by Simon Clark
Again came a sharp tap of knucklebone on wood. Following that came a moment’s absolute silence before the sound of the distant foghorn prowled its way up the stairs like a ghost.
Confused, she shut and locked the door. Maybe it was a bird under the eaves, or maybe air in the pipes … she’d only just pushed the rationalizations through her head when the knock came again – impatient, demanding: let me in. She went into the kitchen where the cooker made faint clicking sounds, but those were nothing like the sharp raps on wood she’d heard. Pulling back the curtain, she looked out onto the expanse of rough grass, which provided a parking area for the apartments. Through the mist, she made out fire escapes at the back of the buildings.
‘Idiot,’ she hissed with relief. Ben must have crept up the fire escape for some reason, for some foolish romantic reason, she hoped. The tapping came again; this time she hurried through into the bathroom where the fire-escape door exited onto the escape itself. ‘Idiot, idiot,’ she whispered, amused. Would she find him there with roses as well as the wine?
She shot back the bolts and threw open the door that swung with a startling shriek of seldom used hinges. Running ice fingers over her naked body, came the night air, heavy with sea damp and tang of brine. Immediately, the foghorn cried louder than ever now she was outside.
No Ben. No nobody. Nothing – but mist curling its tendrils round the ironwork of the open-air staircase. Good grief. What the hell’s happening? Who was tapping on the doors then running away? Anyone would think it was….
But, damn it, it was! Suddenly, she expected to hear the call of ‘Trick or treat?’ After all, this was the last day of October. Whitby would celebrate Hallowe’en, too. Come to that, Britons had celebrated it as a religious festival for thousands of years, long before Christianity had washed up on its shores. But why hadn’t those Whitby kids done the ‘trick or treat’ ritual first? Instead they’d knocked on the door and run away? She had no sweets but she could have paid the little tykes off with some coins.
Arms across her naked breasts, she retreated into the bathroom and partly closed the door with just her head out in the cold night air. ‘Hello?’ she called. Then waited a moment, listening for children’s voices, or a cry of ‘Trick or treat.’ All that reached her, however, was the near supernatural lowing of the foghorn. Suddenly irritated she called down, ‘You’ll break your stupid necks running up and down these steps in the dark.’
With no answering shout, not so much as a ‘Shut up, you stupid cow,’ from the kids, whoever they were, she shut the door, then rammed home the bolts.
She’d no sooner done that than a rap sounded on the door to the landing.
‘Damn kids,’ she hissed. Once more she went to the door, but a flash of her naked body in the hallway mirror changed her mind about opening it straight away. She waited for a moment. When the knucklebone sounded again she called out, ‘Ben? Is that you?’
No giggles. No ‘Trick or treat?’ Nothing. Damn well nothing. Blast them. And here I am running around the place in my birthday suit, she fumed.
As she went to the bedroom to get dressed she heard the sharp rap on the fire-escape door. This time she ignored it.
Twenty minutes later, the pizza had reached a perfect golden brown; cheese bubbled and the aroma of its spices filled the rooms where Bram Stoker had gazed out the window and dreamed his dark dreams.
She waited. No Ben showed. Great, just great. Soon the pizza’s crust began to burn. Annoyed, she yanked it from the oven catching her hand on the hot metal interior. Damn … The pizza flipped off the tray to land face down on the carpet.
Well, this was turning out be a perfect evening … Ben’s gone walkabout; the local Whitby kids are tormenting the hell out of me; the carpet’s just gone and got itself a cheese shampoo – what next? For the next minute or so she busied herself scraping the goo from the carpet and dumping the whole lot in the bin. Maybe they should have eaten out as she suggested anyway, but Ben wanted a romantic evening in. Romantic, my foot; he’d either taken a scenic stroll round fog-bound Whitby or had been tempted into one of the pubs for a beer.
Result? One ruined pizza; one set of frazzled nerves; one pissed off lady.
When the next tap on the door came she was ready for them.
‘Stop that!’ she snapped, launching herself through the doorway onto the landing. Once more stairs plunged down into darkness; once more there was no one there; once more she’d made an idiot of herself. No. No she hadn’t. Those trick or treaters were going to be told exactly – EXACTLY – what she thought of them. She ran lightly down the carpeted stair, hitting light switches as she went, flooding landing after landing with light. ‘You come back here … what do you think you’re playing at?’
She hit the light switch on the first floor to find an old man standing outside an apartment. The same old man, in fact, that she’d seen looking up at her earlier. She stared at him suspiciously for a moment, half-ready to accuse him of knocking on her door; then she noticed he leaned on a cane.
‘Is there anything wrong?’ he asked in a surprisingly soft voice.
‘It’s those damn kids….’ She took a calming breath. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that some children have been playing rather annoying games.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘they would do that.’ Then he gave a little smile that caused his eyes to dwindle into two glassy specks in his face. ‘It’s the time of year I’m afraid.’
‘I know … Hallowe’en. But they don’t trick or treat. They just knock on the door and run like hell.’
He gave a whispery chuckle. ‘A local custom. Whitby has a variation of Hallowe’en; it’s called Mischief Night.’
‘Mischief Night.’ She sighed. ‘I figure that gives kids a licence to do exactly that?’
‘Precisely. It’s great fun as a child but tiresome when you’re as old as I am.’
‘What now? They’re going to spend the next five hours knocking on my door and running away before the little darlings go home to bed.’
‘Something like that. Do you have a car?’
‘Yes, why?’ She felt a sinking sensation.
‘Then, I’d check it if I were you. Some children get a bit carried away. They might have let the tyres down or put broken glass under them in the hope you don’t notice in the morning.’
‘The little …’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Thanks for the warning.’ She smiled. ‘And thank you for your concern.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. It’s only I heard you calling, and, well … I thought you might be having a bit of trouble.’
‘I’ve managed to ruin supper and my husband’s bugged out – nothing I can’t handle.’
‘Well, if you should need me, I live here. Number one.’
‘Thank you, that’s very kind.’ She smiled again. ‘And very neighbourly of you.’
‘Not at all … goodnight, then.’
‘Goodnight.’
Feeling a little less irritated she climbed the stairs to her apartment. Even so, she’d have a choice word or two to say to Ben when he managed to wend his way back from whatever bar he’d wandered into.
Still no joy with the TV; a snowstorm on every channel. She drummed her fingers on the armchair, ignoring the tapping on the fire-escape door to the rear and to the landing door.
‘Go away. I’m from down South. I don’t celebrate Mischief Night.’ She’d called out the words in a half-humorous way, but she itched to get her hands on the little brats. Now an hour had ticked away since Ben had so cheerfully bounded down the stairs promising to be back in minutes. Damn.
With the time creeping up to eight it was dark outside. What’s more, the thick mist swamped everything in a lake of white, stained here and there with uncanny blotches of orange, marking where the streetlights lay buried. That’s all she could see. Meanwhile, the foghorn continued its cry. A melancholy sound that rolled out across the ocean to die of loneliness somewhere in the mist.
After a while even the knocking of knuckl
ebones on her door stopped. The brats had either grown tired of tormenting her or they’d turned their attention to other things like—
Oh shit. The car. All it needed was for the yobs to trash the hire-car, then life would become even less rosy than it had been over the last couple of hours. Damn, double damn, triple damn … she pulled a jacket over her sweatshirt and jeans, and once more Ingrid went downstairs.
The instant she left the apartment block fog swallowed her. Ten paces from the apartment she couldn’t even see the building when she looked back into that impenetrable grey wall. Nor could she see the car, even though they’d parked the thing just outside. She followed a pavement now wet and somehow unpleasantly greasy from the mist. Parked cars dripped as if they were stalactites in a cave; they looked as if they’d been there a thousand years.
Soon, however, she found their car. What little light filtered through this murk had turned its red livery into a morbid brown closer to the shade of congealed blood. It only took a moment to see that the car hadn’t been touched; its doors were locked; no one had wedged tacks or glass bottles under the wheels in celebration of the no doubt ancient and occult festival of Mischief Night (when everyone else in the free world was lighting candles in pumpkin heads, eating vampire bat fudge and wearing funny spook masks, damn it).
Great, now her thoughts had taken on an acid quality. But she found she was no longer irritated but angry; a hot burning anger at that. Ben had played a dirty trick on her. Why the hell hadn’t he come back from the supermarket yet? Because some whore gave him the eye on Church Street … No. That wasn’t Ben’s style. He’s been mugged; he’s lying unconscious in one of those little streets; the cold killing him by inches … Oh God, why did she have to think that? Now she couldn’t simply storm back to the apartment then sit drinking vodka, waiting for him to return so she could give him a piece of her mind….
He’s simply missed his way, that’s all, she reassured herself. It’s dark; it’s foggy, so foggy, in fact, you can hardly see five paces in front of you. He’ll have taken a wrong turning somewhere and probably even now he’s standing scratching his head, wondering where the hell the apartment had vanished.
Ingrid zipped up her jacket then determinedly set off for the seafront, the mist snuffing out the sound of her footsteps. In fact, the mist killed all sound apart from the mournful cry of the foghorn. Even the whisper of the sea no longer reached her. And there were no people or cars about even though it couldn’t have been much later than eight. Maybe they were all home protecting their property from Mischief Night kids. She walked as quickly as she could through the mist, seeing nothing but a few slick paving slabs, while every so often dark coffin shapes lying on the pavement loomed toward her. At first she’d stopped, thinking who on earth would leave a coffin out here? Perhaps kids had broken into a funeral parlour and … But no; they were only seat benches. Then again, in this near dark was it surprising her imagination played her up something rotten?
She put her head down as if charging the wall of grey in front of her; already salt deposited by the sea fog ran into her mouth with a briny sharpness; it found the burn on the back of her hand, too, causing the blister to sting like fury. God, what a night, she thought. What a damn awful night.
After walking for a few moments, the dark monolithic shapes of old houses closed in on her as she entered the narrow lane that ran down to the supermarket. Whether lights burned through windows she couldn’t tell. This nightmare mist hid everything but the diffuse outline of buildings. She moved faster now, plunging down a long flight of steps between cottages that, she remembered, led to the supermarket.
‘I don’t believe it … I don’t damn well believe it.’ For a moment she stood looking at the steel shutters covering the doors of the supermarket. ‘For crying out loud, where has he got to?’ She looked round half-expecting to see Ben lying bleeding on the street. Shaking her head, she followed the road that ran steeply down to the harbour-side. No, he must be lost, that’s all. If she walked along the harbour near the amusement arcades she might find him there. After all, there he’d find people who could give him directions back to Royal Crescent.
With blasts of white jetting from her mouth she reached the harbour to find the tide out and an expanse of mud stretching greasily out into the mist. And so much for people being here. Pubs and cafés were shut. Amusement arcades shuttered and silent.
In fact, the whole of Whitby was silent. Apart from the foghorn that still bellowed its mournful cry. God, that sound … it felt as if it was dragging through her body like a saw blade. Didn’t they ever switch the damn thing off?
She put her head down to walk on again, the mist stroking her neck with cold fingers … bone fingers that had been dead for a hundred years … a thousand years … the foghorn lowed across morbid, black mud … there, a long lost rope coiled unpleasantly eel-like … boat tracks formed many an open wound in the riverbed … abandoned lobster pots became the muddy ribs of dead children claimed by the gluttonous silt … beyond those, monstrous shadows loomed in a mist that didn’t reveal so much as a trace of another living human being.
She watched her passing reflection in the windows of The Dracula Experience; a hunched phantom-like figure with mist damp hair pasted down flat against her skull. And all the time the blister on her hand burned as if her flesh was being gnawed by fire ants. That foghorn boomed so loudly it set her teeth on edge and cursed her with the thumping mother and grandmother of all headaches. Good grief, all she wanted now was to get back to the apartment, get under a hot shower – then get some vodka down her throat.
She’d been walking perhaps five minutes when the road ended at a ramp. Confused, she stared at it for a moment. This led down to the sands … how had she missed the road that would take her back?
Ahead of her, the beach stretched out to be lost in that all enshrouding bleak mist. Waves of salt-air rolled with a tomb-like iciness over her, probing cold fingers through her clothes to touch her skin. She gave a great shiver that shuddered down to the marrow of her bones. That cold alone was enough to drive her back to the apartment, Ben or no Ben, but at that moment she saw a figure on the beach. Obscured by mist, she couldn’t even tell if it was male or female, but there was something about the silhouette; the angle of the head….
‘Ben?’
Slowly, she walked down the ramp, sensing stone slabs give way to soft yielding sand beneath her feet. ‘Ben?’
The figure didn’t react to her voice at first. But as she walked out across the sand it turned and moved down the beach toward the still unseen ocean. She followed.
It’s him … I’m sure it’s him, she told herself. What on earth was he doing on the beach at night? Perhaps he had been attacked, or had fallen and struck his head; now he wandered in a confused state, looking for her.
‘Ben!’ This time a full-blooded shout came from her lips. The figure stopped. Looked back (she was sure he’d looked back, even though she couldn’t clearly see his features in this God-awful mist). Then the figure began to walk purposefully once more.
Ingrid found herself half-running after him (it has to be Ben; it is him; no doubt). Soon Whitby town and its cliffs vanished behind her into the fog. Now she moved through that all but dark murk, which had the clarity of ditch water. ‘Ben. What’s the matter?’ This time her call didn’t slow him, he still strode purposefully toward the water’s edge.
But what water?
She could see no waves. The tide had gone way out; she could have been crossing some cold, damp desert. Every so often she’d walk across a white speckling of dead seashells, looking for all the world like tiny skulls. But there was nothing to indicate the direction she walked. She couldn’t even make out the harbour wall that must run out to sea to her right.
Ahead, the figure began to vanish into the mist as it moved faster and faster away from her. ‘Ben … Ben! Wait!’ A breathless panic bore down her; a pitiless weight, crushing her chest. ‘Wait for me!’
She fo
llowed the fading figure for a full five minutes, desperately trying to keep it in view. Still she hadn’t reached the water’s edge; what’s more, she couldn’t even hear the surf between the cries of the foghorn now way, way, behind.
Surely the tide can’t have gone this far out? She must have lost her sense of direction and be walking along the beach, not toward the sea. But even as she walked, the nature of the shore changed; dark boulders emerged from the mist. They littered the beach at weirdly regular intervals. She walked by one. Perhaps eight feet long, it was oblong in shape, and closely resembled its neighbours that now surrounded her.
This was absurd; impossible; but she found herself thinking of them as being coffins hewn from stone. But what would coffins be doing lying out here on the seabed?
Passing by another, she looked more closely at it. Although erupting with a malignant growth of kelp the coffin shape was unmistakable. But coffins, hundreds of coffins on the seabed? Could this be the remains of a long sunken graveyard? After all, she remembered reading that water levels had inexorably risen around the coast over the last few centuries, submerging whole villages. And she recalled the stone coffins at Whitby Abbey where the monks were interred. Maybe an unusually low tide had laid bare this submerged cemetery? One that had long since been stripped of its soil by ocean currents. But the coffins were of tremendous size. She pulled aside strands of weed from one of the stone caskets to reveal where the lid joined to the main body of the coffin. A scabbing crust of shellfish had formed over parts of the stone. Where the lid joined, the shells had broken as if….
She closed off the images her imagination sent oozing into her brain. Find Ben, she told herself. That’s the important thing now. She walked on. The foghorn lowed with a dark and morbid intensity across the beach.