The Rocks Below

by Nigel Bird

  A large, black shape appeared in between bramble bushes.

  “Shoot,” Martin shouted.

  “Wait!” Dougal had seen it straight away, the red collar and the rough, matted hair. Knew it was Thumper. The Murphy’s dog. The enormous Irish Wolfhound. Dougal leaped over. Put his hand on Sam’s barrels and pushed just as the shot was fired. Managed to tilt the aim by a few degrees.

  A pitiful whimper filled the ears of the hunters as they looked at the dog before them, the muscle of his hind leg tattered and bloody.

  Thumper tried to get away from the threat, dragging his wounded limb behind him, but it was no good. Instead of escaping, he collapsed to the floor and licked his wounds.

  “Oh no, man.” Sam had realised his mistake. He fell to the ground and dropped his head between his knees.

  Dougal and Martin acted quickly.

  They were over to cushion Thumper’s head and to stop the licking.

  Martin had his belt off right away. Strapped it around the top of the thigh and pulled tight. “This should stop most of the bleeding. You hold on while I call for a…a what? An ambulance?”

  “Dinnae be daft,” Dougal snapped. “Give me your phone and I’ll get the vet. You hold on to this and put some pressure on the other bleeds.”

  Martin pulled a different pristine, white handkerchief from another pocket and applied it to the tiny holes on Thumper’s abdomen. He pressed hard to try and stem the flow as red petals stained the cloth, all the while talking to the dog as if it were a tiny child who’d lost its mother in a crowd.

  White Heat

  White Sands was the last of the East Lothian beaches to be cleared of rubbish.

  The county owed the Surfers Against Sewage a great deal for their help in tidying up the beaches so quickly. The movement had taken a break from their protests against the fracking in the central belt to work on something closer to their heart.

  “You wouldn’t believe how the businesses are getting away with it,” Hashtag told Sam. “Shame our government won’t ban it, like.” Hashtag had a hint of a Geordie accent that didn’t really suit him.

  Years of outdoor living had tanned his skin and sun-bleached the dreadlocks that he wore tied back in a ponytail held together with a yellow, tie-dyed scrunchy. He wore sunglasses that were like two dark mirrors in front of his eyes. He looked more like an exotic Frenchman than a boy from the streets of Newcastle.

  Then again, he looked more like a hippy than a police officer. He’d been working undercover for a few years when his love of surfing and the sea made him the perfect plant into the new Surfers Against Sewage movement. Problem was, he already sympathised with the cause, it being about keeping the water clean for bathers, so it was only a matter of time before he became a full convert to their ideas.

  From what he’d seen, the world was upside down. Here were these gentle people trying to make a difference while the government and the police were trying to stop them. That same government and police force were also allowing hydraulic fracturing to take place along the coal seams of Scotland. It was madness Hashtag thought and he wasn’t the only one. Pumping into veins and dikes to split them and extract hydrocarbons for energy use risked so much – air pollution, contamination of the surface water that people would be drinking and general spillages that might cause lord-knew-what. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was the chance of causing earth tremors and quakes.

  Things like this ought not to be messed with, not when there were so many renewable alternatives, but as always seemed to be the case, money and old-school ties seemed to be doing all the talking.

  That was why Hashtag had turned. Become one of the protestors. A double-agent no longer working for the police in his heart even though they still paid his wages and expected him to keep them in touch with the movements of the group’s leaders.

  He’d not only joined the protest group, he’d become one of the main organisers. His police bosses thought he was doing a great job; if only they’d realised that he’d fallen in love with a surfer girl and they were soon to have a baby together, or that the man was the force behind the group’s spreading of news via the internet, a skill that had earned him his new nickname.

  “I can’t see us winning this one,” he went on, all the while his eyes pointing in the direction of the police car that was parked just behind them. “Not unless the local people listen to us and join the action. Without them, the fracking goes ahead.”

  “I hear you,” Sam said as he drew stick men in the sand with his finger. “I really do. I’ll make sure I get to the protests when all this cleaning’s been done.”

  “Aye. One last effort to get these beaches into shape and we can go on with saving our water supply.”

  Along the beach, a gang of some fifty surfers and Dunbar volunteers were standing in a line that stretched over a mile of sand and rubbish.

  They walked ahead, each clearing the strip of land that was two metres to each side of them.

  Bags were filled with discarded fishing net, bottles, shoes, plastic toys, crates and rope, then dumped in the skips at the foot of the road where the old arcade had entertained the holiday makers in the years before cheap breaks abroad became the thing.

  “It was good of you to stop the protesting for us,” Sam said. “We’d have been busy for months if the council had been left to it.”

  Hashtag dropped his head and looked down at the sand in case anyone watching could lip-read. They could do things like that and he knew it.

  “Stop protesting? You must be joking. Tonight’s when we paint the town red, if you get my meaning.”

  “You spreading the word?”

  “The messages have gone out on Facebook and Twitter and around the circuit. It’ll be a big turnout, you wait and see.”

  “Where and when?”

  This time Hashtag didn’t speak.

  Instead, he wrote in the sand. 8 o’clock. Bridge to Nowhere.

  “And one more thing,” he said as he scribbled away the message. “You still got those paddle boards of yours?”

  “How many do you need?”

  “We’ll take as many as you’ve got.”

  The Lab

  Labs had always been Jenny Wilson’s favourite places since she first discovered them at High School.

  Science was a great leveller. It put the brains before the looks and that was important. It also meant that when everyone had their white coats on and their safety goggles, everyone was about as pretty as everybody else, something Dr Wilson treasured above all things.

  Better still, when you got to her level, there was rarely anyone about to get on your nerves or to get in the way and, if an occasional student happened by, they were usually too shy and nerdy to strike up a conversation.

  She stood in front of the X-ray defractometer and made sure her samples were in position. Each sample consisted of a slide where she’d put tiny amounts of crushed rock that she’d taken from the boulders on the beach in Dunbar.

  Crushing it up with the pestle and mortar hadn’t really given her any clues. It might have been granite, she thought, or quartz, but most definitely wasn’t the sandstone that one might have expected to find in the area.

  Whatever it was, she was convinced she’d never seen anything like it before. That she was about to expand the frontiers of geology and take the science in a new direction. That the results would tell her what she needed to know and take her a step closer to that Nobel Prize.

  With her 8 slides in place, she stepped back and closed the doors, catching sight of her unkempt grey hair and the biro she always seemed to carry behind her ear when she was in the university.

  She pressed start and stepped back to admire her work, not that there was anything to see. She’d shown many a student how to work the machine and had noted the disappointment in their faces on many occasions as nothing appeared to happen.

  They had little imagination, the youth of today, according to Jenny Wilson. They had to sense the x-rays. Get in tune
with their invisible powers. Trust in the technique she was demonstrating.

  She sat on a padded stool at the computer monitor and waited for the first results with an eagerness that even she wasn’t used to. Her fingers raked at her palms and wiped away the films of sweat that had formed there.

  The computer started to draw its line, slow as a sundial’s shadow.

  Wilson willed it to work faster, but this would require patience.

  She tapped her pencil to the rhythm of one Abba tune after another as the line of the graph was sketched out until everything came to a halt.

  The spectrum that had been drawn out had the look of the Himalayan mountains, peaks and troughs of varying heights. It wasn’t easy to read at a glance.

  There was pyrite and graphite and muscovite and quartz just as might be seen for slate.

  Wilson’s stomach dropped inside her like it was lurching. As if an elevator dropped five floors in one go.

  After all her hopes, to find nothing but slate wasn’t going to win her anything.

  On the keyboard she typed in the commands to get an overlay of the slate spectrum so that she could make her comparison.

  They were practically identical.

  Wilson screwed her eyes tightly shut, and when she opened them again she made herself focus.

  And there it was. Right in front of her. Just as she’d hoped it might be.

  Yes, the peaks were there, but not in the way they should be.

  Not enough of anything.

  Not as much inorganic matter as there should be.

  Something was definitely not right and the only way to make sure of that was to work her way through the other seven samples in the case.

  It was going to be a very long night.

  Wilson took out her phone and dialled the number for the Kalpna Indian restaurant. While she listened to the ringing, she decided on asking for the vegetable biryani.

  Whisky Galore

  Dougal came to the end of another fruitless patrol of the town.

  All he’d achieved was clearing off a bunch of unruly teenagers from the benches by the red friars’ tower at the store and the helping of Mrs Simms with her mobility buggy which she’d managed to get stuck in a muddy puddle when trying to take a short-cut over to her home.

  Not a gang of crooks or a stray dog in sight.

  It had been so uneventful that he was done and it was barely half past 7.

  Before going down to pay Doc Brown an early visit, Dougal stopped at the wall of the sea-cadets’ building.

  He pulled Sheba to heel and she flopped to the floor, her pink tongue lolling outside of her mouth and dripping saliva onto the pavement.

  Dougal reached inside his jacket and pulled out the silver flask he’d put there earlier without his wife seeing. He wasn’t in the habit of carrying around whisky, but he hadn’t felt right since the Thumper incident. He’d never harmed a creature that didn’t deserve it in his life and knowing that Thumper was still in isolation at the vet's and remained in a critical condition made the muscles of his stomach twitch. He may not have pulled the trigger, but he felt the weight of the guilt nonetheless.

  It was a fine Aberlour that he’d filled his flask with. As he took his drink he felt the sting on his lips, soaked up the flavours of peat with his tongue and relished the burning sensation of the alcohol as it trickled down his throat.

  “Kaaaaarh, that was good.” He raised his flask to Sheba and took another huge gulp. Another “Kwaarrrh.”

  The knots in his stomach were untied immediately and he placed his flask back in his pocket. He reached down to Sheba and unhooked the lead from the collar. “Off you go girl.”

  Sheba ran off down to the beach with only the white tip of her tail to be seen bobbing as she went.

  By the time Dougal caught up with her, she was sitting up with her ears pricked and staring into the Doc’s cave.

  “It’s me, Doc,” Dougal shouted up, but there was no response other than the flickering of the orange fire-light on the stone wall. “Come on now. You wouldn’t want to be making an old guy like me climb that wall, would you?”

  If the silence were anything to go by, he apparently would.

  “Then I’m coming up. You wait here, Sheba. Lie.”

  Sheba obeyed the command, but she maintained her state of alert.

  Dougal stepped over to the cliff.

  The climb didn’t look like anything much, but there weren’t many who could get up there without breaking a sweat.

  Dougal reached up to the highest finger hold he could reach, placed his foot on a jutting rock at knee height and pulled himself up. He repeated this until his chin was higher than the cave’s floor and he could get a look in.

  It was the way he remembered it from the last time he’d visited – a sleeping bag unrolled over a blanket that covered the floor, a half-finished packet of mints, a paperback book folded open and the fire contained within a set of bricks laid in a square.

  The only thing that was missing was the Doc.

  “He’s not here Sheba.” He knew she understood from the way she stretched her nose into the air. “Now where on Earth?”

  He turned and looked along the beach.

  The green of the warning light flashed on and off and allowed him to see the sand and pebbles below.

  Between flashes all was dark, but with the light on, he could make out the footprints from the rocks below leading out across the bay. They carried on until they reached the boulder that had arrived there with the storm and that was as far as he could make out.

  He didn’t take any time in getting down again and jumped from a point about half way up.

  When he landed, Sheba got up and barked. She went straight over to the prints and took a sniff, then ran along them to the end of the trail.

  Dougal wasn’t far behind, the exertion telling on him and his lungs feeling a burn.

  The footprints disappeared into nowhere.

  “Not possible,” he muttered.

  Sheba just barked.

  The last print was smudged in the sand, like Doc Brown had fallen over. At the next flash of green light, Dougal noticed the imprint of a body, as if the weight had fallen on the shoulder and make a strong impression.

  With the next flash, he saw the drag in the sand, like the Doc had been pulled along into the boulder itself, as if it had opened up and swallowed him up.

  “Too much Dr Who.”

  That was the moment the tide chose to reach him, the frothy white of the advanced party of waves lapping around Dougal’s shoes.

  “You cannae do this, it’s a possible crime scene.”

  He kicked at the water like he was King Canute and with about the same result.

  The water poured into the indentations left by the Doc’s body until they had completely vanished.

  Sheba danced around in the sea like it was party time. Dougal fiddled in his pockets to try and find his phone so he could take a picture or get someone from the station to come down and get a look and to prove that something was amiss.

  Instead of the phone, he found his flask.

  He became aware of the cold chill in his bones. The whisky would be the perfect antidote. And when he’d finished, he give the old-folks’ home a call. Maybe Doc Brown was having a night off from the outdoors and was safely wrapped up in a proper bed for a change.

  Round Midnight

  The midnight news tagged the area as the East Lothian Triangle.

  Strictly speaking, that was poppycock. Poor maths. It wasn’t as if there were three points to join together. Still, the goings on there had been strange.

  First it had been the dogs, then the twins at Tyninghame. Now it was the old doctor, missing from his Dunbar nursing home in the most unusual circumstances.

  The reports stopped short of calling Doctor Brown a tramp, but they hinted at an eccentric way of life that meant where he’d got to was anyone’s guess.

  Jenny Wilson scooped pot-noodles into her mouth, dripping b
eef and tomato sauce down her chin and not bothering to wipe it away. It wasn’t the perfect dessert to go with her Indian takeaway, but it felt good anyway.

  The news was making her increasingly anxious about her chances of keeping whatever discoveries she was about to make to herself, which made her swallow her food pretty much without chewing.

  In between gulps, she downed sips of strong coffee. Going to sleep was completely out of the question. She’d be able to sleep as much as she wanted once she’d analysed the thin sections of her rock and worked out where to go from there.

  Her hands had the shakes, partly from being in an under-heated building and partly from being thrilled at the prospect of becoming a leading scientist overnight.

  Top of her wish list was that she’d discover a new element that would be the key to cancer cures. She also fancied that she might be on the verge of solving the world’s energy problems.

  Worst case scenario? The filling in of one of the many gaps in the evolution of the Earth theories. That should still get her the approval she’d always sought.

  With the Pot Noodle carton empty and the caffeine making her feel queasy, she fell back in the chair and slapped her face to get the blood flowing again while the man on the TV went on about how Celtic would be champions by Christmas if none of the other teams found some form pretty soon.

  The slides of the sections of stone that she’d had prepared seemed perfect.

  She slipped one of them under the powerful microscope and saw a purply-blue haze when she took a look down the lenses.

  A few tweaks with the focus and things became clear.

  “Stupid fool. How could I have trusted a technician to get it right?”

  The truth was that by getting the technician to make the sections for her, she’d saved at least 2 hours of her own time. Without George, it would have been even later than it already was.

  Even so, they’d clearly managed to contaminate the sample. No way would there be animal cells in a rock sample unless someone had cut themselves and not bothered to clean up the mess.