The Brindle

The Brindle was the one who broke the Code, and the island has never been the same since, which is a strange thing to write about a creature who was gone by nightfall. But it is true. Some things are only load-bearing until they are used.

I saw the Brindle first at a distance, on the third time I walked the village path. He was the largest of the Kindred, a broad, low-shouldered creature with a coat of pale fur patchy over gray skin, marked in irregular dark stripes that had given him his name. He stood apart from the others, at the edge of the yard, and he did not watch me the way the rest of them watched. He watched the gulls. There was a colony of gulls on the cliffs past the inner fence, and the Brindle watched them the way a man watches a door he has been forbidden to open.

The Shambler saw me see him. "He is the oldest of us," he said. "He was made before the Code was complete. He keeps it most days. Some days the keeping is harder." He said it without judgment, the way a man reports the weather. "The Warden says the Brindle is close to finished. The Brindle says nothing."

On the seventh day the Brindle finished something, and it was not himself.

I was at the mess hall window when the noise began. It was not a scream. It was a sound I had heard in the life raft, from my own throat, the sound an animal makes when the thing it wants is more than the thing it fears. It came from beyond the inner fence, from the cliff side, and it rose and held and broke, and then the island was quiet in a way that was louder than noise, and I was out of the mess hall and up the graded road before I understood that I was running.

The gate in the inner fence stood open. That was the first thing I saw. It had never stood open in daylight. Beyond it, on the cliff path, the Brindle stood over the body of a gull, and the gull was broken, and the Brindle's mouth was red, and he had done the thing the Code existed to forbid. He had eaten flesh.

The Kindred came out of the village slowly, and they did not come close. They lined the path at a distance, and they watched the Brindle the way you watch a verdict, and the Brindle looked up from the gull, and his eyes went around the circle of them, and I saw, on that broad striped face, the exact moment a creature understands that the thing that made him human has broken, and that the people he was made among are not going to hold him up.

"Flesh," said one of the Kindred, in a voice like a stone turning. "He has eaten flesh. The Code. The Code."

The Brindle dropped the gull. He stood there, swaying, with the red on his mouth, and he did not run, and I understood that he was waiting for the Warden, the way a child waits for a parent who has never once failed to come.

The Warden came. Voss walked up the cliff path with a long black case under his arm, and he did not hurry, and behind him came Kato. It was the first time I had seen Kato in daylight, and I have not found words for him since. He was enormous, seven feet or more, with a face that had been made and then unmade and then made again, a ruin of features arranged with no reference to a human plan, and he moved with the flat, tireless step of a machine. He carried a net and a pole. Voss carried the case.

The Brindle watched them come, and something left his body, and he went down on all fours in the middle of the path, and the sound he made then was the sound the shed had made at night, and I understood, standing in the bright daylight with the gulls crying overhead, that I had been hearing this exact sound for a week and had refused to know what it was.

"Do not run," Voss said, to the Brindle, in a voice of terrible gentleness. "Running is for the unfinished. You are finished. You know the Code. You broke it. Come."

The Brindle came. He went up the path on all fours, which was the thing he had been made not to do, and Kato walked behind him with the net, and the Kindred stood in two lines and watched their oldest brother walk past them to the shed, and none of them said the Code, because the Code was the thing that had failed.

I followed them. I do not know why I followed them. I followed them to the shed, and I stood at the steel door, and Kato turned and looked at me with the ruin of his face, and Voss looked at me over his shoulder, and Voss said, "Watch, Mr. Marsh. You asked what I make. This is what I make."

They took the Brindle inside, and the door closed, and the sound that came out of the shed was not the sound of a procedure. It was the sound of a thing being un-made, and it went on for a long time, and when it stopped, the wet regular sound began, the careful worker, and I stood at the door with my forehead against the steel until it was done.

Corbett found me there, at dusk, sitting on the road with my back to the shed. He did not ask what I had heard. He sat down beside me, and after a long time he said, "The boat comes in three days."

"Will it take me?"

"It will take you," he said. "And you will never come back here, and you will never tell anyone what you saw, because no one will believe you, and the ones who do believe you will be the kind of people you do not want to know." He stood. "That is the whole truth of it, Owen. That is the Warden's world. Three days."

I sat on the road with the shed behind me and the fence ahead of me and the Code running in my head like a tide, and I understood that three days was both the shortest and the longest thing I had ever been given.