Gruff left the small pebble on the Weeping Stone and headed for home, shivering in his wet clothes. Everything he had seen and heard was bright and loud in his mind. The anguished scream and the desperate, bloodied thrashing of the man-fish played itself through again and again and Gruff could not stop his ears from the sound or blink the image away.
His thoughts stumbled in and out of focus. Dylan. The man-fish. He had swum towards the sweet, ringing note of the hammer with such open curiosity and a laugh on his face – was he really the person the blacksmith said would kill them all?
Perhaps the hammer-blow had made him so angry he wanted revenge. But the blacksmith had said that Dylan did not mean to kill.
The name the islanders gave the terrible summer storms was Clwyf y Môr, the Wounded Sea. Gruff thought again of that scream and the way the waves had responded as though in sympathy. If Dylan’s pain was linked to the water, then perhaps his agony could become a life-threatening storm.
Halfway back to the farmhouse, the Sleepers dragged Gruff from his thoughts. He felt their pull as a keen, desperate pain in his chest, a yearning so deep and powerful he thought it would split him apart. He began to run towards them over the tussocky ground.
‘No,’ he gasped. He hugged his arms tightly round his chest and deliberately fell over, coming down in a patch of springy heather. He lay there, hunched up, his arms wrapped around the terrible loss and the terrible need. ‘Nope. Peidiwch. No chance. Get lost. Shut up,’ he whispered, until he could hear his own words and feel his fingers and toes and the chill of the wind on his face. Until the feeling in his chest was no longer the only one that seemed to matter.
He stood up and trudged very slowly on towards the farmhouse, visible ahead as a grey-black block in the moonlight. A dull ache inside him throbbed at every step, the Sleepers luring him still.
The wicked, angry, insatiable Sleepers, tempting people across the centuries. Sending them down to the drowning depths.
But … Gruff found his thoughts slipping like eels into a sudden understanding. The blacksmith had said that the Sleepers mourned the loss of the seventh stone. When Taid died, his loss tore a hole in Gruff’s heart. Sometimes Gruff was able to step carefully around that hole, but sometimes he fell right into it, missing Taid so badly it seemed he would never be able to climb back out.
What if the Sleepers weren’t maliciously luring people? What if they were yearning for their seventh stone? And people felt that yearning in their own hearts and set out across the Sleepers, eventually leaping right to where the seventh should be. A bottomless hole of mourning in the arms of the sea.
Unexpected pity crept over him and Gruff veered away from the farmhouse and headed for the long, shining line of the beach. He wouldn’t be long. He just wanted to see them, then he’d go home and get some sleep. He would tell Dad and Nain and Iolo about it all tomorrow, and they would know what to do.
The pull of the Sleepers was less uncomfortable now that he had stopped resisting it. His path seemed easier too, as though he was being reeled in towards the Sleepers like a fish on a line. Gruff wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be a hooked fish, but decided he was a shark who could bite himself free whenever he felt like it. Holding this thought in his mind, he stopped at the top of the sea wall, looking down at the silver beach. The fishing line pulled taut. He concentrated hard on staying in one place and did not dare raise his eyes to the Sleepers. ‘I’m a shark with big teeth,’ he said out loud.
The Sleepers didn’t comment.
This is a bad idea, Gruff thought. It was three in the morning. No one knew he was here. He would look at the Sleepers, just for a second, and then he would go home and hide from them until he could return with Dad or Nain or Iolo or Mat. Or even Hywel the dog. Anything but on his own.
He raised his eyes.
The ragged sea was crested with fierce white. The Sleepers were great, dark shapes of mystery and temptation. The wind clutched Gruff and pushed him towards the beach, but he leant back into it and stood his ground. He’d seen them. Time to go.
A slice of darkness leapt from the third Sleeper to the fourth across a hungry gap of salt water.
Gruff tensed. Was that the blacksmith?
The figure had landed on all fours and become invisible against the rock, but now they stood and steadied themselves. Gruff saw they were not nearly tall enough to be the blacksmith. He caught his breath. ‘Mat,’ he whispered.
She jumped again, fourth to fifth.
She was much too small against the vast, dark sea.
‘Mat!’ Gruff shouted. ‘Mat! Come back!’ The wind stole the words from him and she did not turn.
Fear built in Gruff’s chest. Mat would not stop at the sixth stone. Dragged by the yearning pull of the Sleepers she would jump to the ghostly seventh, and the current would take her.
He felt in his pocket for his phone but it was back in his bedroom. There was no way to call for help. And if she took that final, fatal jump…
He was moving before he realised he had made the decision. Gruff half fell down the stone bank and raced across the dry, silver-moonlit sand, heading for the first of the stones.
The small figure jumped from fifth to sixth.
‘Stop! Mat, stop!’ he screamed, but if she heard him she did not turn. He staggered to a halt, the waves licking at his trainers. The tide was two hours off high, but already the first Sleeper was far from him. The sand beneath his feet shifted and bubbled.
‘If I survive this,’ Gruff said out loud, ‘Nain is going to kill me.’
He waded out into the shin-high, knee-high, thigh-high water, and scrambled up the side of the first of the Sleepers. It was not as tall as the Weeping Stone, this one. Only twice his height, and a surprisingly easy climb. Gruff laughed out loud, clinging to the spray-wet surface, shocked at himself. Coming down to the beach on his own in the dark, climbing the Sleepers. Solemn promises he’d made to Dad and Nain, broken in an instant.
He pushed himself to his feet and the wind rose around him. ‘Mat!’ he shouted, but still she did not turn. She was standing on the sixth stone, staring to the horizon. She seemed very far away.
The swell slopped against the Sleepers. Gruff jumped to the second, landing painfully on all fours. He sucked salt out of a cut on his thumb and leapt to the third, calling, ‘Mat! Come back!’
He jumped to the fourth and stood up, preparing himself to leap again – and saw, at the end of the line of Sleepers, the seventh stone that did not exist. On it stood the blacksmith with her back to him.
He saw Mat ready herself.
‘Mat!’ he screamed. ‘It’s not there!’
Mat jumped.
The seventh Sleeper and the blacksmith vanished.
Gruff heard the beginning gulp of a cry of surprise before the waves closed softly and neatly over Mat’s head.