Matt Dovey

This is the story of a coincidence. At any rate I call it a coincidence.

The road where I live is very long and very straight. It's paved with wood and well lighted after dark. The result is that cars and taxis going by during the night... often go quite fast. I don�t blame 'em. They hardly ever wake me unless they stop near the house.

However, about two months ago one did.

I have had what I believe to be the most remarkable day in my life, and while the events are still fresh in my mind, I wish to put them down on paper as clearly as possible. Let me say at the outset that my name is James Clarence Withencroft.

We looked at our face in the mirror. Or rather, she looked at me looking at her, even if she couldn't see me. For many years I have looked out of those eyes, biding my time, saving my strength, waiting to speak.

It doesn't have to be like this, I often tell her. You don't have to fight me.

Hooded eyes stare with fierce intensity across the scarred oak table as the creature looms out of the shadows. "I had never thought to see another..." he muses.

I nod my glass of claret in Adam's direction. The dregs glint like drops of spilled blood in the candlelight.

A faint ringing of metal on metal, the tink! of a coin glancing against a stone wall, a pause before the soft, final landing, and the day's work begins anew. I briefly consider ignoring the summons, as I do every dank, dark morning, but the memory of my mother's words chide me from my nest of leaves and moss.

I push myself to my hands and knees and feel something squelch under my palm.

She came to me through the scent of lavender, curling about my nose like smoke.

"Honora?" I asked. "My sweet? Is that you?" My eyelids cracked open as my head pounded from a night fueled by alcohol and opium. I remembered nothing, except for stumbling out of a pub and going after...after something...

"Thomas," she whispered, her voice hollow and distant.

The dusk of a November day was falling fast when John Aylsford came out of his lodging in the cobbled street and started to walk briskly along the road which led eastwards by the shore of the bay. He had been at work while the daylight served him, and now, when the gathering darkness weaned him from his easel, he was accustomed to go out for air and exercise and cover half a dozen miles before he returned to his solitary supper.

We swung into Norton Street with our lights flashing but no siren, the standard burglary-in-progress procedure. As it was I don't think the guy would've noticed us had Constable Lenski and I pulled into the driveway of Number 38 playing Tiger Rag on trombones.

Last night, I dreamt of the drowned man again.

It starts with a murmur. A prayer, slithering through a sleeping shipmate's lips. Or perhaps a confession, or a memory caught in the fog of the ghostly hours before dawn. It lingers little down here, in the stale air heavy with the stench of urine and unwashed bodies. Soon it rises higher, amidst the sails and the riggings, hungry for fresh air. Then comes the scratching against the ship's hull. Grip by grip, claw-like hands dig into the wood dragging upwards God knows what.

"Well played," muttered Rogers, the majordomo of the Wanderers' Club, amidst the gentlemanly utterances of "Good show," "Hear, hear," and even "Huzzah" as Sir Algernon Hogshead finished his tale with a dramatic flourish.

Though not so socially gregarious as to partake in the verbal bonhomie, I thumped my ivory serpent's-head cane a few times, myself, in collegial support of my frenetic friend as his bizarre, but well-told, tale had come to its breathtaking and remarkable conclusion. Truth told, the hubbub of excited utterances and exclamations regarding Sir Hogshead's fanciful quest were well-said, but, greater truth yet, I had become more and more pensive and apprehensive as the tale progressed.

I knew what was coming next. Not within the story, but after.

A hard man was Ralph Strang, seventh Earl of Beden, seventy years of age on his last birthday, but still upright as a dart, with hair white as snow, but with the devilry of youth still sparkling in his keen dark eyes. He was, indeed, able to follow the hounds with the best of us, and there were few men, even among the youngest and most hot-headed of our riders, who cared to follow him over all the jumps he put his horse at.

"You look like shit."

I cleaned myself up in the room and rinsed my mouth with some whisky from the mini-bar, but I obviously show signs of the afternoon.

"Like you care."

I know that each of you here has already heard some version or other of this tale, and possibly you know it well enough to recount it yourself. But, since you insist, I'll tell you again what I know about the Tenant.

I never pass through Chalk-Newton without turning to regard the neighbouring upland, at a point where a lane crosses the lone straight highway dividing this from the next parish; a sight which does not fail to recall the event that once happened there; and, though it may seem superfluous, at this date, to disinter more memories of village history, the whispers of that spot may claim to be preserved.

The doorbell rings.

"Hello? Anybody home?"

A woman's voice. Well-spoken, which worries me; in this area, anyone with an education is some kind of official.

I'm lying on the sofa and my mind's fluttering back and forth, settling on memories from before Shaun got ill.

Dom doesn't lose his temper as easily as his brother, so normally he's the one who deals with it when shit goes pear-shaped. But shit has been going pear-shaped a lot lately, and by the time Dom gets to the warehouse, Marc is already in full swing. Literally--he's gone after poor Jimmy with a nine iron.

The two siblings exchanged a look of grim comprehension over the breakfast table when the butler laid the broadsheet in front of them. The Morning Post's headline was painfully familiar to them now. In stark black and white, the proclamation that yet another child had gone missing on the shores of Lake Conmere drove away any hint of an appetite the two of them might have had.

The crack in the window let in the ghosts. They came with the night breeze, whistling their mourning songs and carrying with them the stink of rotten water that lay across the paddocks, down past the crooked fence that bent and bowed where the earth had sunk away to let the sea creep closer. Where the salt ate the grass brown, then grey, before the water swallowed it up.