The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (40 page)

“Why choose me?”

The man shrugged. “Because you won’t tell the others. And you’re better equipped than most, to decide what constitutes a genuine emergency. You won’t panic, and you’re not too proud to know when you do need help. Get out by yourselves if you can, of course; but call for us if you must. Whatever the leader says, we really don’t want a fatality. Not good for business.”

Nathaniel nodded. “How does the button work, then, just with a squeeze?”

“Squeeze and hold. There’s a switch inside, but it needs constant pressure for a couple of seconds, or it won’t activate. That’s just a precaution against accidental knocks. Then it triggers an alarm here, which is constantly monitored; and after that it acts as a radio beacon for the helicopter. Wear it round your neck; there’s an aerial inside the cord. Try not to get separated from your team, or you’re the only one we’ll find. And just getting separated, getting lost does
not
count as an emergency. Understood?”

Nathaniel nodded, slipped the cord over his head and tucked the button inside his T-shirt.

Two hours later, with wet suits and waterproof packs, he and his team sat in a flat-bellied Zodiac being bumped across a hard and rising sea.

The shore was lost behind them, in a mist of spray and grey cloud. Shadows ahead and to either side resolved themselves as rocks or clusters of rock; occasionally the wind whipped a hole in the mist long enough for Nathaniel to think he could see a longer, bulkier shadow on the near skyline, the promise of an island. Certainly there ought to be islands. Orientation wasn’t easy in this enveloping murk, but he knew how long since they left camp, he knew the direction
roughly and the top speed of a Zodiac; after three weeks here he knew the coastline and the maps. Yes, there ought to be islands all around them.

And yes, sudden as a whale, there was an island dead ahead, the navigation reassuringly professional and precise.

Not much of an island, only a low silhouette with a softer outline than the rocks they’d passed already. Perhaps not a full-blown whale, then, perhaps only a calf; but every calf has a mother. He squinted to windward, thought perhaps he spotted her, though perhaps he only wanted to.

The man on the tiller edged the black craft through the surf, till Nathaniel felt its bottom scrape on rock. The air was drenched with spray here; he choked on salt, as the wind flung it against his teeth.

“Out you get, then,” the man shouted. “Don’t leave anything behind, I’m not coming back.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Josephine demanded.

“Survive, and keep moving. That’s all. Pick-up point is on Jamesay, forty-eight hours from now.”

“How the hell do we get there?” They knew Jamesay; they’d circumnavigated her in the three-masted schooner last week. At the time, they’d thought they were only learning to sail a big vessel in a contrary wind.

Nathaniel consulted a sketch-map in his head. Jamesay must be twenty miles south of here, and five miles further out to sea.

The man shrugged, uninterested. “That’s up to you. Out you get, now. Move it.”

Bewildered, angry or uncertain, they were all none the less obedient by now. One by one they jumped out into almost a metre’s depth of bitter water, feeling a steep-shelving stony shore below their feet. They hurried up out of the surf with packs clutched in their arms, then turned and stood in a tight group, unspeaking, to watch the Zodiac bounce away over the water.

The man on the tiller didn’t wave, didn’t call a farewell, didn’t look back.

What now
? was the question no one asked, a confession of weakness and a pointless waste of breath.

“There’ll be something,” Josephine said. “There must be something, they don’t expect us to
swim
it. Split into two, we’ll go opposite ways around the shore. Meet on the far side, and report.”

So they did that, jogging for warmth and speed, as best they could on the treacherous ground. The two groups lost sight of each other fast in the haze, but the island was as small as
Nathaniel had thought; they met up again fifteen minutes later.

“Nothing.”

“Us neither. Not a thing.”

So they climbed instead to the island’s crown, and from there could just make out all of its shoreline; and no, there was no boat, nor anything to build with.

“Ideas?” Josephine looked around her team; and when no one else spoke, Nathaniel pointed out what seemed so obvious to him, what surely shouldn’t have needed saying.

“The tide’s high.”

“How can you tell?”

“No high water mark. Where the surf’s reaching now, that must be its limit.”

“Okay. So the tide’s in. So?”

“So if there’s no boat and they’re not expecting us to swim, we can walk off. Or scramble, anyway. Look,” pointing, “there’s a bigger island to the east there. It’s hardly any distance, if we could see clearly. And the tidal fall is bound to be significant, in an environment like this. At low water, I bet we’ll be able to make our way over, pretty much dryshod. You can see, those rocks almost make a causeway already, or the start of one . . .”

He was right, and they knew it; and they weren’t grateful, but he hadn’t expected that.

They sheltered in the driest crevice they could find, where the island was split down to bedrock. Six hours more or less to kill, before they tried the crossing; and Raoul produced a knife.

“We’re a team,” he said, “we depend on each other. We need to bond. A sign, a symbol would be helpful. What I feel, you all feel also.”

And he laid the blade across the palm of his hand; but Josephine stopped him.

“No,” she said. “I’ll do it. I’ll do it for all of you. I’m leader.”

She took the knife from him, held his open hand firmly in hers and drew the blade deeply through the pad of flesh below his thumb. He flinched but didn’t pull away, didn’t take his eyes from hers.

“Good,” she said. “You’ll feel that. But it won’t bleed for long in this cold, and the salt’ll keep it clean. Who’s next?”

One by one, they offered their hands to her knife, and their blood all mingled on her skin.

Nathaniel came last, thinking this foolish and unnecessary: why do the team damage, when it most needed all its strength? But it would be damaged more by his refusal; he kept his face neutral and
held out his hand, already subvocalizing a mantra he had taught himself, a mental trick to suppress pain.

Josephine’s hard fingers closed around his, she looked into his eyes, she smiled; and the blade stabbed down, and the point drove through all the flesh of his hand, grating against bone and almost shaking him out of his mantric flux.

Almost, but not quite. Pain’s shout was lost in the murmuring of his mind; he held her gaze, and thought he saw more hurt in her than she would have seen in him.

He sat unmoving, until she jerked the knife free; then she held up her hand, and yes, she was bleeding too. The blade had gone all the way through his hand and into hers, as perhaps it had been meant to.

Correction: as certainly it had been meant to.

“If we harm each other,” she said – making a virtue, making a lie of it, though not one meant to be believed, by him or anyone – “we also harm ourselves. We’re a team, we’re bonded now. The team has primacy. Let’s remember that.”

At the tide’s turn, as Nathaniel had predicted, exposed rocks made a road from calf to mother, their small island to its far larger neighbour.

It was a hard road to follow, jumping from one sharp wet tooth of rock to the next, while vicious currents sucked at ice-grey water only a little below their feet. But they helped each other: the brave encouraged the nervous or else abused them, whichever was more prolific of result; the strongest made the journey twice or three times, ferrying packs across and offering a hand to grip where it was most needed; and at last they might be soaked with spray and shivering, they might have torn their jeans and the skin on their hands to add more blood-loss to what they’d given already, but they were all safely over. Tumbled together on scant grass, they grinned exhaustedly at each other, punched the air and whooped with what little breath they had left.

No one grinned at Nathaniel, no one so much as glanced in his direction although he’d found the road for them and been both the first and the last across, though he’d carried more than anyone and had barely made it back with his final load, leaping from toehold to toehold on vanishing rocks as the waters rose more quickly than they’d guessed.

He nodded unsmilingly, wishing not to feel it, not to care; he rested for five minutes, and then he went to search along the shoreline.

Under a pegged tarpaulin, he found seven canoes with life-jackets, helmets and paddles.

* * *

There were rations there also, a collapsible stove and billy-cans, everything they needed. No tents, but the tarpaulin was large enough to shelter them all, stretched over a framework of paddles; weighted with rocks and lashed together, the canoes made a useful windbreak.

After they’d eaten they built a fire of driftwood, lighting it – Nathaniel’s idea – with wood chips dried in a billy on the stove.

“No map,” Tarian said. “They haven’t given us a map. How’re we going to find Jamesay?”

“Follow the islands down,” Nathaniel said. “They’re like a chain, all the way; if we stay on the landward side, we’ll miss the worst of the weather and the high seas, too. Then there’s just a mile of open water, we go dead south and there’s Jamesay.”

“You knew,” Charlotte accused him. “You knew what we’d be doing, that’s how come you’re so well sussed about it all.”

“No,” he said.

“You just happen to have memorized the charts, then, is that right?”

He shrugged. “I suppose, yes. I looked at them, on the schooner,” which was quite enough; he’d learned them at a glance, and he’d never understood about forgetting. Once learned, a thing was with him always. “It’s a trick, that’s all. Useful, but not significant.”

“Like you, then. Right?”

He just looked at her, looked at her frustrated anger and recognized it from their chess games earlier. Emotional maps were no different. Any kind of lesson, the same applied: once learned, never forgotten.

Alas
, he thought, and turned his eyes to the fire, where bright flames burned green with salt.

Barely sheltered where he slept, furthest from the windbreak and least in touch, least belonging, he felt no constraint to stay with the team when he woke, when they were still close-huddled in sleep. He rolled out from under the canopy, got to his feet and walked down to the sea’s fretful edge. The wind’s bite was fierce through damp clothing, but he welcomed the cold of it, and the hard spray in his face.

Staring out at dark water in the hiss and crash of water breaking on rock, he neither saw nor heard her until she was there beside him, touching his arm for attention.

Josephine, of course. Team captain, prime mover: not a bad choice after all, given that any team with himself in charge would have been in a state of constant rebellion.
Start stupid, learn fast
: lessons in the psychology of leadership would never be enough for someone like
him, and so he’d tell people if he could only make them listen. In case they meant to try again.
You got me wrong
, he’d tell them,
it doesn’t work this way. Evolution’s got muddied by democracy, you can’t just overleap the majority any more. You’ll have to be more careful next time, give the poor bastard some handle on normality or there’ll be nothing to hang on to, first or last
. . .

“Remember,” Josephine said, her voice tight with distaste, “what he said at breakfast, about sleeping with each other? If it was good for the team?”

“Yes,” neutral as he could make it.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it. I thought, anything that would make you a part of us, it had to be worth it . . . But it wouldn’t work, would it?”

“No,” he agreed, still neutral. Still separate.

“It’s too late for that.”

“Yes.” It had been too late for a long time now, since his first week in camp. Ever since he’d started stupid, measuring himself publicly against the others.

“You’re – artificial,” she said, seeking to explain it to herself. “
Built
to be better than us. That’s what it is . . .”

“No. Doesn’t matter how I happened, I’m as real as you are. No different.”

“Better is different. State of the art, right? Real maybe, but – well, hell, human kind cannot bear very much reality. You know?”

“I know,” he said, burdened by too much knowledge, far too much reality.

“Okay, then. Nothing changes, I guess.”

“I guess not.” Nothing ever changed, nor ever would.

He thought she nodded in the darkness, as though she’d caught the thought; and then she turned, back to her sleeping team. And stopped, and turned again, and said, “You know Goya?”

He smiled briefly, bitterly; and killed the smile before he spoke, so that she wouldn’t hear it in his voice. “
El sueño de la razón produce monstruos
,” he said.

“Yeah. Right. Hang on to that.” And then she was gone, and for once in his life he was uncertain, he was confused.
The sleep of reason begets monsters
: that was inarguable, it was a constant theme in his life. But he couldn’t be sure if she’d meant it as an accusation, or an apology.

They set off at first light, with weary work ahead of them if they were to reach Jamesay today. They kept in the lee of the island chain, and swung their paddles in a constant rhythm; and here at least Nathaniel could fool some imagined observer if not himself, if
none of the others. He could echo the rhythm precisely and imitate the power of their strokes, he could keep his place and seem no different.

At noon they broke for a meal and a rest in a sheltered bay, and he was again no part of what they were together; and then it was back to the water and aching muscles locked into relentless rhythm, and yes, dwelling on the pain in his hand, he could understand their need for bonding. It would be the only way for some of them to survive this. As usual, though, he understood without sharing. Keeping time was only a pretence. He’d have been better on his own, setting his own rhythms and timing his own rests.