Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

“I didn’t gasp, or cry out. I don’t think I even felt anything.

“First off, there were only two of them. The highest was Charlie. He’d climbed almost to the very top of the main mast, which had tilted over so far that it couldn’t have been more than twenty-five feet above the water. Even with that overcoat engulfing him and the hat pulled all the way down over his ears, I could tell by the arms and legs snarled in the rigging that it was him.

“ ‘Is he moving, girl?’ Charlie’s father asked, and I realised he hadn’t been able to bring himself to look, either. We lurched closer.

“Then I did gasp, Mr Selkirk. Just once. Because he was moving. Or I thought he was. He seemed to be settling . . . resettling . . . I can’t explain it. He was winding his arms and legs through the ropes, like a child trying to fit into a hiding place as you come for him. As if he’d just come back there. Or maybe the movement was wind. Even now, I don’t know.

“Charlie’s father swore at me and snarled his question again. When I didn’t answer, he turned around. ‘Lord Jesus,’ I heard him say. After that, he just put his head down and rowed. And I kept my eyes on Charlie, and the empty blue sky beyond him. Anywhere but down the mast, where the other Kendall boy hung.

“By his ankles, Mr Selkirk. His ankles, and nothing more. God only knows what held him there. The wind had torn his clothes right off him. He had his eyes and his mouth open. He looked so pale, so thin, nothing like he had in life. His body had red slashes all over it, as though the storm had literally tried to rip him open. Just a boy, Mr Selkirk. His fingertips all but dancing on the water.

“Charlie’s father gave one last heave, and our little boat knocked against the last showing bit of the Kendalls’ ship’s hull. The masts above us groaned, and I thought the whole thing was going to crash down on top of us. Charlie’s father tried to wedge an oar in the wood, get us in close, and finally he just rowed around the ship and ran us aground on the sandbar. I leapt out after him, thinking I should be the one to climb the mast. I was lighter, less likely to sink the whole thing once and for all. Our home, our lighthouse, was so close it seemed I could have waded over and grabbed it. I probably could have. I leaned back, looked up again, and this time I was certain I saw Charlie move.

“His father saw it, too, and he started screaming. He wasn’t even making words, but I was. I had my arms wide open, and I was calling my husband. ‘Come down. Come home, my love.’ I saw his arms disentangle themselves, his legs slide free. The ship sagged beneath him. If he so much as touched that water, I thought, it would be too much. The cold would have him at the last. He halted, and his father stopped screaming, and I went silent. He hung there so long I thought he’d died after all, now that he’d heard our voices one last time. Then, hand over hand, so painfully slowly, like a spider crawling down a web, he began to edge upside-down over the ropes. He reached the Kendall boy’s poor, naked body and bumped it with his hip. It swung out and back, out and back. Charlie never even looked, and he didn’t slow or alter his path. He kept coming.

“I don’t even remember how he got over the rail. As he reached the deck, he disappeared a moment from our sight. We were trying to figure how to get up there to him. Then he just climbed over the edge and fell to the sand at our feet. The momentum from his body gave the wreck a final push, and it slid off the sandbar into the water and sank, taking the Kendall boy’s body with it.

“The effort of getting down had taken everything Charlie had. His eyes were closed. His breaths were shallow, and he didn’t respond when we shook him. So Charlie’s father lifted him and dropped him in the rowboat. I hopped in the bow with my back to the shore, and Charlie’s father began to pull desperately for the mainland. I was sitting calf-deep in water, cradling my husband’s head facedown in my lap. I stroked his cheeks, and they were so cold. Impossibly cold, and bristly, and hard. Like rock. All my thoughts, all my energy, all the heat I had I was willing into my fingers, and I was cooing like a dove. Charlie’s father had his back to us, pulling for everything he was worth. He never turned around. And so he didn’t . . .”

Once more, Mrs Marchant’s voice trailed away. Out the filthy windows, in the grey that had definitely darkened into full-blown dusk now, Selkirk could see a single trail of yellow-red, right at the horizon, like the glimpse of eye underneath a cat’s closed lid. Tomorrow the weather would clear. And he would be gone, on his way home. Maybe he would stay there this time. Find somebody he didn’t have to pay to keep him company.

“It’s a brave thing you’ve done, Mrs Marchant,” he said, and before he could think about what he was doing, he slid forward and took her chilly hand in his. He meant nothing by it but comfort, and was surprised to discover the sweet, transitory sadness of another person’s fingers curled in his. A devil’s smile of a feeling, if ever there was one. “He was a good man, your husband. You have mourned him properly and well.”

“Just a boy,” she whispered.

“A good boy, then. And he loved you. You have paid him the tribute he deserved, and more. And now it’s time to do him the honor of living again. Come back to town. I’ll see you somewhere safe and warm. I’ll see you there myself, if you’ll let me.”

Very slowly, without removing her fingers, Mrs Marchant raised her eyes to his, and her mouth came open. “You . . . you silly man. You think . . . But you said you knew the story.”

Confused, Selkirk squeezed her hand. “I know it now.”

“You believe I have stayed here, cut off from all that is good in the world, shut up with my nuns all these years like an abbess, for love? For grief?”

Now Selkirk let go, watching as Mrs Marchant’s hand fluttered before settling in her lap like a blown leaf. “There’s no crime in that, surely. But now—”

“I’ve always wondered how the rowboat flipped,” she said, in a completely new, expressionless tone devoid of all her half-sung tones, as he stuttered to silence. “All the times I’ve gone through it and over it, and I can’t get it straight. I can’t see how it happened.”

Unsure what to do with his hands, Selkirk finally settled them on his knees. “The rowboat?”

“Dead calm. No ghost wave this time. We were twenty yards from shore. Less. We could have hopped out and walked. I was still cooing. Still stroking my husband’s cheeks. But I knew already. And I think his father knew, too. Charlie had died before we even got him in the boat. He wasn’t breathing. Wasn’t moving. He hadn’t during the whole, silent trip back to shore. I turned toward land to see exactly how close we were. And just like that I was in the water.

“If you had three men and were trying, you couldn’t flip a boat that quickly. One of the oars banged me on the head. I don’t know if it was that or the cold that stunned me. But I couldn’t think. For a second, I had no idea which way was up, even in three feet of water, and then my feet found bottom, and I stood and staggered toward shore. The oar had caught me right on the scalp, and a stream of blood kept pouring into my eyes. I wasn’t thinking about Charlie. I wasn’t thinking anything except that I needed to be out of the cold before I became it. I could feel it in my bloodstream. I got to the beach, collapsed in the sun, remembered where I was and what I’d been doing, and spun around.

“There was the boat, floating right-side up, as though it hadn’t flipped it all. Oars neatly shipped, like arms folded across a chest. Water still as a lagoon beneath it. And neither my husband nor his father anywhere .