The Five Gates of Hell Read Free

himself in a towel and explored the beach. He found a skull wedged between two rocks and managed to prise it loose without breaking it. He showed it to Yvonne.
    â€˜It’s some kind of gull,’ she told him.
    â€˜Can I keep it?’
    She laughed. ‘What would you do if I said no?’
    He smiled, but was uneasy.
    Then he looked down at the skull again, his skull, and a strange pleasure eased through him. Everything spread outwards from the object he held in his hand, everything spread round him, unlimited, available.
    Back at the house, after their swim, they ate a breakfast of eggs speckled with fresh herbs from the garden and waffles soaked in maple syrup and tall glasses of cold milk.
    â€˜You know, I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen you swim,’ Yvonne said. ‘You’re pretty good in the water, aren’t you? You were made for it, I’d say.’
    â€˜Dad says it’s in my blood.’ Nathan licked a trickle of syrup off his finger. ‘You know when you get hot and sweat? That’s how you can tell. You taste it and if it tastes like salt, it’s because the sea’s in your blood. Dad’s got the sea in his blood too. He told me.’
    She was smiling down at him. Sometimes, when she smiled, her whole face seemed to wobble, like a drop of rain just before it falls off a twig.
    For the first few days the weather stayed damp and grey. In the early afternoon the sun would almost burn through, you could sense the blue sky somewhere high above, the blue sky planes fly through, and then the light would fade and the mist would come ghosting in off the ocean, over the dunes and the marshland, over the withered silver bushes that looked like bits of witches, over the old coast road, and you had to switch your headlights on if you drove to the store, even though it was still daytime, otherwise some tree’d step out and put an end to everything.
    Yvonne told him about the walk out to the headland. She had cut the path herself, she said, with her own two hands and a machete, and nobody must ever know. It was their secret, other people would ruin it, you must never tell, she said.
    â€˜Who would I tell?’ he asked her, and saw that smile on her face again, that smile that was like a drop of rain, and then she took his head in one hand and brought it to her breast and held it there.
    He went on the walk every day. You left the house through the sliding doors at the front, crossed a garden of tangled shrubs and plants and, when you reached the cliff edge, you pushed your waythrough a bush and there was the hidden entrance to the path. You followed the cliff edge for a long time, the sea sleeping way below, that rustle as it rolled over in its bed, that sigh. Eventually you were forced inland, through a forest of twisted black trees and green grass, and it was this forest that delivered you out on to the headland. It was sixty feet high, but still the spray came vaulting over the edge, a fright every time because you couldn’t hear it coming, it was like someone jumping out from behind a door. He found a flat rock near the edge and sat and watched the wind lift clouds of fine spray off the top lips of the waves.
    One day Aunt Yvonne followed him out. He heard her as a movement in the grass behind him and didn’t need to turn. He’d known that, sooner or later, she would come. She sat down next to him and locked her arms round her knees.
    He’d been thinking, and now he turned to her. ‘When my mother died, where did she go?’
    â€˜She went into the ocean.’ Yvonne took his hand in hers. ‘She loved the ocean. It was in her blood, just like it’s in yours.’ She lit a cheroot and suddenly the world smelled like the inside of a cupboard that hadn’t been opened for years. ‘When you go back to the ocean,’ she said, ‘all the bad things you’ve ever done, they’re washed away. You’re