by Chris Speyer
‘What did it say?’
‘It said, “Time for you to die.”’
‘Die! What did it mean? Aren’t you frightened?’
‘Of course I’m frightened!’
‘There must be someone we could talk to – someone who could help.’
‘And what do we tell them? That I’m possessed? That I’m in danger of turning into the beast from hell? Do you seriously think anyone would believe us? No – I’ve got to sort this out.’
‘You mean, we’ve got to sort this out.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know,’ said Anusha firmly, ‘but I’m here, aren’t I.’
They sat in the semi-darkness, wrapped in their own thoughts, each waiting for the other to say something.
Eventually, Anusha broke the silence. ‘The bracelet . . . and the music . . .’ she said slowly.
‘And the mask,’ added Zaki.
‘What? Our mask?’
‘On the wall – it came alive.’
‘Perhaps you are possessed.’
‘Your mum said the masks were used to get rid of demons.’
‘That’s right, the shaman wears the mask and becomes a demon, then, through the music, he can drive out the demon that’s in the person they’re trying to cure.’
‘Perhaps that started to happen tonight. Perhaps my demon felt threatened. Perhaps that’s why he spoke. Listen, I want you to find out everything you can about these Devil Dances. Ask your mum and dad; see if they’ve got any books or pictures, or anything.’
‘OK, but . . .’
‘I know; it’s completely unreal.’
‘I’ll get everything I can.’
‘Do you suppose I could borrow the mask?’
‘Yeah, I’m sure you could. I’ll say we need it for school – for Mrs Palmer.’
‘Yeah, good. What about music? I think the music’s important.’
‘Don’t ask me to play the drums, I’m useless!’
‘Pity. And we can hardly ask your dad.’
‘How about a recording?’
‘A recording – hey! Yeah – it might work!’
‘Drums on soundtracks . . .’ Anusha thought for a minute. ‘Yes . . . I think . . . Yes! I’m certain! “Varanasi” – he used that drum on “Varanasi”.’
Anusha pulled open a filing drawer and flipped through the rows of filed CDs and DVDs. She pulled out a CD and held it out for Zaki. ‘Here. This just has the drum track on it.’
‘Fantastic.’ Zaki took the proffered CD.
‘Now what?’
‘We need to know what we’re doing. We need to read the logbook. It might tell us all sorts of stuff we need to know.’
‘Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’ve got all day.’
‘Well, not quite all day. I need to take the dinghy back to Morveren. Remember?’
‘We’ll take the logbook with us! Read it on your boat. Then no one can disturb us.’
‘Brilliant! And there are charts on the boat if we need them.’
Zaki felt better now that they had a plan of action. He had to admit that it wasn’t a very clear plan but at least they were going to do something, not just wait for things to happen.
Anusha locked up the recording studio and they crept back into the house. Back in his unfamiliar bed, creatures with eyes of fire pursued Zaki through his dreams so that he woke feeling more tired than when he had gone to sleep.
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Chapter 16
Zaki lay in bed wondering whether or not he should get up. He couldn’t hear any sounds of people moving about. What time did the Dalals have breakfast? Did they have breakfast? He should have asked Anusha. He decided to get up anyway, dressed, and made his way to the kitchen, where he found Mr Dalal seated at the kitchen table, working on something on his laptop computer.
‘Sorry,’ said Zaki, when Mr Dalal looked up, ‘didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Mr Dalal. ‘I am only doing some stupid emails and I am only doing that because I have nobody to talk to. Did you sleep well?’
‘Quite well,’ Zaki lied.
‘Good, because there were some people creeping around the house last night, and I thought they might have woken you. Cup of tea?’
‘Um – thank you,’ said Zaki, embarrassed that their midnight comings and goings had not gone unnoticed.
While Mr Dalal was busy making a fresh pot of tea, Zaki looked around the room. Every available surface seemed to support a little line of carved elephants. Some lines were arranged in ascending height; in other lines all the elephants were more or less the same size but were carved out of different materials. The majority were made from wood, but some were fashioned from coloured stone. They marched across the tops of cupboards, shared shelves with the crockery, and one very large stone elephant served as a doorstop.
‘The elephants belong to my wife,’ said Mr Dalal. ‘She bought one when I first took her to India. My family decided she must love elephants and now they send her one every time they find a new one, which in India can be very, very often.’
Mr Dalal poured mugs of tea and pulled a chair out for Zaki at the table.
‘I was thinking about something you said last night, about not being just bodies,’ Zaki said.
‘Body and mind?’
‘Yes. Do you think it might be possible for our minds to – I don’t know – to get changed somehow?’
‘I change my mind all the time. Ask my dear wife.’
‘I didn’t mean like that.’
‘No, of course you didn’t. Excuse me – I was only teasing.’
‘What I meant was . . . can something happen so that your mind can exist without your body?’
‘Some say there is really only one mind, that exists everywhere, and that each of our minds is a little bit of it.’
Zaki shook his head, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Imagine a big, big window that has been painted completely black. Now, I scratch a hole in the paint on the left side and you scratch a hole in the paint on the right side. When we look through the holes, we can both see the same view but we see it from slightly different angles. The holes are our minds, what we are looking at is the one mind. Does that help?’
‘A little,’ said Zaki.
‘When we talk about mind like this, we are not talking about brain.’ Mr Dalal wagged his finger.
‘Could my mind work in somebody else’s body?’
This time it was Mr Dalal’s turn to shake his head in puzzlement. ‘That is a truly wonderful question . . . and, if you ever find the answer, you must tell me what it is.’ The next to arrive in the kitchen was Anusha’s mother. She regarded the two at the table, heads together, like a pair of conspirators.
‘Sandeep, has that poor boy had any breakfast?’
‘Certainly! Cup of tea, and yogic wisdom.’
‘Oh, honestly! You could at least have given him some cereal. And where is Anusha?’
‘Sleeping, I expect. Perhaps I should wake her.’
‘Perhaps you should. Now, Zaki, what would you like? Cereal, toast, eggs?’
‘Toast would be fine, thanks.’
Mr Dalal left to wake Anusha while his wife bustled around the kitchen making toast, and setting out plates, bowls and cereals on the kitchen table.
Zaki went back to examining the carved elephants. He noticed one that looked rather odd and he got up from the table to take a closer look. The little elephant had been given a place of honour. It was seated in a niche in the wall. Unlike the other elephants, it was brightly painted. Now Zaki saw that it had the head of an elephant but the body of a human, except that the body had four arms. One of the four hands held a noose, one held a sort of stick, the third was held up, palm forward, the fourth held a broken tusk. There was a snake around the creature’s waist and a mouse at its feet.
‘That’s Ganesha,’ said Anusha.
Zaki turned to find her standing behind him. Her hair was still wet from th
e shower.
‘Why does he look like that?’
‘Well, there are two different stories, but anyway he lost his head when he was a baby and his father, Shiva, who is a god of course, gave him an elephant’s head. The really important thing is that he’s the remover of obstacles.’
‘The remover of obstacles,’ Zaki repeated.
‘What are all those things he’s holding?’
‘That’s a goad, a stick to prod you forward, and that’s the noose he uses to catch all the difficulties that are in your way. The snake is energy. He’s got big ears so that he can listen to you, and his elephant head is full of wisdom, it’s like the soul, and his human body denotes earthly existence. I’ve forgotten about the tusk. Mum? Why does Ganesha have a broken tusk?’
‘He used it as a pen to write the Mahabharata.’
‘Oh yes – that’s this huge big poem about all the gods and heroes and so on.’
‘And the mouse shows that he’s humble because he’s the destroyer of pride and selfishness,’ added Mrs Dalal.
For the next quarter of an hour they concentrated on eating. Mr Dalal didn’t rejoin them. Maybe he had gone to the recording studio, Zaki thought. He obviously knew they had been down there last night. Did he mind? Was he checking to see what they had been up to? Anusha didn’t seem at all concerned. Well, different families had different rules, he supposed.
‘The remover of obstacles’ – the words kept repeating in Zaki’s head. He could really do with one of those right now! Michael used to be his remover of obstacles. The one who went first: the first to climb a cliff, the first at the secondary school. He went ahead and came back and told Zaki what it was like, that it was safe. But now the obstacles had grown bigger and not even Michael could remove them.
He looked up from his plate and found Mrs Dalal smiling at him.
‘Mum,’ Anusha asked, as they tidied away the breakfast things, ‘can Zaki borrow the mask from the living room?’
‘There seems to be a lot of interest in that mask all of a sudden,’ her mother remarked.
‘We’re doing myths and stuff with Mrs Palmer and Zaki’s got to do a project.’
‘Well, yes, take it, by all means. But you might need to give it a bit of a dust.’
Anusha wrapped the mask carefully in an old tea towel and it joined the logbook and the borrowed CD in Zaki’s rucksack. Then they made themselves a picnic lunch to take with them to the boat.
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Chapter 17
It was the sort of September day that seems to have borrowed its weather from mid-July; there was no wind to speak of and the sun shone out of a clear blue sky. Sitting beside Anusha, while the bus wound its way through the lanes to Salcombe, Zaki felt rather self-conscious in his school clothes on a Saturday, and, despite the sunshine streaming in through the bus window, he kept his jacket zipped up over his pale blue school sweatshirt. He could feel the slight weight of the bracelet in his jacket pocket.
‘What if Curlew is still anchored near your boat?’ asked Anusha as they walked from the bus to the boat shed. Zaki had been wondering the same thing, but they needn’t have worried.
‘She’s long gone,’ Grandad told them.
‘Up the estuary, or out to sea?’ asked Zaki.
‘Out to sea. Only one person aboard, far as I could tell.’
Zaki fetched Morveren’s cabin key from the nail by the door, lifejackets for himself and Anusha and the oars for the dinghy. Grandad offered to tow the dinghy out with the launch, but Zaki replied that Anusha could do with the rowing practice.
‘That shoulder of yours all right for rowin’?’
‘Seems to be fine,’ Zaki replied nonchalantly.
Grandad raised a quizzical eyebrow but let it go at that.
‘If you intend leavin’ the dinghy on Morveren, fly the mermaid when you want fetchin’.’ ‘The mermaid’ was a large square flag with a mermaid on it. ‘Flying the mermaid’ was the family’s way of letting those ashore know that they were wanted onboard. During holidays, when the mermaid was run up the mast, it was the signal that lunch was ready and that Zaki and Michael should stop whatever they were doing and get back to the boat. Zaki’s mum had made the flag. This summer it hadn’t been flown.
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They had the tide with them until they were level with the harbour office, but as soon as they headed out across the estuary the ebb swept them sideways and they had to pull hard at their oars to make the moorings by the opposite shore. However, Zaki’s newly healed shoulder allowed him to use both arms to row and he and Anusha were a well-balanced pair, matching stroke for stroke, so they were soon aboard Morveren with the dinghy tied to the yacht’s stern.
It was the first time Anusha had seen inside Morveren’s cabin. Every detail that was so familiar to Zaki was new to her. She was amazed at how many things had been dovetailed into such a small space. Eventually, when Anusha had made a thorough inspection of every nook and cranny and Zaki had satisfactorily answered all her questions, they settled themselves at the saloon table and opened the logbook.
The first entry was dated 15th October 1907 and gave details of a day’s oyster dredging in the Carrick Roads including notes on the size and quantity of oysters harvested. Similar entries continued throughout the autumn and winter months – mostly oyster-dredging but some days the boat had been used for fishing. There was no mention of crew, so the skipper must have worked alone.
Occasionally, in the margin beside an entry, there was a drawing of a dolphin. Around a third of the way through the book the short log entries stopped. Zaki flicked forward through the remaining pages. They were all filled with the same neat, sloping handwriting. It appeared to be one long entry.
‘What’s this all about?’ Anusha wondered.
‘Only one way to find out,’ Zaki replied, turning back to the page where the entry began.
Heads together, their elbows on the table, they settled down to read.
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Chapter 18
1st March 1908
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Oh Una – where are you? If only I could talk to you. If only I could ask your forgiveness for what I have done. But I did it to stay near you – you must know that – or as near to you as I can be. No – no, perhaps it is you who should ask me for forgiveness! After all, it was you who deserted me.
Yes, I went back. Yes, I took some of the more valuable pieces that I had hidden. And yes, yes! I know they are for ever stained with blood – the blood of other innocent people. It would have been so much easier to have died along with our parents the night of the wreck. You saved us. You see? It was you! You really are to blame! I don’t mean that. You know I don’t mean that. But why save me and then leave me on my own, trapped in this life? It was cruel of you, Una, so cruel.
I know you are sometimes not far away. That is why I bought this boat. And some days you come to play. It is you? You and your friends?
Yes, Una, I went back and I took a few valuables. And I know I swore I would not, but how else could I get the money for the boat? Now I have blood on my hands.
And I have nightmares. I should never have gone back to that cursed rock. I dream every night that I am him again and I am on that beach, killing, killing, killing. I think I will go mad. There is no one I can talk to. I am becoming confused. Even during the day I sometimes wonder who I am. Is it possible I once had a normal life – was a young girl with loving parents and a sister? Una, what shall I do?
Yes, Una, you are right. How sensible of you. You always were the clever one. I must set it all down. I must start from the beginning. Get it clear in my poor, confused head. That is the thing to do. I will imagine I am telling a stranger, somebody kind and patient who listens and asks no questions, somebody – and this is important – somebody who is capable of believing the unbelievable.
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Dear Stranger (may I call you that?) – how should I start? Shall I tell you who I am? Yes, since we have not met before, I should introduce myself. My
name is Rhiannon Davies. I have a twin sister named Una. We were born in June under the twin sign of Gemini and were so alike that even our parents had difficulty telling us one from the other. (Our parents! Oh, Una, I’m beginning to forget what they looked like!)
I’m sorry – let me continue. Our father was the Reverend Bryn Davies, our mother Gwyneth Davies.
Our father believed that God wished him to be a missionary, to preach the Word in those dark corners of the world where it had not been heard. And it was this belief that propelled our little family of four in the spring of 1851, with our few possessions and a great many Bibles, from the Welsh Valleys to a tropical paradise, where there were already a good many gods and where my father was amazed to discover that his own god had been known since the time of St Thomas, although considered to be no greater than any of the others.
We arrived in Ceylon, or Serendip as the ancients called it, soon after Una and I had celebrated our ninth birthday, and we remained there for a little over five years. While our father and mother were engaged in ‘civilising the natives’ and ‘steering them away from their dark superstitions’, the natives were engaged in steering us, their children, towards those very same dark beliefs and practices. Our chief instructor in this was the local Edura (or ‘idolatrous witch doctor’ as our father called him), a kindly old man who, when not driving out demons, cast bronze statues of gods and goddesses and of all the local saints, and made bells and cymbals for ritual dances.
It is the belief, in those parts, that there exists a host of different demons and that every illness and misfortune is caused by a particular one of them. It is the Edura’s duty to determine which demon is the cause of each affliction and then, through the terrifying Yakum Natim or Devil Dances, in the disguise of that very demon, to persuade it to leave the body of the sufferer.
Every day, as soon as our mother had finished giving us our morning lessons, my sister and I would scamper off to the Edura’s. There we would squat in the heat and semi-darkness, watching him work and listening, wide-eyed, to his tales of the Yakka, or demons, and the many tricks and ruses he had used to overcome them. All around us, on the walls, lit by the red, flickering glare from the hearth, hung the masks of the Yakka, their faces twisted and distorted in cruel reflection of the diseases they caused: Naga Sanni Yakka, bringer of nightmares; Kori Sanni Yakka, the paralyser; Amuku Sanni Yakka, green-faced inflictor of stomach ills; Dala Sanni Yakka, causer of whooping cough; Riri Yakka, the fearsome blood demon; Kola Sanni Yakka, leader of the devils, and all the rest of his ghastly retinue.
