Roddy remembered an occasion several years ago, when he had been more scared than at any time in his life. One of his friends had borrowed his father’s motorbike and offered to take Roddy for a ride. Once committed, there was no backing out. At each jerky change of gear, Roddy was sure he was going to be flung off backwards, smashing his head like a coconut on the road. The bike tilted this way and that as his friend negotiated blind corners, hardly slowing down. He had the blind confidence of the young.
It was not the speed that terrified Roddy, or even the thought of being spilled onto the road. It was the lack of control. The fact that his life was, for those few minutes, totally in the hands of someone else. He’d felt like pissing himself when he’d considered that they were not even particularly close friends. What a way to die.
The fear he felt now was more intense, more all encompassing. It made his terror at the youthful lark pale into insignificance. Now, he feared not only for his body — a body already ravaged by war and hunger and thirst — but also his mind. He was being stalked through the dark avenues of his thoughts, and he had yet to see the pursuer. All the while, the island sat smugly around them. How could logic and self-awareness continue to exist untouched in such a place? A place that seemed happy to kill them, and determined to do so.
Not for the first time, Roddy wished that he had more faith in God. He had seen what belief had done to Ernie, but perhaps his faith had been too blind, too passive. It was ironic that a war which had seemed to bring many people closer to their faith, by forcing them into challenges of mind and spirit, had driven him further away. While people dying on beach-heads prayed to God, Roddy could not understand how God could do that to them in the first place. If He did exist then He was cruel indeed.
They buried Butch away from the stream, so that any future floods would not wash away the soil covering him and expose his body to the elements. None of the men spoke because they could all feel danger watching them, sitting up in the high branches or raising beady eyes from the stream. It watched them where they toiled, and laughed, and counted off another victory on skeletal fingers.
3. NAMING THE NAMELESS
They headed inland. None of them felt like walking, but they were even less inclined to stay near Butch’s grave. The chuckling stream threatened to drive them mad.
They remained within the jungle. It seemed to stretch on forever, as if the grasslands had never existed, and the flora and fauna of the place began to reveal more of itself to them. Much of it was strange. Max seemed to find solace in trying to identify birds and plants, but his comfort was short lived. For every species he knew, there were a dozen he did not. A snake curled its way up a tree trunk, bright yellow, long and very thin. Max went to name it, but then several scrabbling legs came into view around the trunk, propelling the creature’s rear end, and Max turned away. Roddy recalled the story of the Garden of Eden; how the snake had been cast to the ground, legless, to slither forever on its belly, eating dust. This creature did not belong to that family. This thing, in this place, did not subscribe to the ancient commandment.
They saw another snake, with gills flaring along its flanks and green slime decorating its scales. Max stared at it, frowning, trying to dredge an impossible name from his memory. Impossible, because the creature had no name. “Slime snake,” Max said, and named it.
“You should name it after us, if you must,” Norris commented.
“Who’ll ever know?” The finality in Max’s voice turned Roddy cold, but the big man would not be drawn. He was too keen to continue with what he called his naming of parts, as if the entire island were one massive machine and the slithering, flying and scampering things were the well-oiled components.
In a place where the trees thinned out, they saw several giant tortoises picking regally at low foliage. They skirted around the clearing, and Roddy checked the shells to see whether there was any recent damage. Norris was all for attacking the creatures, but to Roddy it seemed pointless, and Max said something which persuaded them that they were best left alone. “Why annoy them more?”
The reptiles raised lazy heads as the men passed, watching them with hooded black eyes. One of them may have had bits of Ernie still digesting in its gut, but to the men they all looked the same. Roddy mused that the same probably went both ways; the idea chilled him to the core, and he did not dwell upon it.
The more Roddy saw, the more he came to acknowledge the alienness of the island. Max’s strange naming process only helped to exaggerate the feeling. And he also came to see how they had all taken so much for granted, and how their ignorant assumptions had led them into strangeness. They had been washed up on an unknown shore after five days at sea, putting the perceived peculiarity of the place down to the fact that they were somewhere none of them had ever been before. The sense of disquiet had been borne out by Ernie’s sudden suicide. But even that had not alerted them as it should have.
Now, with Butch being snatched away so soon after Ernie’s death, Roddy felt like he was waking up. Surfacing from a nightmare into something more disturbing.
They had all maintained a blind faith in the rightness of things, and now they had been led astray. Just as Ernie’s faith had fooled him, so they were being deceived by their ignorance.
“Two-headed spider,” Max called out, pointing up into a tree. Roddy gasped and stepped back when he saw the huge, hairy shape hanging there, as big as his head, legs jerking as whatever they grasped struggled its final death throes. There were indeed two fist-sized protuberances at its front end, though whether they were heads or other organs for more obscure purposes, Roddy could not decide.
“Lizard-bird,” Max said.
“Greater-mandibled mantis.”
“Three-ended worm.”
“Tree sucker.”
“Yellow bat.”
His naming continued. The men took a chance with a bush of yellow berries, hunger overcoming a caution which Roddy was coming to consider more and more useless. To protect against the unknown, he thought, was impossible. They were at the island’s mercy. And, in a way, this made him more relaxed. He had never before felt resigned to an unseeable fate, not even when the ship was going down; then, he knew he could swim. Here, he was slowly drowning in strangeness, and there was nothing he could do. He knew nothing.
Until he saw the woman. She was naked, her body seemingly tattooed with nightmares, muscles hanging in sepia bunches. She was standing beneath a tree to his left, waving imploringly at the three men. The sun came through the canopy and speckled her with yellow pustules.
“Black lizard,” Max called. Norris was with him, further ahead.
The woman held out both hands, her mouth open but silent. Roddy could see that she was shouting. A shadow moved across her body and she seemed to change position. She did not move, but flowed, as she had the night before. She lived within the shadows, and their shifting dictated her own motion.
“Large-headed quail. Big bastard.”
Roddy tried to shout. He opened his mouth, but in sympathy with the ghostly form beneath the trees he could say nothing. The woman began to shake her head, waving more frantically. Her body crumpled with helplessness as shadows shifted across the sunbeams breaking through the trees and blotted her from sight.
“Triple horned toad.”
Roddy could not move. He was sure the shadows had possessed teeth. They had been voracious.
He began to shake and the pressure of the island pressed in from all sides. The ground crushed against his feet, driving them upwards to meet his head where it was being forced down by the hot, damp air. Bushes seemed to march in from all around, the trees stepping close behind, closing in, threatening to crawl into him and make him a fleshy part of them. Rooting and rutting in a vegetative parody of rape.
He thought he cried out, but the only reply was Max naming, and Norris mumbling something unheard.
The world tipped up and Roddy was tumbling, striking his head and limbs, thorns penetrating skin as he fought with the ground. Sight left him, and sound, and then all his other senses fused into one all-encompassing awareness — that they were intruders, alien cells in a pure body, and that slowly, carefully, they were being hunted and expunged.
Then even thought fled, and blessed darkness took its place.
