Island of the Doomed

The Thirst of Dawn

The Thirst of Dawn Mind you, gin with a touch of meltwater from a cascading mountain stream, a few half-chewed young holly leaves, a pinch of roasted cardamom soaked in gallic acid, hastily swallowed at dawn as the car door slams shut on the last peal of laughter - ah, well Lucas Egmont's right hand crept a little way in his sleep over the rough, glittering, salt-encrusted sand, dragged by his finger tips. Was it caressing a cheek? A long worm, white, but with thread-like, closely-packed joint rings in deepest black, suddenly seemed to emerge from the lapping surf and come wriggling over the gently sloping beach, menacing, terrifying.Was it real, or was it just a figment of his fear? Lucas Egmont lay prostrate with his uninjured leg pressed close to the ground, a position not as comforting as it seemed, since quite soon after sunset the sand began to transmit a sharp, aggressivechill which enveloped his limbs in an inflexible film, hard as armour-plate, becoming ever more unyielding as this island fell further and further through the night. Yes, fell. Was he alone in noticing that the nights no longer wafted down from some roof up above, or that 3 daylight no longer surged in like white gas filling the black balloon? No, the shifts were violent and unexpected : candles lit to produce an apparently reliable flame, and then suddenly snuffed out - but the hand doing the snuffing was never glimpsed. Was he alone on this hurtling planet, this sand-strewn marble plunging down into the cosmic well? Transparent strata of air green at the edges, mauve streaks, deep-red flames flashing past and driving wedges like elephant tusks into one's own trembling being, which itself was constantly changing colour, chameleon-like, in the constant flux. Blue bands broken brutally asunder by exploding formations of violently yellow swallows' wings. Fathomless darkness, the same air, but the colour itself must have a consistency enabling it to check the speed of descent. The fall through the night was no less terrifying , but now the pace was slower. Swarms of sparks rose slowly in the form of stars encircling the islandand were visible far below in a grey, milky layer where white rivulets trickled in as if from some hidden giant udder. Dawn. Lucas Egmont, lying prostrate in the sand, his wounded leg with its pierced calf raised in a slight curve like a long bridge, sloping gently down on each side, was woken slowly by the grey, bitter-sharp streaks brushing his eyelids. His eyes cowered in terror under their trembling lids as he watched his hand coming crawling towards him over the sand. A swollen, toadlike creature with bleeding limbs. 'Go away!' he wanted to scream, 'Leave me alone!' - but the creature merely dug holes in the ground, from which dazzling white strands of smoke, as thin as copper wire, rose skywards. Note hispredicament: he wanted to scream but found 4 it impossible: his swollen tongue lay like a large, quivering, clenched fist in his mouth. When they'd run aground, the metal kegs of fresh water had been hurled overboard and split open against the sharp reef. Now they were lying there like sealshalfway out of the water on the seaward side of the reef, and the slow swell, detaching itself from the horizon in an endless series of blue pulses,drummed all day long with its soft knuckles on their gleaming metal shoulders. At least they had some music, then. The muffled, hollow roll of funeral drums droned on relentlessly, penetrating the swishing sighs of the surf, and as the island plunged through the scorching expanses of fiery yellow, Lucas Egmont could feel fine, live electric wires linking his auditory nerves to the restless throbbing from the reef. He tried to tear himself away from the agonizing noise by fleeing to the interior of the island, but the wires trailed behind him over grinding, bone-dry sand, squelching shallows, sharp-toothed pinnacles of rock, in whose shadows huge brown lizards, iguanas, lurked. Their noisy thudding pursued him through the dense, green, hissing scrub, pregnant with mysterious silence, into shoulder-high grass crowned with large, frightening panicles and filled with mysterious little sounds; from snakes, perhaps, or some of those little rabbits hungry Tim Solider claimed to have glimpsed at the edge of the island's undergrowth . The run set...