Dark Tides

Every home hides a secret. My job had taught me that. People rarely open up to the police right away. Not suspects. Not witnesses. Sometimes not even victims. It’s a primal response, I think. We all fear authority. We’re hardwired to conceal information. And a warrant card is no passport to the truth.

But here’s something else I’ve learned: you don’t have to rely on someone to tell you what’s hidden. You can train yourself to feel for it. To sense it from your environment.

And yes, I know, that sounds a little crazy. But believe me, I was listening to my instincts right now – alone in a dilapidated cottage at the extreme north of the Isle of Man – and they told me one thing with absolute certainty:

This is where you’re going to die
.

Melodramatic, right? I can see why you might think so. Not so many years ago, I would have thought the same thing myself. Truth is I never used to be this way. I’m really not the neurotic type, though in all honesty, nobody could blame me if I were. For the record, I’m not superstitious either, but even I could tell that the omens weren’t good.

A storm was closing in outside and the afternoon was unusually dark. There were no tree branches scratching the window glass, or lone dogs howling at the sky, but the October rain was hammering down in a violent frenzy and the wind coming off the Irish Sea was blasting over the sand dunes and the grassy flatlands that fronted the cottage. It gusted against the whitewashed walls and droned in the chimney of the old fireplace just in front of me.

A garage door kept slamming out back. It was a garage that contained an awful secret of its own.

But here’s the real clincher: it was Hop-tu-naa, the Manx Halloween; the phase of the year when the veil between our world and the spirit world is said to be tissue thin. A time for ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night. A date on the calendar that I’d come to fear like nothing else. A day that had haunted me since I was eight years old.

I’d already searched the cottage.

I was soaked and shivering by the time I slipped inside. The rain had pasted my clothes to my body and my hair to my face. I shuffled forwards with a can of CS spray clutched in one fist and nothing but tension in the other.

I’d taken a huge gamble coming here by myself, but I was past believing that anybody else could help me now, anyway. This was a moment I’d long been destined to face, if not tonight, then the following year, or the one after that. There was no avoiding it. All I could do was confront it. It was the only way the torment would ever end for me.

The hallway was unlit and clogged with decorating gear. Lots of paint tins and buckets, a confusion of tools, some old work boots, a broom and a crumpled pair of overalls. The walls had been stripped back to lath and plaster. Electrical wires were tied in loops from the ceiling. There was a strong odour of damp and decay.

I picked my way through the mess to the living room. Nobody was in there, but I saw something that told me I was in the right place. Not something I’d wanted to see. Not anything I could pretend that I’d missed. But not something I could focus on just yet, either.

I moved into the kitchen. The renovation work had progressed since I’d been here last. Most of the old cupboards and wall units had been ripped out. Only a dirt-smeared fridge and the metal sink remained.

The pantry door was ajar. I raised my foot and kicked it so hard that it bounced off the wall and had almost swung closed again before I saw that the space was empty.

I froze, gripped by a sudden, pinched emptiness in my lungs, as if someone was holding a plastic bag over my head.

But there was no response. No blood-curdling shriek from behind. No fast drumming of feet from above.

Hard to tell if I was on my own or if I was just being toyed with.

I backed out towards the stairs, flattened my spine against the peeling wallpaper and forced myself to climb. The sketchy dimness on the landing throbbed with menace. I listened closely but all I could hear was the wind and the rain and the thump of blood in my ears.

There were two bedrooms. The first had been stripped back to exposed floorboards and walls, just like the hallway. An old dustsheet was draped over a stepladder in the middle of the room, looking like a ghost that had shrivelled in on itself.

The second bedroom was a little more civilised. There was a mattress on the floor and a sleeping bag on the mattress. An upturned wooden crate was functioning as a bedside table. There was a torch and a paperback book on the crate. A holdall of clothes behind the door.

That just left the bathroom, and when I edged inside, I saw that the shower curtain was drawn across the bath. It shouldn’t have surprised me. I hate horror films. Loathe every slasher cliché. And this was my reward. A mildewed shower curtain obscuring an unknown threat; a rotted window frame rattling in the thrusting breeze; the warped reflections from a rusted old mirror.

I reached out and ripped the curtain to one side but all it revealed was a wall of chipped tiles and a dated brown bath with a shower hose coiled in the base.

The cottage was abandoned. There was just me, and the secret this place was holding on to, and the message I’d spied on the living room hearth.

I snatched the torch from the second bedroom, then crept downstairs to the living room and lowered myself into a tatty armchair. The fabric was stiff with age and coated in dust. The carpet was threadbare, rotted in places, and the walls were speckled with mould spores.

The message had been left for me. I didn’t have the slightest doubt about that. Staring at it now, it looked familiar and yet strangely unreal. It was something I’d been waiting for so long to see, and now that it was here, it seemed a little phoney. A touch cheesy, even.

Which isn’t to say that it didn’t scare me.

The fireplace was Victorian with a blackened finish and a cracked tile surround. The mantelpiece was dark marble, the hearth a worn flagstone.

But all of that was just window dressing. Theatre. The only thing that mattered – the only thing that ever had – was the solitary footprint on the hearth, formed out of grey ash, pointing towards the door.

The outline was exact, the tread detail clear. It was the stamp of a training shoe. Quite large. Almost certainly a men’s size nine.

Next to the footprint was something else. An extra message, just for me. Maybe some of the others had seen it too, though I had no way of knowing that now and no way of finding out.

The second part of the message had also been formed from ash. The outline was just as precise as the footprint. Four letters. One word.

Soon
.

Funny. I’d always believed that the waiting was the toughest part – the remorseless, drip-drip anticipation year on year – but now there was this, and it was so much worse.

Because, you see, it’s not only homes that hide secrets. I had secrets of my own. Some of the most terrible you can probably imagine. I’d held them tight to me, nurtured them, protected them, as, one by one, the others who’d known the truth had gone or been taken.

Now there were only two of us left. There was me, and there was the person who’d left the message for me to find here, in this forgotten place, in the dusk and the wind and the rain, on Hop-tu-naa.

Soon.

I wedged the torch down by my thigh and fumbled with the CS spray. It wasn’t much of an arsenal. I asked myself if I should go and hunt for a hammer or a chisel from among the tools in the hall. Maybe search for a knife in the kitchen.

And perhaps I would have done, if it hadn’t been too late already. Because right then a hand rested on my shoulder and a sharp blade pricked at the skin below my jaw.

Something plummeted in my stomach and a grievous thought rushed in at me:
You should have checked the cupboard under the stairs
.

Then the hand moved downwards, sweeping past my throat to my breast. Finally, there was the voice at my ear. It was husky. Low. Laced with the thrill of excitement, like that of a lover.

‘Remember this?’