The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales (15 page)

But it was too late now. The boat gave another lurch and swung round. We were under way. The prow came in line with the route that I had seen the fishing boats take through the reef, though the boat still rolled from side to side as if a multitude of travellers were hauling themselves over the beam.

I had the sense of no longer being alone. A disquieting claustrophobia began to take hold of me and I shrank in on myself. I felt my muscles contract as I tucked in my elbows against my flanks. And with each sway of the boat, it sat deeper in the water. Perhaps we were holed and would soon sink. I dipped my hand into the bilge, expecting it to be at least a foot deep in seawater. All I found was a short length of damp rope.

The sail billowed, taking the wind. We began to pick up speed. It struck me that this was the first offshore breeze that I had encountered on this coastline. There was no need to tack or even, or so it seemed, to steer. The boat made rapid way and the gaunt man’s hand rested only lightly upon the tiller.

Sitting in the prow, I felt the slap of the water against the hull and spray on my face. As we met each wave, I expected the black water to cascade over the sides and swill about around my booted feet, but it didn’t.

I looked over the edge, down into the dark waves. Here and there in the water I thought that I saw shapes, like the figures of men, pale and indistinct in the moonlight, their hands reaching up and out, but before they could take hold of the timbers and haul themselves aboard, we had moved on. Then I heard the strange and plaintive wailing that, on the cliff top, had accompanied my arrival into the village the previous night.

It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes. I was caught between horror and wonder for our boat was now crowded with those taken by the sea. The drowned. They stood shoulder to shoulder, massed like rotting corn left too long in the fields. I was transfixed by their awful faces, sagging and collapsing in every stage of decomposition and decay, rags for clothes, limbs torn and broken, fleshless fingers flailing at the night. The swell became deeper and they jostled against one another. I began to hear their voices, despairing and complaining, but with a note of restrained joy whose reason I could not fathom.

I wondered what kind of madness had enraptured me. Was I asleep in the hammock? Had I eaten the flesh of some hallucinogenic fish? I had no idea if such a thing existed. Or perhaps it was the herbs, the green leaves with which the stew was flavoured?

No, it couldn’t be. I could feel the spray on my cheeks and taste the salt on my lips. Whatever was happening had to be true. Simultaneously, I knew it could not be real.

We were nearly at the reef. Another silvery hand tried to reach up and take hold of the craft as it passed. An angry murmur went up from the ghastly passengers. One of the long-dead reached out a claw-like hand and beat the other away. It fell back into the water with a terrible moaning sound of renunciation and loss.

‘Why can the others not come aboard?’ I shouted.

The question was absurd. They were mirages, surely, a play of the moonlight upon the water. But I persisted.

‘If some can be transported to the afterlife, why not all?’

I saw his lips move but could not hear his voice.

‘Please, tell me,’ I cried.

His lips moved again and, this time, the tightly packed drowned turned towards him. In parody of some ghastly stage routine, they began to whisper together and turn. First those closest to him repeated his low words, then they passed the message to a neighbour who turned and passed it on again. In that way, the message travelled down the boat from gaping mouth to mangled ear, until all the appalling faces, blue and white and bloated, were hissing it at me in ragged unison, each it seemed in a separate language, but all of them comprehensible to me by some demonic alchemy.

‘They have not yet earned their deliverance. Might not ever do so . . .’

I fell back in the prow of the boat. It was true. He was the Ankou and I had embarked upon the Ship of the Dead.

There was a moment of silence followed by a faint cry of hollow triumph. We were through the reef and out in the open sea. The wind drove us on. We sat so low in the water that it rose in a wall of darkness to either side.

The dead souls became excited. They grimaced and turned to one another, mouthing incomprehensible words. Our pace slowed, the great wake subsided and the island became visible, at first just a black shadow on the night, then more and more distinct. I soon made out trees and a beach.

There we headed.

The drowned edged forward. Those closest to me wanted my place in the prow. They leaned in, almost touching my garments. Those further back shuffled forward too, pressing up against their fellows, until soon I was completely hemmed in by the foul and rotting bodies. They groped with their terrible hands past my face, scratching their bony claws through the night air, as if the gesture would make the island come more rapidly near.

Through the thicket of decomposing flesh, I saw the gaunt villager stand and raise his hand. There was the unmistakable grinding of hull on shore. We had arrived.

Immediately, they began to leave. Clambering over me in their haste to quit the boat and reach the land, I was trampled and buffeted by their vile remains. Ten then twenty then thirty and more, kicking and dragging themselves over the prow and splashing away through the shallows to the beach.

Speechless with horror, I covered my head with my hands and curled myself into a ball for fear of contamination or injury. The truth is, I felt no pain – their touch was insubstantial – but it left a nausea, a deep, disconcerting revulsion. I cursed myself for having come. In my need to prove myself better than the villagers and their ancient superstitions, I had brought this dreadful experience upon myself.

They staggered from the water, took a few steps upon the land before coming to a halt and raising their hands. I heard their joyful voices like the yelps of distant dogs, as they began to fade. I cannot say precisely when their substance disintegrated utterly into darkness.

Without the gaunt man even seeming to turn the boat around, we were all at once again riding the white crests. We got into trouble in a spiralling eddy from which our boat was flung. The prow swung violently round and, without any kind of wind, as if moved by some mysterious underwater force, the boat began to drive homeward towards the shore. The gaunt villager lay back against the timbers and the tiller swung wildly back and forth. Unburdened of our cargo, we seemed to skim across the waves.

We made straight for the centre of the reef where the rocks were sharpest and tallest. I felt sure we must be sundered by the teeth of stone. I believe I may have uttered some kind of imprecation. I don’t know to whom. Perhaps it was answered. More likely, the Ship of the Dead cannot be sunk by anything in our base world. In any case, we sailed right though the deadly rocks, dancing on the wild foam.

My fear made me oblivious to my surroundings. Only once we were in the quiet of the bay did I realise that the boat was becoming less and less distinct. The timbers beneath my hand were translucent as if they, too, like the long drowned, had finished with this world. The prow itself, though still substantial to my touch, appeared like paper, as if my hand could push through it into the cold black water beyond. The mast seemed no more than a blade of straw. The aft panels were quite invisible. At last, the beach approached. Now it was as if the two of us, the gaunt man and I, were hovering across the waves, so transparent had the boat become.

Just as it felt that my imagination could no longer sustain the image of the craft and I must drown, I felt myself thrown up onto the sand. I lay still for a moment, dazed with all I had seen. I was drenched from the spray. The waves lapped at my legs but I hadn’t the strength to pull myself upright. Then I noticed the gaunt man already trudging away up the beach. The sun was rising and a pale shaft of yellow light illuminated his sunken features.

I dragged myself to my feet and ran after him. ‘Why you?’ I cried.

He held my gaze for a moment then replied, in a voice thick with sorrow and resignation:

‘Because I was called.’

I let go of his arm and the man continued on his weary way. I watched him go. There was, in the awkward droop of his shoulders, a terrible lassitude – or at least so it seemed to me.

I thought again of the carved bones that dangled from the timbers of his roof – all the vile little faces. I pictured him in his lonely cabin, working away at some of that very evening’s passengers. He carved them as they must have been in life, but I could not have done the same. I wondered if he was the only man allowed to see the men they had been. As an interloper or a stowaway, I had perceived the desperate transformations that death had wrought.

I knew that I would be haunted for ever by what I had seen. But how much worse must it be for he whose role was forever to transport the drowned into the next life? And, in recompense for this task not of his own choosing, to be ostracised by family, neighbour and friend.

I sank back down onto the sand. The sun was not yet warm but I allowed its brightness to banish the visions of the night from my consciousness. The waves lapped closer, I shielded my eyes and looked out at the island.

Some time later, the routine of the day in the village began again. The men dragged their boats down past me and put out to sea. The women brought wood for the fire. The two children brought me one of the earthenware jugs of fresh water and I thanked them and drank deeply. The other jug was emptied into the eternal broth and the children were dispatched to refill them.

Did they know what horrors I had endured during the night?

I stayed where I was until the sun was high in the sky, allowing the steady and timeless pace of the villagers going about their business to soothe my troubled spirit. Someone brought leaves for the pot. Someone else climbed the uncertain stair and returned a little later with a hessian bag of root vegetables – turnips, I thought, from a distance.

Finally, the fishing boats came back in with their catch, without mishap. I watched but, this time, did not assist as they were hauled up onto the sand. The fishermen tidied their nets and lines and prepared their catch for the cauldron.

I realised it was time for me to be gone. I did not belong here, however romantic my first associations had been. I returned to the small house where I had been so generously received and collected my things. I left a few coins on the table in recognition of their hospitality.

Outside, the sun was bright on the monument in the centre of the village. I paused a while, now understanding it did not commemorate a saint. The opposite, in fact. It was, rather, Ankou. The fisherman called by name in the deep of the night to transport those lost to the sea to the world beyond.

At the base of the monument a small drift of loose sand had blown against the stone, forming a soft dune. I knelt and brushed it away, revealing an inscription. The stonemason had carved the letters in an angular style, almost like Celtic runes. It took me a moment to decipher their meaning. Eventually I solved the puzzle by tracing them with my finger. In this way I imparted to them a kind of cursive flow that put me in mind of my grandfather’s old-fashioned handwriting. Indeed, no sooner was the memory of those days rekindled than I realised that I had known the name of the place all along: the Bay of the Departed.

I made my way to the stair and began to climb back up the cliff. I paused halfway and scanned the beach. I suppose the rhythm of life was the same each day in that place. I saw the gaunt villager cross the sand and watched as he disappeared among the rocks and pools at the northern end. No one paid him any attention. He was afforded no more respect than a shadow.

When I reached the fingerpost, with its three directions offered to the traveller, this time I took the path inland as most likely to lead me to a town where a train could transport me, as swiftly as technology would allow, back to the metropolis.

My journey was done.

Author’s Note

This is the second of the stories inspired by Breton folklore. The westernmost tip of the Brittany coast, jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, is alive with legends of the sea. Mythical creatures, giants, sprites, a kind of Dreamtime that explains the violence and the beauty of the coastline. The stories are often harsh and, to modern ears, cruel. Men and women destined to live out the same sacrifices for all of time, retribution for crimes committed by earlier generations or as an attempt to appease the angry sea.

My version of the Ankou is based on research and translation undertaken by my husband, Greg Mosse, from the books inherited from my uncle in April 2013. I chose to set the story in the period between World War I and World War II, where the way of life still followed the steady tread of the century before and the century before that, and aimed to capture a timelessness in the retelling of the old folk tale.

As in many ghostly stories, the narrator is an outsider who finds himself drawn into a strange, hidden community. Today, this part of Brittany is famous for its surfing and seafood. But the ancient legend – the one that has endured ‘ever since the world began’ – insists that the Baie de Trépassés, the Bay of the Departed, has always been a portal into death.