The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

stone with the obliterated name. “And, behold, there was no stone there, but your lost pocket-knife was lying in the heather,” said a sceptical friend to whom I once related this story.

That, I suppose, would be a good way to round off an invented tale if I were a professional story-teller. But, in simple fact, the stone was there, and so was my knife. Ruth took it from me, and when we came to the place where we had left the cliff path and turned into the moor, she hurled it far out and we heard the faint tinkle of its fall on the rocks below.

“And now,” she said with resolution, “we go back the way we came, and we eat our Christmas dinner in Falmouth. Then you can inquire for the first train to Manchester. Didn’t you say there are fogs there?”

“There are an’ all,” I said broadly.

“Good,” said Ruth. “After last night, I feel a fog is something substantial, something you can get hold of.”

South Sea Bubble

Hammond Innes

Location:  Sumburgh Head, Shetland.

Time:  September, 1973.

Eyewitness Description:  “Every now and then I had the sense of a presence on board. It was so strange at times that when I came back from telephoning or collecting parts or stores, I would find myself looking about me as though expecting somebody to be waiting for me. . .”

Author:  Ralph Hammond Innes (1914–98), who became one of the century’s most popular novelists with over thirty novels of high adventure, was born in Horsham, Sussex and after being educated at Cranbrook School in Kent became a journalist on the Financial Times. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Artillery, eventually rising to the rank of Major, and also began writing the type of books based on personal experience and exhaustive research that made his name, notably Attack Alarm (1941), based on his experiences as an Anti-Aircraft Gunner during the Battle of Britain. After the war he began his regular schedule of six months’ travelling and six months’ writing to produce an annual novel for his publishers, several of which were filmed, including Hell Below Zero (1954), Campbell’s Kingdom (1957) and The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959). His interest in the supernatural at sea had been evident in his very first book, The Doppelganger (1937), and continued through his career as well as in one of his best short stories, “South Sea Bubble”, written for the Christmas 1973 issue of Punch Magazine. Innes’ knowledge of the sea as an experienced yachtsman and his fascination with its mysteries are very evident.

She lay in Kinlochbervie in the north-west of Scotland, so cheap I should have known there was something wrong. I had come by way of Lairg, under the heights of Arkle, and four miles up the road that skirts the north shores of Loch Laxford I turned a corner and there she was – a ketch painted black and lying to her own reflection in the evening sun.

Dreams, dreams . . . dreams are fine, as an escape, as a means of counteracting the pressures of life in a big office. But when there is no barrier between dream and reality, what then? Draw back, create another dream? But one is enough for any man and this had been mine; that one day I would find the boat of my dream and sail her to the South Seas.

Maybe it was the setting, the loneliness of the loch, the aid of Nordic wildness with the great humped hills of Sutherland as back-cloth and the mass of Arkle cloud-capped in splendour. Here the Vikings had settled. From here men only just dead sailed open boats south for the herring. Even her name seemed right – Samoa.

I bought her, without a survey, without stopping to think. And then my troubles started.

She was dry when I bought her. Nobody told me the agents had paid a man to pump her out each day. If my wife had been alive I would never have been such a fool. But it was an executor’s sale. The agents told me that. Also that she had been taken in tow off Handa Island by a Fraserburgh trawler and was the subject of a salvage claim. With her port of registry Kingston, Jamaica, it explained the low asking price. What they didn’t tell me was that the trawler had found her abandoned, drifting water-logged without a soul on board. Nor did they tell me that her copper sheathing was so worn that half her underwater planking was rotten with toredo.

“A wee bit of a mystery,” was the verdict of the crofter who helped me clean her up and pump the water out of her. Nobody seemed to know who had sailed her across the Atlantic, how many had been on board, or what had happened to them.

The first night I spent on board – I shall always remember that; the excitement, the thrill of ownership, of command, of being on board a beautiful ship that was also now my home. The woodwork gleamed in the lamp-light (yes, she had oil lamps as well as electric light), and lying in the quarter berth I could look up through the open hatch to the dark shape of the hills black against the stars. I was happy in spite of everything, happier than I had been for a long time, and when I finally went to sleep it was with a picture of coral islands in my mind – white sands and palm trees and proas scudding across the pale green shadows of warm lagoons.

I woke shivering, but not with cold. It was a warm night and the cold was inside me. I was cold to my guts and very frightened. It wasn’t the strangeness of my new habitation, for I knew where I was the instant I opened my eyes. And it wasn’t fear of the long voyage ahead. It was something else, something I didn’t understand.

I shifted to one of the saloon berths, and as I slept soundly the rest of the night I put it down to nerves. It was a nervous breakdown that had led to my early retirement, enabling me to exchange my small suburban house for the thing I had always dreamed of. But I avoided the quarter berth after that, and though I was so tired every night that I fell asleep almost instantly, a sense of uneasiness persisted.

It is difficult to describe, even more difficult to explain. There was no repetition of the waking cold of that first night, but every now and then I had the sense of a presence on board. It was so strong at times that when I came back from telephoning or collecting parts or stores I would find myself looking about me as though expecting somebody to be waiting for me.

There was so much to do, and so little time, that I never got around to making determined enquiries as to whether the previous owner had been on that ill-fated voyage. I did write to his address in Kingston, but with no reply I was left with a sense of mystery and the feeling that whatever it was that had happened, it had become imprinted on the fabric of the boat. How else to explain the sense of somebody, something, trying to communicate?

It was August when I bought her, late September when I sailed out of Kinlochbervie bound for Shetland. It would have been more sensible to have headed south to an English yard, for my deadline to catch the trades across the Atlantic was December. But Scalloway was cheaper. And nearer.

I left with a good forecast, and by nightfall I was motoring north in a flat calm with Cape Wrath light bearing 205° and beginning to dip below the dark line of the horizon. My plan to install larger batteries, an alternator and an automatic pilot had had to be shelved. The money for that was now earmarked for new planking. I stayed on deck, dozing at the helm and watching for trawlers. I was tired before I started and I was tireder now.

A hand touched my shoulder and I woke with a start to complete silence. It was pitch dark, clammily cold. For a moment I couldn’t think where I was. Then I saw the shadowy outline of the mainsail above my head. Nothing else – no navigation lights, no compass light, the engine stopped and the boat sluggish. I switched on my torch and the beam shone white on fog. The sails, barely visible, were drawing and we were moving slowly westward, out into the Atlantic.

I pressed the self-starter, but nothing happened, and when I put the wheel over she took a long time to come back on course. I went below then and stepped into a foot or more of water. Fortunately I had installed a powerful, double-action pump. Even so, it took me the better part of four hours to get the water level below the cabin sole. By then it was daylight and the fog had cleared away to the west, a long bank of it looking like a smudge of smoke as the sun glimmered through the damp air.

I tried swinging the engine, but it was no good. Just as well perhaps, because it must have been the