Alan Baxter - The Gulp - Five Tales of Horror

“Patrick!”

Edgar raised his palms. “We are who we are, mate.”

“And who are you, exactly?”

“You want to change us?” Shirley asked. “We would never ask you to change.”

“Patrick, please,” Ciara said. “What’s got into you?”

“Nothing! I’m not the one under their fucking spell.”

“Chill out, yeah?” Ciara said, laying a hand on Patrick’s forearm. “It’s cool here, is it not? Hanging out with a rock band, immersing ourselves in local culture.”

“I’m not really a fan of this culture, Ciara.”

She smiled, shook her head. “Chill out. It’ll be a nice week, then we can get a room in Enden, watch the gig, crash there, and hit the road again on Saturday. No real plans, remember? Let the trip take us where it will, isn’t that what you said?”

“Yes, but–”

“But nothing. We made new friends, we’re seeing new things. It’s just a week, we have months more ahead of us.”

Patrick ground his teeth, looked around the group. They band smiled, patient and relaxed. Edgar seemed a little more smug than the others. Torsten and Simone wouldn’t meet his eye. He turned back to Ciara, but her eyes had hardened a little, daring him to challenge her further. He knew the look.

“Fuck it, I need some fresh air.”

Outside was still winter cool, but the sun warm as he walked across the grass. Patrick felt untethered, lost.

The Gulp has a habit of swallowing people. But sometimes it spits one out.

Patrick took a ragged breath, glancing back at the house. As he started to turn away, movement caught his eye. Something up above. He turned back and saw a window high on the house he hadn’t noticed before. Above the second storey, in the apex under a heavy chimney, a round window with a wooden cross in it making four even quarters of glass. An attic window. Someone looked out of it. Patrick frowned. It was an old man, pale, with long white hair. A moment of recognition tickled Patrick’s mind, but slipped away. He’d heard those footsteps the night before… The man snapped his head around and pinned Patrick with his gaze. Patrick gasped and took an involuntary step backwards, tripping on the edge of a flowerbed. He staggered but managed to regain his balance. When he looked back up, the round attic window was empty.

The Farmer’s Marketstransformed the park behind Carlton Beach into bustling activity. Dozens of stalls under Easy-Up canopies were selling pretty much everything imaginable. Fruits and vegetables of every kind, nuts, herbs, mushrooms. Some of the mushrooms on sale looked decidedly weird to Patrick, but he chose not to mention it. There were arts and crafts too. Beeswax candles, watercolours, wooden carvings, leather belts.

“Here’s a seafood stand,” Ciara said, dragging on his hand.

Patrick was still smarting from the earlier shutdown of his concerns, but he tried to play along for now. If nothing else, he needed Ciara to trust him, not start hating him.

They went over, Torsten and Simone with them. The seller had several polystyrene boxes filled with ice, various fish and shellfish laid out on top.

“You have any bugs?” Ciara asked.

The man behind the table was short and squat, with a wide face and eyes too far apart. Looks like a bug himself , Patrick thought uncharitably.

But the man smiled warmly. “Gulpepper Bugs, eh? Keen to try the local cuisine? I can tell from your accent you’re not from around here.”

“We’re told they’re really good.”

“They are, but you have to know how to prepare them safely.”

“Safely?” Patrick asked.

“Yeah, they have a poisonous bit, like some crabs do. You know what to do with them?”

“A friend is doing the cooking,” Ciara said. “A local.”

“Ah, you’ll be right then. How many?”

“Eight, I guess?”

“All right.” The man stepped back and slid a large plastic tub out from under his table. It sloshed with water and he popped the lid off. Dozens of large shellfish, like wide, flat, shortened lobsters hunched and jetted over each other inside.

“Oh, they’re alive?” Ciara said.

The man looked up. “Yeah. You gotta cook ’em fresh. I’ll box ’em for ya, though, make it easy to carry.”

“Can you keep eight aside for us, so we can pick them up later when we’re ready to go back?”

“Sure, if you pay me now.”

“How much?”

The fisherman eyed Ciara for a moment, then smiled. “Let’s say ten bucks each, as you’re new to this.”

“Eighty bucks,” Patrick said. “We’re on a budget.” Ten bucks each for something like lobster actually seemed pretty reasonable, but he didn’t like the idea of eating anything so specifically local to this weird place.

“You’d pay three times that for lobster tails at the supermarket,” Ciara said. “Besides, we’re saving a lot staying with the band and they’ve been giving us loads of food and booze. This is a steal!”

Patrick kept his mouth closed, teeth clenched, as Ciara counted out the eighty dollars. She was right, after all, they’d had a free ride so far. Torsten handed her forty and she smiled at him, slipped some of her money away again.

“We’ll be back in an hour or so, okay?”

“Whenever you like before six.”

It was only a little after four by the time they headed back up the Manor, taking turns to carry the polystyrene box with the shellfish scratching and scuttling around inside. Howard was overjoyed to receive it.

“You remembered!”

“Of course,” Ciara said.

“You beauty! We’ll eat well tonight!” He took the box into the kitchen.

Simone went off with Clarke, holding hands as they went upstairs. Torsten slumped onto a couch next to Edgar and Shirley, where they were watching a movie, drinking beers. He took a bottle from the fridge, held it up asking Patrick if he’d join them.

Patrick shook his head. “Might have a nap.”

He went upstairs, with no intention of sleeping. The stairway gave out onto a wide landing and immediately to the left were four doors. The two rooms they occupied, the bathroom they were using, and one other. He opened that one and saw another guest room, made up like theirs had been. The other way from the top of the stairs led down a long hallway with three doors on either side and one more at the far end. Among those would be the rooms the band members used. He glanced back down the stairs, saw no one, and ventured along.

The first doors on either side were locked. The next two were both bathrooms. The next two were locked. Maybe the band kept their rooms locked, but he wondered why. Perhaps because they had house guests so often?

The door at the end drew his eye. He opened it, surprised as he had expected that to be locked as well. A narrow staircase went up along the wall, into darkness.

Heart hammering, Patrick climbed the steep wooden stairs. They creaked softly, made him wince. When he neared the top, he looked cautiously into the attic space. It was huge, running the entire length of the massive house, with a high, vaulted ceiling under dark A-frame rafters. The floor was solid, polished floorboards. Candles burned here and there, bookcases lined the walls, jammed with hundreds, maybe thousands of books. Light leaked in at the far end from the round window he’d seen from outside. In one far corner was a curtained off area, but he caught a glimpse of a ceramic sink through a gap in the curtains. In the other far corner was a huge, mahogany four poster bed. It had a heavy, deep red velvet canopy, with side curtains all tied back to the posts. Someone lay in the bed.