The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas

by Syd Moore

  Down below, a crowd of more than thirty villagers were waving bright bundles, burning torches and lanterns, seemingly coaxing the ship towards them, urging it in.

  But that could not be, for it was not a safe harbour. The vessel would be torn and ripped apart. And as she thought this, moans and cries of shock were borne aloft and over to her on the wind: the crew were becoming wise to their fate. But at last the ship was letting down its sails. A small lifeboat was lowered, swinging, into the raging waters below. Though this last ditch was too late for the men on board the larger vessel.

  Borne aloft on a giant and vicious wave, propelled in a chaotic, spiralling motion by the cruel and angry sea, the ship surged forwards. It pitched and lurched.

  There was a loud, grating sound, metal against metal, shattering glass, wood and timbers splintering, forced apart.

  A well of cries went up from the beach as the vessel was picked up and driven forward again by the spiteful sea, piercing itself finally on the bank of rocks. Chunks were torn from the hull as it was forced, mortally wounded, into the shallows of Devil’s Cove.

  The torches on the beach waved furiously. A roar went up from those gathered there.

  Dark little figures were jumping from the decks, abandoning ship, making for the shore.

  Ethel-Rose held her field glasses to her eyes and passed them over the waves. The lifeboat was bobbing precariously. There were men in there, with oars, rowing the dingy to shore. Now it appeared the villagers had undergone a change of heart – she could hear their shouts from her clifftop, ‘Here, safe harbour, here’. They were calling the lifeboat in.

  Her eye caught a tiny whiteness on the scrap of beach closest to her. She shifted the binoculars and saw a man reach dry rocks on the crust of the cove.

  A survivor!

  And yes, she saw, he was struggling, raising his hand for help. Several villagers, the one like Mrs Trevelyan, two men who had come down the cliff with handkerchiefs about their necks, and a milkmaid, ran to the seaman, their arms outstretched.

  At last, she thought. The villagers are rallying.

  But no sooner had the beleaguered mariner been raised to his feet, a terrible thing did happen. The maid, who had been fiddling with her pail, produced a thin sharp thing, shaped like a knife. The men clutching the seaman held him up to face the women. Then the one like Mrs Trevelyan took the dagger from the maid and ran it through the seaman’s heart.

  Ethel-Rose cried out and dropped her glasses to the ground.

  Hells Teeth! She squinted at the bay. Had she really witnessed a profane murder. What should she do?

  She sank to her knees, overwhelmed by the weight of responsibility. For she concluded she must continue to bear witness to the crime and take her testimony to the police. If the local constabulary refused to act then she would hitch a lift to Truro and speak to them there. Justice for this foul deed must be meted out.

  Without it, there was only chaos.

  And that, also, was too much to bear.

  With reluctant hands she found her glasses on the damp grass and, still kneeling, pointed them at the cove again. The murderous villagers were now gathered round the sailor’s prone form. But, she saw to her disgust, they were rifling through his pockets, ripping at his clothes.

  How could they degrade themselves further? This was so wrong and she hardened her resolve to fetch the authorities and judges.

  When the men had picked everything from the dying mariner and the women had chewed over what was left, the four of them picked him up and cast his limp body back into the surf.

  Other villagers had waded in too. For the sea had becalmed – the surface of the water was flat. The moon ventured out weakly from behind the clouds and illuminated the unfolding scene: men from the shore were clambering aboard the ship and a chain had been formed. Cargo was carefully unloaded from the hold and passed along to those waiting in the bay.

  But that was stealing! That was … and it finally dawned on Ethel-Rose that these people were not a clutter of opportunist villagers. These people were wreckers.

  She had heard of them before, yet thought them just legends. Her Aunt Rozalie had read stories in which dastardly crooks used tricks, and ‘false lights’, to lure in sea-faring vessels so that they would run aground and be looted – they called themselves ‘wreckers’. Though these here tonight were not foul criminals or gangs as depicted in the fictions, but ordinary people who worked at farms, who lived in St Hilliards, a pretty seaside town. A far cry from the depraved pirates she had imagined.

  But then she had a thought – was this why the God-fearing were deserting the place like rats from a …? She looked up again at the wounded ship. Did this treachery explain the crowd departing at the station? Were they leaving to avoid any part in this vile assault upon innocent men?

  But then why not alert the police?

  Unless the local station was in on it too?

  Or perhaps they were there now? Readying to help.

  She shifted the binoculars to the shore and saw that the lifeboat had reached it. The rowers were helping two women to disembark: one old and crippled, another younger but small.

  The air was filled with the sounds of a pistol.

  One shot, then two fired in quick succession.

  Then three shots more.

  Ethel-Rose had jumped at the noise and covered her eyes.

  When she looked back the bodies of a man and the old woman were scattered on the sand. Around them were other corpses. Another man was struggling with his attacker. She took her field glasses away from the unfolding horror, but even without them caught the small lithe shadow of the young woman running away down the shoreline.

  Two men gave chase and quickly caught up, whereupon they fell upon her.

  Ethel-Rose heard shrill screams that made her heart beat so fast she feared it might rupture.

  Then the men stepped away and the screams came no more.

  Putting her hand to her mouth and cheek, she realised she was weeping.

  A villager was returning. In his arms he carried a little body. But it was limp. She was no doctor but, even from this distance, she could tell there was no life in the poor girl.

  The murderer reached what was now becoming a large pile of bodies amassing on the pebbly shore and placed his fresh victim on the top, next to the corpse of the old woman.

  Someone screamed. It went on for a long long time before she realised it was coming from her own lips.

  She sank even further into the ground, willing her eyes to see no more, sweat pouring from her temples.

  At some point she became aware that her gaze had drifted back to the shore. There were no more passengers or seafarers there. Only bodies piled high on the beach. One of the maids was pouring liquid over the limbs and heads there, throwing it up so it touched the uppermost tangle of limbs. Another threw a torch on.

  There was a sudden burst of light, then the heap of corpses that just minutes ago had been living, breathing men and women, exploded into flames.

  The funeral pyre danced higher, lighting up the whole shore and the villagers standing about it, some still, heads bowed, others examining, counting their bounty.

  Her stomach turned as the bitter taste of bile filled her mouth.

  From out at sea she heard a strange sound and turned to search for the source. Something wispy, like a tatty flag, was moving at the end of the garden.

  Could there be a ship, another one, passing into the cove? But to reach so high as to be seen over the cliff? Well, it must be huge. Was it indeed possible, for something so large to get so close to shore?

  The distinct and deafening chime of a bell spread out over the land and into the cove. She put her hands to her ears, understanding at once that whatever made it must be giantlike, to resonate with such strength. It came again – a deep melancholy knell, echoing into Devil’s Cove. The people there stopped their activity and faced the sea.

  Ethel-Rose followed suit and turned her field glasses out, s
pluttering as the noxious smell of burning flesh reached her and filled her nostrils.

  The ship was sailing into the cove.

  But, indeed, this one was far bigger than that which had run aground. This had four masts, and sails that, strangely, appeared … looked … she faltered. ‘Infirm’ was the only word she could find to describe what she saw. And as she took in the foggy, wavering outline glistening before her, every single drop of blood in her body seemed to freeze.

  Adorned with pearls of mist, formed from undulating shadow, the ship slipped closer. Her eyes ran over the beams, the raggedy sails trailing gossamer threads, which hung down, empty of wind. Yet it was moving at a good speed.

  But no, it too was heading for the shipwreck! If it wasn’t careful it would suffer the same fate.

  Driven by moral compulsion Ethel-Rose got to her feet and waved the field glasses.

  ‘Weigh anchor,’ she shouted at it. ‘No further. There are wreckers,’ she yelled.

  But it had no effect. The ship continued towards her over the rocks.

  Over the rocks!

  How could that be? She stood stock still.

  But boats needed water to move. This must be an illusion: shadows in the swirls of mist and fog.

  She pressed her top lids down then, slowly, first left, then right, opened her eyes again.

  But there it was – bold and solid yet simultaneously shifting, dissolving and reappearing, a miraculous mirage on the shore.

  Where it stopped.

  Another ear-splitting peal rang out from the prow across the sands.

  The chain gang had ceased its activity and the men were staring into the mist. At the spectral ship.

  And there, up on the deck, there was movement.

  Rope ladders were being thrown down. Over the sides of the boat pale forms flitted, and she saw them beginning to descend.

  Behind it the funeral pyre danced higher, deepening the shadows to this side. Yet she could still make out some of the villagers – who were beginning to turn away. She shifted her gaze to the bottom of the ship where the sailors were disembarking, shambling across the craggy coast.

  Yet, they didn’t look like ordinary seamen.

  They were dark and slight.

  She held up the field glasses and focused them on one of the sailors at the fore.

  His dress was old-fashioned. He wore a frayed jacket and dusty tricorne hat, the like of which she had seen sailors wear in pantomimes. She only glimpsed his face, yet in that brief moment she had the impression the poor man was gruesomely disfigured.

  Everything was happening so quickly.

  She saw the mariner unfasten his belt and bring out a scabbard. In a jerking, almost mechanical action, white fingers handled the belt and she watched him unsheathe a cutlass. The light of the pyre glinted on the blade.

  Ethel-Rose took a step back as the sailor began to approach the gathered crowd. Swiftly, without pause, he reached them. Holding the cutlass above his head she saw a glimmer of a smile cross his lips. Then he brought the weapon down across the heads of three villagers. One went down, the others began to turn but the ghastly mariner was fast upon them, the cutlass whipping up and down with frightful speed.

  Cries of panic rose into the air, carried to Ethel-Rose on her cliff. She gulped in and blanched, knowing, through some black intuition, what was coming.

  And surely enough, a tall grim sailor jumped from the boat, then another, with more from the ladders following their lead. In their hands all waved weapons: knives, swords and daggers, which they thrust stiffly through the villagers’ bodies time and time again.

  She could see a couple trying to flee, making their way to the cliff that led up to Lillia Lodge.

  To her.

  And though she wanted to tear her eyes away from the slaughter she found she could not move. Her body was forcing her to bear witness to this most unholy of acts.

  A scuttling alerted her to an approach. Soil, pebbles and stones were falling at the garden’s edge where the lawn gave way to the cliff.

  Dropping the binoculars, she stared and saw a hand reach up and clamp on to the lawn, clawing its way like a fork on the grass. A man, who resembled Merryn Trevelyan, climbed up into the garden. He did not seem to see her and once he had scrambled upright he moved swiftly across the garden into the shadows of the house.

  A couple of seconds passed before yet more scuffing sounds returned her gaze to the cliff edge. One of the seamen was following on. A tricorne appeared, rising up over the cliff edge, followed by a body moving in a strange, jolting way.

  Every single hair on her body rose up.

  For where the seaman’s face should have been there was only a skull. Where the eyes should have been, a queer darkness glowed. Beneath them she glimpsed a hole for a nose, yellow bones of the neck, the fractured collarbone tattered with scraps of old skin, beginnings of a lumpy ribcage. A creature drawn from nightmares.

  Fear began its full descent.

  On her knees she tried to push back and away from the advancing spectre. But her limbs were not easy to move. It was as if she had been pinned, yet not quite paralysed, by the horrendous sight.

  As the atrocious phantasm emerged fully onto the grass, its skinless jaw dropped open, suspended only by threadlike sinews. A strange groan came out of it – an enormously deep, cavernous moan that combined both despair and savage fury.

  It bowled into Ethel-Rose, levelling her with a sense of horror, dismay, indignation, rage, brutality, violence. She could feel the thing’s most bitter madness stretch its tendrils round her neck and paw at the edges of her soul.

  The avalanche of feeling, of dread, of terror, that this unleashed, however, did not overwhelm Ethel-Rose but, contrarily, sharpened her senses, and, in that very moment, as the sailor’s grief washed over her she understood what the spectral crew had come for.

  Of course, she thought, it must be so.

  Retribution and punishment. Yes, indeed. The scales of justice must be tipped into balance by the sacrifice, the execution, of the villagers. Those that did not flee on Angels’ Night. Those left behind. And she drew breath, wondering how they chose, but as she did she realised the creature had brought an odour up with him – not, now, burning flesh. It was something more akin to rotting, dampness and decay. It made her retch and she clutched her chest wanting to bend over, to vomit, to expel the awful smell, the feelings of treachery that were invading her very heart. But the thing was raising its hand. And in its bony grip she saw the cutlass.

  It does not know I am not of their blood, she realised as it began to stalk towards her. But it could not have her. She had done no wrong and she had a son and a husband who needed her. The thought of her family, bereft and alone, spurred an energy within and she reared up and turned and began to run for the safety of the lodge.

  Once inside the cottage she closed the front door and, panting, pulled the bolts across. Tearing into the kitchen, she could see, through the windows, a steady stream of ghostly mariners filing across the lawn. Though they stumbled, and some collapsed, their tawdry remains coming apart, she knew the crew would not stop until they had achieved their aim. They would be relentless.

  Something heavy rapped three times on the front door.

  Ethel-Rose turned and looked down the hallway. Outside, the creature was battering against the wood. If all the spectres followed him it surely would not be long till the door gave way and they would fall upon her.

  She needed to find a safe space. Somewhere to hide from the diabolical crew.

  Sanctuary.

  Then she remembered it – the priest-hole beneath the stairs.

  Yes, there!

  As the lost souls congregated at the porch, piling high against the door, and the clamours for blood filled her head, she calmed herself: the priest-hole was a place of sanctity, created by a saint. It would, if anything could, provide a safe haven.

  Taking in deep breaths she moved her fingers over the wood until she felt the edge of
a lever.

  The door sprang open and, as it did, she heard the clattering of bones across the slate tiles.

  The avenging spectres were inside the house.

  Quickly, on the floor, she felt around for the next door. Moans filled the passage. A coldness was flowing through the house, bringing mist and chill.

  At last the lid sprang open. She flung herself into the void, knocking her head. Just as she drew the lid shut something heavy and brittle banged hard against it.

  In the darkness she closed her eyes, jammed a fist into her mouth and rocked herself back and forth.

  Above her the scratching began.

  The light blinked with dazzling force into her hiding place.

  She didn’t know how long she had been down in the priest-hole. It could have been days.

  Unused to the brightness she shielded her eyes and tried to make out the shadow above her.

  ‘You’ve come through,’ said Mrs Trevelyan. The older woman extended her arm. ‘Take it.’

  Ethel-Rose complied and let herself be pulled up.

  The housekeeper looked her over then, as if satisfied by what she found, took her by the shoulders and pushed her into the kitchen where she sat her down.

  Mrs Trevelyan sighed. ‘There ain’t no bother a cup of tea can’t fix.’ Then she went to light the stove.

  The sun was shining, filling up every corner of the room with wholesome brightness, glittering on the turquoise sea outside. As she looked, dazedly, out of the window, Ethel-Rose could see no evidence of the ships of the night, the fallen villagers and ghastly crew. But then, somehow, she had come to know this would be the case.

  ‘I saw three ships,’ she said simply.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Trevelyan. The kettle began to scream. ‘Every year on the feast of All Angels.’

  ‘Angels,’ repeated Ethel-Rose. ‘But heavenly beings … those were no heavenly beings,’ she protested.

  Mrs Trevelyan placed the teapot on the table. ‘Not all of them are good. Michael fought against Lucifer, and remember the prince of darkness once had wings too. The Feast of All Angels is when we pay the price for our ancestral crimes. The sins of the father shall be visited on the child …’ And she broke off and looked away.