Dark Echo

She left the Botanic Gardens museum with Jane Boyte’s deposition in her bag. On her way back to Roe Lane through Churchtown she stopped at a picturesque pub with tables outside called the Hesketh Arms. She did not read. She ate. It was after two thirty now and she was very hungry. The sun was warm on the weathered surface of the table she sat at. Ivy grew green and verdant on the white walls of the pub. Flowers in window boxes filled with freshly watered soil smelled sweet and fragrant. She ordered a cheese salad and it was very good: fresh, crusty bread and crumbly Lancashire cheese and plump tomatoes freshly picked from the greenhouses outside the town at one of the farms on the South Lancashire plain. The scene would have been idyllic, were it not for the lorries trundling by, their emissions rippling in the summer light, distorting the view.

Suzanne walked back the way she had come. They did not have taxis you could hail in Southport. They had minicabs. And there were plenty of those, but none stopped for her when Suzanne had tried in the preceding days to hail them. They stopped at designated ranks to pick up fares, she supposed. But she did not know where any of the ranks were located. Or you could ring them. But she did not know the numbers. They would have put her right on that score in the Hesketh Arms, of course. But the weather was lovely and the unfamiliar streets were picturesque and totally different from what she was used to. Southport was largely Victorian and very largely, in terms of its domestic architecture, still intact. She was enjoying the exercise. She was enjoying the anticipation. And so she walked.

It was almost four when she reached the point on Rotten Row where she knew Spalding’s mansion lurked above the rise. She looked at her bag. Jane’s deposition wore the protection of a large padded envelope. The fellow in the museum had provided it, to keep the covers of the volume from the sun. It was his overdue bid at professionalism and conscientiousness, his tardy attempt to be seen as competent. Suzanne was very keen to examine the contents of the envelope. But the lure of the house over the steep grass slope was inexplicably strong. She wanted another look. She wanted just a peek at the place. She did not see how, in the bright sunshine, with schoolgirls passing on the way to the cement courts in Victoria Park with their tennis rackets swinging from their hands, it could hurt just to sneak another look.

This time she was more brazen about it. She climbed the stone steps with their smooth inlay of terracotta tiles. She unlatched the wooden gate at the top, took a breath and walked through into the garden. And it hit her immediately. It hit her like an arctic shift in the weather or a solid punch to the gut. Everything was different here and none of it was right. She began to shiver and sweat at the same time, chilled but clammy at the forehead and temples. The feeling got worse with every footstep she extended towards the house. She was surrounded by a silence that her deep foreboding insisted would be torn asunder any moment by a scream she knew she would share. And she recognised this feeling. She remembered it. It was the selfsame instinct of terror she had felt in Duval’s barn, before she reached the barn door and Duval himself confronted her, comforting in his surly rudeness, safe wielding his shotgun, after the other-worldly hazards of the barn interior.

What had he done here? She turned round. She had to. She could not will herself to take another step. The ground felt corrupt under her feet. The taint of death hung like a pallor above the earth. She ran for the gate and escape, and descended the brick steps back to sanity, back to smiling pedestrians, a clopping bunch of riders, back to cars in the sunshine driving slowly along Rotten Row, giving the horses a wide berth as they edged past them in the safe and pleasant hope and colour of a lovely June afternoon.

Aboard Dark Echo

It seems that the writing habit is a hard one to lose. Though I am writing this in longhand in one of the handsome morocco-bound volumes my father intended to have serve aboard the vessel as his log. My laptop battery has failed. Since we have no electrical power aboard any more, I write by the light of a paraffin lamp. And the instrument in my hand is my father’s fountain pen. The master of the Andromeda himself could not better me at this moment for simplicity or tradition. But Captain Straub would not be proud of me. He passed on a warning that I should have heeded but chose to ignore. I was no longer strictly under his command when he delivered the warning. But I should have listened to him. He would be disappointed to know my predicament now. And he would be right in thinking that I have only myself to blame for it.

I am in my cabin, writing this seated at my desk behind the locked cabin door. My father lies unconscious on my bunk. Occasionally, things slither past along the gangway outside. Or at least, they sound as if they do. There is the growl of a dog or the whimper of a child. More rarely, and the more shocking for it, there is the sudden loud scream of a woman hysterical with terror. That sound comes from my father’s cabin, which is really Spalding’s cabin, of course. There is often laughter, but it is dark. There is whispered pleading, which is met by silence. And there are scents. These are more varied than the noises. Sometimes they are pungent and sometimes subtle. Sometimes it is a hint of perfume, Arpege or Mitsouko, florid and heavy. Sometimes it is the whiff of strong tobacco. Sometimes the treacle aroma of rum is in the air. On occasion I’ve smelled cordite, sharp and strong as though from the barrel or firing chamber of a gun just discharged in close proximity. There is often the coppery odour of blood, freshly spilled. There is the sour secretion of fear. Worst of all, there is now and then the overwhelming stench of mortal decay that radiates from the self-murdered corpse of Gubby Tench as his remains stew in the heat of Havana Bay.

They are the boat’s memories, these various and randomly occurring sounds and smells. And they are growing in strength and vividness as we approach our meeting with its one true master. Harry Spalding haunts the boat. But he does this in a paradoxical way. For I believe Spalding haunts the Dark Echo without really being a ghost at all.

Suzanne encountered a ghost, I remember, in Dublin back in January. Her ghost was benign. I suspect she encountered him again and never let on to me about the fact. Her ghost, in life, had an eye for the ladies. She was looking pretty hard at him, back then. He probably considered he had the justification to take a look right back at her. Whether she sensed him again or not, he meant no harm. And being dead, he could do no harm, either. I don’t believe a dead man can physically hurt the living.

Nothing about Spalding was ever benign. I had pondered on this after my efforts to send my account of events to Monsignor Delaunay, as my father got steadily drunker and the boat shifted under me as it continues to do now on its own relentless course. He had used his occult knowledge to keep death at bay in the war. He had practised barbaric and blasphemous rituals to guarantee his survival. He had sacrificed and kept on sacrificing. I suspected that the woman who supposedly dumped him on the quay at Rimini had been the first of his peacetime offerings. But Tench and the Waltrow brothers had been sacrifices, too, hadn’t they? Another had been made only recently, in the man who bled to death following that impossible accident in Frank Hadley’s yard. Between Gubby Tench and Hadley’s man, I suspected that the lost log of the Dark Echo would have documented a lot more deaths down the years and decades. But Spalding had ended his own life in 1929. Why did a man, long since deceased, need to go on paying the Devil the price of immortality? There was no reason. He did not need to do so. So what was the obvious conclusion? My own logic impelled me to believe that Spalding had never died at all.

The ‘Send’ light was still flashing feebly on my computer screen. Providence would determine whether Delaunay ever got my emailed testament. It was beyond my fingertips now, in cyberspace, out of my hands. I got up and went to confront my father. I wanted to ask him about the log. He once said he had read it. I’d thought the claim blithely made and untrue, just something said to shut me up when, at Hadley’s yard, the Dark Echo really had seemed cursed. But it was possible he had actually read it. He was a voracious reader and an intellectually curious man and the boat had been his coveted prize.

But when I got to him he was beyond interrogation. He was stretched unconscious on the floor. At first, I feared he had suffered a stroke. But his features wore their familiar symmetry and there was nothing rigid in his posture, lying there. His breathing was ponderous but steady. I bent to listen to his heart and it was regular and strong. The sounds aboard of infant crying had tormented him, as perhaps they were supposed to do. I knew with dull certainty in my own heart it was not my sister but some infant victim of the boat’s bloody history. My father, though, had believed it was Catherine Ann, come back to chastise him for some sin he had never committed.

My father had now taken to the refuge aboard the Dark Echo of deep shock. I was on my own. I gathered him in my arms and carried him to my cabin and put him in my bunk. I kissed him on the cheek and brought the blanket snugly to his chin. I smoothed down his dishevelled hair to restore some dignity to my dad. I said a prayer for him. Locking the door behind me, I returned to the master cabin. The machine that played the wax cylinders looked like it had when I’d brought it out of its rotting box. It looked like it would never play again. I took the cylinder we had listened to from the cradle bevelled for it and put another in. It stank and slipped between my fingers with greasy decay.