Devil's Rock Part 14

'I thought it looked Indian,' added a.n.u.sha.

'May I take a closer look?' asked Mr Dalal.

'Yes, but I don't think it's a good idea to handle it too much,' said Zaki.

Without enquiring why that should be, Mr Dalal took a table napkin and, with it, picked up the bracelet as though he were handling an ancient relic in a museum.

'Probably Sri Lankan, rather than Indian,' he said. 'This metal is quite unusual. It's bronze, you see, but not the common bronze alloy; this is a high-tin bronze. Look at the colour. Look where it has become a little polished. You see? It's quite pale; that's the effect of plenty of tin. High-tin bronze was developed in Sri Lanka for making bells. The tin makes the bronze brittle, but it gives the bells a special clear tone. Whoever made this was probably a bell maker, maybe from Kandy in the hill country. This type of bronze is made in very, very few places.' He turned the bracelet so that he could examine the rim. 'Ah ha! This bracelet was made for a musician.'

Mrs Dalal leant close to her husband. 'How can you be so sure?'

'Look at the inscriptions, my dear.'

'Oh yes,' said Mrs Dalal.

'What are they?' asked Zaki. 'I thought they were some kind of writing.'

'More like musical notation, I would say,' replied Mr Dalal. 'I think they are drumming patterns. The Indian word is theka theka. But these are not from northern India. They look a little different, perhaps because they are Sinhalese, or perhaps because this bracelet is quite old.'

'Why write music on a bracelet?' Zaki asked.

'Probably decoration. In India we learn to play drums by chanting the rhythms, not by reading music. Ah ha! But you need a demonstration!' Mr Dalal sprung up from the table and rubbed his hands together, delighted with the opportunity to perform. 'I will show you.'

'You might ask our guest if he wants a demonstration!' protested Mrs Dalal.

'Of course he wants a demonstration,' declared her husband, selecting a long, double-ended drum from the collection in the corner of the room and slinging it around his waist.

'No stopping him now!' a.n.u.sha laughed.

'You must excuse me, I am really a tabla player but, since I think the bracelet is from Sri Lanka, I am going to play the yak bera yak bera. It's the drum they use to accompany the Devil Dances.'

Mr Dalal began to chant and as he chanted his hands flicked and slapped and tapped the tightly stretched skins on the ends of the long drum, echoing back the rhythms and tones of the chanted syllables: 'Dhin-dhin,' he chanted. 'D-hin-d-hin,' sang the drum. 'Dha-ge-ti-ra-ki-ta, ta-na, ka-ta, dha-ge, ti-ra-ki-ta . . .' Faster flew the hands, faster and faster; driving the rhythm into ever more complex configurations, drawing out deep ba.s.s notes over which exploded cascades of high, staccato beats that he struck from the very edges of the skins. To Zaki it seemed as if a whole band of drummers had entered the room; it was impossible that one person could produce the intricate crossings of rhythms and tones.

Quietly, Mrs Dalal rose and opened one of the larger instrument cases. She lifted out her cello and her bow and tightened the bowstring. Soon, the cello's sonorous voice joined the cavorting dance of the drum, filling the whole room with its resonance. Sitting a few feet away, it seemed to Zaki that the cello's strings were within his body and that every note, every change of pitch and rhythm, vibrated through every living cell.

Now a third voice joined the other two and Zaki turned to see that a.n.u.sha had her violin. The fiddle's bow rocked and sawed across the strings, sending a flurry of notes to skip lightly around the cello's measured steps. Then the cello swept its counter melody between and around the fiddle and drum. Zaki was flying again, but not as a seagull, not as a hawk. The music lifted and carried him. Occasionally, he would become aware of the musicians, see the looks that pa.s.sed between them, and he understood how this family had developed its wordless method of communication.

Looking up, Zaki's eyes fell again on the grotesque mask that hung on the wall. Now all the light seemed to drain from the rest of the room and the colours of the mask to glow with greater intensity in the surrounding gloom. As Zaki watched, the eyes of the mask bulged, swelling out from their sockets like boils about to burst. The protruding teeth twisted into a ghastly grin, the nostrils flared and a snake wormed its way out of one ear and proceeded, tongue flicking, to coil itself around the hanging head. The cacophony of voices that Zaki had first heard in the cave, and then again in Curlew Curlew's cabin, burst in, drowning out the music; a press of faces, some painted, all streaked and shining with sweat, crowded in around the grinning mask. Zaki's nose, mouth and lungs filled with the choking smell of wood smoke. Then the awful voice that had first growled the name 'Rhiannon' two nights before on the dark street spoke again: 'No! You will not drive me out. Time for you to die!'

Zaki would have screamed if someone else hadn't screamed first. The sudden, shrill cry broke the spell and all was bright and normal in the room, except that a.n.u.sha was pointing excitedly at the bracelet on the table and shouting, 'Look, everyone! Look!'

The etched inscriptions on the rim of the bracelet, instead of being dark lines and curls, now shone as if lit from within, shone with the intensity of liquid metal in a crucible, shone like the white heat of a furnace. And they were moving, transforming as though being written and rewritten by an invisible hand.

Zaki, instinctively, reached for the bracelet but dropped it with a cry of pain as its heat seared the skin of his hand.

As Zaki and a.n.u.sha watched, the markings on the bracelet darkened and stood still.

a.n.u.sha's mother, having laid her cello in its case, came to see what had so excited her daughter. 'What happened?'

'The bracelet! Didn't you see? The writing was moving!'

'And it's burning hot!' added Zaki, nursing his hand.

Mr Dalal leant between his wife and a.n.u.sha to touch the bracelet. 'Warm. I wouldn't say hot.'

'But, Dad! Look at the writing!'

Once more, Mr Dalal used the napkin to lift the bracelet.

'Hmm. That is odd.'

'What is?' asked Zaki.

'The inscriptions they don't look quite the same.'

'I told you, they were moving! And they were shining!'

'But that's not possible,' said Mrs Dalal.

'No, but they do look a little different.'

'You've not remembered them right, surely.'

Mr Dalal scratched his right earlobe thoughtfully. 'Where did this come from?'

Zaki and a.n.u.sha glanced furtively at each other. 'It was Zaki's grandmother's,' lied a.n.u.sha.

'Was?'

'She's dead,' Zaki explained.

'Oh, I'm sorry.' Mr Dalal pa.s.sed the bracelet to Zaki. 'You should take great care of it. It's certainly most unusual. It may even be quite valuable.'

Zaki returned it to his pocket. It was no longer even warm but the glare of the fiery inscriptions seemed burnt into his retina so that their bright traces danced in his vision and swam in a sea of red each time he closed his eyes.

'Bedtime, I think,' said Mrs Dalal, with a yawn.

Zaki stood up, then realised he didn't know where he was going to sleep, and waited, rather awkwardly, for someone to show him to his room.

'Come on,' said Mrs Dalal. 'I'll show you where everything is.'

'That mask,' asked Zaki as he followed Mrs Dalal upstairs, 'where's it from?'

'That's Riri Yakka the Demon of Blood,' said Mrs Dalal, rather dramatically. 'It goes with the drum Sandeep was playing. They both came from Sri Lanka. They're used in the Devil Dances.'

'Devil Dances? What are they?'

'Ceremonies for driving out demons.' She opened the door to the spare bedroom. 'Here you are. Sleep well. And I hope that mask doesn't give you nightmares!'

Chapter 15.

Lying in a strange bed in a strange room, Zaki thought he had only just closed his eyes when he was woken by a soft tap on his door. He sat up quickly and wondered, for a moment, where he was. The door swung slowly open. In the darkness, he could just make out a figure in the doorway.

'Are you awake?' It was a.n.u.sha.

'Yes,' Zaki whispered back. 'What are you doing?'

'There's something you have to see. Come on,' said a.n.u.sha, and disappeared.

Zaki struggled into some clothes and stumbled, half awake, into the corridor.

'Follow me,' said a.n.u.sha.

She led him to the back of the house and out through the back door, which she held open and then closed carefully behind him. The concrete paving slabs were cold and wet under Zaki's bare feet and it was very dark in the back yard.

'This way,' hissed a.n.u.sha.

Zaki followed her shadowy form to another door at the end of a short path. They stepped inside the building.

Little lights and dials glowed in the darkness. There were banks of k.n.o.bs and sliders on a sloping, black desk, and one end of the room was closed off by a gla.s.s part.i.tion behind which were microphones on stands.

'Wow!' said Zaki. 'You've got a recording studio. My brother would love this!'

'My mum and dad do music for films and stuff,' said a.n.u.sha.

'Do you . . . ?'

'Play on the soundtracks? Sometimes, when they need an extra violin. I had to sing once. But look at this.'

She sat at a keyboard to the side of the mixing desk. Her fingers clicked expertly over the keys and a large video screen flashed into life.

'You can sit there if you want,' she said, indicating an office-type chair beside hers. Zaki perched on the chair and stared up at the screen.

'I've downloaded the camcorder recording. You can see a lot more on this big screen than you could on the camcorder's screen.'

a.n.u.sha clicked the mouse and an image appeared on the screen. Zaki saw himself, back to the camera, sitting on the edge of the landing stage. It was the recording a.n.u.sha had made that morning.

'Wait, I'll fast-forward it; nothing happens for a bit except for that stupid woman with the dog.'

The image jiggled and there was a scrabble of sound from the surrounding speakers. The woman and her dog appeared and seemed to scamper about like comic figures in a silent movie, then the picture steadied and the sound returned to the soft sighing of the wind. A gull flew in from the left side of the image and settled on the landing stage not far from the seated Zaki.

'Can you stop it there?' asked Zaki.

a.n.u.sha froze the image just after the figure of Zaki turned to look at the gull.

'Yeah. Now can you zoom in?'

The image got larger in a series of jerky steps until the head of the gull, with its bright yellow eye, filled the screen.

'OK. Go on, and watch the eye,' said Zaki, knowing instinctively that the eye was what they should be looking at.

a.n.u.sha unfroze the image; the eye blinked but still retained the gull's characteristic gla.s.sy stare. The eye blinked again and it was as though a shadow pa.s.sed across its surface, like the wind-ruffled shadows that race over the water on a sunny day. When the shadow had gone, the eye appeared to have gained added depth, reminding Zaki of peering down into deep water on a still morning. Although the eye was the eye of a gull, it no longer appeared to be the spirit of a gull that looked out through it.

'Did you see?'

a.n.u.sha nodded. 'It changed. It stopped looking like a gull's eye. It was you, wasn't it. You were looking out of the eye.'

'Yeah, it was me. I know it's weird, but . . .'

a.n.u.sha gave another little nod; he didn't have to go on; he didn't have to explain. She had seen it and she believed him.

The eye still filled the screen.

'Can you zoom out?' asked Zaki.

Several clicks of the mouse and Zaki's seated figure came back into frame. There he was, sitting beside the gull, except . . . the gull was now him and the thing that looked like him was what? Something, somebody else.

'Shall I run it on?'

'Yeah please.'

a.n.u.sha allowed the action to resume; the gull took off and flew out of frame, the camera remaining on the seated figure. Obviously, a.n.u.sha had been quite unaware of the significance of the gull while she was filming.

'Can we run it back?'

'There's something more important you need to see.' a.n.u.sha's fingers click the keys and the image jumped forward. 'I kept the camera running as I walked towards you.'

Zaki heard a.n.u.sha's voice on the soundtrack call his name. He saw the figure's head and shoulders turn and the eyes looked straight into the camera. a.n.u.sha froze the image once more and zoomed in on the face his face but not his face. Not his face because the eyes were not his eyes.

A chill of fear ran up Zaki's spine. A cornered wolf might look like that just before it leapt for your throat treacherous, vicious, cruel, waiting to attack.

a.n.u.sha allowed the recording to run on in slow motion. The wolfish eyes shifted uneasily and then the head turned away as though trying to hide the face from the viewer. A few moments later the screen went black.

'That's all I have. Do you want to see anything again?'

'No thanks,' said Zaki.

a.n.u.sha was busy for a few minutes shutting down the equipment, then she swivelled her chair to face him.

'I'm sorry if I didn't believe you straight away about being the gull and about it not being you that attacked me but it's all so strange. Where do you think that thing the thing that took over your body where do you think it is now? Maybe it died when you when it when your body fell over the edge. Maybe it's gone maybe you've killed it. Do you think?'