Page 34 of Curse of the Stag's Eye
Forget the schedule. Thereis no schedule.
“We didn’t get in front of you,” I said. “We haven’t moved.” The lighthouse still stood behind us, flashing its beacon.
“But we followed the wall,” she said. “We followed it.”
“Come on,” Gaz said. “We’ll bring you to the bridge.”
“Will you be crossing it?” I asked. “Or coming back with me?”
Gaz didn’t answer. We found the wall and followed it away from the lighthouse. It had led us directly from the bridge to the lighthouse when we arrived so surely it would do the reverse. The four of us marched on and on through the fog until the lighthouse became nothing but a faint pulse of ethereal light, high in the hazy sky, a glowing heartbeat.
“We should be there by now.” Gaz couldn’t hide the anger in his voice. Or he wasn’t trying to.
The farther we walked, the denser the fog became until we lost sight of the throbbing beacon and then even the wall. I reached out to find it but came up empty. Dawn suggested we each hold hands but Gaz settled for a hand on Nikesh’s shoulder.
“Stop,” I said. “We could be near the cliff edge.”
“I don’t hear the waves,” Nikesh said. “I don’t hear anything.”
The air, thick though it was, should have been punctured with the crashing of the sea but instead, we were met with perfect, unnatural, crushing silence.
Nikesh shivered and dropped his rucksack. “I don’t feel right, babes.”
We all twitched as the air filled with the scent of decaying vegetables. I jumped back when the fog behind Nikesh grew dimmer, then darker, then denser. It swirled in a ring, then it churned and billowed but in a contained space, a furious storm captured in one spot.
“It’s the shape,” Gaz said.
“It’s Baines,” I said.
“No,” Dawn said. “It’s something else.”
At the same moment, both of our lanterns were extinguished. All we had now was the struggling light of the moon.
Nikesh spun round and the shape reached out as if to touch him. He staggered backwards. “What is that? Why does it keep trying to get me?”
We all walked backwards a few paces, slowly, aware of the possibility of tumbling down a sheer cliff face with one wrong step. The shape remained in place, part of the fog yet separate from it.
Dawn stopped and turned to Nikesh. “I think it wants something from you.”
“From me? What can I give it?” He pointed as the shape billowed and grew.
Dawn’s eyes darted as she tried to make sense of what she was feeling. “I think… I think I woke it up but it’s reaching out to you. It wants you to… understand? I don’t… I’m not…”
“I understand there’s a scary dark cloud following me about!” Sweat gathered on Nikesh’s brow. I wasn’t certain he’d blinked since the shape had appeared.
Dawn growled and stamped her feet, shouting at the shape. “I’m not a bloody medium! What are you trying to—? Oh my God, it’s Squirrel! It’s Mr Squirrel!”
“He’s here too?” I asked. “He’s been here this whole time? With Baines?”
Dawn closed her eyes at tightly as she could. “There’s anger here but it’s not like it is with Baines. Mr Squirrel is angry because he thinks Nikesh should understand. He thinks Nikesh should… be like him? Nikesh, didn’t you say something about bad dreams earlier on?”
“Well, yeah,” Nikesh said. “I have a recurring dream about something chasing me around the house I grew up in. Something… something I can’t really see.” He stood up straighter and took a step towards the cloud. “It started after my nan died. A proper tyrant, she was. She ruled the family. She made our lives miserable.”
The shape darkened even further.
“She wanted me to be a doctor but I kept telling her I didn’t have the brains for it. I certainly didn’t have the marks for it. She kept needling me about it, over and over, again and again. Right up until the day she died.”
“That resentment you’re carrying for her, that’s what the shape is latching on to,” Dawn said. “It’s like Rhys said. Ghosts need a human mind to manifest. They need our energy, our emotions.”
