Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Although it had started to drizzle again, he decided to go for a walk. Leaving the B&B he turned right, away from the pier and the police activity beyond it. After a quarter of a mile the town’s buildings petered out, as did the beach, the strip of grey sand squeezed increasingly thinner between the incoming tide and a jumble of craggy rock formations until it disappeared altogether. The rocks, black as fire damage, swelled gradually into a curving cliff face that enclosed the bay. A coastal path, edged with spiny marram grass and tangled clumps of tough, springy bracken, formed a deep groove that meandered across the top of the cliffs. The path sloped uphill for at least two miles before levelling out at the top, from where, Skelton supposed, you could turn to see the town spread out below you. Despite the weather, he decided to walk as far as he could, in the hope that the psychological baggage he carried with him would become increasingly lighter the more distance he put between himself and civilization. His eventual hope was that if he walked far enough it would become entirely weightless, leaving him free.

It was a fanciful notion, but it was nice to entertain it nonetheless. It was nice to be surrounded by the drizzle too. Although it was an isolating experience, he felt protected by it, rather than besieged. Perhaps being alone was his natural state; certainly he felt calmer, less anxious, when he had no one to answer to. What was that old saying? Hell is other people. Much as he loved Janice, perhaps the biggest mistake of his life had been to allow himself to become involved. By doing so, he had ruined not only his life, but Janice’s too.

Had it come to that? Were their lives ruined beyond repair? Skelton felt guilty about the fact that in the early days of their marriage, Janice had expressed a desire to have children; a desire which had subsequently dwindled and died, perhaps due to his lack of enthusiasm.

Was it too late for her now? Was it too late for both of them? How old was she? Forty five? Struggling up the path, he glanced ahead of him, and saw a standing stone at the crest of the slope, silhouetted against the murky sky.

Suddenly his right foot, coming down on a nub of rock slick with lichen, slid from under him. He stumbled, would have fallen on his knees if he hadn’t put his hands out to break his fall. Within seconds he had regained his balance. He straightened, rubbing his hands together before holding them palm-up to the drizzle to clean them. Then he froze.

The standing stone had gone.

Coldness prickled through him, as if the drizzle had seeped into his body. But almost immediately his mind clicked back on to its rational course. He must have been mistaken; it must have been a person, not a standing stone, he had seen. He had only glanced at it, and the reason it had seemed featureless was because the sky was so murky it stripped light, and therefore detail, from everything.

And now that Skelton recalled, hadn’t he subconsciously thought of the stone as womanly? He had assumed it was because he was thinking about Janice, but perhaps that wasn’t the case. Scrambling up the slope, he called out, “Hello?”

Only the hissing of rain in the undergrowth greeted him. But when he reached the top of the slope, didn’t he glimpse a dark blur of movement on the path ahead, just before it bobbed behind a protruding thicket of bracken at the next corner?

“Hello?” he shouted again. “Anyone there?” It occurred to him that if the figure was a woman, then she might be alarmed by his presence, and more particularly by his apparent over-eagerness to make her acquaintance.

He paused on the path, breathing hard. He had thought he might hear her brushing through the undergrowth as she progressed up and along the muddy path ahead of him, but the persistent white noise of drizzle muffled all other sound.

Should he actively pursue her? If he did, it would only be to satisfy his curiosity. And then would come the awkwardness of explanations and apologies, of exchanging comments about the terrain and the weather simply to be polite. Plus, of course, they’d be faced with the prickly question of how they should proceed from this point—together or singly? If together they would be forced to converse, because silence between strangers is always embarrassing; and if singly, it would be like a mutual snub, each of them making clear that neither relished, nor desired, the other’s company.

Skelton told himself that none of this should matter, and yet somehow it did. As a result, he decided to wait a few minutes, give the woman time to move ahead. Because the foliage grew to chest height on either side of the path, and because frequent outcroppings of jagged black rock rose up to form mini valleys along the route, Skelton was not entirely sure how close he was to the summit of the cliffs.

As it turned out, he was closer than he thought. After waiting for five minutes, he began walking again, and a few minutes after that he emerged from between clumps of bracken to find the sky, grey and marbled like old cheese, expanding before him. He clenched his teeth as the drizzle, propelled by a wind now unencumbered by obstacles, flew at him almost horizontally, stinging his face. To his left, in his peripheral vision, he glimpsed movement.

He turned, squinting against the rain, and saw a figure standing at the edge of the promontory a hundred or so metres away. The figure was silhouetted against the mist-grey sea that seemed to merge seamlessly with the sky on the horizon. Though the figure had its back to him, Skelton felt an instant jolt of recognition at the sight of the masses of wind-swept black hair that flapped and writhed around its head.

“Belinda!” he shouted, moving towards her, but his voice was snatched away by the wind.

He was still fifty metres from the woman when she spread her arms out wide and dropped forward, disappearing over the cliff.

Skelton screamed and broke into a run, though all at once his legs felt as if they were made of loosely connected splints of wood. He couldn’t have seen what he thought he had seen. It was a mistake, a trick; perhaps the woman (Belinda?) had known he was there, and simply wanted to shock him for some reason.

He reached the promontory and fell to his knees, shaking as if with fever. He felt so faint, so uncoordinated, that he couldn’t trust himself not to stumble forward and follow the woman over the edge. Experiencing a sudden attack of vertigo, he dropped on to his front and crawled the last few metres, using his fingers to drag himself across the soft, wet ground. Craning his neck, he peered over the cliff, dreading—and already flinching from—what he might see.

There was nothing. Nothing but white, foamy waves swirling around the black rocks far below.

Had he been somehow mistaken? Or had the woman’s body already been dragged out to sea? He looked further out, fearful of glimpsing something dark and shapeless bobbing in the water, but the sea beyond the shoreline was like grey, unbroken skin.

After a few moments he slithered back from the cliff edge and pushed himself, with difficulty, to his feet. He swayed and shuddered like a drunk, his upper body hunched over. What he had seen—thought he’d seen—had sapped the energy from him, turned him into a shambling wreck. He began to stumble back the way he had come, desperate to fetch help, or at least alert the authorities. He wished now that he hadn’t consistently and stubbornly refused to buy a mobile phone, despite Janice’s exhortations.

How he managed to get back to town he had no idea. It seemed to take an age, and he spent the majority of the journey slipping and stumbling, half-falling down the path, his eyes blinded by rain and tears, his ability to think obliterated by the pulse of shock filling his head.