We had not found the path we were seeking. We did not seek it any more. Abruptly, we turned right and began to walk into the moor. So long as we could see, we kept the coast behind our backs. Soon we could not see at all. The night came on, impenetrably black and there would be no moon.
It was now six o’clock. I know that because I struck a match to look at the time, and I noticed that I had only three matches left. This is stuck in my mind because I said, “We must be careful with these. If we can’t find food, we’ll find a smoke a comfort.”
“But, my love,” said Ruth, and there was now an undoubted note of alarm in her voice, “we must find food. Surely, if we just keep on we’ll see a light, or hear a voice, or come to a road—”
She stopped abruptly, seized my arm, held on to prevent my going forward. I could not see her face, but I sensed her alarm. “What is it?” I asked.
“I stepped in water.”
I knelt and tested the ground in front of me with my hands. It was a deep oozy wetness; not the clear wetness of running water. “Bog,” I said; and we knew we could go forward no longer. With cliff on the one hand and the possibility of stumbling into a morass on the other, there seemed nothing for it but to stay where we were till heaven sent us aid or the dawn came up.
I put my arm round Ruth and felt that she was trembling. I want to put this adventure down exactly as it happened. It would be nice to write that her nerves were steady as rock. Clearly they weren’t, and I was not feeling very good either. I said as gaily as I could, “This is where we sit down, smoke a cigarette, and think it out.”
We went back a little so as to be away from the bog, and then we plumped down among the heather. We put the cigarettes to our lips and I struck a match. It did not go out when I threw it to the ground. In that world of darkness the little light burning on the earth drew our eyes, and simultaneously we both stood up with an exclamation of surprised delight. The light had shown us an inscribed stone, almost buried in the heather. There were two matches left. Fortunately, we were tidy people. We had put our sandwich papers into the rucksacks. I screwed these now into little torches. Ruth lit one and held it to the stone while I knelt to read. It seemed a stone of fabulous age. The letters were mossy and at first illegible. I took out a penknife and scraped at them. “2 Miles—” we made out, but the name of this place two miles off we do not know to this day. I scraped away, but the letters were too defaced for reading, and just as the last of the little torches flared to extinction the knife slipped from my hand into the heather. There was nothing to do but leave it there.
We stood up. Two miles. But two miles to where, and two miles in what direction? Our situation seemed no happier, when suddenly I saw the stones.
I had seen stones like them on the Yorkshire moors, round about the old Bronte parsonage. But were they the same sort of stones, and did they mean the same thing? I was excited now. “Stay here,” I said to Ruth, and I stepped towards the first stone. As I had hoped, a third came into view in line with the second, and, as I advanced, a fourth in line with the third. They were the same: upright monoliths set to mark a path, whitewashed half-way up so that they would glimmer through the dark as they were doing now, tarred on their upper half to show the way when snow was on the ground. I shouted in my joy: “Come on! Supper! Fires! Comfort! Salvation!” but Ruth came gingerly. She had not forgotten the bog.
But the stones did not let us down. They led us to the village. It must have been about nine o’clock when we got there.
Half-way through that pitch-black two-mile journey we were aware that once more we were approaching the sea. From afar we could hear its uneasy murmur growing louder, and presently threaded with a heart-darkening sound: the voice of a bell-buoy tolling its insistent warning out there on the unseen water.
As the murmur of the sea and the melancholy clangour of the bell came clearer we went more warily, for we could not see more than the stone next ahead; and presently there was no stone where the next stone should be. We peered into the darkness, our hearts aching for the light which would tell us that we were again among houses and men. There was no light anywhere.
“We have one match,” I said. “Let us light a cigarette apiece and chance seeing something that will help us.”
We saw the wire hawser: no more than the veriest scrap of it, fixed by a great staple into the head of a post and slanting down into darkness. I first, Ruth behind me, we got our hands upon it, gripping for dear life, and went inching down towards the sound of water.
So we came at last to the village. Like many a Cornish village, it was built at the head of a cove. The sea was in front; there was a horse-shoe of cliffs; and snuggling at the end was a half-moon of houses behind a seawall of granite.
All this did not become clear to us at once. For the moment, we had no other thought than of thankfulness to be treading on hard cobbles that had been laid by human hands, no other desire than to bang on the first door and ask whether there was in the place an inn or someone who would give us lodging for the night.
Most of the cottages were whitewashed; their glimmer gave us the rough definition of the place; and I think already we must have felt some uneasy presage at the deathly mask of them, white as skulls with no light in their eyes.
For there was no living person, no living thing, in the village. That was what we discovered. Not so much as a dog went by us in the darkness. Not so much as a cock crowed. The tolling from the water came in like a passing bell, and the sea whispered incessantly, and grew to a deep-throated threatening roar as the tide rose and billows beat on the sand and at last on the seawall; but there was no one to notice these things except ourselves; and our minds were almost past caring, so deeply were we longing for one thing only – the rising of the sun.
There was nothing wrong with the village. It contained all the apparatus of living. Bit by bit we discovered that. There was no answer to our knocking at the first door we came to. There was nothing remarkable in that, and we went on to the next. Here, again, there was no welcome sound of feet, no springing up of a light to cheer us who had wandered for so long in the darkness.
At the third house I knocked almost angrily. Yes; anger was the feeling I had then: anger at all these stupid people who shut down a whole village at nine o’clock, went to their warm beds, and left us standing there, knocking in the cold and darkness. I thudded the knocker with lusty rat-tat-tats; and suddenly, in the midst of that noisy assault, I stopped, afraid. The anger was gone. Plain fear took its place. At the next house I could not knock, because I knew there was no one to hear me.
I was glad to hear Ruth’s voice. She said, surprisingly, “It’s no good knocking. Try a door.”
I turned the handle and the door opened. Ruth and I stepped over the threshold, standing very close together. I shouted, “Is there anyone at home?” My voice sounded brutally loud and defiant. Nothing answered it.
We were standing in the usual narrow passageway of a cottage. Ruth put out her hand and knocked something to the floor from a little table. “Matches,” she said; and I groped on the floor and found them. The light showed us a hurricane lantern standing on the table. I lit it, and we began to examine the house, room by room.
This was a strange thing to do, but at the time it did not seem strange. We were shaken and off our balance. We wanted to reassure ourselves. If we had found flintlocks, bows and arrows, bronze hammers, we might have been reassured. We could have told ourselves that we had wandered, bewitched, out of our century. But we found nothing of the sort. We found a spotless cottage full of contemporary things. There was a wireless set. There was last week’s Falmouth Packet. There were geraniums in a pot in the window; there were sea-boots and oilskins in the passage. The bed upstairs was made, and there was a cradle beside it. There was no one in the bed, no child in the cradle.
Ruth was white. “I want to see the pantry,” she said, inconsequentially I thought.
We found the pantry, and she took the cloth off a breadpan and
put her hand upon a loaf. “It’s warm,” she said. “It was baked today.” She began to tremble.
We left the house and took the lantern with us. Slowly, with the bell tolling endlessly, we walked through the curved length of the village. There was one shop. I held up the light to its uncurtained window. Toys and sweets, odds and ends of grocery, all the stock-in-trade of a small general store, were there behind the glass. We hurried on.
We were hurrying now, quite consciously hurrying; though where we were hurrying to we did not know. Once or twice I found myself looking back over my shoulder. If I had seen man, woman, or child I think I should have screamed. So powerfully had the death of the village taken hold of my imagination that the appearance of a living being, recently so strongly desired, would have affected me like the return of one from the dead.
At the centre of the crescent of houses there was an inn, the Lobster Pot, with climbing geraniums ramping over its front in the way they do in Cornwall; then came more cottages; and at the farther tip of the crescent there was a house standing by itself. It was bigger than any of the others; it stood in a little garden. In the comforting daylight I should have admired it as the sort of place some writer or painter might choose for a refuge.
Now I could make it out only bit by bit, flashing the lantern here and there; and, shining the light upon the porch, I saw that the door was open. Ruth and I went in. Again I shouted, “Is anyone here?” Again I was answered by nothing.
I put the lantern down on an oak chest in the small square hall, and that brought my attention to the telephone. There it was, standing on the chest, an up-to-date microphone in ivory white. Ruth saw it at the same moment, and her eyes asked me, “Do you dare?”
I did. I took up the microphone and held it to my ear. I could feel at once that it was dead. I joggled the rest. I shouted, “Hallo! Hallo!” but I knew that no one would answer. No one answered.
We had stared through the windows of every cottage in the village. We had looked at the shop and the inn. We had banged at three doors and entered two houses. But we had not admitted our extraordinary situation in words. Now I said to Ruth, “What do you make of it?”
She said simply, “It’s worse than ghosts. Ghosts are something. This is nothing. Everything is absolutely normal. That’s what seems so horrible.”
And, indeed, a village devastated by fire, flood, or earthquake would not have disturbed us as we were disturbed by that village which was devastated by nothing at all.
Ruth shut the door of the hall. The crashing of the sea on granite, the tolling of the bell, now seemed far off. We stood and looked at one another uneasily in the dim light of the hurricane lamp. “I shall stay here,” said Ruth, “either till the morning or till something happens.”
She moved down the hall to a door which opened into a room at the back. I followed her. She tapped on the door, but neither of us expected an answer, and there was none. We went in.
Nothing that night surprised us like what we saw then. Holding the lantern high above my head, I swung its light round the room. It was a charming place, panelled in dark oak. A few fine pictures were on the walls. There were plenty of books, some pieces of good porcelain. The curtains of dark-green velvet fringed with gold were drawn across the window. A fire was burning on the hearth. That was what made us start back almost in dismay – the fire.
If it had been a peat fire – one of those fires that, once lit, smoulder for days – we should not have been surprised. But it was not. Anyone who knew anything about fires could see that this fire had been lit within the last hour. Some of the coals were still black; none had been consumed. And the light from this fire fell upon the white smooth texture of an excellent linen cloth upon the table. On the table was supper, set for one. A chair was placed before the knife and fork and plates. There was a round of cold beef waiting to be cut, a loaf of bread, a jar of pickles, a fine cheese, a glass, and a jug containing beer.
Ruth laughed shrilly. I could hear that her nerves were strained by this last straw. “At least we shan’t starve,” she cried. “I’m nearly dying of hunger. I suppose the worst that could happen would be the return of the bears, demanding ‘Who’s been eating my beef? Who’s been drinking my beer?’ Sit down. Carve!”
I was as hungry as she was. As I looked at the food the saliva flowed in my mouth, but I could as soon have touched it as robbed a poor-box. And Ruth knew it. She turned from the table, threw herself into an easy chair by the fire, and lay back, exhausted. Her eyes closed. I stood behind the chair and stroked her forehead till she slept. That was the best that could happen to her.
That, in a way, was the end of our adventure. Nothing more happened to us. Nothing more? But, as you see, nothing at all had happened to us. And it was this nothingness that made my vigil over Ruth sleeping in the chair the most nerve-destroying experience of all my life. A clock ticking away quietly on the chimney-piece told me that it was half-past nine. A tear-off calendar lying on a writing-table told me that it was 24 December. Quite correct. All in order.
The hurricane-lamp faded and went out. I lit a lamp, shaded with green silk, that stood on the table amid the waiting supper. The room became cosier, even more human and likeable. I prowled about quietly, piecing together the personality of the man or woman who lived in it. A man. It was a masculine sort of supper, and I found a tobacco jar and a few pipes. The books were excellently bound editions of the classics, with one or two modern historical works. The pictures, I saw now, were Medici reprints of French Impressionists, all save the one over the fireplace, which was an original by Paul Nash.
I tried, with these trivial investigations, to divert my mind from the extraordinary situation we were in. It wouldn’t work. I sat down and listened intently, but there was nothing to hear save the bell and the water – water that stretched, I reminded myself, from here to America. This was one of the ends of the world.
At one point I got up and locked the door, though what was there to keep out? All that was to be feared was inside me.
The fire burned low, and there was nothing for its replenishment. It was nearly gone, and the room was turning cold, when Ruth stirred and woke. At that moment the clock, which had a lovely silver note, struck twelve. “A merry Christmas, my darling,” I said.
Ruth looked at me wildly, taking some time to place herself. Then she laughed and said, “I’ve been dreaming about it. It’s got a perfectly natural explanation. It was like this . . . No . . . It’s gone. I can’t remember it. But it was something quite reasonable.”
I sat with my arm about her. “My love,” I said, “I can think of a hundred quite reasonable explanations. For example, every man in the village for years has visited his Uncle Henry at Bodmin on Christmas Eve, taking wife, child, dog, cat, and canary with him. The chap in this house is the only one who hasn’t got an Uncle Henry at Bodmin, so he laid the supper, lit the fire, and was just settling down for the evening when the landlord of the Lobster Pot thought he’d be lonely, looked in, and said: ‘What about coming to see my Uncle Henry at Bodmin?’ And off they all went. That’s perfectly reasonable. It explains everything. Do you believe it?”
Ruth shook her head. “You must sleep,” she said. “Lay your head on my shoulder.”
We left the house at seven o’clock on Christmas morning. It was slack tide. The sea was very quiet, and in the grey light, standing in the garden at the tip of the crescent, we could see the full extent of the village with one sweep of the eye, as we had not been able to do last night.
It was a lovely little place, huddled under the rocks at the head of its cove. Every cottage was well cared for, newly washed in cream or white, and on one or two of them a few stray roses were blooming, which is not unusual in Cornwall at Christmas.
At any other time, Ruth and I would have said, “Let’s stay here.” But now we hurried, rucksacks on backs, disturbed by the noise of our own shoes, and climbed the path down which we had so cautiously made our way the night before.
Th
ere were the stones of black and white. We followed them till we came to the spot where we found the stone with the obliterated name. “And, behold, there was no stone there, but your lost pocket-knife was lying in the heather,” said a sceptical friend to whom I once related this story.
That, I suppose, would be a good way to round off an invented tale if I were a professional story-teller. But, in simple fact, the stone was there, and so was my knife. Ruth took it from me, and when we came to the place where we had left the cliff path and turned into the moor, she hurled it far out and we heard the faint tinkle of its fall on the rocks below.
“And now,” she said with resolution, “we go back the way we came, and we eat our Christmas dinner in Falmouth. Then you can inquire for the first train to Manchester. Didn’t you say there are fogs there?”
“There are an’ all,” I said broadly.
“Good,” said Ruth. “After last night, I feel a fog is something substantial, something you can get hold of.”
South Sea Bubble
Hammond Innes
Location: Sumburgh Head, Shetland.
Time: September, 1973.
Eyewitness Description: “Every now and then I had the sense of a presence on board. It was so strange at times that when I came back from telephoning or collecting parts or stores, I would find myself looking about me as though expecting somebody to be waiting for me. . .”
Author: Ralph Hammond Innes (1914–98), who became one of the century’s most popular novelists with over thirty novels of high adventure, was born in Horsham, Sussex and after being educated at Cranbrook School in Kent became a journalist on the Financial Times. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Artillery, eventually rising to the rank of Major, and also began writing the type of books based on personal experience and exhaustive research that made his name, notably Attack Alarm (1941), based on his experiences as an Anti-Aircraft Gunner during the Battle of Britain. After the war he began his regular schedule of six months’ travelling and six months’ writing to produce an annual novel for his publishers, several of which were filmed, including Hell Below Zero (1954), Campbell’s Kingdom (1957) and The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959). His interest in the supernatural at sea had been evident in his very first book, The Doppelganger (1937), and continued through his career as well as in one of his best short stories, “South Sea Bubble”, written for the Christmas 1973 issue of Punch Magazine. Innes’ knowledge of the sea as an experienced yachtsman and his fascination with its mysteries are very evident.
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories Page 57