Michael Morpurgo - Listen to the Moon

As Jim scanned the island for any sign of life – footprints on the sand, the telltale smoke of a fire perhaps – all the stories about St Helen’s came back to him. He remembered landing there before, a few times. He had walked the length and breadth of it. It was no more than half a mile from end to end, a few hundred yards across the middle, an island of bracken and brambles and heather, a shoreline of great grey boulders and pebbles, with that one spit of steep, shelving sand, and the great rock he remembered so well rearing up behind the Pest House. The Pest House itself had long since fallen into ruin, roof and windows gaping, walls crumbling. But the chimney was still standing.

Jim had gone there first as a small boy, with his father, collecting driftwood for the fire, piling it up on the beach to bring home, or scouring the beach for cowrie shells, ‘guinea money’ as they called it. He’d climbed the rock once with his father, dared himself then to climb it again on his own, got to the top, but had been scolded for it by his father, and told never to do it again without him.

Jim had never really liked the place even as a small boy, had never felt at ease there. St Helen’s had seemed to him even then an abandoned place, a place of lost souls, of ghosts. There was something dark and sad about the island, and he’d thought that long before he’d ever been told the stories. Over the years he had learnt about its grim history bit by bit, how once long ago it had been a holy island, where monks, seeking solitary, contemplative lives, had lived out their years. The ruins of their chapel were still there. And there was, he knew, a holy well just beyond the Pest House – his mother had told him that much. He’d gone looking for it once with her in among the bracken and the brambles, but they had never found it.

But it was the story of the Pest House itself, why it had been built, and how it had been used, that had always troubled him most – so much so that he had never told Alfie about it. There are some stories , he thought, too terrible to pass on . In years gone by, in the days of the great sailing ships, St Helen’s had once been a quarantine island. To prevent the spread of disease, any sailor or passenger on board, who had fallen sick, with yellow fever or typhoid, or some other infectious illness, was put off on St Helen’s, to recover if they could, but much more likely to live out their last wretched days in the Pest House. The sick and dying had simply been left there in isolation, abandoned, and with little hope of survival. All his life Jim had been horrified at the thought of it. Ever since he’d been told about that Pest House, he had thought of St Helen’s as a shameful place, an island of suffering and death, to be avoided if at all possible.

Quite definitely now, and there could no longer be any doubt about it, Jim was hearing the sound of a child crying. Alfie was sure of it too. Neither said a word. The same unspoken thought occurred to both of them then. They had heard tales of ghosts living on St Helen’s – everyone had. Scilly was full of ghost stories. There were the ghosts on Samson Island, the ghost of King Arthur out on the Eastern Isles, and everywhere, all over the islands, there were stories of the spirits of stranded sailors, pirates, drowned sailors. Stories, they told themselves, just stories.

Coughing interrupted the whimpering. This was no ghost. There was someone on the island, a child, a child wailing, whimpering, and still coughing too. It was a cry for help they could not ignore. As they hauled in their lines, in a great hurry now, Alfie found there were three mackerel dangling on his hooks. He hadn’t even felt they were there. But the fish didn’t matter any more. Jim pulled up the anchor, and Alfie rowed hard for the shore. A few strong pulls and they felt the boat beaching. They leapt over the side into the shallows and hauled the boat up higher on to the sand.

Standing on the beach, they listened once again for the sound of the child. For some reason, they found themselves talking in whispers. All they could hear was the sea lapping softly behind them and the piping of a pair of oystercatchers that were flying off low and fast, their wingtips skimming the sea.

“Can’t hear nothing, can you?” Jim said. “Can’t see nothing neither.” He was beginning to wonder now if he had imagined the whole thing, if his hearing had deceived him. But the real truth, and Jim knew it, was that he did not want to venture any further. At that moment he was all for getting the boat back into the water, and rowing home. But Alfie was already running up the beach towards the dunes. Jim thought of calling him back, but he didn’t want to shout. He couldn’t let his son go on alone. He took off his jacket and laid it over his catch in the bottom of the boat, to hide their fish from any sharp-eyed, marauding gulls, and then, reluctantly, followed where Alfie had gone, up over the dunes, towards the Pest House.

A chill came over Alfie as he stood on top of the dunes, looking up at the Pest House, and he knew it wasn’t only the cold. Gulls, hundreds of them, the island’s silent sentinels, were watching him from rocks everywhere, from the walls of the Pest House, from the chimney, from the sky above. After a while, Jim was at his side, and breathless.

Alfie called out. “Anyone here?” There came no answer.

“Who’s there?”

Nothing.

A pair of gulls dived on them then, screeching and wheeling away, first one then another. The rest glared at them darkly. The message was unmistakable. You are not welcome here. Get off our island.

“There’s no one here, Alfie,” Jim whispered. “Let’s go home.”

“But we heard someone, Father,” Alfie said. “I know we did.”

Becoming more fearful now with every passing moment, it was Jim who called out this time. His whole instinct was to turn away, get to the boat fast and go from this place at once. But at the same time he needed to persuade himself that there was no child on the island, that Alfie was wrong, that they must have been imagining the whole thing. They both called out now, echoing one another.

Closer, and quite unmistakable, came the same whimpering as before, but more muffled, stifled. There could be no doubt about it. It was the voice of a child, a child who was terrified, and it was coming from inside the Pest House.

Jim’s first thought was that it had to be some local child who had gone out fishing maybe and had some sort of accident, lost an oar perhaps, or fallen overboard. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that he had rescued a young lad from the water after the boy had got into trouble out in a boat in Tresco Channel. He’d tripped and gone overboard, and was being swept out to sea by the current. This one had been washed up on St Helen’s – there was no other explanation he could think of. But if any child had been missing then surely he’d have heard about it. The alarm would have been raised all over the islands. Everyone would have been out looking. He couldn’t understand it.

Alfie had already gone on ahead of him up the track towards the Pest House, calling out to whoever was in there, softly, as reassuringly as he could. “Hello. S’only me. Alfie, Alfie Wheatcroft. I got my father with me. You all right, are you?” There was no reply. Both of them stopped outside the doorway, uncertain now as to what to say or do.

“We’re from Bryher,” Jim went on. “You know us, don’t you? I’m Alfie’s father. What you doing over here? Tipped yourself out of a boat, did you? Easily done. Easily done. You must be half frozed. We’ll have you out of here in a jiffy, get you back home, cup of nice warm tea, tatty cake, and a hot bath. That’ll shiver the cold out of you, won’t it?”