by F. G. Cottam
‘And the church has been derelict since then?’
‘It has.’
‘Were there no other boats out that day when the Carol-Anne was lost?’
‘There were two. They did not see anything. The fog was blanket thick.’
‘Did they not hear the cries of the crew when she foundered?’
‘I’ll tell you what they said they heard. You can make of it what you will. Most of them stayed silent on the subject. Three or four of them swore they heard the sea, singing.’
James Greer sat in the departure lounge at Denver Airport trying to inventory the good things about his life. It was his way of trying to deflect the disappointment threatening to overwhelm him. There would be a point at which disappointment became despair. He knew he was close to it. More accurately, it was close to him. He had to try to force a perspective that diminished what he felt. The Americans had coined that phrase, hadn’t they, about keeping it in the day.
The difficulty with keeping it in the day for him was that his disappointment centred on something over which he had been toiling for close to a decade. Even on the flight on the way out there, he had spent the time tinkering on his laptop embellishing, improving, fine-tuning in a last-minute effort to make his game not just good, but perfect.
Americans spoke in a code. In business meetings they did, anyway. He had sat with the beaming reception committee of geeks and they had told him his game was a masterpiece. And then they had spent two hours telling him how he could improve it even further by turning it into something completely different from what he had always intended it to be.
They used this word all the time, which was terrific. Except that terrific had a completely different meaning in American from what it signified in English. His concept was terrific. His execution was terrific. The structure of his game, its internal architecture, its levels and avatars and variously realised landscapes and domains were all terrific. And what this actually meant was mediocre, lightweight, rankly amateurish and nowhere near achieving the potential as a package the concept deserved.
He peeled the cellophane from a tuna and cucumber sandwich and took a bite and then folded what remained back into its package and rose without appetite and walked over to what the Americans called a trash can and dropped it inside. He chewed, unable to taste anything, the swallow reflex reluctant to come, a physical symptom of the malaise afflicting his soul.
They had wanted two fundamental changes to his medieval survival epic. The first of these was the introduction of a character, a roaming mercenary they even had a name for. He was to be called Krull. He was an assassin, an executioner. He was utterly cruel, totally ruthless and profoundly cold.
The player was supposed not just to root for Krull but to admire and aspire to be him. His let-off, the secret gimmick that enabled him to avoid the moral consequences of all the slaughter he was responsible for – and the Americans were very pleased with this – was that he came from another planet. His planet was very advanced. This made Krull’s slaying of medieval humans no worse morally than puffing ant killer on to a troublesome nest.
The second improvement was a mobile torture chamber that trundled through Europe in the charge of a psychotic sect called the Marauders. James had researched the medieval period very punctiliously and he was absolutely bloody sure the Marauders had not trundled through Europe then with their wagon train of portable racks and flays and whips and branding irons. Why would they? What would have been the point? Anyway, someone would have stopped them. The world in the Middle Ages wasn’t some anarchic free-for-all.
He had wanted something with the values and sophistication of Risk and Diplomacy wrapped in a software package complex enough to seduce cutting-edge gamers. They had wanted yet another apocalyptic, heavy-metal gore-fest. He had left the meeting after three hours without having signed the proffered contract or even having agreed anything with them in principle.
His son and his daughter, he thought. His children and their love were the best things in his life. And the love of his beautiful and adulterous wife, that was important to him too. Three people elevated his existence. Emotional pain had figured rather too much in his recent family experience, but it was Lily and Jack and Livs on whom he relied for happiness and fulfilment. The game was not important compared to them and the Colorado experience was a setback he could and would live with and overcome.
Krull had his nemesis in their version of his game, of course. But it wasn’t some veteran of Crécy or Agincourt schooled since the age of seven to be invincible in martial conflict. A knight on a warhorse, a noble-blooded European warrior of the period was too mundane for them. Krull’s nemesis was a mythic winged creature, a dragon, for fuck’s sake. He was quite surprised they hadn’t dragged Merlin into the mix.
He was in his seat aboard the plane and the seatbelt sign had been switched off before he remembered the notebook Lillian had packed for him and his promise to his daughter that he would read it. He would do so now, he decided. He had to keep his children’s faith. The contents of the notebook might divert him for the duration of the flight, or at least for some of it.
Chapter Ten
June 21 1916
The house is very empty without my beloved wife and cherished daughter. They haunt it. They do not do so in the spectral sense. They do so through the abundant and joyful memories I have of them. They filled these rooms with their energetic and playful spirits as they filled my heart with love. It is not possible to continue to live without them. I do not know whether we meet those to whom we were closest in some afterlife. I have never possessed the zealous certainty of religious faith. I pray it is true, to a God I only half believe in, because it is the only hope left to me now.
These are the last words I shall write. I am certain at least of that. I shall return to France and seek the bullet that will end my mortal existence. I am impatient enough to provide it myself if the enemy should prove reluctant to do so. My grief is beyond endurance. It has cost me whatever poetic gift I possessed. There are not verses to describe this loss. The language does not possess words freighted with sufficient sorrow.
Might I have saved them, had I returned sooner? The answer is that I would have died with them. They could not have been saved. They had been chosen. There would have been no influencing the likes of Teal and Tamworth, Jasper, Carney, Worth, Sharp and Flood. And I would never have been able to persuade Penmarrick or that cold and beautiful creature he calls his bride. The old ways are sacred to him. The ancient spirits must be appeased. The prosperity of the village depends upon it. More: its very survival. Neglect to honour the Singers under the Sea and the legend says caprice will turn to spite and then destruction.
My mistake was in marrying an incomer. Doing so provoked the thirst for fresh blood which my wife and daughter have paid for with their innocent lives. I see them manacled to the rocks in my mind whenever I close my eyes. They wait for the tide to creep upward and touch and slowly engulf them. They see the Harbingers caper and fret on the night shingle awaiting the sound of the demons they serve. And they hear the music toil from the depths as they struggle against their iron bonds, drowning. Such a desolate death and deliberately so because the spirits the old way serves are strangers to mercy.
Everyone born in the bay grows up knowing its secret. Thus is the ritual made to seem simply a part of the pattern of existence. It is a custom, a tradition and a necessity. I matured into adulthood believing all of that. Then I went away to Cambridge and university and instead of reflecting on the pagan strangeness of the place in which I grew up, I almost forgot about it altogether.
I suppose I thought of it, if I thought about it at all, as a necessary evil. And Penmarrick’s glib reasoning has a certain objective logic to it. He calls it the price only occasionally exacted of the very few for the profit and permanent wellbeing of the many. I accepted this. Only when the price was exacted of those nearest to me did I see it for what it is: which is ritual murder and human sacrifice and
not something with any place or justification in a civilised world.
I should start at the beginning, in medieval times, when witchcraft first summoned the sea spirits we call the Singers with an incantation legend insists was composed in druidic times and then secretly taught and remembered through the centuries. The druids believed that the sea spirits were far stronger than those that roamed the land. They would bring you luck and prosperity and could even grant those wishes not based on personal greed. But they were powerful and once summoned could not be dismissed again. And their potency came only at mortal cost.
They were first courted by the Cornish enchantress Ghislane in a ceremony enacted in the stone circle during one particularly bitter winter in the fourteenth century when the sea had frozen and the village was starving for want of fish. The summoning was successful. Lots were drawn to decide the sacrifice. That was duly made and the weather broke and the bounty of the following spring and summer were without precedent.
They gained in power quite by accident. The witchfinder sent west in Cromwell’s time unwittingly assisted this. He manacled those suspected of witchcraft to the boulders of the east shore as one of his tests. The sea spirits were nourished by their innocent deaths. Thus did they become stronger than Ghislane ever imagined they would become.
There is no written record of when the Harbingers first came among us. They were so called because their appearance signified the time for fresh sacrifice was becoming due. They are somewhere between emissaries and foot soldiers in nature. Perhaps they are closer to the latter than the former because they are not capable of communication but they can inflict physical harm along with the corrosive sense of dread that just sighting them can provoke.
I now realise that one of them visited me in the days before my leave and this desolate homecoming. I was on night patrol, in the line, at the forward observation post when a private on sentry duty began to shoot rifle rounds from the fire step into no-man’s-land late on a clear and moonlit evening. My immediate concern was that our section was the target of a trench raid. But when I reached the sentry and swept the ground beyond the wire before him through a periscope, there was no movement and there were neither the muzzle flashes nor the sound of return fire that would signal enemy approach.
I ordered him to stop firing and to descend the ladder to where we could communicate out of sight and range of German snipers. I was anxious on two counts. He had fired sufficient rounds to give their mortar parties a good indication of the exact position of our forward base, our principal dugout and our forward supply dump. And practically, the noise of his rifle fire would disturb men robbed of decent rest already by the sustained enemy bombardment we had endured there in our part of the line for close to three days.
‘I saw something,’ the man insisted. ‘Sir,’ he added, as a stubborn afterthought. It was Davies, a tenant farmer’s son from Totnes, a sturdy boy of eighteen cool under fire, not given in the slightest to flights of imaginative fancy.
‘What did you see precisely, Davies?’
‘I saw a figure, sir.’
‘You saw just the one?’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘They do not attack individually, Private.’ I supposed he could have been a scout doing night reconnaissance. It seemed unlikely. I climbed the ladder and risked a look through my field glasses. They were not military issue but ship’s binoculars given me by Sharp the chandler as a parting gift when it became known in the bay I had volunteered for the fight. They were of excellent quality and the moon was bright and yet I saw nothing.
‘You must have hit him,’ I said to Davies. But Davies looked doubtful about this. ‘Describe him to me.’
‘He moved very quickly, sir. He had a loping gait, rapid, like a hare. And he had on a mask.’
‘You mean a gas mask?’
‘Burlap, it looked like. Sockets of glass stitched over his eyes, sir. Must have been glass, gave him a look like he had no eyes in his head. Altogether right strange, he looked.’
I told Davies to make his way back to the support trench and to brew himself a can of tea and to return to his post in half an hour. I would occupy his position while he took a short absence from it that I considered he had earned. He was cool and vigilant and the carrot is more useful than the stick the further forward men are ordered to go. War is enervating on the nerves. My conclusion, as the Devon boy went to get his beverage, was that he had killed a scout wearing some sort of camouflage or experimental protection.
I took and, while he was gone, examined his rifle. The weapon was clean and well lubricated; the barrel smooth and his bayonet polished and stropped to the keenest edge. He was a good soldier, disciplined and professional. I did not think he had been shooting at shadows.
Dawn and daylight revealed no body in no-man’s-land. This did not mean he had not been there. He might have crawled back unscathed to his own lines once I ordered Davies to stop firing. He might have crawled back wounded. He might have sought cover in a shell hole and drowned in the putrid water that has filled them half full after the recent rain. He might still be there, hungry and thirsty and afraid, waiting for the night, praying for cloud cover and concealment from the bright moon after dusk.
But he was not there, I know now, because he was not a man at all. He was a Harbinger, one of the grotesque apparitions that come to visit us when sacrifice is due. They come to scare and remind and prompt us and I do not think that bullets fired from a Lee Enfield rifle can conveniently eradicate them. Neither can prayer do it. He came that I should see him. I do not think it would have made any difference to the outcome if I had.
The following afternoon I was writing to the mother of a comrade killed in the earlier bombardment. I told her of course that he died bravely. In fact he died oblivious, blown to pieces while he slept in a direct hit from a howitzer shell on the dugout where he slept. The single largest piece of him recovered intact was the thumb of his left hand. I did not tell his mother this.
I felt a chill of malevolence as I wrote so cold it made me shudder. I looked up and saw something grey-faced and unblinking gazing back at me with incurious fury. It was not a human countenance. The features were crude and ragged and somehow unfinished, the mouth a vacant leer under the empty scrutiny of eyes that were little more than holes. It appeared to crouch and lurk, this creature. I blinked and looked up at the dirty sky and back again and all I saw where it had appeared to me were sandbags, shoved together in a damp and wrinkled pile against the corrugated tin wall of the officers’ quarters.
I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me. It was the Harbinger again, of course, come to summon me home; come to remind me that the people of the bay have duties from which war provides no escape.
I find it the deepest irony of my life that I have written verse inspired by human sacrifice. The brave men who have perished on the altar of freedom have pushed my pen across the page, posthumously, in commemoration of their valour and loss.
They were my comrades, my brothers in blood and common cause and I have tried in my way to honour them and their memory and to celebrate their youth and courage and deeds. I have shared their laughter and lived among them and sung our ardent songs marching shoulder to shoulder with them and trod through their gore in the aftermath of battle. I have mourned them.
Now I mourn my sacrificed wife and daughter. Sarah was, simply, the sunlight in my life. We met at Cambridge. Romance overcame all the many and deliberate obstacles to any sort of contact between male and female students. The attraction was instant and obvious to both of us and simply would not be denied. We walked and punted and told one another of our dreams in endless talks. We made forbidden love and it was magical.
We duly married. We lived in London at first. I taught English at a prep school at East Dulwich and we found a small house in Kennington in Lambeth affordable within our means. Sarah worked as a governess, teaching her young charges Latin and Greek and giving them music lessons on the piano. She was a fair pianist, tho
ugh her real gift was for fine art. She could paint and draw with wonderful accomplishment.
When she fell pregnant with Paul we were overjoyed. He was a robust infant and athletic and graceful. He walked before his first birthday and could ride a bicycle before his third.
That was a milestone he never reached. Our beloved boy was taken from us by a bout of diphtheria. Grief afflicts people in strange ways sometimes and the loss of Paul made us more determined to be parents together to a second child. Sarah duly fell pregnant just a few short months after we buried our son.
This was in the autumn of 1907. At about that time, my cousin Edith Heart wrote to me from the bay. She mentioned in her letter that there was a vacancy for a new head at the Mount School. She inferred that were I to apply for the job, my local connections would of course count in my favour when the selection process took place among what competing candidates there were.
She said she had recently spoken to Penmarrick and that he had asked fondly about me and whether I might one day return to live in the village of my birth. Some of my early poetry had been published in a couple of the literary journals by then and he said he had seen and admired them, as indeed had his wife.
The temptation was made irresistible by my own wife’s condition. I knew that no harm would come to our baby as the child was to be born and raised in the bay. That is the way of things, the charm of it, its uncanny freedom from the pestilence and poverty and general misfortune that can befall anywhere that does not exist in a state of enchantment. London, the great metropolis with its turbulence and squalor, felt to us by then like a tainted place. We were almost anxious to escape from it. All we saw in the west was a safe and bountiful life ripe with opportunity.