The Sea Gate

by Jane Johnson

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admit.

  ‘There may have been some movement of the ground down there. We had better check on him.’

  I notice he doesn’t use Eddie’s name. ‘I just want to find Gabriel and make sure he’s OK first.’

  Reda nods and goes down the hallway towards the front door, making tchhing noises and calling softly, ‘Djibril, Djibril!’

  In the end it’s me who finds the parrot, though he’s not really hiding. He’s perched on top of the longcase clock, watching the cellar door with a gimlet gaze. Just as I’m about to speak, the clock lets out a sonorous chime. It’s the first time it’s made a sound in all these weeks. I had thought it was broken: a beautiful, redundant antique. But it is ticking now, quite clearly, its pendulum telling out the seconds, the movement of its long hand unnervingly loud in the reverberating space of the hall now that the rain and wind have abated.

  ‘I’ve found Gabriel!’ I call to Reda. He rejoins me and watches as I dig in my pocket and lay peanuts on the palm of my hand for the parrot. For once, the creature doesn’t show the least bit of interest in them, doesn’t even move. His claws are splayed across the top of the clock as if he’s holding on for dear life and the white rings around his dark pupils seem wider than usual. ‘Bal-lack!’ he cries. Get back!

  ‘Come on, Djibril,’ Reda says, and offers his hand for the bird to jump onto but Gabriel just continues to sit there, unblinking. Reda murmurs something in Darija which sounds coaxing but the parrot is adamant.

  ‘Bal-lack!’

  ‘I think he’s all right,’ Reda says, stepping back.

  ‘Look at his feathers, though, all fluffed up. He’s scared of something.’

  ‘All the noise, I think. Come on, we should check on him.’

  I listen for the second time that day at the cellar door. It is as quiet as the grave and I can’t see any light coming from under the door. Taking down the key, I glance at Reda and he nods: he is ready in case Eddie charges up the stairs. I turn the key in the lock and quickly push the door open. It is pitch dark and there’s no response when I flick the light switch. The bulb must have blown – water in the electrics, perhaps. Or perhaps there was a lightning strike and the electricity down here spiked. Perhaps that’s why Eddie shrieked. I wouldn’t blame him.

  ‘Eddie?’ I call.

  In response there is a sudden stirring in the air and a clattering sound and then Gabriel appears overhead, his wings beating furiously. I think for a startled moment he is going to swoop down into the cellar, but he lands on top of the door, tucks his wings in close and curls his talons around the wood of the frame, sentinel-like. Reda and I exchange glances. It’s as if he’s waiting for something.

  Reda fetches a big rubber torch from his work kit, clicks it on and shines it down the stairs. Swirls of dust eddy in its silver-white beam in a complex atomic dance.

  But of Eddie there is no sign.

  We have to go down: there is no avoiding it. With Gabriel’s eyes on our backs we head down, our steps ringing off the stone.

  ‘Eddie?’ I call again, but my cry is swallowed into the darkness.

  We reach the bottom of the stairs and Reda swings the torch beam back and forth across the cellar. The shelving unit has collapsed, spilling its contents everywhere: might that have caused the noise? For a moment I wonder if it’s fallen on Eddie, but it appears to be lying flat. Behind the shelves, the door in the back wall is ajar, its leading edge pushed out into the deeper darkness of the tunnel.

  ‘He’s escaped!’ I swear I can see my breath clouding the air. The atmosphere down here is eldritch: I have the strong sense that I don’t want to be here, and that something doesn’t want me to be here. That our presence is disturbing some long-established equilibrium reached between the house and its bedrock. I can, I think, smell something foreign – old cigarette smoke, the unfiltered type. Has Eddie taken up smoking again after years of giving it up? Maybe he found some of the Sparrow brothers’ contraband. But it smells faint, not recent, like a scent-echo of something long gone.

  Suddenly I feel the need of warm human contact. I take Reda’s hand. His fingers close around mine and I can feel the pulse in his thumb: his heart must be beating as fast as mine.

  Reda shines the torch over the tunnel door. The patterns around its edges seem more clearly delineated than usual in the focused white light, their points and triangles sharp, as if newly carved. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘What? Sorry, what?’

  ‘These carvings.’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re interesting, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re protective, not just interesting. They’re here for a reason.’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps Olivia—’

  ‘I know who made this. I’ve seen it before, exactly the same.’ He steps in front of me, takes a sharp breath and tries to push the door open further. There is a skittering, a pattering sound. Like rats’ feet, I think, but as Reda’s torch plays across the chaos beyond the door I realize that it is loose earth, and that the tunnel has become blocked by a rockfall.

  ‘A landslip,’ he confirms, pulling the door back and closing it firmly. He sends the torch beam jumping up to the cellar ceiling, to the junctions of its walls. ‘No cracks. I don’t think it’s a major one.’

  ‘What about Eddie?’

  He shoots me a quick look, hard to make out his expression in the darkness. ‘I don’t know. Where does the tunnel go?’

  ‘Down into the cove beneath the house.’

  ‘Is there another way down?’

  ‘Through the gate and down the steps on the other side of the lane below the house.’

  ‘Come on, then,’ he says grimly.

  *

  The moon is a silver sliver between scudding clouds, the intermittent light from it chancy and fitful. It makes the garden an alien place as it shifts in and out of full darkness. In the trees behind the house, the wind soughs as if the hillside is breathing into the night.

  I use the app on my phone to light my way, though Reda swings the torch beam back and forth on the steps to aid my progress. Out onto the lane we go, where the air is almost still and the sea stretches charcoal to the horizon. We go through the sea gate, and when Reda reaches behind me to close it, the torch catches the carvings on its seaward side. His breath hisses in through his teeth.

  ‘We should leave this till the morning.’

  I stare at him, his face seeming as carved as the wood, and eerie, lit from below, his eyes agleam in cavernous sockets. ‘We can’t. What if Eddie is trapped by the landslip? He might die. I don’t want that on my conscience.’

  ‘You still care about him.’ It’s not a question.

  ‘No… yes, well, not really. I wouldn’t leave anyone down there,’ I say lamely. ‘Not if we can help him.’

  ‘You stay here then,’ he tells me, but I’m past the stage of being told what to do by men any more.

  ‘No, if you go down I’m going with you, and if you stay here I’ll go by myself.’

  He shakes his head then mutters something in which I hear the name Allah pronounced several times. A prayer. The idea of Reda – this big, strong, practical man – praying before going down to the cove unnerves me far more than the storm, the fitful moon, the superstitious fear of the dark, but we have to go down: it’s our human duty.

  ‘It’s a bit tricky in places,’ I say. There is nothing for it but to go down on bum and hands, even though we’re going to get filthy. I hear the shuffle and scuff of him as he follows me down. As we reach the cove I hear the susurrus and recoil of the waves, the rattle of pebbles as the sea sucks at them, but this soothing sound is punctuated by an intermittent clanging noise, discordant and doomy, like a cracked and distant bell.

  The tide is halfway in – or out – but as we crunch up the pebbles the light from my phone shines on the stones to a certain point after which they appear duller, as if they are drying, so I think, and hope, it’s on its way out.

  At
the rear of the cave we find the origin of the clanging sound – the iron gate into the tunnel has been left unlatched and gusts of wind are knocking it into the rocks. I wonder who left it like that – Ezra and Saul Sparrow as they made their getaway? Or Eddie?

  Behind it, the tunnel beckons, a thin, sardonic mouth in the cliff face. I really don’t want to go in, but I must. I have spent a long time running away from things, trying to ignore them, hoping they’ll go away. It’s only a small landslip, I tell myself. A geological accident. All the recent rain seeping into that softer seam of earth that made the construction of the tunnel possible. What was it the Sparrows said to me? The cliffs round here are unstable. Water gets into the soil and they slip… It seems both reasonable and rational, yet utterly terrifying.

  Up the tunnel I go with Reda behind me, one hand holding out my phone with its arc of white light, the other pressed to the rock, which seems so very cold. Colder than anything I have touched before other than actual ice. My fingers begin to numb, the bones to ache. I can feel dank, salty air filming my skin, making my face and neck clammy. As we pick our way through the pinch point there is the first sign of rubble – earth and loose stones underfoot; then as we near the steps up towards the cellar we come upon thicker, more unstable debris. I move up cautiously but even so manage to dislodge a rock that skitters past Reda, knocking against the walls of the tunnel, the sound of its passage unnaturally loud in the dense silence.

  ‘Eddie?’ I call. There is no echo: the fallen earth swallows the word. I try again, louder, and we stand still, bending our senses towards the invisible door into the cellar. Unless he managed to get down the tunnel before the fall came, Eddie must be somewhere in the next fifteen feet.

  ‘This place,’ Reda starts. ‘I—’ His voice cracks: he is scared. I remember how I felt the first time down here, coming out of light and air into this chill blackness, aware of the rock pressing in all around.

  ‘I know.’ I turn and brush my fingers over his cheek and he shivers. My hand is cold, but even so I feel the warmth between us, life and hope and everything they stand for. And then he smiles, the reflection of the torchlight in the half-moons of his eyes, and I am smiling too, our joined gaze a gossamer thread that binds us in the darkness, a tenuous link that speaks of liking and desire but also of trust; a moment of lightness in the gloom. Then I break the connection and we forge on.

  The last few feet of the tunnel are choked with detritus – floor-to-ceiling rock and earth and twists of pale roots and sticks. It is hard to make any further headway.

  ‘Eddie?’ How can he be under all this and have survived? It seems unthinkable. But how can he have got out? There was no sign of him on the beach or the rocks of the cove, and I know he cannot swim.

  There is a faint noise. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s neither movement nor a word but somehow both at the same time. All the hairs along my spine start to prickle.

  Reda touches my shoulder and I almost jump out of my skin. ‘Go back. I’m going to use the mattock – I don’t want you getting hit by falling rocks. If it does come down, just run, as fast as you can, back out to the beach. Get up the hill or down towards the village and call for help.’

  ‘But what about you?’

  He makes a minuscule shrug. ‘I hope Allah hears my prayers. Go back, Rebecca, I don’t want anything happening to you – this stuff is unstable.’

  I move aside and he sets the head of the mattock into the fallen earth, pulls against the resistance and steps back to let the debris trickle harmlessly to the ground. Carefully, he repeats the exercise. I move to where I can see him: I cannot leave. More detritus, but no sign of Eddie.

  The air gets chillier, if such a thing is possible. I hug myself, and the light from my phone is muffled against my body; only the torch, left on the ground, pointing up, breaks the wall of utter darkness.

  Far away – as if in another world – I hear what may be a parrot’s cry.

  Another strike and this time rocks come bounding out and I have to dodge them. One goes rattling off down the tunnel. The other bangs up against my foot. I am about to look down when something buffets past my head, its swift progress as palpable as the air from beating wings. I think, How did Gabriel get down here? but then it is past, trailing behind it an appalling stench. A rotten reek, ancient filth tinged with the faint, acrid scent of old tobacco, fills the air. My ears ring from the sound of it, high-pitched between a wail and a whistle.

  And then it is gone.

  I stand there with my heart trying to smash its way through my ribs. ‘What the hell was that?’ I whisper. Reda looks back at me, his eyes wide. Then we both look down.

  At my feet, liminal in the darkness, neither of one world nor another, lies a human skull.

  24

  HOW NEITHER OF US BREAKS AN ANKLE IN OUR FLIGHT down the tunnel back out to the cove, I will never know. We do not stop until we make it down to the water’s edge and breathe in great gulps of the sharp salty air.

  I am shaking now, half frozen, half scared to death. ‘Did you hear it? Did you see anything?’

  Reda’s face is pale in the moon’s shine as he shakes his head. The clouds have parted: the surface of the sea is spangled with scintillas of light.

  ‘I heard something,’ he admits.

  ‘I thought it was Gabriel,’ I say, and there’s a question in my words.

  ‘Whatever that was it wasn’t Gabriel.’

  ‘And the…’ I can hardly bring myself to say the word.

  ‘… skull? It was a skull, wasn’t it? I wasn’t imagining it?’

  ‘Yes, it was a skull.’

  ‘Reda… there’s something I ought to tell you.’

  He looks at me intently. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I found a bone down in the tunnel one day a few weeks back. A finger bone. I suspected it was human at the time, but I was too worried to do anything about it, or even to mention it. I tried to ask Olivia about it…’ My voice trails off.

  He considers this for a long moment, then says, ‘And you think this is why she wanted us to brick up the cellar?’

  I nod mutely.

  ‘Whoever these remains belong to has been down there for a long time,’ Reda says.

  ‘I suppose so. But Olivia is in her nineties…’

  ‘We’ll have to tell the police.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ There’s no avoiding it now that Eddie is down there too.

  He shakes his head, then says, ‘Look at you. You look so cold.’ And he pulls me into an embrace and we stand close together, sharing each other’s warmth, letting our heartbeats return to a more normal rhythm. Not entirely normal, because now I’m feeling something else: an awareness of his proximity, the tang of his sweat, which does not smell at all offensive, but makes me want to get closer to the source of it.

  ‘I’ll call the police,’ I say at last.

  Reda nods and hands me his phone. Miraculously, it has a signal.

  *

  Back up at the house, we find feathers scattered in the hall. I gather them up and cradle them against my chest.

  ‘Oh no…’

  While Reda bravely checks the cellar, finding nothing of note, I walk the length of the corridor, checking each room in turn. Everywhere is tranquil; the hall washed with the light of a gilded-rose dawn, the tiles patterned with red, gold and blue reflections from the stained glass door-panels. But of the parrot there is no sign.

  I cannot help but remember that far-off cry before the churn of rotten air whistled past my head and my heart droops. ‘Gabriel!’ I call in vain the length of the hall, into the dining room, the kitchen, into the quiet comfort of the reading room, into Olivia’s new living quarters.

  All is serene in the parlour. Slanting tiger-stripes of sunlight pattern the wooden floor, reflect off the vases and ornaments, slick off the polished coffee table. In the grate, the fire has burned to embers that give off an aromatic woody scent. A tiny spatter of guano lies on the edge of the hearth, and instead of
feeling a tremor of annoyance and disgust my throat feels tight with suppressed emotion and my eyes begin to burn.

  ‘Oh, Gabriel.’ I feel he was standing guard for us when we went down into the cellar, and maybe stood sentinel all the time while we made our way up through the tunnel. I remember him crying out ‘Bal-lack!’ and it is hard not to interpret it as a warning, his way of trying to protect us against something he understood better than we did.

  I am about to go and find Reda to report my lack of success when I sense eyes upon me. I turn… and a head pops up from the floor of the parrot cage.

  ‘Gabriel!’

  The cage door is closed, though not latched. It appears he took refuge in here and has – quite literally – been lying low. I reach in and stroke the top of his head with a finger and he pushes against me in what I like to interpret as affection. When I lay out on the cage floor all the peanuts in my pockets he casts a sardonic look at me in case this bounty is some sort of mistake then covers them with his huge feet and gathers them into his body, like young. Little peanut eggs waiting to be hatched. Relief bursts out of me in a torrent of laughter.

  ‘Reda! Reda!’

  He comes at a run, as if I sounded hysterical, which isn’t completely surprising. ‘Djibril, Djibril, you monster,’ he chides the bird, then touches a hand to his heart and says softly, ‘Alhemdullilah.’

  ‘Alhemdullilah,’ echoes the bird piously, then he bends his head, cracks another peanut wide and attacks the contents with alacrity.

  ‘Nothing much wrong with him,’ says Reda, grinning.

  *

  The police arrive with remarkable speed, two of them in uniform: one very young and looking rather unshaven, the other a dark-eyed Cornishwoman in her thirties, who removes her chequer-banded hat and briskly shows me her ID card. They look around the tranquil house, bemused, after the drama of the call received to roust them at the crack of dawn and the urgent scramble to get to this remote spot from wherever they are stationed.

  We explain who we are and how we came to be present in someone else’s house and how my ex had turned up and tried to make off with valuables and been threatening when we tried to stop him; I show them the bruises and the cut on my neck, and then take them down to the cellar where we had shut him in, with its fallen shelves and dust and detritus. Reda takes the policeman down into the cove and shows him the tunnel choked with landslip, and the skull. The lad looks wide-eyed upon his return and accepts a cup of coffee with some gratitude.