Hard Light (34 page)

I scanned the horizon in front of me and saw Sam's skinny frame silhouetted against the bright sky. She stood beside the abandoned chest freezer at the dumping ground we'd passed a day ago, still wearing my black leather jacket. Her back was to me, as she raised and lowered her arm tirelessly. Each time she brought it down, that same hollow thump echoed across the moor.

I headed toward her, calling out in a low voice. She turned, grinning when she saw me. “Hey! Come here!”

“For Christ's sake, keep it down,” I warned.

Sam snorted. She was holding a large wooden mallet, its head the size of a shoebox. “They can't hear us up here. They were fighting, that's why I left. Like screaming cats in a bag, Adrian and that crazy munter.”

I looked at the freezer. The top was covered with hundreds of thumb-sized dog whelks, most of them crushed to a blue-gray mass of shell and slime. “What the hell are you doing?”

“What you said yesterday—I wanted to see how long it would take to get them and bring them up here.”

She nudged a white plastic bucket that had once contained sheetrock mud. It was half full of winkles.

“So how long did it take?”

“Not that long if you go at low tide. Back then, the coastline might've been shaped different—maybe it wouldn't have been such a long ways. It was hard carrying them up here. That thing's heavy, try it.”

I grasped the bucket's handle and hefted it. “No kidding. You carried that all the way here by yourself?”

She nodded and wiped a glistening bit of mollusk from her cheek. “Yeah, 'cause who's gonna help me.”

I set down the bucket and stared at the freezer again. She'd pushed most of the shells to one side, leaving a swath of glistening mucus like the track of a gigantic snail.

“Well, this is impressively disgusting.” I made a face. “Did you try eating one?”

“I did. Didn't taste like much. Gristly.” She set the mallet on the slime-covered metal, alongside a coffee mug and a small hammer. “You'd have to be really hungry to eat them raw. But they mightn't have been eating them. Winkles and whelks are related to those snails they made purple dye from in ancient Rome. They might have been smashing them up to make dye.”

I shook my head. “You are a font of knowledge, Sam. But listen, I need to lay low till it gets dark. Can you take me to that place we went yesterday, the barrow? Then point me the way toward Penzance?”

“Penzance?”

“Yeah. I need to get back to London.”

Sam stared at me in dismay. “You're leaving?”

“Yeah. I've got business back there.”

“But the train's out—the rail line got washed away.”

“Then I'll take a bus. I'll fucking walk,” I said impatiently. “But I need to go. And I don't want anyone else knowing about it, okay? Can you do that? Not tell your father or grandmother or Krishna? Or anyone else, if they ever ask.”

Sam swiped at her face again. She looked utterly crestfallen, and fighting tears.

“Why should I?” she demanded. “What did you do? You and Adrian and her and who else? Some fucked-up business, that's what. You're all a bunch of cunts.”

She turned to storm off. I grabbed her arm. She tried to wrench away but I pulled her toward me.

“Sam. Listen. This has nothing to do with you. Or them.” I pointed to where Kethelwite Farm brooded, out of sight. “They have nothing to do with me.”

“Then why'd they try to kill you?”

I let go of her. “Good point. When they were fighting, Adrian and Krishna—what did you hear?”

She shrugged but wouldn't meet my eyes. “Nothing. Nothing about you.”

We stood in silence. Sam hunched miserably in my leather jacket, black hair whipping around her face. For the first time I noticed a yellow backpack on the ground, patterned with purple lightning bolts. It looked like something that belonged to a much younger kid, except for the bag of loose tobacco protruding from a pocket.

Sam stared at the mess strewn across on the freezer, crushed mollusks and glistening slime. All the fire was gone from her fierce black eyes. Despair had smoothed out her features: She reminded me of Krishna as she slept beside me, and of Poppy, dead in her Stepney flat.
They were all broken people. I know, because I broke some of them.

After a minute I touched her shoulder. She shook my hand off, but she didn't move away.

I waited, then stepped closer to the freezer. I picked up a crushed shell, rubbed it between my fingers, and sniffed. It had a strange smell, nothing like dead fish. More like garlic. I grimaced and dropped it. Sam looked up at me, nodding.

“Right?” she said. “It smells right weird.”

I touched the freezer's slimy surface. “What was the dye you said they made? The ancient Greeks?”

“Tyrian purple. It was Romans, not Greeks. It's a different kind of snail from this one, but they could have used it the same way.”

“Tyrian purple, right. I remember now.” I hurried to the other side of the freezer, stooping to examine its surface. “Check this out—”

Frowning, Sam joined me. “What is it?”

“Look—see this here?” I waved my hand over the top of the freezer, a few inches above the snails' slime gleaming in the bright sun. “It's iridescent.”

Sam crouched and regarded the freezer curiously. “So?”

“So if you're looking at it from the right angle, you can see all kinds of colors. Like an oil slick, right?”

I crouched beside her, so that I was just above eye level with the freezer's top. In front of us, sun struck the glaze left by the crushed shells, a coruscating shimmer: violet, turquoise, sea green, the deep purplish red of clotted blood, a pale misty blue. Sam gazed at it in wonder.

“Why's it doing that?” she asked.

“It's the snail's mucus. Do you have anything white?”

“White?”

“Yeah, like a T-shirt or a handkerchief, something like that.”

Sam looked down at my leather jacket and tugged at the hem of a black T-shirt. She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“What about rolling papers?” I urged. “You roll your own cigarettes—do you have any papers?”

She nodded, excited, retrieved the yellow backpack and rummaged through it. “Here—”

She thrust out a pack of Rizla papers. I examined it and handed it back to her. “Your hands are smaller than mine—take out a bunch of those papers and see if you can put them end to end to make a strip. A square would be even better. If the papers are gummed it'll be easier.”

We sat cross-legged across from each other on the cold ground, huddling close to form a windbreak. I watched as she carefully removed the papers, one by one, holding up each to see where the adhesive was. It took a few minutes, but at last she held out her cupped hands, triumphantly displaying a makeshift sheet of paper a few inches square.

“Okay,” I said. I took the paper, stood, and found a space on the freezer that was relatively clean. “Get a couple of those snails. Big ones if you can. And the mallet.” I indicated the other end of the freezer. “Smash them up—carefully, we don't want a big mess. Get rid of as much of the shell as you can but keep the snail part.”

She did as I commanded. “Now bring them over here,” I said.

She scooped up the crushed remnants of snail, and once more we crouched side by side. I eyed the slimy mess in her hand. “Good job,” I said wryly.

Sam grinned. I positioned the little sheet of rolling papers on the freezer in front of us, pinning it down with my thumbs and forefingers.

I looked at her. “I want you to squeeze that stuff as hard as you can, so that it falls onto the paper. Then watch.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “Really?”

“Just do it!”

She wrinkled her nose, made a fist, and held it above the paper. Yellowish slime oozed from between her fingers and onto the paper, along with a few white threads like tiny worms. It smelled faintly but unmistakably of garlic.

“Those are the dye sacs,” I said, squinting at the wormy residue. “Or whatever it's called. Now pay attention.”

Sam hastily wiped her hands on some bracken and settled beside me. “What's going to happen?”

“Watch.”

Minutes passed. The paper looked as though someone had wiped their nose on it. More than once, Sam shot me a glance of barely contained skepticism. The hard sunlight blazed onto our bizarre tableau: two black-clad figures who squatted beside a rubbish heap and stared transfixed at a hash of crushed shells and slime. Sam started to fidget, and I began to feel a tremor of disappointment. Then …

“Look!” Sam cried breathlessly. She leaned forward to gaze at the paper wide-eyed. “It's changing!”

I edged closer, marveling. A pale grass-green streak bloomed across the paper, like a tendril of green fire. As we watched, the tendril spread, darkening to an oceanic emerald and then a startling azure that bled into an almost black purplish-crimson, before transforming into a glorious rich, twilit amethyst.

“What is it?” whispered Sam.

“It's a kind of dye,” I said. “The snail's mucus is photosensitive—it responds to light. A French zoologist named Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers discovered it in the 1800s. He was on an island, studying snails, and he noticed that the fishermen would squeeze the snails' guts onto their work shirts to dye them. So he started experimenting, and he realized the dye changed colors when exposed to direct sunlight. But it has to be the right kind of hard light—it can't be too hot, otherwise the slime dries out.”

“Fucking hell,” Sam murmured. “That's incredible.”

“Yeah, it was pretty brilliant. He began to soak pieces of silk and paper with the mucus, and press something on top of them—leaves or flowers or feathers. Then he'd put the paper between pieces of glass, and an image would develop. It's called a contact print, because you make a direct contact between an object and the photographic medium. It's basically the same process as when you put silver nitrate on paper—he created an emulsion, using the snail's dye. He came up with a kind of photography, almost before photography was invented.”

Sam looked at me, her face radiant with wonder and delight. “Like what you said about your camera, the chemicals on the plastic film!”

I smiled. “Touché. You remembered.”

She bit her lip, then suddenly nodded agitatedly as she scrambled to her feet. “Oh my god, oh my god…”

I jumped up, thinking that someone had crept up behind us. But we were still alone. The wind snatched the scrap of makeshift photo paper, and I watched it wink into oblivion in the dazzling sky.

“You have to see this!” Sam grabbed my arm. “Come on, I'll show you—”

I shook my head. “I told you, I have to go.”

“It's a better place to hide! Better than the babies' barrow. No one goes there but me, you'll see. Come on,
please
—”

I stood my ground. “Did you even hear me? I need someplace to lay low till tonight.”

“But that's what this is—it's in the fogou. Up by Carn Scrija, no one ever goes there. You'll see.” She stared at me imploringly, swiping tangled hair from her pale face. “Can't you just fucking trust me?”

I gazed across the moor. It appeared utterly desolate, the gorse rippling in the wind and a skein of black birds skimming above the crags of Carn Scrija. I turned back to Sam.

“You father knows where that fogou is. He explored it when he was a kid—that's where he found this.”

I dug out the two thaumatropes, indicating the one with the eye. Sam barely glanced at it.

“No, he doesn't,” she said vehemently. “Maybe he found something a long time ago, but there's chambers in there no one but me's seen. One was sealed up by a big rock inside. During the storm, it came down. At the bottom of Carn Scrija there was a rockfall, but the storm washed away those stones. Big ones, too. So you can see now—there's a little window that goes into the sealed-up chamber. I only found it day before yesterday.”

I looked at the ominous height of Carn Scrija. “You were running around up there in that snowstorm?”

She nodded. “Tamsin doesn't like me to climb it. She doesn't care about the other barrows, but she slapped me once when she found out I'd gone up Carn Scrija. I sneak when I can—when she's in Penzance or asleep or working on her movie. I go up there at night sometimes.”

“No shit.” I shot her an admiring look. “You got cojones, I'll give you that. You really climbed that in a snowstorm?”

“It's not so bad if you know where to go. I was worried she'd see my footprints, but it all melted before she came back. There were rivers down the hillside from all the rain and snow, that's what washed away the stones outside. Inside…”

She raised her shoulders. “Not sure how that big one moved. Maybe everything tumbling down outside jarred it. But you'll see. No one else knows it exists.
I discovered it
.” Her expression grew baleful. “If you tell anyone, I'll kill you.”

“How far is it from there to a road?”

“It's closer than here, or the farm—you can go down the back of Carn Scrija.” She glanced at the freezer, covered with crushed muck and drying slime, and bounced on her heels impatiently. “Listen to me! When you see the fogou, you'll get it.”

I stood a moment longer, weighing my options. At last I nodded. “Yeah, okay. But if you're dicking around with me, I'll kill
you
.”

Sam grinned. She gathered up her tools and tossed them into her backpack, waiting for me to get my bag. We started off across the moor for Carn Scrija.

 

39

From the midden, Carn Scrija had seemed a distant promontory. I'd expected it would take the better part of an hour to reach it.

But distances on the moor were confoundingly deceptive, even in broad daylight. Again and again, we'd cross what appeared to be a level stretch of heather and bracken, an ancient field system hemmed in by stone walls, and without warning the moor would dip into a shadowy hollow, or rise to a stony outcropping topped by cairns or huge boulders. Now and then a shadow flickered at the corner of my vision and I'd freeze, scanning the moor for some sign that we were being followed. I'd see only a solitary crow or chough rise from the undergrowth, black wings flapping until it caught an updraft and glided silently into the blue sky.