New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

PACK YOUR COAT Aliya Whiteley

It swept through our school at a ferocious rate. By the time first bell had sounded for break everyone already knew it, and it was busily mutating in the playground to appeal even more to the children that shared it.

Such stories are viruses. They have a life of their own.

They breathe, and move, and infect us.

This one was about an orange coat.

I didn’t realise how much it had a hold on me until I came across it again, twenty years later, in my office.

“My sister’s friend,” said Katie.

“Your sister’s friend saw him?” Tyler leaned forward, over his desk, his attention fully diverted from his computer.

“What’s this?” I said. I’d just finished a call with a potential buyer for the business. It was the first sniff in an age, and I had been indulging myself in the dream of leaving town for good, starting over somewhere else, as I emerged from the back room to get a coffee.

“Tell her,” said Tyler. “Start at the beginning.”

She walks along the top of the cliffs, with eyes cast down, attention reserved only for the sea. It is unpredictable where the rocks jut out the waves bulge and then spray erupts over the jagged peaks. But this is all happening far below her, and there is no path down. The cliffs have been marked as unsafe, and wire nets have been stapled over the barefaced slabs that threaten to fall. It feels like containment to her; if they should crash, let them go.

There isn’t much daylight left. The tide is coming in fast. The waves have a ferocity to them that excites her. Soon the rocks will be covered, and then the small lip of the beach below.

The dog is having a fine time, capering ahead of her, stopping, sniffing, running on. She doesn’t call him back. He’ll come when he’s ready.

The path diverges from the cliff, turning inwards, and gorse bushes spring up on either side, but she ignores it and sticks to the edge instead. It’s her usual route. A faint track has established itself through footfall over the years. She’s not sure whether it’s been made only by her own walking, or if she’s just one of many locals who come this way.

The wind shifts direction to blow her hair straight back, bringing tears to her eyes and new sounds to her ears. Seagulls. The shush and crash of water. The dog, barking.

She calls for him, and he doesn’t come.

She speeds up, scanning for him, and finally spots him in the distance. He’s very close to the edge, dodging forwards, barking, chasing around in a circle to start again. Shouting at him does no good. She runs the remaining distance, the cold wind stabbing at her face, into her lungs, and grabs his collar to clip on the lead.

His attention is still on the edge. She looks over and sees, on the rocks, an orange coat.

It takes her a moment to work out that it’s not just a coat, flapping. A man wears it. He is waving.

She waves back. He does not stop waving, using both arms over his head. The spray of the waves is soaking him in regular bursts. He slips to one knee, then struggles to stand.

There’s no boat, no sign of how he got there. Did he climb down? How can he climb back up?

The waves are breaking so close to him. For a moment he is hidden from view by a fierce uprush of the sea, and she holds her breath. But he’s still there when it recedes. He is looking at her.

She takes out her phone and dials the emergency number. She asks for the coastguard, and describes where he is. She feels calm, even though the dog is pulling at the lead, still barking. She can’t hear what the voice is saying. “What was that?” she asks.

“Hold on,” says the voice. “Hold on.” It’s not really a message for her, but for the man on the rocks, so she shouts it down to him, knowing that he can’t possibly hear her.

He continues to wave. She can’t wave back any more, with one hand holding the lead and the other holding the phone. “Hold on,” she calls again.

She feels the big wave coming. There’s a pattern to the sea. The smaller waves clashing over the rocks can only lead to a larger swell. The sea pulls back, exposing more of the rock on which he stands, and then the water surges over him entirely, like a sheet being thrown into the air to settle on a bed.

When it recedes, he’s gone.

She scans for a sign of him. The orange coat. Surely that will be visible? Her eyes will find the orange coat. But she does not see it, and the coastguard does not find it, even though they search for hours, well into the night.

Later on, an official suggests delicately to her that maybe the man was a product of her imagination. Not there at all.

“That’s an old one,” I say. It has made some more changes to itself since the first time I heard it, but I’d know it anywhere. It’s the coat that gives it away; the coat is always the same.

“It just happened last week,” says Katie. “To my sister’s friend.”

“Friend of a friend of a friend,” adds Tyler, and smiles at me.

I try to think of something managerial to say, but the best I can come up with is some old cliché about time being money, and then I retreat to my office, abandoning my plans for coffee in my desire to get away from the same old conversations, the usual crowd. The story that never ends

I meet Sarah in the Ship and Anchor. She’s already ordered two white wines. Large ones. It’s been a bad week for her too, then.

We sit in the back room. It was once called the Ladies’ Lounge, and is always quieter than the main bar, as if memories of those times continue to permeate the atmosphere.

“Here’s to Fridays.”

“Fridays,” I echo. She starts talking, and I listen. She’s not from here originally, so even when she’s moaning about life I find it more bearable than talking to the people I grew up amongst. She brings a fresh perspective to it all, which makes me feel better for a while.

I tell her about the possible buyer for the firm.

“That’s brilliant! I know it’s taken a while, but I’ve always said someone was going to come along. That place is a goldmine. Solar panels are the future.”

“Not my future, hopefully.”

She knows this story too. I inherited a business from my father, gave it a few tweaks to bring it up to the present day, and have been tied to it ever since. And she’s wrong: it’s not a goldmine. It’s a life support machine. It sustains me and ties me to itself. Being connected to it, and this town, is almost like living, and nothing like a life at all.

“Are they offering enough?” says Sarah.

“Just about.” I have a whole year of travel planned. I’ve had my route marked on a map above my bed for years. I used to trace it with my finger. “There’s a long way to go yet, though.”

She doesn’t say good luck or fingers crossed or anything along those lines, which is another reason why I like her. She tips her glass to touch mine, and we both drink.

“Why do you hate this town so much?” she asks. “It’s really not so bad. There are worse places to live.”

This is something I’ve never explained to her, no matter how many times she asks the question. I suspect she’d think me crazy if I told her that it is the act of belonging here that makes me hate it. It claims me as its property, and the more I struggle, the more it presents reasons to stay. Financial, emotional. The business, my mother. Love, fear. So many things that it should not be possible to leave behind, and I resent every one of them. Fear—that’s the one I hate the most.

So I shrug and say, “All I want is the opportunity to find that out for myself.”

“Listen,” she says. “The strangest thing happened to my neighbour’s uncle when he was walking the coastal path a while back. Apparently—”

Up high, walking free: it’s the daily routine. A stroll along the cliffs. Every day the hills to the path get harder to climb, but he has it in his head now: miss a day and that’s the start of the end. He’s become attached to routines, that’s how he phrases it to the cleaner who comes in twice a week, paid for by his nephew, who’s a good lad.

Lad. He’s in his forties, with children of his own, but the passage of time never quite seems to take. It’s like this walk. He’s done it so many times, and it’s new to him every day.

The sea is unique, of course, so perhaps that’s the reason. What’s that quote? About never being able to stand in the same river twice. Down below, at the base of the cliffs, the sea is alive, twisting and dragging, rumbling over the spit of rocks that stretches out to form part of the natural harbour of the town. The tide is rushing in, along with the stronger light of late morning. Unstoppable.

He ignores the official path and follows the lighter trail for local feet, hugging the cliff edge. There’s talk of it being dangerous, but if he’s going to go in a rock fall then so be it. Nature itself, snatching away the ground from under you; you can’t argue with that.

There’s a girl on the rocks.

That can’t be right. There’s no path that leads down that way, never has been. But there she is, clear as day, in an orange coat with the hood up and her brown hair spilling out around the sides. The white spray is fierce about her as the waves dance. She has her legs planted wide, no doubt to try to keep her balance, but they are such very thin legs, sticking out from the frill of a dark dress, just visible beneath the coat.

She is waving to him.

He waves back.

She’s in danger. Can’t she see it? Maybe she could swim for it. Her face is very small, and his eyesight is not what it used to be, but he thinks she’s smiling.

He shouts, but his voice is snatched away by the wind. Useless. If only he had one of those phones—his nephew offered to get him one, and he said he’d never use it. What a stupid thing to say. Arrogant, really, to assume there’d never be a need for such a thing.

He shouts that he’ll get help.

A big wave hits, one of those that can reach far up the cliff side and make you think it can even come over the top in the worst weather, and he steps back from the edge, and catches his breath. When he looks for her again, she’s not there. No sign of her, not even a flash of that bright coat.

He looks and looks, wishing for better eyes, and eventually forces himself to look away and start a shambling pace home, to find help, to reach a phone, wishing for faster legs this time. For youth. For anything that could make a difference to the day.

“The weirdest part is, the coastguard searched for hours and—”

“Didn’t find a thing?” I supply smoothly.

“They found an orange coat. For a girl. But it was really old. An antique. They couldn’t understand how it had survived for that long, and then to stay intact in the water, too…”

“That’s a good twist,” I tell her.

“No, it’s true! My neighbour told me directly. Seriously, he wouldn’t lie.” She looks so earnest. I think she really wants to believe it.

This is how it survives. This is how it spreads.

The negotiations of the sale progress, and I try to focus on that alone, but my mind keeps returning to the first time I heard the story. I was very young; was it young too? I doubt it. It had a power to it, even then, that suggested a certain maturity.

I ran home after school that day and found my mother in the kitchen, as usual, looking out of the window towards the harbour. We lived high up in the hills, close to the old church building and the temporary cabins that constituted the school. Behind us a new estate was being built at a frightening speed. We were a growing town.

I told her about the young girl on the rocks, in her orange coat. To me, she was the friend of the Headmaster’s niece, or some such string of relationships. My grasp of how people were connected was tenuous. Like many people, it still is: when others talk of their husband’s brother’s friend’s wife’s daughter’s uncle’s and so on and so on, I soon lose interest. Where do all these paths intersect? The story is always complete, encapsulated, no matter how many degrees of separation it involves. The walker on the cliffs and how they are connected to the town—that remains incidental. We should all be focusing on that orange coat. That’s what the story wants.

The orange coat was the part I wanted to tell my mother about in particular. I could see it so clearly in my mind.

“That old chestnut,” said my mother.

She returned her calm gaze to the sea.

Then the story disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. I wonder where it moved on to. Down the coast to Cornwall, perhaps.

I hated every small alteration that came along as it continued its impregnation of the playground. I had thought it was true. Some part of me wanted it to be true.

“Did they find the girl?” I asked my mother one night as she sat with me after one of the nightmares that started at around that time. “The one with the orange coat?”

She kissed my forehead and squeezed my hand. Her palm was warm and solid. “Best take it all with a pinch of salt,” she said.

Years later I looked up where that phrase came from. There are a few variations. The one I remember is that the Roman general Pompey ingested a little poison every night to try to make himself immune to it; in order to make it palatable he took it with a grain of salt.

My mother likes her sayings. I wonder if she realises that they all have old stories attached to them too.

“It’s a beautiful part of the world,” says Simon. He has balanced his brown leather briefcase against the leg of his chair. It looks expensive and shiny and new. Possibly it was made in China, and then displayed in a shop that’s part of a chain. There’s no story lurking behind it.

It will become part of this office. My father occupied this space for so many years, struggling to keep the business afloat, and now I will sell it and be gone, and Simon and his briefcase can take my place.

“It is stunning in the summer,” I say. “Bleak in the winter, if I’m honest. But some people prefer it that way.”

“Fewer tourists,” says Simon with a smile. “I’m sure there are lots of local customs I’m not aware of. I’ll stand out by a mile at first.”

“You’ll get to know them. Everyone’s very friendly. Katie and Tyler are keen to take you on a night out once you’re settled, and they’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

“They seem very capable. It’s a real shame you can’t hang around for a bit so I can pick your brain, but—”

“My flight leaves tonight,” I tell him. Saying such words brings on a spasm of terror every single time. It’s tempting fate, surely. This is where he says I’ve changed my mind. But no. He doesn’t. He nods.

“Very exciting,” he says. I can tell from his face that he thinks he’s got the best deal here. I’m the fool who sold a goldmine to get away from a beautiful place. Surely there can’t be any place in the world as wonderful as this.

“The best thing about living here is the sea,” says my mother.

“There’s sea in other places,” I hear myself saying, ridiculously. “Seventy per cent of the world is water.”

“It’s not the same.”

She’s been positioned next to the window that looks out over the harbour. Her favourite spot. A crocheted blanket has been tucked around her knees by one of the workers. I feel grateful for their ongoing care of her, and their sympathetic looks on the bad days, but today is a good day.

“You’re right,” I say. “It’s not the same.”

Is it even worth saying goodbye, when she won’t remember it? Maybe she will. I have constructed versions of her, leading up to this moment. There is a version that calls out my name every night, and one of the workers phones my mobile and tells me I have to return. And there is a version that forgets me as soon as I’m gone, sits peaceably in this spot, and looks blankly at me if I ever return. I honestly don’t know which version I’d prefer.

“You look like that lady,” she says.

So it’s not such a good day, after all.

“Which one, Mum?”

“The one on the rocks that time.”

“When?”

She can’t answer this. I shouldn’t have asked the question. She moves her head from side to side, searching, and then returns her vision to the view.

I could ask—was it by the cliffs? What was the woman wearing?

In truth, I don’t know if the story follows me, or if I search it out. It’s like the fear of the dark I developed after the nightmares started. At first, a small bedside light kept it at bay. Then it wasn’t enough. I needed the overhead light on, to try to banish all shadows, and what might lurk in them. Then the dark was a strip of black, under the door, ready to creep in if I let it. I had my eyes fixed on it every night until sleep overcame me.

Once you are afraid of something, you see it, for just a moment, every time you close your eyes. You hear the echo of it between each breath.

I said goodbye in the end, and she looked confused and shook her head. But she did not make a fuss, and now it’s done, and the last thing before I take a taxi to the train station is a slow walk up the cliffs to look out over a view from a vantage point I’ve not dared to visit since I was a child.

It’s approaching sunset, and it’s going to be an unspectacular one, not worthy of a picture postcard; the clouds are low on the horizon, and the sea is choppy. There’s a light, stinging rain starting up. The tide is coming in. It roars and crashes below, and then gathers itself back for another assault upon the rocks.

I take the path that only locals use, skirting around the gorse bushes to stick close to the crumbling edge. I refuse to lift my eyes from my feet; I will not look over the edge. Not until I’m ready. I’ll know when I’m ready.

I wondered if I would know the spot, but a voice inside me tells me when to stop walking. I’ve arrived. I will see it. If I dare to look over the edge, it will be there.

I blink. I breathe.

The line of rocks stretches out to sea, and the tide is rushing in fast, churning and writhing around the peaks. The rain is intensifying; it is hard and cold against my face. It makes it difficult to see, and I have to stand there for a long time before I’m certain.

There’s nobody down there.

No man, no woman. No little girl. No apparition, no mermaid, no creature of the deep. No ghost, no spirit.

No orange coat.

It was never waiting for me in this place. And that means I cannot leave it, and my fear of it, behind.

Will I find it on the other side of the world? It might not be set on a cliff top, or hinge on the threat of a relentless tide. It might have replaced the police or the coastguard with other officials, or done away with the dog barking at the waves. But it will manifest again.

Wherever I go, I’ll take it with me.