Below the Rock

The eastern cliff was not as straight and solid as it looked from the water.

Mr. Calloway led them around the base of it along a narrow path where the rock met the gravel shore. The fog was thick here, and the sound of small waves slapping against the rock came from very close but was impossible to see. Their feet crunched on the wet gravel. Priya held her phone out and used it as a torch.

"Watch your step here," Mr. Calloway said. He was moving more easily than Priya had expected for someone his age, stepping over rocks without looking at them, ducking under a low shelf of stone as if he had done it a hundred times.

He had, she realised. A hundred times was probably not even close.

The door was built into the base of the cliff.

It was wooden, thick and dark with age, set back into a natural gap in the rock where two large slabs leaned against each other like a tent. If you were not looking for it and did not know where to look, you would walk straight past it. The gap in the rock looked like just another shadow.

The door was fitted with an iron handle, orange with rust, and a lock that had no keyhole that Priya could see. Instead there was a small iron wheel set into the door, about the size of a saucer, with markings on it.

"What is inside?" Otto asked. He was writing in his notebook again.

"I do not know exactly," Mr. Calloway said.

All three of them looked at him.

"You have been coming here for forty years and you do not know what is behind the door?" Sam said.

"The lock," Mr. Calloway said patiently. "I have never been able to open the lock."

He told them what he knew. The door had been here when he first found the island. The wood was old, much older than forty years, possibly a hundred years or more. The iron fittings were the same. Whatever was inside had been put there a very long time ago by someone who had known this island and known how to find it.

He had spent years trying to understand the lock. The wheel had symbols on it, twelve of them, spaced around the edge. Some looked like letters from an alphabet he did not recognise. Some looked like simple pictures. A wave. A star. A fish. A key.

"It turns," he said, demonstrating. The wheel moved stiffly but it moved. "But I could never work out what position it needed to be in. And without the right position the door does not open."

Priya was looking at the symbols very carefully. She leaned in close and ran her finger along the edge of the wheel without touching it.

"Otto," she said. "Draw all twelve symbols in order. Exactly as they are."

Otto was already drawing.

Sam was looking at the door itself. He ran his hand over the wood and then stopped. He leaned in close. "There is something carved here," he said. "Under the rust and the moss. Letters."

He pulled out his penknife and very carefully scraped away a patch of the green moss near the bottom of the door frame. Underneath, cut deep into the wood, were words.

He read them out slowly.

"Face the island. Find the first. The first points to the rest."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Priya straightened up and turned around to face the island. Which meant she was facing west. The rocky spine of the island rose up ahead of her in the fog. And at the very top of the spine, just visible through the grey, was a single tall rock standing upright like a finger pointing at the sky.

"The first," she said quietly. "That rock. It is the highest point. The first thing you would see when you approached the island."

She looked at it for a long moment. The rock was pointing slightly. Not straight up but at an angle, leaning toward the south.

She turned back to the wheel. The symbol at the top of the wheel was a wave. The one pointing south, if you turned the wheel to match the angle of the rock, was the star.

She reached out and turned the wheel carefully until the star was at the top.

Something clicked inside the door. Deep and solid and definite.

Otto stopped writing. Sam looked up. Mr. Calloway had gone completely still.

Priya put her hand on the iron handle and pulled.

The door opened.