by Tim Lebbon
“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.