White and Other Tales of Ruin

“How do you feel?” Max asked after a while, and Roddy nodded. He felt terrible, but he was conscious.

“Must be weak,” he said. “From the sea. Maybe the berries were bad. Or the stream water.” He felt terrible, true, but also rested. Grateful, in a way, that he had been removed from things, if only for a while.

Roddy watched the trees. He was not looking for the woman because he was certain he had never seen her. If he had, it was too awful to dwell upon. If he had seen her, she was walking dead.

There was movement everywhere, and soon he felt tired. “What are we really looking for?” he asked. “I mean … the whole place is alive. It’s crawling.”

“We’d better get a move on,” Max said.

“Where to?” Norris stood and spilled fruit onto the ground, most of it merging instantly from sight as if camouflaged or consumed. “Just where are we going, anyway? We’ve hardly been here twelve hours, and there’s only three of us left. It’s hopeless. It’s hopeless.”

As Norris turned away to hide bitter tears, Roddy recalled his own reaction only hours before, when the surge of water had plucked Butch from the world. Hopeless, he had known, and he had not rushed to help. Perhaps if he had still held hope in his heart then, he would have been able to grab Butch, hold on, drag him from the water’s grasp. With hope, he may not have had to die. But Roddy could also recall Butch’s last glance, and wondered whether he would have welcomed rescue at all.

“Nothing’s hopeless,” he said, but the words hung light and inconsequential in the air. A shadow of birds fluttered across the sun.

“No,” Max said, “Norris has a point. We’re walking nowhere. In one place, we can make shelter and gather food. Moving, we’re vulnerable. To exhaustion, or to whatever else may be around.”

Shadows in the trees, Roddy thought. Stalking. Perhaps even guiding.

“I’d like to get out of this place first, though,” Max continued, looking nervously at the permanent twilight beneath the green canopy.

“How about the mountain?” Roddy suggested. “It was our first aim, before we decided to come in here.”

“Why did we decide to come in here?” Norris asked. Max did not answer, and Roddy felt afraid to, because he thought maybe they had been steered. Lured by the promise of water or food, but lured all the same. Guided by their own misguided hope, misled by the faith they had in providence. Lied to, eventually, by the belief they grew up with that, however strange something was, it was God’s plan that it should be so.

“I suppose it’s part way,” Max said.

“Part way where?” Norris was shaking his head, denying the fact that they had control. Or maybe he was dizzy, thought Roddy. Queasy from the fruit. Had the woman in the shadows eaten of it, before her skin was flayed and her muscles clenched in a death-cramp? Or had he seen her because he had eaten the yellow berries?

“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.