quiet and distant. Max and Roddy worked side by side, and Roddy took immense comfort in the smells and sounds around him. Human smells, human sounds.

By the time they had finished the sun was rising, hauling up the temperature. After they drank from the stream, trying their best to ignore the dead things washed up on its banks, Max suggested they go inland. Butch agreed willingly, and Norris said that it was as good an idea as any.

It was strange leaving the beach. Just under the trees there was a line of rotting seaweed stretching along the sands, drawn there by the last storm. It marked the demarcation line between sea and land, a barrier between two utterly different worlds. Roddy did not want to cross it. He looked around at his bedraggled, hungry companions, and saw that the feeling was mutual.

“What’s wrong?” he said, but with awkward questions came hard answers.

“You tell me,” Max replied.

Nothing more was said. Each buried in his own thoughts, the four men moved away from the beach and into the island.

2. INTO THE TREES

Roddy had expected a long, harrowing journey through dense jungle. Snakes dipping down from trees to kiss his shoulders. Spiders in his hair.

They were all equally surprised when, within five minutes, they emerged from the cover of trees onto a wide, undulating plain. The four men paused to rest and take in the view, their bodies weaker from their ordeal than they had at first thought. Hearts thumped, blood pumped through muscles jaded by five days of inactivity, hunger and thirst. The sun continued its attack, relentless and indifferent. Burnt skin peeled and revealed raw pinkness below to the heartless rays.

Roddy knelt on the ground and ran his hand through the rich grass. It looked almost like a meadow or hillside back home in Wales, but there were no daisies here, no dandelions. The grass felt sharper than it should, angry to the touch. It bent stiffly and sprang back with a rustle, shaking itself at his audacity.

“Anyone for cricket?” Butch asked, but he received no reply, not even a rebuke. Instead, they walked out into the grassland.

Ernie was dead. So were the rest of their crew, but Ernie had been a survivor. He had been one of them, if only for five days. That length of time had set them apart from the rest of the ship’s compliment, and losing Ernie was like losing the ship all over again. Their hopes, however vague and troubled they were, seemed to have sunk with him. The men were silent. They walked immersed in their own worlds. Ernie was with all of them, in all their thoughts; either lifelike and spouting prayers, or dead and bleeding into the sand.

For Roddy, Ernie was still the gibbering shadow in the night, talking himself into a hopeless death while a shape moved under the trees, trying to shout out and encourage him. Or perhapss to tell them something through the silent dark.

Roddy had not mentioned his hallucination. He put it down to hunger, but subconsciously there was something else there. Something with a pleading mouth and flayed, torn skin.

None of them had been able to say a prayer over Ernie’s grave. Roddy hated that. He felt as if they had let Ernie and themselves down. God must not be too happy with them today.

Four sets of feet whispered through the grass, kicking up angry puffs of insects. From the position of the sun Roddy could tell that they were moving north, towards the highest point they could see from here. He reckoned the mountain — hill, really — to be a thousand feet high, its gentle lower slopes wooded, the higher parts splashed with clumps of colour like an artist’s well-used palette. It was smooth topped, well worn by time, speckled with outcroppings of a dark, sharp rock. It dominated their view in one direction, hiding whatever lay beyond. In the other direction, west and south-west, the grassland drifted away towards a hilly, heavily wooded area. Steam rose from this jungle, drifting straight up into the air until it was caught by an invisible breeze and condensed into wispy clouds. A few birds swung to and fro high above the island, rarely flapping their wings. They circled higher, swooped down, circled again. Roddy felt observed.

“This is a horrible place,” Norris mumbled.

“Why so?” asked Max. His voice was a drone. It sounded as though he needed to hear other voices, without caring what they said. Even if it was Norris doing the talking.

“Don’t know,” Norris shrugged, apparently disappointing him. They walked in silence for a while, then Norris spoke out once more. “Just feels horrible. Like a hillside before rain. Loaded.”

“Loaded with your bad luck,” Butch muttered, but for once Norris did not retort.

“Where are we going?” Roddy asked. He looked back the way they had come and saw a series of wavy lines marking their progress. It could have been scattered dew, but the grass was dry.

“What, you want a plan?” Butch said, almost smiling.

“To the top of the hill,” Norris said, nodding north. “If it’s a small island we’ll see all of it from up there. If we’re lucky enough to have landed somewhere more substantial — ”

“What, like the moon?” Butch quipped.

“- then we’ll be able to see where to head for,” Norris finished. He ignored Butch, much as an adult disregards a permanently annoying child. Maybe that was why Norris was not really liked. He had no humour.

“Let’s stop and rest,” Max said. “Have a think about it.” They sat in the grass, only fifteen minutes after setting out from the beach. Norris remained slightly apart. Butch picked a blade and slipped it into his mouth, but spat it out with a disgusted grimace.

“I’m so hungry,” Max said, verbalising all their thoughts.

Roddy closed his eyes and leant back, supporting himself on outstretched arms. He was aching all over. His flesh felt weak and weighed down by hunger. “We must eat, Max,” he said. “Let’s leave finding out where we are for later. For now, we’ve got to eat. And drink.”

“Wonder where that tortoise went,” Butch said. All four men quickly stood.

They headed across the meadow to where they thought the stream would be, hiding itself beneath the lush covering of trees it had encouraged. Where there was water there would be food, fruits and berries at the very least.

Roddy felt the silence turn from intimidating to threatening, as though they had passed an invisible boundary. He thought of what Norris had said, the calm before the storm, and looked up into the sky. But the unfaltering blue depressed him, holding no promise of shade from the sun or fresh water to catch in their cupped hands. The thought of the stream made him go weak, because he had seen the dead things in it. And he had drunk the water.

If the island would kill its own, then what of the invaders?

The thought came from nowhere, but it chipped away at his mind as they walked towards the trees. Ernie was already dead, victim of his own knife. But even that was simplification; the blade had not killed him, it had merely been a tool. Something deeper and darker had been Ernie’s undoing. He had been a fair and reasonable officer, but the minute he set foot on the island he had changed. Praising God to high Heaven, but still missing Him, still sensing His absence. Mumbling prayers in the night as if they would bring him closer to God. Or bring God back to him.

God is everywhere, Roddy’s parents had impressed upon him. He had believed them because they were his parents, he always did as he was told, and he knew that his elders were wiser than mere children. As he passed through his teens he took on board his own views, and the duty-bound faith he had been given as a child had slowly dwindled, leaving a black hole in his heart where belief should sit. God had, effectively, vanished.

Roddy was often terrified of what He would think if He really did exist. God is everywhere, his parents had said.

Not for Ernie. Not last night. Last night God had not been here, and Ernie had been abandoned. He was no longer on God’s Earth, and Roddy could only hope that he had found his Heaven. Or maybe he was nothing more than a mutilated corpse rotting in the sand.

As the grasses gave way to bushes and trees, and the sound of running water drew them on, the men perked up. Butch came out with a shallow quip, Max snorted, Norris remained mercifully silent. Roddy felt shadows close about him, but they did not bring the cool relief he had been craving. The sun no longer struck his cracked skin, but the heat was just as intense, and pain still bit in from all sides.

“More like a forest than a jungle,” Max observed. He was right, though the trees were higher and more closely spaced than in forests back home, their roots visible as if trying to escape the soil. Silence pervaded the scene, a pregnant peace. All four men could feel eyes upon them, and they glanced up into the canopy of leaves and hanging vines every time one leaf whispered to another.

The forest floor was covered with a low, rich green crawling plant, its questing tendrils wrapped around trunks in an endless attempt to climb to the heights. Hints of movement caught Roddy’s eye, but every time he turned to see what was causing it only stillness stared back. The light was good, even under the trees, but dormant night vision was teasing him.

“I can hear the stream,” Butch said, head cocked. “This way. Christ, I’m thirsty enough to drink the Thames.”

“Stupid enough, too,” Norris muttered.

They headed towards the distant chatter of the stream. Roddy jumped as something tapped against his ankle. He cursed and staggered several steps to one side, until a tree stopped him.

“What?” Max asked.

Roddy shrugged. “Something in the undergrowth. Don’t you see?”

“Probably — ” Butch began. But he did not finish.

The ground around them burst apart. Shrill cries accompanied the movement as the low lying undergrowth parted and shuddered. Shapes scratched at their knees and thighs, then fell back to the ground, scurrying away under and across the foliage. None of the shapes were ever still enough to focus upon, so Roddy could only make out a disjointed montage of what they had startled into action. He saw curved blades catching the sun, domed heads jerking up and down as the creatures moved. Feathers floated in the eddying air. Red splotches marked the underside of beaks, like identical spots of wet blood.

He backed against the tree and tried to force himself up towards the branches, but then he shook his head and laughed to quell his racing heart. “Birds,” he said. “Don’t panic.”

The others had reacted in their own instinctive ways. Max was kicking out left and right, Butch jumping up and down on the spot, Norris scrabbling around on his hand and knees, trying to regain his lost footing. As Roddy’s words registered and the small, gawky birds jumped and fluttered away from the men, the panic eased.

“Scared the living shit out of me!” Butch shouted, laughing with nervousness and relief. Max closed his eyes and shook his head. He looked around, catching Roddy’s eye and smirking. Norris stood and brushed at his filthy clothes. He stretched his neck in unconscious mimicry of the fleeing birds. He did not speak, and when he caught Roddy’s eye he turned away in embarrassment. His knees and elbows were dirty and damp from his frantic squirming on the ground. His face was red from the same. Roddy almost felt sorry for him.

“At least we know we’re not alone,” Butch said, “though I didn’t think much of yours, Max.”

“Scared the hell out of me,” Max said. He was rubbing beaded sweat from his head, flicking it at the ground. “I didn’t realise I was so on edge.”

Roddy thought he was lying. He thought Max was more than aware of the tension squeezing the four men. An anxiousness built up from outside, as well as in, and threatening to snap at any moment. Perhaps the birds startling them had been a good thing, a release valve for the growing pressures of their unforeseen situation.

“Never seen birds like that before,” Butch said. “Like fat chickens.”

“Quails,” Max said. “At least, I think so. Flightless.”

“Why the fuck be a bird and not be able to fly?” Butch asked. His fringe, greasy and lank, annoyed his eyes, so that he had to keep blinking. “Like a fish that can’t swim.” He glanced at Norris, obviously about to come out with some cutting witticism.

Max barged in before Butch could get himself into trouble. “No need to fly, because there are no predators here.”

Butch frowned, causing his eyes more aggravation. “That tortoise was a shit of a predator, if you ask me. It was eating Ernie.”

“A scavenger,” Max explained. He slapped his neck to dislodge a tickling fly, forgetting his sunburn. “Bollocks!”

Flightless birds, Roddy thought. Mutations. The fittest surviving, a mutation in their species eventually eschewing flight. It all added to the strangeness of the place. “More mutants.” Max nodded at him.

“Dinner, all the same,” Norris said. For a few brief seconds, the others had not been paying him any attention. Now they all turned to look, just in time to see him fall back to his hands and knees. He scrabbled in the shallow undergrowth, leaves and dirt spinning around him. For a moment Roddy thought he’d lost it, and a terribly bitter thought passed through his mind. He wondered whether the others would have any qualms about leaving a madman behind, if it came to that. He hated the thought, despised himself for thinking it, but an idea could not be un-made.

Then Norris stood again, cursing some more, and kicked out at a fleeing bird. Luck, or fate, or something more sinister intervened. Norris’s boot connected squarely with the creature’s rear end and launched it on its maiden flight. Straight into a tree.

They all heard the subtle sigh of tiny bones breaking.

“Yeah!” Norris shouted. “Got you! Yeah!” He raised bloody fists above his head.

But the creature was not quite dead. It squirmed at the base of the tree, fluttering useless wings in an attempt to reverse millennia of evolution and regain its flight, lift off and take itself away from its inevitable end. Nature held its secret tightly to its chest, however, and Norris’s heavy boot finished the bird’s struggles. Roddy was sure he saw a hint of something dark in Norris’s eyes as he ground his foot down.

“I’m not eating that,” Butch said. “Roddy said it’s a mutant. Could catch anything.”

Max opened his mouth to explain, but thought better of it. Instead he headed off between the trees, aiming for the sound of running water. In the distance, calls and rustles marked the route of the fleeing birds. They had still not stopped, as though pursued by something inescapable.

“I mean it,” Butch said.

Norris did not know what to do. Roddy stepped past him, frowning, looking down at the dead thing spilling its insides onto the damp forest floor.

“Roddy?” Norris said, and it was the first time Roddy had ever heard the man use his first name. It sounded bitter coming from the cook’s mouth.

They left the bird. Norris stepped away hesitantly, perhaps waiting for the others to turn around and change their minds. But Roddy eventually heard footsteps following them, and the dead bird remained where it had fallen.

Bleeding. Steaming. Taking to the air at last.

Roddy caught up with Max and matched his pace. Butch and Norris followed on, muttering profanities at each other.

“More mutants,” Roddy said. They walked in silence for a few moments, but Roddy could not bite his tongue. “What’s wrong, Max? What’s bugging you, mate? I hate seeing you like this.”

Max did not answer for so long that Roddy thought he hadn’t heard. He was about to cover the tracks of his last statement with something banal, but then Max turned to him, and his eyes were dark, and even the sun glinting through the trees did not imbue them with any real hope.

“The whole world’s populated with mutants,” he said. “That’s the real philosophy behind Darwin. Everyone is different, so simultaneous faith is a foolishness. Ernie was a fool, but he was a real believer, and he had devout faith. And he loved his faith, and it all came to nothing for him. It fooled him in the end. Drove him to do what he did.”

“He was a fool because he believed so much in God?”

“No,” Max said. “No. He was a fool because he let his belief rule him. His faith stagnated, didn’t allow for progress, something new. It’s an arrogance, I suppose, but this place has nothing in common with what he believed in. When we came here, he thought he’d been abandoned. So he used his knife on himself, and gave in without a fight.” He rubbed his neck, wincing as the dead skin flaked and opened up bleeding wounds. “That’s what’s wrong. If faith can’t save you, what can?”

“I have faith,” Roddy said, but Max looked at him, and Roddy felt foolish.

“Faith in what?”

Roddy did not answer. His words echoed back at him, like the best lies always do. They walked together in silence and Roddy realised that, even after all this time, there was something he still had no inkling of. “You’ve been a sailor all your life,” he said to Max. “You’ve been around. Shit, you’re older than my uncle. What do you think? What’s your faith?”

Max shook his head, but not in denial. He simply could not answer. It was as though the question of his own beliefs had never raised its head. Until here. Until now. A question with no answer, because a man like Max never revealed himself fully to anyone. He was as much a mystery as the complexities he mused upon. Wasted in war, Roddy had always thought. A man like Max should be creating, not destroying.

They came to a more overgrown portion of the forest. With moisture collecting and dripping from palms, and flashes of colour hinting at the secret assignations of birds high in the trees, it looked more like a tropical jungle. They paused for a while, catching splashes of water on their tongues, listening to the steadily increasing murmur of life around them. Roddy tried to tell himself that it was because the sun was rising higher; the island was coming to life. But he could not help but identify a hidden amusement in the alien banter, a titter here, a low, throaty chuckle there. The animals, now that they had taken the opportunity to examine and test these newcomers, knew the limit of their threat and were laughing at it.

“This way?” Max suggested, pointing along a gentle dip in the land. Nobody had an opinion, so they headed in the direction he had indicated. The sound of the stream was becoming louder, so it seemed that they were moving in the right direction.

They had to pick their way through low thorn bushes, the thorns positively carnivorous in the subdued light. They looked around for something substantial to eat. There was nothing. The heat was wafting at them now, as if blown out from some invisible orifice in the island, seeking them through the trees. Their filthy clothes were soon pasted to their bodies, aggravating their already cracked and sore skin.

Each way they turned, they were presented with more difficult obstacles to overcome. They decided to climb the steep bank of the dip and encountered a slope of sharp, cruelly exposed stone. It resembled slate but glittered with buried quartz, showing off the richness of nature on the island. Keen edges kissed lines of blood into unprotected skin.

Roddy was certain that they were the first people ever to land here. They must be. The place felt so untainted, so elemental, so pristine. If someone had been here before them, there would be signs of it in nature; but what existed here was a pureness of environment, with no sign of outside influence whatsoever. Roddy had always had a respectful fear of the sea, but that was different. Man’s natural state was not floating in a metal coffin, putting himself at the mercy of the waters. Here, on the island, he felt even more out of place. These four puny survivors of a terrible war were succumbing to the dominant party.

What about the shape under the trees? he thought, but dismissed it immediately. Shadows. Just shadows. Anything else was simply too terrifying to consider.

They made it up the sharp bank and found themselves elevated, overlooking the stream where it gurgled merrily in a small canyon. The sides were steep, but not unclimbable, and it was only about twenty feet to the bottom.

As he watched Max beginning his descent, Roddy started shaking. Something squirmed in his stomach, scraping at his insides with claws so sharp that he wondered whether he’d swallowed something else along with the water from the jungle leaves. Every step they took, their route was becoming more difficult. Plants sprang out of nowhere, rocks sharpened themselves on their fear, trees melded trunks to form almost impenetrable barriers. Everything conspired to make their progress more hazardous.

Yet he felt guided, by an insistent and heavy hand.

He knelt down gently, head swimming, and then he knew that he had been brought here to die on this small cliff. He would fall and smash his skull on the rocks below, and while Max tried to scoop his brains back into his head Roddy would look up at the sky, and see a moon he did not recognise slowly appearing against the blue, a ghost emerging from the mist, mocking him as his world went dark.

“Roddy!” Max called. The others were already scrambling down the slope, and before his panic could take hold Roddy slipped and slid down to the gully floor. He did not fall, he did not die, but neither did he feel elated. He sensed the land laughing at him, amusing itself with the mild deceit it had planted in his mind. The stream was the sound of that laughter.

It was gently flowing, cool and fresh, and at its deepest it came up to their chests. It twisted and turned in its little valley, disappearing downstream around a rocky corner curtained by overhanging plants. The men stripped and bathed. There were no dead things here. Perhaps the remains on the beach had been drowned further downstream, to deter any visitors from venturing inland. But here, the air was clear of the taint of decomposition, and the sun still found its way through the leaves and branches to speckle their damaged skin.

The water was fresh. Butch tasted it, then gulped it down. Even Norris smiled and refrained from passing some derisory comment.

“Water, water, everywhere,” Max said. Roddy smiled, because he knew what Max meant, and Norris grinned in confused acknowledgement of his eventual acceptance. They all drank and swam, and washed away dried blood and caked dirt.

When they had finished, they climbed from the gentle waters to lie out on the bank and let the sun dry them. Butch remained in the stream. He bobbed in the current, floating a few feet, standing, doing it again.

The surge came from nowhere. Without even a sigh to announce its appearance, as if air and water conspired to fool the men’s senses. Butch turned and stared upstream at the rolling, tumbling, refuse-laden wave of water ploughing towards him. It frothed, like a rabid sea monster angry at the irony of its affliction.

Roddy stood, absurdly conscious of his nakedness. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. He felt a draining flush of hopelessness, the same feeling he had experienced watching his ship split and sink. No hope, he had thought to himself then, no hope at all for anyone left inside.

Now he thought the same. Except he whispered it as well, like a prayer to the dying. “No hope.”

Just before the water lifted Butch from the stream bed, he glanced at Roddy, and suddenly his eyes were very calm, his expression one of equanimity rather than fear. It was a split second, the blink of an eye, because then the wave swallowed him in a flurry of limbs. His head broke surface several times, but he could only utter bubbles. The men watched helplessly as Butch was tumbled away from them, mixed in with the wood and weed and dead things also carried along by the surge.

Roddy started running along the bank. Stones snapped at his bare feet. Breath caught in his throat, possessed of sharp edges. But Butch was firmly in the water’s grasp, and it held him close and low, attempting to drown him even before he struck the wall of the gully further downstream. Roddy tried to shout, but his voice was lost in the angry white-water roar. He sensed the others following him. Their company made it all seem more futile.

He could have made it, Roddy thought. He could have swum to shore. It was impossible, of course. But it seemed that for Butch, even the intention to survive had been absent.

In the waters, jumping from the foam, speckled red for brief instants, Roddy was sure he saw tiny snapping things. It may have been the boiling water itself, spinning Butch in its violent grasp. Or it could have been something in the water with Butch, but surviving there, belonging there, revelling in the violence.

Butch was swept under the overhanging trees and plants, just before the stream twisted out of sight. For the instant before he was pummelled into protruding rocks Roddy saw him, eyes closed, mouth wide open. His bruised face had been struck by something, and he was drowning in blood as well as water.

The wave struck the rocks, scouring its contents across the blackening surface, then surged away downstream. It left behind its load, floating in the suddenly calm waters: a tree branch, stripped of bark; a bird of paradise, bobbing like a drowned rainbow; and Butch, still spread on the rocks, his snapped left arm wedged into a crack and holding him there.

His head lolled. He looked like he was falling asleep, and at any moment Roddy expected him to look up and his bashful grin to appear. His head fell lower, however, until his chin rested on his chest. And then they could see the damage to the back of his head, and Roddy knew that he would never be smiling again.

They had to cross the stream to reach him. Roddy could not bring himself to enter the water, even though it was back to its normal self, as if the bore had never been. He wanted to mention the snapping things he had seen, but he felt foolish; there were no apparent bites on Butch’s body, only cuts and scrapes. He watched nervously as Max and Norris waded across, arms held wide for balance.

Max paused in front of Butch, his attention focussed on whatever was beyond the rocky outcrop around which the stream disappeared. He was still for a long time. Roddy was on the verge of splashing out to him, shaking him awake and shouting at him, when he turned.

“No sign of the wave downstream,” Max said casually. He looked briefly back upstream, indicating to Roddy the wet, scoured banks where the freak surge had made its mark. Norris seemed not to hear, or understand the implication. He was staring at Butch, disgust stretching his face out of shape.

Roddy was glad he had not gone in. This was not a normal stream, not like the ones in the forests and valleys back home. It was a wrong stream, one which could conjure a wave from nowhere and then suck it back into itself, without having to spread it further along its length. It was flowing at its normal gentle rate once more, carrying away the detritus left behind. The colourful dead bird spun slowly as it headed for the beach.

Roddy thought the wave must be waiting somewhere. Tucked on the stream bed, pressure building, ready to appear again when the time was right. Like now, while Max and Norris were trying to free Butch’s trapped arm without touching the bone protruding through the skin.

But perhaps that would be too easy.

“Get him out,” Roddy said, “get him out, now, get him out.” He rocked from side to side, wincing at the pain from his gashed feet but enjoying the sensation at the same time. It told him he was still alive, his brain was connected. He looked down at his pathetic body. His ribs corrugated his skin and his feet bled onto the rocks. His blood was a black splash on the ground. It seeped between stones and was sucked in quickly, the land as desperate for sustenance as they were.

The two men eventually backed across the stream with Butch trailing between them. Norris seemed frantic to keep Butch’s head up out of the water, as if a dead man could drown. They reached the bank and Roddy helped them haul the body out. They lay Butch down on the wet rocks. His head was leaking.

Roddy had seen worse sights than this when the ship sank, but now it was different. Just as Ernie’s death had hit them badly, the sight of Butch lying cooling in this cruel place felt like a punch to the chest. He had been a survivor, one of only a few left from the ship’s crew. He had been valuable. A friend.

“Just where the hell did that wave come from?” Norris asked. “What caused it? There aren’t any clouds, no rain. The stream’s back to its normal level. I didn’t feel…” He prattled on, but Roddy soon cut out his voice. He was becoming aware of the expression on Max’s face.

The big man looked defeated. His arms hung by his sides, shoulders slumped, water dripping from his ears and nose to splash into rosettes on the rocks around him. Pinkish sweat, coloured with his own blood, dribbled down his forehead and around his ears. The burns and scabs on his head were open to the elements. His eyes were shaded from the sun. They looked dead.

“Max?” Roddy said, and Norris shut up. “Max.”

Max turned and looked at them, and Roddy saw that some of the drops were tears. The big man was crying. They were silent, unforced, trickling salt-water into his wounds. “He was only a kid,” Max said. “How old was he? How old was Butch?”

Roddy shrugged. “Nineteen?”

Max nodded. “Just a kid.”

“Where did that wave come from?” Norris said again, now that the silence held their attention.

Max looked back down at Butch, shaking his head slowly, hands fisted. “Something very wrong,” he said.

“The wave, though,” Norris whined.

“Something very wrong with this place.” Max turned and went back to where they had dumped their clothes. He hauled on his trousers and shirt, wincing as aches and pains lit up his body. He said no more.

Roddy remembered an occasion several years ago, when he had been more scared than at any time in his life. One of his friends had borrowed his father’s motorbike and offered to take Roddy for a ride. Once committed, there was no backing out. At each jerky change of gear, Roddy was sure he was going to be flung off backwards, smashing his head like a coconut on the road. The bike tilted this way and that as his friend negotiated blind corners, hardly slowing down. He had the blind confidence of the young.

It was not the speed that terrified Roddy, or even the thought of being spilled onto the road. It was the lack of control. The fact that his life was, for those few minutes, totally in the hands of someone else. He’d felt like pissing himself when he’d considered that they were not even particularly close friends. What a way to die.

The fear he felt now was more intense, more all encompassing. It made his terror at the youthful lark pale into insignificance. Now, he feared not only for his body — a body already ravaged by war and hunger and thirst — but also his mind. He was being stalked through the dark avenues of his thoughts, and he had yet to see the pursuer. All the while, the island sat smugly around them. How could logic and self-awareness continue to exist untouched in such a place? A place that seemed happy to kill them, and determined to do so.

Not for the first time, Roddy wished that he had more faith in God. He had seen what belief had done to Ernie, but perhaps his faith had been too blind, too passive. It was ironic that a war which had seemed to bring many people closer to their faith, by forcing them into challenges of mind and spirit, had driven him further away. While people dying on beach-heads prayed to God, Roddy could not understand how God could do that to them in the first place. If He did exist then He was cruel indeed.

They buried Butch away from the stream, so that any future floods would not wash away the soil covering him and expose his body to the elements. None of the men spoke because they could all feel danger watching them, sitting up in the high branches or raising beady eyes from the stream. It watched them where they toiled, and laughed, and counted off another victory on skeletal fingers.

3. NAMING THE NAMELESS

They headed inland. None of them felt like walking, but they were even less inclined to stay near Butch’s grave. The chuckling stream threatened to drive them mad.

They remained within the jungle. It seemed to stretch on forever, as if the grasslands had never existed, and the flora and fauna of the place began to reveal more of itself to them. Much of it was strange. Max seemed to find solace in trying to identify birds and plants, but his comfort was short lived. For every species he knew, there were a dozen he did not. A snake curled its way up a tree trunk, bright yellow, long and very thin. Max went to name it, but then several scrabbling legs came into view around the trunk, propelling the creature’s rear end, and Max turned away. Roddy recalled the story of the Garden of Eden; how the snake had been cast to the ground, legless, to slither forever on its belly, eating dust. This creature did not belong to that family. This thing, in this place, did not subscribe to the ancient commandment.

They saw another snake, with gills flaring along its flanks and green slime decorating its scales. Max stared at it, frowning, trying to dredge an impossible name from his memory. Impossible, because the creature had no name. “Slime snake,” Max said, and named it.

“You should name it after us, if you must,” Norris commented.

“Who’ll ever know?” The finality in Max’s voice turned Roddy cold, but the big man would not be drawn. He was too keen to continue with what he called his naming of parts, as if the entire island were one massive machine and the slithering, flying and scampering things were the well-oiled components.

In a place where the trees thinned out, they saw several giant tortoises picking regally at low foliage. They skirted around the clearing, and Roddy checked the shells to see whether there was any recent damage. Norris was all for attacking the creatures, but to Roddy it seemed pointless, and Max said something which persuaded them that they were best left alone. “Why annoy them more?”

The reptiles raised lazy heads as the men passed, watching them with hooded black eyes. One of them may have had bits of Ernie still digesting in its gut, but to the men they all looked the same. Roddy mused that the same probably went both ways; the idea chilled him to the core, and he did not dwell upon it.

The more Roddy saw, the more he came to acknowledge the alienness of the island. Max’s strange naming process only helped to exaggerate the feeling. And he also came to see how they had all taken so much for granted, and how their ignorant assumptions had led them into strangeness. They had been washed up on an unknown shore after five days at sea, putting the perceived peculiarity of the place down to the fact that they were somewhere none of them had ever been before. The sense of disquiet had been borne out by Ernie’s sudden suicide. But even that had not alerted them as it should have.

Now, with Butch being snatched away so soon after Ernie’s death, Roddy felt like he was waking up. Surfacing from a nightmare into something more disturbing.

They had all maintained a blind faith in the rightness of things, and now they had been led astray. Just as Ernie’s faith had fooled him, so they were being deceived by their ignorance.

“Two-headed spider,” Max called out, pointing up into a tree. Roddy gasped and stepped back when he saw the huge, hairy shape hanging there, as big as his head, legs jerking as whatever they grasped struggled its final death throes. There were indeed two fist-sized protuberances at its front end, though whether they were heads or other organs for more obscure purposes, Roddy could not decide.

“Lizard-bird,” Max said.

“Greater-mandibled mantis.”

“Three-ended worm.”

“Tree sucker.”

“Yellow bat.”

His naming continued. The men took a chance with a bush of yellow berries, hunger overcoming a caution which Roddy was coming to consider more and more useless. To protect against the unknown, he thought, was impossible. They were at the island’s mercy. And, in a way, this made him more relaxed. He had never before felt resigned to an unseeable fate, not even when the ship was going down; then, he knew he could swim. Here, he was slowly drowning in strangeness, and there was nothing he could do. He knew nothing.

Until he saw the woman. She was naked, her body seemingly tattooed with nightmares, muscles hanging in sepia bunches. She was standing beneath a tree to his left, waving imploringly at the three men. The sun came through the canopy and speckled her with yellow pustules.

“Black lizard,” Max called. Norris was with him, further ahead.

The woman held out both hands, her mouth open but silent. Roddy could see that she was shouting. A shadow moved across her body and she seemed to change position. She did not move, but flowed, as she had the night before. She lived within the shadows, and their shifting dictated her own motion.

“Large-headed quail. Big bastard.”

Roddy tried to shout. He opened his mouth, but in sympathy with the ghostly form beneath the trees he could say nothing. The woman began to shake her head, waving more frantically. Her body crumpled with helplessness as shadows shifted across the sunbeams breaking through the trees and blotted her from sight.

“Triple horned toad.”

Roddy could not move. He was sure the shadows had possessed teeth. They had been voracious.

He began to shake and the pressure of the island pressed in from all sides. The ground crushed against his feet, driving them upwards to meet his head where it was being forced down by the hot, damp air. Bushes seemed to march in from all around, the trees stepping close behind, closing in, threatening to crawl into him and make him a fleshy part of them. Rooting and rutting in a vegetative parody of rape.

He thought he cried out, but the only reply was Max naming, and Norris mumbling something unheard.

The world tipped up and Roddy was tumbling, striking his head and limbs, thorns penetrating skin as he fought with the ground. Sight left him, and sound, and then all his other senses fused into one all-encompassing awareness — that they were intruders, alien cells in a pure body, and that slowly, carefully, they were being hunted and expunged.

Then even thought fled, and blessed darkness took its place.

When he came to, the sun had moved across the sky. The ground was hot beneath him. Norris and Max were sitting back to back on a fallen tree, chewing on something, looking around between each mouthful like nervous birds.

Roddy lifted himself onto his elbows and tried to shake the remaining dizziness from his head. He felt weak and thirsty, and his stomach rumbled at the tang of freshly picked fruit.

“The sleeper awakes,” Norris said, somewhat bitterly. Max turned and glanced at Roddy, then continued his observation of the jungle.

Roddy did not recognise his surroundings, but that meant nothing. It did not appear to be the place where he had collapsed, but viewed from a different perspective, after however long had passed, he could easily have been wrong. Off to his right may have been where he had watched the woman and the shadows. His skin weeped and smarted with a multitude of thorn pricks, and thorny plants sat smugly all around. Looking up between the treetops he could see darting shapes leaping from branch to branch, sometimes flapping colourful wings, occasionally reaching out with simian grips. Myriad bird calls played the jazz of nature.

He was more lost than he had ever been.

“Max?” he said, but it came out like a death rattle. He coughed, sat up fully and leant forward. The ground between his legs was crawling, shifting, fuzzing in and out of view. He shook his head again, then realised that he was sitting on an active ants’ nest. He shrieked, stood uneasily and stumbled to the fallen tree.

Norris glanced nervously at him, then back at their surroundings. Max looked around casually, but Roddy could tell from the way he was sitting — hunched, tense, puffed up like a toad facing a snake — that he was concentrating fully on the jungle. Between the two sat a selection of fruits, of all colours imaginable and a few barely guessed at. Some were wounded and dripping, others whole and succulent.

“Are those safe?” he asked, then realised that he no longer cared.

“Not dead yet,” Norris said, but Roddy was already crunching into what looked like a cross between and apple and a kiwi fruit. It tasted sour and bland, but the crunchy flesh felt good between his teeth. With each bite, his soft gums left a smear of blood on the open fruit.

“I feel dreadful,” he mumbled.

“You’ve been out for two hours,” Max said, not looking around. “You were feverish at first, then jerking and shouting. Couldn’t wake you up. Couldn’t tell what you were saying, either, but it sounded important. To you, anyway. Had to pull a load of thorns out of your face — those damn things work their way in like fish hooks. Then you calmed down, after about half an hour, and you’ve been quiet ever since.” There was little emotion in his voice. Hardly any feeling. He sounded devoid of the old Max Roddy knew, his voice a fading echo of the big man.

“Two hours?” Roddy received no answer. The two men watched the trees, munching half-heartedly on insipid fruit. Roddy followed their gaze, saw only jungle, trees and more jungle. There was an occasional sign of movement as a creature, named or unnamed, skirted the three men. The steady jewel-drip of water from high in the trees made its eventual way to the ground. Nothing else. No moving shadows.

“There was something before I passed out,” Roddy said, frowning, taking another bite of fruit. “Shadows, or something.”

“What exactly?” Max asked suddenly. He turned, fixing Roddy with his stare. His voice was Max again, but Roddy suddenly preferred the monotone of moments before. He wondered what had happened while he was out.

“Well, a woman,” Roddy said quietly.

Norris snorted. “Cabin fever.” He laughed, but it was a bitter sound.

Max stared at him for so long that Roddy became uncomfortable. “What? Am I green? What?”

Max looked back into the jungle. Whatever he expected to see remained elusive; his shoulders slumped and he shook his head. “While you were out, Norris went to look for food. He was back within five minutes with that lot, but he thought he’d been followed.”

“Stalked,” Norris hissed. “I told you, I was stalked. Like a bird hunted by a fucking cat.”

“Followed by what?” Roddy asked. His stomach throbbed, and he felt like puking. His balls tingled, and his chest had tightened to the point of hurting. He realised suddenly how human perception was sometimes so blinkered, so ruled by the present. Until now, they had not actually been threatened by anything dangerous. The island was crawling with weird life, but the only real way they had been interfered with was by the tortoise. And even that had been scavenging meat already dead. Now, if what Norris and Max were saying bore truth, there was something else with them. Following them.

“I don’t know what,” Norris said. “I didn’t actually see it.” He threw the remains of a piece of fruit at the ground.

There was silence. Max did not say anything. Roddy waited for Norris to continue, but he was quiet.

“So?” Roddy said. “What? You heard something following you?”

“No, I didn’t. I felt it. I sensed it. I didn’t see or hear anything.” Norris spoke with a hint of challenge in his voice, as though fully expecting Roddy to mock his claim. But Roddy only nodded, and Norris went back to scanning the jungle.

“Maybe it was your woman,” Max said, but Norris snorted again. “We’ll have to be careful.”

The three men sat and ate, gaining sustenance and fluids from the fruit, not worrying about what it would do to their stomachs.

“How do you feel?” Max asked after a while, and Roddy nodded. He felt terrible, but he was conscious.

“Must be weak,” he said. “From the sea. Maybe the berries were bad. Or the stream water.” He felt terrible, true, but also rested. Grateful, in a way, that he had been removed from things, if only for a while.

Roddy watched the trees. He was not looking for the woman because he was certain he had never seen her. If he had, it was too awful to dwell upon. If he had seen her, she was walking dead.

There was movement everywhere, and soon he felt tired. “What are we really looking for?” he asked. “I mean… the whole place is alive. It’s crawling.”

“We’d better get a move on,” Max said.

“Where to?” Norris stood and spilled fruit onto the ground, most of it merging instantly from sight as if camouflaged or consumed. “Just where are we going, anyway? We’ve hardly been here twelve hours, and there’s only three of us left. It’s hopeless. It’s hopeless.”

As Norris turned away to hide bitter tears, Roddy recalled his own reaction only hours before, when the surge of water had plucked Butch from the world. Hopeless, he had known, and he had not rushed to help. Perhaps if he had still held hope in his heart then, he would have been able to grab Butch, hold on, drag him from the water’s grasp. With hope, he may not have had to die. But Roddy could also recall Butch’s last glance, and wondered whether he would have welcomed rescue at all.

“Nothing’s hopeless,” he said, but the words hung light and inconsequential in the air. A shadow of birds fluttered across the sun.

“No,” Max said, “Norris has a point. We’re walking nowhere. In one place, we can make shelter and gather food. Moving, we’re vulnerable. To exhaustion, or to whatever else may be around.”

Shadows in the trees, Roddy thought. Stalking. Perhaps even guiding.

“I’d like to get out of this place first, though,” Max continued, looking nervously at the permanent twilight beneath the green canopy.

“How about the mountain?” Roddy suggested. “It was our first aim, before we decided to come in here.”

“Why did we decide to come in here?” Norris asked. Max did not answer, and Roddy felt afraid to, because he thought maybe they had been steered. Lured by the promise of water or food, but lured all the same. Guided by their own misguided hope, misled by the faith they had in providence. Lied to, eventually, by the belief they grew up with that, however strange something was, it was God’s plan that it should be so.

“I suppose it’s part way,” Max said.

“Part way where?” Norris was shaking his head, denying the fact that they had control. Or maybe he was dizzy, thought Roddy. Queasy from the fruit. Had the woman in the shadows eaten of it, before her skin was flayed and her muscles clenched in a death-cramp? Or had he seen her because he had eaten the yellow berries?

“Well,” Max said, rubbing sweat from his scalp, “from the mountain we can survey the land. Look for help and… well, keep a look out. And it’s out of this place, and that’s just where I want to be.”

“Amen to that,” Roddy said. He felt an odd twinge at his choice of words.

“Survival of the fittest,” Max said, scooping up some fruit and shoving it into his pockets.

Norris grumbled, “I don’t feel very fit.”

“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.

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.

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.

The sea sighed onto the beach, most of its awesome power already tempered by the reef surrounding the island. The air was heavy with moisture, even though the sun had yet to touch this part of the world today. The sand was hot and sharp where it found its way into his shoes, and if there were any creatures viewing his discovery with him, they were silent. The island was still holding its breath.

They were mostly skeletons. In places hair and skin prevailed, but the flesh had long since shrivelled to nothing or been eaten by scavengers. Teeth hung black and worn from gaping jaws. Orchids grew through a ribcage like twisted, rooted insides. A skull was clamped halfway up a thin tree, face plate split open by the growth of the palm through a void where life had once held memory and faith. A skeleton lay wrapped around the boles of two trees, hips split asunder by one, spine snapped and bent outwards by the other. The jaws hung open, full of a nettle-like plant, as if the trees still gave it pain. Two bodies lay in each other’s arms, half buried in sand blown by decades of sea breeze. One skull was shattered, the other merely dented and cracked. One bony hand held a pistol. A plant grew from its barrel, pluming smoke frozen forever in time.

Roddy stumbled from one tableau to the next, keening uncontrollably, searching frantically for something on which to blame this atrocity, but finding only evidence of these people’s good intentions. A box, lid only slightly askew, contained the faded and pulped pages from dozens of books and manuscripts. Looking closer, Roddy could make out the embossed crosses on their covers.

Rusted knives lay loose between chewed ribs.

A frayed rope hung a corpse from a tree, and a small colourful bird alighted on its bony shoulder. Perhaps it thought the body still held some hidden sustenance, but more likely it was simply gloating.

Roddy stared out at the ship, unable to look at the bodies any more, unwilling to think upon what they must have gone through as they set foot on the island. It was little more than a rotten wreck, masts long since fallen, sails and ropes torn away by the ageless tides. It was stuck firm and most of the timber boarding had been stripped from its ribs. The ship, like those who had sailed in her, lay with innards naked and exposed to the elements. The whole scene was like some sadistic, ongoing sacrifice, laid out as an eternal display for the benefit of whatever had called for it.

Roddy had never imagined such pointless devastation or despair. The agony of the moment hung in the air as if the travellers had killed themselves only yesterday, rather than decades ago. His presence here felt intrusive. But he was no longer alone.

On the air, he smelled fresh blood and bad flesh.

He saw the body along the beach, but it was not until he stumbled nearer that he recognised Max. The big man was still grasping the rusted, blunted blade he must have plucked from the bony grip of one long since dead. He had hacked at his stomach, sawn the blade back and forth, ripping flesh and skin asunder. His head was thrown back, his mouth open in an endless groan of agony, his bald head caked in sand still damp from sweat. The beach around him was black with his own leaked blood.

“Oh Max,” Roddy cried. He felt abandoned and deserted; up until this moment he had still harboured a hope that Max would reappear, however unlikely it had seemed. Now, his wish had been granted. Max was back with him. Roddy wondered which of the strange noises in the night had been Max’s agonised scream.

As if a plan had at last been played out, the jungle burst back into life. Birds cackled and laughed, other things cawed and clucked in amusement. Even the sea was louder for a time. A breeze swept through the trees and set the branches swaying, palms stroking each other with secret whispers. Something lumbered through the undergrowth inland, snapping twigs and stomping bushes. It never revealed itself and the sound of its movement faded slowly away. For the first time since they had landed here, the island sounded as it should.

Roddy felt dismissed.

He reached for the knife. Max’s hands still held a dreadful trace of warmth. Roddy grimaced as he parted the dead man’s fingers, intending to prise the knife from where it was embedded between muscles and organs and flesh, use it to part his own skin and finally allow his insides the freedom they so yearned. The rusty handle was sticky with his dead friend’s blood.

Max groaned.

Roddy gasped and fell back, feeling nothing but abhorrence for the living dead thing before him. He tried to propel himself backwards, away from Max, but succeeded only in pushing showers of sand into the man’s open stomach.

Max groaned again. It sounded as if a cricket were lodged in his throat. His head moved. A muscle spasmed on his forearm, hand closing tighter around the knife. The movement did not disturb the flies feasting at his open wound.

Roddy was going to scream. He felt it welling inside, clearing his head of whatever rational thought had survived these last couple of days, driving controlled emotions out and allowing blind, instinctive panic to take control. He silently prayed to God for help, as though religion were instinctive.

Then Roddy felt himself passing into unconsciousness; his limbs beat at the sand, head spinning. A black shape stood beneath the trees, the naked woman, her arms held out with hands up, the blackness her clotted blood.

All else faded.

When Roddy came to, Max was truly dead. Several small lizards were clustered around the wound in his gut, darting red heads in and out. They glanced at Roddy between each mouthful. He felt too defeated to chase them away.

Somehow, he struggled to his feet. He found it hard to focus. He had been lying in the sun now that it peered over the mountain, and his forehead was stiff and throbbing. The heat was pumping into his head, boiling his thoughts. The black shape from beneath the trees had gone, changed into something different, something solid. Only another skeleton. This one had been tied to the trunk of a dead tree and the rope still held the bleached remains in place. Weed from the last stormy sea had tangled itself around the skeleton’s feet. It still had the remnants of long hair, ancient home to crawling things. Roddy thought it had no arms, so he stumbled closer to see.

It did have arms. Even now, as if caused by some drastic trauma to the bone joints just before death had arrived, the hands remained upright on the fleshless wrists. It was a classic warding off gesture, aiming out to sea. He recalled the flayed flesh, the torn muscles. One finger still wore a ring, and Roddy thought it may be a treasure.

He had found his woman, his haunter, the shadow which had revealed itself to him from the dark over the past two days, driving him into unconsciousness. Rescuing him, however briefly, from his surroundings.

She had been trying to warn him, he realised. Trying to warn others. And then memory flooded back, and Roddy realised what he had brought himself down here to do.

The sea sang invitingly, urging him to enter and fill his lungs. Max lay stretched out on the sand, the knife in his guts coveting more warmth to settle into. Ropes swung free and easy from tree branches, complete but for a swinging corpse. Everything implied death. But Roddy had come this far, and though he was not brave, he was defiant.

The island could wait another hour for his faithless soul.

There were rusty tools, bleached driftwood, even planks from the shattered ship. The work kept his mind his own, excluding for a while all the intimations of death, all the invitations to do himself the final mischief.

The cross was fine. He thought it would hold.

He tied old rope around each wooden arm and ended it in slip-loops. He stood a thick branch against the upright to stand on and kick away when the time came. The island was silent once more; grudging respect, he liked to think, but he could still sense the satisfied mockery behind the temporary peace. He did not even bury Max; there was little point. The island would have him, wherever his final resting place. He had already bled his life into the ground. Now, he was little more than rotting flesh.

When Roddy had tightened the loops around his wrists, he prepared to kick away the branch. He thought of offering a prayer up to God, but if He was there, then He would surely not hear anything spoken from this place. Roddy thought that the bastardised symbolism of his own death was prayer enough.

He kicked the branch away and gasped as the rope tightened and pinched his skin. He had heard somewhere that suffocation killed most crucifixion victims. He stared out across the cove, past the ship, hoping that anyone approaching from that way would see what he had left to them and take heed.

Behind Roddy, in the trees and on the mountainside, from the ravine beyond the mountain, sounds of merriment filled the air as birds took flight, lizards and small mammals gambolled through the undergrowth. But he felt removed from the island, as if he were already dead, and the noise barely touched him.

As he hung there, he had time to really think about what he had done.