Mindwarp

by James Follett

  He waited a minute, hardly believing that she had courage to enter the cave alone.

  “JENINE!”

  Minutes passed. Panic seized him. Supposing she had found that the grille guarding the tunnel was open? He knew that she was sufficiently strong-willed to overcome her fear of confined spaces, so supposing she had crawled in and the grille had slammed shut behind her? He pulled on his shoes and ran frantically along the beach to where the wooded cliff sloped down to the sand. He crashed blindly through the bush, scrambling over rockfalls to take the shortest route to the top. He slipped twice, grazing his knee badly the first time, but took no notice, and pressed on. Near the top exhaustion forced him to rest. He lay on the ground, his tortured heart hammering against his ribs. Without waiting to get his breath back, he continued to the top and half crawled, half shambled along the cliff top, tripping over roots until he came to the tree that Jenine had tied the rope to. This time commonsense prevailed and he waited a few minutes to restore his senses.

  “Jenine!”

  She must have heard him; the cave opening was close, just below an outcrop. He lay prone at the brink and cried out again, but there was no answer. He closed his eyes and decided that his pounding heart was due more to the terrible thought of losing his beloved Jenine than his exertions. He grasped the rope and went down as fast as he dare. His feet encountered the ledge, and he threw himself into the cave’s opening. He picked himself up and stumbled towards the light, and the sound of sobbing.

  “Jenine?”

  He went forward and found her. His senses swam with overwhelming relief. She was kneeling on the floor, the discharge tube lying beside her, forehead pressed in abject misery against the grille that was still closed. There was blood on her hands and the bars - he guessed from where she had torn at the grille in fury and frustration. He wanted to be angry with her: to shout and rant about her stupidity, but he was unwilling to add to her misery. Instead he touched her gently on the shoulder. She took no notice.

  “Jenine… You should’ve waited.”

  “We have to get back!” she sobbed. “We have to tell them. We have a duty. We can’t let them go on like that. Not knowing the truth.” Her fury boiled over and she shook the immoveable grille, ignoring her lacerated hands.

  This time he wanted to get angry with her; to spin her around and slap her face. He resisted the impulse with an effort and kept his voice calm. “They’ll never believe us, Jenine.”

  “That’s what you keep saying. They’ll have to listen. We’ll take back evidence. Those leaves…”

  “They still won’t believe us. But if several of us were to return…”

  She jerked her head off the grille and stared at him, her cheeks streaked with tears. “Several? What do you mean, several?”

  “Those buildings yesterday… I think I saw people.”

  “People!” Her fury returned. “You saw people and you said nothing!”

  “I don’t know for certain. There was something moving about. I blinked and they or it, or whatever it was, were gone. It’s too far away to be sure.”

  She calmed down a little.

  “I’m sorry, Jenine, but you were so intent on returning here-”

  She ran her fingertips over his sweat-streaked chest. He could never be angry with her when she did that. “You got here fast.”

  “I was terrified at the thought of losing you.” He cradled her face and kissed her. “I’m never going to let you out of my sight again. I swear.”

  She smiled at that and returned the kiss. “Dear, sweet, Ewen.”

  “I’m sorry I forgot to tell you about the people.”

  “Oh… It was my fault. I didn’t think to ask. I assumed that the place was deserted… That the buildings were ruins.”

  “They might be for all we know,” said Ewen, relieved now that her customary objectiveness was returning. “I only think I saw them.”

  “Then we have to find out one way or the other.”

  Ewen was nonplussed. “How?”

  “We signal them.”

  10.

  “Now!” Ewen yelled when the heat started melting a hole in the membrane leaves.

  He and Jenine dragged the translucent green cover back from the bonfire they had built near their camp and watched the spreading ball of black smoke they had released rise into air. There were now three distinct black clouds marring the still, clear air above the beach although the highest cloud was being dissipated by a breeze that wasn’t apparent at ground level. It was the second successive day that they had tried the smoke trick. Today they hoped for success because the wind had dropped and they had discovered a forest fuel that gave off dense black smoke when wet.

  “And again!” Jenine cried.

  They dragged the crude cover back over the bonfire and waited for the smoke to build up beneath it. They had made the cover by scoring hundreds of membrane leaves together so that they were bonded into a large sheet. The heat caused the translucent material to billow up like a giant blister, making it difficult to control.

  “Now!”

  They ran sideways with the cover and liberated another pungent black cloud. They tried again, but the heat-weakened membrane finally split and caught fire. They watched it curl and burn. That it had lasted so long had surprised them. The strange leaves had an astonishing resistance to fire.

  Ewen grinned at Jenine. They were naked, their bodies were soot black and streaked with sweat. “I reckon that’s it for today. If they don’t see that, they’ve got to be blind.”

  “And have no sense of smell,” Jenine added, wrinkling her nose.

  “Oh, I don’t think they’d smell you from here…” He paused and twitched his nostril at her. “On second thoughts, perhaps they might.”

  Jenine retaliated by kicking sand at Ewen and chasing him into the sea. They wrestled and splashed in the surf, rubbing each other clean with handfuls of wet sand.

  “Not there, Ewen! You idiot!”

  They fell struggling and laughing together, swallowing seawater and not minding because they had lost much of their fear of the mighty expanse. Jenine broke away and swam into deeper water, kicking hard to wash away Ewen’s inconsiderately-placed handful of sand.

  Ewen sprawled lazily on the beach, savouring the sun’s warmth after his dip. It was early morning, a time of day when they took a chance on exposing their bodies to the the sun’s rays. He propped himself on his elbows and watched Jenine’s lithe body cleaving gracefully through the water, noticing for the first time that, despite their care, the ultra-violet radiation had changed her skin from white to a rich golden colour. He returned her wave. She swam back to the beach and waded out of the water. As he watched, utterly entranced, he realised that he had experienced this scene before: a beautiful, golden-skinned blonde girl rising out of the water against a background of blue; sparkling rivulets coursing between her full breasts, separating into twin streams that joined again as they flowed over her stomach, forming an inviting inverted arrow that drew his gaze willingly down.

  This was his recurring dream of the outdoors made real.

  11.

  On their tenth day in the outdoors the sun was hidden by cloud. The humidity had dropped, the horizon sharp and clear, so they took advantage of the cooler conditions to pack some fruit in the holdall and climb the hill to the ventilator shaft where they stared at the far off line of buildings.

  “They must have seen our smoke,” Jenine declared. “How could they not have seen it?”

  “If there’s anyone there,” Ewen observed. “And besides, fires seem to occur naturally here from time to time. There were those blackened areas that we found yesterday.”

  Jenine screwed up her eyes. “You know, you can almost see the curvature of the water if you look carefully.”

  “But no people?” Ewen queried, pleased at her acceptance of his bizarre theory.

  She didn’t reply but continued gazing at the buildings. “They don’t look like ruins. All the precipitati
on we get at night must cause damage over the years.” She pulled a piece of membrane leaf from a pocket and punched a pinhole in it with a tool from the holdall. Ewen watched her curiously as she held the piece of material to her eye.

  “What’s the idea?” he asked.

  “Trick I learned as a kid… The rays of light are concentrated and focussed more clearly as they pass through a pinhole…” Her voice trailed away and then she gave a sudden whoop that made Ewen jump. “Yes! There’s people! Hundreds of people!”

  “What?”

  She thrust the leaf into his hand and showed him how to stretch it out and hold the pinhole close to his eye. “You’ll see them! You’ve got to see them!”

  Ewen saw them. Hundreds was an exaggeration, but there was no doubt that the almost indistinguishable forms were definitely people. There were larger shapes that could even be ground cars.

  Jenine snatched the leaf from him and gave another cry of exaltation. “There’s men and women!”

  Ewen laughed. “Well I could certainly see something that looked like people. But as for men or women… You must have better eyesight than me.”

  She turned to him, her eyes shining, her whole being vibrant with excitement. “There are people there, Ewen! Rational people. People who erect buildings. People who live under the stars and know what they are. People who know the truth. If we tell them about Arama, they will find a way in and liberate them! Our friends, relations - everyone. We can lead them out of the darkness! This is where they belong! Not shut up in those caverns! The radio message was right. We must escape from this island.”

  12.

  Ewen’s feet touched sand. He stood and guided the drifting tree that Jenine had spotted towards the beach. She saw that he was exhausted after his long swim, and splashed into the water to help him beach the tree, but its branches snagged on the bottom, causing it to swing uncontrollably in the swell.

  “It’s no good - it’s too big,” he panted.

  But Jenine was not so easily deterred. “Maybe we could burn off some of the branches?”

  “Burn them off in the water? A great idea.” Ewen let go of the tree in disgust and staggered up the beach where the fruits of their scavenging, pieces of driftwood of every conceivable shape and size, lay drying in the sun.

  “Ewen! Help me!”

  “Let it go, Jenine. It’s waterlogged.”

  Jenine gave up struggling with the tree and watched the wind and current conspire to drag it out to sea. She waded out of the water and sat a distance from Ewen, twisting membrane leaves into a rope while pointedly ignoring him.

  “Jenine-”

  “If it was something you’d thought of, that tree would be beached by now!” she snapped. “But a raft was my idea so you’ve raised every objection you can think of!”

  “That’s not fair. The smoke signals were your idea. I went along with that.”

  “Not at first you didn’t!”

  Ewen jumped to his feet, seized a length of sea-worn branch and marched to the water’s edge. “Watch!” With that he flung the piece of wood into the sea. It sank and came sluggishly to the surface with the sea washing over it. “You see? Useless! If it’s got a specific gravity of less than one, it floats; if it’s one or more, it sinks.” He kicked a pile of timber over. “It’s all the same, Jenine. It barely floats. We’d need an island of the stuff as big as this island to give us enough residual buoyancy to support our weight. And how would we hold it all together?”

  She held up a length of the membrane rope. “With this. It’s strong.”

  “And so are those waves. I’ve been out there. And even if the raft stayed in one piece, how would we steer it?”

  “The wind will take us.”

  Ewen sat beside her and helped plait the rope, giving each leaf a hard twist. The self-adhesive properties of the leaves ensured that they stayed bonded firmly together. “And the current will take us in the wrong direction,” he said gently. “You saw what happened to the model.”

  “There’ll be no current at night,” Jenine answered, not looking up from her work. “They’re convection currents caused by the heat from the light. When the light’s gone, no currents. That’s logical.”

  “And it’s also logical to suppose that there’s enough residual heat in a mass of water that size to maintain currents all through the night. Besides, it’ll take longer than a night to get there. If we could walk it, it would take at least a day.”

  Their argument dragged on, and got progressively more acrimonious. It ended with Jenine jumping to her feet and storming off along the beach. Ewen watched her go. It was low tide. She rounded the headland and disappeared. He cursed himself for not going along with her idea. She wasn’t stupid; once they had some sort of raft lashed together she would have seen how hopeless the project was. He dragged four of the longest tree trunks into position to form a frame and set to work lashing them together. Best not to build the thing too far from the water. He put a long, slender trunk to one side to use as a launching lever. He became intent on his work and stopped suddenly when he realised that Jenine had not returned. He expected her to be watching him from the headland but there was no sign of her when he shaded his eyes and scoured the promontory. He worked on the raft for another hour and started to worry as the sun dipped lower.

  He abandoned his task, made up the fire so that it wouldn’t go out before sundown, and set off along the beach. Jogging on the soft sand was hard on the ankles but it was firm along the tide’s edge. He reached the headland and clambered to the highest point. She was a distant, forlorn dot on the next beach, sitting watching the sea. If she heard his shouts, she ignored them.

  Ewen pounded along the wet sand towards her, rehearsing his apologies.

  “Jenine!”

  He was much nearer; she must’ve heard him, yet there was no acknowledgement. Not so much as a turn of her head.

  He pushed doggedly on, splattering his legs with wet sand. He could see her more clearly now. The way she kept her gaze directed doggedly out to sea told him that she knew he was approaching.

  “Jen-”

  He didn’t see what tripped him and sent him sprawling flat on his face. Searing pain stabbed through his ankle and lanced up his right leg. He tried to get up but his foot was trapped. He managed to turn his foot in whatever was gripping it below the wet sand so that he could sit up, but his attempts to pull it free were an agony.

  “Jenine! I’m stuck!”

  She gave him a cursory glance.

  “Please, Jenine! I’m hurt!”

  She rose and walked to him, taking her time. She stood disdainfully over him, hands on hips.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve tripped on something and can’t get my foot free.” He grimaced in pain. “It hurts like hell.”

  She knelt and suddenly her demeanour changed. “Oh, Ewen - what have you done? Your ankle’s swelling up.”

  He managed a feeble joke despite his predicament: “And my pride’s deflating. I’m sorry about earlier on, Jenine. I’ve made a serious start on the raft. I think it’s going to be okay.”

  She rewarded his climb-down with a teasing smile. “Well it doesn’t look like you’ll be doing much more work on it for a while, the state this ankle’s in. Keep still.”

  She scooped the sand away from around Ewen’s foot. “You’ve jammed it in something… Something white… Hold on.” She jumped up, searched among the debris along the highwater mark, and returned with a large shell which she use as a trowel to dig the sand away from around Ewen’s foot.

  “I think it’s bone,” she said.

  “Of course my ankle’s bone,” said Ewen indignantly. “It’s an ideal material for skeletons.”

  “Idiot - whatever’s trapping your foot. It’s like those skeletons that get washed up only it must be huge. It goes down a long way.” She dug for a minute, creating a mound of sand. Ewen tried to lean forward to see what she had discovered, but the intensity of the pain forced h
im to lie back and think about what life was like before this agony.

  Jenine jumped to her feet and went on another forage and returned with a large, sharp lump of flint. “Keep still,” she warned, sitting astride the hole.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Cut your foot off, of course.”

  With that she swung the rock into the hole. There was the sound of something breaking. Ewen felt his foot come free. He wriggled backwards and regarded his swollen ankle in dismay. “Thanks, Jenine.”

  She looked at his foot in concern and ran her hands over the swelling, kneading quite hard with her fingers in the process and making him yelp. “Nothing’s broken.” She stood. “Won’t be a minute. Don’t run away.”

  Another scavenge along the foreshore. She returned with a long length of the kelp-like streamer seaweed which she bound tightly around his foot. He was about to voice protests on principle, but realised that the pressure of the makeshift bandage actually relieved the pain.

  “Thanks, Jenine. Where would I be without you?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have to come chasing after me every time I have an attack of the sulks. Do you think you can walk?”

  “I think so, if you could find a stick.” He tried to stand but Jenine pushed him back gently.

  “Rest a while. I want to find out what this thing is you fell over.”

  While Ewen looked on, she went back to work with the sea shell, industriously scraping the hole deeper and exposing more of the strange white object.

  “It’s bone all right,” she announced, shifting into a different position and digging on the opposite side. Ewen eased himself forward and helped scoop out the wet sand.

  “It’s like a giant pot or carboy,” said Ewen. “A skull?”

  Jenine stopped work and contemplated the object she was digging around. Ewen was right - it resembled a giant pot. She tried to lift it, but it refused to budge.

  “It’s full of sand,” said Ewen, staring down at the dome-like bone shell.

  But Jenine had already thrust her hands through the hole that she had enlarged to free Ewen’s foot. She worked for ten minutes, without speaking, intent on scooping out handfuls of wet sand. She tried shifting it again. This time it moved and could be rocked back and forth. Ewen shifted his weight on his buttocks, got a purchase on the object with both hands, and heaved. It came free and together they managed to roll it out of the hole.