by Jules Jones
“Well, if they understood any of it, they’re well-educated dolphins. Right.” Mellow bass guitar streamed out of the speakers as Simon adjusted the volume. “Better get the boat moved close enough in for us to get out. I’ll turn it up so they can hear it properly.”
They pottered around on the beach for a while, Simon following him around to look at the fossils rather than going to look in the rock pool. They found two more nice specimens, plus several common ones that he left in place. “I’ve already got some of those, and there’s no point in taking them out of the cliff to put in a box in the cupboard when someone else might like them.”
“If you do get a place of your own, make sure it’s somewhere big enough to hold your collection.”
“Sounds like a good reason not to get a bigger place.” The books were bad enough without the fossils expanding to fill whatever room was available.
Simon was unrepentant. “Well, you can always use them as corporate gifts.”
Come to think of it, they would make nice gifts. Though if he was going to do that, he’d start cleaning up some of the ones from the previous trip first.
“So where was this one the dolphin found for you?”
“Over there.”
They climbed back into the boat, and Simon manoeuvred it over to the cliff. There wasn’t much sign of where Martin had taken the slab of rock, but he thought he recognised the place, and pointed it out. Simon peered at it. One of the dolphins popped up, nudged the spot on the rock face, and whistled.
“You know, if you could persuade these guys to work with you, you could probably get some pretty nice stuff to sell to the local tourist shops,” Simon said. “If you moved down here and had spare time on your hands, I mean.”
That got the dolphin’s attention, although this time he didn’t whistle. Martin could see an interesting conversation ahead of him tomorrow.
Oblivious to his audience, Simon went on, “Anyway, it’s time to get you back home. You’re starting to look very tired.”
“Let’s have that cup of tea first.” They hadn’t had much time just sitting in the boat keeping the dolphins company; and he didn’t want George and Patrick to think he was avoiding them.
“Good idea.” Simon poured the tea from the Thermos. “So how long do you think you’ll stay? I know you were planning to go home next Sunday whether or not you have a new contract, but that was before you discovered your dream wasn’t.”
“I don’t know. I need to go back to the flat at some point -- I don’t like leaving it too long, just in case I have to go off at a minute’s notice. But I could put it off a few days. If I don’t have to go to a job, anyway,” he emphasised, for the benefit of everyone listening. There was a job likely to come up which could leave him with no choice but to leave in a couple of days.
“Well, as long as you and your friends have a day or two to get the must-shag out of your system and can get around to some serious talking ...” Simon looked over the side of the boat at the two dolphins. “At least these two are around to talk to today. They really do like you, don’t they? You must be a very persuasive lecturer.”
He squirmed inside with embarrassment, but tried to keep a straight face. Besides, that had been their original interest in him. “I think they just liked having someone talk to them without trying to bother them.”
“What, kids get annoying?” Simon asked the dolphins. “Though I’ll bet that’s who originally fed you chocolate.”
One of them whistled at him.
“Now is that agreeing with me, or just asking for more chocolate?”
“Knowing him, probably both. Give him some more, and then we’d better go home.”
Simon sighed and said, “It’s nice to have them here, but I suppose you’re right. Given the way they seem to feel about you, if I want to see them again I just need to get you down here for the weekend.” He broke the rest of the bar into four pieces, handed Martin one, and tossed the other two out to the dolphins.
They ate the chocolate and finished their mugs of tea in silence. The dolphins followed them out of the cove, but as they set off for home the dolphins headed in the other direction. Back to their own home in the cave, presumably.
It had been good to see them, even if he couldn’t talk to them properly. And it had given him a chance to come to terms with what they were. Not men, nor dolphins, but some strange and wonderful amalgamation out of legend.
And his for the asking.
Chapter Ten
Martin was starting to get the hang of parking the boat next to the steps cut into the old stone jetty. Even so, he found Patrick already on the jetty waiting for him. He was greeted with an enthusiastic hug and kiss.
“Let me put the stuff down first!”
“Sorry.” Patrick let go and stepped back a pace. “Anything else to get out of the boat?”
“I’ve brought some books.” He finally noticed something that hadn’t registered because on anyone else it wouldn’t have been out of place. “You’re dressed.” And where was George?
“We’ve been having a look at the passageway. Clothes are useful protection if you go scrambling around rocks.”
So that was why they hadn’t met the boat out in the water. They’d been working inside. He looked around and noticed a clotheshorse set up on the jetty, with some clothes on it. “Doing a bit of housekeeping?”
“There’s a bit of a breeze coming in, so it’s a good time to get things washed and dried.”
“Do you have fresh water?”
Patrick nodded. “There’s a trickle of water coming down through a crack in a rock. And someone built a little dam to catch it.”
More evidence that at some time in the past this place had been a quarry. “Useful.”
“It’s one of the reasons this cave’s good. I wouldn’t drink it unless I had to, but it smells clean.”
In other words, even if it wasn’t up to drinking-water standards, it was clean enough to keep themselves and their clothes smelling respectable. Smelling clean was an important factor in how likely they were to draw attention to themselves in town. “By the way, Simon said to tell you to come and use the washing machine if you need to get some laundry done. Which reminds me -- I need to talk to you about what to tell people about you.”
“Thought you’d already decided that. Here, give me that.” Patrick took the picnic basket from him and set it against the wall of the cave.
“I need a bit more story than that.” But he needed to talk to them both about it. “Is George in the passageway?”
“Yes. We heard you come in, so I came down to have a look, but he’s playing with the rockfall.”
And it probably wasn’t a coincidence that they were inspecting the rockfall when they expected him to arrive. “I’ll get the torch from the boat.”
“Thanks.”
Patrick followed him to the boat and took the bag of books from him. “Might as well drop these off in the cupboard on the way past.”
“Do you have an actual cupboard?”
“Not really. Just some wooden shelves we’ve put up in one of the side chambers.”
He followed Patrick to the back of the cave, where a wide passageway extended back. He could see well enough at this point, but decided to switch the torch on right away, so that he could see fine detail if necessary. This section was clearly manmade, although perhaps following the path of an existing natural passage in the rock. There were side chambers that had been quarried out; he poked his head into a couple of them for a better look, and it appeared that some had been quarried such as to leave just enough stone for supporting piers, while others seemed to have been deliberately left as small rooms. Storage chambers for equipment, perhaps.
He found George examining a rockfall that blocked the passageway.
“Pass me that torch; it might show me something I can’t see.”
He handed over the torch, and George played the beam over the top of the fall. The torch was a powerful one and picke
d out details clearly, although it also cast deep shadows. But George said, “Thought so! Martin, do you think it’s safe to climb up there?”
“Give me back the torch.” Martin examined the rockfall and then the roof. “I think the roof is stable, but if you feel the pile shifting, get off fast.”
“Patrick, stand well back. Just in case.” With that, George levered himself up onto the big block that formed part of the base of the pile of stone. He tested his next foothold carefully, then swung himself up. He reached up and waved his hand above his head. “There’s air coming through here.”
“And it was a breezy day outside. There’s probably an exit to the open air through there somewhere.” Whether it was one they could use was another matter, but it was worth investigating. “George, come down from there. I think we should go shopping for a ladder.”
“Of course,” Patrick said quietly behind him. “We never thought of it, because we’d have had to borrow a boat to get one in here.”
“Borrow?”
“We would have put it back afterwards,” George said as he scrambled down from his perch. “That’s not the sort of thing someone will assume they just mislaid. There are people we could beg a favour from if we absolutely had to have a boat for an afternoon, but we’d rather not ask if we don’t have to.”
“So how did you get some of this stuff shifted?” A lot of it was loose rubble in pieces small enough for two men to handle, but even so it would take some effort.
“We bought some tools we could carry ourselves and wrapped them in plastic,” Patrick said. “Didn’t move the big pieces very far, just into that room. The small stuff we carried out a bit at a time.”
George took the torch off him again and played it over the side room whose entrance they must have cleared. “It was worth it, because we gained a lot more room in there by clearing the door than was taken up with rubble. But it was a lot of work, and we were nervous about another fall.”
“Sensible. You could get badly hurt if any more of that came down. But I think you’ll be able to shift it safely, although I’ll need to take a closer look at it.” He suspected that a weak section in the roof had given way. It had dumped enough rubble to block the passage, but the fall might well have cleared the weak material and left a stable roof again.
There were some big blocks in the pile, fairly square on the sides from natural jointing. They’d probably dropped straight down and stayed where they’d fallen. They were going to cause the most problems, but they were also to one side. If George and Patrick didn’t want the whole passage cleared, the big blocks could actually be useful -- they’d be much more stable than loose chunks. “How much room do you want? Just enough for you to walk through comfortably, or the whole width?”
“Even room to climb through will do,” George said. “At least until we have an idea what’s on the other side. We might want to be able to block it up again.”
This was their home. They’d find a back door useful, but only if they could keep it locked. “I think we can at least clear enough space at the top to crawl through, though I’d recommend a ladder on each side. Then we can check out what’s behind there.”
They nodded, looking satisfied. “Thanks, Martin,” Patrick said. “That gives us a much better idea of whether we could risk it.”
“I wonder where it goes,” George mused. “There’s what looks like a ruined building on the hill.”
Some of the old quarries in the area had associated buildings. “Could be that there’s an access tunnel. Whether there’s an access road is another matter.”
“As long as there’s somewhere we can get in and out without an audience.” George looked the rockfall over again. “It would be worth the risk.”
They were trusting him with a great deal of information. But they’d made the decision to trust him with the biggest secret of all on the day they’d rescued him from the storm, so perhaps this secret wasn’t so difficult. “We could try taking a look around up top first. Have you ever looked up there?”
“No,” Patrick said. “The cliffs are too dangerous to climb just here.”
And it might be a long walk from the nearest place where they could easily get to the clifftop path. Of course, it might not be that far a walk from the nearest parking spot. “I’ll need to check some maps first. But we might be able to drive there and park somewhere relatively close.”
That idea had no more occurred to them than had the ladder, judging by their expressions. Martin made a mental note to himself to never, ever take it for granted that they had thought of the obvious. It might not be obvious to people who spent most of their time in another shape. “I think we need to sit down and think about what you need and want. There may be other ways I can help you.”
“Martin ...” George seemed hesitant.
“What’s wrong?”
“Why? Why help us? The sex is good, but you don’t know us.”
A week with two dolphins. A muddled afternoon, two months of longing, and a day of discovering that it had not been a dream. Not much to build a relationship on. But even without the relationship ... “You helped me. I might have made it home in one piece without your help that day, but I was a lot safer because you took the risk of helping me. Even if I did get concussion out of it.”
Patrick hugged him. “I’m glad we did. And not just for the sex.”
“I told you so,” George said. “He tried to make friends with us, not just get us to do tricks.”
“And his friend’s a nice guy as well.”
“Just because he gave you chocolate,” George grumbled amiably.
“And he understood what Martin was saying about talking to us without bothering us.” Patrick looked into Martin’s eyes. “Though he also said something about getting the must-shag feeling out of the way.”
“I will confess that I didn’t come here this morning with only consultancy work in mind.”
He felt a hand on his shoulder. George said, “Before you two get completely distracted ...”
Patrick let go of him and stepped away. “All right. What now?”
“I just want Martin to take a look at the tools, so he knows what we’ve already got.”
“He’s already had a look at our tools.”
“Idiot.” But George said it with affection. He turned and played the torch beam into the side chamber, lighting up a rock shelf with tools neatly laid out along it. All of them walked into the room, and George aimed the torch at the tools. “This is useful. We should get one.”
“We’ve never needed one before.” Patrick took the torch from George and swung the beam around the room. “Though you can see different things with it, can’t you?”
“I still can’t believe the echolocation.” Somehow that was harder to believe in than the shapeshifting. That they could change shape was bizarre enough. That they still had access to the physical abilities of the other shape, physical abilities that could not possibly exist in their human body, was beyond bizarre. Dolphin echolocation was a physical organ, just like eyes and ears, and there was nowhere for it to go in a human body.
“Can’t you?” George asked casually and looked straight at him.
He felt ... something. A faint pressure against his skin. All over at first, and then the focus narrowed, shrinking down to a very specific area.
“You had some effect on him, Patrick.”
He’d sprung an erection when Patrick had been hugging him. His clothes were loose, so with anyone else it wouldn’t have been all that visible. With these two he had no secrets. “That’s not fair!”
George grinned at him. “No, but it’s fun.”
The pressure on his cock increased, then started pulsating.
“Still don’t believe in it?” George asked.
It was a very convincing demonstration. And a very distracting one. “How the hell are you doing that?”
The pressure increased, then faded.
“We don’t know,” George said. “It doesn’t
work in air for dolphins; only in water.”
But it was still an ability they took for granted. “So things a dolphin can do in water, you can do in air when you’re in human shape.” It shouldn’t exist at all, so if it did exist, there was no reason why it shouldn’t be capable of operating in air.
“Yes. It’s useful.” George scanned him again. “We could watch your condition when you hit your head; although it could have been difficult if you had been seriously hurt.”
“Well, one of us could have towed the boat into harbour while the other one stayed in the boat with him,” Patrick said.
“Though I’ve thought of a more cheerful use for it,” George said. “Martin, will you trust us?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. George was asking permission for something rather than just doing it, and that was all the reassurance he needed. They’d stop if he asked them to.
George snapped off the torch, leaving them in darkness.
Not darkness to dolphins who could walk in human form, of course. They could see where he couldn’t. They could even walk out right now and leave him here without him knowing that they had gone. Leaving him with nothing but his memory of the path in and his knowledge that there would almost certainly be enough light coming up the passageway for him to find his way out once his eyes had fully adapted to the dark. In twenty minutes or so he should be able to see by that faint light. But for the next few minutes he was blind and totally dependent on them.
George’s voice came out of the darkness. “Easy, Martin. I’ll put the light back on if you can’t manage.”
“Just ... just keep talking to me so that I know you’re there.” He could hear the waver in his own voice, but George and Patrick had probably heard/seen his pulse increase before he’d said a word.
“We’re here,” Patrick said. Someone touched him on the shoulder. “Feel me?”