Stephanie resumed her silent watchfulness. She must have been confused. Rod was probably correct. Nobody would swim in the surf off Nolton’s beach at night, not perhaps since Gilbert’s wife went missing. Not in any event; the currents might be tricky.
Stephanie kept watch intently for a few minutes more as the rollers relentlessly arched up the beach. Her eyes were beginning to ache with trying to distinguish the dolphin from the waves that intermittently allowed a peep into their troughs. Wanting desperately for it to be a dolphin. There was nothing, though, nothing more to be seen. The creature had swum back out to sea in search of that elusive shoal.
Yet, lingering in her mind’s eye was that half-seen shape, and it gave her the shudders just imagining what might still be out there somewhere in the depths, if it was not a cetacean. Rightly it must be something with flippers, a shark even, or a dead boat’s hull surfacing, spars waving as the sea drove it.
“Well it’s gone.” Rod said aggressively, as though disgruntled at not being able to make a positive identification. Stephanie slipped her arm under his and tugged gently against his resistance. They turned their backs to the sea and headed to their accommodation. He turned his head back briefly, paused, took a deep breath.
Breasting the dunes using the half-hidden steps that the old man had climbed that afternoon, both of them turned to face the bay again. The moon was a fat crescent, very bright. The extra height furnished them with little more in the way of visibility, however.
Gilbert’s dinghy continued to rock to and fro, the only motion besides the restlessness of the tides.
Rod was stroking Stephanie’s back, but not affectionately. Unconsciously he was urging whatever had been out in the bay to reappear. The mystery of it aggravated him. Stephanie knew he did not enjoy ambiguities. She could sense his dissatisfaction, but could do nothing about that. In any case, it was hardly worth losing much sleep over.
Except . . . the sighting had left her rather uncertain. As if she had glimpsed something that she should not have.
Gilbert swore and stomped along the beach, his waders grinding on newly deposited seashells. As he skirted the rocky inlet, he opened his flies to relieve himself. The urine gleamed bright yellow in the moonlight and hissed as the swirls and eddies took it. He swore again and spat, the wedge of phlegm phosphorescent as it hit the surf.
“Tonight. Tonight . . . Tonight.” He mumbled to himself as he sloshed through the shallows to where his boat was tied up. The vessel tugged on its rein, a frisky horse, anxious for the ride. He felt the vibration in the painter surge through his fingers as he untied it. That urgent, persistent pull. As if the boat knew something. . . He let the line drop into the swell, releasing his watery stallion. As the hull rode the shallows, he stepped aboard and fixed the oars.
Then he began to row, the wooden craft breasting the waves. His strength was transmitted to the timbers and, as if they were extensions of some strangely articulated arms, the oars rowed and rowed.
Tonight . . .
Beyond the cliffs, the sea swell lifted the puny craft and dropped it again, but Gilbert stood up nevertheless as he cast his fishing net overboard. “I’ll give an almighty haul,” he muttered to the waves. “I cut it loose once.” He sat, rowed a few strokes to allow the net to drift on its floats. “I won’t next time. I won’t.” He huddled himself against the sharp and persistent breeze, hugging his waterproofs tight around him.
The sea sensed his presence and the water grew more restless. The moon brightened as luminous drifts of cloud hurried out of the way. Selenitic light shimmered on his oilskins and lit up the boat’s cracked paintwork. His eyes roamed to the heavens. “The water, like a witch’s oils, burnt green, and blue, and white.”
He waited as the boat nodded in acknowledgment of the waves. The moon’s argent haloes existed for the brief life of the swell and were a second later lost and another created. Then there was the tug, the net pulling against the boat’s prow. Instinctively he moved hand over hand, reeling in. The drag of the mesh was steady at first, as if what was netted was somehow comforted, embraced by the nylon lattice. But then whatever was hidden in the waves began making furious water.
“Coming to bed?” Rod’s call from the small bedroom sounded muffled, sleepy.
“Mmm. In a minute.” Stephanie moved the closed curtains aside and peeped out. There was the cove, glittering under the high moon. The surf was rougher now, endless waves poised constantly, on the edge of breaking, gathering their brawn from tideless deeps. She cupped her hands to the glass to eliminate the glare of a table lamp and then she saw the rowing boat coming ashore.
She was holding her breath as she watched a hunched, black-clad, wetly luminous figure haul the dinghy out of the water. Across the thwarts of the boat a fishing net dragged, as if the ocean’s hand had gripped the tangled nylon fibres and held them.
She knew who it was. He fell, slipped on seaweed or net or through old-age, and a muffled curse rang out loud in the night. He struggled to his feet, hauling himself up using the boat and it wallowed, daring him to try again as he lost his footing once more. He was acting in a panic now and began dragging on the net while still prostrate in the shallows. Quickly the motion of hand-over-hand in time with yelled words, repeated over and over:
“Tonight! Tonight!”
And some thing was dragged into the shallow water, a shape that flopped, not struggling, as if unsure whether dry land offered more safety than the sea. On the shining sand at Gilbert’s feet, luminescent plaits of water . . . and this . . . ?
Stephanie pressed her face closer to the glass, fascinated and terrified at the same time. In the net . . . bilious white, flesh that might have been partly consumed by some predator. She tried to imagine it had arms, the waving arm she had seen earlier. Gilbert reached out his hand and began tenderly to untangle the wrinkles of the net. No. . . she mouthed the word silently. He stood and moved in front of her line of sight and bent over the shape on the beach. There was a cry, an echo of which reverberated around the cliffs. An inconsolable cry. Stephanie squeezed her eyes hard shut and, when she next opened them, the old man was trudging for the rocks and the cliff footpath that led to his house.
Once more she tried to focus on the beach. The rising shallows served to shadow whatever had been in the net. It may have been dead or half-alive. Certainly not a thrashing beast anxious to escape its doom on the shore. But there was something still in the water, not moving much. The fishing net both obscuring and trapping its quivering. A dolphin she thought. It must be.
Rod’s resonant and irritated sigh dragged her away from the window. Partly that, but mostly because she was frightened her imagination might make her go down to the beach . . .
“No dolphins around here miss,” the young man said, shaking his head. “They’re all over the other side of the bay. This spot’s a problem for ‘em.” He nodded out towards St Bride’s Bay. “Too hemmed in ‘ere.”
Well there was one last night, Stephanie thought, still assuring herself it had been a cetacean that the old man had caught in his net.
She had risen at first light, leaving Rod flaked out still, and was taking a walk along the beach, to make certain herself that the creature had not died in the shallows. The man had been descending the coastal path and she decided to engage him in conversation. After the usual niceties, she had asked about the dolphin. She had not mentioned Gilbert and his moonlight trip into the bay.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a dolphin round this beach, since . . .” He tailed off as the clap of wood against wood carried down from the cliff.
Stephanie jumped at the sound.
“Gilbert.” The young man explained. “That’ll be him, lives up there.” He gestured at the cliff.
“He’s a bit simple, isn’t he?” she asked. She did not want to talk about Gilbert, but perhaps this was as good an opportunity as any to mention about him catching something big in his net.
“He’s not right,” the man agreed. “Bu
t there’s reasons.”
“I heard his wife drowned,” Stephanie prompted.
He did not need much encouragement and was soon talking. “People say Gilbert was a fisherman for forty years. He went to the Far East to live for a time and brought a pretty wife back with him, younger than he was. Indonesian. He was well into middle age by then and a grim sort. He’d lived too long alone, some said, and the first time the village saw his new bride the talk started. The first time I clapped eyes on her was almost the last.” He smiled oddly.
“I’d been away working in Tenby for the summer and when I came back to Nolton I saw her – she was a cracking girl, hope you don’t mind me sayin’. It was in the beach shop over there,” he pointed to the caravan park. “Chatted her up a bit I did, until Gilbert turned up. Didn’t know it was his missus at the time, I just assumed she was on holiday. He let me have a piece of his mind, I can tell you. After that he kept her mostly confined to barracks like, alone with him up there.”
“I’ve been told a story that she might have been done away with,” Stephanie coaxed.
“Well there was no witnesses to what happened, not here in the dark. Nolton’s a quiet place. They never found her, that’s the point, I’d say.”
“Yes, I heard.” She continued, “Bodies turn up when they drown, but hers didn’t.”
The young man nodded. “Ah . . . whether it’s guilt at what he done, or sadness for his loss, Gilbert’s never been right since. He takes that old wreck of a dinghy out at night, searchin’ for her. One of these days it’ll be him that doesn’t come back.” He paused, thinking. “P’raps that’s what he’s hoping for.”
Stephanie ran her hand along the gunwale of Gilbert’s boat, the flaking pale blue paint raking against her fingers. The fishing net was still strewn down the beach, a coiled nylon snake. There was no body of any description in its folds.
“Gilbert’s story has become a bit of a local legend, a ghost story, if you like, miss,” the man remarked. “It’s whispered that his dead wife swims out there in the surf, trying to get her revenge on Gilbert. And that people might see her on a moonless night.” He laughed. “Maybe that’s what you saw last night, miss.”
Stephanie started and looked sharply at her companion. “A dolphin. It was definitely a dolphin.” And it wasn’t a moonless night, she thought to herself.
They returned to the beach that night. They had enjoyed their day walking some of the public footpaths and bridle-ways inland, and she had been pleased for once not to have the constant sound of the sea in her ears.
Rod had wanted a quick drink at the pub and straight back to the cottage, but Stephanie was in a curious mood and almost insisted they take a stroll along the strand before they return.
The moon was hidden in its entirety by a dense eiderdown of grey cloud, transforming the beach into a dark sheet and the rocks to hunched figures swirled by inky water. Stephanie scanned the little inlet, from the horizon beyond the cliffs, to the eddies near the shore, but it was so dark tonight, she imagined that the dolphin, if he came back at all, would be indistinguishable from the water.
“Are you all right?” Rod asked tentatively, stopping, taking her hands in his.
She was surprised and pleased with his attention. “Yes, why d’you ask?”
He did not reply immediately. She saw what might have been concern in his eyes.
“It’s just that . . . The old man,” she said. “I saw him again last night, in his boat. He’d netted a dolphin . . . I think.”
“So?” Rod put his arm around her waist and they continued their stroll. “I mean, was it dead or something?”
The waves calmly washed the sand near their feet, drawing close and then back. “No, I don’t know. I’d like to know for sure.”
They had walked as far as Gilbert’s boat and used it to sit on. The craft had been dragged farther up the beach and rested solidly in soft dry sand, but the fishing net still lay neglected, strewn between the dinghy and the shallows.
Rod looked around. “Well, I can’t see anything dead lying here. When they strand on a beach they usually attract a lot of attention.” He turned to his wife, cupped her chin tenderly and kissed her. “It must have escaped. Or Gilbert let it out of his net.”
Stephanie nodded, but she was unable to mould her thoughts into coherent words that Rod would understand. Her feelings were ephemeral, insubstantial, as hazy as the ghostly light upon the water.
Before long the surf was riding higher and wrestling roughly with the sand. The sky was beginning to clear as a strong breeze came off the sea and the moonlight gleamed wetly on the waves. The fish were scurrying again and Stephanie hoped that the dolphin might return, to reassure her that it was still alive.
“Brrr. Winter must be coming early.” Rod wrestled with himself. “Maybe we’d better—”
“Look,” Stephanie hissed, pointing. “What’s that?” Goosebumps travelled up her bare arms, more through a sudden fright than the chill wind.
Near the cliff-face one of the hunched black rocks was rising, moving towards them. The light from the moon threw the features into shadow, but Rod recognized its gait almost straight away.
“Gilbert. It’s Gilbert.”
He passed close by them, and Stephanie could swear his wild glare revealed that he was somehow aware that she had been watching him the other night. Yet, he did not acknowledge them or glance back in their direction as he circuited his boat and continued along the beach.
“Ay, difficult waters tonight!” he shouted to himself. Swinging from one hand was a bottle of some sort. Stephanie guessed he was drunk. He wove across the strand and stumbled into the shallows, ankle-deep, knee-deep. Pausing for a breath, he arched his arm and threw his bottle as far as he could. There was a distant hollow plop of sound. Then, ludicrously, he began to wade out after it.
Stephanie never thought she would be so close to a scream. She knew Rod was immune to the atmosphere. Just the old man, drunk and half-mad and mourning his wife all these years, or plagued by guilt at a terrible crime to which he was unable to confess. But there was more to it. More she was aware of. Not aware exactly, a kind of impression that remained half-acknowledged by the conscious brain, but the substance of which her deeper psyche struggled to communicate.
She realized she need not fear Gilbert. He was too feeble and shrivelled. Too old, with his scruffy oilskins, his unpleasant face with its dark wiry bristling beard. The fuzzy uneasiness that she had thought might be because of him was something else entirely. As she watched him slouching away in the shallows, she felt the boat beneath her grind on pebbles. Rod jumped up, but Stephanie was thrown backwards into the craft and her thoughts were diverted.
All around now the rising tide was sweeping relentlessly up the beach. The sea swirled, dark fingers of water weaving like snakes into the shallow gutters circling beached rocks. Rod felt water melt into his socks as it surged over his boots and he began to run for higher ground. He grabbed the tough tussocks of marram grass and hauled himself up the dunes, off the beach, and kneeling, turned to reach down for Stephanie’s hand.
But she had not followed him. Puzzled, he stood up and peered left and right along the shore. Maybe she had made a run for the rocks, silly girl. He would have to wade in now to help her avoid a soaking. But he could not see her clambering onto the rocks.
“Steph!” There was no longer any beach to speak of, the sea had swamped nearly all of it. Sloshing inelegantly was Gilbert’s boat, heading out on the bay, preceded by the drift of net draped over the prow.
Stephanie struggled to sit up, her right hand and forearm tangled in the net. The boat wobbled about and made her queasy. How foolish, she said to herself. Then the boat surged forward, the net tightening, the nylon cutting into her arm.
She felt the dinghy being dragged by the net. She was unable to sit up properly, so she threw herself over on to her front to try to loosen the fibres with her free hand. The boat wallowed heavily and took on some water. Pulling a
t the mesh awkwardly with her left hand, Stephanie wondered what was tautening the swathes of it in the deep water under the boat. The dinghy was shunting the incoming waves, bludgeoning itself against them, raising white spumes over the prow. Spray cascaded over her, soaking her blouse, chilling her skin.
The moon gleamed on the water as she grappled with the raw nylon, and overboard she saw silver filaments dapple the swell. Like little silver fish, she thought, their fins skipping to the surface.
The danger she was in did not make itself apparent until that moment. She saw the erratic movements of the silver fish and the looming presence of the cliffs at either side of the bay. The open sea was very close. She struggled frantically with the mesh, tearing at it with her lacerated free hand.
Briefly, she stopped her labours to take on reserves of air, her chest heaving in panic. Out to sea the fish were gaining ground, leaving her and the boat behind. Yet still the tangled net pulled the craft against the tide. And there now, she saw. A hump of water, breaking over. . . a shape so sinuous in the swell that it might have been made out of the ocean water itself.
Stephanie was overcome with a strange composure, as if some nymph of the sea were hypnotizing her. The dinghy was awash and might stay afloat only a few minutes longer. Her knees and lower legs were submerged in the chill brine. Time was pausing for her to ready herself, and she felt she was ready. She was calm, waiting.
Out on the flowing water was the thing she had seen before. No, not a dolphin. Nor was it Gilbert’s wife, she was long gone. Wavering arms surfaced, seeming to beckon. Was this what the old man had really been fishing for? Was it from this that he sought revenge for his loss? The boat’s prow dipped into a trough and did not recover. Not far away, Stephanie watched the sea creature dip too and she knew that she was next.
He had to wade in chest-deep and swim, then catch hold of the stern. He howled Stephanie’s name and the word fell flat across the ice cool water. Hauling himself up, the boat’s stern went down although the resistance was still firm.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 Page 36