“I wish you were here now,” Jane said, aloud, shivering a little in spite of the hot still air. She was not happy with Simon and Barney deep in a darkness where anything might be lurking, where they might get lost and never get out, where the roof might fall in. . . .
Great-Uncle Merry would have made sure that nothing like that could happen.
Jane looked at her watch. It was twelve minutes past five, and still the line in her hands was moving slowly and irregularly into the cave. She gave two strong deliberate tugs on the line. After a pause she felt it move twice in reply; but faintly. The line was two-thirds unwound; she wished she had measured it as she let it go. Time dragged by; still the line pulled insistently out of her hand, moving into the dark entrance more slowly now. The sun blazed down immovable out of the empty blue sky, and a small breeze sprang up from nowhere to lift the edges of Jane’s long loose hair.
She leant against the rock and let her senses drift, feeling the heat of the sun on her skin, breathing the sea-smell of the wet rocks and seaweed, and listening to the gentle lap-lap of the sea. Then in a kind of sleepy daze, with only her fingers awake, she became aware that the sound of the sea had changed.
She jerked to her feet and swung round. To her horror, the piles of seaweed nearest the sea were swaying up and down in a swell that had not been there before. Waves were washing over what had been the edge of the rocks; nearer her, she thought, than they had been. The tide was on the turn.
Jane felt panic begin to rise within her. The last few loops of the line were loose in her hand now: the boys must be an alarming way inside the cave. She took firm hold of the line, winding part of the slack round her hand and going right up to the dark mouth of the cave, and jerked it hard one, two, three times.
Nothing happened. She waited, listening to the regular swash of the waves creeping in. Then just as tears of fright were beginning to prickle in her eyes she felt the answering signal; three faint tugs on the line pulling at her hand. Almost at once the strain lessened, and the line began to fall slack. Jane let out a great breath of relief. The line came towards her as she pulled at it; slowly at first and then more easily, faster than she had paid it out. Then at last, Simon and Barney, blinking at the daylight behind hands raised to shield their eyes, came stumbling out of the narrow entrance of the cave.
“Hallo,” Simon said foolishly, sounding dazed. His matches had run out five full minutes before they reached the light, and the last part of the way had been a nightmare journey in the pitch dark, walking blind and trusting to the feel of the line to tell them that the way ahead was clear. He had made Barney let him go first. All the time he felt that every next step might bring him crashing against rock, or face to face in the dark with some nameless Thing, and he would not have been surprised when they emerged to find that all his hair had turned white.
Jane only looked at him with a small wry grin and said as he had, “Hallo.”
“Look!” Barney said, and held up the grail.
Jane felt her grin widen with delight. “Then we’ve beaten them! We’ve got it! Gosh, I wish Gumerry were here.”
“I think it’s made of gold.” Barney rubbed at the metal. Out in the sunlight, the grail seemed far less magical than in the mysterious darkness of the cave; but a bright yellow gleam showed here and there through the dirt on its side. “There’s a sort of pattern scratched all over it, too,” he said. “But you can’t see properly, without cleaning it up.”
“It’s terribly ancient.”
“But what does it mean? I mean everyone’s trying like mad to get hold of it, because it can tell them something, but when you look at it there doesn’t seem to be anything it could possibly tell anyone. Unless that pattern’s some sort of message.”
“The manuscript,” Simon said.
“Oh gosh, yes.” Barney took the small, heavy lead tube from the cup, and showed Jane the manuscript inside. “This was wedged in the grail. It must follow on from where our manuscript leaves off. I bet it’s tremendously important. I bet it explains everything. But it breaks up almost as soon as you look at it.” He carefully fitted the cap back on the tube.
“We’ve got to get it home safely,” Simon said. “I wonder if there’s room . . . wait a minute.” He took the telescope case from under Jane’s arm and unscrewed it. Their own familiar manuscript stood up from the lower half, fitting it closely.
Simon took the dark leaden cylinder and dropped it carefully inside the centre of the parchment in the telescope case. “There. Got a hanky, Jane?”
Jane took her handkerchief from her shirt pocket. “What for?”
“Like that,” Simon said, fitting the handkerchief in a tight ball inside the top of the parchment roll. “It’ll keep the new one steady. We’ll have to run if we’re going to get off before the tide catches up with us, and it’ll get bounced about a lot.”
Automatically Jane and Barney turned to look again at the sea. And at exactly the same moment each of them gasped, with a noise of pure strangled fright. Simon had bent his head to screw the two halves of the case back together. He looked up quickly. The waves were lifting the seaweed now within six feet of where they stood. But that was not what was wrong. Jane and Barney, arrested in mid-movement, were looking further out to sea.
For a moment, the one jutting rock obscured Simon’s view. Then he too saw the tall sweeping lines of the yacht Lady Mary, under full sail, come round the end of the headland towards them. And he too saw the tall dark figure standing in the bow with one arm raised, pointing.
“Come on, quick!” He grabbed at Barney and Jane as they stood motionless with shock, and pushed them ahead of him.
They jumped and slithered over the seaweed-cushioned rocks, away from the cave and the pursuing yacht. Barney clutched the grail in one hand as he ran, his arms outstretched to keep his balance, and Simon held the manuscripts in their case grimly to his chest. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw the great white mainsail of the yacht crumpling down on to the deck, and a small dinghy being lowered over the side.
Barney slipped and fell, and nearly brought them both down on top of him. Even as he fell the grail did not leave his grip, but struck the rock once more with the same clear bell-like note as before. It rang out over the sound of their splashing hasty feet.
He struggled up again, biting his lip at the sting of salt eating into a graze on his knee, and they hurried on. They were splashing through water all the while now. The waves had grown, and were washing right over the rocks with every pulse of the rising tide. The water masked the pools and hollows with drifting brown weed, and glossed the bare rock with a swirling coat that would turn, soon, into a current strong enough to dislodge their quick desperate feet.
Barney slipped again, and fell with a splash.
“Let me take it.”
“No!”
He scrambled for a foothold, Jane pulling him up by his free arm, and the frenzied nightmare of a race drove them faster, zigzagging in wild blind leaps over the wave-washed rocks. Simon glanced back again. Two figures in a small dinghy were paddling fast towards them from the yacht. He heard the yacht’s engines cough into life.
“Go on, quick!” he gasped. “We can still do it!” They hastened on, half stumbling, kept on their feet only by their own speed. Still there was no sight of the beach round the headland, but only the sea on one side and the great wall of the cliff rising on the other. And before them, dwindling into the tide, the long path of rocks and weed.
“Stop!” a deep voice rang out across the water behind them. “Come back! You stupid children, come here!”
“They won’t catch us,” Simon panted, catching Barney as he almost fell a third time, and jerking him back to his feet. Jane at his side was sobbing for breath at every step, but running and stumbling with the same desperate haste. Then round the headland in front of them something else came into sight, and dropped their hopes like stones to the bottom of the sea.
It was another dinghy, broad as a tub,
breasting the waves like a barge. The boy Bill sat at a chugging outboard motor in the stem, and Mr. Withers was leaning eagerly forward in front of him, his long dark hair blowing in the wind. He saw them and shouted with triumph, and they saw an unpleasant grin break on the boy’s face as he turned the boat’s nose towards the rocks in their path.
They skidded to a halt, appalled.
“Which way?”
“They’ll cut us off!”
“But we can’t go back. Look! The others are going to land!”
With the edge of the water creeping round their feet they looked distractedly back and forth. Not ten yards ahead, the boat with Mr. Withers evilly smiling was heading to cut off their path, and behind them the other dinghy was bobbing almost at the edge of the rocks. They were caught, neatly, in a trap.
“Come over here!” the deep voice called to them again. “You will not get away. Come here!”
Mr. Hastings was standing up in his dinghy, a tall black figure, one arm flung out towards them. With his legs planted apart to keep him balanced, swaying with the boat’s rise and fall on the swell, he looked as if he were straddling the sea.
“Barnabas!” The voice dropped lower, to a hypnotic monotone. “Barnabas, come here.”
Jane clutched at Barney’s arm. “Don’t go near him!”
“No fear.” Barney was frightened, but not bewitched into obedience as he had been before. “Oh Simon, what can we do?”
Simon stared up at the cliff, wondering for a wild moment if they could climb to safety. But the sheer granite face towered implacably up, far, far above their heads. They could never have found footholds there even to climb out of reach, and they would have fallen long before they reached the top.
“Barnabas,” the voice came again, gentle, insidious. “We know what it is you have in your hand. And you too, Simon. Oh yes, Simon, especially you.”
Simon and Barney each closed a hand instinctively tighter round the manuscripts and the grail.
“They are not yours.” The voice rose, more roughly. “You have no right to them. They must go back where they belong.”
Mr. Hastings was watching them intently, poised in the dinghy waiting for the right moment of the swell to jump across to the rocks. Only the heaving mounds of seaweed, masking the edge, made him hesitate. At the tiller, Polly Withers was struggling to control the boat in the rising waves.
Barney shouted suddenly: “You can’t have them. They’re not yours either. Why do you want them anyway? You haven’t really got a museum, I don’t believe all the things you said.”
Mr. Hastings laughed softly. The noise echoed eerie and spine-chilling over the gentle murmur of the sea.
“You’ll never win properly,” Simon called defiantly. “You never do.”
“We shall this time,” a lighter voice said behind them. They swung round again. It was Withers. The outboard motor had cut out, and quietly the other dinghy was edging nearer to them as the boy Bill groped for the rock with an oar.
They drew closer together with their backs against the cliff, pressed as far away as they could; but on either side the boats crept closer towards them. The Lady Mary was edging slowly along off the headland. They could hear her engines thrumming faintly, though they could see no one on board.
“If only we had a boat,” Jane said in despair.
“Couldn’t we swim for it?”
“Where to?”
“There must be something we can do!” Barney’s voice rose frantically.
“There is nothing at all you can do.” Withers’ light sneering voice came over the rocks to them. He was less than five yards away in the bow of the tossing dinghy. “Give us the manuscript. Give it to us and we will take you off safely. The tide is rising very fast now. You must give it to us.”
“What if we don’t?” Simon called rebelliously.
“Look at the sea, Simon. You can’t get back now the way you came. Look at the tide. You’re cut off. You can’t get away unless you come with us.”
“He’s right,” Jane whispered. “Look!” She pointed. Further along the rocks the sea was already washing the foot of the cliff.
“Where’s your boat, Simon?” called the mocking voice.
“We’ll have to give in,” Simon said, low and angry.
“Take your time, Simon. We can wait. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
They heard the boy snicker on the other side of the boat.
“They’ve got us.”
“Oh think—think—we can’t give it up now.”
“Think of Great-Uncle Merry.”
“It’s a pity we ever thought of him in the first place,” Simon said fiercely. “It’s no good, I’m going to say we give in.”
“No!” Barney said urgently, and before they realized what was happening he had snatched the manuscript case from Simon and splashed forward over the wet rocks to the edge of the sea. He held up the long glinting case in one hand and the grail in the other, and gazed furiously at Mr. Hastings. “If you don’t pick us up and let us take them home I shall throw them in the sea.”
“Barney!” Jane croaked. But Simon held her back, listening.
Mr. Hastings did not move. He stood looking across with immense calm arrogance at Barney’s small bristling figure, and when he spoke the deep voice was colder than any voice they had ever heard. “If you do that, Barnabas, I shall leave you and your brother and sister here to drown.”
They had no doubt that he was speaking the truth. But Barney was carried away with a passionate indignation, and he was determined never again to believe anything that Mr. Hastings said. If once he did, he knew he would be under the spell again.
“I will, I will! If you don’t promise, I will!” He raised the grail higher in his right hand, flexing his muscles to throw it. Simon and Jane gasped.
The whole world seemed to stop and centre round the towering black-clad man and a small boy: one will against another, with Barney saved by his own fury from the full force of the commanding glare driving into his eyes. Then Mr. Hastings’s face twisted, and he let out a strangled shout. “Withers!”
And from that moment, for the children, the world cracked into unreality and there seemed no reason in anything that happened,
From either side, Norman Withers and Mr. Hastings made a dive for Barney. Simon shouted, “Barney, don’t!” and dashed towards him to clasp his outstretched arm. Withers, nearer, made a great leap on to the rocks from his boat, setting it swaying wildly with Bill clinging frantically to the tiller. But as his lunging foot came down where the rock should have been, they saw the viciousness in his face change to alarm, and he flung up his arms and disappeared under the water.
He had jumped down on the masked pool among the rocks: the gap where the retreating sea had left deep water, and which now was filled far deeper by the incoming tide. Jane, cowering back against the cliff, chilled with horror as she realized that they would all three have gone headlong into it if they had run another yard further on.
Withers surfaced again, coughing and spluttering, and Barney hesitated, the grail still held over his head. Mr. Hastings had leapt across to the rocks without falling, and was coming at him from the other side with long loping strides, his dark brows a menacing bar across his face and his lips drawn back in a horrible unlaughing grin. Simon dived desperately, and was brushed aside by the sweep of one long arm; but in falling he grabbed at the man’s nearest leg and brought him crashing down full length on the wet slippery rocks.
For all his height, Mr. Hastings moved like an eel. In a moment he was on his feet again, with one big hand clasped round Simon’s arm, and in a swift cruel movement he pulled the arm round behind Simon’s back and jerked it upwards so that he cried out with pain. The girl in the boat laughed softly. She had not moved since the beginning. Jane heard, and hated her, but stood transfixed by the look of concentrated evil cruelty on the face above her. It was as if something monstrous blazed behind Mr. Hastings’ eyes, something not human, tha
t filled her with a horror more vast and dreadful than anything she had felt before.
“Put it down, Barnabas,” Mr. Hastings panted. “Put down the manuscript, or I’ll break his arm.” Simon wriggled in his grasp and kicked backwards, but then gasped and went limp as his arm was jerked savagely higher and pain shot through him like water boiling in his blood. But before Barney, his face twisted with concern, could even move, a great yell rang out over the water from the yacht. A rough voice shouted, in anguished warning, “Master!”
In the same moment they heard a new noise over the low throb of the yacht’s waiting engines: a high-pitched drone that grew louder and nearer. Suddenly round the corner of the headland from Trewissick, they saw a glittering arc of spray shooting up from the bows of a big speed-boat. It was moving tremendously fast, swinging out round the seaward side of the yacht towards the place where they stood. And in a glimpse through the spray, they saw the only figure they knew that could tower as tall as Mr. Hastings, and above it the familiar blowing tousle of white hair.
Jane let out a shout high with relief. “It’s Gumerry!”
Mr. Hastings snarled and released Simon suddenly, making a desperate lunge forward at Barney where he stood wavering on the edge. Just in time Barney saw him and ducked away backwards under his hand.
Bill, in his dinghy, ripped at the outboard motor and set it roaring; then jumped, slithering on the rocks but landing safe. Chunky and menacing beside the giant height of the man in black, he faced them, crouching slightly. Like dancers in a minuet the two moved forward, groping slowly for the treacherous footholds, and the children shrank back against the cliff.
The speed-boat roared up in a great flurry of spray. Within seconds it was alongside the headland. The engine’s note changed to a deeper throb and the boat lurched slowly closer. Looking fearfully over Bill’s advancing shoulder Jane could see Great-Uncle Merry standing erect, beside the blue-jerseyed figure of Mr. Penhallow crouching over the controls.