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

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.”