Devil's Rock - Chris Speyer [49]
A wave of dread flooded through Zaki’s body. He nodded . Yes, Anusha was right; that thing that had called out the girl’s name and the evil thing that had looked out of his eyes – it was one and the same. It had crept into him when he was in the cave; he had brought it into the open. He was like the carrier of a plague, of a deadly virus – and he knew now what it wanted.
‘It’s using me but it’s after the girl. That’s why she doesn’t want me to go near her. I’ve put her in danger – maybe others. You saw it just now; it tried to kill you!’
‘But why? What is it?’ Anusha searched his face.
‘I don’t know.’ Zaki’s head hurt; he felt confused; he didn’t know what was going on.
Anusha got to her feet. ‘Come on. We’re going to get wet if we stay here much longer. Anyway, I’m hungry. Have you got anything to eat?’
‘No.’
‘I have. You can share mine; you look like you need it.’
They climbed back up to the top of the landing stage and returned to the spot where Zaki had originally been sitting. Anusha laid out the contents of her lunch box between them and Zaki added the water bottle from his own rucksack and a snack bar that he found in his pocket and now broke it in half.
Zaki’s mind returned to the awful conversation that morning in the van. He pictured his mother among a group of strangers, laughing happily. He picked up a pebble and threw it as far out into the water as he could. Then he threw another and another, each with more force and anger.
‘Why did you come here?’ Anusha asked softly. ‘Is something going on?’
Zaki flung another pebble across the water.
‘I don’t mean all this, but . . . You don’t have tell me if you don’t want to, but, if something’s wrong . . . you know, something else . . .’ She left the sentence unfinished.
‘What makes you think there’s something wrong?’ Zaki asked defensively. It was none of her business.
Anusha looked away. She fiddled with the snack-bar wrapper. ‘Just then you looked like you wanted to cry.’
Zaki bit his lip. He stood up and wandered to the back of the landing stage. Did telling people things make them more likely to happen? If he told Anusha that his parents were splitting up, would that mean that they would split up? When his throat stopped hurting, he went and sat down again.
‘My mum’s been away a long time,’ he said. ‘I don’t think she’s going to come back.’ There – it was out. It was real. He’d given it life. He couldn’t stop it happening.
They sat in silence, looking out across the estuary. Grey cloud was spreading from the south-west and the water had lost its sparkle, turning dark and uninviting. The breeze was picking up, ruffling the surface, the cold gusts sending cat’s paws racing, like shadows, towards them.
Anusha shivered. ‘It’s getting chilly. What do you want to do?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t much want to go home.’
‘Why don’t you come back to my place for a bit? We can have a look at the tape from the camcorder. Maybe we’ll be able to see something if we watch it on a big screen.’
‘Would that be OK with your parents?’
‘They won’t mind. And you could dry off; you’re still half-soaked.’
g
School would be out in an hour and Zaki had no desire to meet any of his classmates; he set a brisk pace on the walk back into town, hoping to get indoors before the surging mass of school uniforms flooded up the high street. Much of the time, passing traffic forced them to walk in single file, so there was little chance for further conversation, which left plenty of space for one question to nag at Zaki’s mind – when the unknown thing had control of his body, why hadn’t it tried to use the bracelet? Had Anusha disturbed it before it had a chance?
Zaki could feel the weight of the bracelet in his pocket. Anusha had suggested that her father might know where it was from. Should he show it to him, if he got the chance?
g
Chapter 14
They were seated around the dinner table, Zaki, Anusha and her parents. At first Zaki had