Crimson Shore

7

Morris McCool departed the Captain Hull Inn, feeling quite expansive despite the shepherd’s pie that lay heavily in his gut. While the meal had been a travesty of the real dish, he was quite surprised at the fine range of local beers and ales now available in America; on his last visit, twenty years before, he’d been hard-pressed to find something other than Coors.

McCool was an enthusiastic walker. Back in his village in Penrith, Cumbria, he always took a walk after dinner to aid digestion. He was a great believer in fresh air and exercise, and it was on these after-dinner walks that he’d had many of his historical insights and ideas.

But this would be a walk with a purpose. Taking a hand-sketched map from his pocket, he perused it, oriented himself, and started toward a silvered wooden staircase leading down the bluffs to the beach below.

The rollers came in on a regular cadence, thundering and hissing up the strand, withdrawing in a sheen and repeating. Keeping to where the sand was still firm from the dampness of the retreating tide, he continued down the beach toward the broad marshes where the river Exmouth flowed into the bay. The infamous “greenheads,” which dominated the heat of the day, had retired for the cool October evening.

He inhaled the salt air with satisfaction. He was so close now... so very close. While there were still some puzzling — indeed, quite inexplicable — aspects, he was sure he had solved the main mystery.

The beach was deserted, save for a small figure behind him enjoying a similar evening stroll. The figure seemed to have appeared rather suddenly, out of the marshes. McCool was not pleased that someone might note where he was going, and he quickened his pace to leave the fellow traveler behind. Even as he walked, the lighthouse on the distant bluff began winking on and off, no doubt automated to come on as the sun set. And the orange globe of the sun was sinking down into the skeleton pines along the verge of the marsh.

The beach turned inward where a ribbon of the Exmouth entered the ocean, the current flowing out of the broad estuary with the ebbing tide, exposing dark gray mudflats. There was a rich but not entirely unpleasant smell coming off the flats. As he made the turn, he glanced back and was considerably startled to see the figure behind him was much closer. The man must have been walking briskly, perhaps even jogging, to have gained on him that much. Was he trying to catch up? Even from a distance McCool didn’t like the look of the man.

A faint trail led through the marsh grass along the edge of the trees, and he quickened his pace even more. The man was perhaps a hundred yards behind now, dressed in rough-hewn and rather obscure-looking clothing. Or at least that was McCool’s impression from a quick glance.

He walked along the trail, checking the rude map. The nineteenth-century working waterfront, long abandoned, was around the next bend of the estuary. As he turned the corner, it came into view: a series of old wooden pilings extending in parallel rows of stubs into the bay, the decking long gone. Massive granite pilings, formed of rough-cut blocks, still stood along the shore — and would stand to the end of time — the granite foundations of loading docks and wharves, along with a ruined fish-processing plant. McCool had carefully mapped this area, using historical documents and photographs to re-create the waterfront of the 1880s. This was where the draggers and seiners and coasters had plied their trade, having endured a long economic decline from the whaling heyday of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The moribund waterfront had finally succumbed to the infamous “Yankee Clipper” hurricane of 1938. The modern waterfront had been rebuilt farther up the estuary, in a more protected location. But the town had never really recovered.

As the rotting piers came into view, McCool heard a sound behind him and turned to find the man approaching him at a determined rate. And now he noticed what a peculiar and frightening figure this was: with a strangely warped face, a Brillo-brush of wiry red hair, disturbing wet lips thicker on one side than the other, a splotch of diseased-like freckles, a three-pointed beard, and a projecting brow with a single bushy eyebrow straight across. McCool thought he knew everyone in town, but he had never seen this fellow before. He was the stuff of nightmares.

He carried a bayonet in one hand, which — as he approached with fast stride and gleaming eyes — he unsheathed with a zing of steel.

With an involuntary cry of confusion and fear, McCool turned and ran toward the old piers. His pursuer also broke into a run, keeping pace, not closing in or dropping behind, almost as if driving him forward.

McCool cried out for help once, then again, but he was far from the town and his voice was swallowed by the vast marshlands beyond the rotting piers.

In an effort to escape his pursuer, he plunged off the trail, scrambled up an embankment above the first pier, vaulted over a stone foundation, and clawed his way through a thicket of raspberry bushes. He could hear his pursuer crashing along behind.

“What do you want?” McCool cried, but received no answer.

The brambles tore at his pants and shirt, scratching his face and hands. He burst out the other side of the thicket and continued along the contours of the embankment, stumbling past a rotting, caved-in fish house and a tangle of rusted cables and chains.

This was insane. He was being pursued by a lunatic.

He sobbed in panic, gasping, sucking in air. In his terror he tripped over another broken foundation and rolled partway down the embankment, regained his feet, then sprinted into a broad area of marsh grass. Maybe he could lose the man in the grass. He pushed forward, pinwheeling his arms, pressing through the thick grasses. He glanced back; the red-haired lunatic was still following, eyes like coals, sweeping effortlessly along, bayonet in hand.

“Help!” he screamed. “Someone help me!”

A flock of blackbirds burst upward from a swath of cattails in a mass of beating wings. There was no way to outrun this dogged pursuer. He was just being pushed deeper and deeper into the marsh.

The water. If he could just reach the water. He was a strong swimmer. The lunatic might not swim as well.

He veered left, toward the heart of the marsh. Now the grass was so high he couldn’t see ahead, and he stumbled forward, bashing aside the sharp grass with his arms, barely noticing the cuts and slashes it inflicted. On and on he plunged, hearing the crash and swish of his pursuer, now only a dozen feet behind. The bay or a marsh channel would be ahead somewhere. Something, for God’s sake, something...

And suddenly the grasses ended and he burst onto a mudflat, stretching ahead fifty yards to a swift-flowing channel of water.

No help for it; he leapt into the mud, sinking to his knees. With a cry of fear, he struggled, flopping and sucking and flailing through the muck. He turned and saw the red-haired freak standing at the edge of the grass, bayonet in hand, his entire face distorted into a grotesque grinning visage.

“Who are you?!” he screamed.

The man melted back into the grass and disappeared.

For a moment McCool stood in the muck, gasping for breath, coughing, his hands on his knees, feeling as if his lungs might fall out. What to do now? He looked around. The channel lay fifty feet farther on, a muddy stream going out with the tide. On the far side was more endless marsh.

Never would he go back into that nightmare of grass: not with that maniac lurking in there. Never. And yet the only way out of this hell was back through the grass, or else to take to the water and drift out with the tide.

He stood there, heart pounding. The light was fading; the water ran on and the blackbirds wheeled about, crying.

He slopped his way toward the water channel. The mud grew firmer as he approached the edge, where he paused. The mud was cold — and the water, he knew, would be colder still. But he had no choice.

He waded in. It was very cold. He pushed off, letting the current take him, and he began to swim downstream, burdened by the tweed jacket and mud-soaked trousers and heavy leather shoes. But he was an experienced swimmer and kept himself above water, taking long strokes, making fast time, the marsh grass slipping by. The channel narrowed, the current growing swifter, the grass closing in on both sides. He was heading toward the sea. That was all he could focus on. Thank God, he would soon see the beach, where he could climb out and get back to the safety of the Inn.

As he rounded another bend in the channel, swimming frantically, he saw the wall of grass part to reveal a figure: red hair, distorted grinning face, blazing yellow eyes, gleaming bayonet.

“God, no. No!” he screamed, making frantically for the far shore of the channel even as the current swept him toward the embankment where the figure stood — even as the figure leapt like a raptor into the water, crashing down on him — even as the thrust of cold steel felt like a sudden icicle piercing his guts.