Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach (31 page)

"Oh dear. I'll have to try and keep more of my wits about me," Sandra said, holding out a hand.

"No, I mean it's still lost. One of your earrings, it could be."

Sandra gazed at him as if she hoped to see a joke. "I know I've got all the ones I brought with me. I'll show you if you like."

"No," Doug said with patience not too distinguishable from weariness. "I'm saying you lost it at the monastery. We'll need to go and look for it."

Sandra laughed, though not as if she'd found much of a joke. "You mean you want us to look for something else."

"Yes, because you'll see there's nothing there."

Sandra didn't respond at once. "Who's supposed to be going?"

"Just me and Nat and you two. Everyone else will be down on the beach."

"I'm sorry, Doug, but I'll be joining them. That's how I'd like to spend our last day."

"Mum, you really ought to see."

"I'll trust you to tell me what you find," Sandra said, which seemed to make the situation clearer to her. "Just you take care, both of you. You've no idea what there may be. Ray, what are you going to do?"

He suspected she was urging him to protect their children. "I'll go with them."

"Then you be careful as well. At least you know to be." Ray thought she was looking for a hindrance as she said "How are you meant to be getting there, Doug?"

Doug fought to contain a yawn, an effort that tugged his jaw from side to side. "We've rung the place in Sunset Beach and booked a car."

"You won't be driving," Sandra pleaded, "when you're so tired."

"Nat's going to." Doug was plainly more anxious to say "Honestly, it would be a whole lot better if you came to see as well. That way there can't be any disagreement over what we've seen."

"I've already said I won't and that's the end of it. You hurry up and come back and then we can all be together."

"Yes, come along," Ray said to Doug, "or we'll miss the bus." Natalie was perched on a swing in the play area and swaying very slightly back and forth. All around her the lifeless faces shared a grin, as if they were amused by somebody's behaviour. Ray remembered pushing her so high that she'd squealed with delight when she was William's age and some years older too. She was gazing at whoever was on the steps behind him, which he was sure was nobody only once she said "Are we waiting for mother?"

"They've decided she doesn't need to come," Doug said. "Shouldn't that be her decision?"

"It very much was," Ray said, trying not to feel accused. Natalie was silent until they'd left the Sunny View. "Is there much point in going without mother?"

"So long as we all agree what's there," Doug said. To Ray this felt like being rebuked in advance. At least resentment helped him avoid imagining what they might find, and he hadn't too much room for dread while they were running or in his case limping at a fast trot to the bus stop. Doug reached it in time to halt a bus, where several black-clad women occupied the front seats. Once Ray was seated opposite Natalie and Doug he found the breath to whisper "Why do you think they didn't bless us?"

"Sounds like you're going to tell us," Doug said without enthusiasm. Ray would have preferred them to see for themselves. "Because it was never us they meant."

"I don't think we want to know who," Natalie said. He couldn't say it had been their mother, let alone Tim and Jonquil. They would only dismiss the idea and feel worse about him. He stayed quiet all the way to Sunset Beach, where the dead neon looked dusty with the overcast. Very few people were about, and he sensed that Natalie and Doug were watching how he reacted to any of them. While they looked ordinary enough, how reassuring could that be? He did his best to ignore them but saw this was obvious to his children as well.

Matthias Motors occupied a small block of the main street. Beyond a plate-glass window that contained an open door of the same material, a large tanned man sat behind an extensive white desk in a white-tiled room. His grey hair hung well over his ears, and Ray saw that the man had missed rubbing the tan into his pinkish hairline. As the proprietor looked up he brushed hair back from his right ear. "You have been once," he said.

Ray might have demanded how he knew they'd visited the monastery if Doug hadn't saved him from what must surely be a misunderstanding. "Yes, we hired from you last week."

"It is good you come back."

Ray wasn't far from wondering aloud whether this meant few of his customers from Sunset Beach did. As the man drew a pad of contracts towards himself he said "Where do you go today?"

"Your monastery," Ray said before anybody else could speak.

He was hoping to prompt a rejoinder, but the man only picked up a plump ballpoint pen. "Who has licence?"

Natalie passed him her driving licence, and he set about copying the details onto the form. The sight of the bent head veiled on both sides by hair frustrated Ray so much that he said "That's the monastery of St Titus."

The man didn't glance up, but as he crammed an elongated number into a thin box he said "Why you go there?"

"Will one of you answer that?"

As Natalie parted her lips Doug said "I think you ought to, dad."

He had to be hoping the man would refute whatever Ray told him. "It's a return visit," Ray said. "We didn't go all the way down."

"You will take care."

Ray was unnerved by the echo of Sandra's concern. "You're saying there's some danger there."

The man raised his head at last. "Take care with car off road."

Ray felt as if his children's scepticism had fed the man the answer. He was about to subside into silence when the proprietor brushed his hair back once more. "What's that on your neck?" Ray blurted.

"Old scar."

The man bent to the form again, and his hair covered the pink indentation on the side of his neck, surely not before Natalie and Doug had seen. "From what?" Ray persisted.

"Old bite,"

"What bit you? Something big." When the man shrugged and kept his head down Ray said "When?"

"Years gone."

"Before tourists started coming to your island, would that be? Before there was someone else to bite?"

The man's lips stirred as he made the final entry on the contract form. They twisted into a faint wry smile, perhaps not too secret to be meant for Ray as well. It disappeared as the man lifted his head and held out the pen to Natalie. "You will sign," he said.

Ray was opening his mouth when Doug said "That's enough now, dad."

"Who's the parent here?" Ray muttered, but he'd already turned to leave the office. He would have felt ashamed, and not just for himself, to quarrel in front of the proprietor. The artificially swarthy man ushered Natalie and Doug outside and left them by an open jeep. As Ray climbed in the back he was unsurprised to see an icon of St Titus on the dashboard, and couldn't help thinking it symbolised powerlessness, the resignation that was the soul of Vasilema.

Natalie started the engine and eased the jeep out of the car park more warily than the deserted road seemed to call for. Ray could have thought she was afraid someone would appear without warning, but no doubt only he was. They encountered nobody until she turned the jeep along a road that led out of Sunset Beach, towards the forest on the horizon. As she drove across a junction Ray saw a couple in the side lane, which seemed not much brighter than twilit. "Slow down," he blurted. "Look what they're doing."

Natalie glanced along the lane and immediately put on speed. "For God's sake," Doug said. "What do you think they were?"

He didn't mean what Ray heard him ask. The young woman had been pressed against the wall of the alley with her eyes shut and her head thrown back while her thin companion mouthed her neck. "They were snogging, dad," Doug said. "It's that kind of place."

Ray might have been able to agree if he hadn't seen how the girl's arms had been outstretched in the manner of a crucifixion instead of embracing the man. There was no point in reminding Doug and Natalie of this, if they'd even noticed. Nobody spoke until they'd left the last apartments behind, and then Doug said "You mustn't think we don't know how you feel, dad?

"What are you telling me you know?"

"What all this is really about, all the things you've got mum believing now as well."

"You needn't think I did that. If you speak to her—"

"Didn't she accept how she was till she came here?" Natalie said, sending him an anguished look in the mirror.

"She'd managed to come to terms with it, we both had, but then—"

"Dad," Doug said, "you're the only one who hasn't. Maybe we know you better than you know yourself."

"I don't think I can be the only one."

"Yes, even William has. And Tim, and hasn't Jonquil too, Nat?"

"I believe it's helping her grow up. She's been doing everything she can to distract William."

"We know it must be harder for you than the rest of us, dad. But you mustn't get so desperate you start believing, well, you know."

"You've got it the wrong way round," Ray protested. "If I hadn't been so concerned for your mother I might have seen what was happening round here sooner."

"You always used to tell us not to be irrational, so don't be yourself."

"Doug's right," Natalie said.

"That isn't how you told me you felt yesterday."

"I've had more time to think about it, and I don't want the children to be led to believe that kind of thing. I'm sorry, that's the risk, and it can't do them any good at all."

Ray felt more alone than ever. His thoughts no longer seemed worth voicing, and he almost wished he could succumb to the drowsiness he saw overtaking his son, whose head kept sinking before it jerked vertical. He watched the forest appear to advance more gradually than the car was travelling, but at last the trees closed around the vehicle like silence rendered solid. The road had wound between the pines for miles before he wondered "When did we last see a bird? When did we even hear one?"

"Is he madder?" Doug mumbled too loosely to be quite awake, and Ray told himself that his son had asked "Does it matter?"

Perhaps Natalie was too intent on the twisted road to answer her father's question. As the scent of pines was invaded by another smell Ray could have taken the clouds that loured over the forest for an omen of the dark that lay in wait ahead. He wasn't smelling ash, he realised now, but desiccation. Beyond the next bend the silvery grey of the slim tree-trunks and the green of foliage gave way to blackness, and his mind seemed to darken in anticipation. Had the discolouration spread since his last visit? Now he saw how contorted the roots of the blackened trees were, as if they'd clutched at the soil in a convulsive bid to cling to life. Were those dead birds among the roots? Some of the dark lumps appeared to be covered with feathers, not leaves, and quite a few had collapsed, extruding twigs that might be bones. It wasn't worth drawing Natalie's attention to them, let alone Doug's drowsy awareness. Ray hoped he had something far more persuasive to show them, though the prospect threatened to rob him of breath.

When the car reached the end of the track he didn't feel as if it had emerged into the open. It might rather have been entering a place so innately dark that it rendered the daylight irrelevant, no more than an illusion. The monastery blocked off the dull sky like a shadow grown substantial, the essence of the blackness that steeped the ground beneath the car. The dozens of unglazed windows put Ray in mind of the multiple eyes of a spider, and their emptiness hinted at the deeper dark within. Natalie was parking the jeep at the foot of the steps that led up to the entrance when Doug uttered a slumbrous grumble. "A wither?"

"Yes, we're there," Ray told him. For a moment he thought his son sounded like a sleepy child, and then he recollected how much more Doug was—realised how he and Natalie were striving to protect their parents in every way they could believe might help. The handbrake rasped as Natalie hauled on the lever, and Doug mumbled "What chew dumb."

"It's the brake," Natalie said. "We're ready whenever you wake up."

It disconcerted Ray how much trouble Doug had with releasing his safety belt and clambering out of the jeep—more than he himself had. Doug blinked at the door when it failed to slam first time, and then he squeezed his eyes shut so fiercely that they seemed to tug his lips into a grimace while he slapped his cheeks with as much vigour as he shook his head. "All right, I'm back in the land of the living," he declared. "Somebody lead on."

He sounded too careless for Ray's liking, but then he and his sister thought the place was deserted. "Where do you want to look?" Ray said.

"We don't particularly want to look anywhere," Natalie retorted. "We thought you were convinced we hadn't gone down far enough."

"Even me and Pris," Doug said. "Even though we went nearly all the way and all we found were caves."

Ray had a foretaste of panic as he said "I thought you wanted me to see for myself."

"If that's what it takes."

"And while we can as well," Natalie said.

"That's the idea," Ray said and set about tramping to the entrance.

Doug and Natalie overtook him on the steps and helped him to the top, and he tried not to let this make him feel enfeebled, less capable of facing whatever lay ahead. Had the door collapsed further? It was hardly even recognisable as the remains of one. As Ray ventured through the entrance, darkness seemed to close around his brain and parch his mouth, and he had an unpleasant sense that it was waiting for him and his children. Surely all this was apprehension, not evidence of a monstrous thirst that their presence had roused, but Ray had to swallow hard so as to ask "Shall I lead the way?"

"Let me," Natalie said and slipped past him.

Did she think she was the most competent of them, or was she simply eager to get the visit finished? At the end of the outer passage, where the walls looked even more oppressively black, she turned away from the chapel. The muffled daylight reached through the windows of the empty cells to impart some dimness to the corridor, but fell short of the steps leading downwards at the end. Natalie hesitated on the topmost step, though only to activate the flashlight on her phone. When Doug switched his on as well Ray said "I'll leave mine off for now. Better keep one in reserve."