“Well,” Max said, rubbing sweat from his scalp, “from the mountain we can survey the land. Look for help and… well, keep a look out. And it’s out of this place, and that’s just where I want to be.”
“Amen to that,” Roddy said. He felt an odd twinge at his choice of words.
“Survival of the fittest,” Max said, scooping up some fruit and shoving it into his pockets.
Norris grumbled, “I don’t feel very fit.”
“A walk will do you good then.” Butch should be saying this, Roddy thought. He should be the one having a go at Norris. But Butch was dead.
“This way,” Max pointed. Roddy trusted him. Norris merely followed on behind.
After an hour of walking up a slow incline the trees ended abruptly, and they faced up the gentle slope towards the top of the mountain. And on the slope, catching the high sun and reflecting nothing, like a hole in the world, sat the tomb.
Roddy was eighteen the first time he had seen Stonehenge. After the initial shock it had preyed on his mind, its sheer immensity belittling his own existence. He had never been able to come to terms with the time and effort spent on its construction. History sat huddled within and around the stone circle, and in a way it was truly timeless, an immortal artefact of mankind’s short life. But it was also a folly, massive and utterly impressive, but a work of affected minds nonetheless.
His shock now was infinitely greater.
The three men stood speechless, looking up at the rock. It sprouted from the ground half a mile away, rising fifty feet into the sky. It was a featureless black obsidian, reflecting little, revealing no discernible surface irregularities. It appeared to be roughly circular in shape, rising to a blunt point. Around its girth grasses and a kind of curving, pleasingly aesthetic bramble formed a natural skirt, bed in dust and soil blown against its base by aeons of sea breezes. It was a marker of some kind, obviously, and the only thing the ancients usually found worthy of such a grandiose statement was the corpse of a king, or a sleeping god.
It was not the appearance of the monument that sent the men into a stunned, contemplative silence. It was impressive, but no more so than a warship cutting the sea with the sinking sun throwing it into bloody silhouette. The reaction came from the undeniable solidness of this thing, the suddenness of its existence before them. Realisation that this place was or had been inhabited, by whatever strange people had built it, sent cracks of doubt through the fragmented image the men had built up in their own minds.
Roddy despised the island, and he hated this thing. He could see the beauty in it, the history and dedication contained within its strange geometry. But the idea of meeting the people who had carved or constructed it, the race who could exist here on the island in peace and apparent prosperity, filled him with a dread he had never thought possible. It made him feel sick.
“Oh my God,” Norris gasped at last.
“I think not,” Max said.
“It’s huge,” Roddy said. “Massive. I mean, how? It must weigh five hundred tons. It’s huge. Massive.” He was aware that he was repeating himself, but the words felt right. Huge. Massive.
After spending several minutes standing and staring, the men urged themselves onward. From the jungle behind them erupted a raucous explosion of bird calls, and as Roddy turned a cloud of gaily coloured birds lifted and headed back towards the sea. He wondered whether something had startled them. He thought of the vision he had experienced before his collapse, the woman’s shredded skin and bare muscles, the way she had motioned, the wide eyes and frustrated, silent scream.
He hoped they had left all that behind, rid themselves of worry by leaving the jungle. But he berated himself for entertaining such foolishness. The whole island lay beneath them, even though the jungle no longer surrounded them. They still breathed the air above the island, still saw fleeting glimpses of the place’s fauna. Much remained hidden, Roddy knew, but whatever haunted them would surely drag itself out of the trees, like an echo of themselves.
It took them a few silent minutes to reach to rock. Max hurried on ahead. Norris walked at Roddy’s side, glancing continuously over his shoulder.
“More unusual than it seems,” Max said as they arrived. He leant against the stone, dwarfed by its size. His hand was flat and his fingers splayed across its smooth surface, and Roddy expected them to sink in at any moment, subsumed into the sick fleshy reality of whatever it was they were seeing. But nothing happened. Max ran his hand across the rock, palm pressed flat. “Much stranger.” His skin made a soft whispering sound as it passed over the surface, audible above the background noise of the island. He took it away, blowing into his open palm and watching the subtle layer of dust cloud into the air.
“How so?” Norris asked. He approached the stone nervously.
Roddy stood back, unable to move nearer, experiencing a peculiarly linear vertigo as he looked up towards the top of the landmark. It felt like he and the stone were growing, expanding into the pointless surroundings, while everything else shrank back to reveal the skeleton of the world underneath. He expected at any time to strike his head on the ground, but his fall seemed to last forever.
“It’s so smooth!” Norris gasped, drawing Roddy’s attention back to eye level. “Like glass.” He swept his hand across the surface, mimicking Max’s earlier movements as he blew dust from his fingertips. “This dust is gritty. Sand. Finer, though.”
“Most dust is human skin,” Max said. Roddy wondered why the hell he chose to come out with his facts at the most inopportune of moments. Encouraged by Max’s comment, he could not help but imagine the rock as a giant altar to some malign deity, sucking to itself the flayed skin of its victims. They petrified and disintegrated, sticking to their god, merging into one, clothing it with themselves in eternal, unavoidable worship.
“Yeah, thanks Max,” Norris said. Roddy and Max glanced at each other, eyebrows raised, at the cook’s use of the familiar. “That’s just the sort of useless fucking comment we fucking need right now. Butch would have come up with something like that, if he hadn’t drowned himself.”
“What do you mean, drowned himself?” Roddy shouted angrily. His voice sounded muted here, as if tempered, or swallowed, by the huge rock.
Norris did not respond. He kept his hands spread on the rock, leaning there, eventually resting his forehead between them. “Come on. You saw his face.”
“Ernie killed himself,” Roddy said, “Butch was killed. A world of difference, let me tell you. There’s no way — ”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Norris sighed. He sounded muffled.
“Sorry I said anything,” Max said. “Can’t help saying what I think.”
“The sort of junk that flows into your head, you should just shut up all the time,” Norris said. “Just leave us to it. Just let us get on with things.” He stared back down the hill at the jungle, an expectant look in his eyes.
The three men fell silent, each for different reasons, each mulling over their own confused thoughts.
Roddy approached the rock but could not touch it. It seemed distasteful, like a huge living thing, standing there inviting and expecting their attentions. Max walked around its girth, taking a minute to describe a full circuit. Then he did it again, left hand in constant contact with the rock, left foot kicking at the plants growing around its base. Once or twice before he passed out of sight he paused, knelt closer to the ground to examine something in detail. Roddy was curious, but too on edge to ask him what he was looking at. In many ways, he didn’t want to know. To some extent, for the first time ever, he agreed with Norris. Max just had the habit of saying the wrong thing.
Or the right thing. And maybe that’s why it was so frightening.
“I don’t think it’s man-made,” Max said as he completed his second circuit.
“How do you know?” Roddy was intrigued, even though his heart told him to leave here as quickly as possible. The rock seemed to focus all his bad thoughts, nurturing them and giving them life. For the past few minutes he had been thinking about Norris’s words:
“Too smooth, for a start,” Max said. “It’s been here for a long time — far too long for it to be man-made. It’s been scoured smooth by the wind, formed into this peculiar shape by… I don’t know. The way the wind blows down from the mountain. Or up from the sea.”
“But it’s so regular.”
Max shrugged. He looked almost embarrassed. “I know. But I’m certain it’s natural. There’s more. Take a
