by F. G. Cottam
‘There’s going to be a storm,’ a voice from behind him said. He recognised it. It was the first voice James had ever heard in the bay and it belonged to Charlie Abraham.
‘All the people up at the plateau are going to get soaked.’
‘Very likely, but they’d consider that a tolerable state of affairs.’
‘Where are my wife and children?’
Behind him, he heard Abraham lift the bar partition and squeeze himself something potent into a glass from one of the optics. ‘I think you know where they are.’
‘And is that a tolerable state of affairs?’
But Charlie Abraham chose not to answer him.
James had remembered something. He had remembered what Adam Gleason had written in his last testament about the Abraham who must have been Charlie’s great-grandfather, if James had got his chronology right.
The landlord of the Leeward in those days had been unenthusiastic about the bay’s grisly rituals. James thought that antipathy might be generational. If it was, it was something he could work on. There was nothing else he could work on. The bonds tying him had been too tightly secured. Perhaps Abraham had been left here guarding him because he wasn’t one of those who climbed to the plateau rapturous. He wouldn’t be too disappointed to miss their gathering amid the stones. He might, like his ancestor, be a reluctant believer. It was just possible he might actually not believe at all.
Someone breezed into the bar. There was no other word for it. They opened the door and the breeze followed them and James, with his heightened senses, smelled on it the metallic, electric smell of the storm swelling the sky, with cloud becoming bruise-coloured now in his view out over the sea.
It was Megan Penmarrick. Well, he thought, the pub was child-friendly, as had been so warmly demonstrated to them on the evening of their welcoming party. The Leeward was a place that catered to the whole community. Nobody was excluded. She walked around and in front of where he sat, partially silhouetted by the violent colour of the sky behind her, still beautiful and poised, with her arms folded across her chest and her slender weight rested on one hip.
‘I want you to know something,’ she said.
To Charlie Abraham, James said, ‘How can a child be complicit in this?’
Abraham did not reply.
James heard again the squeak of pressure against the optic spring as a glass was pushed up beneath it. ‘Easy on the anaesthetic, Charlie,’ he said.
Megan Penmarrick approached him and unfolded her arms and slapped him surprisingly hard across the face. ‘Listen to me,’ she said.
James was too shocked to reply.
‘I’ll be a worthy successor to your wife. Lillian Greer inspired me and I’m grateful. I will always be grateful. But I know that I am worthy. I will shine as she did. My father says I will eclipse her.’
‘What does your mother say, Megan?’
‘My mother tends to say what my father tells her to.’
‘I see.’
‘You don’t. You never would have.’
‘Your choice of tense seems ominous, Megan.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean. I will always be grateful for Lillian Greer’s inspiration. That’s all. I’m sorry I hit you.’
Megan left. Abraham drank. James watched the gathering storm and listened to him do it, biding what very little time he thought he still possessed to save the lives of his family. ‘When does the tide turn?’
‘In another twenty minutes. How much do you know?’
‘I know that the girl who just slapped me and my wife are half sisters.’
‘You chose not to tell her that.’
James laughed despite himself. ‘She’s eleven years old for Christ’s sake, Charlie. If she’s corrupt, it’s only because she’s been corrupted.’
‘Very Christian of you to see it that way,’ Abraham said. ‘But Christ does not have a great deal to do with what goes on in the bay.’
Outside, the first flash of lightning forked from the sky into the sea, followed a few seconds later by a hollow boom of thunder.
‘It’s a question of belief,’ Abraham said.
‘No, it isn’t. It’s a question of morality. I believe that what goes on here is corrupt. I suspect you believe that too.’
‘It works.’
‘But is it worth the price, Charlie?’
Abraham did not answer him.
‘I burned those things in the church, Charlie.’
‘I heard.’
‘Why were they kept there?’
Abraham was silent. Outside, the rain had started to fall. It was heavy in a downpour that sounded already relentless. ‘There are too many of them,’ he said. ‘They’re predatory, Mr Greer, in the sexual sense. They can’t be culled. It would anger the Singers. They can be subdued, like hooding a hawk. They’re largely content to rest like that.’
‘Angela was their jailer.’
‘A sacred duty, Penmarrick would say. Though there was the odd escape.’
‘Then I’ve done you all a favour.’ Had there been just a hint of sarcasm in that reference to Angela’s sacred duty? James thought there had.
‘You’d never make it to the rocks, you know, not on the full tide. The current is too strong and the water will be too rough. You’d drown.’
‘I’d try.’
‘Byron tried it once. At full tide it’s better than a thousand yards to the boulders and back.’
‘Did he make it?’
‘No.’
‘He did not have the incentive I would.’
Byron had been a very strong swimmer. He had famously swum the Hellespont. He had written a poem about it. James thought that Charlie Abraham would be familiar with the verses.
‘You’d drown, Mr Greer.’
‘I’d take the chance.’
Behind him, the optic squeaked. Out of the window, the sky was darkening. The sea was almost black under odd, staccato lightning strikes. They lit the turmoil of the storm in brief flashes.
‘I read something Adam Gleason wrote after coming back here and finding his family had gone. He mourned his daughter very bitterly, Charlie Abraham.’
‘She was a sweet child. She was altogether delightful.’
‘You sound as though you knew her.’
Silence from behind him in the bar.
‘Her father went back to the front and killed himself. He invited the bullet. He wrote that if that ruse didn’t work, he would supply the bullet himself. He was as good as his final word on the subject.’
Silence.
James cleared his throat. He could not maintain his composure for much longer, he knew. He would rant and weep and squirm in the futile effort to free himself and attempt to save his family. He would curse his captor through grinding teeth as his mind skittered and panicked and betrayed him. He said, ‘My children too are sweet and delightful, Charlie.’
Booted feet thumped across the floor. Abraham’s breath was an open whisky cask. Its odour made James’s bloodshot eye smart as the landlord bent over him and cut through the rope binding him with the blade of a pocket knife. ‘I’m killing you, doing this,’ he said.
James stood. His limbs were stiff. The sprint along the sea wall to the east shore would leave him supple enough. He looked the landlord in the face. ‘Then why are you doing it?’
‘I’m trying to save my soul, God help me,’ Abraham said.
James was out, through the battening door, into the venting fury of the night, soaked before he’d taken half a dozen steps, the sea to his right lit like a panoramic photograph each time the lightning struck, the thunder booming so colossally above it made the teeth vibrate in his aching head.
He could see nothing when he got to the east shore. He could not see the boulders to which his loved ones had been chained. The churning swell was too high and he thought them submerged and drowned and lost to him already but he still had to try. The wind was a gale, a persistent roar in the beating deluge. The sea was alive with
writhing peaks of white spume. He had no plan beyond the key to their shackles in the pocket of his jeans. He stripped to the waist and kicked off his shoes and went into the water.
He heard the singing straight away. It was as real to him as the cold and the salt as he struggled first to find and then impose some rhythm with his strokes. He was a strong swimmer. He had swum all his life and had no fear of the void deepening under him as he kicked away from the shore. The singing was an ardent, angelic chorus, vibrant and so painful to listen to he thought his ears might bleed at the shrill loudness of it.
He had to ignore the sound. He had to ignore the way the water seemed to pluck at him from beneath. When he looked up he could see the humpback boulders glimmering under lightning in the distance. They seemed very far away from him. He could not allow himself to think about what his wife and children, manacled there, were suffering. He simply had to reach them. It meant executing each measured stroke. He had to swim deliberately. If he clawed his way through the water, he would get there exhausted and would be too weak to help them.
He reached Olivia first. She was draped over her rock with the waves lapping at her pale head. They had clothed her in some sort of costume. It was black and voluminous and coarsely sewn and, of course, soaking wet. James unbuttoned and removed it. He did not want to swim against the weight of any handicap and was furious at the indignity they had done to her.
She was secured to the rock by a single manacle on her right wrist. It was very hard for James not to lift his head and check on the condition of the other two. He had to steel himself not to do it. There was no order to it, no favour; but he could only free them and get them out of the water one at a time. Even if his wife and son were conscious, they would be too weakened and numbed by exposure to get back to the shore without help. They were not strong enough swimmers.
Olivia felt insubstantial in his arms. He feared that she was probably dead. Hope fought in him with the cold facts of her icy skin and unconsciousness as he kicked strongly back towards the shore. When he staggered to his feet, his daughter in his arms and the shingle under his soles, Abraham was there, waist deep in the surf, a rope around his middle anchoring him to the beach.
He took the child. No words were spoken between the men. None was necessary. James turned and went back into the water.
He went for Jack, next. He did not want to dwell on the reason for the choice. He was entitled to the love he felt for his son. He was intent on saving them all. Lillian would be the more buoyant burden than his tall and sinewy boy. He should ration his strength. If he went for Jack last, he might not possess by then the stamina to get both or either of them back. That was the logic supporting his choice, if not the truth of why he made it. He did not have the time or energy to argue with himself.
The singing seemed louder. The water had the density of some gravid element. Struggling through it inflicted a sort of torpor on his limbs. He held Jack’s precious head on his chest between his hands and kicked with his own strong legs and babbled beseeching prayers between gasping the huge breaths of air sustaining him. Above them, the sky roiled and was shaken by lightning flashes. James kicked and swam and prayed.
Abraham had put a coat over Olivia, pulled up to a spot beyond the reach of the waves. He took Jack in his burly arms as though the boy weighed nothing. ‘I’d go myself,’ he said, shouted. ‘I can’t swim.’
James nodded. He was beyond words.
‘Your ears are bleeding,’ Abraham said. ‘I fear your girl has gone, Mr Greer.’
He swam for his wife, weeping for his daughter. He swam with the crazed strength of a man defying fate. He reached Lillian entirely spent and strangely energised. What little thought he was capable of suggested to him dimly that this was what it might be like to be possessed.
Lillian’s head was beneath the water and he knew that she was dead. But he was not ready to surrender her to the sea. He would get her back to land. She would be buried, dry, in a box fashioned for the purpose. He released her limp hand from the killing restriction of its manacle. He hugged his wife to him on the boulder’s top as the waves heaved around them. Lightning bolted across the sky in a ragged infliction of brightness and the water, bathed in it, became for a shutter flash of time, translucent.
He saw them, then. He saw on the seabed the ragged maws of the Singers under the Sea, mouthing their ancient song, hungry for sacrifice.
Holding his wife tenderly, his arms under hers, hands linked for what he knew would be the last time across her chest, James kicked with strengthless legs back for the shore. The water seemed calmer. He thought the storm might be abating. Lillian felt cold and soft-skinned in his embrace and her hair washed loosely against his face, sticking and then freed in a teasing, intimate rhythm as they bobbed together shoreward.
Jack lay on his back on the beach. His breathing was very shallow, inaudible against the crash of the surf and the wind’s persistent howl. But his chest was moving. He was alive. Abraham, who had gone, had put a blanket over him before departing. He had left his coat too. It draped Olivia. It covered her face.
James laid Lillian on the pebbles beside her daughter. Jack jerked up abruptly from the waist and brine spewed out of him and he coughed and retched and said, ‘You left Mum till last, Dad. You left her till last because of what she did to you and she’s dead because of it. You could have saved her. You could.’ A sob heaved out of him.
James looked at his wife and daughter lying dead together on the shore. He turned back to his son and staggered over the pebbles to where he sat and knelt before him. ‘It isn’t true, Jack,’ he said. He shook. The grief shuddered through him and he moaned with the pain his heart cradled and could not endure his loss. He could not endure it.
Jack raised his arms and wrapped his father in an embrace and they hugged one another in the wind and fret from the sea. ‘Look,’ Jack said.
James turned his head. Lillian and Olivia, their limbs limp and their faces slack in death, were moving. They were jerking and sliding like marionettes strung from invisible strings towards the sea. There was a crunch on the shingle and James looked up and saw that Abraham was there, had returned. There was a rope between his hands. James saw that it was still attached higher up the shore to the pulley contraption that had delivered them the baskets of fresh bread at the feast of a fortnight earlier.
‘We’ll have to tie them,’ Abraham said. ‘The sea still wants them, Mr Greer. Help me secure your loved ones. If we do not moor them firmly, they will be taken.’
The bodies of Lillian and Olivia were slithering and writhing, jerked seaward incrementally over the pebbles, in this last indignity inflicted upon them. James got numbly to his feet and did as the bay’s publican had asked him to. For Lillian and Olivia, their ordeal was not at an end. Death had not concluded it.
The struggle would continue until day came, James resolved. The sacrifice would remain incomplete, whatever else he felt, whatever sorrow he endured, he was determined about that. The Singers under the Sea would hunger. Their appetite would not be satisfied by dawn. Then they would exact their retribution on those with whom their ancient bargain had been struck. Madeleine Gleason would have her vengeance.
When the knots were tight and the rope taut James stood at Abraham’s side and turned back to look at his son. Jack sat with the sodden blanket he’d been given wrapped around his slight frame, wide-eyed and shivering. He had surrendered to the refuge of shock and his father felt grateful for that. His mind had put Jack beyond seeing what he could not make sense of and feeling what he could not tolerate. The respite would help. It would not heal him. It was natural though. It was a beginning.
‘Why did you help us?’
‘I knew them,’ Abraham said. ‘I knew Adam Gleason and his family. I endured the self-loathing of that hypocritical day we held the memorial tribute to our soldier hero who would not return. What was done to that family was a terrible wrong and I’ve lived with it on my conscience since.’
‘You’ve had a long life.’
‘Too long,’ Abraham said. He looked out over the water. ‘I’m reconciled to paying what it will cost.’ He smiled and raised a hand and squeezed James’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorrier than I can say, Mr Greer, for your loss.’ He turned and walked away.
Epilogue
The bay did not prosper in the aftermath of that night. A number of its leading citizens were lost, believed drowned, only the following day, when the boat they had chartered to take them to a small island for some folkloric celebration foundered in fog. After that the community, what was left of it, seemed to lose its spirit and impetus. Within a few years the population had halved. The fishing fleet had dwindled to three or four boats as fish stocks inexplicably decreased.
What happened was a familiar story of rural economic decline. Too remote for tourism, once its principal resource was exhausted the village could not sustain the size to which it had grown in prosperous times. It shrank and dwindled. It could no longer boast a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. Almost nobody lives there now.
James Greer sold the house in Bermondsey. He moved eventually to a flat in Camden Town. He says that he enjoys the cosmopolitan flavour of the area. He finds its frenetic bustle a comfort in what had become, considering his recent personal history, a fairly solitary life compared to the one he once enjoyed.
He does not see a great deal of his son. They remain close emotionally. Perhaps the problem is that they are too close. When they meet, they are reminded, inevitably, of those they loved and cherished and lost. Jack no longer believes his mother was left deliberately to be the last to be saved by his father. Or more accurately, he no longer believes it consciously. He had some counselling sessions with a Harley Street psychiatrist called Eleanor Deacon. They were a help to him. He even developed a bit of a crush on Dr Deacon in the end.
He plays as a professional footballer now. He has a very successful career. He plays for Liverpool, instrumental in the club’s recent renaissance. He has earned wealth and success and a deserved measure of fame. He never really doubted that he would make the grade. He had trials at Chelsea. And they signed him. But childhood dreams can sometimes perish and his did, farmed out to other clubs for loan spells that frustrated him.