by Shane Staley
Table of Contents
Connect With Us
SHE SLEEPS IN THE DEPTHS
BETTER HEARD AND NOT SEEN
CARRION FOWL
JAWS OF LIFE
NETHERVIEW
CHILDREN OF THE HORNED GOD
About the Authors
First Edition
DarkFuse, Volume 1 © 2014 by Shane Staley
All stories © 2014 by individual authors.
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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SHE SLEEPS IN THE DEPTHS
William Meikle
In the mornings he only remembered glimpses and fragments, but he knew the dreams were always both terrifying and inescapable; the crumpled sheets, the sweat-stained pillows and the tension in his neck and shoulders all spoke of many long, restless nights.
And there was the song; what sounded like an old sailor’s tune. In his head he heard it as if a chorus of voices was singing, accompanied by a wheezing accordion.
She sleeps in the depths, in the depths, in the depths,
She sleeps in the deep, in the dark.
She sleeps, and she weeps in the depths far below,
And the Dreaming God is singing where she lies.
He had only ever heard the song in his sleep, but he also knew that it had wormed into his ear, a malicious repeating virus that would not—could not—be allayed either by noise, or drugs or booze. Fallon knew; he’d tried all three, repeatedly.
He’d also tried searching for the song online, in the hope that just the act of finding it might rid him of its influence. But if the song had ever existed, it was not recorded in any database or volume of folk tunes.
It was almost as if he’d made it up all by himself, but Fallon thought that highly unlikely. He didn’t have a musical bone in his body—a fact that had been proved to him over and over again during failed piano lessons, failed guitar lessons, and polite requests to be quiet any time he attempted to sing.
After a month of sleepless nights, the quest to find the song turned into an obsession, a deep need to get to the source of the problem and root it out of his brain before he was forced to stick a knife in his ear. The only clue he had—and it wasn’t much to go on—was that when he heard the voice in his head, it was being sung with a distinct Scots accent. Both his doctor and his boss suggested he take a holiday, and so, on the first Monday in July, Fallon took a train to Hull and caught a cruise headed for Aberdeen, Orkney, Shetland and points north.
* * *
On the first night, he was to be found in his cabin or in the bar, but mostly in the bar. The booze wasn’t cheap, but at least it was good quality Scotch, and it helped, a bit, to keep the song at bay. Matters improved further when a band started up on the small stage in the corner. They played competent versions of chart hits from the past thirty years, and the older, sedate passengers the cruise had attracted seemed to lap it up. Fallon managed to let the sound wash through him, filling up the spaces where the tune might take root, and for much of the evening he almost managed to enjoy himself.
That all changed when the band took a break and a Karaoke machine got switched on. Middle-aged women suddenly decided they were Madonna or Beyonce; men past pension age threw moves and poses while pretending to be pubescent youths. The cacophony of atonal shouting that passed for singing, accompanied by offbeat hand-clapping and foot-stomping drove Fallon outside, onto the deck for a smoke.
* * *
The vessel chugged through thick fog, so there wasn’t even a glimpse of nighttime coastline to relieve the tedium.
This might have been a bad idea.
“I was thinking the same thing,” a soft voice said to his left. “Can I trouble you for a cigarette?”
Fallon turned to see a woman looking up at him; she could scarcely be more than five-feet-tall, made to look shorter by the bulk of her long coat giving her a stout appearance like a small, friendly bear.
She laughed.
“I didn’t read your mind,” she said. “I’m good, but not that good. I just saw the expression on your face as you left the party.”
Fallon grinned back, and passed her a cigarette, lighting it with a match cupped against the elements.
“It was that obvious?”
She took a deep, satisfied draw of smoke before answering.
“It was written all over your features,” she said. “Don’t worry. There’s only another six days of it to go.”
She laughed again, and to his surprise Fallon laughed along.
Ten minutes later, they had found a quieter lounge bar at the other end of the ship and he was telling her things he’d never mentioned to another person in his life. Somehow it all seemed natural, even the fact that she kept stroking the back of his hand when he got agitated.
“So what brings you on this trip?” he said after a time; he had done all the talking up till that point.
“You’ll think I’m daft,” she said quietly. “I’m haunted by a song and…”
He interrupted her, and sang.
She sleeps, and she weeps in the depths far below,
And the Dreaming God is singing where she lies.
Her eyes went wide with fear, she stood, too quickly, knocking the table over, breaking glasses and spilling beer all over Fallon’s lap. When he looked up again, she had gone out the door.
He hadn’t even asked her name.
* * *
He spent the remainder of the night trying to drink his way to an oblivion where the tune didn’t matter, where upsetting the only person he’d found to talk to in months didn’t matter, where there was just the booze and darkness.
He didn’t quite get there, and after a night and morning of broken sleep, punctuated with an enormous hangover, he dragged himself up on deck for a smoke to find the boat drawn up on a dockside in what must have been Aberdeen.
One of the crew was pulling up a gangway and others were untying the ropes, readying for departure. He’d missed the stop off completely.
“Excuse me,” he said, approaching the crewman at the gangway. “I’m looking for a woman.”
“Aren’t we all?” the man answered, then saw that Fallon was serious.
“She’s short, black hair, probably wearing a heavy coat and…”
The crewman interrupted him.
“Aye, I ken who you’re after, Ms. Leyton. She got off this morning; she looked terrible. Some kind of family emergency, I gather. We won’t be seeing her again.”
I won’t be seeing her again.
The thought drove him straight back to the bar, forgoing any breakfast in favor of liquid refreshments that stretched into lunch and then dinner.
He was surprised to look up later and find that dusk was falling again outside. He w
ent out on deck, somewhat unsteady on his legs, and lit a smoke. It was a clear night; lights twinkled on a distant shore, but his knowledge of geography in these parts was sketchy to say the least, and he had no idea where they might be.
As he smoked, he looked around, hoping that the crewman had been mistaken, hoping that the woman would be there, looking for a smoke, waiting for an apology that he’d be only too willing to offer, given the chance.
It wasn’t to be. He stood there until it got too cold to endure, smoking a succession of cigarettes lit from the butt of the one before, waiting, and fighting the urge to lose himself to the booze once more.
He was forced inside when he started to hear singing in the wind.
She sleeps, and she weeps in the depths far below,
And the Dreaming God is singing where she lies.
* * *
The next stage of the voyage passed in an alcoholic haze, and it was only by blind luck that he was awake and upright when they hove in to Kirkwall harbor in Orkney at some indeterminate later point.
Sample the delights of the local culture, the ship’s tannoy announced. We’re berthing here until the tide turns in the morning.
The cruise ship’s lounge bar had become so welcoming that Fallon had almost forgotten why he was on the trip in the first place. It was the mention of local culture that got him off the boat; there was a chance that he might learn something about the song, here on an island steeped in history and folklore.
As he walked through town, he was glad he brought his overcoat. Although it was supposedly summer, the bay was blanketed in something that wasn’t quite fog nor wasn’t quite drizzle, but a mixture with all the bad qualities of both. His humor wasn’t helped when he found that his destination, the local museum, was closed for the afternoon. He had just made a decision to find the nearest bar when he saw her—a small woman wearing a heavy coat. Not an uncommon sight in these parts, but the black hair gave her away—that and the shocked expression on her face when she saw that Fallon had spotted her.
He expected her to make another run for it as he crossed the road, but she stood her ground, and it was anger rather than fear he saw in her face this time.
“Why are you following me?” he asked.
The anger left her as quickly as it had come, to be replaced by puzzlement.
“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” she replied. “Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you a story.”
* * *
“It started a couple of months ago,” she began. They sat in a quiet corner of The Kirkwall Arms, each with an untouched beer on the table in front of them. Fallon was all too aware that she had started stroking his hand again, but she didn’t seem to notice, getting quickly lost in her own story.
“I thought I was going mad for a while. Who wouldn’t, with a crowd of drunken Scotsmen singing songs about dead women in their ear night and day? I was tested for brain disorders, and at one point they even suspected a tumor. There wasn’t one. I saw a shrink. He wasn’t much help; but he did say one thing that stuck. ‘You won’t have peace until you find out why it’s happening,’ he said. That’s what led me on my quest, through bookshops, folk clubs, databases and finally, to here. I thought I was getting somewhere, to a place where I might get sane again. Then you started following me. You also knew the song, and I believed that, not only was I not sane, I’d gone completely batty.”
She remembered her beer and eagerly gulped down half of it before continuing.
“So when you asked me why I was following you, it threw me for a loop, especially after I’d found out where I have to go. I…”
Fallon stopped her.
“You’ve found something?”
She nodded, suddenly suspicious.
I have to get her trust.
“I hear the song too,” he said, and felt hot tears at the corner of his eye that he brushed away angrily. “I’ve been hearing it for months. It’s why I’m here.”
Now he saw something else again in her stare; it looked like hope.
“Then there’s something you need to know—somewhere we need to get to. But if I’m to tell you, I need something stronger than beer.”
He fetched them both a Scotch—doubles—and she took his hand again before continuing.
“I found it in the museum. I was there all morning, and was giving up hope as they were just about to close down, but one of the curators, bless him, found it for me in the stacks.”
She let go of his hand, leaving Fallon feeling suddenly alone and lost, and took a slip of paper from her bag. It was a photocopy, from what looked like an illuminated manuscript. The top half was a transcription of something he knew only too well, the words being only slightly changed.
It sleepeth in ye deeps, in ye deeps, in ye deeps,
It sleepeth in ye deeps, in ye dark.
It sleepeth, and it dreameth in ye deeps far beneath,
Ye Dreaming God it singeth where it lieth.
Below that was a note.
First heard tae ye west o’ ye auld man off Hoy, in ye year o’ oor Lord Fourtween Hunner and Eichty Twa.
“I’ve chartered a boat for tomorrow,” she said, “And I think you’re supposed to come with me.”
* * *
He replied without thinking of the consequences.
“Of course. I’m in.”
The smile he got in reply was worth the confused twenty minutes he then spent on the cruise liner explaining that he too was jumping ship. He was told he wouldn’t get any money back, nobody helped him with his luggage, but he had a broad smile on his face as he walked down the gangway and back to see his new friend.
They spent the night in the Kirkwall Arms—separate rooms, but Fallon had got the feeling that he only had to say something to change that. He lay awake for a while wondering why he’d said nothing. It was only after an hour or so that he realized he hadn’t heard the singing all day.
He slept all the way through, for the first time in months, waking feeling refreshed and hangover-free. He even enjoyed doing the shopping that Ms. Leyton—“Call me Val,”—said was needed for the trip; he followed her round the supermarket as she collected enough bread, eggs, bacon and coffee to feed a small army for several days. That and a couple of bottles of Scotch meant that they had several heavy bags to lug down to the marina.
She led him to a twenty-foot yacht with twin masts, gleaming white in the morning sunshine.
“I should tell you now,” he said. “I’ve not done any sailing.”
She laughed and jumped aboard.
“Don’t worry. It’s got an engine. It’s as easy as driving a car.”
He decided that now wasn’t the time to tell her that he hadn’t done any of that either and followed her aboard. They went down to a snug but well-appointed sitting area and kitchen in the cabin below. While Val put the food away, he checked the other amenities. There was a narrow shower and toilet facility…and a low-ceilinged bedroom with just enough room for one bed, a double.
“How long are we going to be aboard?” he asked when he turned back to the main cabin.
She smiled.
“At least one night, maybe two.”
He couldn’t stop himself from smiling back.
* * *
He joined her on deck for a smoke as they pulled out of Kirkwall harbor and started to make their way west, hugging the coastline at times, heading farther offshore when they crossed the mouths of bays and inlets. The rocky promontories and cliff tops were treeless and windswept, and many showed traces of now-ruined habitations, alongside older structures; great stone brochs, tall circles of menhirs and mounds that told of chambered cairns beneath. Fallon suddenly felt the weight and heft of history in a way that had never touched him before back in the city.
“Tell me again what we’re doing out here,” he said as they made a turn south later that morning. Instead of answering, she pointed out at the headland to the East.
“Skara Brae is just over there; a prehistor
ic village that nobody knew existed until it was uncovered in a storm. All the people that had ever lived there, built houses, loved and raised children; they were all forgotten by history. If whole villages can be lost for millennia, what else might be here, buried or drowned, just waiting to be found?”
Maybe it was drowned for good reason?
He didn’t voice the thought, not wanting to spoil what was turning out to be a damned fine day out on the water. Sun rippled and danced on the waves, the surface disturbed only by the lightest of breezes. Val did most of the talking, and Fallon got to know her through the course of the journey. And the more he learned, the more he liked. She had a quick way with a smile, she was fond of touching, particularly stroking his hand while chatting, and she understood what it meant to be almost driven mad by the song.
He still hadn’t heard it all day.
Maybe it’s her? Maybe all we need is each other?
That was a pleasant thought to hold on to as the day wore on. The island of Hoy came into view and grew larger on the horizon.
* * *
“Do we have a plan?” he asked.
They lay at anchor, far enough off the tall sandstone stack of The Old Man not to be caught in the ebb and swell nearer the shore. Val made bacon sandwiches that tasted as good—better—than anything he’d eaten on the cruise boat, and they enjoyed a coffee and a smoke. The sun was on its way down behind them and the first chill of the evening could be felt in the breeze. But for now, everything was more than pleasant.