“Maybe a little,” Kerry said.
“How come?”
“It’s just the wind. It stings my eyes.”
She pulled at the oars, aiming for the black line of the reef. Even if no one else might’ve, even if she could no longer see them, as they hid within the waves, she heard them sing a song of jubilation, a song of wrath and hunger. Their voices were the sound of a thousand waking nightmares.
To pass the time, she told Tabby a story, grafting it to all the other tales she’d told about kingdoms under the sea where people lived forever, and rode whales and danced with dolphins, and how they may not have been very pleasant to look at, but that’s what made them love the beautiful little girl from above the waves, and welcome her as their princess.
Tabby seemed to like it.
Ahead, at the reef, they began to rise from the water and clamber up the rock again, spiny and scaled, finned and fearless. Others began to swim out to meet the boat. Of course they recognised her, and she them. She’d sat with nearly a third of them, trying trying trying to break through from the wrong side of the shore.
While they must have schemed like fiends to drag her deep into theirs.
I bring you this gift, she would tell them, if only she could make herself heard over their jeering in her head. Now could you please just set me free?
THE WINNER
by RAMSEY CAMPBELL
UNTIL JESSOP DROVE onto the waterfront he thought most of the wind was racing the moonlit clouds. As the Mini left behind the last of the deserted office buildings he saw ships toppling like city blocks seized by an earthquake. Cars were veering away from the entrance to the ferry terminal. Several minutes of clinging grimly to the wheel as the air kept throwing its weight at the car took him to the gates. A Toyota stuffed with wailing children wherever there was space among the luggage met him at the top of the ramp. “Dublin’s cancelled,” the driver told him in an Ulster accent he had to strain to understand. “Come back in three hours, they’re saying.”
“I never had my supper,” one of her sons complained, and his sister protested “We could have stayed at uncle’s.” Jessop retorted inwardly that he could have delayed his journey by a day, but he’d driven too far south to turn back now. He could have flown from London that morning and beaten the weather if he hadn’t preferred to be frugal. He sent his windblown thanks after the Toyota and set about looking for a refuge on the dock road. There were pubs in abundance, but no room to park outside them and no sign of any other parking area. He was searching for a hotel where he could linger over a snack, and realising that all the hotels were back beyond the terminal entrance, when he belatedly noticed a pub.
It was at the far end of the street he’d just passed. Enough horns for a brass band accompanied the U-turn he made. He swung into the cramped gap between two terraces of meagre houses that opened directly onto the pavement. Two more uninterrupted lines of dwellings so scrawny that their windows were as narrow as their doors faced each other across two ranks of parked cars, several of which were for sale. Jessop parked outside the Seafarer, under the single unbroken street lamp, and retrieved his briefcase from the back seat before locking the car.
The far end of the street showed him windowless vessels staggering about at anchor. A gust blundered away from the pub, carrying a mutter of voices. The window of the pub was opaque except for posters plastered against the inside: THEME NIGHT’s, singa-long’s, quiz night’s. He would rather not be involved in any of those, but perhaps he could find himself a secluded corner in which to work. The lamp and the moon fought over producing shadows of his hand as he pushed open the thick shabby door.
The low wide dim room appeared to be entangled in nets. Certainly the upper air was full of them and smoke. Those under the ceiling trapped rather too much of the yellowish light, while those in the corners resembled overgrown cobwebs. Jessop was telling himself that the place was appealingly quaint when the wind used the door to shove him forward and slammed it behind him.
“Sorry,” he called to the barman and the dozen or so drinkers and smokers seated at round tables cast in black iron. Nobody responded except by watching him cross the discoloured wooden floor to the bar. The man behind it, whose eyes and nose and mouth were crammed into the space left by a large chin, peered at him beneath a beetling stretch of net. Perhaps the dimness was one reason why his eyes bulged so much that they appeared to be stretched pale. “Here’s one,” he announced.
“Reckon you’re right there, cap’n,” growled a man who, despite the competition, would have taken any prize for bulkiness.
“You’d have said it if he hadn’t, Joe,” his barely smaller partner croaked past a hand-rolled cigarette, rattling her bracelets as she patted his arm.
“I’m sorry?” Jessop wondered aloud.
She raised a hand to smooth her shoulder-length red tresses. “We’re betting you went for the ferry.”
“I hope you’ve staked a fortune on it, then.”
“He means you’d win another, Mary,” Joe said. “He wouldn’t want you to lose.”
“That’s so,” Jessop said, turning to the barman. “What do you recommend?”
“Nothing till I know you. There’s not many tastes we can’t please here, mister.”
“Jessop,” Jessop replied before he grasped that he hadn’t been asked a question, and stared hard at the beer-pumps. “Captain’s Choice sounds worth a go.”
He surveyed the length of the chipped sticky bar while the barman hauled at the creaking pump. A miniature billboard said WIN A VOYAGE IN OUR COMPETTITTION, but there was no sign of a menu. “Do you serve food?” he said.
“I’ve had no complaints for a while.”
“What sort of thing do you do?”
“Try me.”
“Would a curry be a possibility? Something along those lines?”
“What do you Southerners think goes in one of them?”
“Anything that’s edible,” said Jessop, feeling increasingly awkward. “That’s the idea of a curry, isn’t it? Particularly on board ship, I should think.”
“You don’t fancy scouse.”
“I’ve never tried it. If that’s what’s on I will.”
“Brave lad,” the barman said and thrust a tankard full of brownish liquid at him. “Let’s see you get that down you.”
Jessop did his best to seem pleased with the inert metallic gulp he took. He was reaching for his wallet until the barman said “Settle when you’re going.”
“Shall I wait here?”
“For what?” the barman said, then grinned at everyone but Jessop. “For your bowl, you mean. We’ll find you where you’re sitting.”
Jessop didn’t doubt it, since nobody made even a token pretence of not watching him carry his briefcase to the only unoccupied corner, which was farthest from the door. As he perched on a ragged leather stool and leaned against the yielding wallpaper under a net elaborated by a spider’s web, a woman who might have been more convincingly blonde without the darkness on her upper lip remarked “That’ll be a good few hours, I’d say.”
“Can’t argue with you there, Betty,” said her companion, a man with a rat asleep on his chest or a beard, which he raised to point it at Jessop. “Is she right, Jessop?”
“Paul,” Jessop offered, though it made him no more comfortable. “A couple, anyway.”
“A couple’s not a few, Tom,” scoffed a man with tattoos of fish and less shapely deep-sea creatures swimming under the cuffs of his shabby brownish pullover.
“What are they else then, Daniel?”
“Don’t fall out over me,” Jessop said as he might have addressed a pair of schoolchildren. “You could both be right, either could, rather.”