The Road to Bedlam cotf-2

by Mike Shevdon

  "Your dad wasn't there."

  "Did he call Ahmed a wog again?"

  "He wasn't there, Karen. I only met your mother."

  "Pity."

  "I didn't come to persuade you to come back either. Only to find out what happened to you."

  "Did Mum ask you to do this?"

  "No. Your mum said that if you meant to come home then you'd find a way."

  "Then who?"

  "I came on my own. Greg Makepeace told me where I might find you."

  "The vicar? What for? What does he get out of this?"

  "He wants me to leave it alone, to stop looking for missing girls. I think you were meant to persuade me to let sleeping dogs lie."

  "That still doesn't give me a reason."

  "Sorry?"

  "You still haven't told me why you came looking for me. If it wasn't for anyone else then why?"

  "I'm writing a story, if I can find enough material. It might sell to the Sundays, or a magazine."

  "A journalist?"

  "Perhaps – when I'm not doing private security."

  She looked again at Ahmed. "It's not much of a story. I met my husband at college. Everyone else wanted to get in my knickers but Ahmed saw me as a person. We talked and spent time together, we got to know each other. We were friends long before anything else. Last year his father died, suddenly. An aneurysm, they said, leaving him and his mum to run the cafe. I started helping out and we got to know each other better."

  "You helped in the cafe, and he asked you to marry him?"

  "You make it sound mercenary. It wasn't. He told me that if he could, he would ask me to marry him, but that it could never be. He had the cafe, his mother, his religion. There were too many barriers. I didn't hesitate. I said yes, even though he hadn't asked. We had to wait until I was eighteen and I'd converted, but the answer was always yes." She hadn't taken her eyes off him the whole time. I didn't need to ask whether she loved him.

  "And your family don't approve."

  "You're joking, aren't you? Little brown grandchildren?"

  "You're pregnant?"

  "No. We'll wait a while; not too long, but a little." She smiled wistfully. "So that's my story. Not exactly Anna Karenina, is it?"

  "It might make part of a larger piece, if I can get your parents' view."

  "I wish you luck. They won't even talk to me. My father won't have my name spoken in the house." She retied the knot on her headscarf. "It doesn't matter now. I have a new name, Zaina, and a new life. Ahmed said it means beauty. Will you change the names for your story?"

  "I can if you want me to. I thought you didn't care what your parents think."

  "Ravensby's a small place. Everyone knows everyone else. I don't see why I should be a source of amusement for them."

  "I thought you were proud to be where you are? Shouldn't they be allowed to know that there is happiness in the outside world, beyond the harbour and the call centre?"

  "As in Christianity, pride is a sin for Muslims. And I don't want to be held up as an example for anyone else. I love my husband, but I still miss my family. Even my dad."

  "Do you want me to carry a message to them?"

  She stared at her tea for a long time. Then she lifted her eyes to mine. "No."

  I drank down the remaining tea and stood, collecting my umbrella from beside the chair.

  "Sure?"

  "Too much has been said already."

  "As you wish. Thanks for the tea. Please give my apologies to your husband. I didn't intend to provoke him."

  I turned and nodded to Ahmed, who watched me to the door. She stood to clear the glass teacups and crossed back to the counter.

  As I was closing the door, she called back to me, "Please?"

  I put my head back around the door.

  "Tell my sister I miss her." There was a pensive tension in her expression. I think she would have said more if she could.

  I nodded and left.

  As I walked back through the centre to the bus station, my mind circled around Karen and her family. I could see why Greg wanted me to leave this alone. If the disappearances were all this messy then they were better left as they were. I couldn't help feeling, though, that there was more to it, that Karen was only part of a larger picture. When Garvin had given me the mission and said it was up my street, he must have meant more than elopement, surely?

  Having used the Ways twice already that day, I did not trust myself to use them again without becoming distracted and lost. Instead, the nearby bus station offered me a ride that would eventually carry me back to Ravensby. I would arrive late, but despite the interrupted sleep of the previous night I felt restless, not tired. A daughter I couldn't find, a pregnant girlfriend somewhere on the road, an enemy returned and a puzzle I couldn't fathom. I let my mind chew on all those as the bus rumbled over the Yorkshire wolds and down to the coast, the twilight creeping up the hillsides as shadows slid into the valleys. When it finally hissed to a stop in Ravensby, it was dark.

  The pubs along the seafront spilled drinkers out on to the pavement. The wind died leaving the evening cool but not chilly. The chip shop was open so I bought cod fried in batter, fresh cooked, so I had to wait. I asked if the fish were locally caught. The answer was terse: not likely. Was there so little support for local industry?

  I took my paper-wrapped parcel down to the bench at the end of the harbour wall where the green and red lights gleamed to guide returning boats and the scents of diesel and seaweed were replaced by salt and ozone. I watched the waves trying to undercut the steep bank on the other side of the harbour and ate until my fingers were greasy with chip fat and my lips gritty and sore with salt. I dropped the paper in the bin and walked slowly back along the harbour wall, counting the boats and noting that there were too many to moor at the wall. Some were tethered to others, in places three deep. Was this the consequence of fishing quotas: no reason to work the boats any more? Or did the call centre have its attractions compared to the waves, the weather and the dark?

  The dock wall ran in a long seashell spiral, punctuated with iron rings every few yards. I followed it round, watching the lights reflect off the water. I had caught fish from such a harbour, years before, using a line weighted with lead, hooks hanging off the side, baited with bread. I thought Alex would be delighted to catch the wriggling slivers of silver, but she was only concerned that they be released unhurt. When one swallowed the hook and I had to kill it to get it loose, she cried and would not look at me for the rest of the day. I didn't catch any more.

  At the end of the harbour the road kinked around the headland, leaving it without pavement and rising to look over the harbour at one side and a shingle beach at the other. Below, massive blocks of concrete tumbled out into the water at the promontory, breaking up the waves, but you could already see that the water was winning. Sooner or later the road would crumble into the sea.

  The road curved around and followed the line of the hill above the beach, each house perched above the next to get a better view. The lights dwindled until there were only the pale ghosts of gulls riding the updraft from the cliff. A path dropped away from the road on to the beach and I crunched my way down, my boots sliding on stones until it levelled out into shingle, shifting with the sea.

  The waves were luminous in the dark, rising sharply to foam on the shore then sift back into the swell. The breeze buffeted me, tugging at either end of the umbrella, twisting and testing my grip. Each wave was a rush, then a sigh. It had a rhythm of its own, irregular and slow, a leviathan snore.

  My thoughts drifted to Blackbird and I was thinking that I would retrace my steps before the tide turned and cut me off from the road, when I encountered something strange. I would have noticed it earlier if I'd been concentrating, but the slow thrum of power beneath me echoed the crump and slide of the waves in a way that felt so natural, it was almost invisible. A Waypoint? There was nothing in my codex about a node on the beach.

  I felt downwards beneath me, testing the
power. Not a Way-point, but something else. I walked slowly up and down the shingle, using the feeling to follow the line. It tracked the line of a stream that ran from tumbled rocks below the cliff down to the sea, staining the shingle dark. I followed it upstream. As I came to the rocks I felt another sensation, a dark prickling across my skin, an urge to turn away. There was a warding. I pushed into it, curious now as to who would place a warding here, and why. What was there to protect?

  The warding changed. I found myself looking up at the rock face, wondering how safe it was, imagining rocks crumbling, falling in an avalanche of tumbling stone and dust, crushing bones. Even more curious. The simple warding I had placed on my bag was for the zip to jam, but it was just that. If someone tried to force it, it would not change into something else since I was not there to drive it. There was no intelligence in it.

  This was different. I pressed forward again and had the immediate sense that the tide had changed. If I didn't leave right now, I would be trapped. I looked behind me. Was the water closer? Were the waves coming higher up the beach? I looked back at the rocks. The cliff face leaned over me, hanging unsupported. A strong wave would bring the whole cliff down, sliding and crashing into the surf, burying anything in its path under tons of soil and stones.

  The last time I encountered a warding this strong had been in the Royal Courts of Justice. The Shade Solandre had left a foreboding, a sense that there was danger waiting for whoever entered. It had been left to keep away the security guards and as a distraction from the real peril that awaited there. She had not remained to guide it, so I was able to overcome it by embracing the creeping unease, holding it up to examination and recognising it for what it was – a baseless fear.

  The way this warding shifted and altered, seeking to exploit my fears and find the cracks in my confidence, meant that there was someone giving it intention, someone with power. As I pressed against it, recognising it for what it was, the reaction would warn them that I was here. They would feel me pushing the boundary, testing their strength. The umbrella in my hand became a sword.

  I pressed in, clambering over the rocks, following the stream of power. Great slabs of stone lent each other support, tumbled and tilted after some great collapse. The gaps between were deeper darkness, slimy with seaweed and treacherous underfoot. My mind conjured sharp-clawed crabs and poison-barbed spiny urchins. I rejected those too, easing under the arch of rock into the space beyond, finding a smooth cleft in the rockface, softly luminous with algae where the stream emptied out under the rocks. The warding was intense now, leaving me sweating and claustrophobic as I squeezed through a shallow dip into the gap. The narrow gash of stone clenched around me so that with only a minuscule shrug the earth would grind me up and spit me out. I felt the beginnings of that shrug, the initial trembling in the earth before the quake that would grind one face against the other, chewing me between granite teeth, and then it was gone.

  The cave was a tall arch, smooth-sided and worn to the touch, buttressed by pillars of striated stone. The rock floor was gently dished with the stream running through a net of intricate grooves cut deep, so that the water babbled and tinkled beneath my feet. A soft glow filled the space, lit from hollow niches scooped from the wall. In each niche was a skull, human size, bare teeth glinting in the light from the rock behind, eye sockets bearing empty witness. The skulls looked old, the bone yellow and waxy in the diffuse light, the pate parchment-thin. I drew the sword from the scabbard, slowly, silently.

  I started counting the grisly trophies as I followed the meandering stream back into the cave. At twentysomething I had to slide between two pillars. I squeezed through, holding the sword unsheathed in one hand, the scabbard in the other behind me, ready to fend off any ambush, but found only more eyeless masks to mark my progress. Ahead, the rock overhead dipped, the roof running into stalactite dribbles between long teeth of stone, open like a maw. The atmosphere felt damp here, and there was a slow dripping. Through the maw, a night-black pool opened out under an upturned bowl of swirled stone. Drips from the roof created expanding circles in the mirror surface, reflecting the ring of glowing grins from the niches spaced around the pool. The skulls looked newer here, the brow-bones white and gleaming.

  "You are unwanted here." The voice came from beyond the pool – the dark, the water and the rock making it difficult to pinpoint the source.

  "The warding gives that impression."

  "You bring bare steel and expect a welcome?"

  I slid the sword slowly back into the sheath, holding it ready. I could draw it if I needed to. "Is that better?"

  "Improved. Now it is only marred by your presence. Remove that and my equanimity will return."

  "Do you make all your guests so welcome?"

  "You are not my guest, Warder."

  "Or do you let them stay only as long as they light your domain?" I swung my arm out, following the ring of lights from empty eye-sockets.

  "Do the Warders involve themselves with trifles now? Is the business of the High Court so dull that the Lords and Ladies must concern themselves with me? What have I done to draw such attention?"

  "That's a good question. What have you done?"

  "Me? I have kept my promise, that's what I've done. I kept my word. It is for others to keep theirs."

  "And what promise is it that you keep?"

  "Four times score, times score again. Where are their promises now? Where are they? Faithless, feckless, feeble scum, worth naught but the ground they grub in. A few toys, a few trinkets and they're lost. Well, they're reaping a just harvest now, aren't they?"

  "Are they?"

  "Leave, Warder. Leave and do not return. There is nothing for you here. Just hollow bones and hollow promises. An empty harvest."

  "Where are the girls? What have you done with them?"

  "The girls? Ah, yes, the girls. Maids, mothers and daughters. See them arrayed around you, proof of a bargain sealed and kept. But there must be another, and soon! It is time!"

  "No more. That's enough." I drew the sword, letting the blade ring. "You may not have another."

  "Fool! Let's see you sharpen your steel with water and stone. Then see how keen you become."

  There was a slithering sucking sound and the water bulged momentarily, ripples spreading from the opposite side of the pool out towards me. I braced my feet, readying my stance, expecting a lunge from the water. The ripples bounced from the edge and reflected. Then a low rumbling shivered through the rock. The grinding of great stones vibrated through the floor. The pool shivered and bulged, then exploded in a great fount of white water. My feet were swept out from under me and I was skimming backwards, slithering in the wild water. I slammed against the twin pillars and the water pressed against me until I was squeezed through the gap. I struggled to hold my sword as I was bounced between the smooth walls, feeling it score down the rock. The water crashed into the crevice and I was thrown up and out, popped like a cork, to thump heavily into the shingle under a stream of spray, my scabbard and sword still in hand.

  Garvin would have been proud.

  A low chuckle greeted me as I slowly sheathed the sword and rolled over, testing for breaks and bruises.

  "Dogstar, you look a little flushed." It was Raffmir.

  "Very funny." Nothing was broken and I was used to the bruises.

  "I see that you are enhancing the reputation of the Warders, even as we speak."

  "What are you doing here?" I looked around but he was alone. "Weren't you supposed to have an escort?"

  "My diplomatic liaison appears to be unable to follow where I lead, but I'm sure someone will arrive in due course. However, I thought I would take the opportunity to speak discreetly. I must apologise. I hadn't expected to find you bathing, and fully dressed too." He smiled and offered me his hand.

  I waved him away and stood, pushing myself unsteadily to my feet on the shifting shingle. "What do you want, Raffmir?"

  "If it's a bad time, I can come back later. Perhaps y
ou hadn't finished your ablutions?"

  "Just… say what you came to say. You didn't come here to give me marks on style and presentation."

  "Hmm, presentation. Is that weed in your hair?"

  I brushed sand into my hair, trying to remove the weed, before realising that there was no weed. "Very funny. Am I keeping you? Is there someone else who would appreciate your banter, someone with a more childish sense of humour, perhaps?"

  "I can think of no one for whom it would be more appropriate, but I didn't come to comment on the weakness of your tactics, I came to offer my help."

  "Your help? Doing what? Are you volunteering for the Warders?"

  "Not as a Warder, no. I wanted to offer my personal assistance with the difficulties you're having."

  "Difficulties?"

  "Your daughter. I believe you may have misplaced her."

  "Why would you think that?" I didn't want Raffmir anywhere near my daughter, even though he was sworn not to harm her.

  "Is she not lost, then? Do you have her secreted safely somewhere?"

  "I'm not sure where she is," I told him, being careful to speak only the truth, "but that's not unusual. She has her own life."

  "All's well, then." The sardonic smile appeared on his lips. "But if you do happen to lose track of her, then my offer of assistance still stands." He made to leave, walking back along the beach.

  "Why would I come to you for assistance, Raffmir? I told you before, you don't have anything I want."

  He paused in his walk across the shingle, and spoke without turning back, his voice almost drowned out by the sibilant crash of the waves.

  "Dear boy, because I am the only one who can show you how to reach her."

  He walked away into the dark. I stumbled after him, my feet sliding on the loose stones underfoot. "You know where she is. Where is she, Raffmir? Where have they taken her?"

  I ran after him, following the track just above the tide where the ground was more solid. It was no use. He'd gone. My words found an empty beach. I willed the sword to be an umbrella again and scrambled my way back up the incline, covered in grit and sand, still soaked to the skin. The wind chilled me quickly and by the time I reached the road I was shivering, despite the warm night. All the way back to the guest house I watched the shadows, wondering if he was lurking there, amusing himself with my misfortune. When I arrived at The Dolphin, I had to use my key. Nevertheless, Martha was waiting for me.