Page 36 of Curse of the Stag's Eye
The air had turned considerably chillier and I did up the buttons of my jacket. “I wish I’d worn thermal underwear. Or at least brought some gloves. Oh, or a scarf. I’ve got a lovely long, colourful scarf I made myself.”
“I thought you came prepared for everything.” Gaz gave a little smile. Well, not a smile really. He pressed his pale lips together, making them disappear entirely, and gave the tiniest of nods. “You knit?”
“I crochet. Sometimes. Only when I’m bored, like.” Which was almost every night, but I didn’t think he needed to know that just then. “Do you have any hobbies?” Christ, what next, was I going to ask if he had any siblings?
He zipped up his burgundy jacket and huddled into it. “I like camping. I said that, didn’t I? Fishing too. Kayaking, when it’s warm. Hiking. I started rock climbing last year — That’s fun.”
I highly doubted that.
“I don’t like this time of year,” he said. “It gets dark too early and I end up stuck indoors. I tried brewing my own ale once. I thought it would give me something to do of a winter’s evening, but almost half the bottles I made ended up exploding.”
“Really?”
“Something to do with the yeast not being fully fermented, or so I read online as I was standing on a sodden carpet. It made a right mess, I can tell you. I won’t be getting the security deposit back on my flat.”
“Only half of it blew up though. How did the other half taste?
“Like someone else had already drunk it.” He made a face, then chuckled a bit. He stopped outside the cottages and pointed. “Where does that go?”
We descended a skinny track in the scrubland, down to a small, pebbly cove. Layers of sandstone and shale piled up around us like pages in a monumental stack of books. From where we stood on the shoreline, only the beacon of the lighthouse was visible.
Before us, the waves rippled out from a single, featureless grey mass of sky and fog. “It’s like being at the edge of the world,” I said. “Or looking at an unfinished painting.”
The waves lapped at clicking pebbles, pulling and pushing at them, over and over. Gaz picked up a stone and flung it into the sea. “I wonder if Baines ever went swimming here.”
“He probably would have been skinny-dipping,” I said. “Most men didn’t wear swimming costumes back then. And it was only men on the island anyway.”
He nudged my arm. “You up for it, then? A bit of chunky dunking?”
I laughed and hugged myself. “Oh yes, let’s go swimming naked in Wales, in October, in the fog. Assuming we don’t immediately get hypothermia and drown, we’ll really look our best, won’t we?”
“You said it yourself, it’s foggy, we won’t see much.”
“In that freezing water, there won’t be much to see in the first place! My willy will be inverted, poor thing. It may never come out again.”
He gave me a grin. “Do you do this sort of thing very often? Lure unsuspecting men to deserted coves?”
"Hah, I might if I had the chance. My work is quite solitary and my hobbies are too. Sitting in front of my Xbox or wandering around an empty building at night, listening out for ghosts. I don't talk to many people during the day so I don't have a chance to meet anyone. I suppose, somewhere in the back of my head, I thought this ghost-hunt-tour thing might be a good way to mix with like-minded people."
He flipped a flat stone over and over in his hand, testing the weight. "And instead you met me. Though I am coming around to your way of thinking, I must say." He threw the stone, skipping it twice across the waves. "I'm surrounded by people all day at work. I'm always having meetings, begging corporations for money, or on the phone to some local councillor or other."
"It's no wonder you like to escape sometimes."
He blew on his hands to warm them up. "It might be nice to have someone to escape with. You know. Every once in a while."
The look he gave me at that moment warmed me from my head to my toes. I tried to think of a suitable response. I took a step towards him and something sharp dug into my heel. “Ow. Bugger. I've got a stone in my shoe. Hang on a sec.”
I handed him the yellow lantern and leaned against the cliff, where I untied my shoe.
Gaz pointed at my foot. “Nice socks.”
“What? Oh, hell. I forgot I had them on.” What a day to wear my Batman socks. “They're not very sexy, are they?”
Gaz had such a warm laugh. “They're adorable. Besides, what men's socksaresexy?”
“Um, maybe those chunky Nordic-looking ones? You know the ones I mean. They look like something a lumberjack would wear. I always see them advertised online around Christmastime. They're quite nice.”
He made a face. “They're notsexythough, are they?”
