Curse of the Stag’s Eye (Haunted Hearts)

20. Chapter 20

Chapter 20

8.31 p.m. Outside.

T here was nothing in my schedule about being outside this much or being this cold.

Gaz and I walked sluggishly away from the bridge, following the low wall. I wished I’d turned on the floodlights before running out of the museum. I held up my bright, yellow lantern to light our way. I couldn’t stop thinking about how Dawn had been when she left. She couldn’t look at me.

I hoped she didn’t hate me. I can’t bear it when people don’t like me. I know I shouldn’t care what people think. I’m probably never even going to see her again but still, it gets to me. I’m a people-pleaser, so I’ve been told. It’s always said as though it’s a bad thing but I don’t see how. What’s wrong with wanting people to be happy? What’s so bad about wanting to get along with everyone? If anyone suffers for it, I do, and, well, that’s nobody else’s problem, is it? I vowed to email her in the morning, just to make sure she and Nikesh were okay, and that there were no hard feelings. And then I’d check my phone every two minutes until I got a reply.

Stag’s Head Island got its name, no one would be surprised to hear, from the fact that it was shaped like a stag’s head. One of the “antlers” had collapsed into the sea about a century ago, but some photographs of it were on display in the museum. Both of the antlers would have been intact when Howard Baines was alive. I imagined him striding around the whole circumference of the place, king of his own little country. I wondered if he had a favourite spot, a place to stand and watch the sunrise, or maybe to sit and read. If I’d lived and worked here, I’d have needed to find a place to get away from the other keepers. A place to be alone with my thoughts.

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 socks are sexy?”

“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 not sexy though, are they?”

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.”