White and Other Tales of Ruin

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: You saw his face

. Butch, standing in the stream, staring at the wall of water bearing down on him. There had been no time. No hope. Had there?

“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 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?”