by Chris Speyer
‘Well, are you going to tell us?’ Anusha demanded.
‘Me?!’ cried Mr Dalal, throwing up his hands. ‘What makes you think I know?’
‘You’re older. You’ve lived longer.’
‘Ah! Only in this life,’ said Mr Dalal with a sly chuckle.
‘What’s the point of having other lives if you can’t remember them?’ asked Zaki.
‘Does there have to be a point?’
‘Well . . .’ began Zaki.
‘We’d like there to be a point. We all want a reason for being here, but that suggests there is somebody out there who thought it all up – an inventor God with a big master plan. Perhaps there is, perhaps there isn’t. Personally, I like to invent my own life. I don’t want life to be a test that I can get right or wrong. Do you think, when we die, God gives us marks out of ten? “Dear, dear, deary-me! Sorry, Mr Dalal – nought out of ten for you. You completely missed the point of your life.”’
The cut on Zaki’s cheek began to itch and prickle. He rubbed it with the tips of his fingers. His present life was complicated enough; he didn’t want to contemplate the possibility of others.
‘If we’re not just bodies, what else are we?’ asked Anusha.
Zaki looked expectantly at Anusha’s father, hoping for a clear answer. Hoping for some explanation for today’s events. How was it that he had been able to slip out of his body? After all, he’d always thought he was his body. He hoped Mr Dalal would talk about souls or spirits.
Mr Dalal thought for a minute. ‘You’d agree, wouldn’t you, that a dead body is not the same as a living one?’
‘Of course,’ said Anusha.
‘Doesn’t that answer your question?’
‘That’s the trouble with Dad,’ Anusha said to Zaki, ‘he can never give you a straight answer!’
‘Sometimes, when I’m sailing our boat, I forget about everything,’ said Zaki slowly. There was something here, he was sure, but it kept slipping out of his reach.
Mr Dalal leant forward. ‘Go on.’
Zaki hesitated, searching for the right words. ‘It just feels right – right to be there – right to be doing what I’m doing. I think that’s when I’m really me. I don’t think that particular me has got anything to do with being in this particular body.’
‘I would say you’ve found your true identity,’ said Mr Dalal with a big smile.
Mrs Dalal came back into the room and sat down next to Zaki. ‘Your dad says that’s fine and I told him I’d make sure you found your way home tomorrow.’ This time it was Mrs Dalal who shot a meaningful glance at her daughter, who pulled a face. It seemed to Zaki that there was always a second conversation going on in this family, a conversation of the eyes in which unspoken understandings flashed backwards and forward.
‘Thank you,’ said Zaki. It felt good to be looked after.
‘What have I missed?’ asked Mrs Dalal.
‘Dad’s been going on,’ said Anusha.
‘Sandeep, you’re not boring our visitor, are you?’
‘Not even minutely,’ declared Mr Dalal, quite unabashed.
Zaki felt for the bracelet in his pocket. He eased it out and laid it on the dining table. Mr Dalal’s expression became suddenly serious. He looked from the bracelet to Zaki and raised one eyebrow.
‘Anusha said you might know where it’s from,’ said Zaki.
‘I thought it looked Indian,’ added Anusha.
‘May I take a closer look?’ asked Mr Dalal.
‘Yes, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to handle it too much,’ said Zaki.
Without enquiring why that should be, Mr Dalal took a table napkin and, with it, picked up the bracelet as though he were handling an ancient relic in a museum.
‘Probably Sri Lankan, rather than Indian,’ he said. ‘This metal is quite unusual. It’s bronze, you see, but not the common bronze alloy; this is a high-tin bronze. Look at the colour. Look where it has become a little polished. You see? It’s quite pale; that’s the effect of plenty of tin. High-tin bronze was developed in Sri Lanka for making bells. The tin makes the bronze brittle, but it gives the bells a special clear tone. Whoever made this was probably a bell maker, maybe from Kandy in the hill country. This type of bronze is made in very, very few places.’ He turned the bracelet so that he could examine the rim. ‘Ah ha! This bracelet was made for a musician.’
Mrs Dalal leant close to her husband. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Look at the inscriptions, my dear.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Dalal.
‘What are they?’ asked Zaki. ‘I thought they were some kind of writing.’
‘More like musical notation, I would say,’ replied Mr Dalal. ‘I think they are drumming patterns. The Indian word is theka. But these are not from northern India. They look a little different, perhaps because they are Sinhalese, or perhaps because this bracelet is quite old.’
‘Why write music on a bracelet?’ Zaki asked.
‘Probably decoration. In India we learn to play drums by chanting the rhythms, not by reading music. Ah ha! But you need a demonstration!’ Mr Dalal sprung up from the table and rubbed his hands together, delighted with the opportunity to perform. ‘I will show you.’
‘You might ask our guest if he wants a demonstration!’ protested Mrs Dalal.
‘Of course he wants a demonstration,’ declared her husband, selecting a long, double-ended drum from the collection in the corner of the room and slinging it around his waist.
‘No stopping him now!’ Anusha laughed.
‘You must excuse me, I am really a tabla player but, since I think the bracelet is from Sri Lanka, I am going to play the yak bera. It’s the drum they use to accompany the Devil Dances.’
Mr Dalal began to chant and as he chanted his hands flicked and slapped and tapped the tightly stretched skins on the ends of the long drum, echoing back the rhythms and tones of the chanted syllables: ‘Dhin-dhin,’ he chanted. ‘D-hin-d-hin,’ sang the drum. ‘Dha-ge-ti-ra-ki-ta, ta-na, ka-ta, dha-ge, ti-ra-ki-ta . . .’ Faster flew the hands, faster and faster; driving the rhythm into ever more complex configurations, drawing out deep bass notes over which exploded cascades of high, staccato beats that he struck from the very edges of the skins. To Zaki it seemed as if a whole band of drummers had entered the room; it was impossible that one person could produce the intricate crossings of rhythms and tones.
Quietly, Mrs Dalal rose and opened one of the larger instrument cases. She lifted out her cello and her bow and tightened the bowstring. Soon, the cello’s sonorous voice joined the cavorting dance of the drum, filling the whole room with its resonance. Sitting a few feet away, it seemed to Zaki that the cello’s strings were within his body and that every note, every change of pitch and rhythm, vibrated through every living cell.
Now a third voice joined the other two and Zaki turned to see that Anusha had her violin. The fiddle’s bow rocked and sawed across the strings, sending a flurry of notes to skip lightly around the cello’s measured steps. Then the cello swept its counter melody between and around the fiddle and drum. Zaki was flying again, but not as a seagull, not as a hawk. The music lifted and carried him. Occasionally, he would become aware of the musicians, see the looks that passed between them, and he understood how this family had developed its wordless method of communication.
Looking up, Zaki’s eyes fell again on the grotesque mask that hung on the wall. Now all the light seemed to drain from the rest of the room and the colours of the mask to glow with greater intensity in the surrounding gloom. As Zaki watched, the eyes of the mask bulged, swelling out from their sockets like boils about to burst. The protruding teeth twisted into a ghastly grin, the nostrils flared and a snake wormed its way out of one ear and proceeded, tongue flicking, to coil itself around the hanging head. The cacophony of voices that Zaki had first heard in the cave, and then again in Curlew’s cabin, burst in, drowning out the music; a press of faces, some painted, all streaked and shining with sweat, crowded in arou
nd the grinning mask. Zaki’s nose, mouth and lungs filled with the choking smell of wood smoke. Then the awful voice that had first growled the name ‘Rhiannon’ two nights before on the dark street spoke again: ‘No! You will not drive me out. Time for you to die!’
Zaki would have screamed if someone else hadn’t screamed first. The sudden, shrill cry broke the spell and all was bright and normal in the room, except that Anusha was pointing excitedly at the bracelet on the table and shouting, ‘Look, everyone! Look!’
The etched inscriptions on the rim of the bracelet, instead of being dark lines and curls, now shone as if lit from within, shone with the intensity of liquid metal in a crucible, shone like the white heat of a furnace. And they were moving, transforming as though being written and rewritten by an invisible hand.
Zaki, instinctively, reached for the bracelet but dropped it with a cry of pain as its heat seared the skin of his hand.
As Zaki and Anusha watched, the markings on the bracelet darkened and stood still.
Anusha’s mother, having laid her cello in its case, came to see what had so excited her daughter. ‘What happened?’
‘The bracelet! Didn’t you see? The writing was moving!’
‘And it’s burning hot!’ added Zaki, nursing his hand.
Mr Dalal leant between his wife and Anusha to touch the bracelet. ‘Warm. I wouldn’t say hot.’
‘But, Dad! Look at the writing!’
Once more, Mr Dalal used the napkin to lift the bracelet.
‘Hmm. That is odd.’
‘What is?’ asked Zaki.
‘The inscriptions – they don’t look quite the same.’
‘I told you, they were moving! And they were shining!’
‘But that’s not possible,’ said Mrs Dalal.
‘No, but – they do look a little different.’
‘You’ve not remembered them right, surely.’
Mr Dalal scratched his right earlobe thoughtfully. ‘Where did this come from?’
Zaki and Anusha glanced furtively at each other. ‘It was Zaki’s grandmother’s,’ lied Anusha.
‘Was?’
‘She’s dead,’ Zaki explained.
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Mr Dalal passed the bracelet to Zaki. ‘You should take great care of it. It’s certainly most unusual. It may even be quite valuable.’
Zaki returned it to his pocket. It was no longer even warm but the glare of the fiery inscriptions seemed burnt into his retina so that their bright traces danced in his vision and swam in a sea of red each time he closed his eyes.
‘Bedtime, I think,’ said Mrs Dalal, with a yawn.
Zaki stood up, then realised he didn’t know where he was going to sleep, and waited, rather awkwardly, for someone to show him to his room.
‘Come on,’ said Mrs Dalal. ‘I’ll show you where everything is.’
‘That mask,’ asked Zaki as he followed Mrs Dalal upstairs, ‘where’s it from?’
‘That’s Riri Yakka the Demon of Blood,’ said Mrs Dalal, rather dramatically. ‘It goes with the drum Sandeep was playing. They both came from Sri Lanka. They’re used in the Devil Dances.’
‘Devil Dances? What are they?’
‘Ceremonies for driving out demons.’ She opened the door to the spare bedroom. ‘Here you are. Sleep well. And I hope that mask doesn’t give you nightmares!’
g
Chapter 15
Lying in a strange bed in a strange room, Zaki thought he had only just closed his eyes when he was woken by a soft tap on his door. He sat up quickly and wondered, for a moment, where he was. The door swung slowly open. In the darkness, he could just make out a figure in the doorway.
‘Are you awake?’ It was Anusha.
‘Yes,’ Zaki whispered back. ‘What are you doing?’
‘There’s something you have to see. Come on,’ said Anusha, and disappeared.
Zaki struggled into some clothes and stumbled, half awake, into the corridor.
‘Follow me,’ said Anusha.
She led him to the back of the house and out through the back door, which she held open and then closed carefully behind him. The concrete paving slabs were cold and wet under Zaki’s bare feet and it was very dark in the back yard.
‘This way,’ hissed Anusha.
Zaki followed her shadowy form to another door at the end of a short path. They stepped inside the building.
Little lights and dials glowed in the darkness. There were banks of knobs and sliders on a sloping, black desk, and one end of the room was closed off by a glass partition behind which were microphones on stands.
‘Wow!’ said Zaki. ‘You’ve got a recording studio. My brother would love this!’
‘My mum and dad do music for films and stuff,’ said Anusha.
‘Do you . . . ?’
‘Play on the soundtracks? Sometimes, when they need an extra violin. I had to sing once. But look at this.’
She sat at a keyboard to the side of the mixing desk. Her fingers clicked expertly over the keys and a large video screen flashed into life.
‘You can sit there if you want,’ she said, indicating an office-type chair beside hers. Zaki perched on the chair and stared up at the screen.
‘I’ve downloaded the camcorder recording. You can see a lot more on this big screen than you could on the camcorder’s screen.’
Anusha clicked the mouse and an image appeared on the screen. Zaki saw himself, back to the camera, sitting on the edge of the landing stage. It was the recording Anusha had made that morning.
‘Wait, I’ll fast-forward it; nothing happens for a bit except for that stupid woman with the dog.’
The image jiggled and there was a scrabble of sound from the surrounding speakers. The woman and her dog appeared and seemed to scamper about like comic figures in a silent movie, then the picture steadied and the sound returned to the soft sighing of the wind. A gull flew in from the left side of the image and settled on the landing stage not far from the seated Zaki.
‘Can you stop it there?’ asked Zaki.
Anusha froze the image just after the figure of Zaki turned to look at the gull.
‘Yeah. Now can you zoom in?’
The image got larger in a series of jerky steps until the head of the gull, with its bright yellow eye, filled the screen.
‘OK. Go on, and watch the eye,’ said Zaki, knowing instinctively that the eye was what they should be looking at.
Anusha unfroze the image; the eye blinked but still retained the gull’s characteristic glassy stare. The eye blinked again and it was as though a shadow passed across its surface, like the wind-ruffled shadows that race over the water on a sunny day. When the shadow had gone, the eye appeared to have gained added depth, reminding Zaki of peering down into deep water on a still morning. Although the eye was the eye of a gull, it no longer appeared to be the spirit of a gull that looked out through it.
‘Did you see?’
Anusha nodded. ‘It changed. It stopped looking like a gull’s eye. It was you, wasn’t it. You were looking out of the eye.’
‘Yeah, it was me. I know it’s weird, but . . .’
Anusha gave another little nod; he didn’t have to go on; he didn’t have to explain. She had seen it and she believed him.
The eye still filled the screen.
‘Can you zoom out?’ asked Zaki.
Several clicks of the mouse and Zaki’s seated figure came back into frame. There he was, sitting beside the gull, except . . . the gull was now him and the thing that looked like him – was what? Something, somebody else.
‘Shall I run it on?’
‘Yeah – please.’
Anusha allowed the action to resume; the gull took off and flew out of frame, the camera remaining on the seated figure. Obviously, Anusha had been quite unaware of the significance of the gull while she was filming.
‘Can we run it back?’
‘There’s something more important you need to see.’ Anusha’s fingers click the keys and the image
jumped forward. ‘I kept the camera running as I walked towards you.’
Zaki heard Anusha’s voice on the soundtrack call his name. He saw the figure’s head and shoulders turn and the eyes looked straight into the camera. Anusha froze the image once more and zoomed in on the face – his face – but not his face. Not his face because the eyes were not his eyes.
A chill of fear ran up Zaki’s spine. A cornered wolf might look like that just before it leapt for your throat – treacherous, vicious, cruel, waiting to attack.
Anusha allowed the recording to run on in slow motion. The wolfish eyes shifted uneasily and then the head turned away as though trying to hide the face from the viewer. A few moments later the screen went black.
‘That’s all I have. Do you want to see anything again?’
‘No thanks,’ said Zaki.
Anusha was busy for a few minutes shutting down the equipment, then she swivelled her chair to face him.
‘I’m sorry if I didn’t believe you straight away – about being the gull and about it not being you that attacked me – but it’s all so strange. Where do you think that thing – the thing that took over your body – where do you think it is now? Maybe it died when you – when it – when your body fell over the edge. Maybe it’s gone – maybe you’ve killed it. Do you think?’
Zaki tilted his head. ‘Is the cut on my cheek still there?’
Anusha leant forward. The only light in the room was the glow from the dials and the little LEDs.
‘It’s kind of hard to tell. It’s very dark in here.’
Zaki ran his fingertips across the smooth skin. ‘It’s gone – feel.’
Anusha felt along his cheekbone then sat back. Zaki could sense she was frightened.
‘So that means . . . ?’
‘That the thing is still there; it’s still inside my body. How else could that cut have healed up so quickly? And it spoke again.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight, when you were all playing that music and the bracelet was going crazy.’
