Was he deaf? His grin broke open again; he thought the horror on my face was a jibe at his nakedness, I realized. He doesn’t understand –
The stone sheered off the top of his head, from the middle of his nose upwards, leaving his mouth still wide, his tongue rooted in blood, and flinging the rest of his beauty towards me in a cloud of wet red dust. The upper part of his head was spilt on to the face of the stone, its expression intact as it swooped towards me. I half fell, and it screamed past me, veering off towards the sea. Once over the water the assassin seemed to lose its will somehow, and faltered in the air before plunging into the waves.
At my feet, blood. A trail that led to where Jonathan’s body lay, the open edge of his head towards me, its machinery plain for the sky to see.
I was still not screaming, though for sanity’s sake I had to unleash the terror suffocating me. Somebody must hear me, hold me, take me away and explain to me, before the skipping pebbles found their rhythm again. Or worse, before the minds below the beach, unsatisfied with murder by proxy, rolled away their grave stones and rose to kiss me themselves.
But the scream would not come.
All I could hear was the patter of stones to my right and left. They intend to kill us all for invading their sacred ground. Stoned to death, like heretics.
Then, a voice.
For Christ’s sake – ‘
A man’s voice; but not Ray’s.
He seemed to have appeared from out of thin air: a short, broad man, standing at the sea’s edge. In one hand a bucket and under his arm a bundle of coarsely-cut hay. Food for the sheep, I thought, through a jumble of half-formed words. Food for sheep.
He stared at me, then down at Jonathan’s body, his old eyes wild.
‘What’s gone on?’ he said. The Gaelic accent was thick. ‘In the name of Christ what’s gone on?’
I shook my head. It seemed loose on my neck, almost as though I might shake it off. Maybe I pointed to the sheep-pen,
maybe not. Whatever the reason he seemed to know what I was thinking, and began to climb the beach towards the crown of the island, dropping bucket and bundle as he went.
Half-blind with confusion, I followed, but before I could reach the boulders he was out of their shadow again, his face suddenly shining with panic.
‘Who did that?’
‘Jonathan,’ I replied. I cast a hand towards the corpse, not daring to look back at him. The man cursed in Gaelic, and stumbled out of the shelter of the boulders.
‘What have you done?’ he yelled at me. ‘My Christ, what have you done? Killing their gifts.’
‘Just sheep,’ I said. In my head the instant of Jonathan’s decapitation was playing over and over again, a loop of slaughter.
‘They demand it, don’t you see, or they rise – ‘
‘Who rise?’ I said, knowing. Seeing the stones shift.
‘All of them. Put away without grief or mourning. But they’ve got the sea in them, in their heads – ‘
I knew what he was talking about: it was quite plain to me, suddenly. The dead were here: as we knew. Under the stones. But they had the rhythm of the sea in them, and they wouldn’t lie down. So to placate them, these sheep were tethered in a pen, to be offered up to their wills.
Did the dead eat mutton? No; it wasn’t food they wanted. It was the gesture of recognition – as simple as that.
‘Drowned,’ he was saying, ‘all drowned.’
Then, the familiar patter began again, the drumming of stones, which grew, without warning, into an ear-splitting thunder, as though the entire beach was shifting.
And under the cacophony three other sounds: splashing, screaming and wholesale destruction.
I turned to see a wave of stones rising into the air on the other side of the island –
Again the terrible screams, wrung from a body that was being buffeted and broken.
They were after the ‘Emmanuelle’. After Ray. I started to run in the direction of the boat, the beach rippling beneath my feet. Behind me, I could hear the boots of the sheep-feeder on the stones. As we ran the noise of the assault became louder. Stones danced in the air like fat birds, blocking the sun, before