by Alex Bell
“Just hand the whole lot over,” Gran told me. “Some of the smaller keys open other doors inside.”
I promised to do as she’d asked and to come back and visit the next day. We said goodbye and then Bailey and I made our way back down the depressing corridor and out into the welcome relief of the cool, fresh air. I wheeled my chair across the car park, Bailey trotting along at my side, and in less than ten minutes, we were driving over the bridge that spanned the river and split the town into East and West Looe. Even in the dark I could see the little boats moored on the water, bobbing gently. There seemed to be large seagulls everywhere I looked, staring at us out of the gloom.
I drove slowly through a narrow street on the edge of the water, behind the shops, where the fish market was. There were even more seagulls there, pecking between the cobbles in search of fish guts and scraps. The shutters of the market were pulled down but that didn’t stop the entire street from reeking of fish – I could smell it even from inside the car.
By the time we reached the quayside the smell had been replaced with salted air, seaweed and fresh paint. Strings of white lights reflected off the dark water and the fishing boats moored there. They bumped against their wooden posts as we drove past, in rhythm with the lapping of the water. I saw hand-painted signs advertising boat trips and a ferry service that would take you across to the other side of the river for only a few pence. When I was a kid I used to do that all the time with my best friend, Jem Penhale. We’d go across to visit our favourite sweet shop and spend the last of our pocket money. Or, at least, I would spend my pocket money. Jem’s dad didn’t give him pocket money so I would buy sweets for both of us and he would pay me back by finding pink shells along the beach afterwards.
It was all so familiar. I had expected it to be different somehow. Even Banjo Pier looked just the same, stretching out into the dark ocean. Jem and I had spent hours there on sunny summer days, watching the sea and the ships and the swooping seagulls. I hoped that I wouldn’t see him while I was here. It would just be so awkward. We’d been best friends once, but I’d have no idea what to say to him now. After my accident, Jem had tried to visit me in hospital, but I didn’t want to see anyone then, not even Jem, so I’d told Mum to send him away. When she came back into my hospital room she’d pressed a small bronze charm into my hand and said, “Jem asked me to give you this.”
It was Joan the Wad, the Queen of the Piskies. Legend had it that she led travellers astray on the Cornish moors, but if you kept a good luck charm of her about your person then she would light your way home instead.
Good fortune will nod if you carry upon you Joan the Wad.
I recognized the charm because I had bought it myself, a couple of years before, at the Joan the Wad and Piskey Shop in Polperro, as a gift for Jem after his mother died.
“He said to say that you need her more now,” Mum said, as I stared down at the tiny bronze figure.
I put the charm on a silver chain to wear as a necklace and had worn it every day since, like some kind of talisman. I could feel the weight of it now, reassuring beneath my shirt. We moved soon after that and I never saw Jem again. I thought about writing to him when I first wrote to Gran but what would I say? And now, seven years had gone by and we didn’t know each other any more.
My stomach clenched in a familiar ache of longing for a life that could never be again so I tried to think about something else, anything else really, and, in another couple of minutes, my car was parked on the cobbles outside the Seagull. I looked across the road at the Waterwitch. The old building was all dark slate and stone, thick bottle-glass windows and leaning, crooked angles. I stared up at the façade and it seemed unnatural to see it without wood smoke curling from the chimneys and orange lights glowing in the windows. Hunched there in the gloom it looked like a dead old shell of a thing.
The sign hung out over the pavement, creaking on rusty hinges in the breeze. I’d forgotten that sign but it came back to me now. There was a picture of the Waterwitch ship after it had sunk. You could tell it was a sunken boat because of the barnacles clinging to the prow, the shredded sails, and the algae covering the portholes and coating the anchor. It was a sad, ruined sight.
I put down the ramp and wheeled out my chair. Bailey hopped out of the car and took my bag from the boot, all set to carry it like he’d been trained to, but I could still hear that yelp replaying in my head from earlier so I took the bag from him and set it on my lap instead.
“Thanks, Bailey,” I said, patting his head. “But I’ll carry it this time.”
We went into the Seagull and I checked in. Log fires made it cheerful and homely, and I was soon settled in a pleasant ground-floor room that looked out on to the street and the Waterwitch opposite. Even though it held awful memories for me as well as good ones, I was still sorry to see the Waterwitch all shut up and empty like that. I couldn’t believe Gran actually thought it was haunted. She’d always been so dismissive of that kind of thing before, and had scorned those Cornish pubs that banged on about their supposed ghosts – like the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor, or the Dolphin Tavern at Penzance, or the Crumplehorn Inn at Polperro.
I gave Bailey his dinner, ate the sandwich that had been sent to my room and then called home to let my parents know I’d arrived and had somewhere to stay. Once I hung up, Bailey helped me to change into my pyjamas, and I was in bed shortly after 9 p.m. – which was pretty early for me, but all the driving and worrying and remembering had thoroughly worn me out. I fell asleep almost at once and didn’t wake up until just gone midnight when I had to get up to go to the loo.
That’s a two-minute job for most people. Not so for me. Even with Bailey’s help it took forever. As soon as I switched on the lamp, Bailey was there in front of me, my walking stick in his mouth. I took it from him and, as I struggled to my feet, he moved around to put his large body behind me, helping to steady me. Then began the slow process of shuffling towards the bathroom.
Finally, I got there, used the loo and then began the journey back to my bed. I stopped by the window to catch my breath for a moment, and, as I stood there, preparing to take my next step, I happened to glance at the Waterwitch across the dark street. The black windows were like eyes staring back at me, and I could see the sign still swaying gently back and forth in the soft light from a nearby lamp post. And then, all of a sudden, I saw it – the smallest flicker of light from one of the first floor windows, like the glow from the flame of a candle. It wasn’t stationary, but moving, as if someone was holding the candle and walking across the room with it.
In a matter of seconds, the light passed out of sight and, although I watched for several minutes, it didn’t reappear in any of the other windows. I blinked and rubbed at my eyes. Gran had said that the Waterwitch was closed, hadn’t she? Perhaps someone had broken in and was squatting there?
I turned away from the window, told myself I’d think about it in the morning, and continued on back to bed. My back throbbed as if I’d just run a marathon – with a gigantic cow strapped to my back. I reached over for the painkillers I always kept within reach and knocked back a couple. It would be a little while before they took effect, though, and I was tense as I lay there, waiting for it to ease.
Bailey always knew when I was in pain and hopped on to the bed beside me to curl up against my back. The heat from his body helped ease the ache a little and I knew I’d have a much better chance of getting back to sleep with Bailey snuggled up beside me.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I told myself firmly. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”
Chapter Four
Emma
I got up early the next morning and went through my usual routine with Bailey. He fetched my clothes and helped me get dressed and into the wheelchair, and then we made our way to the restaurant.
Visiting hours at Gran’s hospice didn’t start till the afternoon, meaning I had a bit of time to kill after breakfast. I was very aware of the chunky weight of the Waterwitch keys in my bag. Perhap
s I’d imagined that light last night, or it had just been a street lamp reflecting in the thick glass, but if there was someone squatting in the Waterwitch then Gran would have to know. I decided to go over the road and check it out, only feeling a twinge of guilt about breaking my promise to her because, really, the whole thing was daft.
I put on my coat and helped Bailey into his jacket, then we headed out and across the cobbled street to the Waterwitch. The lock clicked easily and I told Bailey to open the door as I dropped the keys back in my bag.
Only Bailey didn’t move. I turned in surprise and saw that he was standing on the pavement, his ears pricked up, just staring at the door.
“Bailey,” I said again. “Open.”
I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me the first time, but he ignored the second command, too. Bailey was such a well-trained, obedient dog. He never ignored me like this. And then, to my complete astonishment, he growled – a deep, rumbling growl right at the back of his throat. His lips pulled back, exposing his long white canines.
“Hey!” I said sharply. “Bailey, no!”
He stopped straight away and had the grace to look a little ashamed of himself. Then he decided to obey me after all and pushed the door open with his front legs. But his behaviour had made me uneasy. I’d never seen him act like that and the thought flashed across my mind that perhaps I should lock the place back up and hand the keys over to the estate agent like I’d promised. They could check for squatters themselves. Now that I was right here on the doorstep, though, I felt a strong urge to see the inn again for myself. Maybe it was nostalgia for the past, maybe it was the morbid desire to poke at an old wound but, either way, surely it couldn’t hurt to just have a quick look around?
“Good boy,” I said to Bailey, scratching him behind the ear as I wheeled myself over the threshold. The main door led straight into the restaurant and, for just a moment, I saw people sitting at the tables, all looking at me, all waiting for me to say something. Then the illusion was gone and I was looking at a dark, empty restaurant. Just an ordinary room filled with the chilly bareness of a place that had been left shut up for too long.
Behind me, Bailey whined and I twisted around to see that he was standing in the doorway, staring at me, an uncertain look in his intelligent brown eyes.
“Come on, silly.” I clicked my fingers. “We haven’t got all day.”
He hesitated a moment but then he walked through – or slunk through, anyway, with his tail between his legs – and nosed the door closed behind him. The restaurant wasn’t a sunny room, even during the day. The low ceiling and the dark wood panelling made it a dim space, but I could see that it looked just as I remembered, and everything had been left as it was with even the tables neatly covered in their white tablecloths. There was no mess or litter, no sign of any squatters.
The sloping boards creaked as I wheeled over to the cold fireplace. A huge jar of fish hooks stood on the mantelpiece – gleaming, monstrous things with sharp, cruel barbs. Looking at them was like looking at a jar full of shark’s teeth. The two Cornish luck stones were still there, set into the wall beside the hearth, and I ran my fingers over them lightly, just like I used to when I was a kid.
A model of the Waterwitch ship sat next to the fish hooks, trapped inside its dusty glass bottle, and it seemed like no time at all had passed since I’d stood here with Gran as she told me the story of the ghost ship.
There were old placards hung on the wall, explaining the history, and I scanned over them to remind myself. The Waterwitch had been built at the Royal Dockyard at Deptford in 1577 by a company owned by a wealthy Cornish gentleman from Looe named Christian Slade. When I was a kid there’d been a reproduced painting of him in the restaurant but it wasn’t there any more. It must have been taken away fairly recently, though, because I could see a slightly less faded patch on the wall, marking the place where it had been. I wondered what had happened to it.
I turned my attention back to the placards and read that the Waterwitch, once finished, had been a 140-foot long, three-masted, 400-ton-galleon. Things started to go wrong before it even left the docks, starting with Christian Slade himself. Shortly before work began on the ship, Christian had accused a village woman of witchcraft and she had been put to death. Because of this, he was fearfully paranoid about being cursed or ill-wished, and had given orders for the ship to have a witch bottle built into the prow for protection. I couldn’t help shuddering when I read this part – I already knew all about Christian Slade and his witch bottle.
“It’s a type of concealed charm,” Gran had told me when I asked about it all those years ago. “To provide protection against witches. People used to hide them under the floorboards or behind the fireplace. If the bottle was ever found or broken then they thought they’d have no protection against the witch who’d cursed them.”
She went on to tell me about how Christian Slade had visited the dockyard to inspect the work being done on the ship and was furious to discover that the witch bottle hadn’t been put on board yet. And, even worse, the ship had incorrectly been named the Waterwitch. No one would admit to having painted the name on the prow but Christian believed someone had done it to mock his fear of witches, and threatened to have all the workers flogged. He became inexplicably enraged when he saw the ship’s figurehead and was in the middle of a heated argument with the overseer about it when a huge wooden beam that was being moved fell from its ropes and landed right on top of him, crushing his chest. His lungs collapsed, his ribs were broken and one of them pierced straight through his heart. It took ten men to lift the beam off him, and, by that time, Christian had suffered an agonizing death right there on deck.
Gran told me that everyone got all worked up about the Waterwitch after that because, in the sixteenth century, it was considered really unlucky for a man to die on a ship before it had even left port. I looked at the final placard and read that, after a few years of troublesome voyages, the Waterwitch set out on its last-ever journey and promptly vanished. Everyone assumed it must have sunk, or been attacked by pirates, but, two years later, it was discovered by a fishing boat, drifting aimlessly in the mist off the south-east coast of Cornwall with not a soul on board. Every single one of the two-hundred-and-sixty-man crew had simply disappeared without a trace. There was no sign of a disturbance or fight, and the lifeboats were all accounted for.
After discovering the Waterwitch they attempted to tow it back to harbour but it sank in the storm that followed. Shortly after that, the wood was salvaged from the seabed and used to construct the Waterwitch Inn. I remembered Gran telling me that that was how the guest house had got its name – and the reason why there were so many paintings and models of the ship around.
The timber had legally belonged to one of Christian Slade’s relatives and the inn had stayed in the same family for generations, going right down to Jem’s mother. But then they fell on hard times and Jem’s parents sold the place to Gran shortly before my accident. I glanced back at the faded rectangle on the wall, where the painting of Christian Slade used to be, and remembered how Jem had always jokingly referred to it as “Grandpa’s gloomy old portrait”.
There were lots of paintings of the Waterwitch ship still displayed on the walls and it looked just like one of those galleons you saw on old-fashioned maps. The most impressive painting of all was a gigantic oil one that hung over the fireplace. When I was a kid I had always been a little afraid of it.
The ship was depicted in the middle of a stormy sea, the silvery light of the moon shining white on the black foaming water that churned all around. The figurehead was a woman with a white dress and long black hair. At first glance, she seemed beautiful, but when you looked closer there was something almost a bit mad about her expression. Her eyes were too big and vacant, and they were set just a little too far apart on her face. And her lips were drawn back in a way that made it hard to tell whether she was smiling or grimacing – almost as if she could feel the freezing foam and salted sea spray
that kept slamming into her wooden body over and over again.
The ship was poised right at the crest of a monstrous wave that had just reached its zenith and looked like it was about to come crashing back down with a vengeance. You could almost hear the shattering of splintered wood, and the ripping of great sails torn from groaning masts.
I was so focused on the ship itself that I didn’t notice the birds at first but I remembered them as soon as I saw them again. They were flying all around, flitting like bats between the sails and the rigging and the water. They were entirely black – except for one white spot, just above the tail.
Even now that I was older, I still felt there was something odd about that painting. I stared up at it for quite a long time, trying to work out what it was about those glistening dark oil strokes that bothered me, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
I turned away and looked at the sea of tables, remembering how I used to play hide-and-seek in the restaurant with Jem and his sister, Shell. With all its nooks and crannies, the Waterwitch had always been a great place for hide-and-seek but the thought of those games now made regret twist unbearably in my stomach.
The three of us should never have gone down to the cellar. Gran had made it clear that we weren’t allowed in there, and that it was dangerous while the builders were working. But the huge granite fireplace had seemed like such a great place to hide, especially with all that scaffolding around it.
The cellar was lit by one bare light bulb and the room was covered in sheets that reminded me of sails, even though they were streaked with dirt. They were laid on the floor and walls, and all around the big old stone fireplace in the corner. The builders must have been working on this because some of the stone bricks were in a pile on the floor, and bits of the fireplace were held up with supports. It was the perfect hiding place – until Jem followed me there.