by F. G. Cottam
Uncle Mark said, ‘What have you been reading, Livs? What have you seen on the television that has scared you so? Do Mummy and Daddy let you watch Doctor Who?’
‘I’m not scared of Doctor Who,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I don’t believe that, darling. Sometimes I’m scared of Doctor Who.’
‘I’m scared of the thing in the garden,’ Olivia persisted. ‘I’m scared of the crouching thing without a proper face. It moves so fast. It moves the way an insect does.’
Jack said nothing. He wasn’t feeling quite as buoyant as he had been a moment earlier. He knew his sister; knew when she was lying and when she was telling the truth. She wasn’t even exaggerating now. She was truly afraid and you had to wonder if something real rather than imaginary had done this excellent job of spooking her.
‘Wait here,’ said their Uncle Mark.
No two more redundant words had ever been spoken to the Greer children. They were going nowhere. Certainly they were not about to follow their uncle into the study where they suspected he intended to unbolt the door that led to their garden.
Mark Greer had a duty of care to his nephew and niece beyond the responsibilities with which his brother and sister-in-law had charged him. He no more believed in crepuscular demons than he believed in little green men from Mars. But something in Olivia’s tone and facial expression had raised in him the possibility of genuine danger. She was afraid of something she really believed she had seen. It moved with a spider’s prancing speed and possessed a face contorted by fury. Could a child of eight make up such a thing?
There was a lot of burglary in this area. It wasn’t the random break-ins of desperate crackheads, either. There was a degree of professionalism involved. Intruders often did covert surveillance before breaking in. His brother had several thousand pounds worth of easily sellable computer hardware installed in the house. The pictures and the high-end stereo system were also pretty valuable.
Mark had no intention of being a hero. He had enjoyed a single pint of bitter shandy on the way to the chippie and so was somewhat short of the Dutch courage required for that role. But he could not ignore Olivia’s fears if doing so meant leaving two children in his care vulnerable to the possibility of attack in an aggravated burglary. He would take a look. That was all he would do. He had an obligation to his charges to do that.
He walked into the study without switching on the light and closed the door firmly behind him. He would be able to see nothing beyond his own reflection if he illuminated the room with either the overheads or the desk lamp. He walked towards the glass-panelled door that gave on to the garden. Outside he could see foliage and the bright dabs of flower petals stirring slightly in the evening breeze.
It was a tiny garden and at first casual glance, concealment seemed impossible. There were two trees right at the rear but their trunks were too slender to hide a man. The foliage was thick, though, the leaves dense and fleshy on the bushes against the rear wall, and the spaces between them were cast into deep gloom.
The study was very quiet. There was no sound but for the regular tick of a quartz clock on the wall every second. If anything the ticking of the clock emphasised the silence. Mark could not hear the children. They must be trying to be very quiet in the kitchen to help him, he thought. He looked outside, the detail of the garden clarifying as his eyes adjusted to the absence of light. And he listened intently. It was a good three minutes of this vigilant inspection before he finally turned and put his hand on the door knob.
It was then that he heard the snicker of laughter. It was mordant, mocking, cruel and addressing him. He turned back. There was a face outside, pressed up against the glass. It looked to Mark Greer like the face of someone who had lost their features to a fire. The eyes were lidless and the mouth a lipless maw under the space where the nose had been burned away. The skin had been coarsened by heat into something resembling burlap sacking more than flesh. It was capable of expression, this face. It appeared to leer emptily at him.
Confronted by this sight Mark’s first thought was that Livs had been right. There was after all a spookmeister in the garden. And it had ambitions beyond merely lurking there. He forced himself to walk towards the door. His instinct was to flee. But he needed for his own sake and the sakes of the children in his care to try to rationalise the threat. As he approached the glass, the crude features of the thing he was looking at seemed to slide into refraction and disappear entirely and he realised with a surge of almighty relief that it must have been a mere trick of moonlight and leaf shadow.
This did not explain the laughter Mark had heard. That, he put down to imagination. He must have heard it inside his head because he knew that the windows of the house were double-glazed. They had been insulated, at some expense, by his brother and sister-in-law against traffic and aircraft flight-path noise.
For him to have heard laughter from the garden would have defied the laws of physics. He could be a bit frayed around the edges; a bit ramshackle and disorganised in his private life. He would have been the first to admit that. But he was a qualified and practising engineer and, as such, believed the laws of physics immutable.
He had heard it, though. He could hear it still in his mind. It had come from somewhere; from something. It had been the audible expression of mockery, a gleeful cackle of utter contempt that had been inspired by him and that had not sounded even remotely human. Hearing it had made his scalp tingle and his heart thud and his arms crawl with goose flesh. He turned away from the glass and very slowly and deliberately walked out of the room, aware as he did so that the eight steps required to reach the door were the longest he had ever taken and that his back felt not so much exposed as flayed of its skin.
Chapter Eight
Charlie Abraham guided them to the east beach after closing and shuttering the pub. The Greers were a bit incredulous that he was doing this on a Saturday night, but as he explained to them, the entire village would likely be attending the celebration on the shore and there was no point in keeping a pub open unless it had some customers to serve.
The harbour was to the right of the pub as you faced the seafront, the boats bobbing at anchor beyond the breakwater. In front of the pub, the sickle shape of the bay itself stretched leftwards in a shallow curve. The sea wall ran parallel with the bay and it was this they took to reach their destination, the area beyond the far point of the bay where the strewn boulders lay to which women suspected of witchcraft had once been shackled.
On the sea wall they joined a procession of people, some of them carrying pitch-topped torches that provided a ragged, ruby and orange light in the gathering darkness. Many of the people they walked among, Lillian saw, were wearing a sort of costume of white britches and hooped sweaters and baggy cloth hats that to her resembled the headqear worn by commoners during the French Revolution.
There was a buzz of conversation and anticipation and an excitement that was contagious. People hurried in their progress. The torches bobbed. Leather boots rang and clattered on the cobbles of the sea wall and the surf boomed in the night to their right and sent salt vapour into the air they breathed and the spray touched and caressed them and tingled on their exposed skin.
They saw the glow from the fires above the headland dividing the bay from the east shore. They saw sparks ascending and the shimmer of escaping flames. The sea wall ended and there was the climb and rough descent to the shore itself and as Lillian topped the rise, hand in hand with James, she saw the scene on the shore below her and gasped slightly at the scale of it.
The whole of the bay seemed to be gathering. There were everywhere on the packed shingle griddles over heaps of burning driftwood and dug pits of glowing embers and sea coal in iron troughs white-hot under rows of skewers. The light cast by all this fire flung shadows from the strewn boulders that gave the landscape a strange aspect, as though it was some almost alien place at the furthest border of the world. The black sea beyond, with its roiling lines of white spume, strengthened
the impression.
Lillian descended with her husband to the shore. She saw among the crowd Richard Penmarrick, attired in the hooped shirt and britches worn by most of the rest, but without the hat, bareheaded, his rock-star mane wild and damp with wind and wave drench and a tall and willowy woman at his side she knew from the description James had given her was his wife, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was not in costume. She wore a clingy pale diaphanous dress and, over it, a shawl of ivory silk. There was a turquoise choker around her throat that drew attention to the length of her neck. To Lillian she looked like one of the gorgeous singer/song-writers of the early 1970s; she had that ethereal beauty and hint of another age about her. It was easy to imagine her appearing before an audience between sets by the youthful Emmylou Harris and a shy and callow Joni Mitchell. Looking at her provoked an odd feeling in Lillian. She would have described it as nostalgia for a time she had never known.
There was another woman among the crowd who naturally claimed attention. She was pale and dressed in black and smoking a cigarette and when the torchlight caught her full in the face her eyes had a green glitter and she looked captivating and beautiful. There was glamour in the bay, Lillian realised. It was a slight shock but a pleasure too, an exciting realisation.
James had told her about Elizabeth, of course. He had neglected to mention the black-clad woman who paced the shingle in suede pixie boots that set off her slender calves. Her hair was pulled back from her face and her cheekbones were high and her shapely mouth picked out in crimson lipstick. It was the eyes, though. It was those green eyes she suspected would mesmerise and captivate her husband. She smiled to herself. If they had met, she did not think James would have been able to describe this woman with anything like neutrality.
As if aware of her thoughts, James coughed and introduced her first to Elizabeth and then to the femme fatale, whose name was Angela Heart.
Elizabeth smiled and shook her hand. Richard embraced her warmly.
‘Welcome to the cabaret,’ Angela said.
Smell was a strong feature of the east shore. Seaweed drying on the beached boulders was a rank bass note competing with salt crystallising in the still warm pebbles and the smart of pitch from the torches and beech and oak smoke and burning tar from the pits of washed-up and gathered coal glowing with searing heat under the skewers.
‘Where is the food?’ Lillian asked the general company.
‘Wait,’ Angela Heart said with a smile. In the capricious wind, Lillian caught her scent, then. She wore the Guerlain fragrance, Shalimar. Lillian somehow doubted it was bought locally.
People were drifting down to the waterline. Lillian noticed for the first time that many of them carried barbed hooks or baskets with them. They formed a line just above where the waves tumbled and broke. The torch carriers broke free of the rest of the crowd and formed a circle behind this line, before the biggest of the boulders. In the light of their flames, a set of ancient chains was visible hanging from iron pinions in the stone. Shackles were attached to them and these glimmered rustily. She saw that Elizabeth Penmarrick stood at the centre of the torch circle. She had taken off her shawl and the bodice of the dress she wore underneath was transparent. Her breasts were high and smallish and firm and the nipples proud.
The line of people at the edge of the sea set off a percussive crunching on the shingle. They were stamping on the spot in unison. They were murmuring something that sounded ancient and tribal in a language Lillian had never heard before but thought was probably the old Cornish tongue. Then Elizabeth Penmarrick began to sing and the air seemed to ripple as a voice more ethereal and strange than any she had heard before began to ululate out of the woman.
The singing was unaccompanied. The language sounded a little like Gaelic and the words and phrases as old as time as they shuddered and reverberated through the night air. The tune was discernible because Elizabeth possessed the gift of perfect pitch and the slow tempo at which she sang was sustained seemingly without effort. Her voice was not summoned, Lillian thought. It was released like some powerful and dormant force created simply to soar.
Lillian looked at James who looked back and merely shrugged. There was no expression she had ever seen on her husband’s face adequate to reflect the sheer strangeness of the moment. Beside them, Angela Heart’s features were unreadable. Richard Penmarrick gazed down at the pebbles beneath his feet with his arms folded across his chest and a hint of secret amusement about his pursed mouth.
Lillian felt the ground shake. There was no mistaking it. A seismic shock rippled subtly under her weight. She saw pebbles shift and topple and squirm. At the edge of the sea, the water began to boil. She walked forward, hand in hand with James, curious. Elizabeth had stopped singing. The line of people at the brink of the water had stopped their rhythmic stamping. They took a step back as the surf in front of them seemed to writhe blackly and she heard a skittering sound as claws and mandibles emerged and crabs and lobsters crawled ashore all along its length.
Mandibles twitched and segmented limbs skittered and brine escaped dribbling from the armoured bodies of the creatures summoned from the sea bed as they scrabbled on to the beach.
There was a cry of triumph as the first barbed spear skewered the first crab shell and raised high the twitching beast. Lillian thought it was the biggest crab she had ever seen. Its claws were monstrous. Everywhere the line broke as the men and women and boys and girls composing it brought back their catches to be broken up and cooked or dropped alive into the simmering iron pots amid the coals.
Lillian realised that Angela Heart stood flanking her. She turned and smiled and under the green allure of those remarkable eyes the smile was friendly. ‘Works every time,’ she said, lighting a cigarette from a brass Zippo lighter.
‘Does the earth tremor bring them ashore?’
Angela exhaled at the sky. The smell of cooking flesh was growing strong already, stirring Lillian’s appetite. She remembered she had not eaten dinner. She remembered Richard’s culinary advice of the night before. She looked up. The stars were infinite.
‘The tremor is more effect than cause,’ Angela said.
‘Then what brings the shellfish ashore?’
‘The singing,’ Angela said. ‘The singing delivers our feast.’
Bread was lowered in baskets on a pulley and line strung from somewhere above the shore and as it swung down, Lillian knew from the smell that it was freshly baked. Wooden cases of beer were hauled across the shingle on a hand-drawn cart, their bottles rattling. The ceremonial aspect of the evening was obviously at an end. People chatted and laughed and cooked and ate and drank without formality. It was just a big barbecue, a beach party. If she had not seen the ritual enacted at the edge of the sea, she would not have believed it had ever taken place.
She was introduced to the chandler Martin Sharp and Ben Tamworth the contractor and the boatbuilder Billy Jasper and Bella Worth, who edited the local newspaper. She was served fresh lobster on a paper plate by a polite boy in a Scout uniform. She found herself in conversation with Angela, discussing Olivia’s capacity to adapt to a new home and educational environment.
‘Better change all at once than piecemeal disruption,’ Angela said. ‘Children are adaptable to change and so long as the consistency of her nuclear family is sustained, she should be absolutely fine. I’m assuming her parents have endowed her with good communication skills?’
‘She’s a bit precocious for an eight-year-old,’ Lillian said. ‘She can be a self-possessed little madam, quite insular, actually, when she wants to be. But she is not naturally timid or shy. She does not lack confidence.’
‘I’m sure she’ll be fine,’ Angela said. ‘But I promise you I will keep a very close eye on her for the first few weeks of her settling in.’
‘Thank you.’
Angela excused herself and wandered away.
Richard came over and offered some wine, apologising for the plastic cup. As she took it gratefully, stressing t
hat no apology was necessary, she saw men carrying an array of musical instruments crunching over the shingle to his rear. She noticed that a small stage was being built from empty beer cases. This work was being supervised, in humorous fashion, by Ben Tamworth, being verbally abused by his impromptu workforce variously as a cowboy and a slave-driver.
‘You must come to lunch tomorrow,’ Richard said, moving on through the crowd. ‘Our daughter Megan is a huge fan and absolutely dying to meet you.’
‘Elizabeth is going to sing,’ James said, returning to her from a conversation with an elderly man with rather long hair she guessed might be the local scholar Michael Carney. Carney was an authority on the soldier-poet who had originally owned the house they were in the process of buying. She resolved to ask him about Adam Gleason, if it was indeed him and not just some other elderly and picturesque resident of the bay. James seemed to know all of them. She felt that she was quickly making new friends herself.
‘We’re about to witness a miracle,’ James said. ‘Just wait till you hear Elizabeth Penmarrick sing something in English. Better than that, wait until you hear her sing a song you think you know.’
Lillian nodded at her plate. ‘We’ve already witnessed a miracle,’ she said. ‘How would you explain what we saw half an hour ago? Do you think it was the vibration of their feet, stamping?’
James shrugged and smiled and brushed a stray fragment of lobster meat from the corner of her lips with his thumb and kissed her on the mouth. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t care, frankly. The real miracle is our finding this place. We’re going to be happy here, Lily. We’re going to be happy and at home and from now on, everything in our lives is going to be wonderful.’