White and Other Tales of Ruin (40 page)

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.”