‘Right,’ said Fliss. ‘That’s settled. Now, d’you think we can forget about Ellie-May and that ghastly cupboard, just for a few hours, and have some fun? We’re supposed to be on holiday, you know.’
Gary pulled a wry face. ‘It won’t be easy, Fliss.’
Trot shrugged. ‘I’m scared as a rat thinking about tonight, but what’s the point? Fretting isn’t going to make it go away, so we might as well enjoy ourselves while we can.’
‘Trot’s right,’ said Lisa. ‘We’re on holiday. Let’s at least explore some of these ruins before the teachers get bored and call us together.’
They split up and wandered about, gazing at the walls and the high, slender windows. Fliss tried to imagine what the place must have looked like long ago, with a roof, and stained glass, and flagstones where all this grass now grew, but it was impossible. Anyway, she told herself, I like it better as it is now. You can see the sky. There are birds, and grass, and sunlight, and I don’t like gloomy places.
She shivered.
THEY STAYED AN hour among the ruins, then assembled for the clifftop walk to Saltwick Bay. It was just after eleven o’clock. The sun, which had shone brightly as they left The Crow’s Nest, was now a fuzzy pink ball. A cool breeze was coming off the sea, and the eastern horizon was hidden by mist.
Mr Hepworth gazed out to sea. ‘This mist is known as a sea-fret,’ he told them, ‘and sea-frets are very common on this coast. You probably feel a bit chilled just now, but once we start walking you’ll be all right.’ He turned and pointed. ‘That collection of buildings is the Coastguard Station. The path goes right past it, and that’s where this morning’s walk really begins. Who can tell us what coastguards do? Yes, Keith?’
‘Guard the coast, Sir.’
‘Well, yes. What sort of things do they look out for, d’you think?’
‘Shipwrecks, Sir. People drowning and that.’
‘That’s right. Vessels or persons in trouble at sea – including those silly beggars who keep getting themselves washed out on lilos and old tyres. They also watch for people stuck or injured on cliffs, and for distress rockets and signs of foul weather. Right – let’s go.’
They filed across the Abbey Plain and up past the Coastguard Station. The path was part of the Cleveland Way, and countless boots had churned it into sticky mud, permanent except in the longest dry spells. Because of this, duckboards had been laid down, so that most of the path between Whitby and Saltwick was under wooden slats.
‘What a weird track,’ said Maureen. ‘It’s like a raft that goes on for ever.’
‘I hope it doesn’t go on for ever,’ her twin retorted. ‘It kills your feet.’
It didn’t go on for ever. They’d been walking twenty-five minutes, on the flat and over stiles, when the boards ended and they found themselves on a tarmac road which went through the middle of a caravan holiday camp. Just beyond the camp was a muddy pathway which led from the clifftop to the beach. Mr Hepworth lifted his hand.
‘Right. This is Saltwick Bay.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s twenty-five to twelve, and if it stays fine we’ll be here till about half-past four, so there’s plenty of time. We’ll eat lunch at half-past twelve. In the meantime you may paddle, play on the sand, look for fossils in the cliff-face or collect shells and pebbles on the beach. You are not, repeat not, to do any of the following: sit down in the surf and get your clothing wet. Attempt to climb the cliff. Throw stones or other hard missiles. Murder one another. Chuck your best friend into the sea. Utter shrieks, bellows or similar prehistoric noises, or find a tiny child with a sandcastle and flatten the sandcastle, the tiny child, or both. Is that clear?’
It was.
The bay was sandy in some parts and rocky in others. Fliss and Lisa sat on a rock to remove their boots and socks, then ran down to the water’s edge, where they rolled up their jeans and waited for a wavelet to wash over their feet.
‘Ooh, it’s freezing!’ Fliss scampered clear and stood with her hands in her anorak pockets, curling her toes in the wet sand. Lisa gasped and screwed up her face but refused to budge. The wavelet spent itself and rushed back.
‘Hey, that’s weird!’ She flung out her arms for balance. ‘If you look down when the wave’s going back you seem to be sliding backwards up the beach at terrific speed – like skiing in reverse. I nearly fell over.’
‘I remember that from when I was little,’ said Fliss. ‘It happened the first time I ever paddled. I howled, and it was ages before my mum could get me in the sea again.’
‘There’s something else as well,’ laughed Lisa, as a second wavelet ran back. ‘The water washes the sand away from under your heels. It’s like a big hole opening up to swallow you. I bet that’s why you were frightened. Come and have a go.’
They played along the edge of the sea till it was half-past twelve and Mrs Evans called them to come and eat lunch. They sat on rocks and munched, burying their feet in the dry sand for warmth.
‘I’d no idea it was lunchtime,’ said Fliss. ‘We only seem to have been here about five minutes.’
‘That’s ’cause we’re having fun,’ Lisa replied. ‘If it was maths, it’d seem like five hours.’
Grant Cooper and Robert Field had been looking for fossils along the foot of the cliff. They’d dug some out and brought them back in a polythene bag. Mr Hepworth tipped them on a flat rock and spread them out. Everybody gathered round, and the teacher picked out the best specimens.
‘Look at this.’ He held up a slender, cylindrical object which came to a point at one end. ‘This is a belemnite. It lived in the sea millions of years ago and looked something like a squid.’
‘It looks something like a bullet now,’ observed Andrew Roberts. Mrs Evans gave him one of her looks.
‘And this one’s a gryphia, or devil’s toenail, to give it its popular name. It looks similar to a mussel, but it too lived millions of years ago. And this,’ he held up a thick disc with a curled pattern on it, ‘is an ammonite. It looks snail-like, and you might think it slithered slowly along the seabed but it didn’t. It swam, catching its food with its many tentacles.’
‘How do they know, Sir?’ asked Haley Denton.
‘Know what, Haley?’
‘That it swam about, Sir. There were no people then, and there are no ammerites or whatever now, so how do they know what it did?’
‘Ah – good question, Haley. Well, one thing they do is look at creatures which are built in a similar way, and are alive today. There’s a creature called the nautilus which is something like an ammonite. They know how it gets around, so they’re pretty sure the ammonite got around in a similar way. D’you see?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
When everything had been eaten and washed down with canned pop, the children went off in twos and threes to do whatever they felt like doing. It was a quarter-past one. The mist had thickened, blotting out the sun, and the breeze gusted spitefully, sharp with blown sand. The holidaymakers had withdrawn to their caravans, so that the children of Bottomtop Middle had the beach to themselves. They went barefoot, but did not remove their anoraks.
Fliss and Lisa ranged far along the tideline, looking for shells and fancy pebbles. They found no shells, except some blue-black fragments of broken mussel which they spurned. There were plenty of pebbles though, and some were quite pretty, especially when wet. They picked up the best ones, putting them in the bags they’d saved from lunch. It was absorbing work, and when Fliss finally looked up she was amazed to see how far they’d come.
‘Hey, look – we’re miles from anyone else. The teachers look like dots.’
‘That’s just how I like them,’ chuckled Lisa. ‘We can’t go any further, though – we’ve run out of beach.’
It was true. In front of them a great, dark headland jutted into the sea. Gulls skimmed screaming along the face of its cliff but the still air felt less cold.
‘There’s no wind here,’ said Fliss. ‘Let’s stay for a bit. Look – the tide’s swept all
the rubbish into a corner like Mrs Clarke at school. There might be something good.’
They waded through the flotsam with their heads down, turning it over with their feet, exclaiming from time to time as some new find came to light. A lobster pot smashed in a storm. A clump of orange line, hopelessly tangled. A dead gull.
Fliss worked steadily along the base of the cliff, seeking mermaids and Spanish gold. She heard the hiss of surf on sand, and glanced up to find she d almost reached the sea. As she stood looking out, her eyes were drawn to a dark, spray-drenched rock, and to the bird which sat on it.
It was black, and it held out its ragged wings as though waiting for the wind to dry them. Fliss shivered as she gazed at it, feeling the magic drain out of the day. It reminded her of something. A witch perhaps, or a broken umbrella. Or the iron crow on the Gate of Fate.
WHEN FLISS AND Lisa got back, the teachers had already called everybody together for the return journey. It was only a quarter-past three, but the mist had thickened and there was a hint of drizzle in it. Some of the kids were sitting on rocks, drying their feet with gritty towels, pulling on socks and boots. Others stood waiting with their hoods up and bags of pebbles dangling at their sides. A small party, supervised by Mrs Evans, was picking up the last scraps of litter. Bottomtop Middle prided itself on the fact that whenever a group of its children vacated a site, they left no evidence that they had ever been there.
As they trudged up towards the path in the cliff, Fliss saw a large, slate-coloured pebble lying on the sand. Something about it appealed to her – its perfect oval shape perhaps, or its wonderful smoothness. She bent and picked it up. It was thick, and far heavier than she’d expected, and when she tried to add it to the collection in her polythene bag, it wouldn’t fit. She was cramming it in her anorak pocket when Mrs Evans, who was bringing up the rear, said, ‘Felicity – you don’t really want that, dear. It’s far too big. You’ll be crippled by the time you’ve carried it all the way back to Whitby, not to mention the fact that it’ll probably tear your pocket. Throw it away.’
Fliss was a quiet girl who never argued with her teachers, and so she surprised herself as well as Mrs Evans when she said, ‘I like it, Miss. I want to keep it.’
It was lucky for Fliss that Richard Varley chose that moment to leap on Barry Tune’s back. As the two boys fell on to the sand, Mrs Evans called sharply and hurried to separate them, and by the time she had done so the line of children was toiling up the cliff path. She had to put on a spurt to catch up, and the pebble incident was forgotten.
The rest of the walk back was uneventful, except that it started to rain in earnest which made the duckboards slippery. Several children fell, to the delight of the rest, who laughed and cheered their classmates’ misfortune.
By twenty to five they were back at The Crow’s Nest, drenched and happy. They were sent to their rooms to change and to write up their journals. It was during this interlude that Fliss and Lisa, Trot and Gary met briefly on the fourth-floor landing.
‘We all set for tonight?’ asked Fliss. She felt tense, and was amazed that for a few hours today she’d actually succeeded in forgetting about all of this.
The others nodded. ‘Same time, same place,’ said Trot. ‘And let’s hope nothing happens.’
‘Any news of Ellie-May?’ asked Lisa.
Gary shrugged. ‘I saw Mrs Marriott going into her room as I came up. Maybe they’ll call her parents to take her home or something.’
‘Oh, I wish they would,’ sighed Fliss. ‘I’m fed up of feeling scared.’
Trot nodded. ‘Me too.’
‘We all are,’ said Lisa. ‘Who wouldn’t be?’
After tea, everybody had to rest quietly for an hour in their rooms to let their food settle before Mrs Evans took them swimming. Fliss couldn’t rest. There was something she had to do. She looked out of the window. Yes, old Sal was there as usual. Mumbling something about going to the toilet, Fliss left the room, slipped down the stairs and let herself out. It was still raining.
The old woman looked up as the girl reached the shelter. Fliss smiled. ‘Hello.’
Sal nodded. ‘Evenin’.’
Fliss blushed, looking down at her feet. She didn’t know what to say.
‘I – I’m staying at The Crow’s Nest.’
‘Aye, I know.’
‘I’ve seen you lots of times. Through the window.’
The crone nodded. ‘Windows is the eyes of a house.’
Fliss smiled. ‘Yes. Eyes, watching the sea. Lucky old house.’
‘Lucky?’ Something rattled in Sal’s throat. ‘You’re wrong, child. It’s got the other eye, see. The eye that sleeps by day.’
‘Oh, has it?’ Fliss smiled, not sure whether she ought to. The eye that sleeps by day. Sounds barmy but then, so does room thirteen. Should she mention room thirteen to Sal? No. There wasn’t time. It only needed a teacher to look in room ten and she’d be in more trouble. She looked at the old woman. ‘I’d better get back. They’ll be wondering –’ She let the sentence hang, turned and ran through the rain with her head down.
Nobody had missed her, and when the swimming party set out twenty minutes later old Sal had gone. The rain-lashed streets were practically deserted, and when they got to the pool they found that they had it almost to themselves. They made the most of it, leaping and splashing and whooping in the warm, clear water under Mrs Evans’ watchful gaze. A puzzled frown settled for a moment on the teacher’s face when she noticed four of the children standing by the steps at the shallow end, taking no part in the revelry. Odd, she mused. Very odd. You’d think they were non-swimmers or something, but they’re not. Still, it’s up to them, isn’t it? Perhaps they’re tired from the walk today. Her eyes moved on, and the frown dissolved.
NOBODY CALLED ELLIE-MAY’S parents, or took her home. The word was that she was a little better, and might even be with them on the coach to Robin Hood’s Bay the following day.
Fliss wasn’t fooled. At ten o’clock she was lying on her back, staring at the wire mesh under Marie’s mattress, waiting for half-past eleven. Her hands were folded across her chest, and under them was the pebble from Saltwick Bay. She felt its weight when she breathed, and her fingers caressed its perfect, soothing smoothness.
She was tired. Not from swimming – neither she nor the other three had swum – but from the exertions of the day and a sleepless night before. The swimming must have finished off Marie and the twins, because they were zonked out already. She listened to their breathing and wondered if she could stay awake.
She didn’t. Not completely. At least twice she drifted off and woke with a start, thinking she’d missed the witching hour, but there was to be no such luck. When the town clock chimed for eleven-thirty she was wide awake, and scared.
This time she got to the bathroom first. Trot and Gary came nearly straightaway, but it was nineteen minutes to twelve when the door of room eleven opened and Lisa slipped out.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she whispered. ‘I fell asleep.’
‘It’s OK,’ Fliss told her. ‘I fell asleep too – twice.’
‘I was spark-out,’ admitted Trot. ‘This div had to shake me like a madman to wake me up.’ He looked at Gary. ‘Didn’t you, Gaz?’
Gary nodded. ‘You should’ve got yourself a stick of rock like mine. I sucked that from ten o’clock and didn’t nod off once.’
‘Dirty pig!’ shuddered Lisa. ‘I don’t know how you can.’
Gary grinned. ‘You should see it – it’s getting a really good point on it now.’
‘Tell you what I do want to see tonight,’ said Fliss. ‘I want to see how the thirteen gets on that door. I want to be watching when the clock starts striking midnight – see the exact moment the number appears.’
‘Yeah.’ Trot nodded. ‘Good idea. Let’s do that.’
‘I’ve brought my torch,’ said Lisa. ‘We can shine it on the door – right where the number will be. We’ll see really clearly then.’
Th
ey waited. Gary, sitting on the rim of the bath, looked at his watch every few seconds. Fliss went to the hand basin, ran a trickle of cold water into her cupped hand and sucked it up, watching herself in the mirror. Trot stood by the window, gazing out. The patterned glass splintered the light from a streetlamp. Lisa leaned on the wall by the door, switching her torch on and off.
After a while Fliss whispered, ‘Maybe she won’t come.’
‘It’s only five to,’ Gary told her. ‘Plenty of time yet.’ He hoped Fliss was right.
When his watch told him it was a minute to midnight, Gary got up and went over to the door. The others joined him, jostling quietly till they could all see and Lisa was at the front with her torch. ‘Thirteen seconds,’ he hissed, and began counting down. At fifteen seconds Lisa switched on and steadied the disc of light on the right spot.
It was not spectacular. As Gary whispered, ‘Zero,’ they heard the town clock chime, then strike. At about the fourth stroke they noticed a small shapeless mark on the door, and Lisa moved the torch slightly to get it in the centre of her beam. It was like a stain, lighter than the surrounding woodwork. As stroke followed stroke, the stain seemed to shrink and become paler, and then to divide, becoming two whitish blobs whose shapes altered until, by the twelfth stroke, they formed the figures one and three. As the echo died, they heard a door close somewhere below.
‘I think she’s coming,’ warned Fliss. ‘Switch the torch off, Lisa.’ She did so, plunging the landing into darkness. They withdrew and half closed the door again.
‘Did you see that?’ breathed Trot. ‘It just came out of nowhere. I can’t believe it.’
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