The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales (8 page)

He yawned, stretched, then realised he was hungry. He hoped there would be a good dinner at Régis’s house. Then, he remembered. First, about his parents and the accident. Then, coming hard on its heels, that tonight it was the Feast of St Colomban so there would more than likely be no supper.

Gaston felt with his hands across the floor of the cave. He found the niche in the wall – a natural rupture in the rock – where he had secreted a few special things: the skull of a pheasant picked clean by birds and insects, a bone so big that it must have come from the carcass of some great whale. He knew them by touch and they comforted him. There was also a beautifully built nest containing three speckled eggs from the cliff. It was Régis who’d persuaded Gaston to climb down the cliff face and steal them, even though the curate had visited their classroom to explain that the roosts were protected by law and should not be disturbed.

Outside the cave, Gaston could now hear the waves and the wind beginning their night-time complaint. The sound, echoing gently about him in the cave, sounding more like human voices now. He rubbed his hands across his face. It reminded him of how his grandfather used to stroke his brow with his hard fisherman’s hands, dried out by salt and wind. They had been happy then. But then he died and his parents, rather than living as they had before, spent the inheritance on drink and visits to the town. Gaston imagined his own hands hardened by toil and wondered if the same thing would happen to his heart.

A trick of the tide brought a wave crashing in through the entrance to the cave. The water seemed iridescent, bringing light into the hollow, illuminating the rock like a wavering white flame. Gaston sprang to his feet, suddenly frightened. He tucked his shirt into his trousers, doing up his father’s patched summer jacket to the throat, placed his treasures back in the niche in the rock and went outside. He didn’t want to be trapped by the tide. He didn’t want to put anybody out and he didn’t want Régis to be in trouble for not having taken care of him.

The sight that awaited him drove all domestic thoughts from his mind. The sea seemed turned to glass, smooth as a millpond without a ruck or ripple on its surface. Even the edge of the surf was still, like a wavering line drawn in chalk across the wet sand. The air was tense and still with no sound of wind.

He had never known the sea to behave in this way.

There was a noise from the path above. Gaston stepped back into the shadows and stared up. He saw a line of men and women, all adults, walking in silent and single file down the gulley towards the beach. In the strange, flat light of the glistening surface of the sea, he saw each carried one of the tight bundles of hazel under their arms.

As he watched, they stacked them in a pile, twice the height of a man, and then formed a semicircle behind it, facing the shore. There were perhaps twenty-five of them, each wrapped in dark cloaks with deep hoods.

Then, as if there had been some signal, the water began to break and to shudder. Gaston peered out into the flickering darkness and saw the sea was now starting to shift and slip and slide. Something was emerging from the waves, a human form walking slowly but purposefully up onto the beach. The shape – it was impossible to tell whether man or woman – was wrapped in a cloak that seemed to be woven entirely from dancing ribbons of flame.

As the first figure broke through the shallows, another followed, then another, each trailing seaweed from their ankles. They dripped with brine that hissed and spat and billowed up about their faces in a mask of steam. And still they came, all striding with the same steady, purposeful gait, until some fifty or sixty of them were standing on the beach, treading from foot to foot, marching on the spot, turning this way and that. They began to murmur, their plaintive sound an echo of the sea and the wind on the shingle, their voices growing louder and louder.

He glanced at those who had lit the bonfire on the far side of the semicircle, not sure if they too could see these ancient inhabitants of the drowned village or if he was the only one.

He knew he should remain hidden, but he could not help himself. He felt drawn to them. The unexpected movement attracted their attention. Six or seven of the drowned figures turned towards him. At first, they were still. Then they were floating across the sand, holding out their hands. Gaston stepped back. They smelt like last week’s catch trampled in the bottom of the boat. They smelt of death, and yet Gaston was still drawn. He could feel the warmth of the flames that seemed to engulf them. Then thin fingers were gripping his wrists and his elbows and his neck and pulling him in to the heart of the throng.

Gaston knew that he should be terrified, but instead he felt welcomed, weightless and supported, as the creatures carried him up the beach to the bonfire. Immediately, all movement ceased. Gaston hung suspended between two worlds. He could move neither forward nor back. And he somehow knew that the visitors from beneath the sea were waiting for some kind of signal.

Could the villagers see him? Could they see the ghost women and men who had come, warmed by the light of the bonfire?

The first chime of midnight sounded. Gaston’s sense of calm started to desert him. The wailing started to build in volume once more as six of the drowned hauled their flaming cloaks from their shoulders and threw them onto the stack of burning hazel. Immediately, they caught and sent sparks of white and green shooting through the flames. A second chime, and others stepped forward: twelve of the creatures, seeming to shudder and tremble with the memory of the moment at which the waves closed over their head.

A third and a fourth and a fifth chime brought the same result. Gaston was frightened now. He flinched at the rattle of limpet-encrusted bones as, one by one, the visitors relinquished their cloaks. They shivered, draped in a few shreds of flesh, turning their awful faces left and right before the flames.

The church bell rang out again across the coastline. Gaston felt himself drawn forward, this time towards two children. As thin as he was, he knew he was not one of them and wanted to pull away, yet he found himself powerless to resist. The waifs clutched at him with skeletal hands, dragging the jacket from his shoulders, their tragic voices high and shrill like the desperate wind.

Gaston tried to cry out, but his voice was swamped by the voices of the drowned. Why was no one helping him? Why were the villagers standing by and allowing this to happen? He heard the tenth strike of the bell. Now the children were pulling at the buttons on his thin shirt, desperate to consign everything to the pyre before the final stroke of midnight.

‘Help me,’ Gaston called out, finding his voice at last. ‘They will take me. They want to take me with them.’

He tried to wriggle free, but the children’s hands were clamped fast around his ankles, his wrists.

The eleventh chime.

‘Help me please.’

At the very last moment, Gaston managed to shake himself free and leap back out of their reach. The children, cheated of their prize, threw off their cloaks and cast them onto the bonfire. It was now burning twenty feet into the air. The sparks danced against the night and the final stroke sounded.

The final toll of the bell.

Immediately, silence. Immediately, the ghostly congregation fell still. None of them, now, paid any attention to Gaston. They were as transfixed by the fire as he had been transfixed by their apparition.

Gaston realised that he could hear the surf once more. The sea was in motion, a gentle swell sending shallow waves up onto the sand. Normal for this time of year. The flames were diminishing. The magical garments of fire had almost consumed the stack of hazel bundles.

Then, the villagers on the far side of the flames drew back the hoods of their dark cloaks. Gaston gasped, recognising Régis’s mother and Monsieur Hélias too, standing to one side of the semicircle. As the bonfire burned down, Gaston saw the curate and, standing to his left, Mme Martin. None of them seemed to be able to see him, though. At least, they gave no sign of it.

One of the drowned stepped forward. A man with broad shoulders, though he was all bone and seaweed now. He paused and then bowed low to the living. The curate answered his gesture. The dead man leant forward and plucked a white-hot ember from the ashes, then turned to face the sea.

He held the ember aloft, as if in triumph, then he began to pace purposefully, steadily back down the beach towards their drowned village. The others fell into step behind him.

Gaston watched them go. Some of them seemed to hesitate before treading reluctantly into the surf. One after another they disappeared beneath the black waves until finally only the two children were left. They paused for a moment and turned back, whether towards the fire and its warmth or to invite Gaston to come with them, he could not say.

Then a few steps more and they were gone.

All at once, without his jacket and shirt, with the fire burned down to ashes, Gaston fell to his knees and sobbed, the tears running down his face and over his hands. Crying for those condemned to come ashore once a year to light their kingdom under the sea, crying for the grief and loneliness inside him that drew him to their company. Crying for his parents.

Then, the warmth of real arms around him and he was being pulled to his feet. The sound of a familiar voice.

‘Gaston, how do you come to be here?’

It was Mme Martin’s voice.

‘I didn’t mean to . . .’ he tried to explain. ‘I fell asleep. I didn’t know, I didn’t mean to spy.’

He felt a cloak being wrapped around his shaking shoulders.

‘You’re safe now, don’t worry. Everything will be all right.’

She walked him up the beach. ‘Everything will be all right.’

Monsieur Hélias picked him up in the trap, promising that Régis was back at the farmhouse and there would be a good meal waiting. He didn’t seem angry now and Gaston thought, perhaps, he had misjudged the man. As they rounded the headland, he turned in his seat.

‘Look,’ he said.

Some two hundred yards out at sea, where once the island had been, a light was burning. The drowned islanders had relit their warning lamp from the embers of the bonfire.

Mme Martin smiled. ‘Yes.’

‘But how is it possible?’ he said. ‘How can it burn beneath the waves?’

‘How is any of it possible?’ she laughed. ‘Perhaps it’s just a trick of the light.’

‘Even so,’ he said quietly. ‘I saw it. It must be true, somehow, mustn’t it?’

‘Who’s to say?’ she said. ‘We must trust to providence.’

‘What does it mean?’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

‘Perhaps only that we have to believe that the future can be different from the past.’ She paused. ‘I have been very proud to teach you, Gaston. I believe that you will give us all reason to be proud when you go away to boarding school.’

‘I can still go? I feared . . . I thought maybe not.’

‘The scholarship will pay your expenses and your parents’ money will be set aside for when you leave, for when you are a man. Your writing impressed the Board very much.’

‘And then what will I do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mme Martin, but he could hear the smile in her voice. ‘Perhaps you will write a book about the legends of the Quibéron Peninsula. Set this story down.’

Gaston took a last look at the lamp burning out at sea, then turned back to face her.

‘Perhaps I will,’ he said.

Author’s Note

My lovely Uncle Geoff died in February 2011. A passionate musician and a Francophile, he was a great favourite at Christmas get-togethers with his stories of visits to festivals, food and music, all over France. The year when he fell asleep – properly asleep – on the floor under the Christmas tree, has gone down in family history. When my inspirational Auntie Margie
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died last year, and their house came to be cleared, my cousins suggested I might like some of Uncle Geoff’s French books.

Three boxes were duly delivered. They contained, as well as notebooks and clippings from newspapers, a wonderful mixture of novels, cookbooks, art and illustrated guidebooks. But the biggest treasures were several volumes of Breton folk tales and legends. Some stories were similar to myths I’d heard from Cornwall or Wales, even Sussex, but most were new to me and came very specifically from the coastline and landscape of Brittany past and present.

‘The Drowned Village’ is the first of two stories inspired by those Breton folk tales and is dedicated to the memory of my uncle and aunt.

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The Reverend Margaret Booker was one of the founders of the Movement for the Ordination of Women. She was ordained by the Bishop of Chelmsford on 30th April 1994, the first woman to be ordained in that Diocese.

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL