White and Other Tales of Ruin (44 page)

The sea sighed onto the beach, most of its awesome power already tempered by the reef surrounding the island. The air was heavy with moisture, even though the sun had yet to touch this part of the world today. The sand was hot and sharp where it found its way into his shoes, and if there were any creatures viewing his discovery with him, they were silent. The island was still holding its breath.

They were mostly skeletons. In places hair and skin prevailed, but the flesh had long since shrivelled to nothing or been eaten by scavengers. Teeth hung black and worn from gaping jaws. Orchids grew through a ribcage like twisted, rooted insides. A skull was clamped halfway up a thin tree, face plate split open by the growth of the palm through a void where life had once held memory and faith. A skeleton lay wrapped around the boles of two trees, hips split asunder by one, spine snapped and bent outwards by the other. The jaws hung open, full of a nettle-like plant, as if the trees still gave it pain. Two bodies lay in each other’s arms, half buried in sand blown by decades of sea breeze. One skull was shattered, the other merely dented and cracked. One bony hand held a pistol. A plant grew from its barrel, pluming smoke frozen forever in time.

Roddy stumbled from one tableau to the next, keening uncontrollably, searching frantically for something on which to blame this atrocity, but finding only evidence of these people’s good intentions. A box, lid only slightly askew, contained the faded and pulped pages from dozens of books and manuscripts. Looking closer, Roddy could make out the embossed crosses on their covers.

Rusted knives lay loose between chewed ribs.

A frayed rope hung a corpse from a tree, and a small colourful bird alighted on its bony shoulder. Perhaps it thought the body still held some hidden sustenance, but more likely it was simply gloating.

Roddy stared out at the ship, unable to look at the bodies any more, unwilling to think upon what they must have gone through as they set foot on the island. It was little more than a rotten wreck, masts long since fallen, sails and ropes torn away by the ageless tides. It was stuck firm and most of the timber boarding had been stripped from its ribs. The ship, like those who had sailed in her, lay with innards naked and exposed to the elements. The whole scene was like some sadistic, ongoing sacrifice, laid out as an eternal display for the benefit of whatever had called for it.

Roddy had never imagined such pointless devastation or despair. The agony of the moment hung in the air as if the travellers had killed themselves only yesterday, rather than decades ago. His presence here felt intrusive. But he was no longer alone.

On the air, he smelled fresh blood and bad flesh.

He saw the body along the beach, but it was not until he stumbled nearer that he recognised Max. The big man was still grasping the rusted, blunted blade he must have plucked from the bony grip of one long since dead. He had hacked at his stomach, sawn the blade back and forth, ripping flesh and skin asunder. His head was thrown back, his mouth open in an endless groan of agony, his bald head caked in sand still damp from sweat. The beach around him was black with his own leaked blood.

“
Oh Max,” Roddy cried. He felt abandoned and deserted; up until this moment he had still harboured a hope that Max would reappear, however unlikely it had seemed. Now, his wish had been granted. Max was back with him. Roddy wondered which of the strange noises in the night had been Max’s agonised scream.

As if a plan had at last been played out, the jungle burst back into life. Birds cackled and laughed, other things cawed and clucked in amusement. Even the sea was louder for a time. A breeze swept through the trees and set the branches swaying, palms stroking each other with secret whispers. Something lumbered through the undergrowth inland, snapping twigs and stomping bushes. It never revealed itself and the sound of its movement faded slowly away. For the first time since they had landed here, the island sounded as it should.

Roddy felt dismissed.

He reached for the knife. Max’s hands still held a dreadful trace of warmth. Roddy grimaced as he parted the dead man’s fingers, intending to prise the knife from where it was embedded between muscles and organs and flesh, use it to part his own skin and finally allow his insides the freedom they so yearned. The rusty handle was sticky with his dead friend’s blood.

Max groaned.

Roddy gasped and fell back, feeling nothing but abhorrence for the living dead thing before him. He tried to propel himself backwards, away from Max, but succeeded only in pushing showers of sand into the man’s open stomach.

Max groaned again. It sounded as if a cricket were lodged in his throat. His head moved. A muscle spasmed on his forearm, hand closing tighter around the knife. The movement did not disturb the flies feasting at his open wound.

Roddy was going to scream. He felt it welling inside, clearing his head of whatever rational thought had survived these last couple of days, driving controlled emotions out and allowing blind, instinctive panic to take control. He silently prayed to God for help, as though religion were instinctive.

Then Roddy felt himself passing into unconsciousness; his limbs beat at the sand, head spinning. A black shape stood beneath the trees, the naked woman, her arms held out with hands up, the blackness her clotted blood.

All else faded.

When Roddy came to, Max was truly dead. Several small lizards were clustered around the wound in his gut, darting red heads in and out. They glanced at Roddy between each mouthful. He felt too defeated to chase them away.

Somehow, he struggled to his feet. He found it hard to focus. He had been lying in the sun now that it peered over the mountain, and his forehead was stiff and throbbing. The heat was pumping into his head, boiling his thoughts. The black shape from beneath the trees had gone, changed into something different, something solid. Only another skeleton. This one had been tied to the trunk of a dead tree and the rope still held the bleached remains in place. Weed from the last stormy sea had tangled itself around the skeleton’s feet. It still had the remnants of long hair, ancient home to crawling things. Roddy thought it had no arms, so he stumbled closer to see.

It did have arms. Even now, as if caused by some drastic trauma to the bone joints just before death had arrived, the hands remained upright on the fleshless wrists. It was a classic warding off gesture, aiming out to sea. He recalled the flayed flesh, the torn muscles. One finger still wore a ring, and Roddy thought it may be a treasure.

He had found his woman, his haunter, the shadow which had revealed itself to him from the dark over the past two days, driving him into unconsciousness. Rescuing him, however briefly, from his surroundings.

She had been trying to warn him, he realised. Trying to warn others. And then memory flooded back, and Roddy realised what he had brought himself down here to do.

The sea sang invitingly, urging him to enter and fill his lungs. Max lay stretched out on the sand, the knife in his guts coveting more warmth to settle into. Ropes swung free and easy from tree branches, complete but for a swinging corpse. Everything implied death. But Roddy had come this far, and though he was not brave, he
was
defiant.

The island could wait another hour for his faithless soul.

There were rusty tools, bleached driftwood, even planks from the shattered ship. The work kept his mind his own, excluding for a while all the intimations of death, all the invitations to do himself the final mischief.

The cross was fine. He thought it would hold.

He tied old rope around each wooden arm and ended it in slip-loops. He stood a thick branch against the upright to stand on and kick away when the time came. The island was silent once more; grudging respect, he liked to think, but he could still sense the satisfied mockery behind the temporary peace. He did not even bury Max; there was little point. The island would have him, wherever his final resting place. He had already bled his life into the ground. Now, he was little more than rotting flesh.

When Roddy had tightened the loops around his wrists, he prepared to kick away the branch. He thought of offering a prayer up to God, but if He was there, then He would surely not hear anything spoken from this place. Roddy thought that the bastardised symbolism of his own death was prayer enough.

He kicked the branch away and gasped as the rope tightened and pinched his skin. He had heard somewhere that suffocation killed most crucifixion victims. He stared out across the cove, past the ship, hoping that anyone approaching from that way would see what he had left to them and take heed.

Behind Roddy, in the trees and on the mountainside, from the ravine beyond the mountain, sounds of merriment filled the air as birds took flight, lizards and small mammals gambolled through the undergrowth. But he felt removed from the island, as if he were already dead, and the noise barely touched him.

As he hung there, he had time to really think about what he had done.

* * *

* * *

The Origin of Truth

They were stuck in a traffic queue. There was nowhere they could go. They couldn’t help but see the melting man.

Doug wanted to turn around, cover his daughter’s eyes and hide the sight from her innocent mind. But she had seen stuff just as bad over the last couple of days, and she would probably see a lot worse in the future. He could no longer shield her from the truth. In a normal world, it was only right that his concern translated into action, but the world today was so different from last week. Normal was a word that had lost its meaning.

Besides, she was fascinated.

There were nine television screens in the shop window, and all of them showed the same picture: the man sitting propped outside a baker’s, a split bag by his side, crusty rolls and ice slices scattered across the hot pavement. His legs had disappeared from the knees down. He was watching the process, his face stretched in surprise — eyebrows raised, jaw lowered, brow furrowed — as his limbs turned to gas. The view was being captured by a telescopic lens mounted in a helicopter. The picture was hazy and shaky.

The ultimate in victim TV, thought Doug. Somewhere in the north of France this man was dying. And here, now, in London, they were watching him.

“
Nobody touch the windows,” Doug said, even though he had locked them using his own master control. “And keep the cylinder open.” There were three compressed air cylinders on the back seat next to Gemma. One had already run out, the second had been opened for several minutes.

“
What about when they run out, Dad?” Gemma said sensibly. Damn her, she was so sensible. “What then? Will the air come in from outside?”

“
It already is,” Lucy-Anne muttered from the passenger seat.

Doug glared at his wife but she did not turn, did not register his attention.

“
It won’t, honey,” he said instead. “The pressure inside will keep it out.”

“
But what if those things can
crawl
.”

There was no answer to that, so Doug did not attempt one. Instead he glanced at the man on the screens, saw that his stomach was already possessed of a sick, fluid motion. He leant on the horn. “Get a bloody move on.” He wanted Gemma to see as little of this as possible.

“
If they were here, honey, we’d know it by now.” Lucy-Anne sighed. “They’d have started on the car.”

“
Don’t talk like that!” Doug said.

“
It’s true!”

“
Yes,” he replied weakly, “but not … in front of Gemma.”

“
Why is nobody helping him?” his daughter asked without conviction. She was only ten, but she had learned a lot over the past few days. Like sometimes you just can’t help people. If they can’t help themselves … and against this, no one could … then it’s best to leave them and forget about them, pretend that they never were.

In minutes, this man they were watching from afar would no longer exist, and hours later the same thing would be happening right where they were.

As the traffic moved off Doug heard his daughter turn up the air release valve on the second cylinder. He took one last glance at the TV screens and saw why.

The picture was flickering and spinning as the nanos started work on the helicopter.