Light Errant Read online

  Reaching so far, the wave also surged and kicked among the other vehicles queued up and waiting. Didn’t have the strength now to lift those or overturn them; but a few more engines I thought were getting flooded. A few more men I thought would panic, would not want to set foot or tyre on that suddenly-inimical causeway.

  I watched the tumbled four-by, and it was harder now to be casual; but the passenger-side doors opened—upwards—and two men clambered out and jumped to ground, followed by two others. Lovely, I thought. All alive, no one badly damaged, but oh they must have been shaken up in there, dice in a rattler, and all piled on top of each other at the end. I couldn’t have asked for better.

  “That was neat,” Jamie said behind me.

  “But?” It had been a compliment with a serrated edge; his voice carried doubt slathered all over it.

  “Well, are you sure it’s enough? Is that going to hold them? And even if it does, how are we going to get off, as long as they’re waiting for us over there?”

  There aren’t enough bodies, he was saying, you’ve got to send them screaming to their mothers with all their childhood nightmares turned real, turned gory, acted out in wet flesh right under their noses.

  “It’ll hold them for a while,” I said, though maybe not all day. Maybe not even all the turn of the tide. I couldn’t make a wave without water. “But I’m not finished yet, that was just putting them on hold. You watch.”

  The causeway was the only way off for us, but the reverse didn’t apply to them. They had boats, we knew that, they had at least one Zodiac inflatable that they could make a landing from, anywhere on the Island. That wouldn’t have mattered—let them come, some less civilised voice inside me was muttering, they’ve seen what I can do with water, now let them see what I can do with flesh—except that we knew they had guns also, and a couple of men sneaking round with rifles could even up the odds in no time. They’d just need to see us first, or come at us from two sides at once, so that while I was busy with one of them the other would be busy with me.

  What I needed to do, then, I had to put a total stopper on them now, so that they wouldn’t even think of launching a commando raid around our flank. So that if someone else thought of it, say their ultimate boss—the man with the gas, perhaps—if he gave them orders, they’d still say no.

  o0o

  So after the tsunami came the earthquake. Wrong way round, seismologically speaking, but I never was a purist even in love, so who cares?

  o0o

  Technically speaking, of course—for the purist—it wasn’t an earthquake either, or anywhere near. No continental plates rasping together, even I couldn’t manage that, even on that day. Even my blindsight couldn’t look all that way down into the earth’s crust to find a fault, nor make one. But if any poor unlucky fool with experience of earthquakes had been splashing down the causeway just then, I’d have defied them to tell the difference.

  When Jamie ripped a road up two years earlier he’d been in haste and in rage, and he’d just torn the tarmac apart. Effective, but superficial. Me, this day, I’d bought myself time enough to do it properly; and I had the need also, I had to be certain that nothing could get across when I was done.

  I closed my eyes and did use my blindsight one more time, to look down through the water and the road. The water was a shifting mist and the road lay in strata beneath it, tarmac and concrete, grey layers I could see through like murky transparencies. Beneath them and hardly more solid-seeming were the rocks and shaped stones that had made the original causeway, when there had been a monastery on the Island—well, just an island it was then, presumably, hadn’t acquired capital status yet—and the monks had built themselves a permanent way across, using whatever came to hand. The stones had likely been salvaged from some Roman ruin, there’d been enough of those around.

  I looked, concentrated, tensed—and heaved. To my closed eyes they might seem vague and nebulous, but to my stretched senses, to my mental grip they felt impossibly massy, too deeply embedded in a millenium of silt and held too fast by the road above, I’d never shift them. I couldn’t even shake them. Doubt shook me instead.

  Only that I had to, for Laura’s sake, for Janice’s, for Jamie’s. Everyone I cared for, it seemed to me suddenly, was here on the Island, and very much at risk. It was for me to save them, or nobody could.

  I stripped off jacket and T-shirt, to have more sunlight on my bare skin. Whether that would really help I wasn’t sure at all, but maybe it just might, and I needed all the confidence I could snatch at. Never mind looking cool or casual now. Then I reached and gripped and heaved again, all my energy—no, I didn’t have any, but all the sun’s energy that I could gather focused through me onto one pale shadow of rock, deep down beneath the road.

  I heaved, and it seemed to stir, a little. I pushed and pulled at it, and was sure that it had rocked. Do the thing that’s nearest, don’t think about the hundreds of others; once move one and the rest would be easier, the seal of centuries would be broken and the seawater would help, rushing in among them with its own power.

  Rock of ages, lift for me... I wrenched at it and it came, it burst up and out, I didn’t open my eyes but to my strange otherworldly sight it seemed to me as though all God’s work had been undone in a moment and chaos had come back to the earth.

  Dimly, I thought I heard it rip up through the surface of the road, and then splash back into the sea. I thought I heard shouts of startlement behind me. I thought perhaps I’d shouted too, some wordless cry of effort and exaltation mixed.

  One was good, but nothing like enough. I didn’t even look to see what that had done to the road. I turned my attention back below again and found the next stone, turned it and twisted it into the hole the first had left. It rolled and fell, and another fell with it; and after that, yes, it was easy. Like dominoes: one goes and they’ll all go, though these needed my help still and I was in there among them, pushing and yanking amid the tumble and rush, rocks and water and the fall of great slabs from above...

  o0o

  I was feverish, I guess, I was crazed with a terrible excitement; it took Jamie to stop me, seizing my shoulders and shaking me hard, yelling “Enough!” into my ear.

  That made me open my eyes, at least, so I could catch the last tremors of what I’d done. The road was broken and gone, ten metres ahead of where I stood; where the sea had been licking lightly over tarmac, bidding farewell, now it was rushing back, seething and bubbling into a trench. There was no tarmac, except for the odd slab tilted at a strange angle, shifting and sliding in the tug of new currents, losing its perilous hold on the rocks beneath and slipping away out of sight.

  How far had my internal avalanche run? Undersea and inside I couldn’t have told, I couldn’t judge distance at all. Standing looking with my normal vision, I figured it was a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred metres to where two stilt-legs and a crazy-tilted platform stood sentinel over a jagged end of road, answering my question decisively. That was all that remained of the shelter that had offered protection to the ignorant or lusty; I’d gone a neat halfway with my destruction. Beyond, the truncated causeway ran back to shore like a pier. There were men there, I saw, little men running; running onto what remained, runnng towards us, which I thought was foolish of them.

  “Fuck,” Jamie breathed, still hugging me close. “You mad bloody bastard, how are we going to get off now?”

  “Worry about that later,” I gasped, not worried at all. “They can’t get on now, except by boat. We can watch for a boat.”

  “Sure we can. Better pray for a bloody boat, I don’t fancy the swim.” He let go of me then, stepped back a pace and rumpled my hair, grinning but still shaking his head. His rough touch felt oddly cool against my scalp until I shook him off with an affected scowl, lifted my own hand to smooth my hair again and found it sodden with sweat.

  I picked up my T-shirt and used it like a towel, then slung my jacket on over bare skin and turned back to where the girls were watchi
ng from beyond the open gates.

  Something spanged! off the steel fence. A moment later there was a thin cracking sound from the shore, like the snap of something brittle, like my mind, like my resolution.

  I twisted around again, even as Jamie ploughed past me yelling, “Get down, they’re shooting! Laura, fuck’s sake, get down...!”

  Shooting they were; a couple of men were down on one knee on the causeway, rifles at their shoulders. Why hadn’t I seen their rifles before? I’d known they had guns, for God’s sake, I should’ve been looking for guns.

  Blaming myself, furious with myself but the more furious with them, I raged against the road’s end where they were crouching, tore it apart, ripped off great chunks of tarmac and concrete and hurled them hither and yon. The men scrambled to their feet and went sprinting back towards the shore and some supposed safety; I wrenched up another rock and followed them with it, my own patent guided missile, while my mind shrieked Janice, shrieked Laura, Jamie, their baby...

  Somehow a whisper cut through that shrieking, just as I was poised to deliver my rock like a meteorite, like God’s justice my own. I don’t want any more killing, the whisper said; and God help me, it still seemed true. I still let the rock fall, no, I still threw that bloody rock; but I threw it at the only place I knew was safe, was empty.

  Dunno how much that smart 4 x 4 had cost its owner, but there wasn’t much left of it after the fire that followed the explosion that followed the rock plunging to earth through its engine-space.

  Eleven: Kissing Cozens

  They threw bullets, I threw rocks, they stopped with the bullets already.

  o0o

  We retreated, none the less. They might start up again with the bullets already, and all of them aiming at me; nor did I think I was immune. I thought I might have done something of an unconscious healing job on myself, lying in sunlight under Fizzy’s purring weight my first day back; not the cat but the sunlight working miracles, I thought maybe, I’d felt so much better so fast. But I didn’t think I could patch up a bullet’s rampant passage through flesh and bone and such. Not that fast, not that good. Hubris could keep.

  The Island’s only road curled all around it, snake-style, climbing the while. The attractions lined the road, clung to it, fed from it like parasites sucking at a vein. Where it petered out into rocks and sand and scrub, no more remotely-flat land to build on, the developers had given up.

  Not so the monks. Nearer my God to Thee must have been their driving philosophy, or else—lacking the inspiration of Victorian hymns, too early, not blessed with foresight—they’d taken their cue instead from the barons and dukes who’d built castles on the highest promontories that mediaeval technology and sweat could aspire to. Whatever, the monastery had gone up and eventually fallen down on the very peak of the Island, a beacon of holiness amid rocks like devil’s fangs. God’s tongue lodged behind Satan’s teeth, or else a monument to a sensible founding abbot’s defensive priorities on a coast vulnerable to raiders. Post-religious, the same site had acted as beacon again in a more earthly sense, no monks to save now so let’s save the mariners; those hymn-singing Victorians had built a lighthouse among the tumbled ruins of the monastery’s walls.

  That still stood, it stood still as it was always meant to with the old keepers’ house beside it, though no light burned within its lantern now. Something of a museum it had become, preserved and adorned with prints of ancient wrecks along this coast, open for tourists and school parties to trudge up its hundred and twenty steps and admire the view from the top. Seeking our own safety from our own more mundane enemies—neither the devil nor the deep blue sea—we climbed the path that led between rocks and carven stones, we came to the heavy wooden door that was locked against us, I blasted the lock and let us in.

  On the stone-flagged floor were a few display cases, mementos mori if that’s the plural; around the round wall rose the whitewashed steps that would take us up to the lantern. I’d already climbed half a dozen before I checked, looked back, saw Jan just behind me and Laura and Jamie hand in hand behind her, the others all grouped at the foot ready to follow.

  Ah, the responsibilities of leadership.

  “Look,” I said, “this isn’t going to need all of us up there. Not all at once. And I’m hungry.”

  I paused; they waited. Brutus, you should be living at this hour...

  “Okay,” I said, on a sigh. “They’ve converted the house next door into a café, there must be a freezer and a microwave in there, there’s got to be food. And coffee. What we need is a rota, people to watch from the top in case anyone comes at us in boats, while someone else does kitchen duty. It’ll be more comfy in the café anyway, a better place to wait. Maybe I should come and open the door for you...”

  “No, don’t worry, Ben.” That was Serena, taking charge at last. “We’ll manage,” to the accompaniment of nods from my other female cousins, identifying something they could do, something they were used to, providing comforts for the menfolk.

  Laura was murmuring to Jamie. He grinned up at me, said, “She’s hungry too. Hungry for two, she says,” and his hand patted her belly protectively, possessively, hungry for three, it said. “You go on up, take the first watch. I’ll organise things down here.”

  Which made our female cousins even happier by the look of them, to keep him close. Even in daylight, Jamie had status. I nodded, turned my eyes upward, climbed the steps.

  Took me a while to register other footfalls tracking mine, the sound of another’s breath at my back. Slow, Ben, slow...

  I didn’t look back. Acknowledging this late that she was there would have been an acknowledgement also that she’d once again taken me by surprise. I’ve got my pride.

  I was slow on the stairs as well, and getting slower. Adrenalin disguises exhaustion, but not for long; it had carried me from the causeway this far, but no further. The rest I had to do by myself.

  Except that I didn’t; a quick scurry of light feet and Janice was there beside me, slipping her arm through mine, once again offering a support that I needed, that I’d never have asked for.

  “What is this,” I hissed leakily on the outbreaths, “Succour-a-Wounded-Warrior Week?”

  She shook her head. “I used to work for Moncrieff the butcher every holiday. All that blood and bashing, miles better than a paper round.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m used to hauling sides of beef,” she said, slipping her lithe arm around me now, dragging my slack arm across her shoulders and hanging onto the wrist thereof, hauling me up the last few steps into the lantern.

  “More like beef dripping,” I grunted, sliding down a wall of glass and stone to sit on cool wood boards. “Chicken bones. Pork scratchings...”

  Janice laughed and settled herself beside me. Like the shooting-gallery, but different: the sun came in over our heads here, made angles of light against machinery and gleaming crystal, made the dust dance but left us in shadow, left me alone. And we were hidden here also from friends’ eyes, relatives’ eyes, as they were hidden from us, no targets to shoot at. Jamie could snog Laura all he liked, if that was what he was doing; couldn’t touch me, up here, turned away. They could both of them poke and worry at her burgeoning soon-to-be-bell-shaped belly, a toll of things to come, but what I didn’t see the hurt couldn’t give me grief over, not now, not today.

  Actually, I thought I was just too dog-weary to be snarling-dog, dog-in-the-manger jealous in my usual urbane and charming fashion. All passion spent was how I felt, overdrawn indeed at the angst-bank, sapped and sucked dry. Frankly, I couldn’t be bothered to care.

  “Aren’t we supposed to be watching?” Janice murmured after a minute, though she made no move to do it.

  Me, I couldn’t be bothered to care about that either. “Nah, that was just an excuse to get you alone,” I said, eyes closed not to watch anything, not needing to look at her.

  “Yeah, right,” and now she did move, up and away from me in one swift movement. “
What are we watching for, exactly?”

  “Boats,” I said. “A Zodiac in particular, they’ve got one of those at least.”

  “What’s a Zodiac?”

  “Oh. Flat black rubber thing. Like a ring doughnut with a bottom to it, and filled with pricks. Penis on the half-shell. Pork, you’d know about that. Long pig, for roasting,” though I didn’t want to roast anyone ever again, not even another cop, I’d cooked too many already. And couldn’t think of any other way to keep them off, bar roasting or boiling or simply popping their rubber bubble and letting them sink or swim in the wicked currents around the Island; and didn’t want to think about that at all, only that she was making me do it.

  “Be serious, Ben. We aren’t all magic-users, you know.”

  “You don’t all need to be. I’m here, aren’t I?” In all my reluctance and exhaustion, a most unreliable guard. “And then it’ll get dark,” soon, please God, before anything happens, “and then it’s Jamie’s turn, his call, his turn to play God. He can get us all off.”

  “Can he? How? He doesn’t think so.”

  “Playing God. I said. Parting of the Red Sea. Walking on the water. Miracle-workers one and all.”

  “Ben,” she said, crouching, touching my eyes to make me open them and then staring in from not very far away at all, close enough to see all the way through to the Zodiacs in my head, “what’s the matter with you? You sound drunk, and I know you’re not.”

  I knew that also, and regretted it. I’d have liked to be drunk, just then. “Defence mechanism,” I said. “Clever prattle, it’s a gear that kicks in sometimes. When I’m tired, when I’ve been wound up and I’m running down, when it feels like my springs have broken.” Or when I’m nervous, but that I surely wasn’t, why would I be? We weren’t in any danger now. We could see trouble coming if it came, and I really, really didn’t think it would. I thought my little exhibition-piece down at the causeway would have given them all cause to pause, to keep their side of the water.