White Pines

by Gemma Amor

  ‘Don’t,’ I said, shaking my head to block out his words. ‘Don’t say it.’

  ‘What if next time, it’s a person?’

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘A child?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘And they come back like...that?’

  He pointed to the wall, which moved and fluttered and squawked and cheeped less with every second that passed. As the birds suffocated, and died, one by one.

  I thought of a mouth gasping for air by my feet as slippery, deadly sand poured in. How I had dug down to free the face from the beach, and it had vanished under my touch.

  Mac covered his face with his hands, then. He had used those hands to build a community. Now, they were all gone. I found it impossible to focus on anything else as he continued, just his hands, pressed into his large, red face.

  ‘Like flies. In amber. Jesus Christ.’ He said it from behind his fingers, and the air flickered in my peripheral again.

  Then, we heard screaming.

  23. Pig flesh

  Nothing else, I thought, frantically darting back to where the others were. I had visions of something awful happening to Luke, to Matthew, and knew I wouldn’t be able to bear that.

  I can’t take anything else, please.

  Behind me, the faint, weak chirruping of dying birds cut out, suddenly. I didn’t need to look to know the wall was no longer there. That was just how things were now, on the Island.

  The screaming continued, frenzied, chilling. But it wasn’t human. I could see Luke, Matthew, Rhoda and Johnny, and they were all fine, unharmed. Confused, and scared, but fine. Relief knocked the air from my lungs, and I grabbed Matthew tight in a fierce hug.

  ‘I thought something had happened to you,’ I rasped, letting go of him and picking Luke up from his place on the ground. I hoisted the boy into my arms, marvelling at the deep, primal sense of protectiveness that came over me when I was around him. He buried his hot face into my neck, and I struggled to keep my composure.

  ‘No,’ Matthew said, and he sounded exhausted. ‘It’s coming from out there, somewhere.’ Deep, dark hollows lay under his eyes. He was pale, and a sheen of sweat lay on his temples. The Island was taking a toll on all of us.

  A strange wind picked up. I’d spent enough time watching the Island in the last few hours to know this happened sometimes, usually after something came back. As if the wind followed, from the Other Place. It carried the sound this way and that, changing directions as we tried to keep up, tried to find the source of the screaming. The land was barren, wiped clean of features, but for all that, whatever it was, wherever it was, the noise and its maker eluded us. All we could see was the level, charcoal plane of the triangle, and beyond it, the pines.

  Gooseflesh crawled across my skin. The sound went on, and on. It was terrible. It was the sound of pain, and suffering. It was the sound of death.

  ‘Where is it?’ Johnny said, swallowing repeatedly. Luke shivered as the screaming grew louder, and I squeezed him tight.

  ‘There!’

  We shaded our eyes, squinted into the mid-morning sun.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Rhoda.

  Something large and pink and horrifying thrashed around in the distance.

  ‘What...what the fuck is that?’ Matthew asked.

  It didn’t take Johnny long to figure it out.

  ‘The pigs,’ he moaned. ‘Uncle, it’s the pigs!’

  ‘Aye,’ said Mac, heavily, and there was nothing else to say after that.

  The thing writhed and shrieked, growing harsher and more urgent with every passing minute. I realised it was moving towards us, edging its way over from the far side of the triangle’s edge.

  I narrowed my eyes. Whatever we were looking at was too big for one pig, surely?

  Then it clicked. Pigs, Johnny had said.

  The animals had been rootling around in the soil together in their pen when White Pines disappeared.

  ‘Oh,’ I whispered.

  It wasn’t just one pig that we were looking at.

  The Island had sent the animals back, but in doing so, had crushed the individual beasts together, mashing them into a single, struggling, mutated form.

  The misshapen ball of pig flesh screamed at us again, scudding across the ground on a mass of stiffly braced legs with trotters desperately scrambling for purchase, to no avail. We watched this display with a rising sickness in our hearts, as if a car crash were playing out in slow motion before us. The pigs bucked and rolled and scrabbled until eventually, having shunted themselves completely across one side of the triangle, they came to rest in a spot not far from us, a level stretch of ground that eventually sloped up towards our vantage point under the cairn. The elevation proved too much for the uncoordinated pile of limbs, and so there the beasts writhed, while we looked on, helpless in the face of their suffering.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Matthew, and he began to cry.

  There were three hogs fused together, arms and legs and snouts and ears and tails all jumbled up as if they were once soft clay models and a small, impatient child had smashed them into a single lump in a fit of pique. One of the heads dangled, lifeless, its eyes rolled back in its skull, its tongue lolling from a slack jaw. The deafening screams the creature made came from the two other heads, conjoined pig-twins sealed together in the same skull, but with two different faces, two separate snouts. They gurgled and gnashed their jaws in agony, and I could already see life beginning to fade from their eyes. Just as the sparrows had struggled and died, so would the pigs, because what living creature could survive something like this?

  I pressed my face into Luke’s hair, wanting to scourge the image from my sight and memory, knowing somehow that I would never be able to.

  And a gunshot ripped violently through the air, obliterating the noise of the pigs. The sound ricocheted around the Island’s interior, and I clutched Luke tight, ducking down instinctively and covering his head with my hands.

  Rhoda stepped forward. She had Mac’s shotgun cocked and levelled, sight firmly fixed on the monstrosity. Gone was the weeping woman who shivered beneath the cairn. In her place, a tall, strong figure squared up to fate. I approved of the change.

  The pigs screeched. They were still alive. With a grim determination, Rhoda reset her feet, blew out her cheeks, focussed, and fired again. The gun kicked back hard into her shoulder, but she took the impact, bracing against it, her silver hair clouding crazily around her head.

  Her aim was better the second time around. The shotgun roared, and the squealing stopped, abruptly. Thank God, I thought. It’s over.

  When I turned back, there was nothing to see. Only a flicker.

  The Island had taken the pigs away again.

  Shaken, I looked at Rhoda, who broke the gun with practiced hands. Spent cartridges pinged onto the ground behind her. She blew into the exposed barrels, and handed the gun back to Mac.

  ‘It’s been a long time since I used one of those,’ she said, and I put Luke down, gently, unable to carry him any longer.

  ‘You have good aim,’ I said, eyeing the heavy gun with respect.

  ‘I’m not as good a shot as I used to be. I just couldn’t stand to see them suffer like that.’

  Johnny spoke up.

  ‘We’ve had those pigs since the beginning,’ he said, face tight and strained. He sounded almost accusatory. ‘I hand-reared them from piglets.’

  Rhoda patted her hair. ‘I just couldn’t take it,’ she said. ‘That noise.’

  Mac put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Me either,’ he said.

  24. Plan

  After that, the Island remained still, for the most part, except for the occasional flicker. Almost as if it had run out of energy.

  The incident with the pigs had an unexpected side-effect, in that it served to finally unite us as a group. Brought together by Rhoda’s decisiveness with the gun, we held a meeting, and tried to reason a way out of our shared nightmare.

  ‘If we stay here
, we die.’ Mac stated this as a matter of fact, rather than something that was up for debate. And he was right, I knew that. We could not stay here forever, waiting to see what happened. Eventually we would starve, or die of dehydration.

  But what waited for us beyond the protection of the cairn seemed a worse prospect than death, in my opinion.

  I folded my arms. I was happy to play devil’s advocate if it meant not ending up like Glenn, or the pigs, or the sparrows.

  ‘If we go out there, we die.’

  ‘You don’t know that. It might not work like that.’

  ‘True. Trouble is,’ I said, digging my heels in, ‘It’s kind of hard to test, isn’t it?’

  There was silence as everyone thought about this. I used the opportunity to keep talking.

  ‘None of us wants to be the first to put a foot in that triangle, do we? Not after the things we’ve seen.’

  ‘But we can’t stay here.’

  I sighed. ‘No. We can’t stay here.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Matthew looked haunted. Already beaten down, the fight had gone out of him completely after the pigs.

  Mac and I stared at each other, thinking.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, eventually. I felt as if I had been checkmated in chess.

  Johnny cleared his throat, his eyes red-rimmed and puffy. He’d been crying.

  ‘I’ve been timing things,’ he said, holding up his wrist and showing us an old-fashioned watch he was wearing. ‘I’ve been timing the things that come back.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I frowned, watching Luke from out of the corner of my eye. The boy had fallen into a fitful sleep in the grass, exhausted, and was now dreaming. He whimpered like a dog, and jerked around. I moved closer to him, frightened he would roll himself across the green strip and into the triangle.

  ‘I’ve been timing how long there is between each...appearance. Each thing that returns.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I remembered something from school.’ I wondered if he meant school before White Pines, or whether the community had run its own school. I then immediately thought of all the children who had lived on the Island, children who were now gone, and felt winded, as if punched in the gut.

  Johnny continued, choosing his words carefully, as if saying them out loud helped his own thought process.

  ‘At school we learned about natural disasters, earthquakes, volcanoes, that sort of thing. And about warning systems.’

  Matthew straightened up a little. Rhoda folded her arms, listening intently.

  ‘Go on,’ Mac said.

  ‘I think what’s happening here is a bit like an earthquake. It’s a...a...natural phenomenon, right?’ Johnny stuttered a little as he spoke, awkward and unused to being the centre of attention.

  A natural phenomenon? None of us replied. What was happening on the Island felt like the most unnatural thing imaginable, like a perversion of nature rather than a display of it.

  But the teenager was right in one regard. Whether natural or supernatural, the disappearance of White Pines was a catastrophic event. And in that respect, comparing it to an earthquake made sense.

  And so, we let Johnny talk.

  ‘No-one can know exactly when an earthquake will hit, right?’ He continued, the bit more firmly between his teeth now.

  ‘Right,’ I said, beginning to understand what he was driving at.

  ‘But every quake sends out these waves. And there are different types. Some waves move faster than others. Like...ripples in a pond.’ He made a rippling motion with his hands, demonstrating two waves moving at two different speeds.

  ‘Warning systems detect the early waves, the faster ones. They don’t do much damage. It’s the slower waves that cause all the problems. They come after.’

  ‘So what are you telling us?’

  Johnny rubbed his face. He was skinny, and lean, like Luke. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down on his neck as he continued on.

  ‘I think the things that come back are like the early waves. The fast waves. They come back for a second or two, sometimes longer, then they go again. They’re like...a warning.’

  ‘A warning?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded, in earnest. ‘A warning. That’s the best way I can describe it. A warning for what comes after.’

  ‘And what comes after?’

  ‘The slower waves.’

  Mac spat, losing patience. ‘What’s any of this supposed to mean? How does it help us?’

  ‘It means that something...worse is coming.’ Johnny shrugged, defensive. ‘That’s what I think, anyway.’

  Rhoda shook her head, aghast. ‘What can possibly be worse than what we’ve already seen? What can possibly be worse than losing...losing our home? Our people?’

  I remembered a black beast on a nightmare beach, striding across the sand towards me.

  That could be worse, I thought.

  Johnny waved his watch at us again. ‘I don’t know! But I think we can use it. The space between things coming back, the fast waves, is getting longer. Remember when it first happened? Things came and went so fast we couldn’t see, couldn’t keep track of it. Then it slowed to every few seconds, then every two minutes, then every five, then every seven. The air doesn’t…’ He flapped a hand about in a flickering motion. ‘Do that...as much as it did in the beginning.’

  ‘Wait.’ Matthew frowned. ‘The gaps between waves are getting longer. Shouldn’t that mean we are...safer?’

  ‘One the one hand, yes.’ Johnny picked up a rock, just like earlier, and threw it out into the triangle.

  And this time, it didn’t disappear.

  A ripple of excitement passed around our group.

  ‘Maybe it’s going away,’ Rhoda theorized, looking to the rest of us hopefully. ‘Maybe if we just wait it out, like Megs said, it’ll stop, eventually.’

  I interjected. ‘But the things coming back with each wave are getting worse, aren’t they?’

  Johnny nodded. ‘That’s what I’m driving at. I think the slower wave is on its way.’

  I worked through the implications of that in my mind.

  ‘Maybe...maybe Johnny’s right. Maybe it takes more energy to bring something alive back. Maybe the Island needs more time, and is preparing itself.’

  ‘For what?’ Matthew said.

  ‘Back from where, for Christ's sake?’ Mac added, belligerent, his patience now entirely gone.

  ‘Back from wherever everything has gone.’

  Matthew began to pace around the thin grassy strip. ‘But what you’re talking about...it’s...I mean...you’re talking about…’ He couldn’t articulate his thoughts properly, and it was frustrating him.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about, Matthew.’ I was calm as I said this. ‘All I have to work with are the facts. And the facts are this. There was a town, sitting right where that triangle is sitting now. And now it’s gone. And it’s taken all the people with it. Except it isn’t gone entirely, is it? Things keep coming back. And those things are getting worse. First the birds, then the pigs. I agree with Johnny. It’s like the Island is gearing up for something.’

  I looked at Mac then, remembering what he had said earlier. He’d been right, too. What if the next thing the Island wanted to send back was human? Was Rhoda a good enough shot to put one of her own townsfolk out of their misery? Could she shoot a friend, a neighbour, a child, like she had shot the pigs?

  ‘I don’t see how any of this helps us.’ Rhoda, oblivious to my thoughts, was in agreement with Mac. They were a tight unit, and suddenly, ridiculously, I thought about Tim, and how we hadn’t been a tight unit. I wondered what he was up to, right now, at that very moment, as we debated our own survival with a teenager.

  Johnny took a deep breath.

  ‘I think…’ He trailed off, losing confidence.

  ‘Finish that thought,’ I said, gently.

  ‘I think that if we wait for something else to come back, then wait for it to disappear again, we might h
ave a window. A nine minute window, maybe, perhaps even longer, before something else comes through. And we could make a run for it.’

  I blew out my cheeks. I’d been afraid he would say something like that.

  ‘But what about Glenn? I don’t want to end up like him.’

  Johnny shuddered, then regrouped.

  ‘He made a run for it too soon. The space between the waves was too narrow. The air was constantly shimmering then, remember? Like…’

  ‘Like static on a television,’ I said, finishing his sentence for him.

  ‘Yes. Does that make sense? It’s like a door, I think, the triangle. Each wave that comes...that’s the door opening. And when it’s open, you get sucked in. You go somewhere else. Or, you get thrown out, sent back from the other place. Only you get mixed up with whatever was next to you at the time. Or with something that was nowhere near you when you were taken, but maybe it gets all jumbled up on the other side.’

  My head was now full of sand, and bodies, and human debris trapped in puddles of melted beach-glass. How had this kid figured all that out?

  And what if he was right?

  It would mean…

  Careful, Megs. Careful what thoughts you allow yourself to have. Was that my mother’s voice, this time, or mine? I couldn’t tell.

  It’s like a door.

  It would confirm that my dream hadn’t been a dream at all.

  It would mean that the beach was a real place.

  The Other Place.

  It would mean the god beneath the tree was real.

  And so was the black giant.

  ‘The point is, when the door is shut, for those nine minutes, we have time to move. But we have to be fast. Really, really fucking fast.’

  I looked to Rhoda, then, the eldest of us. The slowest of us. She met my gaze, and nodded, ever so slightly. She was a risk. She knew she was a risk.

  Matthew squinted at the triangle, trying to spot a clear route across, trying to judge the distance with his eyes.

  ‘It’s not too far to the edge of the triangle,’ he said, eventually. ‘Not really. Not from here. Especially if we use the slope to our advantage. We’d be running downhill.’ He pointed to the northern side of the triangle, closest to the path that led through the trees. The way down was steepest from that side of the cairn, and he was right. That could work to our advantage.