“I wonder if they buried them all over,” mused Angela, “or just at the top of the hill, where we found the sheep? Probably just at the top; out of the way of the water.”
Yes, they’d probably had too much of water: their poor green faces picked by fish, their uniforms rotted, their dog tags encrusted with algae. What deaths; and worse, what journeys after death, in squads of fellow corpses, along the Gulf Stream to this bleak landfall. I saw them, in my mind’s eye, the bodies of the soldiers, subject to every whim of the tide, borne backward and forward in a slush of rollers until a casual limb snagged on a rock, and the sea lost possession of them. With each receding wave uncovered; sodden and jellied brine, spat out by the sea to stink a while and be stripped by gulls.
I had a sudden, morbid desire to walk on the beach again, armed with this knowledge, kicking over the pebbles in the hope of turning up a bone or two.
As the thought formed, my body made the decision for me. I was standing: I was climbing off the Emmanuelle.
“Where are you off to?” said Angela.
“Jonathan,” I murmured, and set foot on the mound.
The stench was clearer now: that was the accrued odor of the dead. Maybe drowned men got buried here still, as Ray had suggested, slotted under the pile of stones. The unwary yachtsman, the careless swimmer, their faces wiped off with water. At my feet the beach flies were less sluggish than they’d been: instead of waiting to be killed they jumped and buzzed ahead of my steps, with a new enthusiasm for life.
Jonathan was not to be seen. His shorts were still on the stones at the water’s edge, but he’d disappeared. I looked out to sea: nothing: no bobbing head: no lolling, beckoning something.
I called his name.
My voice seemed to excite the flies; they rose in seething clouds.
Jonathan didn’t reply.
I began to walk along the margin of the sea, my feet sometimes caught by an idle wave, as often as not left untouched. I realized I hadn’t told Angela and Ray about the dead sheep. Maybe that was a secret between us four. Jonathan, myself, and the two survivors in the pen.
Then I saw him: a few yards ahead—his chest white, wide and clean, every speck of blood washed off. A secret it is then, I thought.
“Where have you been?” I called to him.
“Walking it off,” he called back.
“What off?”
“Too much gin.” He grinned.
I returned the smile, spontaneously; he’d said he loved me in the galley; that counted for something.
Behind him, a rattle of skipping stones. He was no more than ten yards from me now, shamelessly naked as he walked; his gait was sober.
The rattle of stones suddenly seemed rhythmical. It was no longer a random series of notes as one pebble struck another—it was a beat, a sequence of repeated sounds, a tick-tap pulse.
No accident: intention.
Not chance: purpose.
Not stone: thought. Behind stone, with stone, carrying stone—
Jonathan, now close, was bright. His skin was almost luminous with sun on it, thrown into relief by the darkness behind him.
Wait—
—What darkness?
The stone mounted the air like a bird, defying gravity. A blank black stone, disengaged from the earth. It was the size of a baby: a whistling baby, and it grew behind Jonathan’s head as it shimmered down the air toward him.
The beach had been flexing its muscles, tossing small pebbles down to the sea, all the time strengthening its will to raise this boulder off the ground and fling it at Jonathan.
It swelled behind him, murderous in its intention, but my throat had no sound to make worthy of my fright.
Was he deaf? His grin broke open again; he thought the horror on my face was a jibe at his nakedness, I realized. He doesn’t understand—
The stone sheared off the top of his head, from the middle of his nose upward, leaving his mouth still wide, his tongue rooted in blood, and flinging the rest of his beauty toward me in a cloud of wet red dust. The upper part of his head was split onto the face of the stone, its expression intact as it swooped toward me. I half fell, and it screamed past me, veering off toward the sea. Once over the water the assassin seemed to lose its will somehow, and faltered in the air before plunging into the waves.
At my feet, blood. A trail that led to where Jonathan’s body lay, the open edge of his head toward me, its machinery plain for the sky to see.
I was still not screaming, though for sanity’s sake I had to unleash the terror suffocating me. Somebody must hear me, hold me, take me away and explain to me, before the skipping pebbles found their rhythm again. Or worse, before the minds below the beach, unsatisfied with murder by proxy, rolled away their gravestones and rose to kiss me themselves.
But the scream would not come.
All I could hear was the patter of stones to my right and left. They intend to kill us all for invading their sacred ground. Stoned to death, like heretics. Then, a voice.
“For Christ’s sake—”
A man’s voice; but not Ray’s.
He seemed to have appeared from out of thin air: a short, broad man, standing at the sea’s edge. In one hand a bucket and under his arm a bundle of coarsely cut hay. Food for the sheep, I thought, through a jumble of half-formed words. Food for sheep.
He stared at me, then down at Jonathan’s body, his old eyes wild. “What’s gone on?” he said. The Gaelic accent was thick. “In the name of Christ what’s gone on?”
I shook my head. It seemed loose on my neck, almost as though I might shake it off. Maybe I pointed to the sheep pen, maybe not. Whatever the reason he seemed to know what I was thinking, and began to climb the beach toward the crown of the island, dropping bucket and bundle as he went.
Half-blind with confusion, I followed, but before I could reach the boulders he was out of their shadow again, his face suddenly shining with panic. “Who did that?”
“Jonathan,” I replied. I cast a hand toward the corpse, not daring to look back at him. The man cursed in Gaelic, and stumbled out of the shelter of the boulders.
“What have you done?” he yelled at me. “My Christ, what have you done? Killing their gifts.”
“Just sheep,” I said. In my head the instant of Jonathan’s decapitation was playing over and over again, a loop of slaughter.
“They demand it, don’t you see, or they rise—”
“Who rise?” I said, knowing. Seeing the stones shift.
“All of them. Put away without grief or mourning. But they’ve got the sea in them, in their heads—”
I knew what he was talking about: it was quite plain to me, suddenly. The dead were here: as we knew. Under the stones. But they had the rhythm of the sea in them, and they wouldn’t lie down. So to placate them, these sheep were tethered in a pen, to be offered up to their wills.
Did the dead eat mutton? No; it wasn’t food they wanted. It was the gesture of recognition—as simple as that.
“Drowned,” he was saying, “all drowned.”
Then, the familiar patter began again, the drumming of stones, which grew, without warning, into an ear-splitting thunder, as though the entire beach was shifting.
And under the cacophony three other sounds: splashing, screaming and wholesale destruction.
I turned to see a wave of stones rising into the air on the other side of the island—
Again the terrible screams, wrung from a body that was being buffeted and broken.
They were after the Emmanuelle. After Ray. I started to run in the direction of the boat, the beach rippling beneath my feet. Behind me, I could hear the boots of the sheep-feeder on the stones. As we ran the noise of the assault became louder. Stones danced in the air like fat birds, blocking the sun, before plunging down to strike at some unseen target. Maybe the boat. Maybe flesh itself—
Angela’s tormented screams had ceased.
I rounded the beachhead a few steps ahead of the sheep-feeder, and the Emmanu
elle came into sight. It, and its human contents, were beyond all hope of salvation. The vessel was being bombarded by endless ranks of stones, all sizes and shapes; its hull was smashed, its windows, mast and deck shattered. Angela lay sprawled on the remains of the sun deck, quite obviously dead. The fury of the hail hadn’t stopped, however. The stones beat a tattoo on the remaining structure of the hull, and thrashed at the lifeless bulk of Angela’s body, making it bob up and down as though a current were being passed through it.
Ray was nowhere to be seen.
I screamed then: and for a moment it seemed there was a lull in the thunder, a brief respite in the attack. Then it began again: wave after wave of pebbles and rocks rising off the beach and flinging themselves at their senseless targets. They would not be content, it seemed, until the Emmanuelle was reduced to flotsam and jetsam, and Angela’s body was in small enough pieces to accommodate a shrimp’s palate.
The sheep-feeder took hold of my arm in a grip so fierce it stopped the blood flowing to my hand.
“Come on,” he said. I heard his voice but did nothing. I was waiting for Ray’s face to appear—or to hear his voice calling my name. But there was nothing: just the barrage of the stones. He was dead in the ruins of the boat somewhere—smashed to smithereens.
The sheep-feeder was dragging me now, and I was following him back over the beach.
“The boat,” he was saying, “we can get away in my boat—”
The idea of escape seemed ludicrous. The island had us on its back; we were its objects utterly.
But I followed, slipping and sliding over the sweaty rocks, ploughing through the tangle of seaweed, back the way we’d come.
On the other side of the island was his poor hope of life. A rowing boat, dragged up on the shingle: an inconsequential walnut shell of a boat.
Would we go to sea in that, like the three men in a sieve?
He dragged me, unresisting, toward our deliverance. With every step I became more certain that the beach would suddenly rise up and stone us to death. Maybe make a wall of itself, a tower even, when we were within a single step of safety. It could play any game it liked, any game at all. But then, maybe the dead didn’t like games. Games are about gambles, and the dead had already lost. Maybe the dead act only with the arid certainty of mathematicians.
He half-threw me into the boat, and began to push it out into the thick tide. No walls of stones rose to prevent our escape. No towers appeared, no slaughtering hail. Even the attack on the Emmanuelle had ceased.
Had they sated themselves on three victims? Or was it that the presence of the sheep-feeder, an innocent, a servant of these willful dead, would protect me from their tantrums?
The rowing boat was off the shingle. We bobbed a little on the backs of a few limp waves until we were deep enough for the oars, and then we were pulling away from the shore and my savior was sitting opposite me, rowing for all he was worth, a dew of fresh sweat on his forehead, multiplying with every pull.
The beach receded; we were being set free. The sheep-feeder seemed to relax a little. He gazed down at the swill of dirty water in the bottom of the boat and drew in half a dozen deep breaths; then he looked up at me, his wasted face drained of expression.
“One day, it had to happen—” he said, his voice low and heavy. “Somebody would spoil the way we lived. Break the rhythm.”
It was almost soporific, the hauling of the oars, forward and back. I wanted to sleep, to wrap myself up in the tarpaulin I was sitting on, and forget. Behind us, the beach was a distant line. I couldn’t see the Emmanuelle.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“Back to Tiree,” he replied. “We’ll see what’s to be done there. Find some way to make amends; to help them sleep soundly again.”
“Do they eat the sheep?”
“What good is food to the dead? No. No, they have no need of mutton. They take the beasts as a gesture of remembrance.”
Remembrance.
I nodded.
“It’s our way of mourning them—”
He stopped rowing, too heartsick to finish his explanation, and too exhausted to do anything but let the tide carry us home. A blank moment passed.
Then the scratching.
A mouse noise, no more, a scrabbling at the underside of the boat like a man’s nails tickling the planks to be let in. Not one man: many. The sound of their entreaties multiplied; the soft dragging of rotted cuticles across the wood.
In the boat, we didn’t move, we didn’t speak, we didn’t believe. Even as we heard the worst—we didn’t believe the worst.
A splash off to starboard; I turned and he was coming toward me, rigid in the water, borne up by unseen puppeteers like a figurehead. It was Ray; his body covered in killing bruises and cuts: stoned to death, then brought, like a gleeful mascot, like proof of power, to spook us. It was almost as though he were walking on water, his feet just hidden by the swell, his arms hanging loosely by his side as he was hauled toward the boat. I looked at his face: lacerated and broken. One eye almost closed, the other smashed from its orbit.
Two yards from the boat, the puppeteers let him sink back into the sea, where he disappeared in a swirl of pink water.
“Your companion?” said the sheep-feeder.
I nodded. He must have fallen into the sea from the stern of the Emmanuelle. Now he was like them, a drowned man. They’d already claimed him as their plaything. So they did like games after all: they hauled him from the beach like children come to fetch a playmate, eager that he should join the horseplay.
The scratching had stopped. Ray’s body had disappeared altogether. Not a murmur off the pristine sea, just the slop of the waves against the boards of the boat.
I pulled at the oars—
“Row!” I screamed at the sheep-feeder. “Row, or they’ll kill us.”
He seemed resigned to whatever they had in mind to punish us with. He shook his head and spat onto the water. Beneath his floating phlegm something moved in the deep, pale forms rolled and somersaulted, too far down to be clearly seen. Even as I watched they came floating up toward us, their sea-corrupted faces better defined with every fathom they rose, their arms outstretched to embrace us.
A shoal of corpses. The dead in dozens, crab-cleaned and fishpicked, their remaining flesh scarcely sitting on their bones.
The boat rocked gently as their hands reached up to touch it.
The look of resignation on the sheep-feeder’s face didn’t falter for a moment as the boat was shaken backward and forward; at first gently, then so violently we were beaten about like dolls. They meant to capsize us, and there was no help for it. A moment later, the boat tipped over.
The water was icy; far colder than I’d anticipated, and it took breath away. I’d always been a fairly strong swimmer. My strokes were confident as I began to swim from the boat, cleaving through the white water. The sheep-feeder was less lucky. Like many men who live with the sea, he apparently couldn’t swim. Without issuing a cry or a prayer, he sank like a stone.
What did I hope? That four was enough: that I could be left to thumb a current to safety? Whatever hopes of escape I had, they were short-lived.
I felt a soft, oh, so very soft, brushing of my ankles and my feet, almost a caress. Something broke surface briefly close to my head. I glimpsed a gray back, as of a large fish. The touch on my ankle had become a grasp. A pulpy hand, mushed by so long in the water, had hold of me, and inexorably began to claim me for the sea. I gulped what I knew to be my last breath of air, and as I did so Ray’s head bobbed no more than a yard from me. I saw his wounds in clinical detail—the water-cleansed cuts were ugly flaps of white tissue, with a gleam of bone at their core. The loose eye had been washed away by now, his hair, flattened to his skull, no longer disguised the bald patch at his crown.
The water closed over my head. My eyes were open, and I saw my hard-earned breath flashing past my face in a display of silver bubbles. Ray was beside me, consoling, attentive. His arms fl
oated over his head as though he were surrendering. The pressure of the water distorted his face, puffing his cheeks out and spilling threads of severed nerves from his empty eye socket like the tentacles of a tiny squid.
I let it happen. I opened my mouth and felt it fill with cold water. Salt burned my sinuses, the cold stabbed behind my eyes. I felt the brine burning down my throat, a rush of eager water where water shouldn’t go—flushing air from my tubes and cavities, till my system was overwhelmed.
Below me, two corpses, their hair swaying loosely in the current, hugged my legs. Their heads lolled and danced on rotted ropes of neck muscle, and though I pawed at their hands, and their flesh came off the bone in gray, lace-edged pieces, their loving grip didn’t falter. They wanted me, oh, how dearly they wanted me.
Ray was holding me too, wrapping me up, pressing his face to mine. There was no purpose in the gesture, I suppose. He didn’t know or feel, or love or care. And I, losing my life with every second, succumbing to the sea absolutely, couldn’t take pleasure in the intimacy that I’d longed for.
Too late for love; the sunlight was already a memory. Was it that the world was going out—darkening toward the edges as I died—or that we were now so deep the sun couldn’t penetrate so far? Panic and terror had left me—my heart seemed not to beat at all—my breath didn’t come and go in anguished bursts as it had. A kind of peace was on me.
Now the grip of my companions relaxed, and the gentle tide had its way with me. A rape of the body: a ravaging of skin and muscle, gut, eye, sinus, tongue, brain.
Time had no place here. The days may have passed into weeks, I couldn’t know. The keels of boats glided over and maybe we looked up from our rock hovels on occasion and watched them pass. A ringed finger was trailed in the water, a splashless puddle clove the sky, a fishing line trailed a worm. Signs of life.
Maybe the same hour as I died, or maybe a year later, the current sniffs me out of my rock and has some mercy. I am twitched from amongst the sea anemones and given to the tide. Ray is with me. His time too has come. The sea change has occurred; there is no turning back for us.
Death by Water Page 50