defiance, a defence mechanism against those who mocked or feared the cook as a Jonah. Without that familiar expression, he was even more disturbing. And disturbed.
They came to a ravine and stopped for a rest. Max wandered off along the gash in the land, towards where he said he could hear water cascading into the dark depths. He suggested they should have a drink. Roddy agreed, but at the same time he was simply too exhausted to go looking for one. Far better to curl up here, lick the dew from the ground in the morning. Norris simply failed to answer.
The sun was low down to the sea, bleeding across the horizon and throwing the ravine into shadow. Roddy sat on a rock shaped vaguely like a pig, facing away from the sunset, watching the dividing line between light and dark creep slowly up the ravine wall. Joan had loved to watch sunsets arrayed across the South Wales mountains, he remembered; but at the same time, he realised that her face escaped him. He had kissed her so much, but when he tried to recall her features, there was nothing there. No voice, no smell, no image of the woman he thought he loved. It scared him, but it was also a comfort. He could not wish Joan here with him; bad enough that he was here alone.
The pending darkness tapped into new realms of disquiet. Roddy supposed that this was where the beach stream originated, and he imagined the slit in the earth to be inhabited by spiders as big as his head, snakes ready to eat each other to survive. There must be nooks and crannies down there, home to bats, scorpions, insects. There could even be people, strange half-blind albinos who had never even seen the sea and who had only a vague, mythological sense of the world outside the canyon. Next to him, another rock hunched low in the attitude of a fat- bellied sow. Roddy wondered whether they were wild boar, caught in some ancient volcanic action. Or perhaps they had once been the more adventurous dwellers of the pit, petrified by their sudden exposure to sunlight.
Norris remained standing behind him, still staring back the way they had come. His long shadow gave him all the attributes of a clumsy scarecrow.
When he laughed, that impression vanished. Only a human could laugh like that. Roddy could not remember hearing such a sound for a long time, certainly since before their ship was sunk six days previously. But here it was twisted into something grim and foreboding, caught by the ravine and distorted into an echoing snigger. Here, it was a laugh mad with something.
Norris was pointing back down the slope towards the jungle, giggling and sobbing. He backed up, slipped on flat ground and slid slowly over the edge. He cried out as darkness tugged at his legs.
“Max! Max!” Roddy leapt to his feet and collapsed with leg cramps. As his muscles knotted and writhed he crawled to the drop. His hands left blood smeared across sharpened stones. He was becoming one big wound.
Norris was pawing at a slowly moving slope of scree. Lying at about thirty degrees, his feet hung over a sheer drop into impenetrable darkness. No hope, Roddy thought, but he was determined not believe that, not even here, after everything that had happened. Best for him if he goes, crossed his mind, and the idea felt horribly true. Norris suddenly quietened and grinned up at him, and Roddy realised with a sickening certainty that he thought so, too.
The pit was becoming darker by the minute. The sun was not halting its descent simply to watch the unfolding of this pitiful human tragedy. Roddy reached out his hand, lying as near to the drop as he dared, terrified that he too would be dragged over the edge. “Grab my hand!” he shouted, his voice echoing back seconds later. “Grab it, Norris!”
Norris was swimming in scree. For each handful he grabbed, two slipped past him and spun out over nothing. Their fall into the ravine, a collection of minor collisions with the sides, echoed as a sibilant whisper from the dark. The dark, now approaching from all sides as the sun steamed into the sea.
“Norris!” Roddy shouted, suddenly terrified, petrified that they were all being sucked down, finally, into the island. Butch and Ernie were already there, held below its misleading surface; now, it wanted the rest of them.
Roddy edged himself forward. Only a few more inches, but enough to grasp onto one of Norris’s flailing hands. The cook’s reaction was not what Roddy had expected; he was silent and still for the briefest instant, then he began to shout. The more Roddy pulled, the more Norris squirmed and wriggled, in an apparent effort to dislodge his would-be rescuer’s grip.
The pit yawned wide, dark and silent.
Just as he began to slide, Roddy felt a weight land on his legs. Mumbled words accompanied the impact, spat from a red raw throat, rich in blood and confusion. The sound was horrible, the words worse, because they were utterly without hope. Max was sat astride his knees, hands curling into his belt and hauling back with all his might. It was not enough. “He’s still slipping!” Roddy said. “Norris, you’re still slipping!” Max uttered something between a laugh and a sob. Roddy could not see him, of which he was glad.
“It’s so cold,” Norris shouted, eyes flickering up into his head to show only the whites, as if there was much more to see in there. “So cold, so helpless, so hopeless. Where’s the point now? Where’s the purpose?”
“Pull me up, Max!” Roddy shouted, but the big man was working to his own agenda. He was hauling on Roddy’s belt, sobbing, and even in the riot of movement Roddy could feel him shaking. With terror, anguish or elation, he could not tell.
“Oh God,” Max began to whisper, his voice curiously louder than before, words carrying the weight of a lifetime. “Oh God, help us, oh God, help us… for fuck’s sake, help us!”
Roddy felt his fingers beginning to stiffen and burn with pain. When he was a boy he had always wondered why people hanging onto a precipice in films let go. He thought them foolish; to know that to let go was death and still to do so. Certainly their fingers may begin to hurt, the cramps and pain may become almost unbearable. But when it was a matter of will — when they knew that they could either put up with the pain and live, or relinquish their hold and die — there should really have been no choice.
His grip was slipping. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, willing his muscles to hold, cursing them as they ignored his call. Behind him, Max was shaking even more, and his muttered prayers were increasing in volume. He was begging God for mercy, or maybe shouting at him, apportioning blame as he asked forgiveness. But from all Roddy had learnt, he knew that God would never be shamed into anything.
Norris was still shouting, words veering in and out of focus, coherent one second, meaningless gibberish the next. His right hand, until now pawing at loose rock to save himself from the pit, began to push, instantly increasing the pressure on Roddy’s grip. He’s letting go, Roddy thought. Letting go, in every way he can. What pain is he going through?
“Pull, Max! I can’t hold him — ”
Everything happened at once. Everything bad. In those few seconds any semblance of control fled into the twilight, and panic found its place and made itself forever comfortable.
First, Max screamed. The sound was terrifying. Roddy’s scalp tingled and tightened, and a shiver grabbed hold of his limbs and would not let go. He sensed Max standing up behind him, letting go of his belt in the process. The big man ran, still screaming, across the broken stones and weirdly twisted heathers of the hillside. Roddy turned his head for a moment, watched as Max ran from light to dark. He passed from day to night with the look of someone who could never return.
Then Roddy began to slip forward across the sharp stones. He was fast approaching what he perceived to be the point of no return.
He saw the ghost. The woman did not appear, as though she had never been there, but made herself apparent. She was floating in the darkness near the centre of the ravine, slightly lower down than Roddy and the still struggling Norris. She was naked of clothes and flesh, bones glimmering in the failing light, hair sprouting wildly from her patchwork scalp. Her hands were held out, palms up. Her mouth hung open in a forlorn scream, but she uttered no sound. Her eyes were the brightest points in the dark pit, but they gleamed with madness, not intellect.
Norris brought up his right hand, clawed frantically at Roddy’s fingers, then slipped free. He raised his hands gleefully, mouth wide open and emitting a high, keening laugh as he slid slowly back on the moving scree. With a shout, he disappeared over the edge. His call continued for a long time, and Roddy could not properly discern the point at which it turned into an echo of its former self. Even the echoes had echoes.
From the pit, a smell rose up. Something dead, something unwelcome. A warning, or a gasp, or the glory in a death.
“Where are you now?” Roddy asked hopelessly, expecting no answer.
The world began to spin. His guts churned and he vomited, stomach acids burning into the raw flesh of his
