by Lauren Algeo
Brewer sheltered in the café for a while and listened but there was no sound of a hiker. He wandered around the cliff tops, marvelling at the steepness of them and the sheer drops to the raging sea.
The National Trust area began to close for the evening and he reluctantly decided to call it a day. The light would be fading soon and he wanted a hot bath after spending the afternoon in the biting wind. The small hotel by the steps was fully booked so he would have to go to the next town.
The bus stop timetable told him that he’d missed the bus for that hour, although he recalled seeing another hotel and lodges not far away, in Trenance. He thought he’d hike there and see if they had any rooms available. He followed a winding road near the cliff tops. A couple of cars passed by but other than that, he was totally alone.
After half a mile, he thought he heard the sound of a child crying. He dismissed it as noise from the wind, however after a few more paces, he heard it again. The sobs of a little girl drifted to his ears and he gave a subconscious shiver at the eerie sound. He looked around but couldn’t see another living soul in any direction. The crying seemed to be coming from across a fiel, towards the cliffs.
Brewer debated whether to ignore it – it wasn’t his business to interfere if some kid was being told off by her parents, but then again, if the child was lost, he couldn’t leave her wandering around here alone at night. He hesitated, the hackles on the back of his neck standing up for a reason he couldn’t put his finger on.
‘Mummy!’ the little girl cried in the distance.
She sounded hopeless and that made up Brewer’s mind. He dismissed the idea of his hot bath and dinner, and headed in the direction of the cliff tops.
The ground in the field was sodden and his boots grew heavier as layers of mud clung to them. The crying got increasingly louder as he neared the grassier area leading to the cliff edge. It was getting dark rapidly. He shrugged his rucksack off his shoulders to dig out his torch. If she was in trouble, he could phone for help and get people out here with more lights. Suddenly he saw her silhouetted against the dusky sky, looking out at the sea. He paused with his fingers on the zip of the pack pocket.
‘Hey!’ he called to her. ‘Are you ok?’
She turned towards him but he couldn’t make out her face properly in the shadows. She looked young, from her height and build, about eight years old. She was dressed ludicrously for the weather in a frilly looking, short-sleeved dress. She must have run away from her parents or something and got lost. Maybe they were staying at one of the hotels?
‘Are you lost?’ he called out again.
He was only twenty feet away now.
‘No,’ she giggled playfully.
She skipped off in the direction of the cliff edge, her long, curly hair bouncing off her shoulders as she went.
Brewer frowned in annoyance. What happened to all the tears? The wind buffeted against his body and he tucked his head down to follow her.
‘Wait!’ he shouted. ‘It’s dangerous out here!’
‘It’s dangerous in here too,’ came her little voice inside his head.
Brewer rocked back in surprise and dropped his rucksack. He struggled to regain solid footing. Her giggles echoed around his mind and she stopped skipping ahead and spun to face him.
He was paralysed. He couldn’t move any of his limbs. She had taken control of his body so easily. He could only stare, wide-eyed with horror, as she walked slowly towards him.
Brewer’s mind was racing. A child hiker? Was that possible? He knew they had relationships, and had considered the possibility of children, but he hadn’t encountered one before. How on earth was she so strong?
The little girl stopped in front of him and clasped her hands behind her back.
‘I want to play,’ she said out loud and in his head.
She smiled up at him with large, black eyes. He got his first proper look at her in the dim light. Her ringlets were blond and she had a blue bow nestled in the right side of her hair.
He should’ve known when he saw the dress – it looked like something a Victorian child would wear. It was white, with a frilly collar and delicate buttons down the front. There was a blue bow tied around her waist that matched the one in her hair, and she was wearing white, ankle socks that folded down over her black, patent shoes. She looked petrifying.
No! Brewer was incapable of speaking but he shouted as forcefully as he could inside his mind.
‘Yes,’ she insisted, folding her arms in front of her small body. ‘Let’s play a game.’
I don’t want to, Brewer begged.
His legs were shaking and his heart was thumping out a warning tune in his chest. He’d never imagined a child hiker could have been behind all these suicides. She was more powerful than any of the adults he’d faced so far.
She wasn’t interested in his past like the others; she didn’t bother to look through any of his thoughts or memories. She just wanted to use him as a plaything, torture him to death.
‘Let’s play a flying game,’ she suggested in a sickly sweet voice.
Brewer felt all the blood rush to his head. If she hadn’t had control of his movements, he was sure he would’ve collapsed in a heap on the floor.
No, please, he thought frantically. I can’t fly.
He tried to push her out of his head, however none of his techniques had any effect. She blew down his mental door like an angelic version of the big bad wolf.
‘Let’s see how far you go!’ she cried, skipping in rings around him.
He wanted to run away as fast as he could but instead he found himself taking a jerky step towards the cliff edge. Then another. He was her puppet.
‘One step! Two step! Jump off there!’ she laughed gleefully.
Brewer’s body convulsed, as though he wanted to throw up, only that reflex had shut down. He was five feet from the cliff edge now. His mind flashed briefly to him on the edge of the rooftop in Leeds and he forced it down. He didn’t want to provoke the little girl’s interest in his memories.
Two feet left. One.
She stopped him, and slowly pivoted his body round to face her. The wind was pounding his torso, trying to knock him over, yet she held him strong.
With his back to the sea, Brewer couldn’t judge how far the drop was. It had to be at least fifty metres. Could he survive a fall like that? And if he did, he couldn’t guarantee avoiding the rocks at the base of the cliff. At least the tide was in so he had some volume of water to plunge in to.
Brewer could see the lights of Trenance to his right and he frantically tried to work out how far it was. He remembered seeing a beach on the map between Trenance and Mawgan Porth, how far round was that? Half a mile maybe? He was a strong swimmer; if he survived the fall, he was sure he could make that.
Laughably, he realised he had resigned himself to the fact that he was going over this cliff. He had given up even trying to fight the devil child.
She stopped laughing abruptly and glared at him sulkily with her arms crossed.
‘You’re no fun,’ she whined. ‘The others cried and begged, and had snot running from their noses!’
She gave an uncontrollable chuckle at this.
‘I don’t want to play with you any more!’ She took two steps up to him.
‘Bye!’
She pushed him gently with the palms of her hands but threw him back forcefully with her mind. Brewer teetered on the edge, his arms flapping wildly at his sides, then his body lurched into thin air as he lost balance and suddenly he was falling. The little girl’s satanic laughter rang in his ears. He was too close to the cliff face; he would hit the rocks below. Gravity turned him mid air and he scraped his back and head on the uneven surface.
Brewer realised that the girl had left his mind. He was about to die so he was of no interest to her any more, and she couldn’t be inside his head when he died.
In one last ditch effort, he grabbed for the cliff face, scrabbling for anything he could get hold of
to halt his fall. He felt the skin being torn from his fingers but finally his right hand hooked onto a jutting piece of rock. His body jolted to a stop, jarring his neck and nearly pulling his right shoulder from its socket with the force.
He swung there for a couple of seconds, trying to control his spinning head. His breath was coming out in ragged gasps and he could hear his heart pounding, yet he felt almost exhilarated too as the adrenaline kicked in – he wasn’t dead… yet.
Brewer tried to get his bearings in the gloom. He’d plummeted about halfway down the cliff and was still at least twenty metres from the sea line. He didn’t have a very solid grip on the rock, and he couldn’t exactly dangle there all night. He scraped around with his left hand, looking for something else to hold on to. There was nothing.
He tried digging the toes of his boots into the cliff face and blindly searching for anything he could balance on to ease the pressure on his arm. His right shoulder was screaming in pain. He gritted his teeth and tried to think. He couldn’t climb down without hand or foot holds. He was further down now so he wasn’t as wary of surviving the fall into the sea, the rocks however…
He looked down between his legs and could see the waves crashing against the cliff. There was no sign of any rocks but he knew they were lurking down there under the water, their sharp points waiting to impale him.
It was hopeless. He had no other option but to let go and take his chances falling into the sea. He braced himself and positioned his boots against the wall, tensing his body. At the same moment he released his grip on the rock, he kicked against the wall as hard as he could to propel himself forward. He twisted in the air, desperately trying to distance himself from the base of the cliff. He prayed it was good enough.
The impact felt as though he’d smashed into a slab of concrete. It slammed the wind out of him brutally, and a searing pain shot through his rib cage. The water engulfed him but he kept on falling. It was freezing. He hadn’t considered how cold the sea would be; he’d been too concerned about rocks. The tide swelled around him, flinging his body wherever it chose.
Finally, he seemed to float in place. He could only have been under for thirty seconds, however his lungs were already starting to ache. Brewer had no idea what way the surface was. He opened his eyes in panic. The salt water stung but there was nothing to see, only darkness.
Calm down, he tried to soothe himself.
His heavy parka was filled with water and weighing him down. He shrugged it off his shoulders and struggled to pull it down his arms. His whole body was numb with the cold and his lungs were burning with the lack of air. At last, he was free of the suffocating coat and he felt himself slowly starting to rise upwards on the next surge of water. At least he thought it was up, could the current be pulling him down?
Brewer had expelled the last of his oxygen and he fought the instinct to breathe or he’d end up with a lungful of water. Another swell pushed him forward and he felt himself rise a little more. Faintly he could hear a pounding. Was it just in his head?
No. It was the waves above crashing into the cliff wall. That was the way. Brewer kicked for the surface. His lungs were crying out for air and his chest hitched, wanting to take a breath that wasn’t there yet.
He flailed his arms and kicked harder, aware he was losing the battle not to inhale the seawater. Suddenly his arm hit the cold night air, followed a fraction of a second later by his hungry mouth.
He sucked in a lungful of sweet oxygen as the rest of his head surfaced. He trod water and inhaled deeply. He’d never been so grateful to be breathing.
The current was strong and the waves were pushing him back towards the cliff face. If he got trapped against the rocks, he’d never be able to swim away. Being so close to drowning was not something he wanted to experience again.
Brewer began swimming out to sea. He was wheezing loudly and his head hurt. but it was nothing compared to the pain in his ribs on the right side of his body. He gingerly touched his ribcage only the cold water had numbed him too much to tell the damage. He guessed a couple of broken ribs. It made swimming against the tide difficult and he had to compensate with his left arm.
When he was safely away from the cliff face, he assessed the shoreline. Trenance was less than half a mile away. He couldn’t see the lights from his position, however he knew it was round the coast to the right. He struck out again with the cliffs on his left.
Every breath hurt and the current tried hard to stop his progress. His head bobbed under a couple of times and he spluttered the salty water out of his mouth. It was the longest swim of his life. After what felt like hours, he saw the inviting lights and could make out the beach area. It taunted him cruelly and he didn’t seem to be getting closer.
At last he kicked down with his legs and touched the floor. He dragged himself to the edge of the beach and collapsed, exhausted, on to the sand. The water still lapped at his boots but he physically couldn’t move any more.
Brewer lay there until some feeling came back to his body, and his panting slowed to regular breathing. He was shaking violently and his teeth were chattering hard. He wanted to sleep, only that would kill him. He needed to get out of his wet clothes and shelter somewhere warm before he got pneumonia.
Come on get up, he instructed himself, but his battered body wouldn’t cooperate.
He hauled himself into a sitting position and went dizzy instantly. He touched his hand to the back of his head then stared dumbly at the blood on his fingertips. There was a vague memory of scraping his head in the fall. When that awful child had… the girl!
Brewer looked around fearfully. He was exposed on the open beach and she could be lurking anywhere. She might come back to finish the job. The terrifying idea of the child hiker reappearing motivated him to lurch to his feet.
He began to walk unsteadily towards the lights of civilisation. Every movement was agony. He didn’t want to go to hospital, although he knew he needed medical help.
He focussed on the side of a building and kept moving, gritting his teeth with the effort. His steps faltered as he neared the path at the top of the beach and he staggered to the side. He could see a woman walking her dog a little further along and she stared at him in alarm. He realised that he looked drunk.
‘Help,’ he choked out.
His legs gave way and he landed heavily on his knees. He saw the woman rushing over to him only she was running at a funny angle. Then the world went dark.
Chapter 26
Georgie had stopped shaking by the time Brewer paused in his story, and some colour was returning to her face.
‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Did the woman take you to hospital?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘She called an ambulance and I woke up in an A&E department. The woman was sitting by my bed, waiting. She was worried that I’d tried to commit suicide like the others, and she hadn’t wanted to leave me alone. I made up some bullshit about taking an evening walk and slipping off some rocks near the beach.’
‘Did they buy it?’
‘Of course. They’d had enough tragedy there over those few weeks and they were quick to believe that I hadn’t been trying to add to it. Anyway, I had to have a few stitches in the back of my head and an x-ray. I’d broken one rib and fractured two others. They patched me up then sent me on my way.’
Brewer was quiet for a minute. He’d never told that story to anyone before; had hardly dared to let himself think about it. Talking about the girl hadn’t taken away any of the terror he felt at the memory of her. The girl had been the scariest thing he’d ever seen.
He’d had to go back to the cliff tops the next morning to retrieve his rucksack. He’d dropped it when the girl had taken control of his body and it had his laptop and spare clothes inside. His keys and mobile phone had been in his parka pockets so he’d had to write those off. Luckily he had a spare set of keys hidden near the flat as a precaution, and the phone was only a pay as you go one. He could pick up a new handset and SIM card
when he got back to London.
The cliffs had looked eerie in the morning light, as dawn’s pink fingers raked across the horizon, but there had been no sign of the little girl. Occasionally she haunted him in his dreams. She was always trying to finish what she’d started and kill him, and he always woke up drenched in cold sweat and gasping for air. He hadn’t been near Cornwall since and he’d avoided getting too close to the sea. Being thrown off a cliff by a child hiker and nearly drowning was enough to put anyone off a day at the beach.
‘I was lucky really,’ Brewer said. ‘It could have been a lot worse.’
‘Yeah, she could’ve killed you! And that boy today…’ Georgie shuddered. ‘Do you think if you hadn’t been there then he would’ve… what? Made me choke myself to death eating snow?’
‘Probably,’ Brewer admitted. ‘I think he was testing what he was capable of, like the little girl.’
‘So you’ve saved my life twice now then.’ She looked disheartened. ‘God, I’m so fucking stupid! You knew something wasn’t right when you saw him. I mean the kid had no coat on in the snow!’
‘I didn’t twig for a few seconds. I was too busy wondering about the coat like you,’ Brewer said. ‘Then I looked down and saw he was wearing those schoolboy, grey shorts. No mother would’ve dressed her child in those on a freezing day.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll have your back one of these days!’
‘There was nothing you could have done anyway. The child hikers are too strong.’
‘But why?’ Georgie asked, her voice rising in frustration. ‘Shouldn’t they get stronger as they get older?’
‘I thought that, before the girl. I don’t know why, but they start powerful. Maybe it’s because their skill is so raw and they haven’t got the fear of the Grand yet to diminish them from using their full potential.’