Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

THE HAG STONE

by CONRAD WILLIAMS

I

A DICEY FLIGHT • I ARRIVE SAFELY AT FORT REQUIN

IT WAS MY first trip anywhere in an aeroplane.

I know that must sound absurd coming from a man in his seventies, especially in this day and age when cheap flights are so freely available and people hop on and off aircraft as if they were buses; but I (nor my wife for that matter) had never entertained the thought to go travelling, let alone sight-seeing. My idea of hell was a hot beach in a land where English was not spoken, and endless hours were spent chasing away flies from whatever inedible repast might be put in front of me at a less-than-reputable restaurant.

No, my heart (though recently damaged) was meant to remain in England. However, the best-laid plans, and all that.

How was I to know I would suffer a heart attack? I say that with the lack of foresight we all of us are cursed with in regard to the proclivities of health, but the question really ought to have been: how could I have expected anything but a heart attack? For the seat of all my passion and feeling had been under assault for two weeks, since my darling wife, my beautiful Clarissa, succumbed to the persistent and aggressive cancer in her spine.

Though the likelihood is that I don’t have much time left on this Earth, what time I do have will no doubt be shadowed by the memories of her final months and the pathetic attempts by the medical staff to arrest the inevitable. Clarissa had quite reconciled herself to that long sleep; I, less so, and I’m afraid I was something of a quivering wreck whenever I sat with her in her hospital bed.

She seemed to be shrinking by the day, but her smile remained a constant, as warm and as inviting as it had been on the first day I was favoured with it, over fifty years previously. And the grip of her warm, smooth hand retained its urgency.

Alas, a sure touch and a ready smile are not enough to repel death, and she succumbed one rainy Tuesday afternoon while I was failing to persuade one of the vending machines in the corridor to yield a hot chocolate.

A fortnight later, not sleeping well, drinking rather more than I ought and in a constant mither of wringing hands and regret, I suffered, in the lobby of a city-centre hotel, what my doctor called a heart seizure. Arrhythmia, apparently: the chaotic spasming of the muscle. I was rescued by the smart thinking of a receptionist who had first-aid training and knew where the nearest defibrillating device could be found.

I was in hospital for a week, and then happily discharged with a hefty arsenal of pills to take every day for the rest of whatever life I had left. I was warned, before leaving, about depression, and that a number of renowned foundations were available for me to consult, but I would not have it. I’d never felt happier. I was convinced that the seizure had marked the return of my wife as something living, and within me, to provide succour and prevent me from falling into a funk of loneliness. Any murmurs from now on I would attribute to her, geeing me up, reminding me to take my medicine, or prompting me to remember her.

Though it was my first journey through the air, it was a notable one, or so I was assured, by my fellow passengers on the flight down to Guernsey from Heathrow, and the pilot of the little Aurigny Trislander, a propeller plane that took us from Guernsey to Alderney.

The weather was atrocious—a knot or two harder and the flight, apparently, would have been cancelled. We were buffeted like a favourite toy in the hands of a clumsy child. I must say, I found it tremendous fun, like being on a fairground ride, although the three other people sitting near me—a man and woman and (presumably) their young son—were a little green around the gills and spent much of their time clutching at sick bags and groaning at each other.

The sea was a riot of white breakers and I could not see any boats braving the swells. That said, I did see something moving against the waves, but at this distance I could not be sure what it was. A seal of some sort, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was alone, and moving fairly quickly.

Then all too soon we were coming in to land at the tiny airstrip. It was a little bumpy, but the pilot knew what he was doing and within a minute we were unfastening our seatbelts and being guided out of the aircraft towards the baggage claim and the single counter that served as passport control.

Soon, trusty suitcase in hand, I was in a taxi headed for my destination. I felt excited and childish, my head twisting this way and that as I took in the sweep of the land, and the houses nestled within it. Gulls were fastened to the sky—it was as if they need never flap their wings again. I was hoping for something exotic, I suppose, but this was only the Channel Islands after all. Even my taxi driver was from Manchester!

He was pleasant enough, and I chatted with him about this and that before the road suddenly gave way to a dirt track along the coast—a precipitous drop to our right on to jags of rock causing me to lean obviously to my left, as if that might help us from slipping down. The taxi driver moved with extreme caution; there were deep potholes here, he explained, and notwithstanding the cliff, he didn’t want to damage the car, or cause it to become stuck.

It took an age, but once we’d rounded the bluff, I saw our destination for the first time: Fort Requin, a beautiful old citadel built into and, somehow, out of a series of huge rocks that were like a final attempt by the island to reach as far as possible into the sea. Built around the advent of steam power, the fort was seen as a necessary bulwark against any possible naval attack by the French. Later it was seized by Hitler as a stepping-stone in his desire for British invasion. Once more I mentally thanked my sons, Brian and Gordon, for arranging and paying for this little holiday for me. They were fine boys and I was lucky to have them.

The taxi driver steered us down an incline and across a causeway to another slight rise which took us to the entrance to the fort. He parked and retrieved my bags from the boot and wished me a pleasant stay.

As I reached the gateway, the door swung open to reveal a tall man in half-moon spectacles and a bottle-green raincoat. This was the caretaker, a Mr. Standish, who briskly showed me to my rooms and gave me a map outlining the other accommodations that comprised Fort Requin.

“Here is the communal dining room,” he pointed out, “and here is a recreation room. No television, I’m afraid. Just books and some board games.”

I told him I was here for long walks and that while I might pick up a book or two, the only other activity likely to be given its head was plenty of sleep.

“Very good too,” he said, with a smile. “Now I must be away. Your food will be delivered some time in the next hour or so—we tried to get everything on your list, but we might have had to mix and match in some cases. The Cotterhams, the family sharing the facilities with you this week, have already arrived and are unpacking in the Officer’s Quarters.”

He put his finger to his forehead as if to help himself remember some important piece of information. “Two more things before I go. There is a Union Jack, neatly folded in the recreation room. It’s purely optional, but we invite our guests to hoist it on the flagpole to announce the fort is occupied—you’ll find it on top of the Upper Magazine, it’s on the map. There’s a bugle too, if you fancy blasting out reveille or taps. Now, the other issue is the Outpost. It’s no longer used because it’s inaccessible. Well, what I mean is that you can get to where there used to be a walkway across to it, but that’s all collapsed into the sea now. We have a danger sign and some metal fencing in place, but the determined will find a way around it. I’d respectfully ask that you steer clear of it, and do what you can to ensure young Ralph—he’s about twelve or so—steers clear of it too. I know it’s his parents’ responsibility, but you know what happens. They might oversleep, as parents of older children are wont to do, and he might nip off on his own. We’ve got a chap coming in to completely seal off the archway with bricks and mortar, but for this week, I ask that you keep a sea-faring eye open for potential mishaps.”

I told him he could rely on me while I was here and that was that. I closed the door behind him and, turning, took a deep breath of the salty, crisp air before heading down to the German Casement, which was to be my home for the next six nights.

II

THE COTTERHAMS • THE FISHERMAN • THE OUTPOST (I)

What a queer place this was! I was in a room with two beds, and racks on the wall showing where the original bunks had been positioned for the German soldiers of the Third Reich—imagine it!—to lay their weary, English-hating heads. I knew Alderney’s citizens had been given the option to evacuate at the start of the war, when the British government decided they held no military significance and would not be defended.

After the German occupation in 1940, four concentration camps built on the island—the only camps of their kind to exist on British soil—housed around 6,000 slave labourers helping to build fortifications, shelters and gun emplacements. What a desolate, lonely island this must have been for those stationed or imprisoned here.

The view from my window was staggering. The ocean and the surrounding rocks—including Les Etacs, an island turned white by the thousands of northern gannets that had colonised it—and miles of thunderous sky. Once more my eye was drawn to the churning sea, and the compulsion that something was swimming within it, against its currents, creating a wake as it moved just beneath the surface.

I kept my eye on it, praying to see the tail of a whale, or the joyous leap of a dolphin, but it remained submerged and, after a few seconds, the wake receded, as whatever it was finned to depths that were only imaginable.

It was slightly on the chilly side in the room, despite the presence of a cast-iron Duchess radiator, and there was a faint smell of oil, as if the grease from the Germans’ guns, or the oil from their lamps, had left indelible traces of itself behind.

I unpacked, hanging my clothes in one of the pair of handsome oak wardrobes, then I took a brief, refreshing shower and dressed for dinner. I reached the kitchen just as the last of the supplies were being delivered. A box on the long dining table had my name pinned to it. A woman was putting the last of the groceries away from her own three boxes. She was the kind of woman who wears a faint smile no matter how laborious the task being undertaken, and went about her work briskly, no-nonsense. She’d have been the kind of woman depicted on those old DIG FOR VICTORY posters that were produced during the war.

“Mrs. Cotterham?” I said, and she looked up, startled.

“Oh my!” she said. “You did surprise me. I think we took that earlier flight together.”

“You’re right,” I said, recognising her now that the colour was back in her cheeks. Her hair was tied neatly back from her face too. “I do hope you feel better?”

“Much better, thank you, Mr.…” she eyed my grocery crate, “Stafford?”

“Adrian, please,” I said.

“You’re alone?”

“I’m afraid so. This is meant to be a convalescence of sorts. I’m recovering from illness.”

“Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear it,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind that we’re here too.”

“I wasn’t expecting to be here by myself,” I said. “And, truth be told, I’m glad there is someone else. I imagine this place would be a little alarming for the lone visitor.”

“You’re right there,” she said. “Especially if this weather carries on.”

The wind groaned as if in agreement, and it heralded the arrival of Mr. Cotterham and his son. We shook hands and exchanged names (Penny and Alastair; young Ralph I’d already heard about) and Penny invited me to dine with them. We all mucked in together, peeling vegetables, uncorking wine, setting the table and, before long, we were tucking into excellent pork chops and trading tales as if we had been known to each other for months as opposed to minutes.

By pudding (pears poached in red wine, delicious) I had learned Alastair (a tousle-haired, portly gentleman with a somewhat out-of-fashion moustache—he reminded me of the playwright Colin Welland) was a technical writer who specialised in the history of British military jets since World War II. He already had three books under his belt regarding decommissioned fighters, bombers and reconnaissance aircraft. I liked the self-deprecatory way in which he brushed off his achievements as so many dry accounts, and liked even more Penny’s leaping to his defence.

Penny was visibly older than Alastair, but she was slim and healthy-looking, so it came as no surprise to find out she was a yoga teacher. Ralph was polite enough, I suppose, but a victim to that dislocated air that afflicts many children on the cusp of teen-hood. I’m sure he’d rather have been anywhere else than that table with its collection of ageing adults talking about their obsessive, exclusive little interests.

Sure enough, when we’d put down our spoons, he asked to be excused and that was the last I saw of him that night.

We adjourned to the sitting room.

“Comics and Nintendo,” his father said, dismissively, as we sat down.

“At least he’s reading,” I reasoned. “Comics didn’t do too badly for me when I was a lad.”

“That was then,” he said. “Your comics were filled with text. His comics are just excuses for a slew of jokes about burps, farts and bogeys.”

“There are worse things to pore over.”

“Oh, he does, believe me. Do you know a boy who isn’t fascinated by blood and death?”

“Ah,” I said. “But, there’s something you can exercise control over at least, no?”

Penny sniffed at that. “We can stop him from playing violent games, or watching video nasties, or whatever they’re called nowadays—”

“Barbaric Blu-Rays!” Alastair interjected.

“—but,” continued Penny, “we can’t, I won’t, censor the news. Even now.” She poured out the last of the wine.

I stared at her blankly. I hadn’t seen a front page or a news bulletin since Clarissa’s death. “What’s happened?”

“The Fisherman,” said Alastair, ominously.

I drained my glass. “The fisherman? What’s this, a quota story? I don’t see how that could possibly—”

“The Fisherman is a killer. He’s been preying on women for the past month. Always women. Always on or near beaches. Never inland. Their bodies are often found dumped in beds of seaweed.” Here Alastair lowered his voice and craned his neck as if he could ascertain whether Ralph was properly out of earshot. “And always, their wombs have been removed.”

“How ghastly,” I cried, and wished there was some of the wine left so I could rinse away the terrible, claggy feeling of dread at the back of my throat.

“Yes,” Penny said. She seemed a little pale, although that might have been down to the bleaching effect of the nearby lamp. “What’s worse is that these murders have not just been confined to one area.”

I spluttered some disbelieving grunt in response, but Alastair was nodding.

“It’s true,” he said. “The first body was discovered in Morecambe Bay. Two days later there was a body, same modus operandi, washed up on the beach in Oban, and then, where was the next one, Pen?”

“They’ve found them all over. Scarborough, Southwold, Newquay… the last one was in Portsmouth. Yesterday.”

The conversation had knocked the stuffing out of me. Silence seemed to have been enforced by the gravity of the story. Their wombs? What could they possibly—I sighed. I was a seventy-four-year-old man trying to understand the machinations of a world I’d outgrown. It was beyond me. And a part of me was glad.

The weather had died down a little and I didn’t want to go to bed with a thick head, so I bid them a good night and, availing myself of one of the torches by the front door, stepped out into the courtyard. Samphire and mesembryanthemum were growing wildly on the rocks across from the stairwell. I gently ran my hands over the foliage while my attention was drawn to the black cauldron of the sea, faintly visible beneath the ice-white frosting of light edging the clouds.

My curiosity had been piqued in regard to the Outpost Mr. Standish had done his best to scare me away from. No longer tired (in fact, I was rejuvenated by the sea air and the prospect of a little adventure), I skipped on to the greensward and picked a route up through the broken collars of rock to a channel carved into the face of the cliff. Here it was that I saw the first barrier to my progress, but it was little more than a wire-mesh fence, unattached, and I was able to lift and reposition it to allow me through.

Warning signs: DANGER. STEEP DROP. DO NOT ENTER. The torch showed me where to put my feet. Suddenly I was there, standing before an arch that did little more than frame a precipitous drop to the fangs of rock below. The walkway connecting the Outpost to the mainland was gone, destroyed by nature most likely. I imagined it had existed as a crow’s nest kind of place—the view of the sea was unhindered.

Perhaps a radio operator would have spent time there, ready to send an urgent telegram to the Wolf’s Lair at the first sign of aggression from His Majesty’s fleet. From here it looked like a tiny space, enough for one man and a rickety little bunk. I wished I could get across to satisfy my curiosity, but it was impossible.

Reluctantly, I turned back, but I had been re-energised and I fancied I’d need more of a walk to coax tiredness back into my limbs. Also, I’d been somewhat unnerved by Alastair’s revelations regarding The Fisherman (not to mention the lascivious glee he divined from relating the story) and I wanted to erase it, or at least remove it for the time being, from my thoughts. No man could entertain the prospect of sleep with that kind of nastiness flitting around his head.

Making sure I had a key to the front gate, I let myself out on to the causeway, and angled down to the beach.

III

LATE-NIGHT CONSTITUTIONAL • A CURIOSITY • THE OLD MAN •

A BAD NIGHT’S SLEEP

Bliss! In all my time, even while I was courting Clarissa and we’d spent the odd weekend in Blackpool, I’d never taken a midnight stroll along the seashore. What I’d been missing!

I saw—or rather, heard—bats, and even felt their tiny wings changing the currents of the air close to my face. I saw phosphorescence in the waves—glimmering green beads of light strung out like a discarded necklace. I was convinced I felt the tremor of the sea as a whale crashed into it, playing deliriously and celebrating its freedom. I thought I might have heard it too, that wildly exciting, but strangely comforting sequence of moans and squeals, both mordant and uplifting in the same breath.

My feet crunched satisfyingly on the shingle beach, a melange of ancient pebbles, shells, polished fragments of glass and what have you, and my spirits were replenished. I trained the torch upon my intended route, to ensure I didn’t sprain an ankle on any rogue lengths of driftwood, but I needn’t have bothered—the ambient light cast by the concealed moon was sufficient to navigate by.

After a good half an hour, I was starting to feel properly tired, that good, ache-filled enervation that comes from honest endeavour. I knew I would sleep well, despite the oily smell of the Quarters and the thoughts of the ghosts of German soldiers who had visited any and all kinds of unpleasantness on the island’s prisoners. That was over seventy years ago, I admonished myself. You’ve lived your life in the span since then. Spilled milk, and all that.

I was about to turn in when the torchlight picked something out that caused my mind to snag for a second. That’s funny, I thought. Some anomaly in the pattern of the beach. I know that sounds a little strange, given that a beach of shingle can’t really lay claim to any sort of pattern, or logic, but there you have it. I felt a difference in the stones. And there it was. A pebble that was larger than the others (about the size of a lime, but flatter), highly polished, and with a hole bored right through, off-centre. It looked like something you might wear on a length of chain or leather.

It was a handsome chunk of stone, and I pocketed it immediately. I poked around for a few minutes more, thinking I might find another like it, but the beach had retained its anonymity. It was then, as I began the slow march back up to the causeway, that I was given another surprise.

I saw thrashing limbs breaking the surface of the sea, and a furious foaming as something came fast towards the shore. I caught my breath and staggered backwards, almost tripping in the shingle. The limbs disappeared, submerging, and the relative calm returned, but then a great column of white rose as whatever it was resurfaced, this time head-first.

The water cascaded off it to reveal a naked man. I laughed out loud with relief and consternation. He seemed more stunned than I, however, and halted his progress from the water mid-stride, almost shying away from me as I padded through the shingle to greet him.

“Are you all right?” I called. I was dressed in thick layers but I could still feel the chill in the air. This man must have been swimming in temperatures close to freezing. He didn’t say anything and I thought, My God, he’s in shock. He’s been washed ashore from a ship run aground on the rocks. But then he seemed to find his voice and I realised his hesitation was down to a lack in his English—he was obviously from distant shores. Perhaps Scandinavian. Perhaps Slav.

“I apologise,” he said, “if I startle you.”

“It’s not a problem,” I assured him. “You just don’t expect to see people swimming at this time of night, at this time of the year.”

“I am swimming every day,” he said. “All year round.”

“Do you live on the island?”

“This area has been in my family’s blood for centuries.”

“My name’s Adrian,” I said, and extended my hand. He seemed nonplussed, as if he had never been taught the rituals of introduction.

“Gluckmann,” he said, finally, but he left my hand dangling.

I nodded, withdrew my arm, suddenly struck by the farcical situation I was in: chatting at midnight with a naked man of my own age—if not older—in the freezing cold.

“Well,” I said. “It was nice to meet you.”

I left him on the shore and picked my way back up to the causeway, pausing at the top to look back. He was still standing there, staring after me. There was no evidence of any clothes, or even a towel, nearby. I felt giddy. I felt as though I wanted to run away, as fast as I could.

We had not shaken hands, yet I felt as though my skin was greasy from his touch. And there was a smell in my clothes, though it hadn’t been there before I met him—a fishy smell, but not the clean, marine piquancy one knows from clean seawater; this was the days-old odour of tainted things, of rotting prawns and mussels gone bad. And hadn’t his skin been a little strange? Was it just that he was old that it seemed spongy and loose, with the texture of raw tripe? Was it merely the slackening of tissue from the piling on of years that gave his fingers a webbed appearance?

Nonsense, I told myself, over and over, as I fumbled to get the key in the lock with fingers that felt thick and unresponsive with fear. I was close to crying out, but I must not. If I disturbed the Cotterhams from their slumber I’d have some explaining to do, and I had nothing to offer beyond the unhinging of my own sanity.

Once I had the door closed on the world, I leaned my head against the wood and tried to calm my laboured heart. I felt his scrutiny through the stone ramparts. Was that who I’d seen earlier? Both from the window of the plane, and while taking in the view from the Soldier’s Quarters? Nonsense, nonsense. But the conviction would not be dissolved, no matter how much I tried to reason with myself.

You would die if you spent too much time in that water. Exposure, hypothermia… yet he had looked as unbothered by the perilous temperatures as an elephant seal, his flesh retaining a healthy pinkness despite its saggy constitution.

I stumbled towards bed, making sure I locked the door of the Soldier’s Quarters. The cold had not been vanquished by that old radiator. Fully clothed, I slid between the sheets of my bed and fell into a tortuous sleep populated by an impossible creature, born from the silly discomfort that Gluckmann had instilled in me, yet blown up into a thing of terror so alarming I could barely credit how my mind had come to fashion it.

My imagination was that of a normal human being, a dull old man if I was being honest. I had never been a fan of the kind of films that were popular among the young: films about death and blood, full of monsters that hunted for human meat. Not my cup of tea. And yet here was a beast that would not look out of place in such a feature.

I dreamed of the old man standing at the sea’s edge, and changing… His horribly soft skin hung in swags around him like discarded clothes. Beneath this thin film that kept his shape vaguely human thrashed an oily roil of cartilaginous limbs, a knot of furious movement like that of an overdue infant impatient to be born. I saw the shudder of his head as his jaws reared back, carrying such a great cargo of teeth that they ought not be able to fit in a human mouth. He was making awful gluk-gluk noises in his throat, which was blocked, crammed with food he had not chewed properly.

His eyes bulged as he worked this mass, but even as he struggled to swallow whatever it was, he was raising more fistfuls of dinner to mash between his fangs—what looked like filthy carrot tops, but which resolved themselves into the hair of dismembered men, women and children, burst and broken between his fingers. He was gigantic, then, though my dream up until that point had not given me a frame of reference against which he could be measured.

I felt myself, in that sickly incapable way one has in nightmares, try to turn and run as his bloodshot eyes found me, but he was upon me within one stride. I could smell the high, ammoniac reek of his breath, feel the chill of his body assault me like hammering waves at a weather-beaten shoreline. I knew his name, though it made my brain bleed from every aperture to think it, let alone say it, if indeed I had the tongue for such a conglomeration of alien sounds.

Uhogguath. Uhogguath.

It sounded like the kind of wet, stertorous breathing a predator does when it is head-deep in carrion. His hand closed around me. I felt his fingers squeeze the life from my lungs. Red filled my vision. I felt the grind of bones as he pulverised my body, felt the furnace of his lungs as they churned carious breath around the target of my head.

When I woke up, my nails having dug into the palms hard enough to draw blood, the name was so much air hissing from between my teeth and I could barely remember it, only that my speaking of it in the dream had caused the oceans to yawn open to their beds, where pregnant things struggled and palpated and razored each other with claws, foul and black like something found rotting at the bottom of a fruit bowl. Things that were not for the sane to alight upon.

The wind was howling once more at the edges of the room and, had I not been reassured that the rock and the living quarters were almost one and the same, I would have believed that the weather could tear open the face of the cliff and deliver me to this churning sea where its bedevilled, unnatural population would devour me in a trice.

IV

THE DISAGREEABLE MATTER OF THE HARE • FISH AND CHIPS •

AN UNFORTUNATE ACCIDENT • THE CORNER OF MY EYE

After a shower, and a modest breakfast—a handful of nuts mixed with Greek yoghurt and honey—I felt emboldened enough to share the dream with my fellow guests. Penny blanched somewhat when I told her about the realisation that the fistful of carrot-tops was nothing of the sort.

“I think that’s easily the most dreadful thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

“Oh come,” protested her husband. “There are worse things every night on the news. This is a dream, a confection of the brain, that’s all.” I could see that he was unhappy with me. I hadn’t thought this through, convinced only that it would make for an amusing anecdote. All it had done was upset Penny, position Alastair against me as a result, and remind me of the whole sordid evening. Ralph was the only one who seemed impressed by my narrative.

“I found this on the beach,” I said, rooting in my pocket, desperate to claw back some vestige of respect. I held up the stone like a trophy. “Pretty little thing, isn’t it?”

And it was, even more so in daylight. The stone had been washed smooth by countless millennia of tidal movement, the hole perhaps created by centuries of focused boring by a channel of water when it had become trapped in one position. Penny was suitably impressed, and I felt the mood change for the better.

She took the stone from me—I felt a sudden pang of resentment at that—and cooed over the striations in the stone, the little glints and glimmers of silica or quartz. I found my resentment deepen when she started to lecture me about what it was called.

“An adder stone,” she said, “or a hag stone. They’re meant to possess magical properties. Some would have it that they’re made from the hardened saliva of a nest of dragons or serpents, the hole made by the stabbing of their tongues. They work like charms, warding off curses or disease. And if you look through the hole, you can detect traps, or see the true identity of witches or other supernatural creatures.”

“Thank you for that lesson,” I said, somewhat tartly, and extended my hand. Penny returned the stone and I slipped it into my pocket. “There are others, I’m sure, if you do a little hunting.” I felt awkward now that the stone was back in my possession, as if I’d humiliated a child. There remained a stiltedness in the atmosphere that would not be relieved.

I decided to do the honourable thing and retreat for a few hours. The wind was stiff still, but not quite so savage as it had been first thing and anyway, its bark, especially in the exposed knuckle of the Soldier’s Quarters, was much worse than its bite. The clouds were torn to shreds by it, allowing a bright, wintry sun to have some say in the matter.

I decided to unlock one of the guest bicycles and take a ride to Bray beach via the coastal road. If I found a windbreak, I could warm up over the newspaper for an hour or two before a spot of lunch.

The romantic notion I had of myself pedalling gaily along a picturesque coastline was swiftly banished once I found myself travelling against the wind. I was breathing heavily by the time I reached the end of the causeway, and I stopped to button my jacket closed in a bid to lessen its drag quotient.

As I did so, I nervously eyed the surf, searching for a glimpse of Mr. Gluckmann. But surely he would be at work today? I tried to imagine what sort of job he did, but could not shake the unpleasant images of him picking his teeth with the splintered bones of something he’d just consumed. He looked like the type of person who entertained vast appetites. When he wasn’t swimming, I imagined him eating—his wide, fleshy mouth enveloping tidbits like some ravenous sucking loach at the bottom of a fish tank.

I set myself against the wind once more and wobbled upright, but then my eye was distracted by something on the causeway, blocking my route, and I almost fell from the saddle. Covering my mouth with my hand, I pushed the bicycle to the edge of an apron of blood. It was dried into the causeway rock, but it possessed a lighter shade, suggesting it had not been long since it had been spilled.

At the centre of this was a hare, or the remains of a hare—all I could discern amid the twisted, denuded limbs, was a pair of matted ears and a few dried, salt-encrusted organs that were either inedible or a mouthful too far for whatever had destroyed the poor thing. The chewed, grey foreleg bones poked from the shredded sleeves of its fur like knitting needles freighted with an aborted garment. I guessed it must have been picked clean by seagulls, but what had done for it in the first place, and why had it been left here, like some warning?

I shuddered to imagine Penny or Ralph seeing this (I was in no doubt that they would consider me a dreadful person for leaving it in full view of them, or anybody else who should come this way), so I toed it off the causeway, into a rock pool where the crabs could undress it further at their leisure.

I went on my way, struggling up the hill, negotiating potholes and puddles, cursing the painful, self-inflicted wounds in my palms, until I reached a level surface where I could get a little speed up. It was hard work. The blanketing of many years played its part, but I had to accept that I was not the fit man of even ten years previously.

Eventually I hit a downward slope and freewheeled for the best part of a mile, pretty much all the way to the harbour. I slowly levered myself off the bicycle and locked it against the drainpipe of the harbour inn. My shirt was glued to my back, and I was having trouble calming my breath down. I felt a little panicky for a moment, wondering if I really ought to have been doing this at all, considering my reasons for being here in the first place, but gradually the dials all started to swing back to normal.

There were no suitable hiding places to get away from the wind that hadn’t already been snaffled by families and lovers, so I decided I had deserved a drink and settled myself in a corner of the inn’s beach-view patio.

I had an interminable wait until some young thing with more tattoos than wit came to take my order. I asked for a pint of bitter and a newspaper, and she trotted off, leaving me to wonder if she’d poured herself into those skin-tight satin trousers.

An hour passed pleasantly enough. Putting some distance between me and the fort (and, by extension, the hare and Mr. Gluckmann) had done wonders for my mood. The beer had something to do with it too, I’m sure, but for the first time I felt as though I was relaxing, that I didn’t feel the need to be anywhere or to be doing something. Time was redundant (other than helping me to decide when I should order my lunch) and there were no appointments to fret about. I wrote a couple of postcards to my sons, then leaned back to try to allow as much vitamin D as possible into my skin, and opened the newspaper.

People began to drift into the patio and the tables filled up around me. I asked the waitress for fish and chips and took a break from the cryptic crossword to watch the activity on the beach.

The breakwater was host to a bunch of teenagers in swimming costumes performing bombs and swan dives off the edge. Older people wrapped up against the chill stood along the railing, watching, shaking their heads. It was busy, despite the cold—fun-seekers desperate to eke out one last day of larks on the beach, no matter how distant and weak the sun was becoming.

The waves creamed against the bank of dark, damp sand, pushing before it a line of debris—driftwood, seaweed—that failed to settle. It was turning out to be a lovely day, but my eye was drawn to a haze of dark cloud far away to the east. There was rain in that—you could tell by the faintest teased-away columns within it, darker, grainier, like pleats of shadow in a lace wedding dress.

Ah, Clarissa, you would have loved it here.

I ordered another drink; my meal came. It was good and fresh, if a little on the large side for a person whose appetites had shrunk somewhat in the preceding decade. But as I got to the end of what I presumed was a fillet of battered cod, my teeth crunched into something that was certainly no shell of deep fried flour and egg. Its taste contained the sharp tang of rot. Discreetly, I spat the mouthful back on to my plate, and with a fork I prodded the bolus of semi-chewed fish.

I was appalled to see a mangled conglomeration of piscine body parts reveal themselves on its tines. There were fish-bones, but these were black and oily; an eyeball, larger than one might expect from a cod, made opaque by the process of cooking, and most horrible of all, a fractured beak from an octopus, with a tiny green, decayed fish trapped within. Whatever had happened, this beast had been caught and killed while it was in the process of consuming a meal. Lord only knew why the chef hadn’t seen it while he was battering fillets in the kitchen.

I pushed the plate away and pressed a napkin to my lips. It’s all right, I thought to myself. I didn’t swallow any of that.

The first spots of rain came down, as if in sympathy with my mood. That rain front had whipped in double-quick to dissolve the furthest curve of the beach—about half a mile away—and send packing, in an ecstasy of flapping towels, the people from the sand.

The waitress returned and I told her what had happened. She seemed unimpressed by my story—more put out by the fact that I had regurgitated my meal. She cleared the table without the merest hint of remorse and asked me if I wanted anything else.

“Just the bill,” I retorted, and turned my attention back to the breakwater in time to see a man and woman locking their bikes against the railing, while a young boy of around three or four leaned against the lowest bar. I felt my guts loosen.

I’ve always hated heights, especially seeing others display a fearlessness of them such as those old photographs of men hopping around girders at the top of unfinished skyscrapers in New York.

The divers on the breakwater had decided to call it a day—one of them, a teenage girl in flip-flops and long blonde hair seemed lost, she walked up and down it as if she’d misplaced something.

The bay was emptying quite rapidly now as the grey deepened and the rain—an unpleasant driving mist—enveloped the whole of the beach and set the parasols fluttering. Lights came on.

The little boy fell.

I felt the thump of his body through my feet as he hit the sand. My heart skittered. He was still for a while, but then he began to move like someone coming out of deep sleep—squirming, flinching. His parents were still absorbed by their lock and had not seen the accident occur.

The sea was coming in—I could see it lapping at the boy’s feet, like something tasting him. The image—prompted by the unpleasant affair of my meal—disgusted me and I leapt upright, gesturing wildly at the couple on the breakwater. Nobody else had witnessed this. The boy could be lying there with a punctured lung, drowning on his own fluids while Mum and Dad bickered about how best to lock a bicycle to a post.

Now the boy found his voice and let out a cry. He was clearly hurt. The sound did not reach his parents. I hurried down the steps from the patio to the sand, ignoring the bleats of the waitress who had returned to present me with my bill.

As I rounded the first set of steps, a shoulder of the patio blocked out the view to the beach. In my peripheral vision—I was concentrating on my descent and did not want to follow the boy into A&E with a pratfall of my own—I saw a diabolically large shadow separate itself from the surface of the sea, close to where he was lying. It was muscular, gunmetal grey, carrying the sheen of something alive and purposeful.

I began to scream and shout, hollering like a madman, and the faces of the boy’s parents were tilted down to me as I rounded the final flight and reached the sand. As I had disturbed them from their obsession with the bike lock, so I had disturbed whatever it was that had risen from the sea.

Now there was just the boy, getting wetter as the tide foamed at his back. I yelled at the dozy idiots to get down to their poor child, and they whirled around like pantomime actors on a stage. Mum started wailing; Dad shouted “Billy! Billy!” in a desperate voice. I suddenly felt bad about raising my voice at them. A momentary loss of concentration and a child’s life was in the balance.

I got to him first, moments before the father.

“Don’t touch him!” I snapped, and he favoured me with a gaze to cook the skin off my bones. “He might have a bad break. If you lift him up it could be catastrophic.”

“He was right next to me,” the father said. “He was an inch away.”

“It’s these railings,” I said. “Fine for you and me, but they look like a climbing frame for children.”

We crouched by Billy and managed to get him to tell us if he hurt anywhere. It soon became apparent that the relatively dampening effect of the sand and a child’s natural “bounciness” had resulted in little more than a bad fright.

“I’ll call an ambulance, if you want me to,” I offered.

“It’s okay,” said the mother, as she rocked her son and repeatedly kissed the top of his head. “We’ll drop by the hospital and get him seen to.”

They thanked me fulsomely and traipsed up to the main road. I felt the occasional pang I got when I see children playing, or being cuddled by their parents. A wishfulness, a wistfulness. The faint memory of tender, unconditional, filial love. And then it was gone, and I turned back to the ocean, which was being whipped into large combers of seething white.

I stared into it for some time, trying to convince myself that what I’d seen was strange shadow-play, a collision of the last glint of sunlight and the enveloping dark of the squall.

“You’re bitter,” a voice said.

“I beg your pardon?” I turned to see the waitress standing a few feet away, holding out a piece of paper.

“Your bitter,” she said. “You just have to pay for your bitter. No charge for the food.”

* * *

I went back to my bicycle and unlocked it. As I pedalled towards the village centre I caught sight of the blonde teenage girl wrapped in a dark blue towel. She was standing at the end of the breakwater and calling in a tiny, fragmented voice that was pulled this way and that by the wind: “Harry? Harry?”

V

MRS. COTTERHAM • THE POLICE MAKE SOME ENQUIRIES • AN INVITATION

I stopped in the village to buy stamps and to send my postcards. I spotted Mr. Gluckmann while I waited in the post office queue—he was talking animatedly to a man in a dark suit who held a clipboard. They were standing in front of an estate agent’s window. Mr. Gluckmann was wearing a long, grey raincoat, a hat, scarf and gloves. He looked like someone trying to conceal himself, and I wondered if that was what I would do if I suffered his skin condition or whether I would consider it a problem for the public to have to deal with. My attention was gradually drawn away from that strange old man to a conversation two women ahead of me in the queue were having about the Fisherman. Something had happened on the island, it transpired, that morning.

One of the women, whose hair was so white you’d be forgiven for expecting a light dusting of talc to spring from it at every movement she made, was pale with shock. “On your own doorstep,” she said. “Who would countenance such a thing?”

The other woman was more fatalistic. “Why should we be immune? You hear people say ‘Why me, why us?’ all the time and you have to ask the question, ‘Why not me, why not us?’”

Apparently a group of teenage revellers having a bonfire near the cliffs on the southern edge of the island had spotted a woman in the rocks, close to the airport. Her bright orange umbrella marked her out among the black teeth where she had been discarded, otherwise she might never have been discovered at all. A post-mortem was being carried out that afternoon, but everyone was convinced she would be the next notch on the Fisherman’s tally stick.

I was feeling tired by now; within an hour it would be dark and I didn’t want to be navigating those treacherous roads with the small, ineffectual lights on the bike. I set off back along the coastal road thinking of Clarissa, and the events of the day, and wondering if, after all, my dead wife would have liked it here.

Thanks to the weird, cruel way of the world, my journey back was just as tough and rigorous as the first leg, the wind having changed direction to beat me in the face as I fought against that long incline to the disintegration of the road, where the slope would turn in my favour, but the poor surface would keep me at a crawl until I reached the causeway. The light had turned gloomy by then, full of mud, so I could no longer see a clear break between the sky and the sea.

I returned the bike to the lean-to inside the gate and hurried back to my room, hoping to avoid the Cotterhams, but Alastair must have been waiting for me because he shot out of the door, his face wild, his normally well-groomed hair antic.

“Have you seen Penny?” he demanded. He said it in such a way as to make any denial seem redundant, yet deny it I had to.

“Not since this morning, when I left,” I said. “Why?”

Alastair studied me as if I must be lying, concealing something, and I thought: The Fisherman. No. No. Surely not.

“She’s missing,” he said. “She left this morning to go for a walk, clear her head—she suffers from these awful migraines—and I told her I would have breakfast ready for her return, but an hour went by, then two, and she didn’t come back.”

“Have you contacted the police? The coast guard?”

He looked suddenly close to tears, as if my saying this had somehow confirmed what he was fearing. “No,” he said. “I wanted to wait as long as possible. I wanted to ask you…” His voice tapered off, perhaps as he realised how pathetic he sounded.

“Allow me,” I said, and swept past him, into the Officer’s Quarters. Ralph was sitting on one of the sofas, his knees drawn up to his chin, trying not to allow the little boy through, but failing miserably. He looked alarmed, forlorn, lost. I tried to smile at him, but the muscles in my face were still stiff from the journey—I must have looked anything but optimistic to him; he turned away.

I managed to get through to the island police office and informed them briefly of the situation and our whereabouts. They told me to stay where we were, and that an officer would be with us within the half-hour.

I went straight to my suitcase and pulled out the small bottle of Jura I’d brought with me to help keep the nip from my bones. I poured two glasses and handed one to Alastair. He eyed the whisky with suspicion but swallowed it down in one gulp. He sighed. “Thanks,” he said. “That was good.”

I sipped my own drink in a more leisurely fashion, perched on the edge of the kitchen table while he sat with Ralph and tried to comfort him. When I’d finished I pulled on my coat and went up to the gate and peered through the hatch, trying to make out any kind of movement on the causeway, or the hills leading off in the direction of Bray. After about five minutes I saw headlights following the ruined road towards the causeway.

Ambient light, most probably from the fort’s floodlights, picked out the reflective stripes on the side of the car. I unlocked the gate as it pulled up in the small parking space and two uniformed officers climbed out.

We didn’t speak. I merely led the way and indicated Alastair’s whereabouts. The officers thanked me with the kind of sad, formal smile that heralds no good news.

I listened, a hand over my mouth, as the officers went through the motions. We’re very sorry to have to inform you… terrible news… your wife, Penelope, was found this morning… she died as a result of her injuries…

It was decided that he and Ralph should leave immediately in order to identify the body. I told Alastair that I would help in any way possible and he thanked me, though I imagine he barely heard what I said to him. I gave Ralph a pat on the back and told him to be strong and look after his dad, but he was in a terrible state, unable to hold the tears back any longer.

What a terrible, terrible ordeal. Losing my own wife had no bearing on this whatsoever. We’d both had time to come to terms with what was happening and Clarissa’s demise, though premature, was as near to what one might term a ‘good’ death as one could hope. I wished Alastair and his boy might find some form of closure. It was pale comfort, I suppose, but at least a body had been found. If the rocks had not snagged her, she might never have been seen again.

I had another glass of whisky in a bid to ward off the maudlin thoughts jostling for attention, and to blunt my senses against the realisation that I was now alone in this remote outcrop. My skin prickled with the thought of Mr. Gluckmann emerging from the water like a sponge that has been chewed beyond recognition. I thought I still smelled the residue of our meeting the previous night in the tips of my fingers and felt my gorge rising. I managed to reach the bathroom before I was sick, and I was bizarrely grateful for the hot stink of whisky fumes to mask that other odour.

Back in the Soldier’s Quarters I showered and brushed my teeth, and fell into a weak, feverish sleep invaded by Gluckmann, who was once again naked, his skin looped and pale like something molten. What looked like organic baskets were stitched into the flesh around his waist and slung over his shoulders like bandoliers. Each basket was topped by a scalp, to keep covered whatever lay inside.

He came out of the shadows and the moonlight, where it touched him, made him translucent, and I discerned shadowy joins in the skin, like little blisters. They shimmered in a peristaltic motion, chasing each other over the immense surface area of his body like shoals of fish jinking this way and that to confuse a pursuer. The ‘baskets’ I noticed were translucent too. Each contained something craven in attitude, hunched in on itself as if trying to hide. Something limbless, yet budding, with a network of veins feeding, and leaving, a soft, red heart beating at the centre. Something unformed, vaguely human, yet riddled with teeth and spines.

I woke up cold and frightened and close to tears. I had wet the bed.

Angry with myself, I stripped the sheets and took another shower. It was a couple of hours until dawn, but I didn’t want to court sleep again, not with that poor woman dead and the spectre of Gluckmann so fresh in my thoughts. There would be no refreshing slumber now.

So I dressed and made tea and I took it up to the flagpole, where a cannon the best part of a hundred years old had been left to rust away, a reminder and perhaps a warning of what had occurred on this island during the war. The Union Jack whipped and smacked under assault from the wind. The Cotterhams must have been up to perform the ceremony. I imagined Penny trying to coax a tune from the bugle, the family laughing together at whatever squeaks and squawks flew into the night.

There was no sign of any lone swimmer in the ocean.

The hot drink inside me, I felt much happier. Despite the terror of the dream and the unpleasantness of the previous evening I felt buoyed, optimistic even. I was on the mend and not feeling any deleterious side effects from my hours cycling, beyond a slight rash and a not unpleasurable ache on the tops of my thighs.

I went down to the kitchen to find that at some time in the night Alastair had packed away the family things and vacated their rooms. There were two letters on the kitchen table addressed to me. One was from him, thanking me for my help and wishing me well, the other was from Mr. Standish, hoping that the unfortunate incident had not put me off the island, and asking whether I would like to accompany him—weather permitting—on a kayaking expedition that afternoon.

VI

MADMAN’S WOUND • STRIKING TRANSIT AND AN UNEXPECTED HAZARD • THE BONE BOOK

To ensure I spent my energies best on the paddle rather than the pedal, Mr. Standish had arranged for a car to pick me up. Nigel, his son, took me on the brief drive to Murène Bay, a broad beach with a half-mile crescent of sand and a protective wall that Nigel told me had been built during the German Occupation. Mr. Standish (“Call me Trevor, please”) was waiting, looking very keen and professional in what I’m led to believe is called a shorty wetsuit. No such apparel for me, but then I wasn’t intending to go in the water, as he was.

I was given a life jacket and a paddle and shown to my boat, a handsome thing with a transparent base, to better enjoy any marine life we might espy.

“Very sturdy, very stable boats, these,” Trevor assured me. “Honestly, you could do an Irish jig in it and it would barely move. The only problem is that, as a result, it’s a bit of a bugger to steer, so you have to work hard to turn left or right.”

I told him not to worry. I had done quite a bit of canoeing in the Bristol Channel when younger (a lot younger), but I felt confident in a boat (especially when I’d checked my pocket to make sure the hag stone was safely accompanying me) and once we’d set off and I got the feel of the vessel beneath me, we started making good time heading around the coast to investigate the many caves that ate into the sides of the island.

We were lucky with the wind. Where it had been savage during the nights, now it barely registered, and what sun there was licked my bare arms and felt good on my face. Streams of silver fish darted beneath the boat and it was all I could do to keep my attention on the rocks to make sure I didn’t come a cropper and put a hole in a very expensive bit of kit.

“Over here!” called Trevor.

I dutifully paddled over to him and he showed me a deep crevice channelling into the cliff-face. “Madman’s Wound,” he yelled (the gravelly, rasping cry of the gannets gliding around us was near deafening). “So-called because for a period of about twenty years in the eighteenth century it actually sealed itself shut, healed itself, you might say—some weird realignment of the rocks, tectonic shifting, minor earth tremor, nobody knows for sure—until about seventy years ago, when it mysteriously reappeared.”

“Is it safe to go in?”

“Today, yes, I think so. Usually no, because of the swift tides around here and the choppy waters.”

“Shall we?”

“If you’re feeling intrepid enough, of course.”

And so it was that we braved the currents and the rocks to breach that horrible aperture in the cliff-face which looked—I hesitate to say it in case it should make me appear downright strange—vaguely sexual, and travelled through a claustrophobically narrow and low tunnel (having to duck our heads on numerous occasions) until we reached a broadening space that bounced the echoes of the lapping waves and our wondrous voices back at us, along with the eye-watering stench of bat guano.

I felt myself become rather faint—there was no obvious vent in the interior to allow the air in here to be recycled—and had to bring the boat to a stop alongside a low outcrop of rock in order to hold myself steady. To lose consciousness here, in near darkness, was to invite a swift drowning.

The shock of that thought helped revive me a little; but not as much as the inadvertent placing of my hand on something both horrible and yet strangely familiar. I thought I’d simply touched a pile of waste—more of that stinking ordure, most probably, or the body of a bat that had reached the end of its life and was settling into putrescence. But this possessed uniform shape, despite its revolting, organic yield beneath my fingers.

Before I knew what I was doing, I’d scooped up the queer artefact and hidden it beneath the seat of my boat. My heart was drumming—I felt as though I’d committed a crime. I heard Trevor yap on about the cave without taking any of it in, beyond the mention of it being rumoured to be a location for ceremonies involving pagans making sacrifices to the sea.

When his lecture had run its course, we navigated a route back out into open water and wearily paddled back to shore. I was tuckered out, but I felt good. Fresh sea air and honest exertion had repaired me, I believed.

“Look!” called Trevor. I followed the trajectory of his pointing finger and saw what at first glance looked like a lighthouse striped black and white on a promontory of rock fronting one of the smaller islands. But it was far too small and at the top, where there ought to have been a light, was more like a turret.

“Striking transit,” Trevor explained. “If you line that up with the white tower behind, so it’s blocked from sight, it means you’re in the vicinity of a hazard. Underwater rocks that will tear a hole in a ship like a witch’s claw through a pair of tights.”

We paddled carefully over to the area the striking transit was warning us about. “See?” Trevor yelled, his face intent on the transparent base of his boat. I stared down at the seemingly limitless green-grey sea and felt a twinge of vertigo at the thought of all that depth.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“You’ll see it in a minute, just keep drifting this way.”

I used the paddle as a rudder to steer closer to Trevor’s position, and flinched in shock as a cluster of sharp black jags of rocks appeared like thrusting fingers, inches away from the hull.

“Impressive, no?” As he made for shore, Trevor was grinning like a schoolboy who had found a rude magazine. I nodded and began to paddle to catch up with him. A glint of light caught my eye; no natural play of sunlight this… It was a soft, strangely greasy light coming from within the water—not a reflection, or a glint of scales on the silver flank of a mackerel.

I’d never seen its like before. It seemed to be some freak conglomeration of limbs and fins and, yes, mouths. A hideous collision of terrifying sea creatures, as if many different breeds had somehow managed to find a way to make the worst of their genes apparent in their offspring. It was devilish, unholy. Massive. And it was coming towards me.

It was finning its way around the treacherous columns of rock, moving much more swiftly than its awkward bulk should have allowed. The light came from odd, fleshy baskets arranged around and across its torso, similar to those I’d seen on Gluckmann in my dreams. Scraps of hairy skin—weird ‘lids’—flapped back and forth on top of them, allowing a view of what lay coiled inside: wet, dark things with grinning jaws that flashed in deep, layered triangles of silver. Shark mouths on human embryos—my nightmares given oxygen. I hadn’t been dreaming. I’d predicted this, or been channelled some hellish vision after meeting Gluckmann that night.

The speed of it.

It changed direction with the dizzying immediacy of a shoal of herring. I saw a strange mix of fin and hand rise up momentarily, splayed as a brake was applied to its progress, and it was like a pale starfish, webbed, peppered with tiny barnacles. It stared up at me with ancient, anemone-encrusted eyes, then at the thing I’d stolen from the cave, and I felt my knees began to shake uncontrollably with fear—they began spanking uncontrollably against the side of the kayak. What had I done?

Trevor was ahead of me now, so did not see me reach down to pick up my find. I thought my capacity for surprise had been blunted over the past few days, but here was another shock. I felt the wind belted from me as I beheld what could only be described as a book fashioned from the sea—its covers a melange of fish-skin, scales, fins and needle-bones. An eye stared lifeless, opaque, from one corner. The whole had been varnished with some kind of foul-smelling lacquer; it shone like the creamy, nacreous innards of an oyster shell.

I turned the ‘pages’ and a rotten nam pla odour assaulted me like slaps across the face. Mashed, dried fish, teeth and tentacles. Crushed octopus beaks. Frills and gills and suckers. No words. I felt each page as if there might be some braille-like sense to be gleaned from them, but I received nothing for my labour but the stomach-turning reek of decay and the jab of spines into my skin.

How long had it been there in the oily shadows of the cave?

The creature beneath the surface had changed its posture. It had assumed some sort of attitude of attack—everything sharp on its body curved towards me. I tossed the ‘book’ into the surf and wiped my hands against my jacket. Just some oddity created by a personage with too much time on their hands and an unhealthy relationship with things best left below the surface of the sea.

Nevertheless, the creature was besotted by it: I watched it follow the book as it sank to the shadows. The only thing to suggest any kind of living being had been within my vicinity was a stream of silver bubbles torrenting up from the deep.

Back at shore Trevor helped me drag the boat on to the sand.

“Are you okay, old chap?” he asked.

I nodded, incapable of speech. If I’d tried to say anything, I would have been violently sick. Eventually I was able to thank Trevor for allowing me to accompany him on his adventure (though I wanted to do anything but), blaming my pallor on my age. I’d been overdoing it, despite my overall feelings of good health. He drove me back to Fort Requin and I was horrified to see the sea lapping at the causeway, the beach where I had walked and unearthed the hag stone now covered completely by water.

“High tides,” he explained, unnecessarily. “But you’ll be quite all right inside those thick walls. The sea will have retreated by morning.”

He drove expertly through the surf, knowing instinctively where the road was, though I could see nothing beneath that shifting, hungry body. He dropped me off and waved goodbye, and I watched him churn through the water back to St. Anne.

Darkness was coming on and I suddenly felt very alone, and utterly certain that I wanted to leave. I should have asked him to take me to the airport. At the very least I might have asked him to stay with me that night, to provide company and beggar the fact he’d have thought me a nervous ninny.

I locked and bolted the gate, ditto the door to the kitchen. I was determined to spend the night in there rather than the chilly Soldiers’ Quarters with its unfettered vista of the ocean. I’d had quite a bellyful of the sea. I was looking forward to getting back to the dry, landlocked interior of Leicestershire.

I made myself a cup of tea and carried it to the sofa, where I made a den from the blankets and pillows from the bed Ralph had vacated (I found one of his comics that had fallen down the side; it upset me disproportionately). A long, sound sleep and then in the morning I would see about making preparations for my departure. Trevor Standish could have no qualms about reimbursement—my convalescence was predicated upon calm and rest. I’d encountered neither. I’m sure he would not like to have a heart attack as well as a murdered guest on his hands.

I turned out the light and wriggled down into my shelter—the sofa was long and deep. Rain rattled briefly at the windowpanes like the nails of someone demanding entry. I willed sleep to come. I did not want another night of anxiety. Usually, when I wanted slumber to envelop me, I thought of water. I imagined myself as a smooth, dark pebble thrown into deep water. By the time I hit the ground I would be snoozing contentedly.

Water, though, was the thing I least wanted to think about. I didn’t like what it concealed here. I didn’t appreciate the way it had erased the concourse and trapped me in this cold, forbidding place. They could dress it up as much as they liked—pretty curtains, fancy soaps in the dish by the bath—it was still a place where soldiers had marched, with their guns and their knives and grenades, death on their minds.

At least, I comforted myself, I was in a place that had been designed to be well-nigh impregnable. The walls in parts of this structure were almost twenty feet thick. Do your worst, Mr. Gluckmann, I thought. Do your damnedest.

VII

THE OUTPOST (II) • THE EYE OF THE STONE

“The hag stone, it finds you. You do not find it.”

I felt my neck snap as I jerked upright at the deep, clotted voice. Mr. Gluckmann was standing knee-deep in the surf, his baskets hanging glutinously around his hips like oilcloth canteens. What hair remained on his head hung limp and grey. His mouth was much wider than I had initially thought, the corners slack and encrusted with dried salt. His lips glistened, pursing obscenely. It was a mouth that looked like something big and meaty you might unlock from the seized shell of a bivalve.

His eyes, round and black, were fast upon my pocket. I felt the stone within cold against my thigh, as if it were the intensity of his gaze that was reducing its temperature.

“You know,” he said, “there are a lot of fishermen around here who invest great stock in the idea of holy stones protecting their boats? They tie them to nails hammered into the bows, near the gunwale. It is believed these stones ward off the approach of witches, or witch-directed spirits. Those that decide not to tie a stone to their vessel, or do not position it carefully, might not land as many fish. If they’re lucky. If they’re unlucky? Well, there are a lot of wrecks in these waters. A lot of unrecovered fishermen swaying in time to those deep ocean currents.”

Something flopped over the lip of one of the baskets. Long, spiny feelers, or, God forbid, fingers. As far removed from human as you could pray for. They clacked together, stiff but with some yield to them, and they were wet with some kind of slime, like the thick, bubbled spit worked up within the maws of crabs or lobsters. Mr. Gluckmann slapped at them with his hand and they retreated.

“How is your house-hunting going?” I asked. All of the baskets were rattling now—I saw movement within each one. Some were being stretched as whatever squirmed inside extended itself. The membrane thinned, whitening as claw or pincer or tooth became embossed against it.

Mr. Gluckmann rubbed at his cheek and the layers of flab there shivered. I wouldn’t have been surprised, had he teased them open, to see a set of gills arranged across the flesh. “We walk among you now,” he said. “It has been so long.”

Behind him the sea began to boil. I forced myself to look away, certain that my meagre faculties would not be able to cope with the sight of the thing—beyond massive—that could cause such a churning. I pulled the stone from my pocket and Mr. Gluckmann began to jangle and jerk like a marionette. Those baskets—those wombs—which I now saw were not merely looped over and around his body, but attached to Gluckmann’s skin, were swelling by the minute. Soon they would not be able to contain their inhabitants.

A shadow fell across the world, and the odour of something unimaginably old hit me like a wall. I felt the coil and slither of gigantic tentacles test my limbs from all angles. And slowly, inexorably, I was drawn towards the sea. At my back I felt the heat of jaws I refused to countenance.

The last thing I saw was Mr. Gluckmann carrying his crowning babies as he waddled towards the town and its unsuspecting population. “You are no threat to us,” he said, “damned as you are by the cage of your own mortality.”

* * *

Somehow I had become tangled in the blankets and sheets that formed my temporary bed. I was hot and sweaty, the stone in my hand threatening to slip from my grasp. It took a moment to orient myself, but in the end I was just glad to be anywhere other than in the grip of some terrible, benthic creature eager on adding me to the contents of its belly.

What a nightmare. The most horrible, the most vivid I have ever encountered in my three score years and ten.

What was worse was that only two hours had gone by since deciding to go to bed. Muscles aching, but sleep now as likely as Clarissa’s return, I padded to the kitchen and set about making myself a mug of hot milk.

The weather remained squally—spits of rain (or maybe even fragments of shingle and surf tossed up by the tantrum winds) clattered against the windows. I shrugged on my coat and, hot drink in hand, unbolted the door.

It was piercingly cold; within seconds my milk had been cooled to a drinkable temperature.

We walk among you now.

I shuddered. What was that dream all about? Some weird idea, fuelled by too much red wine and seafood, of a world being gradually overtaken by an army of amphibious Mr. Gluckmanns? Utterly preposterous, yet I felt vaguely proud of the breadth of my imagination. Surely my ongoing fear of dementia was a long way off yet.

I thought about the object I’d found in the cave. That weird, fishy book, if it could be called such a thing. I found myself thinking I was lucky to have thrown it back to the sea. It seemed unthinkable now that I might have taken it for good.

At the hatch in the gate I peered down towards the causeway and saw, with dismay, that the sea had completely cut me off from the mainland. Waves crashed up against the car park where I had trundled my cycle not twelve hours previously. I eyed that dark stretch feverishly, but there was nothing in it, or of it, that caught my attention. Nor would there be beyond limpets, seaweed and crabs. The most exotic thing found at these latitudes were conger eel and smooth-hound. Perhaps the odd seal.

I set my jaw against the weather and the water and drew an imaginary line under my fear. Come dawn, I would be shot of the place.

Turning back to the promise of warmth, I heard a sound under the racket of the sky and ocean that gave me pause. It sounded like crumbling masonry, but the walls here were sound as far as I could see. Rocks then? Peeling away from the cliff-face under scrutiny from the buffeting wind?

I tried leaning over the parapet in the courtyard fronting the quarters, but I could see nothing untoward. Then I remembered the Outpost, and the more expansive view the disintegrated walkway allowed of the bay. I put down my mug and clambered back up through the samphire to the narrow corridor and negotiated once more the mesh barriers and warning signs.

A shadow moved across the open doorway of that separated room.

I stared, barely able to breathe, and tried to convince myself I had not seen it. But then terrible sounds came to me from the black shadows of the open window and that gaping doorway. The tiny room ought not to have been able to produce the kind of acoustics that caused the sounds to carry, but here they came—moist, tearing noises. And beneath them, muttered, but with a kind of religious intensity, I heard words. They were words I’d never heard before—and never want to hear again—but I couldn’t replicate them here. They sounded foreign, wildly alien even, but somehow rooted to reality, an Earth I knew from folklore, or race memory or some-such.

Forgive me if I ramble, but it’s difficult for me to explain. I come from a modest background, a family that lived on the breadline for many years, after the hardships of World War II. I didn’t see a banana until I was in my teenage years. So this kind of peculiarity left me stunned, scared. It didn’t fit into any pattern I recognised.

Furthermore, I didn’t want to recognise. I wanted to block it out, forget it, refuse to acknowledge that anything like this could occur in a world I thought I’d got the hang of during my time in it. But I stood there and I listened and I cringed under the weight of those impossible words and the crimson sounds in which they were couched. There was injury and death and meanness in every plosive, fricative and aspiration.

Without realising it I had started crying. I felt like a child who had strayed into a room where grown-ups were fighting, or making violent love. I didn’t understand.

I began to edge back from the gap in the rock. I didn’t trust myself not to give away my position via some pathetic whimper, or pratfall.

I’d like to think, as I turned and plunged back towards that lockable fortified room, that cell of mine, that the stink coming off the waves was being pushed from Les Etacs, where the gannets turned the rock white in more ways than one, but I knew the odour was pulsing from the Outpost.

And I had to keep thinking of the smell, otherwise my mind would fasten on to the sight of something loose, like a grey sack, flopping across the doorway and being dragged away. A sack unfit for any kind of business, it was so full of holes. A sack, after all, though, yes. A sack it was.

I fought with the urge to try to escape, to cast my luck upon the depth of water on the causeway, and the hope that the current was not as keen as it looked. Come dawn, not three hours away, the waters would have retreated and I would be able to cross to the mainland and leave this wretched place for good.

I sat on my bed, fully dressed, gripping a bar from one of the loose bunk rails, my eyes glued to the handle of the door. I didn’t move for the rest of the night and, because the light came back to the room so stealthily, did not realise it was morning until, yawning, I felt my back crackle as if my spine had been taken from me during those cold, lonely hours, and replaced with a giant icicle. I was stiff all over, my neck bright with pain whenever I turned my head.

I put down the bar and went to the window, pulled back the curtains. Grey sky, grey sea. Les Etacs was engulfed with wings. The waves were topped with scimitars of foam, as if the sea were trying to copy the shape of the birds it stared at all day. Against my better judgement, I unlocked the door and stepped outside.

The wind was little more than playful this morning, exhausted from last night’s violence. I stared up at the little mound that prefaced the corridor to the Outpost and, though I desperately wanted to assuage my suspicion, my legs simply would not carry me back up there.

The beeping of a car horn.

I went back to my room and grabbed my packed suitcase. In that moment I felt my heart beating, but I was kidded into thinking it was a strong, healthy pulse—rather it was the flesh that carried it, grown weak over the decades, amplifying every pathetic rinse and suck of blood. Yet strangely, I was no longer afraid of that tardy muscle, sitting withered and wounded in its cage.

You are no threat to us…

I realised there were lots of other things to be fearful of in this world, and, in many ways, thank God, it had taken me a lifetime to discern it.

I shut the gate and struggled to remain upright on the slippery rock as I headed down to where the taxi was parked. The driver, my friend from Manchester, helped me to get the suitcase in the boot and then I was safely in the back seat and we were trundling over the causeway, now dry, the withdrawn tide collected in the surrounding rock pools, serene, all threat in abeyance; you’d be forgiven for thinking there was no such thing as high-tide here.

I felt in my pocket for the hag stone, momentarily panicked by the possibility I’d left it in the bed, but it was there, smooth and warm, and I clasped it as we headed towards the airport.

The heat in the taxi was thick and restful. I felt it seep into my bones.

Movement.

I jerked my head up and the muscles in my neck yelled at me. The sea was flat and relatively calm. No boats. But closer, down on a track beneath the road, what was that? It was Mr. Gluckmann, walking with his hands deep in his pockets, his wispy hair flailing around his head like seaweed lacing a submersed rock. He looked up as we slowly went by and his shaded eyes were shark-black. He smiled. I nodded, glad to see him fall behind us as the road improved and the taxi driver leaned on the accelerator.

Gluckmann raised his hand and I mirrored him. The hag stone was in my fingers. As I withdrew it, my view of the diminishing Gluckmann was impeded until he appeared within its hole, as he returned his arm to his overcoat pocket. And I had to close my eyes against the thrash in my chest and force myself over and over to believe that what I had seen in that ancient frame was skin and bone, and not the sinuous curve of a tentacle.