Page 37 of Curse of the Stag's Eye
I slipped my shoe back on. “It depends on who's wearing them. And if he’s wearing anything else.” There was a moment, just a flicker in his eyes, where I thought he was going to kiss me but he didn’t. He just slouched and shuffled away. Something was bothering him but I didn’t feel I could ask what it was.
We walked back up the track and returned to the low wall which continued on past the lighthouse tower and dipped out of sight. We walked along — carefully — and traced the wall down onto the island’s sole remaining “antler”. There, the wall curved around in a little circle and ran back up towards the tower again. In the centre of the circle stood an old-fashioned, seaside telescope. The kind that lined the seafronts of little coastal towns up and down the country, used to cost twenty pence but now costs a whole pound, and offers a fuzzy view of the beach through vandalised lenses. This one was free.
“Someone’s missed a fundraising opportunity there.” Gaz leaned against the wall with his hands in the pockets of his blue jeans. “What about this girl ghost you mentioned? You said you saw her clear as day.”
I rubbed my nose. “I was on a ghost hunt, a bit like this, but in a big old manor house way out in the countryside. A good while ago, this was. Must have been ten years, at least. There was this big group of us, the leader — so to speak — was a big bloke named Trevor. He was a white witch, a psychic, a medium, the whole works. Or so he claimed. Anyway, he got us all to split into groups and go off to a different room of the house. It was night but the house had dim lightbulbs. They might have been original or just used for effect. Anyway, three of us sat on a little padded bench in the house's library. No, not a bench. What are they called? Those long chairs. It’s something French.”
“Chaise longue?”
“That’s the one. So we’re all sitting on it, I’m on one end, there’s a woman on the other, and a guy in the middle. I can’t remember their names but it doesn’t matter. We were being very quiet, very respectful, very ghosthunty, you know, when we all turn our heads towards the open door. Standing there as clear as you are now was a little girl of about ten or eleven years old in a short white dress with blue ribbons.
“She walked into the room, and I swear it was like the air had this charge to it. Every hair on my arm stood up. She walked straight through a couple of free-standing bookcases, did a loop of the room, then came right up to us, reached out, and touched the chest of the guy sitting in the middle. She sent a spark of static electricity through him and into me and the woman on the other side of him. All three of us jumped up, all at once, just like what happened to all of us tonight in the kitchen. The girl ghost had gone but we’d all seen and felt her. That was the most vivid experience I’ve ever had before tonight. I don’t think infrasound could cause that. Or false memories. Or… bloody… sunspots.”
“What about moon phases?” He laughed a little. He kept looking at me in a very particular way. He cleared his throat. “Listen, about the kiss earlier. I—”
“It’s okay.” I held up my hands. “You don’t have to worry about it. It was probably just the heat of the moment. I know it didn’t mean anything.”
“Oh. Okay, then. Yeah, you’re probably right.” He pressed his lips together and then leaned down to look through the telescope. “Nah, it’s too bloody foggy. Can’t see a chuffin’ thing.”
I handed him the lantern and peered through anyway. I turned it towards the cliffs on my left and could just make out the fuzzy lights of a car far off in the distance. I wondered if it was Dawn and Nikesh speeding away from here as fast as they could go. I turned it to my right, towards where the other antler would have been and stopped.
I rubbed the eyepiece with the sleeve of my jacket. The formerly open water was now speared with a narrow bluff, much like the one I was standing on. Cloudy and indistinct but dry land, nonetheless, and in muted daylight no less, when all around us was night.
I started when a hand suddenly clutched the rocks from below. Carefully, up the newly appeared antler climbed a man, naked and soaking wet, scrambling from the water’s edge. He stopped at the top, shook sea water from his hands, and rubbed his face. He was handsome in a rugged sort of way, burly in build, with a powerful, square frame. The kind that comes from a lifetime of arduous labour, with strong shoulders and a single patch of hair in the centre of his flat chest. He ran his hands over his toned backside and down his hairy, sturdy legs, flicking water from them. He took a cloth from a pile of clothes by his feet and ran it quickly over his soft belly, down to the thick, black bush around his privates, causing his short, plump manhood to wobble as he worked.
He stooped to pick up something else, a pale blue cravat which he hung around his stout neck. Slowly, he came to realise he was not alone. He stood facing me, his hands resting on his hips. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t even be sure that what I was seeing was real. He squinted at first, taking his time, time enough for me to make out the dimple in his chin and the grey in his temples, then he simply smiled and waved to me.
“What is it?”
I told Gaz to look quickly.
“I can’t see anything.”
I — gently— shoved him out of the way but sure enough, there was nothing to be seen.
“Was it Baines?”
“No,” I said. “I think it was the man who killed him.”
Chapter 21
Rhys decided that weneeded a proper rest to determine what we were going to do next. After retrieving our bags from the museum, he let us into the keeper’s cottage, the only one preserved as it had been when keepers and their families lived in them. A simple affair, with a joint kitchen and living room, a bedroom, and a tiny washroom with a basin.
“Can you imagine raising a family in here?” Rhys unfurled his sleeping bag. His breath misted when he talked. The cottage took the full brunt of the cold air coming from the sea.
“I grew up in a little council flat in Sheffield, so kind of.” I laid out my bag next to his. There wasn’t much room on the floor. “Can we use the bed? If we need to, I mean. For sleep.”
“It’s only for show. It’s not a real mattress.”
I grumbled as I plonked onto my sleeping bag. “This isn’t going to do my back any good.”
Rhys laughed. It wasn’t very polite of him, I thought. “Aren’t you used to roughing it? I should have brought an air bed, but I didn’t think we’d be staying the whole night.”
“You think we’ll be here that long?” I took out a bottle of water from my bag and unscrewed the lid.
He blew out his lips. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what we’re going to do yet.”
The sitting room floor was harder and colder than I would have liked. The room itself was painted in dark colours, with thick-legged, dusty furniture. I eyed the couch and wondered if I could spend the night on it. The low ceiling added to the heavy atmosphere of the place.
