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

Magnus and Hildy had brought Simon to the ruined church when they were children.

“Posh, aren’t you?” Cormac towered over Simon, who was still wearing his school uniform, even though it was the summer holidays. All the children had gathered on the makeshift football pitch at the end of the village. “Are you a frog, like your mum?”

“She’s French .” Simon’s accent was cut glass.

Cormac snorted, as he’d seen the adults do when they were talking about her.

“She’s a snob, that’s what.” Simon’s mother had only visited the island once. The islanders had mistaken her shyness for snootiness and her eating disorder for Parisian chic. “And so are you, turning up for the summer and then buggering off. You don’t belong here.”

“Let him alone.” Magnus stepped in.

“Or what?”

“You’ll get another share of what I gave you last time.”

The two boys squared up to one another. Simon was incidental to old enmities. The other children looked on, too scared to take sides. Except for Hildy. Strong, desirable Hildy was the only one who wielded enough power to end it. She got between them, thumping them both.

“Stop it, you idiots.” Cormac laughed but Magnus still cut a fighter’s pose. She pulled at his sleeve. “Let’s go.”

They went up to the cliffs to show Simon the puffins and the gulls’ nests on the precipices. Seals basking on the rocks below. There was a whole fleet of trawlers out on the glistening water. The three of them spent the long holidays roaming. Little Isle was rough, green fields and granite hills sculpted by glaciers.

“What’s that noise?”

Hildy was about to answer Simon but Magnus put a finger to his smiling lips to hush her. The roaring got louder as they approached.

Magnus stood close to Simon, enjoying his surprise. There was a whirlpool out on the calm sea. Its pull was mesmeric, the downward spiral of all that water into the depths.

“It’s Maw.” Magnus felt a swell of pride.

The maelstrom was a conspiracy of complex tidal flows in a narrow strait. Water forced itself up from a stone pinnacle on the seabed, opposed to the surface stream, so creating a downward vortex. The swirl was visible below the glassy surface.

“Wow.”

“It’s clearer when there’s a high wind or standing waves. You think it’s loud now. Just wait ’til the tides are right. You can hear Maw roaring from miles off.”

At St Connaught’s they found a nest of mice in the shadow of the stone altar. It had become nature’s temple.

“I found a crow skeleton here once. And a snake’s skin.” Magnus had never seen Hildy so shy. She pulled a sketchbook from her rucksack and passed it to Simon. “Look.”

He leafed through the pages. “These are brilliant.”

She gave Simon a broad smile.

“I like drawing too, but I’m not as good as you.”

“Will you show me yours?”

“Look, here.” Magnus pointed to the wall above the altar.

Simon squinted at the weathered markings. “What are they?”

“Fish jumping into a boat.” They leapt high, pouring themselves onto the deck in an arc.

“How can you tell?”

“My grandfather said. He died last year. He knew everything. Our family have always lived here.”

Simon flushed. His father had purchased the island only two years before.

“He didn’t mean anything by that.” Hildy nudged Simon.

Magnus hadn’t finished yet. “Guess what this is.”

Above the fishing boat was a figure falling into a spiral.

“A man going to hell?”

“It’s Maw.”

Magnus recited his granddad’s teachings. “He’s been given to Maw as a gift and Maw will give us the sea’s bounty in return.”

Magnus checked in on Mairi on his way home, just like his dad used to. Andrew Spence called her the old woman , even though she wasn’t that much older than he was.

He would sit with her, sometimes for up to an hour at a time. Magnus would peep into the single-roomed cottage through the door that was always propped ajar to let the weather in. Sometimes Mairi would scream and shout at his dad, other times they’d sit in silence.

“Hello.”

“I’ve been waiting for you.” Mairi sat on a stone bench outside. “Come and sit, John.”

“It’s Magnus, Mairi, not John.”

She turned her lined face to him. She was pushing seventy now, he reckoned. She’d been more muddled of late. He wondered whether he should talk to the doctor when the radio was back up.

“Of course you are.” Her voice was strong and certain now, which unnerved him. “Have you seen it?”

“What?”

“The bloody great container down on the shore.”

Her eyes were as temperamental as the sea, sometimes clear aquamarine, sometimes grey and chilly.

“Yes.”

“Maw sent it.”

The comment alarmed him less than her mistaking him for his granddad. Mairi was known for it. She’d lived alone from a young age. A bit touched. She’d been visited by a psychiatrist once, after which she learnt to keep her stranger pronouncements to herself.

“That bay over there”—she jabbed with her finger— “used to be full of trawlers. Everyone had work. All because of John Spence.”

There’d been crops of barley, oats and potatoes that thrived on seaweed-fed beds. Lambs, sweet on salt-laden grass. There were farmers, shepherds and weavers, but the island only flourished because the fishermen were kings.

John’s re-energisation of the industry brought a row of shops, two pubs, a new church and a primary school. The only thing that remained of this golden time was the new church. The school had shut years ago, despite the protests.

“We’ve turned our backs on Maw. We won’t be forgiven easily. To think, we have the blood of marauders and conquerors in us. We sailed to Byzantium. And now we’re diminished with each generation by the milksop messiah, taxes and fishing quotas.”

History marked the land. Cairns and gold torcs buried in the earth.

“I still send Maw boats.”

An old tradition. The islanders once gathered on the shore at harvest festival and sent out wicker and wooden boats, laden with gifts for Maw’s maelstrom. Priests came and went over the centuries, either smiling indulgently or shaking their heads.

The sea is hungry.

The sea has blue hands.

The little boats contained the choicest fish, the finest prawns, a cake, or a piece of fat-marbled lamb. A baby or man carved from soap.

“We put boats on the water last year,” Magnus repeated, wondering if Mairi had heard.

“Yes,” she spat, “and we were the only ones. A can of sardines and a loaf might be good for the five thousand but not Maw.”

She seized Magnus’s hand.

“You and I need this place. We can’t survive anywhere else. Not for long. It’s why you came running back with your tail between your legs. Same for your dad. You shouldn’t have let them take him away.”

Magnus turned his face from her. He’d looked after his dad for as long as he could after his mother died. Poor Andrew, so young to have dementia.You’ve done a grand job , the nurse had said, but he’s getting worse. He needs care from trained nurses now.

Magnus took a job on the docks over on the mainland so that he could visit his dad’s nursing home each day. The trained nurses were hard pressed and didn’t have time to dab the crusted cornflakes from his dad’s shirt.

His dad hated cornflakes.

Dementia stripped his father of sense, self and dignity. It took the meat from his bones and hollowed him out, as crafty and insidious as cancer.

The sea, the sea needs little boats, the sea, there are men in the water, blue hands, blue hands, blue hands. They’re so hungry.