by Gemma Amor
The Island deceives. The Island deceives. The Island deceives. The Island deceives.
It was then that the world fell silent.
18. Silence
Not a gradual tapering off of sound.
Not a quietening down, or a low murmur dropping away gradually as the party lulled. Not an ebb or flow of noise, dipping and rising with the breeze. There was no breeze. Everything was incredibly still, especially the air.
No. The noise...all noise...just stopped.
Dead.
As if we had been sealed, suddenly, in a sound-proofed room. I felt my ears glug, and pop. The hairs on my arms stood up. The skin beneath prickled. There was a faint tremor in my fingertips. The effect on us was devastating, like a bomb had been dropped. Not a single noise could be heard from the town below. No music. No children playing and laughing, no stamp and shuffle of people dancing, no shrieking violins, or banging drums, no pipes, no barking dogs, no snuffling pigs. Not even the sound of a fire crackling, or beer cups rattling together.
There was nothing, and the absence of sound was deafening.
I watched Mac’s face as the quiet hit him. He finally lowered the gun, frowning at me. I licked my lips, which were suddenly very dry. An understanding passed between us. Something outside of the realms of normality was happening here. Whatever business he had with Matthew and I, it could wait.
He hesitated, then turned and walked back around to the other side of the cairn, the side that looked down upon the town square. The rest of us followed, because we knew something was wrong. We all felt it. Something was horribly, earth-shatteringly wrong.
Luke broke free of the silver-haired woman and came to me, slipping his hand silently into mine.
‘What’s going on?’ He asked, in a small voice.
I squeezed his hand, not knowing how to answer, and we rounded the cairn together, Matthew close at my back.
And I looked down. Down to where only moments before, a festival had been underway. Down to where hundreds of people had swirled around in joyous harmony, to where a thriving community had been celebrating an anniversary.
They were not celebrating any more.
I felt heavy, and drunk. For a second or two, I did not know what I was actually looking at.
Then I realised that this was it.
This was the event.
This was why I was here.
Because White Pines had disappeared.
Dawn chose that moment to creep up on us, almost as if it had been waiting. I hadn’t realised how late it was, hadn’t seen the night tip over into early morning. The sky lightened, became a deep, bruised pink with purple accents. The moon waned to a thin, pale disc, now redundant.
And the sun, with horrible alacrity, pushed its head up above the tall tree tops. I saw rich, yolky light spill out across the centre of the Island, where moments before, the town of White Pines had stood.
To where the people, the children, the band, the houses, the cobbled square, the large tables set up with food, the barrels of ale on their trestles, the cast-iron hand pump, the storage buildings, the chapel, the sandstone bench, the vegetable patches and fruit trees and pigs in their pens, even the bunting, the discarded plates and cutlery and the spit-roasted lamb…
To where it had all been, and now, was not.
And before us, instead of White Pines, there lay something else. Something that spread out inside the circle of pine trees, something that occupied the same space that the town had, but was devoid of life, of movement, of landmarks, of distinguishing features of any kind.
It was a large, black scar upon the land.
A scar in the shape of a huge, perfectly proportioned equilateral triangle.
At each point, there sat a cairn. In the centre rested the fourth cairn, the largest, and the one underneath which we stood, stunned.
Three sides, three corners…
I couldn’t finish the thought.
Lines, and shapes, and symbols, all around.
But there was nothing sacred about this geometry. This was evil. This was the geometry of abomination.
The silver-haired woman screamed, then, long and loud.
The scream hung in the air like smoke, lingering long after it had left the woman’s mouth.
And the Island, now blank and empty like a slate wiped clean, listened.
19. One second
My first thought was of the boy’s Ma. The boy who held my hand, and stared at the scarred land below us, mute with shock. Had there been a father, too? Yes, he had mentioned his Dad, I was sure of it.
I felt him next to me, small, vulnerable.
Orphaned. Homeless.
The boy who would be gone, too, had he not followed us here.
His mother had been kind. Angry, but kind. She had given us beer, good beer, and directions.
And then I thought of all the other people I’d seen. The old men, sitting by the fountain, smoking. The kids that had been running through people’s legs and around the square in feral packs. The women chattering with their arms about each other. The couples dancing ‘strip the willow.’ The piper. Even the drunk woman who had kissed Matthew.
Everyone who had existed inside the boundary of that triangle was now gone. Ceased to exist, as if they had never been there at all. Except for us. As if we were dreamers, and had suddenly woken.
Why us? Why leave us behind?
‘What’s going on?’ Luke asked, again.
Mac dropped his gun to the ground. The silver-haired woman wailed again, and swayed as if on the verge of collapse. The man with the fish tattoo went very, very still, eyes almost popping from his head. The teenager swore and closed his eyes, then reopened them. He did this over and over again, as if in the grip of a seizure.
But it didn’t matter how hard you looked, or how many times you closed your eyes and hoped that when you opened them, things would be different.
Because they weren’t.
White Pines was gone.
A tiny white flake of something drifted past my nose. A flake of what could have been snow. It landed on my arm, and I let it sit there, too terrified to brush it away.
It wasn’t snow.
It was ash.
‘I don’t understand,’ Matthew whispered, staring at the empty wasteland where the town square had stood. The silver-haired woman had collapsed into Mac’s arms, and was babbling hysterically. The teenager wiped tears from his face, which had gone from pale white to a blotchy, shocked shade of red.
Luke just kept holding my hand, confusion writ large across his face.
‘It’s gone,’ he said, and I heard Matthew let out a great, shuddering breath as he heard the boy say this.
‘Where’s it gone?’ He asked, and then he repeated himself.
‘Please, where’s it gone?’
I tore my eyes from the scar to look at him. And I had a moment of blinding clarity.
An ocean, where slate roofs poked out of the waves. A chapel, half submerged in the tide-line.
A beach, full of bodies.
A cast-iron water pump sticking out of the sand. Other things that once belonged somewhere else.
It wasn’t a dream, I realised.
If I’d had anything left in my stomach to bring up at that moment, I would have.
The man with the fish tattoo spoke up. ‘No,’ he said, as if quarrelling with a friend over something inconsequential. ‘No, that isn’t possible.’ And before any of us could stop him, he started to march downhill, towards the place his town had been, saying over and over again in business-like tones: ‘No. No, no, I don’t think so.’
I had a moment then, when I felt something shift in the air, when a feeling of absolute dread gripped me tight as I stared at the retreating form of the man. I remembered the piper, snapping out of view. I remembered Matthew, there one moment and then suddenly, not.
‘Stop!’ I shouted, suddenly, as the man left the shadow of the cairn. ‘Come back!’
‘What is it, Megs?�
� Matthew said, voice thin with fear. ‘What do you know?’
‘Stop!’ I screamed again, but it was too late. The fish-tattooed man took another step, still shaking his head and muttering to himself, and I saw a quiver, a change in the atmosphere around him, as if the air was flexing, shivering with a strange, uncontrollable energy, and then, in front of all of us, he simply winked out of existence.
The silver haired woman screamed again, and Mac made as if to repeat the same mistake. The teenager snapped out a hand, and grabbed his shirt. ‘No!’ He said, face piebald with fright. ‘Don’t, it isn’t safe!’
‘I don’t understand what just happened,’ Matthew whispered, and in that moment he sounded no older than the small boy who gripped my hand.
I looked down at my feet. Why us? I thought again. Why are we still here?
Then, I saw why, and grunted in surprise.
‘What?’ Said to Matthew, in a hushed voice. It felt suddenly rude to speak out.
I pointed to the ground near our feet, and he looked down. Where we stood, just below the cairn, the land was still grassy and green. The grass made a definitive ring-shaped strip around the base of the cairn, about five or six feet deep. Outside of the shadow of the cairn, outside of the green circle, everything was charred, spent, and empty.
My right foot sat at the very edge of this green strip, my big toe a mere inch away from the dead ground. And I sensed what Matthew seemed to sense, at the same moment: that stepping over that green boundary, putting even one toe into that black scar, would invite great pain and suffering. Like stepping into a bath full of scalding water.
I moved my foot back, with great care.
‘Look,’ Matthew whispered.
I was afraid to, but I did as he asked. I looked, and saw that there was something wrong with the air beyond the green circle, the air that filled the ashen triangle.
It flickered, as if it were static on a television set.
‘Over there,’ Matthew said.
He gestured at something lying on the ground. Half-full of beer and resting on its side, contents draining into the dead soil, a small dark puddle soaking the earth beneath it. A beaker. Matthew had thrown it away earlier, and it had obviously landed and rolled down-slope, away from the cairn.
We watched, and the air crackled, warped, and then the beaker was gone.
Without thinking, I reached towards the spot where it had lay, just as I had when I’d watched Matthew’s reflection disappear in the mirror in Luke’s house. I wanted to feel the ground, to see if it really was wet, to see if the cup had ever really been there at all, but Matthew, my shield against the impossible, stopped me.
‘Don’t,’ he said, sharply, and I caught myself, snatching the hand back.
And I had a terrible thought.
Was it the town that had disappeared?
Or had we gone somewhere else?
My eyes scanned the scene, back and forth, back and forth. Could I make out even the faintest of outlines, foundations, remnants of buildings? No, not even any debris, rubble, or litter. It was as if everything within the triangle had been swept clean away by a giant brush. Nothing moved, except the air, which buckled like a sheet of metal under great pressure.
I looked around. I needed to test something. I picked up a loose pebble from the ground near the bottom of the cairn. I threw it at the space where the beaker had been, where now only air remained, air that moved with a strange intent. The stone sailed across the distance between where I stood and the dead place in a definitive arc, and then…
Vanished, mid-trajectory, before it hit the ground.
‘That’s...that’s not possible,’ Matthew said, sounding like the man with the fish tattoo. ‘None of this is possible.’
‘What was his name?’ I asked, out loud, for it seemed important to know. I could not think of him as the ‘fish-tattooed man’ forever.
‘Glenn.’ The teenager had come forward to stand beside us. ‘His name is Glenn.’
Present tense, I thought. Is.
What ‘is’ Glenn now? Alive? Dead? Something in between, like Schrödinger’s doomed cat?
Luke clutched at my arm, his thumb now stuck in his mouth as he tried to comfort himself. The older boy gestured at the staccato beat of air, moving consistently, rhythmically, as if reality were tuning in, and out. From one place to another place, this place and then that. Wherever that was.
I had an impression of a veil being lifted, or a curtain pulled back, only fleetingly, momentarily, before it was dropped once again.
‘What do we do?’ Matthew said, voicing the question we were all thinking at the same time, but too afraid to ask.
‘I think…’ I swallowed, changed my mind. There was no point in telling them what I thought. They wouldn’t understand about the beach. Not yet.
I chose different words.
‘I think that if we leave the shelter of this cairn, go out there…’ I trailed off, fully realising what it was that I was about to say.
‘Well?’ Mac’s gruff voice rasped out behind me.
I shook my head. ‘Well. I wouldn’t, is all.’ And I picked up another stone, a larger rock the size of my fist this time, from the base of the cairn. Another shock like electricity ran through me as I brushed against the mound of stones in the act. I gritted my teeth and ignored it. One anomaly at a time, thank you.
I threw the rock, further this time, arcing my arm back, hurling the stone as far as it would go, and the exact same thing happened as last time. It sailed through the air, crossed into the space within the triangle, came down in a curved trajectory, and then ceased to exist.
Gone.
‘It must be a trick of the light,’ said Matthew, trying to ascribe logic to a situation so far beyond description it was almost comedic. ‘A heat haze? Or perhaps a fog of some sort. It’s just not…’
‘Stop, Matthew,’ I said, rubbing my tired eyes with my four-fingered hand. ‘Just stop.’
I heard the silver-haired woman speak, then. She had joined us at the edge of the cairn boundary. Her face was a portrait of shock, and grief. Her hands trembled as she patted her hair, a distracted, obsessive gesture that told me her brain was running in one direction, and her motor functions in the other. The other Islanders gathered around her, as if to catch her if she fell. They were a unit, I realised, like Matthew and I were. Part of a community. It made me unbearably sad.
‘I only looked away for a second,’ she said. Her hands kept patting that silvery pile of soft hair.
‘Only a second.’
I swallowed, fighting too many feelings.
Clearly, one second had been long enough.
20. Marooned
‘So you’re telling me...we’re stuck here?’
Mac was a thick-set man, barrel-chested, stout-bellied, yet his stomach heaved up and down, and his eyes darted about frantically as he tried to come to terms with the new, insubstantial reality we now found ourselves trapped within.
I retrieved another rock, silently. I handed it to Mac. With a grim expression, he threw it out of the green grass circle. We all watched as it flew through the air, and then disappeared.
‘You saw what happened to…’ Even though I had just asked, the name evaded me, and I shook my head. I’m sorry, I can’t…’
‘Glenn.’ The teenager stared at the ground, sadly.
‘I’m sorry. To Glenn. You saw it. We can’t leave. At least not that way.’
‘What about the other side?’ Matthew meant the other side of the cairn.
‘Let me check.’ The teenager, eager to do something, anything, found his own stone, thought about it for a second, and collected several more. Then he walked clockwise around the base of the cairn, stopping every few paces to throw a rock into the triangle. He did this until he had looped the rock pile completely, and returned to the point where we stood, waiting.
Nice little ritual, I remembered Matthew saying.
Now empty-handed, the teen shook his head. Ever
y single stone had blipped out of existence.
I thought of a desert island. We were marooned on a small islet in a sea of disquiet. Were there sharks out there in the water?
None of us felt brave enough to find out.
‘We can’t leave.’ Mac repeated my words from earlier, only now it was more of a statement than a question.
I shrugged, feeling numb. ‘Feel free to try.’
The collective realisation fell heavily on our disparate group. We were stuck. On this small mound of grass and rock in the centre of a black, dead triangle. For how long, was anyone’s guess.
Mac glared at me then, as if everything was my fault. Deep down inside, in the part of me that wasn’t shocked and exhausted and fore done, I felt the same. I felt inexplicable guilt. I felt the consequence of touching the face of a sleeping deity in my dream.
Because everything had gone to shit since I’d dreamed that dream.
Was this all my fault?
‘We should wait,’ I said then, as it was the only logical thing left to say. ‘If we wait, this...whatever this is, it might end soon. Maybe everything will come back. Maybe it won’t. I don’t know. But this?’ I pointed at the Island’s empty interior.
‘I don’t want to set foot in that.’
Mac and I locked eyes, and I saw all of the blame and terror that he was struggling to swallow brim to the surface. He had a ruddy face, polished by cold winter winds and outdoor living. It grew darker as he let rage push his fear to one side. He took a threatening step towards me. Matthew moved once again to place himself in the other man’s path.
‘And what about water?’ The Islander said, in a flat, livid voice. ‘What are we supposed to drink while we wait? Or eat? What about food?’
I shook my head, out of answers.
