Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~

Minutes passed before she heard it: the crunch of stones under someone's shoes, slow but even, like they had no fear of not seeing their way in the dark – and the dark in the cave was total with Sonali's phone off, clutched inside her pocket, pressed against her belly, desperate not to give any sign. The footsteps stopped, and someone spoke, a woman calling out in some unknown language, wild and musical, but with a hint of uncertainty and almost fear. Sonali held stock still, her breath dead in her nostrils. The voice muttered again in the language, like she was reassuring herself everything was fine, and the stones shifted again under her feet. There were some more clacks, slow and methodical like she was dismantling one of the cairns, and at length she started talking again, rhythmic, half-rhymed, like one of the old poems where the flow of the language was enough to make it a song, and the light changed.

The light changed – light, in the darkness, shifting haloes of cinnamon and the taste of brass, light from out around the corner and a smaller light reflecting through the falling water, from the fossil on its chain under her trackie. Sonali let go her phone and grabbed at the trilobite through the fabric, choking the light out, the gleam still seeming to trace through her fingers, the syllables of the poem or song or spell still skipping over the stones, every bounce with the smell of a different color, the taste in Sonali's mouth like chewing on the sounds of a half-tuned radio, and then it was gone, falling away, the light falling with a snap as green as sea foam, and the sound – the actual sound, like her senses were back wired to the right receptors again – of a splashing and half-dragging receding away, moving down with the water, down the tunnel and out to the sea.

Sonali opened her hand, and then slid down the zipper of her tracksuit top, pulling up on the chain to bring the trilobite out in front of her. She could see it – half see it – somehow still in the dark, bits of whatever it had reacted to still shedding off, tracing ancient lines and joints in the rock. There was something here. There was something here that had reacted to something else here, something else that had plugged her senses in backwards and came on shoes and left in a splash of water. Maybe. But if it wasn't, then what was this? Magic? Aye right.

Sonali stood up as best as she could, shivering as the water spilled over her and down her leg. Gingerly, she leaned around the corner of the flue, listening, looking into the dark as best she could. Nothing – or at least enough nothing that if she pulled her phone out and it wasn't nothing, there would be nothing that she could do about it. Sonali fumbled for her phone, pressing the button to turn the screen on again, and looked over the cavern. Three of the cairned piles of clothes were there, the same, but the fourth one, that strange furry skin, was different; she bent to look closer at it, and perhaps it was just a trick of the half-light, the colors in her wallpaper doing something weird with the rocks, because it looked like nothing more than now, just another pile of clothes – and one topped with a black blazer chased with golden braid.

Getting out of the cave had been easy; you'd never see it from the landward side, but there was a path of almost steps running along the cliff down to the sand. It was more for mountain goats than for people, but it was there. Getting back to her bike had been a little harder: Sonali could see the tops of the grinding towers at the quarry from where she came up, so it was only a short hike along the railroad, shivering as the wind blew through her soaking clothes, to get back to the entrance in to the heather, and then to lie on the ground for like half an hour, exhausted, trying to soak up a little more of the sun to feel like a human being again, and summon up the strength to get back on her bike and get back moving like she needed to. Even the slow ride back into town wasn't that hard: with her limbs moving, Sonali could get her blood pumping again, and there was the chippy for durties on the way. Single fish, nae chips, ignore the counterman looking judgy at her for coming in stinking like she'd been dredged up from the harbor, trackie stained and her hair a mess: it was only ever durties who came in here anyways, and she'd never be back except like this, if she had to and was looking and feeling shit enough to blend in. What was hard was figuring out where to start at the library: where to start looking to fill in the stuff she didn't understand about something she couldn't identify that wasn't even supposed to exist.