I was half-way back to the ‘Emmanuelle’, holding my nose as I stepped over the bands of rotting weed, when I heard the noise of a little murder behind me. Jonathan’s whoops of satanic glee almost drowned the pathetic voice of the sheep as it was killed, but I knew instinctively what the drunken bastard had done.
I turned back, my heel pivoting on the slime. It was almost certainly too late to save one of the beasts, but maybe I could prevent him massacring the other two. I couldn’t see the pen; it was hidden behind the boulders, but I could hear Jonathan’s triumphant yells, and the thud, thud of his strokes. I knew what I’d see before it came into sight.
The grey-green lawn had turned red. Jonathan was in the pen with the sheep. The two survivors were charging back and forth in a rhythmical trot of panic, baaing in terror, while Jonathan stood over the third sheep, erect now. The victim had partially collapsed, its stick-like front legs buckled beneath it, its back legs rigid with approaching death. Its bulk shuddered with nervous spasms, and its eyes showed more white than brown. The top of
its skull had been almost entirely dashed to pieces, and the grey hash of its brain exposed, punctured by shards of its own bone, and pulped by the large round stone that Jonathan was still wielding. Even as I watched he brought the weapon down once more onto the sheep’s brain-pan. Globs of tissue flew off in every direction, speckling me with hot matter and blood. Jonathan looked like some nightmare lunatic (which for that moment, I suppose, he was). His naked body, so recently white, was stained as a butcher’s apron after a hard day’s hammering at the abattoir. His face was more sheep’s gore than Jonathan –
The animal itself was dead. Its pathetic complaints had ceased completely. It keeled over, rather comically, like a cartoon character, one of its ears snagging the wire. Jonathan watched it fall: his face a grin under the blood. Oh that grin: it served so many purposes. Wasn’t that the same smile he charmed women with? The same grin that spoke lechery and love? Now, at last, it was put to its true purpose: the gawping smile of the satisfied savage, standing over his prey with a stone in one hand and his manhood in the other.
Then, slowly, the smile decayed, as his senses returned.
‘Jesus,’ he said, and from his abdomen a wave of revulsion climbed up his body. I could see it quite clearly; the way his gut rolled as a throb of nausea threw his head forward, pitching half-digested gin and toast over the grass.
I didn’t move. I didn’t want to comfort him, calm him, console him – he was simply beyond my help.
I turned away.
‘Frankie,’ he said through a throat of bile.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. There was nothing to be done for the sheep, it was dead and gone; all I wanted to do was run away from that little ring of stones, and put the sight out of my head.
‘Frankie.’
I began to walk, as fast as I was able over such tricky terrain, back down towards the beach and the relative sanity of the ‘Emmanuelle’.
The smell was stronger now: coming up out of the ground towards my face in filthy waves.
Horrible island. Vile, stinking, insane island.
All I thought was hate as I stumbled across the weed and the filth. The ‘Emmanuelle’ wasn’t far off –
Then, a little pattering of pebbles like before. I stopped, balancing uneasily on the sleek dome of a stone, and looked to my left, where even now one of the pebbles was rolling to a halt. As it stopped another, larger pebble, fully six inches across, seemed to move spontaneously from its resting place, and roll down the beach, striking its neighbours and beginning another exodus towards the sea. I frowned: the frown made my head buzz.
Was there some sort of animal – a crab maybe – under the beach, moving the stones? Or was it the heat that in some way twitched them into life?