Page 28 of Curse of the Stag's Eye
Rhys locked the window. “There’s no such thing as seagulls, remember.”
“Very funny. Help me up.”
He reached out and pulled me up. We stood face to face. "You can't always just blunder through life, Gaz. You need to think things through."
He let go of me and I brushed myself down. "How did it get in? Did you open that window?"
“Not me and I didn’t see the others near it.” He bent down and scooped up the scattered pages. “We’d better get up there before something else happens.” He returned the pages to the table and the books to the shelves. “But promise me you won’t go running off towards any more scary noises?”
I grinned at him. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you were worried about me.”
“Could be.” He cupped my elbow and kissed me again. “Or it could be that I don’t have any insurance for this tour.”
Chapter 15
8.49 p.m. Sitting Room.
Forty-nine minutes behind schedule.Forty-nine.
Nikesh and Dawn met us on the stairs. They’d heard the commotion and come running.
“Are you sure it wasn’t a gannet?” Nikesh asked.
Gaz turned a bit red in the face, from anger or embarrassment, I couldn’t tell. Dawn said she needed a pee so she and Nikesh headed back down to the museum. While we waited for them to return, I suggested to Gaz that he and I explore the sitting room.
Initially, I hadn’t held out much hope of finding anything as there had never been any reports that mentioned it. The room itself was more or less as I’d imagined — a circular room, a couple of old sofas, an armchair, and some framed navigational charts on the wall. An old radio, used for contacting the mainland and checking in with other lighthouses around this part of the coast, sat in one corner. When I’d popped in earlier to rig up the speakers — the thought of which by now made my ears and neck burn with embarrassment — I’d skipped this room entirely. It gave me a chill when I passed by, and I hadn’t wanted to be alone in it.
I started explaining how unusual it was for a rock lighthouse to have both rooms inside and cottages outside, how the cottages had come later, but Gaz wasn’t listening. He’d crouched by a shelf and was staring at some ships in bottles.
“Another common pastime for keepers,” I told him. “It’s a skill that takes ages to learn and they’ve got a lot of time to kill between shifts. Some keepers sold them to make a bit of extra cash.”
A row of six or seven bottles lined the shelf, each filled with intricately detailed models of sailing ships, lovingly crafted. I’ve never been into sailing ships. I prefer spaceships.
“Where have I seen this before?” Gaz pointed to one of the models, a triple-masted ship with two distinctive white lines running along the hull.
I got down on my haunches for a closer look, bringing me close to Gaz’s face. His aftershave made me a bit weak in the knees. I made a mental note to ask him what it was later. Something with bergamot and citrus, I guessed. It made me want to nuzzle into his thick neck. I remembered how his skin felt in the close confines of the store room, the warmth of his body, what it was like to have his arms wrapped around me. “Oh, hang on.” I leaned in closer to the bottle. “It’s theBranwen, isn’t it? The packet ship that sank. I wonder if these are all shipwrecks.”
“I’ve always liked ships,” Gaz said. “Give me a good swashbuckling pirate film any day of the week. I thought about joining the navy once. When I was younger.” He straightened up and examined one of the framed charts. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life once I left school. I didn’t have much money but I spent it all on a ferry across the channel and just bummed about Europe for a couple of years.”
I refrained from making a joke about bumming and asked him what he did over there.
“Oh, all sorts. I can’t even remember most of the jobs I had. Most of them were as a porter, you know, moving stuff around fruit markets, stocking up kitchens. I was a handyman in a couple of hotels for a while. I was rubbish at it but it got a me few weeks’ wages, enough to move on to the next place. I did a season on the ski lifts in France, which was an eye-opener, I can tell you. Plenty of tips, plenty of booze, plenty of sex.”
My ears pricked up at that.
“I was a deckhand in Italy for a while but I didn’t like it and that sort of put me off the idea of being a sailor for life. I spent a good many nights alone — guarding warehouses, roaming hotel corridors, walking the streets of old, old cities — and do you know, in all that time, in all those places, what I never once saw? A ghost.”
I wasn’t supposed to, but I sat on one of the little armchairs, next to an arched window. Michael would have a fit if he knew. The chair had a tartan throw over the back of it. I wondered if that was how it looked when Baines was alive. Maybe his spirit was restless because he didn’t approve of the décor. “I haven’t travelled much. A few holidays in Gran Canaria and Benidorm, but that’s about it. I’d love to do a cruise around the Mediterranean. Or the Caribbean. Or anywhere really.”
Gaz made a face. “And get stuck on a ship with a bunch of boring bastards? Nah, you want to get a little camper van, like Nikesh and Dawn’s. Take it over to France and just start driving. See where the road takes you.”
That sounded much too adventurous for me. Just go with no plan, no itinerary? What would I pack?
“A couple of warm tops, a handful of T-shirts, a pair of jeans, and a pair of shorts.” Gaz listed them on his fingers. “Oh, and two pairs of socks. One to wear, one to wash.”
“No underwear?”
He shrugged. “Most of the time I don’t wear any.”
