The world is monochrome. Sun and shadow. The white tops of stones and their black underbellies. Life on top, death underneath.
'Burial?' said Angela. 'What sort of burial?'
'War dead,' Ray answered.
Angela: 'What, you mean Vikings or something?'
'World War 1, World War 11. Soldiers from torpedoed troop-ships, sailors washed up. Brought down here by the Gulf Stream; apparently the current funnels them through the straits and washes them up on the beaches of the islands around here.'
'Washes them up?' said Angela.
'That's what it says.'
'Not any longer though.'
'I'm sure the occasional fisherman gets buried here still,' Ray replied.
Jonathan had stood up, staring out to sea, the blood off his body. His hand shaded his eyes as he looked out over the blue grey water, and I followed his gaze as I had followed his finger. A hundred yards out that seal, or whale, or whatever it was, had returned, lolling in the water. Sometimes, as it turned, it threw up a fin, like a swimmer's arm, beckoning.
'How many people were buried?' asked Angela, nonchalantly. She seemed completely unperturbed by the fact that we were sitting on a grave.
'Hundreds probably.'
'Hundreds?'
'It just says "many dead", in the book.'
'And do they put them in coffins?'
'How should I know?'
What else could it be, this God-forsaken mound - but a cemetery? I looked at the island with new eyes, as though I'd just recognised it for what it was. Now I had a reason to despise its humpy back, its sordid beach, the smell of peaches.
'I wonder if they buried them all over,' mused Angela, 'or just at the top of the hill, where we found the sheep? Probably just at the top; out of the way of the water.' Yes, they'd probably had too much of water: their poor green faces picked by fish, their uniforms rotted, their dog-tags encrusted with algae. What deaths; and worse, what journeys after death, in squads of fellow corpses, along the Gulf Stream to this bleak landfall. I saw them, in my mind's eye, the bodies of the soldiers, subject to every whim of the tide, borne backwards and forwards in a slush of rollers until a casual limb snagged on a rock, and the sea lost possession of them. With each receding wave uncovered; sodden and jellied brine, spat out by the sea to stink a while and be stripped by gulls.
I had a sudden, morbid desire to walk on the beach again, armed with this knowledge, kicking over the pebbles in the hope of turning up a bone or two.
As the thought formed, my body made the decision for me. I was standing: I was climbing off the 'Emmanuelle'.
'Where are you off to?' said Angela.
'Jonathan,' I murmured, and set foot on the mound.
The stench was clearer now: that was the accrued odour of the dead. Maybe drowned men got buried here still, as Ray had suggested, slotted under the pile of stones. The unwary yachtsman, the careless swimmer, their faces wiped off with water. At the feet the beach flies were less sluggish than they'd been: instead of waiting to be killed they jumped and buzzed ahead of my steps, with a new enthusiasm for life.
Jonathan was not to be seen. His shorts were still on the stones at the water's edge, but he'd disappeared. I looked out to sea: nothing: no bobbing head: no lolling, beckoning something.
I called his name.
My voice seemed to excite the files, they rose in seething clouds. Jonathan didn't reply.
I began to walk along the margin of the sea, my feet sometimes caught by an idle wave, as often as not left untouched. I realised I hadn't told Angela and Ray about the dead sheep. Maybe that was a secret between us four. Jonathan, myself, and the two survivors in the pen.
Then I saw him: a few yards ahead - his chest white, wide and clean, every speck of blood washed off. A secret it is then,' I thought.
'Where have you been?' I called to him.
'Walking it off,' he called back.
'What off?'
'Too much gin,' he grinned.
I returned the smile, spontaneously; he'd said he loved me in the galley; that counted for something.
Behind him, a rattle of skipping stones. He was no more than ten yards from me now, shamelessly naked as he walked; his gait was sober.
The rattle of stones suddenly seemed rhythmical. It was no longer a random series of notes as one pebble struck another - it was a beat, a sequence of repeated sounds, a tick-tap pulse.
No accident: intention.
Not chance: purpose.
Not stone: thought. Behind stone, with stone, carrying stone -
Jonathan, now close, was bright. His skin was almost luminous with sun on it, thrown into relief by the darkness behind him.
Wait-
- What darkness?
The stone mounted the air like a bird, defying gravity. A blank black stone, disengaged from the earth. It was the size of a baby:
a whistling baby, and it grew behind Jonathan's head as it shimmered down the air towards him.
The beach had been flexing its muscles, tossing small pebbles down to the sea, all the time strengthening its will to raise this boulder off the ground and fling it at Jonathan.
It swelled behind him, murderous in its intention, but my throat had no sound to make worthy of my fright.
Was he deaf? His grin broke open again; he thought the horror on my face was a jibe at his nakedness, I realized. He doesn't understand -
The stone sheered off the top of his head, from the middle of his nose upwards, leaving his mouth still wide, his tongue rooted in blood, and flinging the rest of his beauty towards me in a cloud of wet red dust. The upper part of his head was spilt on to the face of the stone, its expression intact as it swooped towards me. I half fell, and it screamed past me, veering off towards the sea. Once over the water the assassin seemed to lose its will somehow, and faltered in the air before plunging into the waves.
At my feet, blood. A trail that led to where Jonathan's body lay, the open edge of his head towards me, its machinery plain for the sky to see.
I was still not screaming, though for sanity's sake I had to unleash the terror suffocating me. Somebody must hear me, hold me, take me away and explain to me, before the skipping pebbles found their rhythm again. Or worse, before the minds below the beach, unsatisfied with murder by proxy, rolled away their grave stones and rose to kiss me themselves.
But the scream would not come.
All I could hear was the patter of stones to my right and left. They intend to kill us all for invading their sacred ground. Stoned to death, like heretics.
Then, a voice.
For Christ's sake - '
A man's voice; but not Ray's.
He seemed to have appeared from out of thin air: a short, broad man, standing at the sea's edge. In one hand a bucket and under his arm a bundle of coarsely-cut hay. Food for the sheep, I thought, through a jumble of half-formed words. Food for sheep.
He stared at me, then down at Jonathan's body, his old eyes wild.
'What's gone on?' he said. The Gaelic accent was thick. 'In the name of Christ what's gone on?'
I shook my head. It seemed loose on my neck, almost as though I might shake it off. Maybe I pointed to the sheep-pen, maybe not. Whatever the reason he seemed to know what I was thinking, and began to climb the beach towards the crown of the island, dropping bucket and bundle as he went.
Half-blind with confusion, I followed, but before I could reach the boulders he was out of their shadow again, his face suddenly shining with panic.
'Who did that?'
'Jonathan,' I replied. I cast a hand towards the corpse, not daring to look back at him. The man cursed in Gaelic, and stumbled out of the shelter of the boulders.
'What have you done?' he yelled at me. 'My Christ, what have you done? Killing their gifts.'
'Just sheep,' I said. In my head the instant of Jonathan's decapitation was playing over and over again, a loop of slaughter.