Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~

After an hour of stress and strain, the pain and exhaustion of clambering across the rocks, Sonali wasn't thinking straight – she couldn't've been thinking straight, because she had ducked inside the cave before her brain even registered what a godawful stupid idea this was. Don't go in caves. It's dark and you can't see where you're going, you'll hit your head and pass out and the tide will come in and you'll drown. It's dark and you'll get lost and you'll pass out and freeze to death. All the stuff her parents had leaned on her and Naresh about whenever they were at the beach – all the stuff she kept saying to the twins when she was watching them at the beach, all of it, straight out the window. Sonali leaned against the wall, the chill of the rock leaching through her beat-up trackie top, and tried to collect herself. There was still light here, kind of; she was only just inside the entrance and the sun was still high enough that the cave wasn't completely in shadow. She put her left hand on the wall, and made sure that her right was on her phone, in her jacket pocket. Slowly, slowly, don't bump your head, don't take your hand off the wall, don't go in anyplace you'd have to belly-crawl. If you keep your same hand on the wall, no matter how far, you can put your other hand on the same wall next to it, turn around, and always come out the way you came in.

The cave was larger inside than Sonali expected – you don't just get caves, normally, that are near on big enough to stand up and walk around in. This one was really big, for a cave in the shadows of Aberdeen, even one with an entrance that was under water most of the time. The ceiling wasn't closing in on her, and after a minute or two of waiting, breathing softly, hoping no one was right there waiting to jump out at her, she turned her phone on to have a look around.

In the half-light of the screen was something beyond strange. Not just the near-gallery ceiling in this chamber, nor the sloping tunnel down and out she'd inched along to get up here, but the bank of smooth round stones, like the bed of a river far too wide for the narrow stream still blurbling through the middle of it, down the tunnel and away to the ocean – and the places where those stones were disturbed. Knowing this was a bad idea, knowing that she shouldn't take her hand off the wall, knowing that if this was what it looked like – the place she thought it was – she would be giving herself totally away, Sonali stepped forward, light in front of her, to look closer at the stones and the things beneath them.

There were stones on the bank, and then there were stones on piles of things piled on the bank: cairns in layers, layers of cloth – cold but soft to the touch, held down just over the high-water-line – held down by stones that someone had placed there for a purpose. In a cave with no access from inland that Sonali could see right away, drowned at high tide. They were folded up, not discarded but... cairned, cairned, like someone would have call for them sometime else. Sonali didn't dare disturb them – there was no telling when whoever'd weighted them down might come back – and couldn't tell in the phone half-light – couldn't remember even in the best case – if any of the clothes in any of the piles might match up with Nicky Dunbar or Liam Conroy. One, two, three, four piles, and the fourth was well strange: only one layer, folded up over and over on itself, something tough and rigid like an old oilskin raincoat, but strange to the touch, like fine fur on it under Sonali's battered and half-frozen fingertips. That was really strange, even among clothes under cairns in a cave below the tide, and Sonali reached out for one of the stones to lift it off, shift whatever this thing was out from under, when she suddenly felt something else and stopped cold.

There was someone else here. No, there was someone else coming – nothing she could see or hear or smell was saying so, but she knew it, somehow, just the same as if it had been written on the rocks under her feet, tattooed onto her hands. She had to hide, she had to get out of sight somewhere, anywhere – with a clatter she pushed herself up again, dashing into the wall with a thud, scrabbling along until she found the inlet, the narrow pipe that the stream through the cave waterfalled down through from wherever it had gotten sunk under the land. Sonali wedged herself in, trying to listen back around the corner, trying not to sneeze in the shock of the icy water flowing down over her shoulder and across her back, hoping desperately that whoever was here wouldn't notice something like a change in the sound of the stream, wouldn't notice anything amiss in the cairns, in the pattern of the rocks on the cavern floor.