A Book of Horrors Read online

  That was stupid, he thought, hastily wiping his hand on his trousers. Now I’ll get dysentery. Or whatever one gets from cows.

  He stood there for another minute, then turned and retraced his steps to the rental car. He saw a pair of headlights approaching and flagged down a white delivery van.

  ‘I’m lost,’ he said, and showed the driver the map that Evan had given him.

  ‘Not too lost.’ The driver perused the map, then gave him directions. ‘Once you see the inn you’re almost there.’

  Jeffrey thanked him, got back into the car and started to drive. In ten minutes he reached the inn, a rambling stucco structure with half a dozen cars out front. There was no sign identifying Cardu, and no indication that there was anything more to the village than the inn and a deeply rutted road flanked by a handful of granite cottages in varying states of disrepair. He eased the rental car by the mottled grey buildings to where what passed for a road ended; bore right and headed down a cobblestoned, hairpin drive that zigzagged along the cliff-edge.

  He could hear but could not see the ocean, waves crashing against rocks hundreds of feet below. Now and then he got a skin-crawling glimpse of immense cliffs like congealed flames – ruddy stone, apricot-yellow gorse, lurid flares of orange lichen all burned to ash as afterglow faded from the western sky.

  He wrenched his gaze back to the narrow strip of road immediately in front of him. Gorse and brambles tore at the doors; once he bottomed out, then nosed the car across a water-filled gulley that widened into a stream that cascaded down the cliff to the sea below.

  ‘Holy fucking Christ,’ he said, and kept in first gear. In another five minutes he was safely parked beside the cottage, alongside a small coupé.

  ‘We thought maybe you weren’t coming,’ someone called as Jeffrey stepped shakily out onto a cobblestone drive. Straggly rosebushes grew between a row of granite slabs that resembled headstones. These were presumably to keep cars from veering down an incline that led to a ruined outbuilding, a few faint stars already framed in its gaping windows. ‘Some people, they start down here and just give up and turn back.’

  Jeffrey looked around, finally spotted a slight man in his early sixties standing in the doorway of a grey stone cottage tucked into the lee of the cliff. ‘Oh, hi. No, I made it.’

  Jeffrey ducked back into the car, grabbed his bag and headed for the cottage.

  ‘Harry,’ the man said, and held the door for him.

  ‘Jeffrey. I spoke to your wife this afternoon.’

  The man’s brow furrowed. ‘Wife?’ He was a head shorter than Jeffrey, clean-shaven, with a sun-weathered face and sleek grey-flecked dark brown hair to his shoulders. A ropey old cable-knit sweater hung from his lank frame.

  ‘Well, someone. A woman.’

  ‘Oh, that was Thomsa. My sister.’ The man nodded, as though this confusion had never occurred before. ‘We’re still trying to get unpacked. We don’t really open till this weekend, but …’

  He held the door so Jeffrey could pass inside. ‘Thomsa told me of your loss. My condolences.’

  Inside was a small room with slate floors and plastered walls, sparely furnished with a plain wooden table and four chairs intricately carved with Celtic knots; a sideboard holding books and maps and artfully mismatched crockery; large gas stove and a side-table covered with notepads and pens, unopened bills and a laptop. A modern cast-iron wood-stove had been fitted into a wide, old-fashioned hearth. The stove radiated warmth and an acrid, not unpleasant scent, redolent of coal-smoke and burning sage. Peat, Jeffrey realised with surprise. There was a closed door on the other side of the room, and from behind this came the sound of a television. Harry looked at Jeffrey, cocking an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Jeffrey.

  Harry nodded. ‘I’ll take you to your room.’

  Jeffrey followed him up a narrow stair beneath the eaves, into a short hallway flanked by two doors. ‘Your room’s here. Bath’s down there, you’ll have it all to yourself. What time would you like breakfast?’

  ‘Seven, maybe?’

  ‘How about seven-thirty?’

  Jeffrey smiled wanly. ‘Sure.’

  The room was small, white plaster walls and a window-seat overlooking the sea, a big bed heaped with a white duvet and myriad pillows, corner wardrobe carved with the same Celtic knots as the chairs below. No TV or radio or telephone, not even a clock. Jeffrey unpacked his bag and checked his phone for service: none.

  He closed the wardrobe, looked in his backpack and swore. He’d left his book on the train. He ran a hand through his hair, stepped to the window-seat and stared out.

  It was too dark now to see much, though light from windows on the floor below illuminated a small, winding patch of garden, bound on the cliff side by a stone wall. Beyond that there was only rock and, far below, the sea. Waves thundered against the unseen shore, a muted roar like a jet turbine. He could feel the house around him shake.

  And not just the house, he thought; it felt as though the ground and everything around him trembled without ceasing. He paced to the other window, which overlooked the drive, and stared at his rental car and the coupé beside it through a frieze of branches, a tree so contorted by wind and salt that its limbs only grew in one direction. He turned off the room’s single light, waited for his eyes to adjust; stared back out through one window, and then the other.

  For as far as he could see, there was only night. Ghostly light seeped from a room downstairs onto the sliver of lawn. Starlight touched on the endless sweep of moor, like another sea unrolling from the line of cliffs brooding above black waves and distant headlands. There was no sign of human habitation: no distant lights, no street-lamps, no cars, no ships or lighthouse beacons: nothing.

  He sank onto the window seat, dread knotting his chest. He had never seen anything like this – even hiking in the Mojave Desert with Anthea ten years earlier, there had been a scattering of lights sifted across the horizon and satellites moving slowly through the constellations. He grabbed his phone, fighting a cold black solitary horror. There was still no reception.

  He put the phone aside and stared at a framed sepia-tinted photograph on the wall: a three-masted schooner wrecked on the rocks beneath a cliff he suspected was the same one where the cottage stood. Why was he even here? He felt as he had once in college, waking in a strange room after a night of heavy drinking, surrounded by people he didn’t know in a squalid flat used as a shooting gallery. The same sense that he’d been engaged in some kind of psychic somnambulism, walking perilously close to a precipice.

  Here, of course he actually was perched on the edge of a precipice. He stood and went into the hall, switching on the light; walked into the bathroom and turned on all the lights there as well.

  It was almost as large as his bedroom, cheerfully appointed with yellow and blue towels piled atop a wooden chair, a massive porcelain tub, hand-woven yellow rugs and a fistful of daffodils in a cobalt glass vase on a wide windowsill. He moved the towels and sat on the chair for a few minutes, then crossed to pick up the vase and drew it to his face.

  The daffodils smelled sweetly, of overturned earth warming in the sunlight. Anthea had loved daffodils, planting a hundred new bulbs every autumn; daffodils and jonquil and narcissus and crocuses, all the harbingers of spring. He inhaled again, deeply, and replaced the flowers on the sill. He left a light on beside the sink, returned to his room and went to bed.

  He woke before 7:00. Thin sunlight filtered through the white curtains he’d drawn the night before and for several minutes he lay in bed, listening to the rhythmic boom of surf on the rocks. He finally got up, pulled aside the curtain and looked out.

  A line of clouds hung above the western horizon, but over the headland the sky was pale blue, shot with gold where the sun rose above the moor. Hundreds of feet below Jeffrey’s bedroom navy swells crashed against the base of the cliffs and swirled around ragged granite pinnacles that rose from the sea, surrounded by clouds of white seabirds. The
re was a crescent of white sand, and a black cavern-mouth gouged into one of the cliffs where a vortex rose and subsided with the waves.

  The memory of last night’s horror faded: sunlight and wheeling birds, the vast expanse of air and sea and all-but-treeless moor made him feel exhilarated. For the first time since Anthea’s death he had a premonition not of dread but of the sort of exultation he felt as a teenager, waking in his boyhood room in early spring.

  He dressed and shaved – there was no shower, only that dinghy-sized tub, so he’d forgo bathing till later. He waited until he was certain he heard movement in the kitchen, and went downstairs.

  ‘Good morning.’ A woman who might have been Harry’s twin leaned against the slate sink. Slender, small-boned, with straight dark hair held back with two combs from a narrow face, brown-eyed and weathered as her brother’s. ‘I’m Thomsa.’

  He shook her hand, glanced around for signs of coffee then peered out the window. ‘This is an amazing place.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Thomsa said evenly. She spooned coffee into a glass cafetière, picked up a steaming kettle and poured hot water over the grounds. ‘Coffee, right? I have tea if you prefer. Would you like eggs? Some people have all sorts of food allergies. Vegans, how do you feed them?’ She stared at him in consternation, turned back to the sink, glancing at a bowl of eggs. ‘How many?’

  The cottage was silent, save for the drone of a television behind the closed door and the thunder of waves beating against the cliffs. Jeffrey sat at a table set for one, poured himself coffee and stared out to where the moor rose behind them. ‘Does the sound of the ocean ever bother you?’ he asked.

  Thomsa laughed. ‘No. We’ve been here thirty-five years; we’re used to that. But we’re building a house in Greece, in Hydra, that’s where we just returned from. There’s a church in the village and every afternoon the bells ring, I don’t know why. At first I thought, isn’t that lovely, church bells! Now I’m sick of them and just wish they’d shut up.’

  She set a plate of fried eggs and thick-cut bacon in front of him, along with slabs of toasted brown bread and glass bowls of jam, picked up a mug and settled at the table. ‘So, are you here on holiday?’

  ‘Mmm, yes.’ Jeffrey nodded, his mouth full. ‘My wife died last fall. I just needed to get away for a bit.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m very sorry.’

  ‘She visited here once when she was a girl – not here, but at a farm nearby, in Zennor. I don’t know the last name of the family, but the woman was named Becca.’

  ‘Becca? Mmmm, no, I don’t think so. Maybe Harry will know.’

  ‘This would have been 1971.’

  ‘Ah – no, we didn’t move here till ’75. Summer, us and all the other hippie types from back then.’ She sipped her tea. ‘No tourists around this time of year. Usually we don’t open till the second week in March. But we don’t have anyone scheduled yet, so.’ She shrugged, pushing back a wisp of dark hair. ‘It’s quiet this time of year. No German tour buses. Do you paint?’

  ‘Paint?’ Jeffrey blinked. ‘No. I’m an architect, so I draw, but mostly just for work. I sketch sometimes.’

  ‘We get a lot of artists. There’s the Tate in St Ives, if you like modern architecture. And of course there are all the prehistoric ruins – standing stones, and Zennor Quoit. There are all sorts of legends about them, fairy tales. People disappearing. They’re very interesting, if you don’t mind the walk.

  ‘Are there places to eat?’

  ‘The inn here, though you might want to stop in and make a booking. There’s the pub in Zennor, and St Ives of course, though it can be hard to park. And Penzance.’

  Jeffrey winced. ‘Not sure I want to get back on the road again immediately.’

  ‘Yes, the drive here’s a bit tricky, isn’t it? But Zennor’s only two miles, if you don’t mind walking – lots of people do, we get hikers from all over on the coastal footpath. And Harry might be going out later, he could drop you off in Zennor if you like.’

  ‘Thanks. Not sure what I’ll do yet. But thank you.’

  He ate his breakfast, making small talk with Thomsa and nodding at Harry when he emerged and darted through the kitchen, raising a hand as he slipped outside. Minutes later, Jeffrey glimpsed him pushing a wheelbarrow full of gardening equipment.

  ‘I think the rain’s supposed to hold off,’ Thomsa said, staring out the window. ‘I hope so. We want to finish that wall. Would you like me to make more coffee?’

  ‘If you don’t mind.’

  Jeffrey dabbed a crust into the blackcurrant jam. He wanted to ask if Thomsa or her brother knew Robert Bennington, but was afraid he might be stirring up memories of some local scandal, or that he’d be taken for a journalist or some other busybody. He finished the toast, thanked Thomsa when she poured him more coffee, then reached for one of the brochures on the sideboard.

  ‘So does this show where those ruins are?’

  ‘Yes. You’ll want the Ordnance Survey map. Here—’

  She cleared the dishes, gathered a map and unfolded it. She tapped the outline of a tiny cove between two spurs of land. ‘We’re here.’

  She traced one of the spurs, lifted her head to stare out the window to a grey-green spine of rock stretching directly to the south. ‘That’s Gurnard’s Head. And there’s Zennor Head—’

  She turned and pointed in the opposite direction, to a looming promontory a few miles distant, and looked back down at the map. ‘You can see where everything’s marked.’

  Jeffrey squinted to make out words printed in a tiny, Gothic font. TUMULI, STANDING STONE, HUT CIRCLE, CAIRN. ‘Is there a fogou around here?’

  ‘A fogou?’ She frowned slightly. ‘Yes, there is – out towards Zennor, across the moor. It’s a bit of a walk.’

  ‘Could you give me directions? Just sort of point the way? I might try and find it – give me something to do.’

  Thomsa stepped to the window. ‘The coastal path is there – see? If you follow it up to the ridge, you’ll see a trail veer off. There’s an old road there, the farmers use it sometimes. All those old fields run alongside it. The fogou’s on the Golovenna Farm; I don’t know how many fields back that is. It would be faster if you drove towards Zennor then hiked over the moor, but you could probably do it from here. You’ll have to find an opening in the stone walls or climb over – do you have hiking shoes?’ She looked dubiously at his sneakers. ‘Well, they’ll probably be all right.’

  ‘I’ll give it a shot. Can I take that map?’

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s not the best map – there’s a more detailed Ordnance Survey one, I think.’

  He thanked her and downed the rest of his coffee, went upstairs and pulled a heavy woollen sweater over his flannel shirt, grabbed his cell phone and returned downstairs. He retrieved the map and stuck it in his coat pocket, said goodbye to Thomsa, rinsing dishes in the sink, and walked outside.

  The air was warmer, almost balmy despite a stiff wind that had torn the line of clouds into grey shreds. Harry knelt beside a stone wall, poking at the ground with a small spade. Jeffrey paused to watch him, then turned to survey clusters of daffodils and jonquils, scores of them, scattered across the terraced slopes among rocks and apple trees. The flowers were not yet in bloom, but he could glimpse sunlit yellow and orange and saffron petals swelling within the green buds atop each slender stalk.

  ‘Going out?’ Harry called.

  ‘Yes.’ Jeffrey stooped to brush his fingers across one of the flowers. ‘My wife loved daffodils. She must have planted thousands of them.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Should open in the next few days. If we get some sun.’

  Jeffrey waved farewell and turned to walk up the drive.

  In a few minutes, the cottage was lost to sight. The cobblestones briefly gave way to cracked concrete, then a deep rut that marked a makeshift path that led uphill, towards the half-dozen buildings that made up the village. He stayed on the driveway, and after another hundred feet reached a spot where a nar
row footpath meandered off to the left, marked by a sign. This would be the path that Thomsa had pointed out.

  He shaded his eyes and looked back. He could just make out Cliff Cottage, its windows a flare of gold in the sun. He stepped onto the trail, walking with care across loose stones and channels where water raced downhill, fed by the early spring rains. To one side, the land sheared away to cliffs and crashing waves; he could see where the coastal path wound along the headland, fading into the emerald crown of Zennor Head. Above him, the ground rose steeply, overgrown with coiled ferns, newly sprung grass, thickets of gorse in brilliant sun-yellow bloom where bees and tiny orange butterflies fed. At the top of the incline, he could see the dark rim of a line of stone walls. He stayed on the footpath until it began to bear towards the cliffs, then looked for a place where he could break away and make for the ancient fields. He saw what looked like a path left by some kind of animal and scrambled up, dodging gorse, his sneakers sliding on loose scree, until he reached the top of the headland.

  The wind here was so strong he nearly lost his balance as he hopped down into a grassy lane. The lane ran parallel to a long ridge of stone walls perhaps four feet high, braided with strands of rusted barbed wire. On the other side, endless intersections of yet more walls divided the moor into a dizzyingly ragged patchwork: jade-green, beryl, creamy yellow; ochre and golden amber. Here and there, twisted trees grew within sheltered corners, or rose from atop the walls themselves, gnarled branches scraping at the sky. High overhead, a bird arrowed towards the sea, and its plaintive cry rose above the roar of wind in his ears.

  He pulled out the map, struggling to open it in the wind, finally gave up and shoved it back into his pocket. He tried to count back four fields, but it was hopeless – he couldn’t make out where one field ended and another began.

  And he had no idea what field to start with. He walked alongside the lane, away from the cottage and the village of Cardu, hoping he might find a gate or opening. He finally settled on a spot where the barbed wire had become engulfed by a protective thatch of dead vegetation. He clambered over the rocks, clutching desperately at dried leaves as the wall gave way beneath his feet and nearly falling onto a lethal-looking knot of barbed wire. Gasping, he reached the top of the wall, flailed as wind buffeted him then crouched until he could catch his breath.