Devil's Rock

by Chris Speyer

  Zaki climbed up the steps and out into the cockpit. Michael, on the helm, gave him a cheery smile as he emerged.

  ‘Urgh! You look awful! You’ve gone all green.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Zaki.

  ‘You’re not going to be sick, are you? Because if you are, do it downwind.’

  His brother’s banter, together with the refreshing breeze, began to dispel the nausea he had felt in the confines of the cabin. He settled himself next to Michael, hanging on to the cockpit edge with his good hand. It was perfect sailing weather: a steady wind blowing out of a clear, blue sky; a gentle swell with white horses brightening the tops of the waves. ‘Morveren’s going like a train,’ said Zaki, borrowing one of his grandad’s favourite expressions.

  Michael grinned. With the wind sweeping the mop of dark hair off his freckled face, he looked like the old Michael, Zaki’s best friend, the one he could talk to about anything.

  ‘I had the weirdest dream.’

  ‘Yeah? What was that?’ asked Michael.

  ‘I kept being chased by things. First I was a fish, with an otter after me, then I was a bird, then a rabbit, or something, and other things kept wanting to eat me.’

  ‘Who’d want to eat you, you smelly little toerag?’

  ‘Well, it was really weird. And there was this great big eye.’

  ‘You’ve been watching too many scary movies,’ said Michael. ‘Can you make yourself useful and have a look under the sail? Tell me if there are any boats downwind that I can’t see.’

  Zaki scrambled down, taking a little more care than usual, his left side stiff and sore. There were a few open boats fishing for mackerel a fair distance off and a crab pot buoy just downwind.

  ‘Don’t change course until you pass the crab pot,’ called Zaki.

  ‘What crab pot?’ shouted Michael.

  ‘That one!’ Zaki called back, as the buoy bobbed past, only a few metres clear.

  ‘Thanks for the warning,’ said Michael. ‘Anything else you’re not gong to tell me about until it’s too late?’

  ‘No. All clear,’ said Zaki.

  ‘As you’re going to be next to useless pulling ropes, you’d better steer,’ said Michael, as Zaki clambered, one-armed, back up to the windward side. They swapped places, Zaki taking over the helm.

  Rounding Bolt Head always seemed to be the slowest part of any journey Morveren made west of Salcombe. No matter how well they planned the passage, the tide was always against them.

  Unlike the other great headlands of the West Country coast – Start Point, Prawl Point and the Lizard, which stab their jagged blades out into the Channel – Bolt Head appears to have been chopped off square and blunt by a mighty guillotine, leaving a precipice that runs for several miles like a massive granite curtain, torn in the middle by Soar Mill Cove, with its narrow beach in a deep cleft.

  ‘If you come up on to the wind now, we should make the entrance,’ called Michael.

  Zaki brought Morveren round to point at the tip of the headland as Michael hauled on the main sheet and then winched in the jib.

  Since the tide was approaching dead low, Zaki chose to play it safe and lined Morveren up with the red and white way marks that guide boats over the Salcombe bar and, as they passed the starboard Wolf Rock buoy, their father joined the boys on deck to get the sails down and furled away.

  As is usual for a sunny day in the summer holidays, Salcombe Harbour was busy with day boats and dinghies, launches and tenders, and Zaki was kept on his toes keeping clear of the small craft races and giving way to ferries and fishing boats. The harbour master came by in his launch but, recognising Morveren as a local boat, he gave them a wave and motored off to assist a large family adrift in a small flat-bottomed boat with outboard motor problems.

  No sooner were they moored than Grandad’s old blue launch nosed alongside. Jenna, Grandad’s black and white collie, gave two welcoming barks then scrambled from one end of the launch and back, wagging her tail, eager to greet everyone. Grandad tossed a mooring line to Michael. Zaki loved to watch the effortless way the old man moved around on a boat, never hurried, never losing his balance; ropes always falling exactly where he intended, judging boat speed and distance with unerring precision.

  ‘What you done to your arm, boy?’

  ‘Fell,’ said Zaki, a little shamefaced.

  ‘Wasn’t expecting you back for a day or two.’

  ‘Think we should get the doctor to take a look at him,’ said Zaki’s father.

  ‘Doctor, eh? Don’t sound too clever.’

  ‘Anyway, they’re back to school next week. Won’t do them any harm to look at a book or two before they start back.’

  ‘Oh, Dad! Did you have to mention school?’ groaned Michael.

  ‘Here, if you’re ready, you can start handin’ down your bits and pieces,’ said Grandad.

  ‘How did you know to meet us?’ asked Zaki.

  ‘Telepathy,’ said Grandad, with a wink.

  ‘Dad called him on the mobile,’ said Michael.

  ‘What we call mobile telepathy,’ said Grandad.

  Zaki winced as he attempted to lift a holdall over the yacht’s rail.

  ‘Come on, young’un, get in the boat. You look about ready to hand in your knife and fork.’

  Grandad steadied Zaki as he climbed over the side and down into the launch. The constant ache from his shoulder had worn him out and his head felt a little dizzy. Jenna came to sit beside him. She beat her tail against the wooden seat and licked his face. Zaki pushed her nose away and rested his head against the dog’s warm fur. It was a relief to do nothing while the others handed the bags and gear down to Grandad, who stowed everything in an orderly pile on the floor of the launch.

  Zaki gazed vacantly at the other local boats on the surrounding moorings. He knew most of the boats; these were town moorings, which seldom changed hands, often staying in families from one generation to the next. The remains of a white, plastic rubbish bag, trapped by the wind against the stern rail of a neighbouring yacht, caught his eye. The tattered edges of the bag flapped in the wind. As he watched, a small, dark hole appeared in the centre of the flailing plastic; more an absence than a presence of anything, a still, black point about which the white plastic fluttered. Something was happening around the hole, the stillness was spreading outwards, reordering the whiteness of the plastic, giving new definition to the edges of the hole. Then the hole blinked and became an eye; an eye that was regarding him with sharp attention. The shock of the transformation made Zaki catch his breath and he felt the dog beside him stiffen. Zaki glanced round to see if anyone else was watching this metamorphosis, but when he looked back, the plastic bag had gone and, instead, a large, white gull balanced on the stern rail, its eye still fixed on him. Jenna erupted in an outburst of furious barking. The gull opened its wings and, with a few powerful beats, climbed into the evening sky.

  ‘Quiet!’ growled Grandad.

  The barking stopped but occasional tremors continued to run through the dog’s body.

  ‘What set her off?’ asked Grandad.

  ‘Didn’t you see?’ began Zaki. ‘There was a bag and then it turned into . . .’ He trailed off, realising the ridiculous impossibility of what he was about to say.

  ‘You’re lookin’ terribly queasy,’ said Grandad, his face serious, ‘we best be getting you home.’

  A single chandlery and half a dozen small, ramshackle, wooden sheds, their slipways reaching down to the water’s edge, were all that remained of Salcombe’s once busy marine industry, most of the buildings on the waterfront having long since been converted to boutiques or pulled down to make way for holiday apartments. The faded sign on Grandad’s shed said simply ‘Isaac Luxton – Boatbuilder’, although most of the work now was in maintenance and restoration.

  There was just enough water left in the channel for Grandad to bring the launch to the foot of the slipway, where the holiday gear was unloaded, carried through the shed and piled into the back of Gr
andad’s battered Volvo estate for the drive to Kingsbridge.

  Once settled in the back seat of the car with Michael and the dog, Zaki propped his head against a sail bag and slept all the way home.

  g

  Chapter 5

  ‘Not much we can do for a cracked collarbone, I’m afraid,’ said the young duty doctor as she showed Zaki the X-ray with its ghostly image of his chest, shoulder and upper arm.

  ‘There – you can see the crack. It’s pretty insignificant.’

  Zaki could see a very fine, dark line, like a hair, running in from the edge of the bone.

  ‘Nothing’s out of place, so it should heal up OK.’ She turned to Zaki’s father. ‘But no sport for a few weeks. He needs to be careful he doesn’t bash it again.’ And to Zaki, ‘We can’t put your shoulder in plaster, so it’s up to you to look after it.’

  Zaki nodded. He was still studying the X-ray. He could see the left half of his chest with its curving ribs, the shoulder joint and the big bone at the top of his arm. He thought of the child’s bones in the sand, on the floor of the cave. Once the flesh had rotted, there had been nothing to hold the bones together, to keep the arm attached to the body. How long had that taken?

  ‘What’s that bone called?’ he asked, pointing to the arm.

  ‘That’s your humerus. Although it wouldn’t be funny if you broke it.’

  She was nice, this doctor. She looked tired, but she explained everything carefully and didn’t rush them.

  ‘How long do bones last?’

  If he could think of the right question, he might be able to work out how long the child’s skeleton had been in the cave.

  ‘Come on, Zaki,’ said his father, ‘I’m sure the doctor’s got plenty of other people to see.’

  ‘Last?’ asked the doctor. ‘You mean inside you?’

  ‘I mean, once you’re dead.’

  ‘I’m not a pathologist, but I guess that would depend on what age you were when you died.’ The doctor filled in a card and clipped it to the X-ray image. She looked up. ‘As you get older, the mineral content of your bones decreases, so they become more fragile. I would think a young person’s bones would last longer than an older person’s. But it would also depend where the bones were. Why? Do you have a skeleton in the cupboard?’ She smiled her tired smile.

  ‘If they were in a cave, for instance?’

  The doctor glanced at Zaki’s father, who shrugged and said, ‘I’m sorry; I haven’t a clue what he’s on about.’

  ‘Can’t answer that one,’ said the doctor. ‘Probably a very long time. Now, remember what I said about sport.’

  Zaki was having difficulty getting his shirt back on. Anything that required him to lift his arm was painful. His father came across to help him.

  ‘We’ll need to take another look at it in a few weeks – make sure it’s mending properly. Ask reception to make you an appointment for three weeks’ time.’ The doctor ushered them out into the corridor, where they hesitated, trying to remember whether they had come from the left or the right.

  ‘Left for reception,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Zaki’s father. ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘Good luck with the skeleton,’ said the doctor.

  Zaki looked at her in surprise, then realised she was referring to her own joke and, of course, knew nothing about the child in the cave. He turned and followed his father down the brightly lit hospital corridor with its lino floor that squeaked against the soles of his shoes.

  g

  Zaki was keen to talk to his grandad. He wanted to find out if there were any stories about a cave or secret passage leading off from the Orme estuary. Maybe his grandad had even seen the cave during his time on the fishing boats. His dad had said the sandbanks kept moving. Could it be that the cave entrance was only covered up quite recently?

  The opportunity to talk to his grandfather came that very afternoon. His father, who was anxious to get back to work on Number 43 Sandy Lane, figured that, as the hospital visit had meant Zaki missing most of the first day of the new school term, he might as well miss the rest of it and spend the afternoon with his grandad at the boat shed.

  Number 43 was the house his father was renovating. It was how he had made his living since giving up his city job and bringing the family back to Devon; buying houses that were neglected, sad and damp, fixing them up, calling them something like ‘Fisherman’s Cottage’ and selling them to outsiders. They were holiday houses – second homes, mostly – ‘grockle cottages,’ the locals sneeringly called them. In the past, they had lived in each house while it was being rebuilt and then, just as it stopped being a building site and began to resemble a proper home, they had sold it and moved into another ruin. Fortunately, they couldn’t live in Number 43 – it had no roof – so they were allowed to stay on in Moor Lane and call it home for the present, or at least until Number 43 was habitable.

  There was no sign of Grandad in the boat shed. There were the usual smells of freshly planed wood and varnish, smells that so permeated Grandad’s clothing that they travelled with him wherever he went and would hang in the air of a room for some time after he left it. The back door of the shed was ajar and competing estuary smells of weed and mud entered on the little gusts that swung the door on its rusty hinges.

  In the centre of the shed stood the bare spine of the open, wooden rowing boat that Grandad had just begun building. Another skeleton, thought Zaki, running his hand over the silky-smooth timber.

  He made his way through the clutter of the shed and out on to the slipway behind to see if the launch was there. If it wasn’t, Grandad would be somewhere out on the water. It was and Grandad was kneeling on the boat’s floor, his back a round hump, as he peered into the engine compartment. Jenna sat, patiently panting, watching her master. Hearing Zaki approach, she barked once and began to wag her tail.

  ‘Engine not working?’ asked Zaki.

  ‘Will be, soon as I get all these bits back in their proper manner,’ said Grandad, without looking up from what he was doing.

  Zaki knew better than to distract his grandfather during the tricky business of reassembling the engine. Instead, he made himself comfortable on a bollard and watched two men on the jetty opposite loading crab pots on to a brightly painted fishing boat. He felt something rub against his leg and, glancing down, saw a pale grey cat.

  ‘Hello, puss,’ he said, scratching the cat behind an ear. ‘Who do you belong to? I haven’t seen you before.’

  The cat sat by Zaki’s foot and regarded him with an unblinking stare and then, as though satisfied that it now knew all there was to know about him, stretched and sauntered across to the other side of the slipway to watch the grey mullet feeding on the weed-covered mooring lines.

  Eventually, Grandad heaved himself up off the floor of the launch and started the engine. He let it run for a couple of minutes and then shut it off.

  ‘What was the problem?’ asked Zaki.

  ‘Sucked up a bit o’ weed.’ Grandad put the spanners back into his toolbox and wiped the grease off his hands with a piece of rag. ‘What did the doctor say?’

  ‘Said it was cracked. They took an X-ray.’

  ‘Teach you to be more careful, you great gawk,’ said Grandad.

  Zaki followed his grandfather back into the shed. The grey cat followed Zaki, and Jenna, as though wary of the cat, followed her, tail down, a few metres behind.

  ‘Whose cat’s that?’ asked Zaki.

  ‘She’s been hanging around the last few days. Never seen her before. If you’re makin’ us a cuppa, you can give her a dollop of milk.’

  Zaki took the hint, put the kettle on and poured some milk into a cleanish plastic bowl for the cat, then, seeing the dog looking jealous, made a fuss of her until, satisfied that she was still loved, she went to lie down in her box under the workbench.

  g

  When the tea was made, Zaki and Grandad settled themselves on the dusty camp chairs that lived in one corner of the
shed.

  ‘See your father’s allowin’ you to neglect your edification again,’ said Grandad. ‘What’s your mother going to say?’

  Zaki studied the steam rising from his tea. He wished his grandfather hadn’t raised the subject of his mother.

  ‘Does she know about your arm?’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said Zaki. ‘She didn’t phone at the weekend.’

  ‘Couldn’t you phone her?’

  ‘Dad says she’s really busy and we shouldn’t worry her.’

  Grandad frowned. ‘So, when’s she comin’ home?’

  ‘Don’t know. She says soon, but she says it’s difficult to know when.’

  He felt that what his mother was doing wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t have stayed away so long. ‘This job in Switzerland is just temporary,’ she’d said. Temporary. That was only a short time, wasn’t it? That’s what he’d thought. That’s how they’d made it sound. Now, whenever he tried to talk to his father he’d say something like ‘We did all discuss it before your mum took the job’, as though they’d offered him a choice – like ‘Do you want your mum to go away or not?’ Well, nobody had ever asked him that.

  ‘Expect you miss her, don’t you?’ said Grandad.

  ‘There aren’t any jobs like that here in Devon,’ said Zaki, feeling compelled by family loyalty to defend his parents. ‘Dad says it’s an opportunity. They had to borrow a lot to buy number forty-three and this’ll put us back on our feet.’

  ‘Been quite a long time, though,’ said Grandad.

  It had been a long time. It had been much too long for Zaki.

  The cat jumped up on to Zaki’s lap, almost spilling his tea.

  ‘That cat’s taken to you,’ said Grandad.

  Zaki seized the chance to change the subject.

  ‘You know the Orme . . .’ he began.

  ‘I ought to, number of times I’ve been in there.’

  ‘Did you ever hear about a cave or a smugglers’ passage, or anything like that?’