Writ in Water

by Natasha Mostert

But here it was. The door was half-closed, but he spotted a bed with a red quilt through the opening. He pushed the door fully open and stepped into the room.

  There were two twin beds and one wasn’t made up. The quilt was dragged all the way down to the foot of the bed and the sheets were twisted.

  So this was where she slept. He was feeling better. He picked up the pillow and brought it close to his face. Oh, yes. This was more like it. He could smell her. He could definitely smell her.

  He dropped the pillow back on the crumpled sheets and turned toward the other bed. This one was covered with copies of newspaper clippings. He moved in to take a closer look. The Face of a Killer.

  For a long moment he stared at the picture. This man’s life had touched his own with the impact of a meteor and, even though they would never meet again, the two of them were linked. He had read once that certain cultures believed that if you save someone’s life, he belongs to you forever. He may not have saved Adam Buchanan from a literal death but, by choosing to let him go, Buchanan was in his debt as surely as any survivor was to his rescuer.

  Nothing in life was random. If Adam Buchanan hadn’t turned his hand to murder, the Watcher and Justine would never have met. If not for a killing nine years ago, she would never have entered his life. It was all meant to be.

  Justine was obviously fascinated by Buchanan. Against one wall she had taped up a picture of the man. It was enlarged, big and rather blurred. Imagine going to sleep with the picture of a murderer in your room. Did Justine fantasise about this man? Did she dream of the moment when Adam Buchanan sliced a blade into his brother’s chest? Women found violence erotic. Go to any wrestling or boxing match, and it was the women who were screaming with pleasure. Murderers on death row received marriage proposals from women who knew nothing about them except for their bloody crimes. The entire book of Genesis revolved around a woman’s attraction to evil. Justine’s interest in this man was completely understandable.

  The tall, white-painted chest underneath the picture looked promising. He walked over and pulled open the top drawer. As the drawer slid open, he got a whiff of flowery scent and he smiled at the contents. Knickers. Blue and pink and girly. And they were excellent quality. He picked up a white pair with lace all over the crotch. He would write about it in his notes tonight.

  As he replaced the knickers, he felt the outline of something hard underneath his fingers. It was a blister pack, several rows of tiny pills covered by plastic bubbles. Birth-control pills. Well, considering the kind of work she did, traipsing around the globe all the time, he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. She has probably had her fair share of men. And these men would be explorers out there in the real world. Adventurers. Men different from him. He slammed the drawer shut.

  A small washbasin with a tap was set in the corner of the room. Next to the tap was a glass with a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. In the mornings this was where she’d wash her face. He touched the hand towel hanging from the rail and was disappointed to find it dry.

  He looked at the toothbrush; he liked the translucent green colour. He picked it up and stared intently at the bristles. They were slightly worn out. Time to replace your toothbrush, Justine.

  He always liked to leave something of himself behind. Something for his subject to remember him by, so to speak. But of course the rule of the game was that his subject should not be aware of the Watcher coming and going. So he had to be very subtle. He brought the toothbrush up to his face. Slowly he rubbed the bristles across his tongue. Back and forth. Back and forth.

  He dropped the toothbrush back into the glass. He should be on his way.

  But he was back in the game. The unease that had gripped him earlier was gone. Observe the observable. Play the game. If you stick to the rules, you stay in control.

  But as he descended the staircase and walked into the entrance hall, his eye was caught by a door standing slightly ajar. Through the opening he glimpsed a dark bookcase filled with handsome volumes. The library.

  He pushed the door wide open.

  And stopped, surprised.

  There were photographs all over the place. On the sofa, the writing table, propped up on the mantelpiece, layering the floor. Pictures everywhere. Black-and-white images, which made no sense at all.

  He touched one of the photographs. The surface was glossy, liquid-like; he almost thought it might stick to his fingers. It showed a large room with a big vase on the mantelpiece. In the middle of the room was an animal. A wolf.

  For a few seconds he simply stared at the image, dumbfounded. The wolf stared back, the unblinking eyes utterly feral.

  With difficulty he tore his gaze away. But everywhere he looked there were more photographs. They appeared to have been scattered all over the room with a kind of mad abandon. In some of the pictures the wolf was out of focus, a mere silhouette, but as his eyes wandered from picture to picture, there was no doubt in his mind that he was looking at the same animal.

  And the house. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He recognised the house. The staircase, the tall windows, the entrance hall with its black-and-white tiles.

  A wolf was walking through the rooms of Paradine Park.

  Trick photography. It had to be. Photographic sleight of hand. But the vibe coming off these pictures was strange, really strange.

  But also wonderful.

  He touched the picture hesitantly once more. Trick photography. No doubt about it. But these pictures told him a lot about her. She was hankering after something wild and luxuriant and passionate. Something she had lost along the way, maybe.

  There were so many pictures. If he took this one, she probably wouldn’t even know. He got to his feet, holding the picture carefully so as not to smudge it.

  He had been inside the house for almost an hour. Time to go. No use pushing his luck.

  But at the door he stopped. He looked back over his shoulder and silently made himself a promise.

  TWELVE

  SKELETON COAST.

  The Phoenician explorers were probably the first to sail past this deadly shore. Those intrepid seafarers, the Portuguese, followed in 1486 and erected stone crosses to mark their passage. The Portuguese had a rough time of it, their skills tested to the limit by the savagery of a coast more treacherous than anything they had encountered before. They were followed by other European expeditions, often ill-fated.

  Whales, boats and the skeletons of desperate men were buried here, shipwrecked seafarers who had approached this evil shore with a prayer in their hearts. Scurvy-ridden, in dire need of fresh water—the sight of land must have seemed to these men a blessing from heaven. Until they went ashore and found a land with no life, only wind.

  One group of sailors had seen ‘people’ in the distance and had started to walk toward them. But after stumbling through the sunburned sand for hours, the travellers had discovered that what had seemed like humans from afar, were in fact, not people but bobbing seals, chattering and screaming.

  As Adam looked out over the pale, undulating dunes, he wondered what had gone through their minds as the men had turned back, desperately searching for a source of fresh water that did not exist. He had once got lost in the desert himself and he would never forget the raging, agonising thirst which had taken possession of him as the sun drained his body and the concentration of salt increased tremendously in the mucous membranes of his mouth. He had been lucky. He had managed to find his way back to civilisation in time to reverse the calamitous loss of moisture. But from the moment those sailors had set foot on land, they were beyond hope. They had escaped from being swallowed by the ocean, only to find themselves drowning in the desert. Hallucinating, their body temperature rocketing, their brains disintegrating absolutely under the stupendous stress of heatstroke, they had perished among those windswept dunes, their parched, wide-open mouths filling with sand, their dry eyes staring. Their skulls could still be found today, bleached and white.

  With a sharp shrug o
f his shoulders, Adam started pulling on the boat. If he wanted to finish his dive today as planned, he certainly did not have time for morbid daydreaming.

  As he pushed the boat from the pale sand into the milky waves, he shuddered from the shock of the icy water biting into the exposed skin of his hands. He was wearing not only a drysuit, but an insulating layer of underclothes as well. The water here was freezing—the Benguela current that flowed along this coast had its origin in sub-polar latitudes. This early, the sun was still hidden and the sky had the glimmer of mother-of-pearl. Adam could feel the skin on his face tightening from the chill of the fog that pressed moistly against him. Grabbing on to the edge of the boat, he swung his body over the side. With strong, rhythmic strokes he started to row away from the shore toward the calmer water behind the break line.

  The swell was strong and he could feel his muscles straining with effort. After rowing for fifteen minutes, he lifted the oars and sat back.

  On his left was Pennington’s Island, Mark’s latest mission in life. The island used to be covered with birds, but after Grachikov sent in the mechanical diggers to start digging the foundations of his hotel, they had left their nests in alarm. From where Adam sat in the boat, he could see the bulky outlines of the heavy equipment, transported by Grachikov at great cost and with enormous effort. Their mechanical jaws were eerily silent and still. They looked like stranded dinosaurs.

  He started rowing again. In the distance he could see Giant’s Castle, his destination; an enormous rock formation jutting out into the sea. From afar it did actually give the appearance of a fortress crenelated with towers and sturdy battlements. Even from here, Adam could see the waves breaking against the rock face in a fan-like spray of white foam. For centuries a battle had raged her between rock and water, the fury of the sea carving deep fissures into the stone, sculpting it into bizarre shapes, wrinkling it as though it were mere paper.

  The castle was home to a large colony of birds—cormorants, Cape cormorants and gannets—as well as a sizable population of seals, which used this barren strip of coastline as a breeding ground. The two colonies lived side by side, usually in harmony, although it sometimes happened that the heavy seals would slide down the rock face without much regard for their winged neighbours, leaving behind them a trail of squashed, dead birds. The last time he had visited the castle, the female seals had been heavy with the burden of their unborn young. But as he approached the rock, the air was filled with the cries of hundreds of newborn pups. In the past month the castle had, in effect, become a giant crèche for a new generation of baby seals. The sound of their thin, sharp squeals, mingling with the baritone barks of their parents, was deafening.

  But the seals were not what interested him. Giving the breaking waves a wide berth and rowing hard against the current, he headed for the far side of the castle. Here a small, sheltered bay had formed, the inlet deepening to create a natural lagoon of calmer water. The lagoon was the gateway to a labyrinth of underwater caves, which he and Mark had been exploring over the past few months. It still amazed him that Africa—continent of plains and deserts—had some of the biggest underwater lakes and cave systems in the world. The network of caves he and Mark were discovering section by section, was vast, covering miles of water-filled tunnels and chambers.

  The caves drew him. He was enthralled by these water-filled caverns; sometimes when he entered their tremendous silence he almost had a feeling of déjà vu, a tremulous sense of recognition. They were a place of secrecy and the water moving through the twisting tunnels seemed like primeval water; ancient amniotic fluid. Within the quiet of these caves he could sense the heartbeat of the Earth. It was an ancient, ancient place and some of the rocks to be found here were more than 1,100 million years old, the product of gigantic tectonic movements and the cataclysmic eruptions of submarine volcanoes.

  He reached the lagoon and paddled into its shallows. The smell of rotting kelp was strong in his nose. The looming rock face above him was white with the droppings of thousands of birds. He looked up at the mass of seething birds, as always slightly overwhelmed by the presence of so many beaks and wings and eyes.

  Jumping out, he pulled the boat behind him and dragged it as far above the high watermark as he could. The last time he had visited, a massive bull seal had taken a fancy to the boat in his absence and it had taken a harrowing twenty minutes of flapping his arms and making aggressive honking noises before the bull could be persuaded to leave.

  After stowing the boat, he started to kit up to get ready for diving. By the time he had finished, he not only had tanks on his back but extra bottles hanging from underneath his arms as well. The weight was severe and, even though he was a well-built man, he grunted from the effort as he started walking. Fins splaying his feet in a bizarre approximation of a balletic movement, he inched carefully backward until he reached the water’s edge.

  Once he entered the water, weightlessness set in and with it that incredible feeling of liberation and euphoria. This was the feeling he had craved ever since he was introduced to diving as a teenager. By the age of sixteen he had obtained his BSAC certification. By the time he left school, he had been trained in cave—as well as cold-water—wreck diving. His father had envisaged Oxford or Cambridge for his eldest son, and was disappointed by his decision to pursue a career as a commercial diver.

  For seven years he had lived away from home, working mostly off the coast of Scotland, rarely visiting. He was passionate about the place of his birth, but he could not bring himself to live under the same roof as his brother.

  Richard, with his knowing, pointed smile, so adept at finding his older brother’s weaknesses. Richard, so handsome, so charming, so utterly manipulative. As a child he hadn’t stood a chance against his brother’s guile and as they entered adulthood he had continued to find himself at a disadvantage.

  But then his father died unexpectedly, and overnight he found himself the master of Paradine Park. His mother, Richard, and Harriet would have the right to live in the house for as long as they wished and share equally in the financial assets, but the property itself was his. He was the firstborn son and his father was a conservative man. The only provision was that he would not be allowed to spend more than sixty days in the year away from the house. If he could not see his way open to living at Paradine Park, the property would go to Richard.

  He was stunned by the sudden turn of events; for a while he even considered refusing his inheritance. What stopped him was Richard. The idea of Paradine Park going to his brother was something he could not bring himself to contemplate.

  Paradine Park. If he hadn’t returned home to claim what was his, things might have turned out so differently…

  He was now swimming parallel to the lagoon’s surface. In order to conserve as much of his air supply as possible, he was using a snorkel for this, the first part of the swim. He took care to stay out of the way of the seals that glided through the water at fantastic speed. The lagoon was shallow, but at its landward edge was a long, narrowish gap opening up between outcrops of jutting rock. This was the entrance to the cave system. A submerged tree barred the entrance with its spreading branches.

  He swam past the sunken tree and carefully tied off a white nylon guideline to one of the large branches. This thin line would ultimately lead him out of the warren of caves he was about to enter. Like Hansel and Gretel following crumbs of bread, he would, at the end of his dive, follow the line back to safety.

  Within the lagoon the darkness was not complete. The rays of the sun formed shafts of light penetrating the water. But the black stillness beyond the entrance gap promised a much deeper darkness. He hesitated, his mind preparing itself for the gloom. Then, with a powerful flip of his leg, he dropped into the enfolding blackness, the water pierced only by the beam of his primary diving light.

  The chamber in which he found himself was big and wide. He and Mark had christened it the Waiting Room because this was where they usually completed their final dec
ompression stops on the way out. Once he dropped down and left the cavern he would find himself in a maze of tunnels and chambers, the rocks sculpted into weird and wonderful shapes. It was an eerie kingdom, a madman’s underwater palace filled with cavern upon cavern, some vast and cathedral-like, others tiny with low ceilings where the least clumsy movement of a fin could stir up a curtain of blinding silt. And it seemed to be never-ending, the water-filled passageways long and often changing direction with unexpected suddenness. He and Mark had explored this network jointly for two months now and still the cave continued.

  It was a sterile place—there were no bulging-eyed, colourful fish, waving anemones and jewel-like coral—but the allure of the caves was more subtle than visual gratification. Cave diving was a supremely dangerous sport and claimed far more lives than mountain climbing or sky diving. But that was part of the addiction. There was no topping the rush of pushing the envelope and of swimming through waters that had known few, if any, other human visitors.

  He glanced at the dive computer strapped to his forearm, which had automatically sensed the start of his dive. He was at a depth of nine metres. This was where he was going to leave his staged decompression tanks. Leaving them here, clipped to the line, freed him from having to take all the tanks with him and would give him the freedom to squeeze through narrower openings.

  With a feeling of elation he started to fin his way into the narrow entrance of a tunnel branching steeply off to the left.

  • • •

  HE GLANCED at the dive computer. He was at a depth of fifty metres and he had been down below for half an hour. He could feel the buzz of nitrogen narcosis. The martini effect, divers called it. Underwater, nitrogen is forced from the lungs into the blood and from there into the tissues, including the brain. The effect on the diver was very much like alcohol intoxication. For every fifteen metres of depth, a diver breathing compressed air would experience the equivalent of downing one martini on an empty stomach. Adam knew that at the moment he was at least three martinis down. Although he felt fine, he was aware that his hand–eye coordination might be affected. But he was fortunate; his tolerance for nitrogen narcosis was good. He had never suffered from the intense paranoia or hallucinations that cause some divers to forget the limited quantity of air in their tank—with disastrous consequences. But he was never complacent. If the buzz got too severe he’d immediately turn back.