No Other God but Me
Adrian Cole
October’s a weird month. Sometimes you get an Indian summer, and days are more like the good ones in August. Other years it’s like November’s come early, with high winds, seas fuming and a deep chill settling under clouds that never disperse. Here on the north coast of South Western England, where the villages jut out into the Celtic Sea before it merges with the open Atlantic, we notice the cold. Our climate is pretty mild, even in the autumn. Maybe this change they keep talking about had something to do with events two years back. When all hell woke and came visiting.
People think it began with the vicar, Martin Shute. The way he died and all. They found his body one morning, down on the beach. It was a mess: the gulls had already flocked in to feast on it. They eat anything, not just fish: food waste, chips they can pinch off tourists, even human flesh if it’s available. The police reckoned it was the birds who’d picked Shute clean, but I don’t see how they could have leeched all his blood and flown off with half his bones. Maybe they knew there was something nastier at work, but they couldn’t figure it out. They did admit it was unusual – their word – for so much religious stuff to be scattered around the priest’s remains. A number of small crucifixes, a Bible and a prayer book, both badly torn up, a couple of silver salvers from the church, crumpled like paper and a miniature Jesus statue.
It didn’t need a genius to know someone was taking the piss out of Shute’s Christianity. It was an act of violation, coupled with the killing. Someone suggested sacrifice, but the police were prepared to consider it religious mania, the work of nutters. They combed our village, Rooksands, but found nothing, no clues. The national press had a wonderful time and we suffered TV people milling around, as bad as the gulls, but once the trail went cold with nothing new to add, they all took off back to look for something else to gorge on.
The Reverend Shute was found at 5:00 AM on October 1. Three weeks later, Rooksands was almost back to normal. The police maintained a watch, an ‘incident room’ in the Parish Hall, so they could continue their investigations, but the fact was, they were going backwards.
Like I said, people think it began with the vicar. Me and most of the villagers knew otherwise, but we weren’t about to blab to the police. They’d have taken us for lunatics if we had. Mind you, Shute’s death was the last straw for us. I’d been saying for a long time we needed to take action ourselves. No one liked that, or my suggestions, but the death of the holy man broke the camel’s back, so to speak. Maybe it did some good, though I’d not have seen Shute slaughtered like he was. He’d been a good man. Naïve, but kind.
So where did this nightmare begin? I’d say two years ago. I was one of the first people to know about it, because I spend a lot of time at sea. I don’t make my living as a fisherman, like a lot of the Rooksands men, but I have a small boat and I like to go out into the bay for mackerel, or sometimes I’ll go for something much bigger. I’m fifty and I retired early. Drove big trucks for most of my working life, never married (came close twice) and put enough money aside to keep me going. Bought an old cottage in Rooksands, where I grew up, and modernised it. I like the simple life.
Only life in Rooksands wasn’t so simple. Not once the killings started. Make no mistake, they were killings. I know they were seen as accidents and at first it seemed like they were – people lost at sea in storms, others carelessly falling from the local cliffs. Easy to dismiss them as freakish. The coast and sea here are a harsh environment. There’s an old village further along the coast, Trewithick Hole that was almost dragged off the shore and flattened in a horrendous storm back in 1922. All that was left was a few broken-down houses, like huge gravestones. Tourists like to visit the place and I know Tom Kellow makes a bob or two taking his Ghost Walks along there.
So a handful of local deaths – with no trace of any of the bodies – could be attributed to freak weather. Some of us in the village suspected something worse. Trouble was, the things we saw weren’t credible. I mean, this land is stiff with legends. Down in Cornwall they have the Beast of Bodmin, a big cat or something that chews up sheep and the like. Never been caught. I know people who’ve seen the thing, but as far as the world is concerned, it’s a myth, a night shadow.
The things out in our bay are the same. Like the night Davey Smale and I was out fishing for shark. Thought we’d hooked a big one, but when we got it into the boat, we had a shock. At first I thought it was an oversize squid, almost as big as me, only we don’t get them here. It must’ve come up from beyond the Atlantic shelf. We had a hard time killing it and Davey suffered nasty damage to his arm from the thing’s suckers. We got it back to my place and stuck it in one of my small outbuildings. Covered it with a tarpaulin. Next morning the door was ripped off its hinges and the thing was gone. Tarpaulin was shredded. Worse than all that, Maurice Tiddy, a neighbour, had lost two dogs. We found enough blood to suggest foul play.
Davey Smale and I described the thing we’d brought ashore to the police, but it didn’t help them. Soon after that the so-called accidents began. Five people lost, two local and three holiday-makers. All in bad weather, in some cases in the middle of summer. I’d found some weird tracks along the narrow beaches, leading into the sea, and the villagers complained about a stench that hung over the water, like something huge had died out there, a whale maybe. But there was no carcass washed up. I don’t reckon anyone would have suspected what I did. They might be superstitious, but the world isn’t so small any more. They like practical explanations.
My trucking days had taken me all over Europe. I’d heard some strange tales. I’d met sailors and travellers who’d picked up word of things at sea, things they said explained what I’d dragged out of the deeps that time. Creatures that lived out in the ocean and worshipped gods most of us never heard of. Mostly it had struck me as rubbish, the booze talking, or just someone spinning a good yarn to entertain us on the long nights on the road.
It struck me, though, that Rooksands needed to defend itself from whatever was out in the bay. At first everyone laughed it off. The nasty death of the vicar brought the village to its senses. While the police were nosing around, trying to make sense of things, I had a small posse visit me. Tom Kellow, Davey Smale and Kelvin Dobbs, spokesmen for the rest. They were good, honest men, hard workers all. They’d put their necks on the line to help you if need arose.
“You were right,” Davey told me. “About fetching help. The police are stumped.”
“They will be,” I said, “as long as they’re looking for answers on land. You boys know where the real problem lies. It’s out there in the bay.”
Tom nodded. “My ghost stories are based on legends and the like, though I don’t believe in ghosts myself. You’re right, though. Whatever did that to the vicar, isn’t normal.”
“It was a warning,” I told them. “Martin thought he could use his Christianity to ward off those things. It took a lot of guts for him to recognise the problem and stand up to it. You saw what they did to him. His God wasn’t strong enough to defend him.”
Before Shute’s death, the three men would have been appalled by that kind of comment, but not now. They were frightened, and none of us was sleeping well.