Sunlit Shadow Dance

by Graham Wilson

  She found the front entrance and let herself in. A middle aged man came to the counter to help, “Yes, how may I assist?”

  The words came out unbidden, “It is Locked Box 972532, I need to open it and retrieve the contents. The security code is 679013.”

  The man looked up his list, wrote down the numbers she had given then nodded. As he went to speak Susan’s mother joined them, so he paused until she was alongside as well.

  The man said, “That box was in use with that security code for two years, until a bit over a year ago. However at the end of that rental period the owner had not returned to collect it. So its contents were removed. It is now in use again with a different security code.”

  Susan felt panic flood into her mind, It could not be possible that the contents were gone, she wanted, no she needed to see the diary that she knew was inside.

  She calmed herself. “Do you know what has happened to the contents since they were removed?”

  The man shook his head. “No, but I can find out. Generally we hold the contents for a further 12 months before we dispose of them. However in some cases where the contents are clearly valuable and we know that we can recover the cost if needed we will hold them for longer.”

  He picked up the phone and spoke a few words. In another minute they were joined by a lady of similar age who was introduced as the person who managed the recovered objects. This lady brought them into an office and keyed the details into a computer.

  “Yes,” she said, “I can see what happened. The security box had two things inside, a book that looked like an old diary and a pouch with some jewelry inside. Our preliminary estimate was that the diary is of no particular value but the jewelry is highly valuable. So we stored them in a new secure storage compartment in the off limits area. It is our policy to hold items of this value for five years before we consider disposing of them.”

  Susan could feel relief flooding into her. She did not know why these things were important but she knew they were. They were a vital part of her life from before and, even if she could not remember them, she needed to have them back and see what they told her.

  She asked, “So are we able to collect them now?”

  The lady looked carefully at her, as if assessing what to do. “Well there are two things to cover; one is to confirm your entitlement to the objects. The second is to pay the outstanding fees for their storage. You have confirmed you know the security code, so that is a start. In addition at the time you stored the objects we recorded your driver’s license number as an independent way of confirming your identity should the need arise.”

  Now Susan felt flummoxed again, she had no memory of a license.

  She said, “I don’t have my license with me, do you need to see it.”

  The lady shook her head. “No just the number will suffice.”

  Unbidden the number came into Susan’s head. She recited it and the lady wrote it down. It was checked against a field on the computer screen.

  “Well that is all correct. So there is just a matter of $300 pounds; that is for two further years of storage fees and an additional charge for the removal and storage in a new location.”

  Her mother pulled out her credit card and made the payment.

  In a five minutes Susan was holding these two objects in her hands.

  Her mother looked at her, curious, “Do you want to check the contents?”

  Susan shook her head, “No I just want to bring them home. I will look at them later.”

  Her mother shrugged and they drove home.

  *

  Susan sat alone in her room in the late night. She had suppressed her desire to look at the diary and the bag of stones that she had carried home. She knew it had been a subject of conversation with her mother and father and her Gran who had stayed for dinner, she had walked into the room as they were talking and felt the conversation fall into a lull on her entrance.

  Finally her father had blurted out, “Your Mum was just telling us about your visit to Wokingham today, meeting the Kashmiri man and his kind offer to translate the book, and also about your stop off at the storage place on the way home, how you remembered that you had left things there before you went away.”

  He stopped there, waiting for her to say something. A silence ensued. Finally, realizing she was being ungracious, she said. “I don’t really remember what it is. But I feel like I need to have a look with Vic before I show whatever it is to others. He may be able to help me understand what it means.

  “So I plan to bring it home tomorrow on the train and then we can have a look together. Once we do that I promise I will tell you about it.”

  They all nodded but she could see a disbelieving look on all faces. She felt bad. She could not remember lying deliberately before. Doing it to these people, who had been so wonderful to her, felt unworthy.

  But she could not bear to open something so significant and private with anyone else looking on, not even Vic. This book was a story of the life she had lost. She must know what it said, just she and only she, to begin with.

  After that no one raised the contents of the locked box any further. The night proceeded with laughter and humor, entertaining the children as her parents and Gran told stories about here when she was little. Now they were all gone to bed, the children in their own room, Vic lying in the crib alongside her bed, sleeping soundly.

  She sat on her bed with the book in her hands, looking at a reddish brown cover with only “Mark B”, handwritten, to distinguish it. It was just as she had remembered it from when she had photographed the other book. She knew that inside would be the words of writing her mind had glimpsed.

  She felt no real interest in the stones in the cloth pouch. The lady had said they were jewels, but they felt like small stones to her. One day soon, when she had read the book, she was happy to open the pouch and show the stones to others. She did not care about them. If they were valuable, all the better, but it was of minor importance. The story must come first. She knew, with a deep clarity, that this was her story, the key to unlocking a part of her mind. She held the book in her hands and immersed herself in its presence. It had its own presence, the essence of a vanished spirit, perhaps Mark B.

  Chapter 39 – The Ghost of Mark

  She kept holding the book and let it fill her consciousness; it had its own clear presence. As she thought of it she felt it enter her mind, it had a face, half human, half crocodile. She should have been frightened, as on the day when she glimpsed the crocodile tearing at her children. But there was none of that, just a faint regretful curiosity, wondering where this man had gone.

  Now his crocodile part dissolved and only the man remained. It was a regular man’s face, weather beaten edges and an eye crinkling smile, not quite handsome, but utterly arresting. It looked into and captivated her soul.

  With a pang of pain she knew she had utterly and totally loved this man. His departure had been the most devastating thing she had ever known. She loved Vic no less, but the sense of the loss of this earlier love was so powerful and poignant that it dwarfed all else in her mind. She could feel tears trickling down her cheeks.

  She turned the pages forward a little way and started reading. She was reading the story of E or Elfin, become the Elfin Queen. This man had loved her too, fully and completely. It did not take from what Susan knew was his love for her and hers for him. As she read of how E had died and he buried her in the boat he had made, somewhere out in the desert by a river, she felt tears streaming down her face. He was desolate, heartbroken. She shared in his heartbreak.

  She read on, various odd stories were interspersed, one about a metal bird and a man named Vic, she realized with a shock this was her Vic, he was this man’s friend. They had shared much together.

  There were more stories about him and other characters over the pages that followed, along with other stories she realized were set in the Australian Outback, musters, cattle, horses, more helicopters, shooting and fishing, and crocodiles,
lots of places with crocodile stories and images. There were some references to other girls too, but they seemed to pass like ships in the night, lighting pages only for brief spaces, then their lights were gone.

  Then a second significant person came along, B, or Belle, or as time went by “my beautiful B”. It began as a lovely story of friendship, meetings and re-meetings. Then it told of a road journey together, to a faraway place in part of Australia called the Kimberly, from Broome heading north. It was a trip of joy and wonders, friendship morphing into deep love. It was clearly a two way thing; she read it in Mark’s words and read it also in the elegant cursive script of Belle, some parts French, some English. Belle told of her delight in her new found lover, her plans to bring him home, to meet the family, to make babies with him. It was utterly gorgeous.

  Then she turned another page. She was devastated. Belle had fallen into a pool full of crocodiles, huge crocodiles, beasts that had torn her body apart. Mark, using the only weapon to hand, had finished it before she could suffer, a single shot into the head he loved so. Belle felt nothing. The crocodiles got only a body, the soul departed.

  But he had killed the thing he loved. Rage and grief tore apart his soul, leaving something else in its place, a dark and malevolent crocodile spirit, hunter and destroyer. She could bear to read no further. She had no tears now, just a soul full of devastation as she shared his pain. She did not want to read on, nothing good could come past here.

  So she lay in her bed, light off, and dreamt awful crocodile dreams. This time they were not of her children but of a girl, dark haired, one who looked somehow like her, her body torn apart as monsters feasted, limb torn from limb as blood darkened water, while the man watched in anguish. Then it was his body they tore at. She first thought he had thrown himself in the pool with Belle, consumed by grief. But as she watched she saw these were other crocodiles, in a different place and time. The eyes that watched were hers.

  In the morning she woke up with the book on her lap and only vague remembrances of her dreams and the man. They felt to belong to another place and time. Yet a portent of unresolved doom, with tearing crocodiles at its centre, remained.

  She pushed it from her mind, determined not to let it spoil this, her homecoming day. She felt mounting excitement to be on her way back to her husband, she loved the sound of that word and she loved the thought of his intense smiling face.

  She was upbeat now; she wanted to share this discovery with him. Then she thought of how good her parents had been to her. They deserved for her to be more forthcoming with them too.

  She knew what she would do, she was not ready to let them read the contents of the diary, after all Vic had the first right to see that. Instead, she would open the contents of the pouch with them. After all it was only a bit of old jewelry, maybe some semi-precious stones, going on what the lady at the storage place said. Perhaps they were worth a few thousand pounds, enough to ensure their bill was paid.

  She put the dairy in her suitcase, under her clothes, in the place which had before held her Kashmiri book. Then she took the pouch in her hand and went out to see the others in the kitchen.

  Her Gran had stopped over and the children were up, eating breakfast. The kitchen was a babble of noise. She walked in, unnoticed. As they realized her presence they looked up.

  She said. “I thought, before I go home today, we should open this pouch of supposedly old jewels to see what it contains.”

  She handed it to her mother. “Perhaps, as you were there with me when I collected it, you should do the honor of opening it.”

  He mother nodded, looking thoughtful and a bit tense. She untied the strings and tipped the contents gently onto the table. As the stones rolled out she let out a gasp, which was mirrored by her Gran and her father.

  There were about fifty stones, with only two made into settings. These two were a gorgeous milky pale blue stone set into a ring and another stone, almost identical, made into a pendant. She saw their blue clearly.

  Susan felt her eyes riveted to just these two objects. Without knowing where they came from her words came tumbling out, “He said he chose them to match the color of my eyes.”

  She shook her head, “I don’t know why I said that, I don’t even know who he is, but I know he gave them to me.”

  The others seemed to have barely noticed her words. They were gazing, as if awestruck, at the rest of the pouch’s contents, big stones in many different sizes, shapes and hues. Susan knew they were many colors though she could not make these out; just the two blue pieces had color.

  Her father was shaking his head, saying, “Unless I am seriously mistaken, this is a lot more than some bits of old jewelry and semi-precious stones. See all the colors, red, blue, orange, green, milky, clear and sparkling. I think this is the real stuff, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, nothing but the best.

  “I would not begin to be able to guess what these are worth. It must be a huge amount. If each is worth ten thousand pounds, and many are worth much more than that, we are looking at half a million pounds on the table.”

  Susan looked at her Dad as if he was crazy, “Dad, you are joking. Why would someone put such things in a locked box and forget about them?”

  He replied, “Sweetie, I don’t know, I did not put them there. But look for yourself. Then tell me if I am wrong.”

  So she looked. While she could not see the colors except for the blue of her amazing opals, she realized it must be true.

  He said, “This stuff needs to go into a bank vault somewhere until we can make arrangements to have it properly assessed and valued. Whoever’s it is it is far too valuable to just leave lying around.”

  Susan felt disappointed, she had been looking forward to taking these home to Vic and admiring them together, “Oh, Dad, I don’t know. Can’t I just take them with me, home on the train and show them to Vic. I can’t wait to see his eyes open wide when he sees them. I want to surprise him.”

  Her father shook his head in disbelief, “Susan, what a crazy idea. What if happens if something happens to them, what if they get lost or stolen? They are far too valuable to be careless.”

  Now she felt annoyed. “Dad, they have been sitting, forgotten in a box for three or four years. Before that God only knows where they were and for how long. Yesterday I carried them home in that little bag in the car without anybody thinking anything of it. Then last night they sat in my bedroom without any lock and key. We are the only people who even know about them. Why would something suddenly happen to them now. Not to mention that if I had not remembered that code yesterday they could have sat in that storage place forever.”

  She could see her mother and Gran nodding with her in agreement. Reluctantly her father gave way. “Well, I suppose that is true. It is like you were meant to discover them. But you must let one of us come with you on the train, I am sure your Gran would be glad to come with you.”

  Her Gran nodded, “Of course, pet, I am free and would love to come. I have barely been introduced to your children. A day with them on the train would be wonderful. And who is safer than an old lady with a walking stick.”

  Now they all laughed and it was agreed. Today she and her Gran would go on the train to Scotland. Tonight they would show them to Vic. Tomorrow they would be taken and stored in a bank vault in Edinburgh or Glasgow until they were valued and assessed.

  The trip home was uneventful. Vic was there to meet them all, encasing everyone, Gran included, in a group hug. Susan felt her news bursting on the tip of her tongue but she held it in. She would save it for after supper when it was just the two of them. Then she would show him both the diary and the stones together. In doing this she knew she must ask him to tell her about this Mark, his friend. She could run away from that knowledge no longer.

  As they were sitting over supper, chatting around the table with the whole family, telling of the trip and the book from Kashmir, the phone rang. Her aunt got up to answer it. In a minute she had a puzzled look on her
face.

  Finally she said, “Just a minute,” and turned to address Susan, “There is a girl, Cathy, on the phone. She says she had a letter of introduction from your friend Anne. She has just arrived from Australia. She asks if she could come over here now and give this letter to you. She is staying nearby and could come straight away if it is alright.”

  Susan was looking forward to the rest of her night alone with Vic, but could think of no polite way to say no to someone who wanted to meet her at Anne’s request. So she shrugged her assent.

  Chapter 40 – Meeting a Lost Girl

  Soon there was the sound of car tires crunching on the gravel drive. Then came a knock on the door. Susan went to the door and opened it herself.

  Standing before her was a girl of somewhere around her own age, with darkish hair cut short. She could also see a dark skinned man still sitting in the car parked some distance away. The girl held out her hand and said, “Hello, I am Cathy. I was just talking to your aunt on the phone.”

  Susan invited her in, but the girl replied, “Thanks, but no thanks, at least not tonight. I just wanted you to have this letter sooner rather than later.

  “I am hoping to have the chance to meet you and talk about what it says in the next couple days. Tonight we are both jetlagged and need to sleep,” she said, pointing to the man in the car. “I want you to have chance to think about what we are asking and say no, if you want, before we go further.”

  So Susan took the letter she proffered, thanked Cathy and watched her walk back to the car and drive away before she came back inside.

  The others all looked at her with interest. She briefly explained what had happened, saying, “If Anne wanted to give me a message it is funny that she did not ring me and tell me directly. It must be something complicated that I need to think about for her to have written to me instead.”