“What happens if you don’t paint it?”

“You return.” Thomas grinned. “You end up back here. Look, we really mean it: Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

“Pumping station’s straight that way.” He pointed confidently across a wasteland that looked like the surface of Mars. “Think you’ll make it from here?”

“Hope so. I appreciate the lift.”

When the SUV had disappeared, Kane walked over to the Lizard and touched it. His fingers came away sticky. Do people paint it when they kill themselves? That’s what he should have asked. He had collected various death rituals on his travels, curious about the superstitions they reflected. The idea that you might not die successfully was common enough, that you might fail to cross over. He’d never come across anything equivalent for successfully escaping a place. But they were the same thing, he reasoned. Not being able to leave.

No sign of the pumping station or golf course. The ground was pocked with what looked like craters from bomb tests. The temperature was thirty-two degrees in the direct sun now, the black rock giving back a suffocating heat. Something among the craters shifted and Kane realized he was looking at animals. It took him some time to recognize them as sheep: their wool was gray with ash, hanging in tatters where it had torn on rocks and cacti. Presumably these were descendants of one of the failed attempts he’d read about to farm the island. What an existence. Did they know where the last cats were hiding? He imagined being stranded here alone, castaway, and having to face slaughtering them for your dinner. Necessity would ease qualms—then it would just be a question of technique. The real challenge was hydration. It was Victorian times before the Royal Marines dug their way to a reliable water source. The abandoned Dutch sailor had found himself on a thirty-five-square-mile desert, searching the place for anything to drink with increasing desperation. I kept constantly walking about the island, that being all my hopes. It was a line from his diary that had got under Kane’s skin. The sailor began drinking his urine, then the blood of seabirds. In one of the last entries he described slicing the head off a turtle and drinking the blood from its throat. Kane wished he hadn’t read it. The landscape hadn’t changed in the intervening centuries and it felt like this search for a petrol pump was the first touches of his own insanity.