He became aware of other noises, carried on the still air. A second dog took up the howling of the first, and he thought he heard a third, more distant. Cows lowing, and the bray, hideous and earsplitting even at a quarter of a mile distance, of one of Miss Lucie’s donkeys. The sounds, familiar though they were, had a touch of horror in their present context: this otherwise quiet night, with no breath of wind, the sharply delineated peace of the middle hours of darkness. Then came another sound, as mild, as well known, but now the eeriest of them all. The chatter of birds, awakening from their sleep. One or two first, and then more and more, until Matthew felt that all the birds in the island were awake and shrieking their unease. He stopped again, abreast of the canebrake at the end of his kitchen garden.
Then, after one swift, barely perceptible shudder, the earth heaved beneath him, slammed him like a rat against itself and, heaving again, tossed him bruised and winded through the air.
2
MATTHEW felt the canes whip against his face and body, and reached out convulsively to anchor himself. The earth subsided and he began to slip down, then rocked as violently as before, throwing the stars into a lunatic gyration across the sky. This time he went deep in, the canes yielding to the thrust of his body. His left leg and the left side of his body up to his shoulder were wedged painfully between the shafts of bamboo.
There had been a hush at the first shock, a silence that almost rang in the ears. The noise reached him with the second one, a bellowing rumbling diapason that dwarfed his memories of the Caen bombardment, that sounded, he thought crazily, as though the world were being torn from its orbit and sent grinding and skittering through space. It died away only to start again, and by this time the earth was heaving for the third time, the canes that held him tilting violently in defiance of gravity. From that point the shocks were successive—lurch and roar, lurch and roar, in a hideous phased rhythm. Once he thought he heard a dog howl, but for the most part a sound so small would have been lost in the brutal crescendos of the torn and protesting earth.
When a new noise did break through, it was altogether different but on as gigantic a scale. It swelled into the ebb of one of the shock waves, and Matthew realized that he had been hearing it without distinguishing it for some moments. It was the howl of a storm and the bellow of an avalanche mixed up, along with the whine and scream of the sea in tempest. It rose to a high, scarcely endurable pitch of savagery, and subsided from it. But, subsiding, it changed its pitch, like the whistle of a railway train which has passed the station and is racing away into the distance. As it died, the earth heaved again, and roared, and heaved and roared, a stupendous theme and variations, orchestrated by demons, and a great gale of wind almost plucked him from his perch.
He had no idea how long it was before the first real lull came. He had the impression that the shocks had been going on for hours, but that was not to be relied on; all his senses had been thrown out of gear by the physical and sonic buffeting he had endured. At some time he had heard the splintering crash of glass, shattering into a hundred thousand pieces, but he was too confused to remember whether it had come at the beginning or the end. But at least he was conscious of the fact that the earth was still, that the agony of its mutilation was fading in faraway groans and squeals. The silence which came was not of expectancy but exhaustion, a silence following pain, a terminal quiet. The crackle of bamboo was loud in his ears, as he struggled to free himself and get down. It was not easy, he was so firmly wedged, and he was sweating in the cold night air by the time he managed it.
And even though he was on firm ground, something was subtly wrong. His balance? Could the battering have affected it? He was not standing quite straight, he thought, and when he started to walk along the path toward the house, he stumbled and nearly fell. He halted, looking up. The sky was serene, unchanged, the bright stars and the quarter moon. Matthew shifted his feet, and realized what was wrong. Here the ground had been level. Now it rose a little, toward the greenhouses, toward the west.
The thought stunned him. He had known this was an earthquake, a series of earthquakes, of frightful severity. He had known his glass was gone, and expected his house would be badly shattered. But the earth itself twisted out of shape?
He had dropped the torch he was carrying (switched off, he recalled with wry surprise, because he had been hoping to surprise the dog among his hens) when he grasped for the support of the canes. He looked for it but there was no trace, and he abandoned the search. Instead he walked back in the direction of the house. It was light enough to see a little way in front of him. Surely, in fact, to see the house from here? He ran a few paces; then stopped. When he walked forward again, he did so slowly. The moonlight and starlight showed him the pile of rubble. It covered a fairly extensive area, but it did not rise very high from the ground. The highest features were a door, somehow still upright, and the television aerial, sprouting from a hillock of shattered bricks. Matthew was staring at this when the shock hit again, flinging him to the ground.
It was less violent than the earlier ones, and the one that came as he struggled to his feet was milder still, shaking him but not throwing him down. At the same time, he was more consciously aware of fear than he had been before, possibly because, his mind being less severely bludgeoned, he could think more clearly. The canebrake had protected him, and might do so again. There was no other refuge.
He went back and crawled in among the lances of bamboo. By breaking them and twisting them underneath him, he was able to make himself a kind of cage or nest; not comfortable, but better than nothing. In the next shock it creaked but did not collapse. He settled down as well as he could, to wait for the night to pass. His watch, which had been on the table beside his bed, was somewhere under the nibble. It might have been any time between midnight and four o’clock.
There were other shocks, but they were not very strong and the intervals grew longer. He thought about Jane, and was glad she was so far from the island. Close on two hundred miles—more than enough, surely, for safety. Later he thought about his own future: All his capital had been tied up in the vinery and the house. He tried to remember what his insurance policy said about earthquakes. Still, he was lucky. He was alive. He realized with chill certainty that most of his neighbors would not be. There was no sound anywhere. Even the dog had stopped howling.
In the east the sky turned from black to purple and, as the stars faded, to light-flushed blue. The earth was quieter, trembling from time to time but with no great violence, almost gently. Matthew came down, cold and cramped, from his perch, and stretched his stiff limbs.
The path that ran past the vinery led to the Margy farm. The glass lay like a frozen lake, laced with driftwood that was the shattered structure of the houses. Beneath it, like drowned vegetation, lay the crushed green plants, spotted and splotched with red. Just beyond was the smashed heap of the packing shed in which, the previous afternoon, over fifty trays of fruit had been left ready for picking up this morning. More than a quarter of a ton of tomatoes. Matthew averted his head and carried on down the path.
Somehow the sight of the Margy farmhouse was more shocking than his own had been. It was the same idiot’s heap of bricks and granite blocks, rising only a few feet from the ground. Matthew walked slowly forward. There had been some idea in his mind that he might be able to help, to rescue someone trapped. The sight before him disposed of that. He walked round the pile, finding no reference point that he could recognize. All sorts of things were jumbled together—curtains and crockery, smashed furniture, the gaunt finger of a standard lamp, a book lying open, one page weighted down with a fragment of slate. And, toward the center, a human arm stretched out, in protest or supplication. It looked very young and white. The daughter, probably—Tessie, who was to marry the young chap from the garage at the end of summer. Matthew turned and walked away.
He was aware, reaching the ruins of his own home, of cold and numbness, and also of the sharp pangs of hunger. He stared at the
tangle of stone and torn wood, working out where the kitchen had been. He climbed gingerly over the rubble and saw the cream-colored top of the refrigerator just under the surface. He heaved a couple of broken beams away, and started to clear away in front of the door. It was fairly easy to start with, but became progressively harder as he got down to the more compressed layers. At last he reached something quite beyond his power to move—one of the oak roof beams that had wedged itself under the handle. He straightened his back, sweating. Hunger gnawed at him, more viciously for the disappointment.
As he glanced down, he saw the colored label of a tin. He scrabbled and unearthed it. A tin of frankfurter sausages which had been in the house for some time—Jane liked them but he did not. He felt more than ready to eat them raw. He looked wryly at the tin in his hands. All he needed was an opener.
There had been one, he remembered, in the cutlery drawer of the kitchen cabinet, and at his feet a fragment of glazed green glass, part of the cabinet, stuck out of a chunk of plaster. Matthew got down and worried the rubble like a terrier. He found odd things—knives, a battered saucepan, part of the coffee percolator, a breakfast cup incredibly intact—but no opener. He went on looking for a long time, only desisting when he came on more tins of food. Baked beans, asparagus, and sardines. He threw the first two aside. The sardines had an opener attached to the tin.
A couple of stone mushrooms, perches for the Guernsey witches, had stood in his front garden. One had fallen, but the other was still upright, more or less. Matthew sat on it and carefully wound the lid off the sardines. He picked the fish out with his fingers, and ate them one by one. Afterwards he lifted the tin and drank what remained of the oil. He looked automatically for somewhere to dispose of the empty tin; in his housekeeping he had always been meticulous about not attracting flies. Then he thought of the arm reaching from the ruins of the Margy farmhouse, and with an angry motion tossed the tin away from him.
It was quite light now. The sun was almost up, the landscape clearly visible. The weirdness lay not only in the devastation of house and vinery, but in the lie of the land itself, the horizon dipping to the west, strangely rising to the east. For the first time, he took this in properly. My God, he thought, the whole island must have been tilted, twisted. He saw a trail of wire and identified it—the telephone wire. Jane had said she would ring again this morning. Was it going to be possible to get in touch with her that day at all? Or were all the lines down, throughout the island? It seemed more than likely.
There was no point, anyway, in staying where he was. There was nothing he could do for the people in the Margy house, but he might be able to help elsewhere. The Carwardines, for instance. He felt better equipped to deal with things after the sardines. The hunger had probably been more psychological than real, a need for reassurance. Matthew looked again at the debris. Was there anything useful he could take with him, anything he could pick up without too much effort? Catching sight of something else, he smiled. It was the silver cup he had won for boxing, as a subaltern. He supposed looters might get it, if any were left alive and active enough to loot. He did not think it was worth either taking or hiding.
But before he left he found something which he felt was worth taking—the shotgun, its stock embedded in soft earth. It was still loaded. He checked the safety catch, and tucked it under his arm. He did not know why, but it seemed a sensible thing to do.
Matthew walked down the slope of land, toward the brightening east. There were a few hundred yards of lane leading to the main road. Near the top a clump of trees had been uprooted and had fallen, barring the way; he climbed the bank to get round them. Their exposed roots thrust toward the sky, on the edge of a fissure several feet deep. He could see the empty road now, and the remains of a couple of cottages. The same total destruction, the same silence. The dawn was well advanced, but there was no twitter of birds. He wondered what had happened to them all. Plucked from their roosting twigs and dashed against the earth? Or flown away, seeking refuge in distant safer lands? Or simply stunned into silence? He trudged on, listening to the sound of his own footfalls on the ground.
The road was empty; there would have been very few people driving at the time the earthquake struck. It curved back on itself on this stretch; he was traversing an arc of circle with his home as center. He heard the familiar noise with an uprush of relief—the bray of a donkey. One of the four Miss Lucie kept, and had done for years. Jane, on her way to school, had stopped to feed them with pieces of bread, cake and stale apples. There was life still. He hurried toward the sound.
The house was a heap of stone and dust and oddments. He went on past the ruin where the stables had been, and came to the paddock. The body of one of the donkeys was lying against a twisted stretch of fencing, and he saw another dead one a little farther on. He could still hear the braying, and went up the field. It was L-shaped, containing a thicket—sloe and elderberry and willow—which was also bounded by a douit.
The donkey brayed more loudly and pitifully when it saw him. It was lying with one leg folded under it, at such an angle that it was plainly broken. Matthew went to the animal, and patted it on the head. The long face and big liquid eyes stared at him, and it groaned hoarsely. He placed the muzzle of the shotgun near it, slipped off the safety catch, and pressed the trigger. The shot crashed across the stillness and the shaggy head dropped back.
He was walking back to the road when he heard braying again, turned, and stared incredulously. The noise came not from the field but from the thicket, and looking there he saw the fourth donkey. It was helplessly caught in the spiky tangle of sloe branches. The sight had a comic grandeur that made him want to laugh. He crossed the douit and forced his way into the thicket.
The donkey was stuck but seemed unharmed. Presumably it had been thrown up there by one of the early shocks. Its struggles had enmeshed it more fully in the cocoon of thorn, and the cocoon had preserved it as the cane had done with him. All that was necessary now was to free the animal. He tried wrenching at the branches with his bare hands, but only succeeded in scratching himself. He needed a tool—an ax or something. He might find one, he thought, in the wrecked stable. He backed out, and the donkey brayed at him. Matthew recognized it now as the light-colored one, Cobweb—the four donkeys had been named after Titanias fairies.
“Don’t worry, old girl,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
The search was, at the outset, discouraging. It had been a typical Guernsey stable, built with heavy beams of wood and granite blocks, and he found himself sweating and straining and not getting far. The sun came up over his labors, and soon after there were more earth tremors—mild ones, but enough to make him take refuge for a time in more open ground.
Eventually he found a spade. It had been kept in good shape, and the edge was keen. He took it to the thicket and attacked the branches, driving the blade down as a cutting edge with what strength he could muster. The donkey struggled at first, but went quiet as he continued. The work was not easy: The thorn branches were springy and the blade frequently skidded off. After half an hours work he did not seem to have made a great deal of progress. He paused and wiped the sweat from his face.
It occurred to him that he had got his priorities all wrong. There might be other human survivors needing help or rescue. It was ludicrous for him to be bending all his effort to the release of a donkey from a thicket. The donkey brayed again. Matthew shrugged, picked up the spade, and returned to the attack.
He had no idea how long it was before he got the animal free. He loosened the last leg from a snare of twisted branches, and it stepped forward, showing little sign of distress. He rubbed the furry head, the soft silky nose. Cobweb went to the douit and lowered her head to drink. Matthew realized that he was thirsty, too. He hesitated; even under normal circumstances, douit water was not regarded as fit for human consumption, and there was no knowing what pollution existed now. But there was, anyway, no alternative. He knelt beside the donkey, cupped water in his hands, a
nd drank deeply.
Unconcernedly, Cobweb cropped the grass a few yards from her dead companions while Matthew rested and thought what to do. He was aware again of the enormity of having spent so much time and effort on an animal when people—the Carwardines, possibly, or Meg Ashwell and her children—might need help. The least he could do was get on to their place as quickly as possible. He would have to leave the donkey, of course. He remembered a coil of rope he had thrown aside in his search of the ruins of the stable, brought it to the field, and tied a noose round Cobweb’s neck. He attached the other end to one of the willows. It would keep her from wandering, but was long enough to give her a fair grazing range.
Farther down the road he came on the ruins of more houses. He stood and called out, listening after each call for a sound that might indicate that someone was still living. But there was nothing. Surely in earthquakes some survived inside the wreck of their houses? But he remembered how shock had followed shock during the endless night; it was all too likely that those who had merely been trapped by the first had been battered to death by the ones that followed. Matthew looked up into the empty sky, where the sun was already high. He was searching for something, without at first understanding what it was. It came to him: airplanes. The island might have been beaten almost to death, but surely help would be coming from the mainland? He remembered the television pictures of the other disasters, taken from helicopters. They should be here by now. And if they weren’t, what could it mean? Only that the devastation stretched farther than he had guessed, that what had happened to a small island was not reckoned important in the great canvas of disaster.
Jane, he thought. Had the damage reached as far as East Sussex? He shook his head. Even if it had, it could not have been as severe as here. This must be the worst. Here on the bend the houses, shaken to pieces, had been spilled out over the road. He could see a leg in the rubble, a grotesque bunioned foot projecting. He called again, but did not expect any reply.
A Wrinkle in the Skin Page 2
