Freelance and Fishmaids is a supernatural novella, serialized in twelve episodes. This is Episode Four. Start Here.
Previously, Caroline embarked on her first paranormal investigation, in an old farmhouse turned into a private medical practice.
In this episode, Caroline and Reyville are roped into a strange—and dangerous—rescue mission.
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For more tales set on Ferris Island, check out the Ferris Island Index.
Happy New Year was the last thing Caroline expected to see written at the bottom of an eviction notice, and she stared at the phrase for a long, long time. So much can be said in three little words, somehow.
Happy New Year.
30 Days Notice.
Building for sale.
The January rain lashed against the apartment windows, blown about by an impatient wind that had swelled as soon as the milky winter sun slipped below the horizon hours earlier.
Caroline curled deeply into the couch, holding the letter tightly in her hand, reading and rereading it until the words all blurred together.
First fired, then evicted. What next?
Only a few weeks into this freelancing thing, and reality came crashing in, as usual.
Happy New Year.
The wind howled, begging to be let in, and Caroline looked at the time. 9:20pm. A little late, but…
She picked up her phone, hesitated, and then dialed anyway.
After a ring or two, Reyville picked up.
“Evening,” he said, pleasantly.
“Hi,” Caroline said. “Sorry to call, it’s…uh…I just got some…news.”
“Oh? Bad news?”
“You could say that.” Caroline pinched the bridge of her nose where it suddenly felt very tight. “It's an eviction notice. My landlord is selling the building, I guess. I have thirty days to find a new place to live. I'm not sure why I called, I just…needed to tell someone and…”
“Bollocks. That’s rotten. What will you do?”
Caroline laughed, without humor. “Search me. I really thought this whole freelancing thing was a good idea, but…getting evicted sure isn't going to help. I'm kind of at a crossroads here, Reyville. I really don't know if it's wise to stay. To do…this.”
Reyville made a thoughtful noise, the sound of the rain on the boat’s cabin roof audible through the phone.
“Miss Phelan, I have a philosophy that commiserating is best done in person. Let’s go out.”
Caroline thought she hadn’t heard right. “What?”
“Out. For a laugh. Or a cry, if you need it. You know the Wake?”
The Fishmaid’s Wake, a fisherman’s bar down at the Port Salish harbor. Caroline had been persona non grata there, ever since one of her nocturnal ghost hunts in the bar had been rumbled by Ezekiel Shy, the Wake’s owner.
She winced. “Uh…yeah, I know it. I’m…kinda infamous, there.”
“Did you piss Zeke off?”
“Yeah. Caught a ghost in the basement.”
“Troublemaker.” Reyville laughed. “Zeke doesn’t like anyone, but he tolerates me. Let’s go for it. I’m buying. Say, ten o’clock?”
*******
Caroline ran from the small parking lot into the dive bar’s neon-soaked front door, holding her hood tightly over her curls against the wind and rain. The smell of spilled beer, stale cigarettes, and cleaning fluid hit her square in the face, along with the jukebox playing Rhiannon at a volume just a shade too loud for comfort.
She had been hoping to slip in largely unnoticed to find Reyville, but no such luck. It was a stormy winter Tuesday night in a small tourist-driven town, and the tavern was remarkably quiet. Just a few folks in the booths and one or two at the bar.
Zeke Shy looked up from polishing a glass and glowered at her, clearly recognizing her. He was a giant of a man, silver hair and a big beard, arms alive with old sailor tattoos. He limped to and fro behind his bar like a man who has never quite gotten used to being on land.
She gave him a little wave. He ignored it.
To her chagrin, Reyville was sitting at the bar, a pint glass in front of him that he had already sipped down to nearly halfway.
So much for slipping in unnoticed, she thought, and wandered over to the empty stool beside him.
“Miss Phelan,” he said, smiling as she sat. “Welcome to the Wake.”
“Thanks. It’s been a while. Still smells…the same.”
Before she could fully settle in, Zeke had materialized in front of her, staring down at the two of them, not even pretending not to be surprised that they were together.
“What’ll you have?” Zeke asked, staring at Caroline like a challenge, seawater roughness turning his voice to a growl.
Caroline panicked, unprepared, but tried to smile graciously up at him. “I’ll have…what the Captain here is having,” she said.
Zeke lingered for a moment, eyes flicking between the two of them, then walked away to get her drink.
Reyville chuckled into his own glass. “You really did piss him off.”
“Yeah, well, comes with the territory,” Caroline said, taking off her wet coat and hanging it on the hook under the bar. “Journalist. Paranormal investigator. I guess I was never destined to be popular.”
Zeke returned with the fizzing glass and set it down in front of Caroline.
“Cheers,” he said, unsmiling, and walked away.
Caroline lifted her glass to Reyville, and he tapped it with his own.
She sipped, swallowed, and let the surprise travel to her face. It was ginger ale.
Reyville, clearly recognizing her shocked expression, tipped his glass at her. “To be fair, you didn’t ask before you ordered.”
She swallowed, the unexpected sweetness leaving her grimacing. “I didn't take you for a ginger ale fan.”
He shook his head, a smile playing about his lips. “Nah, just not an alcohol fan. I’d be happy with tea, personally, but Zeke gives me ginger ale so I blend in. Sailor-types drinking tea at the bar is bad for the Wake’s reputation.”
Caroline took another sip, thoughtfully, ready for the sweetness this time, but still pondering it. Her journalist brain tried to fill in the gaps about this person, this Captain Reyville from Lancaster. Answering an impulse, she had already attempted one or two searches online since this whole thing started, trying to learn more about him, but without a first name it was pretty much impossible to get anything substantial. He didn’t exactly strike her as the social media type, anyway.
“So,” Reyville said, setting down his glass, “thirty days’ notice, eh?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Thirty days’ notice.”
“That’s not a lot of time.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Plan?”
“I mean…you’re not going to leave the island, are you?”
Caroline shrugged. “I don’t want to. But I was lucky to get this apartment for the amount I did, especially right in the heart of town. Without a day job, I really don’t know what I can afford, yet. It’s all backwards.”
She paused, then said, “I really want this freelancing thing to work out, Reyville, but right now it just feels like I’m delaying the inevitable.”
The jukebox clicked and sputtered, and the opening chords of Wonderwall filtered out into the tavern. Caroline chuckled, groaned.
“Anyway, here’s Wonderwall,” she said.
Reyville frowned. “What have you got against Wonderwall? It’s a better song than people give it credit for.”
“It’s kind of cheesy.”
“Overplayed, maybe, but not cheesy.” Reyville hummed, mouthed along to the first few lines.
Today is gonna be the day that they’re gonna throw me back to you…
Caroline smiled. This was new.
“So you're an Oasis fan,” she said. “Oasis and ginger ale. Who would have thought.”
Reyville looked up at the bar, the beer signs drenching his face in neon. “Ginger ale I could take or leave. But Oasis is a very good band. Soundtrack of some very good times, for me. I do love them, very much. True, they are Man City supporters, of course, but nobody's perfect.”
At Caroline's lost expression, Reyville added, “Football. That's football. Soccer.”
Caroline shrugged. “Well, no judgment here. Oasis is just a…a classic taste. Retro.”
But Reyville thought, for a moment, smiled fondly in that pensive way Caroline only occasionally caught. “Maybe so, Caroline. But some things just stick around. The best things do. Mostly.”
She didn’t have a moment to think about how strange her own name sounded in his voice—Caroline, not Miss Phelan—when the quiet was shattered, Wonderwall unceremoniously shouted down, as the doors of the Wake flew open, a tangle of people crowding into the bar in a chaos of anxious, upraised voices.
Reyville was on his feet immediately, but Caroline was frozen in place on her bar stool as the tangle loosened and revealed about six people, their faces swallowed in their raincoats, carrying something heavy and low between them.
It looked like a…
Was that…
Caroline felt her stomach lurch. It was a body. A human body.
The smell of low tide filled the room and the cold wind invited itself inside through the open doors, which no one had bothered to close. The group set down their load on the scored, beer-stained wood floor and clustered around it.
It was a man’s body, sickly pale. There was blood. A lot of blood.
“He’s alive,” someone said. “Call an ambulance, then get Doc Mulligan out here.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Caroline saw Zeke limp straight to the landline phone on the back wall of the bar, dialing with purpose.
Reyville had joined the group, talking in a low voice to a short, stocky woman with close-cropped hair, her poncho dripping. Caroline recognized her as Dan Simmons, the Port Salish Harbormaster.
Following impulse more than desire, Caroline stood and approached Reyville and Dan, catching the conversation as she got closer.
“…they found him clinging to the rocks way off at the head of the Strait, screaming his head off,” Dan was saying, wiping the rain from her face with a steady hand. She had seen too much in her lifetime to be thrown by this. “Clearly he was attacked.”
Caroline stood in the rough circle beside Reyville and looked down at the stranger. A halo of puddled saltwater and rain had formed around him, tinged rosy with blood. Paper-white skin—a color skin simply shouldn’t be—dark stringy hair, dirty fingernails, hollow closed eyes and heavy tragic brows, bare feet, and the blood.
He was dressed strangely. At first, Caroline thought he was wearing pajamas. But then, she realized that it was simply linen. A yellow linen shirt, with green linen trousers. His right arm was crooked at an odd angle, at least one bone broken, and there were blood-soaked gashes in the stained yellow shirt and all the way up his neck and the right side of his face, as if he had been clawed by something.
“That big male has been spotted hanging around the Strait, tailing fishing boats,” Dan said, thoughtfully. “Do you think…”
But Reyville shook his head. “This wasn’t a fishmaid. The claw spacing is wrong. And the Brackers know better than to get into a tangle with a maid at this time of year.”
Brackers. Caroline realized, all of a sudden, what she was looking at.
Ever since moving to this island to work for the Port Salish Chronicle, she had been given one very clear rule: do not, under any circumstances, go to the Brack. A smaller, narrow island connected only by bridge to the larger Ferris Island’s eastern side, the entire Brack was private property with special dispensation from the Ferris Island municipal government, and had their own ways of doing things. They were not to be trifled with, not to be trespassed upon, and not to be bothered by outsiders.
Caroline had always assumed they were a cult. And nothing she had ever learned about them, which was very little, had changed her mind.
If this man was a Bracker, that explained the strange clothes. She had seen Bracker women at the Port Salish farmer’s market on summer Saturdays, never speaking to anyone as they made their purchases, and they always wore various shades and styles of that gold and green linen.
“Before he lost consciousness,” Dan said, “he told us that there was a child with him. But no one saw a child. He was delirious, so I don’t know.”
There was movement on the floor. One of the group, kneeling beside the man, had managed to revive him slightly, asking him about the child. Everyone leaned in to listen.
The man spoke softly, painfully.
“For the turning. Dark wings, dark wings on the waves,” he murmured. “She…took my girl away. My child. The turning, the…turning…”
And then, he slipped away from them, again.
Caroline looked up at Reyville, but he was lost in thought.
“What do you think?” she said.
He looked down at her, as though noticing her for the first time. “I have a theory,” he said. “But it’s not a pleasant one. I’m going to have to cut our drink short, Caroline.”
“Where are you going?”
“If there was a child out there, then time is not on my side. I may already be too late, but it’s my job to go looking.”
“Can I go with you?”
The ambulance came screaming into the parking lot, and the group in the bar shuffled again to make room for the paramedics.
Reyville shook his head. “It’s not safe. This isn’t fishmaids; I don’t think we have a rule, for this one.”
Caroline met his eyes with her own.
“Reyville, I’m going with you.”
*******
Her first cruise on the Princess of the Weathers had been calm and peaceful until the fishmaids showed up. But even then, the whole thing had been orchestrated by Reyville, solid in his experienced hands, a controlled kind of chaos.
But this time, sitting up in the pilothouse of the old trawler felt very different. As they left the sheltered harbor and crossed the Strait, the waves tossed the Princess up and down, rain and wind howling against the window. Reyville was quiet, no small talk, all business. Caroline was beginning to understand what made him such a capable sailor. When he was switched on, he was really switched on.
“When we get there,” he said, the first words out of his mouth since they left the harbor, “I need you to stay inside the Princess, this time. I’m not sure what we’re up against.”
“You said you have a theory, though.”
“I do.” Reyville kept his eyes on the waves, steering the boat against the maelstrom with a deft hand. “Just a theory. But…an informed one.”
“Are you going to share with the class?”
“I’m a little too busy making sure we don’t hit the rocks,” he said. “They’re pretty vicious, here at the mouth of the Strait. Not too keen on the idea of shipwrecking on the Brack. Help would not be guaranteed. It’s lucky that poor bastard back at the bar even got noticed out here, at all.”
This disturbing thought left Caroline wordless. She glanced down at the box on the floor next to her feet, still full of CDs. Realized, for the first time, that at least half of them were Oasis albums.
She smiled to herself, grimly. Wonderwall felt like days ago, with how fast everything had moved once the half-drowned Bracker had shown up.
Ahead, the spires of the rocks took on a ghostly quality in relief against the tossing surf. But Reyville was like a magician, some kind of muscle-memory guiding his hand as he navigated through the storm. Caroline was transfixed by his skill, his ability to sense the storm’s personality and the water’s moods and correct for them. The boat moved easily under his instruction like a receptive animal with a beating heart.
Princess of the Weathers, indeed.
One moment it was a tempest, the next—without warning—a peace descended on the Princess and the waters calmed around them.
Reyville tapped a switch on the instrument panel, and a bright floodlight at the top of the boat suddenly filled the space ahead. They had entered some kind of sheltered cove, craggy rock walls surrounding them and shielding them from the worst of the storm, though the rain still fell steadily on them from above.
“What is this place?” Caroline asked, fascinated.
Reyville cut the engine and threw another switch, and the sound of whirring below them declared that the anchor was descending to hold them steady in the middle of the cove. “Lots of little nooks and crannies tucked into the rocks around this island, Miss Phelan,” he said. “Part of my job is knowing where to find them.”
He stood, then, and crossed to the back of the pilothouse where a narrow locker sat on the floor. He flipped it open, and pulled out a long-barreled gun.
Caroline swallowed, her mouth suddenly gone dry. “What…do you need that for?”
“It’s a dart gun,” he said. “And I’m not sure, yet. But…I didn’t get this far without being prepared for the worst. I’m going to go check out my hunch. Stay here, as I told you.”
With that, he descended the stairs from the pilothouse, out onto the starboard side of the deck.
Caroline sat, shivering, and watched through the wide window as Reyville, holding the dart gun against his chest in a soldierly stance, walked carefully forward around the deck of the Princess, scanning the cove, the surrounding walls, the black, boiling water below. The boat’s floodlight left harsh shadows, black holes behind craggy corners, an incomplete picture. It shifted and changed slowly as the boat turned in the water. The rain fell like phantom applause in the quiet left behind by the boat’s cut engine.
Reyville passed along the bow of the Princess and then rounded the corner heading aft. Soon he was behind the pilothouse, out of sight of the window.
Caroline waited, watching the shadows shift, the boat slowly turning, until something caught her eye. Ahead and slightly starboard there was a spire of stone jutting up from the water, just outside of the line of the floodlight, still smothered in darkness. As she stared at it, the strangeness of its shape became more and more confounding. There was something on top of it.
She stared harder, willing the boat to spin faster so that the floodlight would hit it.
Then, as her attention was focused on the spire, something—something big—fluttered past the window, startling Caroline so badly that she shrieked.
There was something out there. There was something out there.
Reyville.
Caroline scrambled out of her seat, down the pilothouse stairs and onto the deck, slamming straight into Reyville as he was running fore from the stern.
“I told you—” he began to say, trying to steer her back inside, but was interrupted by a long, low rattling sound that echoed off the walls of the cove and rippled on the surface of the water. Then, a sound of fluttering. Like wings.
Like large, dark wings.
“What is it?” Caroline whispered, searching blindly for the source of the sound in the gloom beyond the floodlight.
Reyville gently pushed her behind him, dart gun at the ready, as they backed away from the bow toward the stern. “You need to go back inside,” he said. “Now.”
“What is it?” she insisted. “Tell me what it is.”
“I’ve only heard stories about them. I’ve never seen one.”
“Seen what?”
“The Shag. She’s called a Shag. It’s a sea-spirit, it’s…”
The low rattling slipped up and over the sound of the rain, again, a fretful sound, along with a heavy, birdlike, singsong chuckling that radiated around the cove.
The boat had spun enough now that Caroline could see what was sitting on top of the spire of stone she had been staring at from the pilothouse, in full view of the floodlight.
It was a nest. A huge bird’s nest of sticks and fir branches, the size of a dinghy. Even from this distance, Caroline could see something huddled in it.
A thump, behind. The back of Caroline’s neck went ice-cold and she turned quickly, looking back at the stern of the boat. There, perched on top of the the rear of the cabin, was the dark shape of something large, upright with wings outstretched like a sunning cormorant.
Dark wings, dark wings. And flashing eyes, in the gloom.
“Reyville,” Caroline whispered. “It’s…”
But with a rattling shriek the thing took off and darted straight at them, knocking both to the deck with heavy clawed feet and sending the dart gun rattling forward to the bow. Then, with a scream, it continued on up and over the Princess and landed on the spire of stone where the nest sat.
Caroline pushed up to her knees, horrified at what she was looking at.
In the full view of the floodlight it was monstrous, feathers and scales, something between a woman and a long-beaked bird, but too large and misshapen for either. Long broad black wings tinged green, hooked golden beak, and wicked clawed feet.
But those eyes. Those eyes were human.
Reyville had crawled forward, picking up the dart gun, taking aim.
But the unseen thing that Caroline had noticed huddled in the nest shuffled a little, and Caroline saw what looked like an arm, clad in golden linen. A flutter of long dark hair.
The child.
The Shag crouched over the nest, hissing, staring down the barrel of the dart gun with no fear, those all-too-human eyes flashing.
“Wait!” Caroline said. “Wait, Reyville!”
He paused, but did not take his eyes off of the Shag.
Caroline pushed herself onto her feet and walked forward along the deck, joining Reyville at the bow. There was something about those eyes, something beyond an animal’s intelligence. A sea-spirit, Reyville had said.
Well, Caroline knew a thing or two about spirits.
Summoning whatever courage she could, she called out to the creature, hunched over the nest.
“Can you understand me?”
The Shag blinked, staring down at Caroline. Then, it jerked its head down, nodding once. Yes.
Caroline’s skin prickled. This island. This strange and savage island!
“We don't mean any harm,” Caroline said. “We're just here for the child. She belongs with her family. She’s not yours.”
The Shag blinked again, listening.
“Why did you take her?” Caroline asked.
She could feel Reyville at her elbow, ready to fire the dart, though both of them knew damn well that a sea-spirit—a supernatural creature—wouldn’t mind a dart, wouldn't bat an eye. Why should she?
The Shag tilted her head, birdlike, yet those eyes continued to blink, solemnly.
“He meant to cast her into the sea.”
Caroline was not prepared to hear the Shag’s voice, a long slow exhale with no tone, a breeze off the winter waters, those green-tinged black feathers fluffing as she raised her wings in cruciform, like a cormorant, like a sunning cormorant. A god-bird.
“Who are you talking about?” Caroline asked.
“The man who brought her to the rocks,” said the Shag. “The man in the boat. He meant to cast her into the sea, a vicious offering. To honor the Turning. But I would not see her drown.”
It was Reyville who asked, “The Bracker man, in green and gold. Is that who you mean? Her father?”
The Shag jerked her head down again, once, nodding. “It was that man, but he was not her father. He stole her, to do this foul thing. But I would not see her drown.”
The child in the nest stirred and raised herself up on an elbow, looking down at Reyville and Caroline in the boat, shielding her eyes against the floodlight. Just a small child, only six or seven, with wide dark eyes, dressed in Bracker green and gold, her cheeks streaked with tears.
“She will be safe,” Caroline said to the Shag, heart tugging under the gaze of the child. “No one will hurt her. But we do need to take her back, with us.”
The Shag examined the both of them carefully with those strange eyes, taking special interest in Reyville, and it was not altogether friendly.
“You reek of regrets,” she said, at last. “All of your kind do. It is what makes you all so untrustworthy.”
Reyville dropped his gaze from the creature at these words, but Caroline said, “We promise. We swear to you. We'll make sure she gets home safely.”
The Shag considered this. Then, keeping her own counsel, gently gathered the child in her claws and raised up, swooping down, to deposit the little girl carefully onto the deck of the Princess of the Weathers before lifting up and back to the nest on the spire of stone.
Caroline took off her coat and wrapped it around the shivering child, holding her close. She tipped her face up to the Shag. “Thank you. You were right to take her. To help her.”
The Shag, for a final time, jerked its head down, nodding.
“I will be watching her safe return,” she said. “Keep your promise.”
*******
For Caroline, the aftermath was all a blur.
The stormy ride back to the harbor, the child resting in Caroline’s arms, wrapped in a blanket from the boat’s cabin, her wide eyes haunted, a green-tinged black feather clutched tightly in her small hand. Caroline humming something to soothe the child, to soothe herself, only to realize later that it was Wonderwall.
Back at the harbor, it was all conversations. Conversations with the island police, with a representative from City Hall, and with a smooth-talking liaison from the Brack whose entire job was to make things go away.
Everything having to do with the Brack and their kind was kept quiet, veiled, but Caroline gathered a few things. The Shag had been right; the man who had taken the child was not her father. The horrid ritual the Shag had saved her from—a child sacrifice to appease old gods, long dead at the bottom of a heaving sea—was not a typical Bracker observance. This was different. Unnervingly so.
And the Turning? Simply the Bracker name for the turning of the old year to new.
Happy New Year.
Aside from that, all the rest was left in the dark, a rocky cove in a stormy sea. And all the while, Caroline felt that she could hear the rattle of the Shag’s call, the thunder of her dark wings, her eyes flashing as she ensured that Caroline and the Captain kept their promise to return the child home safely.
The man would be turned over to the authorities of some kind or other, and the child was returned to her family. That was all anyone could hope for.
It was late into the night before Caroline no longer heard the Shag's rattling breath.
*******
The tempest eventually subsided into an ashen sky the following morning, when Caroline and Reyville slipped into their usual corner booth at the Seavend General Store.
Caroline yawned as Reyville ordered their pie and coffee from the bored teenager behind the counter.
“I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” she said, as he slid into the booth. “You?”
He shook his head, rubbing his eyes. “Not a minute. Kept thinking about that little girl, what she went through, how confused she must be. Poor little mite.”
Caroline nodded, blearily. “Whatever else happens, you went out and saved her, Reyville. You brought her home.”
“You were the one who spoke to the Shag,” Reyville replied. “I was ready to shoot first and ask questions later, but who knows where that might have gotten us? Not far, I’d bet. I wasn’t thinking it through.”
“What is a Shag, anyway?” Caroline asked.
Reyville glanced out of the window at the small Seavend marina. “Having seen one, I'm less sure. I always heard it as a sort of ghost story, that the Shag is just a sea-spirit in the form of a bird. But…I knew a fellow once who said they were the spirits of the drowned, appearing to help those lost at sea. Funny, that. He might have been on to something.”
“How did you know where to find it?”
“I didn't, really,” he replied. “I've just heard things. I know where places are that sailors and fishermen whisper about when they think no one is listening.”
Reyville traced a line in the droplets of water on the table, left behind by the condensation of a previous glass. He said, quietly, “Have you…given any more thought to your living situation?”
Caroline sighed, moved her arms off of the table so that the bored teenage waiter could set down the plates of pie and the coffees. “It’s pretty much all I’m thinking about. I looked up apartments online last night while I was tossing and turning, figured I could put my insomnia to good use. But everything is out of my current price range. Renting on this island is pricier than you think.”
She picked up her fork to take a bite of pie, but felt eyes upon her and looked up to see the teenage waiter still standing there, shyly, clutching the empty tray.
“I, uh…sorry…I didn’t mean to listen, but uh…there’s actually a place to rent here, behind the General Store. It’s, like, a little cottage.”
Reyville cocked an eyebrow at Caroline. She smiled kindly up at the kid. “Thanks, that’s really nice of you to let me know. A cottage sounds fancy.”
“Yeah, well, it’s actually kind of a shithole. We’ve been using it for storage, but my dad wants to get it fixed up to rent out, so…I could tell him, if you’re interested.”
Reyville’s tickled smile deepened behind his coffee cup, and Caroline kicked him under the table.
“Maybe. Thanks, really. I’ll think about it, and let you know, after we’ve eaten,” she said, genuinely.
The kid nodded, then turned to look over both shoulders, to make sure he wasn’t being overheard, before leaning down, conspiratorially. “Between you and me, I’m not sure I would. Rent it, I mean. I’m pretty sure this building is haunted. I’ve been here alone doing inventory, before, and it’s pretty freakin’ spooky. Especially upstairs. There's definitely something weird about this place. You probably don't want that kind of trouble.”
He straightened, tapped his temple. “Just something to think about,” he said, and slouched back over to the cash register.
Caroline and the Captain met each other’s gaze over the apple pie, the steaming cups of coffee, the table, the floor, the island’s earth beneath them, roiling and writhing with ghosts. Every year turning, turning over like soil, bringing new things to light. Turning and turning, always and ever. Always more ghosts to find, always more ghosts to discover. Waiting to be seen.
Sometimes, right under your very nose. Sometimes, right in the place you never thought to look.
Caroline raised a bite of pie, like a toast to the turning of the year, to a potential haunted house, to a new home.
What could be better?
“Yeah. Just something to think about, indeed,” she said.
Thank you for reading! 📸
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Well done.
A new year turning
A child missing on the sea
A spirit of salvation
for all to see
A man who knows the dark places
A woman who knows how to speak
A couple who could find
Everything they seek.
Oh, this was fantastic. The Shag's intervention, Caroline going to live in a haunted cottage....brilliant. I don't believe I've heard Wonderwall, but I really do want to listen to it now.