Devil's Rock Part 15

Zaki tilted his head. 'Is the cut on my cheek still there?'

a.n.u.sha leant forward. The only light in the room was the glow from the dials and the little LEDs.

'It's kind of hard to tell. It's very dark in here.'

Zaki ran his fingertips across the smooth skin. 'It's gone feel.'

a.n.u.sha felt along his cheekbone then sat back. Zaki could sense she was frightened.

'So that means . . . ?'

'That the thing is still there; it's still inside my body. How else could that cut have healed up so quickly? And it spoke again.'

'When?'

'Tonight, when you were all playing that music and the bracelet was going crazy.'

'What did it say?'

'It said, "Time for you to die."'

'Die! What did it mean? Aren't you frightened?'

'Of course I'm frightened!'

'There must be someone we could talk to someone who could help.'

'And what do we tell them? That I'm possessed? That I'm in danger of turning into the beast from h.e.l.l? Do you seriously think anyone would believe us? No I've got to sort this out.'

'You mean, we've got to sort this out.'

'You don't have to.'

'I know,' said a.n.u.sha firmly, 'but I'm here, aren't I.'

They sat in the semi-darkness, wrapped in their own thoughts, each waiting for the other to say something.

Eventually, a.n.u.sha broke the silence. 'The bracelet . . . and the music . . .' she said slowly.

'And the mask,' added Zaki.

'What? Our mask?'

'On the wall it came alive.'

'Perhaps you are are possessed.' possessed.'

'Your mum said the masks were used to get rid of demons.'

'That's right, the shaman wears the mask and becomes a demon, then, through the music, he can drive out the demon that's in the person they're trying to cure.'

'Perhaps that started to happen tonight. Perhaps my demon felt threatened. Perhaps that's why he spoke. Listen, I want you to find out everything you can about these Devil Dances. Ask your mum and dad; see if they've got any books or pictures, or anything.'

'OK, but . . .'

'I know; it's completely unreal.'

'I'll get everything I can.'

'Do you suppose I could borrow the mask?'

'Yeah, I'm sure you could. I'll say we need it for school for Mrs Palmer.'

'Yeah, good. What about music? I think the music's important.'

'Don't ask me to play the drums, I'm useless!'

'Pity. And we can hardly ask your dad.'

'How about a recording?'

'A recording hey! Yeah it might work!'

'Drums on soundtracks . . .' a.n.u.sha thought for a minute. 'Yes . . . I think . . . Yes! I'm certain! "Varanasi" he used that drum on "Varanasi".'

a.n.u.sha pulled open a filing drawer and flipped through the rows of filed CDs and DVDs. She pulled out a CD and held it out for Zaki. 'Here. This just has the drum track on it.'

'Fantastic.' Zaki took the proffered CD.

'Now what?'

'We need to know what we're doing. We need to read the logbook. It might tell us all sorts of stuff we need to know.'

'Tomorrow's Sat.u.r.day. We've got all day.'

'Well, not quite all day. I need to take the dinghy back to Morveren Morveren. Remember?'

'We'll take the logbook with us! Read it on your boat. Then no one can disturb us.'

'Brilliant! And there are charts on the boat if we need them.'

Zaki felt better now that they had a plan of action. He had to admit that it wasn't a very clear plan but at least they were going to do something, not just wait for things to happen.

a.n.u.sha locked up the recording studio and they crept back into the house. Back in his unfamiliar bed, creatures with eyes of fire pursued Zaki through his dreams so that he woke feeling more tired than when he had gone to sleep.

Chapter 16.

Zaki lay in bed wondering whether or not he should get up. He couldn't hear any sounds of people moving about. What time did the Dalals have breakfast? Did they have breakfast? He should have asked a.n.u.sha. He decided to get up anyway, dressed, and made his way to the kitchen, where he found Mr Dalal seated at the kitchen table, working on something on his laptop computer.

'Sorry,' said Zaki, when Mr Dalal looked up, 'didn't mean to disturb you.'

'Not at all, not at all,' said Mr Dalal. 'I am only doing some stupid emails and I am only doing that because I have n.o.body to talk to. Did you sleep well?'

'Quite well,' Zaki lied.

'Good, because there were some people creeping around the house last night, and I thought they might have woken you. Cup of tea?'

'Um thank you,' said Zaki, embarra.s.sed that their midnight comings and goings had not gone unnoticed.

While Mr Dalal was busy making a fresh pot of tea, Zaki looked around the room. Every available surface seemed to support a little line of carved elephants. Some lines were arranged in ascending height; in other lines all the elephants were more or less the same size but were carved out of different materials. The majority were made from wood, but some were fas.h.i.+oned from coloured stone. They marched across the tops of cupboards, shared shelves with the crockery, and one very large stone elephant served as a doorstop.

'The elephants belong to my wife,' said Mr Dalal. 'She bought one when I first took her to India. My family decided she must love elephants and now they send her one every time they find a new one, which in India can be very, very often.'

Mr Dalal poured mugs of tea and pulled a chair out for Zaki at the table.

'I was thinking about something you said last night, about not being just bodies,' Zaki said.

'Body and mind?'

'Yes. Do you think it might be possible for our minds to I don't know to get changed somehow?'

'I change my mind all the time. Ask my dear wife.'

'I didn't mean like that.'

'No, of course you didn't. Excuse me I was only teasing.'

'What I meant was . . . can something happen so that your mind can exist without your body?'

'Some say there is really only one mind, that exists everywhere, and that each of our minds is a little bit of it.'

Zaki shook his head, 'I don't understand.'

'Imagine a big, big window that has been painted completely black. Now, I scratch a hole in the paint on the left side and you scratch a hole in the paint on the right side. When we look through the holes, we can both see the same view but we see it from slightly different angles. The holes are our minds, what we are looking at is the one mind. Does that help?'

'A little,' said Zaki.

'When we talk about mind like this, we are not talking about brain.' Mr Dalal wagged his finger.

'Could my mind work in somebody else's body?'

This time it was Mr Dalal's turn to shake his head in puzzlement. 'That is a truly wonderful question . . . and, if you ever find the answer, you must tell me what it is.' The next to arrive in the kitchen was a.n.u.sha's mother. She regarded the two at the table, heads together, like a pair of conspirators.

'Sandeep, has that poor boy had any breakfast?'

'Certainly! Cup of tea, and yogic wisdom.'

'Oh, honestly! You could at least have given him some cereal. And where is a.n.u.sha?'

'Sleeping, I expect. Perhaps I should wake her.'

'Perhaps you should. Now, Zaki, what would you like? Cereal, toast, eggs?'

'Toast would be fine, thanks.'

Mr Dalal left to wake a.n.u.sha while his wife bustled around the kitchen making toast, and setting out plates, bowls and cereals on the kitchen table.

Zaki went back to examining the carved elephants. He noticed one that looked rather odd and he got up from the table to take a closer look. The little elephant had been given a place of honour. It was seated in a niche in the wall. Unlike the other elephants, it was brightly painted. Now Zaki saw that it had the head of an elephant but the body of a human, except that the body had four arms. One of the four hands held a noose, one held a sort of stick, the third was held up, palm forward, the fourth held a broken tusk. There was a snake around the creature's waist and a mouse at its feet.

'That's Ganesha,' said a.n.u.sha.

Zaki turned to find her standing behind him. Her hair was still wet from the shower.

'Why does he look like that?'

'Well, there are two different stories, but anyway he lost his head when he was a baby and his father, s.h.i.+va, who is a G.o.d of course, gave him an elephant's head. The really important thing is that he's the remover of obstacles.'

'The remover of obstacles,' Zaki repeated.

'What are all those things he's holding?'

'That's a goad, a stick to prod you forward, and that's the noose he uses to catch all the difficulties that are in your way. The snake is energy. He's got big ears so that he can listen to you, and his elephant head is full of wisdom, it's like the soul, and his human body denotes earthly existence. I've forgotten about the tusk. Mum? Why does Ganesha have a broken tusk?'

'He used it as a pen to write the Mahabharata.'

'Oh yes that's this huge big poem about all the G.o.ds and heroes and so on.'

'And the mouse shows that he's humble because he's the destroyer of pride and selfishness,' added Mrs Dalal.

For the next quarter of an hour they concentrated on eating. Mr Dalal didn't rejoin them. Maybe he had gone to the recording studio, Zaki thought. He obviously knew they had been down there last night. Did he mind? Was he checking to see what they had been up to? a.n.u.sha didn't seem at all concerned. Well, different families had different rules, he supposed.

'The remover of obstacles' the words kept repeating in Zaki's head. He could really do with one of those right now! Michael used to be his remover of obstacles. The one who went first: the first to climb a cliff, the first at the secondary school. He went ahead and came back and told Zaki what it was like, that it was safe. But now the obstacles had grown bigger and not even Michael could remove them.

He looked up from his plate and found Mrs Dalal smiling at him.

'Mum,' a.n.u.sha asked, as they tidied away the breakfast things, 'can Zaki borrow the mask from the living room?'

'There seems to be a lot of interest in that mask all of a sudden,' her mother remarked.

'We're doing myths and stuff with Mrs Palmer and Zaki's got to do a project.'