Max Gilbert

by Simon Clark

  This time as each wave receded it left him clear of the water-at least briefly before the next one. Then another roll of surf came roaring up the sand and carried him, this time fairly gently further up the beach.

  The water slid back, sucking sand and shingle from beneath his hands.

  He wasn't going to drown after all.

  Mark stayed there on his hands and knees, wearily shaking his head.

  "Safe."

  The word oozed from his lips like something half solid.

  "Safe."

  The tide began to retreat. The next wave only licked the soles of his bare feet.

  Unable to walk, he moved up the beach on his hands and knees until clear of the surf, his hands crunching on sand and pebbles.

  At last he stopped and looked back. The moonlight revealed long lines of surf rolling in with a low continuous roar.

  The wind was dropping. But he was bitterly cold.

  Rising unsteadily to his feet, he walked to and fro, searching the beach for something to protect him from hypothermia. He knew that wet clothes allowed body heat to bleed away from the body, which would kill as surely as severing a main artery. At last he found a piece of tarpaulin the size of a bed sheet.

  His numb fingers were useless things now, like bent sticks that did not belong to his body. It took a full five minutes to wrap the tarpaulin around himself with a piece over his head like a monk's cowl.

  There he sat for an hour, perilously close to passing out from exposure. But he had to wait until he could see the ocean properly. The mental picture of the terrorists escaping the Mary-Anne by lifeboat still hammered in his brain.

  Gradually dawn came, sending streaks of gray edged with red up into the sky.

  Two hundred yards to the left he could see that the huge thing he had taken to be a ship was an old sea-fort. It had probably been part of the country's coastal defenses for centuries.

  Which country? Holland? France? England? He could be anywhere.

  As soon as he could he forced himself to his feet. Gathering the tarpaulin around his shoulders like a cloak, he walked down to the water's edge-now at low tide- and looked out.

  No ship.

  No terrorists. They were all dead. Somehow he was certain of that. The ship had gone down so quickly.

  His friends were dead too. But somehow he could feel no sadness. He could think only of the old Skipper, blind, but with the heart of a lion, beating that steady tattoo on the iron wall of the ship as if it were a massive drum.

  His clothes were drying and his blood drove its way back painfully into his limbs and face. His nose began to ache where it had been smashed by the terrorist three days ago.

  Mark Faust turned his back on the sea and began to walk slowly up the beach. Above the softening roar of the surf he fancied he could hear the distant, distant sound of metal beating against metal. A slow rhythm; almost like the heartbeat of a sleeping giant. He didn't look back.

  "Keep beating the drum, Skipper," he murmured. "Keep beating the drum."

  The boy carried on, limping up into the dunes. The cold breeze made his eyes water. The slow, regular beat continued, only growing fainter and fainter as he limped slowly inland away from the restless ocean.

  After a hundred paces he could hear the massive beat no more. But somehow an echo of it continued in his heart.

  Chapter Eight

  "You've copped for a cracking black eye there, me old cocker. Who's tha' been scrapping with?" asked the man as he piled up the concrete blocks for the caravan.

  David hopped toward him, happy he could tell his story again. "I wasn't fighting. I was flying. I was sitting on top of the elephant at the hotel."

  "Elephant?" exclaimed the man. "They've got a zoo, then?"

  "No-wer, an elephant slide."

  The man efficiently wedged more concrete blocks under the caravan. "A slide?"

  "Ye-ess. Anyway, I got the black eye when I was flying."

  "Flying?"

  "Ye-ess!"

  The man laughed heartily.

  "Nobody believes me. They keep saying I fell in the

  stream. But I was flying. Then I banged my face on the tree."

  "You were flying too fast, then?"

  "Suppose so."

  Chris leaned forward against the car, elbows resting on the roof. David had told the story of how he got his black eye to anyone who would listen to him. By now he was getting touchy if anyone doubted the truth of the story, so he and Ruth decided it best to humor him.

  Now the six-year-old repeated the flying episode to the workman. Chris looked over the caravan, feeling pleased with himself. Within six hours of being told by the old git in Out-Butterwick that the caravan was no longer for rent, they had found this one for sale on a caravan site down the coast. It had two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, lounge and dining area. A regular home from home.

  Now in its setting, he could have kissed it. They had positioned it on the edge of the sea-fort's courtyard which was big enough to avoid being claustrophobic, even though on three sides of the cobbled square the walls soared up twenty feet. Behind him, the sea-fort rose a good thirty feet in its butter-colored stone. The dozen or so windows set high in the walls reflected the evening sunshine.

  Entrance to the courtyard was through a set of huge double timber gates set in the wall. They were so big you could drive a bus through them. The hinges had corroded badly on one of the gates; it rested uselessly against the wall. Just one more job among the thousands of others to be completed before the sea-fort opened next spring.

  In one corner of the courtyard, a narrow flight of stone steps ran up to the walkway that ran around the top of the wall.

  "Your lad's got a fair old imagination," chuckled the caravan man as he walked across to Chris, wiping his oil-black hands on the seat of his overalls. "Flying? He makes the flipping head spin. Right, you've got the, er ... doings."

  It's funny how some words in certain situations are taboo, thought Chris. The man obviously considered it vulgar to say the word "check".

  He tore the oblong piece of paper from the stub. "Thanks for all the help. Now at least we've got a home."

  The man looked around the courtyard. "Solid-looking place." He shot Chris a look. "Don't you reckon you might find it a bit... spooky?"

  "You won't recognize the place in twelve months. New windows, swimming pool, soft landscaping, a few climbing vines along that wall. And we'll have plenty of company ... paying company, I hope. This time next year, call in for a drink. It'll be on the house."

  The caravan man leaned forward and shook Chris by the hand. "I'll hold you to that, me old cocker. Thanks for the... doings." He pocketed the check. "See ya, son," he said to David. "Remember, go steady with the flying. No more of them black eyes." He strode away to his truck parked on the causeway. Already the tide was sliding in to lap at the boulders that raised the roadway above the beach.

  "Okay," said Chris, ruffling David's thick hair. "Let's see what Mother has to say about the new home."

  Ruth had started to unpack. Boxes of food, cutlery, pans, detergents, toilet rolls, shoes and David's toys covered the floor.

  On the dining table stood the fishbowl that contained Clark Kent. The fish swam listlessly, its mouth clamped to the undersurface of the water like an upside-down Hoover. All this moving from house to hotel to caravan hadn't done the poor beggar much good.

  Ruth slung a cardboard box through the caravan door onto the courtyard.

  "What do you two want?" Her face was pink with exertion. "There won't be any tea for a long time. And it'll be sandwiches, cake and pop. We haven't got any gas bottles yet."

  "Have we got electricity?" asked David.

  "Sure have, kidda." Chris switched on a light to emphasize the point. "Just like home."

  David smiled. "I like it. It'll be like being at home but being on holiday at the same time."

  "That's right. We'll be living at the seaside-forever and ever."

  "Amen," added R
uth, then smiled to disguise any cynicism.

  "Anything we can do?"

  "Yes. Go. Give me an hour to get this place in shape, then you can come back and give me a hand to make tea."

  "You're the boss, Ruth. Come on, David. Let's explore."

  Chris and David walked toward the double timber doors that led into the sea-fort.

  "Dad?"

  "Yes?"

  "I might do some more flying tomorrow."

  Chris groaned inwardly. David was in a happy, prattling mood.

  "You know when I was on top of the elephant, Dad? I felt really light like one of those soap bubbles. Then I was flying."

  "David ..." They had reached the doors to the building.

  " ... the clouds. I wanted to see if you can really stand on them."

  Chris crouched down and took his son's head in his hands so he could look at him face-to-face. He kissed him on the forehead, just above the bruised eye. "David, enough of these flying stories now, eh, son?"

  "But, Dad, I really did fly."

  Chris looked into those earnest blue eyes. "Tell me about it later. Now ... Come on, let's have a look around before it gets too dark. Do you remember the gun?"

  "A real gun?"

  "A real one, kidda. Come on, let's go find it."

  David ran to the door as Chris fished the key from his pocket. One of the first things the last owner of the place had done was substitute a user-friendly Yale for the old clunking Victorian lock. It opened easily (no Frankenstein castle creak, he thought). Father and son stepped inside into the gloom.

  The smell ... Chris breathed in deeply through his nostrils. A little musty. All the place needed was ventilation. Let the sea breezes blow through the dusty corridors for a day or two and the place would smell almost sweet.

  They were standing in a hallway with three corridors running off-one to the left, one to the right; another straight ahead to a staircase. This would be the entrance lobby with the hotel reception desk in one corner. The light from the windows amply revealed the mounds of builder's rubble against the walls. There were rusty iron bed-frames (probably abandoned when the Army moved out), and a neat stack of breeze blocks that must have been abandoned ten years before when the builder quit work on the conversion.

  "Come on. Let's explore."

  They began a tour of the long, dusty corridors. Some had been plastered during the conversion attempt ten years ago, but many were still bare stone, the shoe-box-size blocks of rock so expertly cut and fitted together you couldn't have put a knife-blade between them.

  The first room they reached must have been used as a rubbish dump. Old drinks cans, bottles (one whiskey, most beer-the military certainly knew how to unwind), broken chairs and, along the far wall under the window, a dozen olive-green metal boxes, bearing white stencilled letters. AMMUNITION. They moved on, David at a trot now, wanting to see the gun.

  "Hang on, David. Not so fast." This was still a dangerous place. Cables hung down at intervals; part of the unfinished wiring job. They shouldn't be live, but you never could tell. The other rooms on the ground floor were largely a repeat of the first. Clearing these alone would be like one of the labors of Hercules. Maybe he should hire some help.

  They reached another room. Empty apart from an old dining table and three ill-matching chairs.

  "I suppose this is where the builders had their break room."

  "Look, there's some playing cards," said David, walking across the room, his feet echoing slightly. "Can I have them?"

  "Best leave them." Chris noticed that they had been dealt out into two hands. Ten years ago the players had been interrupted. There was also a packet of dusty-looking Polo mints. Half were gone. The others looked like circular yellowing bones in the cylinder of crinkled foil. A box of matches. And open on the table, a newspaper. The twentieth of April. Ten years old to the very week.

  He shivered. It made him think of the Marie Celeste. The builders had simply stopped whatever they were doing and had gone, leaving jobs half done. Bankruptcy hits you like that. It raised a phantom in Chris's mind. What happened if their plan did not come off? They were going to sink every penny they had in the world into this place. If it failed...

  "David ... Come on, son, time to move on."

  "I've found something weird," David replied, looking through a door that Chris had taken to be a cupboard.

  "What is it?"

  "God knows."

  "Language." The reprimand came automatically, but he was more interested in what lay behind the wooden door.

  David frowned and swung the door backwards. "Steps, but going down. And we're already on the ground floor."

  Chris laughed. "It's a cellar. It was probably used for storage."

  But a cellar on an island? The building was only a yard or two above the high-tide level anyway. That meant the cellar was below sea level. That was impossible. Unless it flooded at every high tide.

  Chris peered into the black pit of the stairwell but could make nothing out.

  "Aren't we going down?"

  "Not tonight. We haven't got time. Come on, let's make tracks if we're going to find that gun."

  The idea of the underwater cellar intrigued Chris, but it would have to wait. There could be only a few more minutes of daylight left.

  On the next floor they found the big room that looked over the sea. From ceiling to floor, and along the entire length of the far wall, ran the window. Immediately beyond that was the old gundeck; beyond that nothing but sea and blue sky all the way to Holland. After all these years the windows were smeared a blurry white from salt spray, with a random white and black splash here and there. Pure seagull guano.

  The room was empty and relatively clean; just a couple of lengths of gray flex added to the evidence of building work abandoned in a hurry. The Marie Celeste.

  "Where's the gun?" David ran across to the windows. "Pee-ow! Pee-ow!"

  "Over there." Chris pointed to a shape as big as a car, covered by a tattered tarpaulin. "A 40mm Bofors. But I don't think we can blow any ships up tonight."

  "Why not?"

  "No ammo." He smiled down at his son. "Also, I have a feeling the Army might have taken some parts of the gun away so it can't be fired."

  "Isn't that being a vandal?"

  "Well, it seems like it. But we wouldn't want any of the guests firing the gun by accident, would we?"

  "Suppose not."

  "But you see where those platforms are-near those gaps in the wall? That's where the old-fashioned cannon used to go, before they had modern guns."

  "Breech-loaders."

  "That's right, David," said Chris, surprised at his son's knowledge. "How do you know that? I was ... Blast, what's wrong with this door?" Chris had wrestled with the brass handles for a full thirty seconds. They would not budge. "I think we've got a little problem here. I can't open the door."

  "Have you got the key?"

  "No. There isn't one. There's not even a lock. We're so high up you'd need a helicopter to get onto the gundeck ... Dear me." If David hadn't been there the words would have been a little stronger. Chris gave the doors a last rattle. They were shut tight. "Not to worry, kidda. We'll get the doors fixed then we can have a proper look. We'll just have to see what we can through the windows."