Dancing with Mermaids

by Miles Gibson

‘You’re late,’ barked Big Lily White as the party began to shuffle forward.

  Charlie muttered darkly and clicked his teeth.

  ‘We were supposed to leave at dawn,’ moaned the grocer. He had left his wife to open the shop but was worried she would slice her fingers into the bacon.

  ‘I’m too old for climbing cliffs,’ clicked Charlie, dragging his spade.

  ‘He’s afraid the blackie will catch him,’ someone shouted and they all laughed to chase away their fear.

  They plodded along the coast road and slowly worked their way up the great curved spine of Anvil Cliff. All morning they ferreted in cracks and crevices, whipped the grass and drummed the rocks with their walking sticks. All day they searched the high cliff path. The sun scorched their eyes and blistered their faces. The salt wind pulled and stiffened their hair. Late in the afternoon there was a lot of shouting and running in circles when the mutilated stump of a leg was found protruding through a knuckle of the turf.

  ‘It’s the boy!’ groaned Big Lily White, falling to his knees.

  ‘Dear God, he’s been skinned!’ heaved the grocer and went to be sick in a clump of sea pink.

  ‘Someone fetch the mother,’ shouted Big Lily White, shielding the corpse with his outstretched arms.

  ‘She won’t want to see it,’ grumbled Charlie.

  ‘It has to be done. She’ll need to identify him,’ insisted the landlord.

  ‘That’s right,’ declared Oswald Murdoch. ‘I’ll go and fetch her up here. She knows me.’ And before anyone could argue he had scrambled away down the cliff.

  The search party sat down to wait beside the grave. Charlie chewed his pipe. Big Lily White chewed his fingernails. No one spoke. They sat and watched the sun sink slowly into the sea. It was almost dark when the butcher returned with Mercy Peters.

  She came stumbling along the narrow path, confused, frightened, half-mad with misery. The butcher had pulled her from her bed. She was wearing a raincoat and a pair of fancy carpet slippers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ growled the landlord, leaping to his feet as the woman approached him.

  ‘We think we’ve found the boy,’ clicked Charlie.

  ‘Where is he?’ she asked. ‘What happened to him?’ She stared around at the circle of forlorn faces. Her chin quivered, her nostrils flared and she burst into tears.

  ‘Don’t go near it,’ warned the grocer. ‘It’s horrible.’

  ‘It’s not a pretty sight,’ confessed Big Lily White, stepping aside to let Charlie Bloater attack the earth with his spade.

  The old gardener worked bravely for a few minutes but when, at last, he peeled back the turf he dropped his spade in surprise.

  ‘It’s not human!’ he groaned.

  The search party pressed forward and glanced fearfully into the ground. Someone whistled. Someone spat. The grocer fled back to the sea pink.

  ‘It’s a dog,’ said the butcher, kicking the corpse to pieces and sniffing critically at the remains.

  Mercy Peters shook her head and began to laugh. It was an ugly scream of laughter that made her rattle in her raincoat, stretched her face and bared her teeth. She laughed until she cried. She laughed until she choked. She laughed until she nearly died.

  ‘Quick!’ shouted Oswald Murdoch. ‘She’s having a fit!’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ roared Big Lily White. ‘I know how to handle women.’ He threw himself at Mercy Peters and sent her sprawling with a fast cross-buttock. ‘All right,’ he growled. ‘Calm down.’ He wrapped her face in a full head chancery, locking his arms around her chin. ‘Stop struggling and you won’t get hurt,’ he shouted as he squeezed her throat. But Mercy Peters had fainted beneath him. The party returned to town, angry and exhausted.

  The next morning Charlie left the boat and set out alone to search the country east of the Upton Gabriel Road. From the cabbage patch he followed a footpath that ran across the shoulders of the back meadow and then plunged through a gulley towards the shade of Fiddlers Bottom.

  Beyond the trees the land rose in soft, green domes towards the cliffs and the sea. But the gulley was an undergrowth, a thick and peppery jungle of bramble, bindweed and thistle. He entered the hollow like a man wading an unknown river, his arms raised against his chest and his legs kicking through the treacherous tangle. Tall banks of dandelions moulted tufts of fur that drifted into his ears and mouth. Teasels rattled like snakes. Small tortoise-shells, drugged with heat, fell from the thistles and scattered in flecks of ash at his feet.

  He was soon so hot he could no longer push himself through the stale and suffocating air. On the slope of Fiddlers Bottom he lay down in a nest of long grass and rested, staring up at the rolling castles of cloud. A buzzard was sailing high, high on the summer thermals. A spider ran over his leg.

  He took out his teeth and stowed them safely in his pocket, scratched his stomach and closed his eyes. The lost children would wait for him. Bones are patient. Skeletons don’t walk. He thought again of Matthew Mark Luke Saint John sitting among the cabbages with a gallon of cider between his knees. They had talked that evening of Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, of the fruit that turned to wine and the fat, bare-breasted women. But, even as they had laughed, the giant must have been plotting his murders. The delicate scent of a sweet pink steak. The pop of a kidney in a driftwood fire. Did he eat everything? Did he drink the blood?

  As he lay in the nest, dreaming, a breath of wind stirred the trees and made the branches groan. He shivered. The grass fluttered madly around his shoulders. He turned slowly, half-afraid to open his eyes, twisting his head to stare back along the gulley. And there, through the trench of crackling brambles, in the dusty dazzle of noon, with his mouth open to scream and his hair standing out from his head like ectoplasm, Charlie Bloater saw the ghost of Wilton Hunt, stiff as a corpse, on his hideous phantom horse. His swollen face was white as chalk and his clothes were nothing but rags. The flanks of the nag were caked in mud, foam hung from its jaws and the eyes rolled crimson in their sockets. Slow as death, the horse and rider advanced upon Charlie until they were so close he could smell the rotted leather and hear the chink of the rusting bridle. Then the nag sneezed and the spectre was gone.

  Charlie scampered, shrieking, back to the Upton Gabriel Road and didn’t stop running until he had reached the Dolphin at Rams Horn.

  That night the sea ran with a ghostly phosphorescence. It washed the esplanade with light and turned the legs of the pier to gold. The moon crashed through a buttress of cloud and disappeared. The black earth smouldered. Charlie, inflated with best Badger beer, continued to chill the Dolphin’s men with talk of the hideous Wilton Hunt. ‘I saw him,’ he clicked. ‘He was full of worms and rode an enormous corpse of a horse.’

  The old men shook their heads and poked about in their whiskers. It was a bad omen. The last time Wilton Hunt had appeared a lobsterman had gone berserk and killed his wife with a filleting knife. One old cassandra predicted a plague and another forecast a flood.

  At ten o’clock the door smacked open and Tom Crow appeared, breathless and sweating. His goggles flashed. His leather coat creaked around his legs. ‘There’s something out there,’ he moaned as he staggered among the crowded tables. ‘I think they’ve arrived!’

  ‘Good God – it’s Wilton Hunt,’ jeered Big Lily White, cracking the cap from a bottle of Guinness. He picked up a glass, glared at it, spat at it, and wiped it roughly on his sleeve. He wasn’t going to be frightened by mad Tom Crow.

  But the rest of the company were shocked by the sight of him. His face was the colour of a raw meat pudding. When they prised off his goggles they stared at eyes that were blind with fright.

  ‘You look horrible,’ said Oswald Murdoch, as he pushed Tom into a chair. ‘What’s happened to you?’

  ‘Flying machines. The sky is full of flying machines,’ Tom whispered, peering around the sea of faces.

  ‘You saw them?’

  ‘I saw the landing lights over Beacon Hill. They must have come in from the
south and dumped their fuel – there’s a long slick of it around the pier …’

  ‘How do you know?’ growled Big Lily White.

  ‘It’s glowing in the dark,’ said Tom.

  There was silence. Charlie looked bilious. Oswald Murdoch measured the distance between himself and the safety of the cellar door.

  ‘Well, let’s go out there and have a look,’ exploded Big Lily White, banging the counter with his fist.

  ‘I’m not going out there again,’ said Tom stubbornly.

  ‘They’re your friends!’ roared Big Lily White. ‘And if there’s any trouble I’ll be there to look after you. I can handle myself. I’m not afraid of anything.’

  ‘No, I’m not going out there,’ muttered Tom.

  ‘Why?’ demanded the landlord.

  ‘They’re not human,’ whispered Tom. Someone offered him a sip of their rum. He flicked back his head and drained the glass.

  ‘We’ve got to do something,’ snivelled Tanner Atkins.

  ‘Send for the doctor,’ said Tom. ‘He promised to help when the time arrived. He’ll know how to approach them. He’s an educated man.’

  ‘He can’t do anything! He doesn’t have the strength to push a thermometer up his arse!’ screamed the furious landlord. ‘Does anyone have a shotgun? You! Bring me a shotgun.’

  ‘Fetch Mrs Clancy,’ called the butcher suddenly.

  ‘Are you going to hide behind a woman’s skirt?’ roared the landlord. He grabbed the knife he used to slice sausage and pushed it into his belt like a dagger.

  ‘She’s a medium,’ retorted the butcher. ‘She’ll understand their language.’ He looked around the room, hoping for some flicker of approval among the dumb and flabbergasted faces.

  ‘That’s right,’ clicked Charlie. ‘And if we meet Wilton Hunt she’ll know how to handle him.’

  ‘Shut up, you daft bugger!’ shouted the landlord. The sausage knife slipped through his belt and speared the floor between his feet.

  ‘I saw him – he was full of worms,’ clicked Charlie defiantly.

  ‘Perhaps it’s the darkie out there on the hill,’ said Tanner Atkins.

  ‘I’m not afraid of darkies,’ growled the landlord, blowing through his moustache.

  ‘The lights,’ said Tom Crow. ‘I saw the lights.’ He was mumbling like a sleepwalker, his eyes staring vacantly at the wall. He had waited a lifetime for the night when the stars fell to earth. He had plotted and preached for twenty years, studied the sky and kept the faith. And now the hour had arrived he found himself confused and angry, unable to take command.

  ‘He’s lighting bonfires,’ said Big Lily White. He sniffed his fingers and took a slug of Guinness for courage.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, he might be planning to burn down the town.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said Tanner Atkins.

  ‘That’s right,’ sniffed Big Lily White doubtfully. ‘I fought plenty of darkies in my time. I understand how their brains work.’

  ‘It could be a trick. And while we’re up there looking for him, he’ll be down here eating babies,’ warned an ancient mariner as he sucked the stem of his pipe.

  ‘No,’ said Tom Crow shaking his head. ‘There’s something out there from another world.’ He shrugged, smiled, hid his face in his hands and wept like a child.

  ‘Send for Mrs Clancy,’ clicked Charlie in horror.

  ‘I’ll go and fetch her – she knows me,’ volunteered the butcher. And before anyone could stop him he had pushed his way to the door and disappeared into the darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Mrs Clancy was sitting at home trying to comfort Mrs Reynolds. They sat together, drinking brandy and crunching morosely on gingernut biscuits. They both secretly believed that Polly must now be dead but they continued bravely to talk of her rescue. Mrs Reynolds snorted into a wet handkerchief and promised to give the girl a good thrashing whenever she returned. Mrs Clancy tried to smile but it wasn’t easy and she felt very weary. She had taken the doctor’s medicine the previous evening but it hadn’t helped to soothe her nerves or limit the destructive effect she exerted upon her surroundings. The Captain’s gold-tipped fountain pen was busy scribbling obscenities on the wallpaper behind the sofa. A small pot of geraniums floated anxiously across the ceiling. She was already late for her appointment at the surgery but she felt so disheartened by the doctor’s failure to cure her of these creeping horrors that she couldn’t be bothered to find her shoes. She intended to keep the appointment, of course, but Mrs Reynolds wouldn’t stop talking and she couldn’t leave her friend.

  When the brandy was almost gone and they could no longer bear to think of Polly, they discussed the fate of poor Mercy Peters. She’d been told by little Smudger Austin that Vernie Stringer had interfered with her son and hidden his body in the woods. She had confronted Mrs Stringer with her suspicions and Mrs Stringer had chased her down the street with a frying pan. But when Mercy Peters caught Vernie out on the beach she’d accused him of murder and smacked his face until he’d screamed. He wriggled and swore he knew nothing. But she didn’t believe him and continued smacking his face. She might have killed him and good riddance but he made such a noise that several people came to his rescue. It had taken three strong men to pull them apart and she’d bitten one of them on the nose. Vernie had run away and now he had gone missing. His mother hadn’t seen him since yesterday. But nobody wanted to look for him.

  Mercy Peters had seemed in such a bad condition that Mrs Reynolds had persuaded the wretched woman to stay with her until the children had been found and was, at that moment, fast asleep in the sailor’s bedroom.

  ‘I slipped some sherry into her milk,’ said Mrs Reynolds confidentially.

  ‘I’m afraid she’ll do herself a mischief,’ sighed Mrs Clancy wagging her head.

  The sound of the doorbell startled them into silence. Mrs Clancy dropped her biscuit. The pot of geraniums fell from the ceiling and shattered softly on the carpet.

  ‘Who is it?’ shrieked Mrs Reynolds as they tiptoed to the door.

  ‘Oswald Murdoch,’ wheezed the butcher.

  ‘Perhaps he’s been drinking,’ hissed Mrs Reynolds. Yes, mad with drink and come to truss them to the bed like a brace of fat hen pheasants.

  Mrs Clancy unchained the door and threatened him with a poker. ‘What do you want?’ she boomed.

  ‘They sent me to fetch you,’ gasped the butcher. ‘We need your help.’ It took him several minutes to explain the purpose of his visit and when he mentioned the lights on Beacon Hill Mrs Reynolds burst into tears.

  ‘It’s Polly trying to signal for help,’ she wailed.

  ‘It could be anything,’ argued Mrs Clancy. Monsters. Devils. Rats dressed as women. Wolves disguised as men. Anything. What could she do about it? Did they expect her to snap her fingers and conjure up an army of angels?

  ‘They’re waiting for you at the Dolphin,’ urged Oswald Murdoch. It had been his own idea to collect Mrs Clancy and he was determined to take her back with him.

  ‘I’ll fetch your shoes,’ said Mrs Reynolds, running to the bedroom.

  Twenty minutes later the search party, led by Mrs Clancy, marched from the Dolphin and made its way towards the hills behind the town. She knew it was a mistake but no longer had the strength to argue and she didn’t want to be left alone.

  The landlord carried the sausage knife in his belt and an oil lamp in his fist. He growled and grumbled and tried to kick Charlie Bloater but his fury only masked his fear. He had damaged some fast and violent men in his prime and he’d taken a few thrashings too, although he didn’t often talk about them. But he would rather have confronted any of them, blindfolded, than have to walk down this dark street towards the jaws of death with nothing but a knife and a lantern to save him. He’d rather be crushed and thrown from the ring. He’d rather have his neck broken and his ears cauliflowered. Anything would be easier than following this mad procession. Why, they didn’t even know if they were l
ooking for man or beast, the living or the dead. He swung out his boot and caught Charlie full in the pants.

  Charlie grinned. He was so heavy with beer that he staggered along the street with his head bent and his feet pointing in opposite directions. He thought they were taking him home.

  Behind the landlord and Charlie, Oswald Murdoch walked beside Mrs Reynolds. He had wrapped an arm around her waist, for support, and leaned against her shoulder, for comfort. The landlord had given him a carving fork which he’d made into a bayonet by lashing it to a broomstick. Mrs Reynolds trotted beside him with her skirt flying and her eyes fixed on the black curve of the hills. Her excitement that Polly might still be alive was exceeded only by the hope that she would catch one last glimpse of Matthew Mark Luke Saint John before he was hacked to death. She barely noticed the butcher’s breath on her neck.

  Tom Crow walked behind them with an escort of drunks, a ragged band of fighting men, armed with bottles and sticks. He walked with his arms stiff and the goggles pulled down over his eyes. He was walking into history.

  Mrs Clancy led them reluctantly along the Drizzle road and through a hole in the hedge to the meadow at the foot of the hills. Before them the land rose in steep slabs of darkness towards a black and smouldering sky.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ called Mrs Reynolds softly.

  ‘No,’ whispered the clairvoyant. She felt uncomfortably hot and her scalp prickled with sweat. It must have been the brandy. She pulled miserably at the buttons on her dress, hoping to force a draught between her breasts.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ growled Big Lily White. He spat in disgust and wiped his moustache. But Mrs Clancy was already stumbling up the narrow path towards the crest of the hill. The lantern had alarmed the shadows along the track so that they darted and snapped at her face. Her head hurt and there was a sour taste in her mouth.

  At the top of the slope the hunting party stopped and squinted at the great bruised buttock of Beacon Hill.

  ‘There!’ hooted Tom Crow, waving a crooked finger into the darkness. ‘Lights!’