Pincher Martin Read online

  “You are a projection of my mind.”

  He made a snorting sound.

  “Infinite regression or better still, round and round the mulberry bush. We could go on like that for ever.”

  “Have you had enough, Christopher?”

  He looked at the lips. They were clear as the words. A tiny shred of spittle joined them near the right corner.

  “I could never have invented that.”

  The eye nearest the look-out was bloodshot at the outer corner. Behind it or beside it a red strip of sunset ran down out of sight behind the rock. The spray still flew over. You could look at the sunset or the eye but you could not do both. You could not look at the eye and the mouth together. He saw the nose was shiny and leathery brown and full of pores. The left cheek would need a shave soon, for he could see the individual bristles. But he could not look at the whole face together. It was a face that perhaps could be remembered later. It did not move. It merely had this quality of refusing overall inspection. One feature at a time.

  “Enough of what?”

  “Surviving. Hanging on.”

  The clothing was difficult to pin down too so that he had to examine each piece. There was an oilskin—belted, because the buttons had fetched away. There was a woollen pullover inside it, with a roll-neck. The sou’wester was back a little. The hands were resting one on either knee, above the seaboot stockings. Then there were seaboots, good and shiny and wet and solid. They made the rock behind them seem like cardboard, like a painted flat. He bent forward until his bleared window was just above the right instep. There was no background music now and no wind, nothing but black, shiny rubber.

  “I hadn’t considered.”

  “Consider now.”

  “What’s the good? I’m mad.”

  “Even that crevice will crumble.”

  He tried to laugh up at the bloodshot eye but heard barking noises. He threw words in the face.

  “On the sixth day he created God. Therefore I permit you to use nothing but my own vocabulary. In his own image created he Him.”

  “Consider now.”

  He saw the eye and the sunset merge. He brought his arms across his face.

  “I won’t. I can’t.”

  “What do you believe in?”

  Down to the black boot, coal black, darkness of the cellar, but now down to a forced answer.

  “The thread of my life.”

  “At all costs.”

  Repeat after me:

  “At all costs.”

  “So you survived.”

  “That was luck.”

  “Inevitability.”

  “Didn’t the others want to live then?”

  “There are degrees.”

  He dropped the curtains of flesh and hair and blotted out the boots. He snarled.

  “I have a right to live if I can!”

  “Where is that written?”

  “Then nothing is written.”

  “Consider.”

  He raged on the cardboard rock before the immovable, black feet.

  “I will not consider! I have created you and I can create my own heaven.”

  “You have created it.”

  He glanced sideways along the twitching water, down at his skeleton legs and knees, felt the rain and spray and the savage cold on his flesh.

  He began to mutter.

  “I prefer it. You gave me the power to choose and all my life you led me carefully to this suffering because my choice was my own. Oh yes! I understand the pattern. All my life, whatever I had done I should have found myself in the end on that same bridge, at that same time, giving that same order—the right order, the wrong order. Yet, suppose I climbed away from the cellar over the bodies of used and defeated people, broke them to make steps on the road away from you, why should you torture me? If I ate them, who gave me a mouth?”

  “There is no answer in your vocabulary.”

  He squatted back and glared up at the face. He shouted.

  “I have considered. I prefer it, pain and all.”

  “To what?”

  He began to rage weakly and strike out at the boots.

  “To the black lightning! Go back! Go back!”

  He was bruising skin off his hands against the streaming rock. His mouth quacked and he went with it into the last crevice of all.

  “Poor mad sailor on a rock!”

  He clambered up the High Street.

  Rage, roar, spout!

  Let us have wind, rain, hail, gouts of blood,

  Storms and tornadoes …

  He ran about on the look-out, stumbling over scattered stones.

  … hurricanes and typhoons ….

  There was a half-light, a storm-light. The light was ruled in lines and the sea in ridges and valleys. The monstrous waves were making their way from east to west in an interminable procession and the rock was a trifle among them. But it was charging forward, searing a white way through them, careless of sinking, it was thrusting the Safety Rock forward to burst the ridges like the prow of a ship. It would strike a ridge with the stone prow and burst water into a smother that washed over the fo’c’sle and struck beneath the bridge. Then a storm of shot would sweep over the bridge and strike sense and breath away from his body. He flung himself on a square stone that lay where the old woman had stood with her masked head. He rode it astride, facing into the wind and waves. And again there was background music and a mouth quacking.

  “Faster! Faster!”

  His rock bored on. He beat it with his heels as if he wore spurs.

  “Faster!”

  The waves were each an event in itself. A wave would come weltering and swinging in with a storm-light running and flickering along the top like the flicker in a brain. The shallow water beyond the safety rock would occur, so that the nearer part of the wave would rise up, tripped and angry, would roar, swell forward. The Safety Rock would become a pock in a whirlpool of water that spun itself into foam and chewed like a mouth. The whole top of the wave for a hundred yards would move forward and fall into acres of lathering uproar that was launched like an army at the rock.

  “Faster!”

  His hand found the identity disc and held it out.

  The mouth screamed out away from the centre.

  “I spit on your compassion!”

  There was a recognizable noise away beyond the waves and in the clouds. The noise was not as loud as the sea or the music or the voice but the centre understood. The centre took the body off the slab of rock and bundled it into a trench. As it fell the eye glimpsed a black tendril of lightning that lay across the western sky and the centre screwed down the flaps of flesh and hair. Again there came the sound of the spade against the tin box.

  “Hard a-starboard! I’ll kill us both, I’ll hit the tree with that side and you’ll be burst and bitched! There was nothing in writing!”

  The centre knew what to do. It was wiser than the mouth. It sent the body scrambling over the rock to the water-hole. It burrowed in among the slime and circling scum. It thrust the hands forward, tore at the water and fell flat in the pool. It wriggled like a seal on a rock with the fresh water streaming out of its mouth. It got at the tamping at the farther end and heaved at the stones. There was a scraping and breaking sound and then the cascade of falling stones and water. There was a wide space of storm-light, waves. There was a body lying in the slimy hollow where the fresh water had been.

  “Mad! Proof of madness!”

  It made the body wriggle back out of the hole, sent it up to the place where the Look-out had been.

  There were branches of the black lightning over the sky, there were noises. One branch ran down into the sea, through the great waves, petered out. It remained there. The sea stopped moving, froze, became paper, painted paper that was torn by a black line. The rock was painted on the same paper. The whole of the painted sea was tilted but nothing ran downhill into the black crack which had opened in it. The crack was utter, was absolute, was three times real. />
  The centre did not know if it had flung the body down or if it had turned the world over. There was rock before its face and it struck with lobster claws that sank in. It watched the rock between the claws.

  The absolute lightning spread. There was no noise now because noise had become irrelevant. There was no music, no sound from the tilted, motionless sea.

  The mouth quacked on for a while then dribbled into silence.

  There was no mouth.

  Still the centre resisted. It made the lightning do its work according to the laws of this heaven. It perceived in some mode of sight without eyes that pieces of the sky between the branches of black lightning were replaced by pits of nothing. This made the fear of the centre, the rage of the centre vomit in a mode that required no mouth. It screamed into the pit of nothing voicelessly, wordlessly.

  “I shit on your heaven!”

  The lines and tendrils felt forward through the sea. A segment of storm dropped out like a dead leaf and there was a gap that joined sea and sky through the horizon. Now the lightning found reptiles floating and flying motionlessly and a tendril ran to each. The reptiles resisted, changing shape a little, then they too, dropped out and were gone. A valley of nothing opened up through Safety Rock.

  The centre attended to the rock between its claws. The rock was harder than rock‚ brighter, firmer. It hurt the serrations of the claws that gripped.

  The sea twisted and disappeared. The fragments were not visible going away, they went into themselves, dried up, destroyed, erased like an error.

  The lines of absolute blackness felt forward into the rock and it was proved to be as insubstantial as the painted water. Pieces went and there was no more than an island of papery stuff round the claws and everywhere else there was the mode that the centre knew as nothing.

  The rock between the claws was solid. It was square and there was an engraving on the surface. The black lines sank in, went through and joined.

  The rock between the claws was gone.

  There was nothing but the centre and the claws. They were huge and strong and inflamed to red. They closed on each other. They contracted. They were outlined like a night sign against the absolute nothingness and they gripped their whole strength into each other. The serrations of the claws broke. They were lambent and real and locked.

  The lightning crept in. The centre was unaware of anything but the claws and the threat. It focused its awareness on the crumbled serrations and the blazing red. The lightning came forward. Some of the lines pointed to the centre, waiting for the moment when they could pierce it. Others lay against the claws, playing over them, prying for a weakness, wearing them away in a compassion that was timeless and without mercy.

  14

  The jetty, if the word would do for a long pile of boulders, was almost under the tide at the full. The drifter came in towards it, engine stopped, with the last of her way and the urging of the west wind. There was a wintry sunset behind her so that to the eyes on the beach she seemed soon a black shape from which the colour had all run away and been stirred into the low clouds that hung just above the horizon. There was a leaden tinge to the water except in the path of the drifter—a brighter valley of red and rose and black that led back to the dazzling horizon under the sun.

  The watcher on the beach did not move. He stood, his seaboots set in the troughs of dry sand that his last steps had made, and waited. There was a cottage at his back and then the slow slope of the island.

  The telegraph rang astern in the drifter and she checked her way with a sudden swirl of brighter water from the screws. A fender groaned against stone. Two men jumped on to the jetty and sought about them for the bollards that were not there. An arm gesticulated from the wheel-house. The men caught their ropes round boulders and stood, holding on.

  An officer stepped on to the jetty, came quickly towards the beach and jumped down to the dry sand. The wind ruffled papers that he held in his hand so that they chattered like the dusty leaves of late summer. But here they were the only leaves. There was sand, a cottage, rocks and the sea. The officer laboured along in the dry sand with his papers chattering and came to a halt a yard from the watcher.

  “Mr. Campbell?”

  “Aye. You’ll be from the mainland about the——?”

  “That’s right.”

  Mr. Campbell removed his cloth cap and put it back again.

  “You’ve not been over-quick.”

  The officer looked at him solemnly.

  “My name’s Davidson, by the way. Over-quick. Do you know, Mr. Campbell, that I do this job, seven days a week?”

  Mr. Campbell moved his seaboots suddenly. He peered forward into Davidson’s grey and lined face. There was a faint, sweet smell on the breath and the eyes that did not blink were just a fraction too wide open.

  Mr. Campbell took off his cap and put it on again.

  “Well now. Fancy that!”

  The lower part of Davidson’s face altered to the beginnings of a grin without humour.

  “It’s quite a widespread war, you know.”

  Mr. Campbell nodded slowly.

  “I’m sorry that I spoke. A sad harvest for you, Captain. I do not know how you can endure it.”

  The grin disappeared.

  “I wouldn’t change.”

  Mr. Campbell tilted his head sideways and peered into Davidson’s face.

  “No? I beg your pardon, sir. Come now and see where we found it.”

  He turned and laboured away along the sand. He stopped and pointed down to where an arm of water was confined by a shingly spit.

  “It was there, still held by the lifebelt. You’ll see, of course. There was a broken orange-box and a tin. And the lineweed. When we have a nor’wester the lineweed gets caught there—and anything else that’s floating.”

  Davidson looked sideways at him.

  “It seems important to you, Mr. Campbell, but what I really want is the identity disc. Did you remove that from the body?”

  “No. No. I touched—as little as possible.”

  “A brown disc about the size of a penny, probably worn round the neck?”

  “No. I touched nothing.”

  Davidson’s face set grim again.

  “One can always hope, I suppose.”

  Mr. Campbell clasped his hands, rubbed them restlessly, cleared his throat.

  “You’ll take it away tonight?”

  Now Davidson peered in his turn.

  “Dreams?”

  Mr. Campbell looked away at the water. He muttered.

  “The wife——”

  He glanced up at the too-wide eyes, the face that seemed to know more than it could bear. He no longer evaded the meeting but shrank a little and answered with sudden humility.

  “Aye.”

  Davidson nodded, slowly.

  Now two ratings were standing on the beach before the cottage. They bore a stretcher.

  Mr. Campbell pointed.

  “It is in the lean-to by the house, sir. I hope there is as little to offend you as possible. We used paraffin.”

  “Thank you.”

  Davidson toiled back along the beach and Mr. Campbell followed him. Presently they stopped. Davidson turned and looked down.

  “Well——”

  He put his hand to the breast pocket of his battledress and brought out a flat bottle. He looked Mr. Campbell in the eye, grinned with the lower part of his face, pulled out the cork and swigged, head back. The ratings watched him without comment.

  “Here goes, then.”

  Davidson went to the lean-to, taking a torch from his trouser pocket. He ducked through the broken door and disappeared.

  The ratings stood without movement. Mr. Campbell waited, silently, and contemplated the lean-to as though he were seeing it for the first time. He surveyed the mossed stones, the caved-in and lichenous roof as though they were a profound and natural language that men were privileged to read only on a unique occasion.

  There was no noise from in
side.

  Even on the drifter there was no conversation. The only noises were the sounds of the water falling over on the little beach.

  Hush. Hush.

  The sun was a half-circle in a bed of crimson and slate.

  Davidson came out again. He carried a small disc, swinging from a double string. His right hand went to the breast pocket. He nodded to the ratings.

  “Go on, then.”

  Mr. Campbell watched Davidson fumble among his papers. He saw him examining the disc, peering close, transferring details carefully to a file. He saw him put the disc away, crouch, rub his hands backwards and forwards in the dry, clean sand. Mr. Campbell spread his arms wide in a gesture of impotence and dropped them.

  “I do not know, sir. I am older than you but I do not know.”

  Davidson said nothing. He stood up again and took out his bottle.

  “Don’t you have second sight up here?”

  Mr. Campbell looked unhappily at the lean-to.

  “Don’t joke, sir. That was unworthy of you.”

  Davidson came down from his swig. Two faces approached each other. Campbell read the face line by line as he had read the lean-to. He flinched from it again and looked away at the place where the sun was going down—seemingly for ever.

  The ratings came out of the lean-to. They carried a stretcher between them that was no longer empty.

  “All right, lads. There’s a tot waiting for you. Carry on.”

  The two sailors went cautiously away through the sand towards the jetty. Davidson turned to Mr. Campbell.

  “I have to thank you, Mr. Campbell, in the name of this poor officer.”

  Mr. Campbell took his eyes away from the stretcher.

  “They are wicked things, those lifebelts. They give a man hope when there is no longer any call for it. They are cruel. You do not have to thank me, Mr. Davidson.”

  He looked at Davidson in the gloom, carefully, eye to eye. Davidson nodded.

  “Maybe. But I thank you.”

  “I did nothing.”

  The two men turned and watched the ratings lifting the stretcher to the low jetty.

  “And you do this every day.”

  “Every day.”