A Wrinkle in the Skin

by John Christopher

  When Matthew woke, he saw Billy’s still figure and thought it must be over. He touched his face, expecting to find it cold, and to his surprise found the warmth of life: the ordinary warmth. The fever had gone and he was sleeping quietly and peacefully. He felt joy and thankfulness, muted at first and then ringing through his body, so clamorous that his head swam with it. He put his hand on the boy’s brow, but gently so as not to wake him. The fever was gone completely.

  It was late afternoon, with the sun throwing blocks of golden dust-specked air between the trees. Matthew found wood and built a fire. When he had got it going, he saw that Billy was awake and watching him.

  He went to him, and asked, “How are you now, Billy?”

  “I’m all right, Mr. Cotter.” The voice was very weak still, but clear. “I’ve been asleep.”

  “Yes. Do you think you could eat something?”

  Billy hesitated. “Yes. I am a bit hungry.”

  The big pot had been left down in the cellar; presumably they had thought it too heavy to take with them. Matthew made a stew, finding a few fresh vegetables in the kitchen garden, and fed Billy and then himself. Afterwards they sat together, looking into the fire.

  Billy said, “How did we get back here, Mr. Cotter? I don’t remember.”

  “I carried you a bit of the way.”

  “I think I remember a dog. I’m not sure, though.” He glanced up at the awning under which they were sitting. “What about Lawrence and everybody? When are they coming back?”

  “They aren’t coming back here, Billy. They’ve gone to find a better place. Somewhere that will be safer.”

  “So we shan’t see them again?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I should think they’ve gone up into the hills. When you’ve rested and got a bit stronger, we can go and look for them.”

  “Do you think we could find them?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “It would be nice if we did.”

  “It’s only a matter of looking. There aren’t that many people left. It may take us a while, but I think we should be able to find them in the end.”

  “Lawrence said he would teach me how to be a doctor. Not a proper doctor, but some of it.”

  “Yes. You’d better lie down now. If you’re to get your strength back, you must rest as much as possible. Rest and eat, and we’ll have you well in no time.”

  Matthew’s own headache and heaviness had gone, too. It had been worry, chiefly, he thought, and fatigue—most of all, the sense of futility. All that was ended. There was something to do, a purpose. Something to look forward to.

  During Billy’s convalescence Matthew busied himself with preparations. There were no shoes of Billy’s size among the things in the cellar, but there were larger ones, and he found a hammer and some tacks. He cut up the larger shoes and soled and heeled Billy’s as best he could, using odd bits of metal and stone for lasts, and learning the job as he went along. In the end he produced something which Billy said was comfortable and which, he hoped, would stand up for a few weeks until they could find something better. He did a similar repair job on his own shoes, and washed and mended their clothes.

  After that, he had a shot at making the bow he had spoken of to Lawrence. The steel rods had been left, and there was an odd length of nylon rope which could be unraveled to make strings. He got a bit of rough metal and tried filing notches at either end of one of the rods. But the steel was harder than he had thought, and after hours of work he had made very little impression. So he abandoned it and cut a straight length of ash. It made a reasonable bow, and he cut arrows and hardened their points in the fire. Later he practiced shooting with them, and Billy watched, applauding when he scored a hit on the target.

  The last thing he did was to get supplies together for their journey. He had been tempted many times, during the two terrible days carrying Billy on his back, to abandon the haversack which had Billy’s smaller bag inside it, but he had managed to hold on to it. Now he started packing the two bags again, choosing, of the things which the others had left, those that were most likely to be valuable. And on a fairly long-term basis. It would be a weary time before they could hope to find them—months, probably years. They had to be ready for a long haul.

  There was a spell of cold wet weather. For most of two days the rain beat against the canvas awning and dripped from the bushes in the garden. During the morning of the third day, the wind dropped and the sky began to clear. Billy was restless from having been cooped up and went running through the garden in an exhilaration of freedom. He was fit enough, Matthew decided, watching him. They would leave the next morning. There was no point in putting off their departure any longer.

  In the evening he left Billy making supper and went for a walk. The wind had blown the roses from the graves, all but one, of which only the stem and a couple of petals were left. Matthew broke off new blooms and laid them where the others had been. Walking on, he found himself taking the same path he had followed with April. He reached the oak. The winds which had blown the roses had not been strong enough to topple it. It hung at the same awkward unlikely angle over the long grass of the field. There was movement in the branches: a squirrel. Squirrels were edible, were they not? If only …

  April’s voice laughed in his mind:

  —If only you had your bow and arrows with you!

  —Well, why not? I’d probably miss, but it would be worth trying.

  —Your bow of unseasoned wood, with its unflighted arrows?

  —I know. But they will do for now. All these are makeshifts. Everything is a makeshift. It will be different when …

  —When?

  —When I find you.

  Now her laughter was cruel, and edged with bitterness:

  —So you still want to sacrifice him to your own illusions?

  —No illusion. And he wants it, too. He wants you, and Lawrence.

  —An illusion. The same illusion as before. What difference does it make that you have half persuaded the boy to want it also? The same illusion, Matthew. That’s why I despised you then, and why I despise you now.

  —Your voice in my mind is the illusion. There is no reality until I find you.

  —And how long will you search? One year? Two years? Until you die? And the boy? Is that the legacy you will bequeath him? If he survives the years of wandering and hardship?

  The squirrel hopped to a lower branch and stood cleaning its face only a few feet from him.

  —You ask me to give you up?

  —Not me. You gave me up that evening. Your fantasy. But that’s too much to ask. Isn’t it, Matthew?

  He had a restless night, and woke early. While Billy was still asleep, he got things ready for their departure and made up the fire for breakfast. It was the smell of cooking which awakened Billy. He got up, yawning, from his blankets.

  “Are we going today, Mr. Cotter?”

  “When we’ve had breakfast, and cleaned up.”

  “North, to the hills?”

  “No. South.”

  The boy looked at him, puzzled.

  Matthew said, “Over the seabed. We’re going back to the islands.”

  19

  BILLY pointed it out, on the eastern horizon, a couple of miles distant at least. Even so it looked huge, dwarfing the rocks in which it rested.

  “Uncle Matthew, its the tanker, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the captain still there, do you think?”

  “I suppose he is.”

  There was no smoke against the pale blue sky, and he tried to remember if there had been any last time. The weather had been bad then, of course, and a slight discharge of smoke would probably have been unnoticeable. It would only be slight, on a small standby generator. Perhaps one would not see it at all.

  But if the oil had given out, was Skiopos still ruling his crumbling kingdom—still cleaning and tidying and polishing? What would he do in the long evenings, once the film projector stopped w
orking? Peer out from the bridge, perhaps, searching for the sea which had abandoned him and his command. Matthew thought of April, as he still did sometimes, with a pang that carried, as well as unhappiness, the embers of hope; they flickered and glowed with the thought. Once he had taken Billy back to the island, and settled him in with Miller and the others … what was there to stop him from going north again on his own? It was Billy’s safety and future that counted.

  Billy said, “It’s all right for us to be west of it, isn’t it, Uncle Matthew? I mean, since we had to go off course on the way over, with that first lot of mud.”

  April’s voice laughed in his mind, and he knew he would not do it. There were habits of thought which might persist, but one came to a recognition, an acceptance, and they no longer had power. Not being indulged, they would in time die altogether. And there was more than Billy’s safety and future; since the illness there was Billy himself. He looked at the boy’s face, serious of expression, still—after all that had happened— a child’s, but reaching toward maturity. For the first time since the Bust, he was disposed to thank God for what he had.

  “Yes,” he said, “were bearing west a little. There isn’t a lot of point in stopping off at Alderney. It will save us a few miles if we aim direct for Guernsey.”

  “It will be funny being back there.”

  “It will be safe,” Matthew said. “No yobbos.”

  “What about from France?”

  “Not even from there. No one’s going to be tempted to cross the seabed for what small pickings the islands might be able to offer.”

  Matthew looked about him, at the dried mud and sand, the arid rocks. The sun gleamed on patches of caked salt. It had become land, but a barren inhospitable land. In a way, it offered more protection to the islands than the sea had ever done.

  They found fewer pools than on the outward journey; many of them, probably, had dried up. In one they did discover there were fish, but dead and floating belly up in the warm stagnant water. Later they came on a stream and traced it to its source, a spring bubbling strongly from between rocks. This water was fresh and cool, cold even. They refreshed their hot bodies with it, and emptied away the stale water from the container and refilled it.

  They came on another wrecked ship not long after that. It was a cargo ship, of less than a thousand tons, and it lay on its side with its broken superstructure tilted north. The big wave had dropped it there, Matthew thought; it did not look as though it had been under water. They scrambled into it to investigate and found a skeleton, wearing a tattered blue jersey and trousers, wedged against one of the bulwarks. The bones glistened, cleaned by something sharper than putrescence. Matthew looked into the hold and saw a brown shape dart among the shadows. He wondered if some of the crew had survived and, like the crew of the tanker, left the stranded ship. The rats, at any rate, had not. There was no immediate danger, and a food supply for the present: The rotting smell from the hold made him think the cargo had been an edible one.

  Billy cried, “Look!” and he turned quickly.

  “What was it?”

  “A kitten.”

  He saw it himself a moment later, a tabby kitten, perhaps nine or ten weeks old, picking its way along the sloping deck. And another, a third. The rats live on the cargo, and the cats live on the rats. A balanced ecology, for the moment—but based on rapidly dwindling resources.

  “Can we take one with us?” Billy asked.

  Matthew smiled. “If you can catch one, you can try taking it.”

  He watched the boy chasing the kittens; it made a pleasant, slightly ridiculous scene. There was no question of his catching one, of course, and he would very likely have regretted it if he had. In thousands of years the cat had never fully accepted domesticity, and the reversion was swift and complete. These were jungle-wild.

  The following day there was mist all round when they woke. It lifted to some extent as the sun got up, and Matthew thought it was going to lift altogether, but he was mistaken. Now and then the pale disk of the sun could be seen, hidden by drifting veils. It was enough to give them the barest confirmation of direction. They made good time, chiefly over mud flats which Matthew suspected were a westerly continuation of those around which they had been forced to detour on the outward journey. Here, too, there were places where the surface crust of mud broke under their feet, but these were rare. The weeks of drying out had had their effect.

  They camped on the mud that night and lay clasped together, shivering. At least, Matthew thought, it was nearly over. The following day, if his calculations were right and if the mist lifted, they should be in sight of Alderney.

  And beyond Alderney, Guernsey. Miller would be pleased, he thought, both by their return and by the news they brought of the barbarism and desolation outside the confines of his kingdom. Matthew himself felt no anticipation but a more willing resignation than he had expected. He listened inside his mind and heard Aprils voice again, small and far away now, but kinder, all bitterness gone. A place for Billy to grow up in, a kind of home. She approved of that. The voice, the memory, would fade, but he knew she would stay with him, a touchstone. It was a loss still, but a more bearable one.

  The boy slept in his arms.

  The mist did clear, but not until the middle of the day. Before that they walked between reefs of pink granite which might, for all one could see of their upper reaches, have been Himalayan foothills. The sea had cut the rock into strange shapes; at one time they traversed a twisting gorge, floored with bright sand, where their voices echoed back to them.

  Billy, discovering this, amused himself with cries, and with listening to the sounds ring round them, dying far away among the mists. But the mists were rising and vanishing; the suns disk appeared, white at first and then pale yellow, and there were glimpses of spurs and summits dazzling with color.

  Matthew pointed. “Can you climb that one? See if you can see anything.”

  Billy made his way up the side of the reef, sure-footed. From the top, he called down, ‘1 think … I think its Alderney.”

  “I’ll come up myself.”

  As Matthew climbed, Billy said something which was indistinct. The only word he caught was water. He went on up; at twenty feet the mist was very thin, at thirty nonexistent. The sun was hot and golden, the sky an unstained blue. He looked for the horizon. Five miles or more to the south, pinnacles of rock rose out of the gently billowing sea of white. Matthew thought he recognized them, and looked to his left. There was Alderney, a little farther away. The pinnacles were the Casquets, the graveyard of the White Ship and countless others.

  “Fair enough,” Matthew said. “We aim for the Casquets, and then a little south of west for Guernsey. We’ll make it tomorrow.”

  “I thought I saw water,” Billy said. “The mist opened a bit, but it’s closed again now.”

  “A pool, probably.”

  “It looked big.”

  Matthew was scrambling down the rock face. “Come on, Billy. Almost the last lap.”

  They came on the lake unexpectedly, less than a mile south. The ground dipped, and there it was, green and blue with the remnants of the mist clinging to the surface here and there. It was about three-quarters of a mile across, but the impressive thing was its length. It stretched, apparently endless, in either direction.

  Billy said, “Is it the sea, Uncle Matthew?”

  There was only one thing it could be. He said, “Not the sea. The Hurd Deep. A hole in the bed of the Channel. I suppose water stayed trapped in it when the land tilted.”

  “Will we have to go round it?”

  “I think we’d better. It’s a long swim.”

  Billy stared at the water. “Which way, though?”

  Matthew was trying to remember a chart he had seen once. The Deep started north of Alderney, and perhaps a little east. It was very long—seventy miles or more. The best plan, he decided, was to head for Alderney after all. They could stay the night there, and then tomorrow it would be a clear
run to Guernsey.

  “East,” he said. “We go east, Billy.”

  The detour was longer than he had expected; it was something like ten miles before they reached the end of the lake and could round it and head southwest toward the island. As he walked, Matthew thought about its size. So huge a body of water, comparable with Lake Geneva, would be years, decades, drying out, if it ever did. It might well be self-renewing. And there would be fish in it, for a certainty. He wondered if Miller had discovered it yet. It would be worth building a boat, making nets …

  The voice startled him. He had thought there was no one within thirty miles of them.

  “Mr. Cotter! Billy!”

  He looked disbelievingly and saw the small ginger-headed figure emerge from behind the shelter of a rock on their right. Billy called, “Archie!” and went running toward him. The two figures met and hugged each other.

  Over Billy’s head, Archie said, “I heard someone, like … Didn’t know who it might be, so I took cover. Didn’t think it could be you, Mr. Cotter. Didn’t see how.”

  Matthew stared at him. A dream? But the scrubby carroty beard, the wrinkled monkey face were real enough.

  “For Gods sake, Archie,” he said, “how do you come to be here?”

  “Been fishing.” He had a bag with him, and he held it open to show what was in it. “Caught four nice ’uns.”

  “But I thought if you left the grotto you were going to the hills.”

  “Well, they talked about it, April and Lawrence. They decided this part was best, from what they’d heard from you. Quieter, you know. And they was right.” He gestured toward the bulk of the island, a few miles away. “There’s hens up there, and fish here in the lake. I like fishing, Mr. Cotter. Lawrence tells me to come out here and fish. It’s a good place.” It had been a long time since Matthew could remember joy shaking him like this. He found himself grinning like an idiot. “The others are there, then, on the island? All of them?”

  “Of course,” Archie said. He grinned back, in open simple happiness. “I reckon they’ll be glad to see you.”

  The sun was going down the sky, but it had a long way to go to its couch among the distant jagged rocks. It was a cloudless summer’s day, with more to follow.