by Lu Hersey
“Come along, it’s not far,” Mamwyn calls cheerfully. She’s shorter than me, but even she has to bend low to avoid hitting her head on the tunnel ceiling. It must have been made by dwarves or something. I remember Mum once telling me that people were shorter in the past. I have to bend almost double to avoid injuring myself, and even then I scrape my arm on the rough-hewn walls a few times. The sleeves on the dressing gown I’m wearing are way too short to offer much protection.
Just when I start wondering if the tunnel stretches on for ever, the air becomes fresher and the tunnel widens. I can just make out a massive stone blocking the way in front of us. I’m about to say something to Mamwyn when she suddenly disappears. There’s only the stone in front of me, shaped and rounded to fit the space. I start to panic. It feels like the walls are closing in on me. There’s no way forward, yet she hasn’t gone back past me. She’s vanished into thin air.
“Just walk round it.” Mamwyn’s voice is muffled and deadened by the emptiness of the tunnel and the stone blocking my way. I reach out and feel it. It’s the kind of cold, hard granite you find on the moors. A hand reaches out of the blackness at the side of the rock and I jump.
“What are you doing, girl? Take my hand!”
I hold up my lantern and see Mamwyn’s face peering round the side of the rock, her arm stretched out towards me.
“Oh, there you are,” I say relieved. I squeeze myself through the narrow gap, following her into the darkness beyond.
The cave arches above us, almost perfectly rounded like the inside of half a gigantic grapefruit. Now we’re here, there’s no visible way in or out. The cave walls are uneven, but there are no chisel marks like I saw in the tunnel. I think it must be a natural cave, not man-made. It’s obvious people have been here before though. The cave surface is covered with spots of dark red, forming beautiful patterns and spirals over the walls.
“It’s not blood, is it?” I immediately think of documentaries I’ve seen about tribal ceremonies. Sometimes they involve ritual cutting or bloodletting, and it looks horribly painful.
“Not human, don’t worry.” Mamwyn picks up a dark red stone from the cave floor and hands it to me. The rock is strangely soft, like densely packed sand.
“It’s ochre.” Her tone is suddenly serious. “The ancestors believed it was the blood of the earth.”
I wonder how long ago that was.
“Ours is a gift from the dawn of time,” she says.
I get the uncomfortable feeling she can sense what I’m thinking.
“So how long has this cave been here?”
“Quite a while. The sea people found this one when sea levels rose and they had to move. Or so my mam told me and her mam told her and so on, back to when we first came.”
I shiver. The way she talks about these things, it’s like it was yesterday. But surely that must have been thousands of years ago?
“Best not to think about it too much.”
That’s the second time she’s said that. I only wish I could stop myself thinking.
“The moon will be up soon. It’s time for us to begin.” She smiles at me contentedly. “Sit here and I’ll start the preparations.” She points to a flat stone, like some ancient altar, rising slightly from the cave floor.
As I move towards the stone, I wonder whether to run out of here while I still can.
But deep down, I know it’s too late to turn back now.
chapter 19
Mamwyn places her candle on a rock by the cave wall and takes down a clay bowl from a ledge above it. She hands the bowl to me. It’s old and heavy and the inside is blackened by fire.
Pulling a handful of the dried leaves from her housecoat pocket, she places them in the bowl. She doesn’t say a word. I notice her face looks different in the flickering candlelight. She could be almost any age if it wasn’t for the white hair.
Reaching into her pocket again, she brings out the box of matches and strikes one. For a second the ochre patterns on the cave walls are lit by the flare. She places the lighted match in the bowl. As soon as the leaves catch fire, she blows out the flames and a cloud of smoke wafts up in my face, practically blinding me.
“Don’t drop the bowl, just close your eyes.”
I close them, then start coughing. The pungent smoke reminds me of Dad burning his sage, but it’s much stronger.
“Try not to cough. Keep breathing, breathing in the smoke.”
Since I’m holding the bowl for her, I don’t have much choice. The smoke billows up my nostrils and into my lungs. I swallow hard, trying not to choke. I open my streaming eyes to catch a glimpse of what’s going on, just as Mamwyn reaches out and takes the bowl from me. I watch as she dips a hand in the bowl and covers her fingers in ash. She puts the bowl down.
For a second I think Mamwyn’s saying something, then I realize she’s chanting, mumbling a load of words I can’t quite catch. She moves towards me and I focus on the chanting. The words aren’t English. I don’t recognize the language at all. Some of it sounds more like clicking and whistling noises than actual words.
I feel her fingers tracing the ash in spiralling patterns down my face and neck. I’m hypnotized by her voice and the strange ceremony. In the smoke and darkness of the ancient cave I see spots of light appearing. At first I think my eyes are playing tricks on me.
“Let go of all thoughts and concentrate on the lights.” Mamwyn reaches back up to the ledge and gently lifts something down.
It looks like a living thing, some kind of animal. But when she holds it up in front of me, I see it’s not alive – it’s an animal skin, dark grey with swirling patterns and spots of silver, about as big as a hearthrug. The markings on the pelt dance like the lights at the edges of my vision. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It changes subtly in the candlelight, the patterns moving like liquid mercury, and I want to bury myself deep in the magically soft fur.
“Take off your gown and your shoes and I’ll give you this gift from our ancestors.” The word ancestors echoes round the cave walls. “It will be yours for the rest of your lifetime.”
Just for a second I feel self-conscious and I hesitate. At the swimming pool I find changing excruciating, and try to cover myself with a towel as quickly as possible. I look up at Mamwyn and see she’s already taken her housecoat off. She’s standing like a marble statue, waiting for me, holding the pelt as though it’s a sacred offering. She looks surreally beautiful. My awkwardness drains away and I take off my borrowed things.
In the flickering candlelight we look like the ghosts of cave dwellers from long ago, our shadows dancing on the cave walls. There is something ancient about this ceremony, and I feel elated as I take the skin from Mamwyn. As soon as I touch it, I get a sense of countless others who have gone through this before me. I hold it up to my body, feeling the warmth, wanting to bury myself in this amazing thing.
“Push yourself into it. Don’t think about it, just do it.” Mamwyn’s voice now comes from the dark of the cave.
I bring the shimmering pelt up to my face and press it against my skin. Even when I close my eyes I can still see the swirling patterns of silver and the points of light ahead of me in the darkness.
“Keep following the lights,” says Mamwyn. “Push your way towards them.”
I think of nothing but reaching the light spots, wanting to get closer to find out if they’re real. Gradually I start to feel patches of light and warmth on my skin. The spots become brighter and brighter, until they sparkle on the edges of my vision like stars around a tunnel of velvet darkness.
“Now go into the tunnel.”
I wonder how she expects me to go into a tunnel that isn’t really there.
“Think yourself into it.” Her voice sounds closer now.
I try to push myself into the tunnel with my mind and somehow my body just follows. It’s as if I have no choice. The sensation is dreamlike, but I know it’s real. I feel as though my entire life has been leading up to this poin
t and I’ve only just realized it. As I enter the tunnel, I have the sensation of falling, dropping through starlit space. The spots of light spiral round me, then zoom ahead, pooling together to form one bright, dazzling circle. The light is so intense I can see it with my eyes closed.
Toc!
The sound is like someone clicking two large pebbles together. Everything shifts. I’m through.
I’m face down on a hard, lumpy surface. I lift my head to see where I am. My chest is flat against the stones on a rocky beach. It’s dusk. The half-moon hangs in the darkening blue sky of early evening. Somehow the way I’m seeing things is completely different, as if there’s a faint rainbow around everything, even the silver moon above. I’m filled with wonder.
The smell of the sea is more intense than anything I’ve ever experienced, a profusion of salt and seaweed and a thousand other things I can’t begin to identify and have never even noticed before. Every pebble has a different scent.
I try to turn around and I fall flat on my nose. Suddenly I’m afraid. Why can’t I move properly? I raise my head again. A grey seal is looking straight back at me with dark brown eyes. I start to panic, but the seal pushes her face towards mine, slowly and deliberately, until I can feel her whiskers and the reassuring warmth of her breath. I see the spots on her pelt shimmer and swirl, a magical, living thing, and I realize she is Mamwyn.
At last I make the connection.
Sea people. Seal people.
Mamwyn turns and moves across the rocky beach towards the water. She keeps looking back at me until I understand she wants me to follow her. It takes several painful minutes and all my concentration to get to the shoreline, even though it’s only a few metres away. It’s difficult to move in this new form and I start to feel anxious. What if I’m stuck like this? I have to use my elbows to drag my heavy body forward and I keep losing my balance, nosediving onto the rocks.
It becomes much easier the moment we get to the water’s edge, and I calm down slightly. The sea starts to support my weight. It’s still so early in the year but it doesn’t feel cold. I slide towards the open water. Once I’m in deep enough, I dive under the waves to the world beneath.
Part of me thinks I must be dreaming, yet I know I’m not. I’m underwater, able to see clearly in the dusky early evening light filtering down from the surface. The lumbering awkwardness I experienced moving across the beach is gone. I glide through the water with ease, using only the power of my legs. Or rather, the part of me that was legs before the changing.
Within seconds I realize how perfectly this body is adapted for life in the sea. The water is still winter cold, but I’m warm, warmer than if I was wearing the most expensive wetsuit. I sense a sharp outcrop of rock looming in front of me even before I see it, and quickly swerve away. Somehow the whiskers on my face are sending signals directly to my body, helping me avoid obstacles without even thinking. I can hear a thousand clicks and noises from all the creatures that live and move in the sea, and I know exactly what direction each sound is coming from. It’s so exhilarating that I feel no fear at all.
I can see as clearly as if I was wearing a diving mask, but with a far wider field of vision. From the tiniest prawns walking along the bottom to the shoals of glittering sand eels, everything looks totally amazing. I feel like I’ve just been born. How could anyone not want to experience this?
Mamwyn stays close by, and I know precisely where she is at any one time without even turning to look. It doesn’t seem odd that we’re in this form, not even for a moment. She circles around me a few times until I understand that I should follow her. Then together we swim for what must be miles around the rocks and gullies offshore, chasing fish through the seaweed and over stretches of tide-rippled sand.
Lobsters raise their claws menacingly from rocky crevices as we dart past. Shoals of sand-speckled flatfish flutter across the seabed when we get too close. Out in the open water, we circle a swarm of ghostly jellyfish with cauliflower-like tentacles that have somehow survived the winter, drifting along on some invisible current. I swim through the darkening water, somersaulting round and round in sheer joy at the sensation and the freedom.
We stay under for such a long time, only needing to surface every so often to breathe. Each time we come up, I notice the sky is getting darker and more stars are beginning to appear.
A distant rumbling sound gets much louder. I look round in alarm. The noise becomes deafening, confusing me by blocking out all other sensation. Sound waves judder right through my body. Mamwyn swims away but the vibrations are holding me to the spot. The clunking of the engine is almost overhead before I understand it’s a boat.
I dive down deep to get away, then panic, knowing I have to take a breath soon. I swim until I can hear other sounds in the sea again. Lungs bursting, I surface and see the silhouette of the fishing boat against the deepening indigo sky. It’s so much further away than I thought. Sound is different underwater.
Mamwyn surfaces beside me, and then dives again, expecting me to follow. I sense it’s important we leave now. We swim fast, following the shoreline. I know immediately when we’re getting close to the rocky beach we started from. Usually I have no sense of direction at all.
As we approach the shore, I’m distracted by a shoal of mackerel that swishes in front of us out of nowhere. Swimming close together, they move as one, underbellies flashing silver in the twilight. I smell the oiliness of their iridescent skin and I’m compelled to try to catch one. I chase them backwards and forwards, up and down until I manage to single one out of the shoal and snap it up in my jaws. I surface and swallow it whole, no problem. Then I dive down again and follow Mamwyn, heading into the beach by the cave.
We heave ourselves out of the water and immediately I feel the weight and awkwardness of this body on land. The last tip of the half-moon sinks below the horizon, and as I look up at the stars they start to move and spiral together. Time stands still. I spin through a vortex of intense pain, aware of every cell in my body, shifting, changing. I can’t breathe for several long seconds. It feels as though the life is being squeezed out of me, yet I’m strangely unafraid. At the last moment, I manage to will myself through, into the circle of light.
Toc!
I hear the sound again, like the clicking of pebbles.
And I’m back.
I lie on the beach in the dark. I feel really sick and start to shiver uncontrollably. I try to get up. My legs are shaking. Then I lean over the stony beach, retching and heaving until finally I throw up. It’s horribly painful. When I look down, I realize I’ve thrown up a mackerel, whole, just a few bite marks on its body.
“Good thing it was a small one,” said Mamwyn. “I forgot to tell you not to eat while you’re out there.”
chapter 20
Mamwyn points to the sealskin lying on the barnacled rock next to me.
“Pick it up quickly – we need to get off the beach.”
My stomach is still churning from throwing up the mackerel but I realize we have to get out of view of any passing boats as soon as possible. I wrap my sealskin round my body like a towel and stumble across the rocky beach, following Mamwyn back towards the cave. I’m amazed how fast she climbs over the massive boulders at the entrance, despite her age. I guess she’s had plenty of practice.
I look down at the floor of the cave, unable to see where I’m putting my feet in the semi-dark. The place smells of damp rock and rotting seaweed. By the time I look up again, Mamwyn is nowhere to be seen. A voice calls to me from somewhere above my head.
“Come on, don’t hang about!”
I look up and can just make out Mamwyn’s face peering through a fissure in the cave roof. We must have come through it on the way out, but I have no memory of it at all. I scramble up onto a massive boulder, slimy from all the algae growing on it. When I reach the top, I have to lean forward to avoid hitting my head on the rough surface of the cave roof. I push my way up through the incredibly narrow opening to reach the cavern a
bove, clutching my sealskin round me more tightly so I don’t get scratched.
The candles we left earlier have burned down low in the lanterns, but the ochre spots on the cave walls still dance in the flickering light. As soon as I’m through, Mamwyn moves a slate slab over the crack in the floor. The slab is worn and old and has been made to fit perfectly. I guess sea people have been using it for many generations to keep the upper cave hidden from anyone entering the sea cave below. Not that many would. The coast is treacherous and the beach has too many sharp rocks and boulders to make a good landing place for boats.
I’m cold and wet and exhausted. But I feel exhilarated. Crazy as it is after what’s just happened, I feel normal for the first time in weeks. Suddenly everything has become clear.
The weird dreams I’ve been having, the seawater seeping through my hands – it was all part of this. I wasn’t going mad. I’ve inherited the family legacy, and I believe Mamwyn is right.
It’s a gift.
My elation holds, despite being freezing and having only an old, threadbare dressing gown to wear. Mamwyn puts our sealskins away on the ledge.
“That was a great start, Danni. Everything went very well.” Her wrinkled face glows in the candlelight. It’s reassuring the way she talks about things. Almost as if turning into an animal is a perfectly normal thing to do. I can’t help smiling. Levi would probably laugh his head off if I told him, though of course he wouldn’t believe a word of it. Anyway, I can’t tell him. I’ve taken the oath. Thinking about it sobers my buoyant mood a little.
I’m going to have to deal with everyday life and the people around me exactly the same as I did before this happened. Yet my world is now a completely different place.
“Looks like you’re thinking too much again, Danni. Just enjoy this time. It’s more precious than diamonds.”
I swear that woman’s a mind-reader.
Back up in the house, Mamwyn goes straight through to the front room and builds up the fire.