The Beast of Seabourne

by Rhys A. Jones

  “Is there an exact place we need to be aiming for?”

  Soph answered. “Forty metres up from this point, towards the rocks above. Readings indicate that the source is sixty-two point three metres from here.”

  Oz looked up. They were going to have to climb and scramble up the last few yards. It was steep and precarious underfoot, studded with loose rocks that had tumbled from the cliff face above. There was nothing to see except a small bent tree growing out from a small depression. “Let’s aim for that,” he said, pointing upwards.

  They said nothing for the remainder of the climb. All thoughts of the cold were now gone as they clambered up, and for the first time Oz felt sweat trickling down his neck onto his chest. Finally, they reached the windblown tree. It was no more than four feet high, but at least it provided something to hold on to on that precipitous incline. Ruff was the last to arrive. He grabbed onto a branch and sucked in air. Above them, the sky was turning to tarnished silver.

  “Okay. So, what now?” Ruff gasped.

  “Soph,” Oz asked, “what do your readings say?”

  “I have a very strong signal twenty yards from this very point, directly north.”

  “Which is which way?”

  A compass floated in the air between them. The arrow pointed in, towards the belly of the mountain they were on.

  Ellie groaned. “Does that mean we have to go up over the top?”

  Oz looked up. They were at the point at which the grass gave way to loose stones and scree and where the cliff face became almost sheer. If they were going to go any higher, they would need to find handholds on the rock.

  “No, Ellie,” Soph said. “The reading shows no higher elevation. If anything, it is a few metres lower.”

  “Lower than where we’re standing?” Ruff said. “So have we missed it?”

  “No, Ruff.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ruff said. “I do,” Oz said, and there was something in his voice that made the others look at him. “She means it’s twenty yards inside the mountain, don’t you, Soph?”

  “That is correct, Oz.”

  “What?” Ruff said.

  “Think about it,” Oz said. “McClelland brought us to this point. He was into burial sites. Maybe there’s a cave or something. Come on. Let’s have a look.”

  It was Ellie who found it.

  “Up here,” she cried excitedly from a point five yards up from the tree’s lowest branch.

  Ruff and Oz joined her and they all stared into a dark space, little more than a jagged vertical slit about five feet high. It nestled behind a large outcrop, which kept it constantly in shadow, well-hidden from any casual glance. It was the foothold the tree had grown out of and into which its roots extended. Oz knew instantly that it was the right place, from the way his voice echoed into its depths.

  “How the hell did McClelland find this?” Ruff asked in an awestruck voice.

  “Dunno, but I’ll bet that this is where Soph’s reading is coming from,” Oz muttered.

  He took the first tentative step in, the way instantly lit by Soph. The floor was rubble-strewn and wet as they wound first left and then right along a narrow but negotiable passage. Where they put their hands on the walls for support, their fingers came away damp and slimy. After ten yards, Oz could feel the air change about him. The way widened, and suddenly, they were standing on a shallow platform. Below them, the floor had been shaped into steps descending to a wider lower level, while above, the walls suddenly funnelled out to reveal a slit of milky dawn light filtering through a canopy of green bracken and overhanging branches.

  “Blimey,” Oz said.

  “Buzzard,” Ruff breathed.

  “What is this place?” Ellie whispered.

  “Reminds me a bit of being in a church,” Ruff said in awe.

  Silently, Oz nodded in agreement. He took the steps down. They were narrow but firm. Above them, the light was strengthening, but at the bottom of the chasm it remained as dark and dank as the deepest dungeon. Behind him, he could hear Ruff’s nasal breathing, sheltered as they now were from the wind, their echoing footsteps the only other noise. It was an eerie place, and it was easy to believe that this might be somewhere people had come to worship their gods. Oz wasn’t scared, but there was something about the place that made the hair on his neck quiver like a guitar string. Not looking at where he was walking, he half-stumbled and came up with a start, feeling Ellie grumble at his clumsiness as she bumped into him from behind.

  “What is it?” Ellie asked, recovering quickly.

  “Don’t know. Tripped over a branch, I think?”

  “Stop messing about, you two,” Ruff hissed. “I vote we find the ring and get out of here pronto.”

  “The reading is coming from this chamber,” Soph said. “But I am also picking up high concentrations of calcium.”

  “Calcium. Good for teeth and bones, right?” Ruff said.

  Oz knew that when Ruff was worried, he talked. It seemed to help him cope.

  Soph led them onward but halted abruptly. “On the eastern side, there is another drop down to a lower level, approximately six metres below us. Be careful.” Oz shone his torch over and saw the floor slope away sharply.

  “Thanks, Soph,” he said.

  “Why have I got such a bad feeling about this?’ Ruff asked in a chattering whisper.

  No one answered. Soph led them forward another twenty feet, and Oz saw the walls begin to rise again in front of them, but at the very end was a denser shadow, where the chamber extended beyond Soph’s light.

  “Wonder what’s in there,” Ellie said and stepped forward to shine her torch in. She let out a stifled scream.

  “What is it?” moaned Ruff from behind Oz.

  “Soph?” Oz asked.

  The avatar moved in front of Ellie to bathe the furthest recesses in silver light. What was revealed made Oz’s skin crawl. Lining the walls, in a pile at least five feet high and many yards long, was a carefully arranged mass of human bones.

  “Is this some sort of cannibal cave?” warbled Ruff. “It is an ossuary, Ruff,” Soph said. “A way of carefully commemorating the dead. It is a common practise in many cultures.”

  Oz swung around and shone his torch on to the floor they’d just crossed. There, where he’d stumbled, lay a large human femur. He shivered involuntarily at the memory before turning back to study the ossuary. It was obvious that it had been there a long time, because the water dripping incessantly from the roof had begun to coat the skulls and bones with limestone, such that the top layer was covered by a kind of gritty icing. It looked like the rock was reclaiming the dead, converting them all back to the stone from which they had come.

  “Just so you both know, I am not enjoying this,” Ruff said in a wobbly voice.

  “Okay. Let’s just find what we came to get.” Oz didn’t want to linger, either. This was a sacred place, and they needn’t stay a moment more than was absolutely necessary. Ellie had edged across to where the floor of the chasm petered out. She was looking down into the depths.

  “Wonder what’s down there,” she mused.

  “Don’t know and don’t want to find out,” Oz said. “Soph, tell us where to start looking.”

  Soph beamed out another pencil-sharp ray, which scanned the wall above Oz’s head, criss-crossing at a ridiculous speed until it stopped at a point four feet above Oz’s left shoulder.

  “There is the point source,” Soph said.

  Oz turned to look at the wet, slimy, uneven chasm wall. Although it was not as icy out of the wind, it was still a cheerless and cold spot, and the constantly dripping water added nothing to its charm. It looked as if the sun, even when it was high overhead, would never penetrate this deep.

  “You are wrong, Oz,” Soph said in response to Oz’s brooding thoughts. “There are six days surrounding the summer solstice when the sun does indeed penetrate right to the floor and the very spot at which you are standing.”

  “Not today, then?” Oz
said.

  “Not today,” Soph agreed. Effortlessly, she glided across the floor and illuminated the point at which her laser was focused.

  “Hold on, I’ll see if I can get up closer. Ruff, give us a bunk up.” Oz got a handhold and, standing on Ruff’s bent back, managed to get up a couple of feet. The rock wall was slippery and treacherous, and it was clear he was not going to be able to get much higher. But with his arm at full stretch, he could just about feel the small crack in the rock where Soph’s beam was pointing.

  “There’s moss and stuff inside it, and I can feel grit and dirt at the back.”

  Ruff arched himself upwards to give Oz another couple of inches.

  “Isn’t there anything else in there?” Ruff asked with more than a hint of discomfort in his voice.

  The wet, gritty dirt under Oz’s finger was stubborn. He had to pull most of it out with his index finger. The crevice was jagged and tight, and now that he had cleaned it out, it was filling with icy water, which was quickly making his finger numb.

  “I can’t feel anything…” Oz pushed his finger in almost to the knuckle. Neither Ellie nor Ruff was talking now, and Oz could feel their disappointment beating out at him in waves. They’d come all this way for just this moment. Could Soph have been wrong? Was McClelland just a huge wild goose chase after all?

  And then his clawing finger brushed against something right at the bottom of the crevice. He felt a curved edge, hard as the rock around it, but different because it was completely smooth. He tried rolling it out, and twice it fell back. His arm and hand were trembling from the effort, and he could feel Ruff beneath him struggle to keep his footing. With one final effort, Oz managed to roll the ring up and over the lip of the crevice. He grabbed it between his numb finger and thumb.

  “Got it,” he yelled and stepped back off Ruff’s back onto the cavern floor with a jolt. He held out his hand for the others to see. There, nestling in his gritty palm, was an octagonal ring, as black as the pebble, but as light as pumice. The surface was featureless, but inside the band, a network of fine golden filigree glistened, just as on the maker’s mark on the pebble. Oz held the ring under one of the dripping rivulets cascading down the walls to clean it and held it up. In Soph’s light, it glistened wetly, untarnished and whole after its years in the cave.

  “Is this it?” Oz asked Soph. “Is this what we’ve been looking for?”

  “Place it on your finger, Oz. I will know immediately,” Soph said.

  Carefully, his fingers still trembling from the cold, Oz put the ring on the middle finger of his right hand. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to happen, but suddenly seeing himself standing there next to Ellie and Ruff made him woozy, and he took an involuntary step back.

  “Wow,” he said. “Am I seeing myself through your eyes, Soph?”

  “Yes, Oz. The ring, as you call it, is a remote cognitive link and neural interface. With practise, you will be able to use your own sensory input as well as mine.”

  “What? You mean see what you see and what I see at the same time?”

  “Exactly.”

  Oz thought about what that meant and made an effort to try and look at Soph through his own eyes. The transfer was instant and smooth. Remembering seeing himself from Soph’s perspective a moment ago, he thought about it again, and instantly, it was there too, like a split screen in his head. But not only was he seeing the world from two viewpoints, he was seeing what Soph was seeing. And that meant that her viewpoint also displayed a whole variety of data. The height of the wall and its composition, the rate of water flow in the little rivulet that trickled down. Above, he saw that it was 8.63 meters to the first frond of bracken. It was totally amazing.

  “Oz, you all right?’ he heard Ellie ask. “If your mouth drops open any more, it’ll be scraping the floor.”

  Oz turned to look at her and watched himself shutting his mouth in Soph’s screen in his head.

  “Fine,” he said, laughing. “Totally weird but brilliant.I’m seeing you, but I’m seeing me seeing you, and I know how tall the chasm is and how much calcium there is in the bones and…”

  They were looking at him with bemused expressions.

  “Have a go. You have to try this. They can try it, can’t they, Soph?” Oz asked, suddenly worried that it only worked for him.

  Soph answered in his head. “Though it is a genetic interface, and will not work as well as it does with you because of the genlink, many functions are accessible.”

  Oz took the ring off and held it out. Ruff was the quicker off the mark and managed to grab it before Ellie.

  “Hey,” Ellie protested. “What happened to ‘ladies first’?”

  “I see no ladies,” Ruff said rudely, and slipped on the ring. His face lit up as he started looking around to see what Oz had seen. Suddenly, he was firing off all sorts of questions to Soph. But Oz was only half-listening. He was thinking about what Soph had said about the genlink. He had no qualms about allowing Ellie and Ruff access to Soph, but she would not work for them without his permission, and that was the most baffling thing of all. The genlock and the genlink—the DNA-based connection he had with the avatar, and which he’d never been able to find an explanation for—remained a huge mystery. Over two hundred and fifty years ago, some others had tried to get Soph to work, but no one had succeeded. His dad had been led to her in Egypt through the vaguest of connections, which seemed, on the surface, to have been little more than chance. Suddenly, Oz was thinking about Caleb, who was not convinced that chance had anything to do with it at all. He, at least, was certain this was all meant to be.

  Ruff’s “totally buzzard amazing” brought Oz back from his musing. Ruff was staring at the ossuary now, obviously seeing something in it that was overcoming his fear and distaste.

  “Yeah, I know,” Ellie said, reading Oz’s expression, “Look at him, Mr Fickle. Five minutes ago, he was ready to run out of here.” She sounded still quite miffed at Ruff for having taken first go with the ring.

  Oz forced a laugh, his mind still preoccupied. He knew that Soph had answers to everything in her memsource, but until they found the pendant—he thought of it as some sort of external hard drive containing whatever was missing from Soph’s memory—he wouldn’t be able to find out. However, the ring was a significant step closer.

  Ruff was running his fingers over the walls of the chasm like a man discovering that his house was really made of cheese.

  “Come on, Ruff, give Ellie a go,” Oz said.

  “I will, I will. Does it do anything else, apart from making me a cyber genius?”

  “It is also a tactile neuro-interface.”

  “A what?” Oz asked.

  “Perhaps it would be easier to show you.”

  Instantly, the ossuary melted away as Soph projected a three-dimensional holographic image into the chamber. Oz found himself looking in through a doorway on a dimly lit room, with a stone floor and oak trusses holding up the ceiling. A large mullioned window looked out onto darkness outside. There was a stale smell of burning fat coming from the sputtering candles on the walls behind him, and Oz had a fleeting moment to reflect on how on earth he was able to not only see but smell what Soph was now showing him, before his attention was drawn to something in the uncertain light of a storm lantern. There, a figure slumped against one wall, its arms bound behind its body with thick rope attached to iron rings set into the sturdy timbers. Gone was the dank chill of the chasm; instead, the air felt warm, and, combined with the smell of straw, Oz felt it must be summer wherever Soph’s holotrack had been made.

  The figure was not stirring. Its head was bowed and in deep shadow, and Oz wondered absently if it was sleeping.

  Suddenly, Oz was entering the room with three men. Two were dressed in leather waistcoats over rough shirts and breeches. Their hands looked calloused and dirty from manual work, their faces ruddy. The third was a stooping, slighter man, older and smaller than the other two. He was dressed in a frock coat, his face haggard
with dark circles under his eyes. They walked across to the bound figure, which did not stir at their approach. One of the younger men lit another lantern and held it up as he lifted the figure’s chin. Next to him, Oz heard Ellie’s breath catch in her throat.

  The face was that of a boy, not much older than they were. With the man’s touch on his chin, the boy’s eyes flared open, the whites visible right around the irises, like those of a wild animal disturbed in its slumbers. The boy struggled and twisted his head away from the hand that held it, but in the light of the lantern, Oz could see dark brown and ochre stains on the front of what had been once a white shirt. The remainder of his clothes were filthy, his hair matted, his face smeared with mud or worse.

  Suddenly and most horrifyingly, the boy let out a low, inhuman growl. Yet, despite the feral hate distorting the features, it was obvious to Oz that the boy’s face bore a striking resemblance to that of the older man. Whereas the boy’s expression was hateful and wild, the man’s was creased with pain and concern in the grimace that appeared in response to the boy’s reaction. So much so, Oz felt his heart constrict on seeing it.

  The boy’s struggling wrenched his chin out of the lantern holder’s grip. The latter instantly stepped back to place himself out of reach of the boy’s snapping jaws.

  “Sir,” he said to the older man urgently, “I know it is not my place to speak, but I must protest again at this folly. Much as I know how much you care for Master Richard, it is plain to see that he no longer occupies this body. Some demon or devil has taken his place, and I fear for your safety if we are to continue with this…” He sighed audibly. “In truth, I see nothing but misery and pain in this deed.”

  The old man smiled, though his eyes remained mirthless. “You need not fear to speak plainly with me, Edmund Redmayne. Your loyalty to me is unquestionable, and your help with Richard over these last days…” He shook his head as if to clear it of some dread memory. “How you found him and brought him back, I do not know, but I am grateful beyond words. Here you address me as an equal, and you need not fear expressing your concern, for I, too, have the gravest of doubts that my actions will have any bearing.” His voice dropped lower. “And yet I see no other course before me, and I will not be swayed. If you feel that you cannot assist any longer…”