He knew then why it was he had stayed to free the donkey. Because he could not believe that, himself apart, there was any survivor on the island. He would go through the motions of looking, but he would not find any. The disaster was total.
Something moved on the edge of his vision, and he turned his head quickly. Not just the donkey and himself. Many, probably most, of the smaller animals might have survived.
The rat, a large one, stopped, then skittered on across the mound of min. Loathing it with all his heart, he found a stone and threw it. The stone fell short, and the rat stopped again, squatting on its hind quarters. He read defiance in the gesture, picked up more stones and lunged toward it, throwing as he went. The rat disappeared, under a pile of wood and plaster.
There was something else he could see from this new vantage point. It squatted as the rat had done, looking at him, but provoking horror and nausea, not anger: the head of an old man. Eyes and mouth were open, frozen in a gasp of agony. There was a beam behind it, dried blood on the plaster in front. Matthew bent over and was sick. The noise of his vomiting tore at the stillness of the morning. When he had done retching, he went away, keeping his eyes from seeing it again.
He could only guess the position of the road from its continuation in the distance. Here it was lost beneath the debris. Glass and cloth and metal—a child’s toy car, a hat-stand, a Victorian family portrait, a splintered piano. And broken bottles and a strong and familiar smell. There had been a pub here, on the corner. He almost tripped over the projecting edge of a cardboard crate exuding whisky fumes. It had been sliced across and the bottles broken. All broken. It was a pity. A moderate intoxication, he felt, would have been preferable to sobriety in the world in which he found himself.
From time to time he stopped and called, and his voice echoed emptily back at him. The wall at the Vauxbelets was shattered, the old monastery a gray tumulus in the distance. He went down the dip and up the other side, then climbed over a flattened hedge and headed across a plowed field toward the airport.
The field was tilted, but the landing strip, in addition, was buckled and twisted, and riven by huge fissures. Near one of the hangars a Viscount sprawled, starboard wing crumpled, fuselage broken in two. Matthew stared at it. To him, as to most islanders in recent years, it was the airport rather than the harbor which was the link with England. No planes would land here again. Hangars might be rebuilt, and cracks filled in, but what would be the point, with the ground itself at this angle?
Standing in the middle of the sloping emptiness, he shouted, “Is anyone there? I’m here. Fm here! Is anyone alive but me?”
The emptiness drowned his voice. He walked on, across the field, toward the Forest Road. There were houses, crumbled like the others, and he kept away from them. He headed down toward the valley of the Gouffre, where the Carwardincs lived. Had lived—he had no hope now of finding them alive.
Even so, when he came to what was left of the house, he set to work, pulling away bricks and plaster and wood and broken sticks of furniture. He found them at last. They were huddled in the remains of their bed, clutching each other as they must have done when the shock woke them and, in almost the same instant, killed them. Matthew stared at their bodies unhappily. They were to have come to him for a drink on Sunday— tomorrow morning. There ought to be something he could do. Dig a grave, perhaps, and bury them. But he was tired, drained of energy, and the spade was back at Miss Lucie’s. All the same, he could not leave them exposed like that. He heaped broken plaster over them, till they were hidden again.
He went on, with no particular aim except that he was not far from the sea, and the idea of its vastness and changelessness appealed to him. In the garden of one of the ruins he passed, bees swarmed in the sun, dipped down to take nectar from a flowering bush that seemed to grow out of stone, and danced again. Matthew stood for a while, listening to the somnolent murmur of their buzzing. He wondered about sea gulls. As near the sea as this, one usually heard them mewing and shrieking. Had they gone, too, like the land birds? He would have thought that they could live out any cataclysm by taking to their own element.
He stared in disbelief as he came down the last stretch of hill, steeper now, and looked out to where the sea should have been. It was like a glimpse of another planet, a strange savage and barren world. He could see the tangled green of the great weed beds, the rawness of exposed rock and sand. Here and there the glint of water; light thrown back from pools trapped in hollows. But the blue sweep of wave was gone. A sunken land was drying in the early summer sun.
3
MATTHEW went out onto the cliff path. There were several shallow stretches of water—lakes or ponds —but as far as the eye could see, the seabed lay open to the blue sky. Far to the southeast a higher hump of land was Jersey; they could scarcely have fared any better than Guernsey. He remembered the great noise, the rushing and whining and howling, which had changed its pitch in mid-course. The sea, draining back past the island, rushing to the west to find its new level. The island … Not any longer. He strained his eyes to the north, looking for the vanished gleam of the sea.
He turned from that at last, and made his way back inland. He felt empty and light-headed. He supposed he should try to find something to eat—it must be late morning, and he had vomited up the few sardines he had had. But the hunger which had been ravenous then was as markedly absent now. The feeling was something like drunkenness: He contemplated his state with mingled pity and grandeur. The last man left alive? The Robinson Crusoe of planet Earth? It might be so. The silence went on, and the sky stayed blue and vacant.
He went across a field to avoid more ruins and, stumbling over broken ground, almost fell. He used the gun to keep his balance, and the muzzle went into the ground. Matthew found a piece of stick, and cleaned it out. Doing so, he thought of Jane, with a clear and biting lash of grief. If she had been here on the island she would have died all the same, but at least he could have given her burial.
He stared at the gun in his hands. He had fired one barrel, to put a crippled donkey out of its misery. The other remained loaded. It would be a simple thing to do, simple and, surely, sensible. What point was there in surviving in a charnel house? On this hillock, rising from a drained and lifeless sea? Peace, he thought, and turned the gun toward himself.
A small sound stopped him. It came from a distance, and might have been no more than one of the shattered houses settling in farther on itself, but his first thought was that it was the donkey braying. He remembered that he had left her tied up. If she were freed, she could forage for herself and survive the summer at least. He put the gun under his arm, and set off across the field.
He traversed the airfield well to the west of his original path. The ground had been cut and twisted here like modeling clay; there was one gap where a plane could have rested without touching the sides with its wings. The walls of the cleft gaped rawly, showing earth and stones, and there was water at the bottom, a spring welling up. In a hundred years, when grass had grown over the nakedness and trees had taken root round about, it would be a pretty spot.
He heard the cry as he slithered down the bank from the airfield to the road. It was very faint, and he could not judge the direction properly. He stood, listening and waiting, for what seemed a long time. At last it came again, weak and indistinguishable but, he was sure, from the west. He walked that way, calling out as he walked.
“Who’s there? Give me a shout if you need help. Let me hear you. Shout so that I can hear you, and find you.”
There was no reply, and he thought that he might have imagined the voice. Hallucinations would not be surprising in this loneliness. He came to the wreckage of a house, and stared at it. It had been shaken to pieces, like all the others. What could possibly have survived in such as that?
But the cry came again, and louder. He hurried toward it, up the road and round the bend. There had been three or four houses together; they were collapsed into a single mound of rubble.
Matthew stood at the edge, and called, “Shout! Give me some idea where you are.”
The voice was muffled and sounded girlish. It came from somewhere at the far end. He began to terrier his way into the mound, but cautiously. Disturbing the mass too much might make it shift and settle.
“Hang on,” he shouted. “Til have you out soon.”
There was no reply. He wondered if, ironically, it had been the final cry for help he had heard, the last gasp before death claimed this one, too. He strained and shifted a beam, and saw there was a figure beneath it. A girl in a flowered nightdress. Then that was it, he thought. She was dead, all right. The nightdress was torn, showing one of her breasts. Matthew touched it: cold, quite cold. He straightened up. Then it could not be she who had cried only a few minutes ago. He called out, and dug with his hands, and called out again.
When he came to the small foot, he thought it was another corpse, but this time the flesh was warm to his fingers, and he thought there was a tremor in the limb. A section of the roof ridge had crashed onto a bed and wedged across it. It had trapped the child, but also protected. Matthew began clearing away the stuff over it.
“You’re all right,” he said. “There’s nothing more to worry about. We’ll have you out in a jiffy.”
It was a boy about ten, semiconscious. His head and face were thickly covered with plaster; it was a wonder he had been able to breathe, let alone call out. Matthew wiped it away as best he could with his hands and the sleeve of his jersey. He bent to lift the child, but he cried out in pain.
“My arm …”
It was the left one. Matthew felt along it gently. A slight fracture—greenstick. He said, “All right, old chap.” Pain had made the boy fully conscious; he looked up, groaning. “A bit of damage to the arm, but we can fix it.”
He had not done first aid since his army days, and he had to think about it before going to work. Forearm at right angles to upper arm, thumb up and palm in. He eased it into position; the boy winced, but did not cry.
“Pretty good,” he said. “Can you hang on like that while I find some splints?”
There were plenty of pieces of wood about. He managed to break a couple of roughly the right length and blunted their jagged ends by rubbing them against a block of stone. He padded them with pieces ripped off the bed’s cotton coverlet, and put them in position along the arm. He tore the top sheet up for bandages, and fixed the splints with one bandage above the fracture and a second figure-of-eighting from the wrist. The boy stayed quiet while he was doing it.
“Right,” Matthew said. “An ami sling, and you’re ready for action. What’s your name?”
“Billy. Billy Tullis. What happened? Was it an explosion?” “Bigger than that. An earthquake.”
The eyes widened. “Was it?”
Matthew tied the ends of the triangle in front of the shoulder; he really ought to have pinned the third point, but he had no pin and it would not matter for the time being. He asked, “How’s that? Fairly comfortable?”
“Yes. What about Mum and Dad? And Sylvia?”
He presumed that Sylvia was his sister, that hers was the body he had first found. He said, “Hang on a minute. I won’t be long.” He went back to the body and covered it up. When he came to the boy again, he said, “That’s something else you’re going to have to be brave about.”
“They’re dead?”
“Yes.”
“I thought they must be.” He had dark, rather nondescript features, and brown eyes with something of a slant. “I called to them. I called a lot, and when no one came I thought they must be dead. Was it a big earthquake?”
Matthew picked the boy up and carried him across the wreckage to open ground. He said, “Very big. About the biggest ever.” He set him down. “Can you stand up, do you think? Can you walk?”
The boy nodded. He stared at the wreck of his home. Then he looked at Matthew. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet. I haven’t given it much thought. You’re the only person I’ve found alive so far. There are just the two of us. Well, three. But the third’s a donkey.”
“One of Miss Lucie’s? Which one?”
“The light gray one. Cobweb.”
“I know.”
“I’ve left her tethered. I think we should go back and see how she is.” He looked at the boy, standing in thin pajamas, with bare feet. “I wonder if we could find some of your clothes before we go.”
“I’m not cold.”
“You will be, later. You stay here and get yourself uncramped, while I look.”
Matthew found the boy’s bedroom slippers under what was left of the bed and, searching further, discovered a shoe. Hunting for its mate, he lifted the edge of a broken door and was looking at the body of a man. The face had been badly damaged, and there was a lot of blood. There was another body, he could see, beside it.
From behind him, Billy called, “Can I come and help?”
Matthew eased the door back. “No. I’m coming now.”
He took blankets with him from the boy’s bed, a left slipper and a right shoe. He put them on the boy’s feet.
“There. That’s better than nothing. We’ll rig one of the blankets round you like a cloak, and I’ll carry the others. You’ll need them tonight.”
“Where shall we sleep?”
“I don’t know. It will have to be out in the open. I shouldn’t think there’s a roof standing, and there may be more shocks.” He rubbed the boy’s head. “You’re going to have to live rough for a few days.”
Billy said earnestly, “I don’t mind. I was supposed to go to scout camp in August.”
“Well,” Matthew said, “you’re all right in that case. Come on, let’s be going.”
They headed back toward Miss Lucie’s. Matthew continued to call from time to time, and Billy joined in, but there was no response. He was concerned about the boy’s reaction to his first sight of death, but when it came—a man’s body, only partly covered by rubble—he appeared to take it calmly. Matthew kept their course well clear of the horror of the head.
Cobweb brayed a welcome as they approached. Billy ran to her and wrapped his free arm round her neck. He said, “I suppose she thought I was bringing her something. I used to, quite often.”
So did Jane, Matthew thought. He smiled with difficulty. “We’ll get her something. I want you to hang on here and look after her. I’m off to do a little foraging, for us as well as for her.”
“Can’t I come with you?”
“Not this time. You stay here. She can do with some company.”
Matthew heard him talking to the donkey as he went away.
He would have to do some planning, he realized. They could not stay in the field with three dead donkeys, and he had no intention of wasting precious energy burying them. Death was all round; in a very short time there would be the stink of putrefaction in the air. There was no way one man and a crippled boy could cope with that except by retreating. They must make themselves a camp, well out in the open but within reach of food. Food was the most immediate need. The little general shop at the end of the lane. He came to a place where the ground had buckled into a ridge five or six feet high, a sycamore fantastically projecting out of it, and climbed over. The heap of bricks and wreckage beyond would be the cottages; the shop had been on the far comer.
It was hard work and, to start with, unrewarding; then he began to get lucky. He hit on the small hardware section and discovered a couple of undamaged saucepans, and next matches. Several gross packages were mashed and scattered, but he found almost a dozen individual boxes in fair shape. Then a kitchen knife, and an aluminum soup ladle. Immediately after that, the best find of all. The cardboard container was battered and tom, but the object inside was undamaged. A tin opener. One of those elaborate ones, meant to be screwed on the wall of a neat modern labor-saving kitchen; he was surprised that Mrs. Triquemin had stocked anything so advanced. But the important thing was that it would open
tins. All he needed now were the tins to open.
He found Mrs. Triquemin first. Her face had the look of faint surprise which had been habitual, as though she were about to open her mouth and say, ‘Why, it s Mr. Cotter—what can I get for you this morning?” The lower half of her body was buried under heavy granite blocks. Matthew covered her up, and went on with the search.
Suddenly he hit treasure trove, a mine of tins of all shapes and sizes underneath the shelves from which they had cascaded. Nearly all were battered and quite a few had burst open, spreading a paste of meat and fruit syrup, processed peas and concentrated soup and other unidentifiable components all round. But there was a great deal to be salvaged. Matthew carted them in armfuls to the place where he had put the saucepans. There was enough here for him and the boy to live on for a week at least. He went back to his digging. It would be nice to find something special for the boy.
A large rectangular object was the deep-freeze chest. The front had broken open, but the top was still in place. He recognized melted ice cream in the mush. The boy would have liked ice cream; he wondered when, if ever, he would taste it again. For the first time he thought of the long-term aspects of survival. The airplanes had not come. It was going to be a hard world—there was no telling how hard.
He rescued various polythene-wrapped meats and vegetables. They could be eaten right away, and the tinned stuff kept. The thing to do, he realized, was to dig out as many tins as possible during the next few days, and then to stay clear of the ruins until the bodies buried under them had rotted down into the cleansing earth. How long would that take? A few weeks? Or months? One could mine them again after that.
But what about next year, and the years to follow? There were crops in the fields—one could plant potatoes. It might be possible to find com, and grow it. Protein was going to be the difficulty. He was brought up short by the shocking awareness of just how great a difficulty: no cattle and, the sea having left them, no fish. Rabbits might have survived—rats, he recalled with distaste, certainly had. He abandoned the speculation. The only thing to do was concentrate on the present and let the future take care of itself.
A Wrinkle in the Skin Page 3
