look.” He walked some way around the rock, and Roddy followed. They left Norris sitting with his back against its black surface, nervously watching their progress. He kept glancing at the jungle they had just left, Roddy noticed. Waiting for something else to leave it, following them.
Max knelt and pulled back the skirt of grasses and bramble, wincing as thorns pricked at his already bloodied hands. “It dips into the ground,” he said. “Curves down. Like it’s not planted here, but was always here.”
“How long’s always?”
Max did not answer. Instead, he stood and glanced over Roddy’s shoulder at Norris. From where they stood, Norris was mostly hidden. Only his feet and legs were visible, but there was always the chance that he could still hear. So Max’s voice was low.
“There’s something else,” he said. “Follow me.” As he walked, he talked. “I can’t find any tool marks anywhere. Even on what I’m going to show you. It’s just a freak of nature, I reckon.”
“Like this island,” Roddy said.
“This island’s no freak,” Max replied eventually. “In fact, I think it’s pretty pure.”
“Pure?”
“Pure nature.” Again, Max had come out with something that sent a cold twinge into Roddy’s bones, nudged his imagination into overdrive. You’re a good friend, Max, he thought, but I wish you weren’t here. Sometimes, ignorance may be better.
“Here,” Max said. He pointed.
There was something marring the smooth surface of the rock. At first it looked damaged, struck by a tumbling boulder from above, perhaps, or fragmented by frost over the centuries. But on closer inspection, Roddy saw that this was far from the truth. This small scar on the huge expanse of rock had a purpose to it. A design. Several rows of designs, in fact, running left to right or right to left, each of them strange in the extreme. Roddy reached out and felt the ridged reality of them. He withdrew his hand quickly, because they seemed to move under his touch, communicating their corrupted message through contact as well as sight. There was no sense to be made from them: some were shaped like bastardised letters from an unknowable language; others seemed to have sprouted from the rock, dictated by whatever was inside. They were knotted diagrams, random weatherings. Archaic language, or representations of things too alien to even try to comprehend.
Here, as elsewhere, there was no hint of tools having been used. No scratches, chips or runnels in the rock. If these markings were hand carved, then it was indeed a work of art, though an art as dark and disturbing as any Roddy had ever imagined. If they were naturally formed… in a way, that was worse. It would be an evocation of Nature’s darkest side.
“What the hell is this?” he said. “They’re horrible.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Max whispered. “I really think we should go.”
“Are you scared, Max?” Roddy asked. He thought he knew the answer and, if he was right, he did not want to hear it verbalised. Not by Max.
“I’ve been scared ever since we got here,” Max said. “From the moment I stepped onto the beach, I’ve wanted to leave. And if the boat hadn’t been smashed up, I’m certain I’d have gone by now.”
“You’d be dead.”
Max shrugged. “Tell that to Ernie or Butch.”
“You think Butch let himself drown?”
Max frowned, chewed his lip, fighting with contradictory thoughts. He scratched his bald head, peeling scabs to reveal fresh ones beneath. If there was pain he seemed not to notice. “I think he had more of a chance than we like to let ourselves believe,” he said, finally. Then, as though reading Roddy’s mind: “It wasn’t hopeless.”
A sense of futility grabbed at Roddy, dragging any hidden hopes he may have had out into the open and butchering them. The black rock stood before him, soaking up his fears, reflecting only the weirdness the scarred area imparted. He turned to Max for comfort, but the big man looked as frightened as he felt. More so, if anything. To see a face usually so full of intelligence and good humour reduced to this — wan, pale, bloodied and empty of hope — was soul-shattering.
“If Ernie was here he’d pray to God,” Roddy said, and Max nodded.
“I reckon that’s why he’s not with us.”
They left the markings to fulfil whatever purpose they had been created for. Norris asked what they had found, and Max told him that the rock was naturally formed, not artificial as they had first thought. The cook seemed disappointed by this, and Roddy was tempted to show him the markings. To show him that if the rock was not natural, then whatever had made it was way removed from the human Norris may have hoped for.
They headed on up the mountain. The further they moved away from the rock, the more Roddy felt watched. And the more he thought about the processes which must have conspired to carve the rock out of the land, the more feeble and insignificant he became. If it had been formed by nature, then it was never intended for the likes of man. It was a secret thing nature had done, for its own inconceivable purposes. Now it had been seen, touched, mused upon. Roddy wondered just what must become of those who viewed something never meant to be seen, touched something intended only to be kissed by the wind, scoured by dust.
He looked at his fingertips, where grime from the rock markings clung to his sweat. He had left something of himself on the rock, both physically and mentally. Most dust is human skin, he thought. In decades and centuries to come, he wondered how much of the dust coating the monstrous monolith would consist of Butch, or Ernie. Or any of them. And where would their souls be residing? In the hands of God, becalmed and soothed by the promise of salvation and goodness in the life everafter? Or in the rock? Buried in blackness. Trapped forever within sight of life. Teased and tortured by purely human needs.
The island seemed to be changing, becoming even further removed from the outside world. It was as though by discovering this place they had driven it further into itself, allowing greater disassociation with the world at large. A world of people and machines and war, where pride-scars marred every real achievement and genocide was considered fair sport.
Roddy looked up towards the head of the mountain, then back at the receding rock and the jungles beyond. Further down, across the slowly waving heads of trees and through spiralling flocks of birds, the sea stretched out, past the reef and on towards civilisation. A timeless power, pounding itself to pieces on the sharp shores of the island.
They needed food, water, rest and shelter. They craved all the basics, even while immersed in the extraordinary. There was a sense now, between the three men, that they had to reach the top of the mountain, to see whether there was anything else on the other side. To see, simply, whether there was any hope at all.
But hope too needs feeding. It fled, once and for all, before they even got there.
4. NOT QUITE ALONE
The three survivors, hardly talking in an effort to conserve their meagre energy, worked their way up the steep incline. The pinnacle of the mountain still lay above and ahead, perhaps only three hundred feet higher. The slopes here were pierced by dark holes, small in diameter but disappearing into invisible depths. Max threw stones into the first few and listened to the rattle and echo of their descent. He soon stopped, because they could not hear them striking bottom. He said they were volcanic, but to Roddy they looked more like throats.
The landscape had changed drastically from the grasslands around the black rock. Instead of bushes and undergrowth, rocks of strangely twisted formations grew from the ground, with a low, loamy grass coating the intervening spaces. Its blades looked sharp. The rocks were shattered into points, shining with oily colours, changing texture and shade depending upon which angle they were viewed from. Heathers sprouted intermittently, strange, sick-looking plants which gave off a stale stench.
It was late afternoon and the sun was dipping towards the horizon behind the men. They were following their own shadows. Roddy found it agreeable. That way, he would be able to tell when something rushed him from behind.
Norris walked on ahead. He had begun mumbling to himself, his words bitter without managing to make any sense. He glanced around continuously, staring past Roddy and Max as though they weren’t there, gaze fixed on the pointed black rock receding below and behind them. His eyes were wide, but drained of their constant state of
