by A. J. Roe
Absolution
A.J. Roe
* * *
The sun darkens,
earth in ocean sinks,
fall from heaven the bright stars,
fire’s breath assails the all-nourishing tree,
towering fire plays against heaven itself.
She sees arise,
a second time,
earth from ocean,
beauteously green,
waterfalls descending;
the eagle flying over,
which in the fell captures fish.
A description of Ragnarök
Völuspá - Iceland - Circa 1000 CE
Author unknown
* * *
1
“Let’s turn back.” Sanjay’s voice was almost lost beneath the wind.
“Not yet. It’ll be okay once we hit the beach.” Rick Wilson really hoped he was right. A gale tore through the scrubby bushes and patches of long grass that spotted the desolate landscape as though it was desperate to uproot them. The sea air stung Rick’s face, the salt burned his eyes and throat. Despite the thick green and black ‘North Face’ parka he wore over a jumper, long-sleeved shirt and T-shirt, a deep shiver lurched up from down below.
The past hour had been hell, but this was where Rick thrived. “A good man never gives up without a fight,” his grandfather would often tell him as a child and he had taken those words to heart. If the stinging cold and ache in his legs were the costs for glory, they were ones he’d gladly pay.
With Sanjay just a step or two behind using him as an improvised windbreak, Rick quickened his pace, pressing forwards down the steep grassy bank towards the icy Scottish sea. It was rising and falling in vast swells as though the Earth itself was huffing and panting beneath the surface. He glanced back to see Sanjay wearing the look on his face of a man who was seriously questioning his life choices. He’ll be fine.
They trekked alongside the riverbank down to the water’s edge for another thirty minutes. The grass of the open, windswept moors above slowly gave way to football-sized granite boulders and patches of black and grey shingle. They were slippery like ice under a mixture of sea spray, moss and clumps of seaweed.
Soon enough, the pair reached a row of towering cliffs that jutted out from the shore. The vast chunks of granite offered a slight respite from the howling, icy wind. Damn, I hope the crazy old bastard was right.
Rick tucked himself in against the cliff face and swung the heavy backpack from his shoulders. He dropped it to the ground, not giving a second thought to the equipment inside, which had already been thoroughly battered over the years. In a squat, he sat with his back against the stone and the heels of his leather hiking boots dug into the shingle.
Sanjay slid down to his right, a look of distinct displeasure on his face. “I can’t believe I’m giving up my weekend for this,” he said, fighting to be heard over the roar of the wind.
“Look on the bright side, man. The Scottish Moors is one to tick off the bucket list.”
“Yeah, well at least now I know not to bother coming back.”
Rick stifled a smile. As they rested, he scanned the horizon in both directions and something caught his eye. “Look.” To the east, a mile or so away, the crumbling first and second floors of a mansion were clinging to life over a half-collapsed cliff edge. It was almost obscured by a closer outcrop, from any other angle or up on the clifftop, the decrepit structure would have been completely invisible. “I can’t believe we didn’t see it before. It’s exactly as he said.”
“True,” Sanjay replied, “but this whole coast is covered in dilapidated buildings. Personally, I’m still not convinced by the stories of an old drunkard you met in the pub.”
“Pfft. Come on, let's get moving, you’ll see.” Rick prayed he was right, with the number of hours of his life that had gone into combing through archaic shipping manifests and pages of old diaries, there was no way he could give up now, he was in way too deep.
Plenty of anecdotal evidence supported the historical records; four hundred thousand pieces of Spanish gold, in seven chests, had arrived on this coastline in 1745. Of the seven, four had been accounted for and eventually arrived with their intended recipients, but another three had mysteriously vanished into the ether.
Through a mixture of official and unofficial references, the disappearance of these three chests could be pinned down to a very specific geographical area. Although they certainly weren't the first to come searching here, Rick had one thing all the others didn’t, desperation.
At this rate, in less than two months he’d be bankrupt. If that happened then he wouldn’t even be allowed to see his daughter, let alone try to rebuild some kind of relationship with her.
With almost insurmountable effort, Rick pushed off the wall with his back, willing his cramping thighs back into action.
✽✽✽
By mid-morning, the wind had begun to soften and a sliver of sunlight pierced through the blanket of grey overhead. This made the miserable trudge on tired feet and with aching knees from the uneven ground, slightly more bearable.
Rick and Sanjay worked west along the wet shingle, weaving around vast granite pillars. Stripes of barnacles and seaweed, almost at head height, on their surfaces indicated two things. One: that the tide was abnormally low, and two: that it would soon be on its way back in.
A good twenty minutes passed before their route was blocked by a larger outcrop than the others, it jutted from the coastline far out into the low, late summer tides. Rick eyed up the water around its body, frothing and foaming, swirling and smashing against the rock. There was no way of telling how deep the drop off into the frigid sea would be.
Rick turned on his heels, studying their surroundings for a sign to confirm his suspicions. The monolith ahead had a thick build-up of brown kelp across its face, revealing just how rare it was that the waters receded so far. “This is it. It must be.”
Everything that Rick had read indicated a tidal cave on the Southwestern Scottish coast that met a very specific set of criteria. It had to sit at the foot of a river which doubles a full one-hundred-eighty degrees back on itself before it reaches the sea but was also within viewing distance from the windows of a nearby clifftop estate.
Rick had waited months to visit until the tides were at the lowest point of the year. He had pinned down three promising locations, all within striking distance to be done over the long weekend.
Saturday had been a bust; they’d searched the most likely area for an entire day but got nothing for their troubles. All of their maps were near enough useless too, with the constant cliff-falls and fast eroding coastline, there wasn’t a single recognisable landmark or defining feature to be found.
Rick was beginning to understand just why this vast fortune had stayed lost for so long and the stress of impending failure was weighing heavily on his shoulders. That evening, while Sanjay had caught up on sleep, Rick went for a well-needed treble of the local single malt in one of the two pubs in the tiny town of Abury.
By sheer luck he had got talking to a half-cut descendant of some local clan about what they were doing in the highlands. The old man was stocky and unkempt but his eyes had a look of experience in them that was hard to ignore.
Rick listened intently as the clansman rambled on, in an accent almost as thick as his beard. While the slurring old man’s theory about how the treasure had disappeared was all wrong, he described a location that sounded suspiciously like the last site on their list.
This is it, Rick told himself as though it might make it true. Sanjay was already scanning the walls of the pillar close to the sea’s edge. The bottom ten feet of th
e massive stone outcrop would all usually be well below sea level, even during low tides, but today the waters were raked back leaving it fully exposed.
Sanjay worked methodically up and down, running his hands across the surface. He was one of the most experienced and knowledgeable men Rick knew, with a working understanding of everything from geology to particle physics. Unfortunately, Sanjay was also the type of man who preferred theory to field work, happy to be in the lab or the library, the polar opposite of himself.
As they crawled up and down, probing every crack and crevice, Rick’s hopes of glory began to fade. He wasn’t often let down by his hunches. “Let’s break for lunch,” he called out after half an hour or so and began to drag his legs, like dead weights, back towards the shelter of the cliffs.
“Wait!” Sanjay shouted back, “Come here.” The excitement in his voice was palpable. Rick swung around to see him lying face up on the shingle, reaching his hands upwards, his fingers probing some kind of space beneath an overhang of rock a few feet from the frothing waves.
“What is it?”
“Give me a torch. It looks like it opens up under here.”
Rick’s frozen hands fumbled with the straps of his red Petzl climbing backpack. After a minute or so, he found one of the two powerful LED torches he’d packed. He placed it into Sanjay’s open palm and stood over his friend bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet for some of the longest seconds of his life.
“It’s a cavern.” Between the wall of rock and wind, Sanjay’s voice was all but lost.
A few seconds later the academic pushed his body out from beneath the crag, revealing a Cheshire Cat grin, his white teeth shining like pearls. “What are you waiting for then? Get in there.”
As Sanjay pulled himself to his feet, Rick smacked him across his wide back with a solid open palm. “You’re a legend mate!”
Throwing his backpack down onto the wet rocks and rummaging through it. Rick pulled out a half-inch-wide red and grey nylon climbing rope. He tied a triple bowline knot giving a loop for each leg and one for his waist, a pretty solid improvised harness.
After double checking all of the knots—knowing a well-tied rope could mean the difference between life and death if things went badly—Rick climbed in and passed Sanjay one end. He slid beneath the overhang and clicked the button on his torch. Aiming the beam upwards at the slimy mottled walls, Rick took in a sight that would change everything.
2
An arc of pale white light cut through the murky darkness as Rick swung his torch. Ten feet above, the narrow walls that sandwiched him in, expanded into a cavern at least double that height.
The exhaustion and his rumbling stomach were all but forgotten as Rick pulled his torso up into the claustrophobic space. The dead still air was blisteringly cold. It was thick with salt and the taste of seaweed but none of that made the slightest bit of difference to his mood.
Twisting and turning in the darkness, Rick’s arms and back grated against rough stone until he was able to pull himself up into a standing position. If anything had been brought in here it must have been bit by bit, the gap was barely two feet wide.
Rick placed the heavy metal torch in his mouth and winced as the threaded metal ground at his teeth, leaving the lingering taste of iron and calcium on his tongue. He reached up against the flat stone wall ahead. At the top of the ledge his fingertips found a slimy, uneven lip of stone. Wedging his back against the wall, Rick used his legs to push off the opposite surface. He walked up one step at a time until he could lie back on top of the ledge.
“What’s in there?” Sanjay’s muffled voice reverberated through the stone. The way it echoed in the blackened space sounded distorted and otherworldly.
“Nothing,” Rick yelled back, running one hand through his hair and feeling his shoulders droop. The vacant space before him was disheartening but maybe there was another opening, or something hidden in the shadows; in his experience the best hiding places were often in plain sight.
Rick scanned the cave to get a feel for the space, it was a long thin oval shape, around thirty feet wide. The floor was dotted with jagged boulders and shards of sharpened rock, otherwise it was empty. Methodically, he ran the white torch light across the space, scouring every dark corner and every mound of silt. With each inch he moved the outlook became more and more bleak. Damn it.
Rick trod carefully over to the far wall, making sure not to lose his footing on the wet rock. Behind a large round boulder in the corner, something grabbed his attention. “Wait,” he said out loud, to no one in particular.
A shape on the floor jumped out at him, it was too perfectly formed to be natural. Rick dropped to his knees to examine the circle and noticed a second, then a third, then a fourth. He reached out for the first one, and picked it up, rubbing his thumb across its surface to reveal a hint of green. “We’ve got coins!”
Beyond the walls, Sanjay responded with a muffled, uncharacteristic whoop.
With the torch back in his teeth, Rick examined all four pieces in the palm of his hand. They were thick with tarnish and practically black in the gloom of the cave. He fought the urge to continue investigating the coins and instead slid them into the zip-up pocket on his grey hiking trousers. For the next half an hour Rick crawled on his knees across every inch of the cave’s jagged salty floor.
The only other things of interest were two deep score lines in the rock, revealing that something remarkably heavy had once been dragged across its surface. Judging by the amount of silt in the tracks it must have been some time ago. Of course, in a tidal cave it was impossible to know for sure, but Rick figured at least a hundred years.
“Whatever had been here is gone,” he muttered half to Sanjay and half to himself.
“The tide’s coming in fast, you’d better get out of there,” his friend called through. Reluctantly, Rick rose to his feet. It wasn’t the find he’d been hoping for, but a discovery was a discovery regardless. They would come back soon, maybe with some metal detectors, ground penetrating radar and better lights, they‘d find something else. If he and Sanjay could use this as a jumping off point to locate the rest of the treasure, then Rick’s whole life would turn around. His name would go down in history, his bank balance would rise up high and he’d finally be able to convince Sarah that letting him back into his daughter’s life wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Rick walked to the ledge which marked his exit, scanning side to side across the cavern one last time. At the lip, he did a double take. There was another object, perched on a natural stone shelf just above eye level. Rick stood six-foot tall and a man even an inch shorter would have missed it entirely, but not him. What the hell is it?
The object looked like a thin wedge of wood, about ten inches long and three inches wide. Rick’s fingers wrapped around the length of the item. Leather. Maybe a map?
The petrified outside layer of cowhide crumbled in his hands, leaving only the soft internal material as he picked it up. It was still stiff and covered in mould, having been gnawed at and devoured by centuries of water and salt. Rick laid it back down, pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket and slipped them on, knowing from personal experience that the oils on his fingers could do damage to a document or anything else fragile.
He picked the leather wrap up and weighed it in his palm. It was too heavy for a document. Some kind of tool maybe?
With a gloved hand Rick softly eased the crumbling lips of leather open. A piece of faded dark red-brown iron sat inside with a handle of wood or bone, it wasn’t anything decorative by any stretch of the imagination, but the fact it had been wrapped at all meant it might be worth at least something.
The blade of the knife was about eight inches long, it was straight with two cutting edges and had most likely been left here by whoever removed the treasure. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as valuable as the coins, which were probably gold, but depending on how it looked after a clean-up and the exact age, it might fetch him a couple of hundre
d pounds.
As Rick lifted the weapon in an open palm to get a better look, his fingers began to prickle beneath the metal. What felt like a low-current pulse of electricity was coming off the dagger and spreading from his gloved palm, up his arms, across his chest and down into the ground through his feet. Weird.
Wanting to investigate further, Rick bit down on the first finger of his right glove and slipped it off.
“Quickly mate, the sea’s coming up fast,” Sanjay’s voice rang through the stone walls. There was definitely a sense of urgency in it now. Damn.
Rick bundled up the dagger into his right glove for protection, put that inside the left then slid the package into the deep main pocket of his backpack. He slung it over his shoulders and lowered himself down from the edge back towards the entrance.
From beneath the crag slid Rick’s bag. It was followed shortly by its owner, who shimmied out onto the shingle, slick with spray from the fast-approaching tide. A grin split his face from ear to ear. Sanjay stared back wide eyed awaiting the news, knowing his friend had something to announce. “Well?”
“It’s not what we hoped, but it’s something alright.” Rick pulled himself up, unzipped his pocket and dropped the coins into his friend’s palm. Sanjay raised one to his face and rubbed it with his thumb. “Looks like gold all right, I need to get this sulphide off to see much more. How many?”
“Four. Found an old workman’s dagger too.”
“Excellent work my friend,” Sanjay smiled, “I’m sorry for doubting you and your ‘pub man’.”
It was a long but brisk climb back up to the lone road that weaved through the desolate highlands. Both Rick and Sanjay were shattered but were pushed on by the excitement of their small find and the awaiting warmth of the car.
Pacing the final few hundred yards up over the crest of a hill, the blue ten-year-old Ford Focus ST emerged from the fading afternoon light exactly where they’d left it. At that same moment, a truly sickening vision hit Rick’s eyes. He convulsed in a mixture of fury and disgust at the horror that awaited them.