The Salt Marsh Read online

  He nodded. ‘Would you like a cup of tea before you set off?’

  Now she was thrown – the prosaic nature of the offer, the prospect of being alone at night with a man she hardly knew. What if he was a nutter?

  ‘It’s OK, thanks. I’m fine.’

  ‘If you change your mind, I live...’ He pointed north along the shore. ‘The cabin with the grey window frames.’

  He stepped away, respecting her space and solitude, she noted. She was the only nutter on the beach – shouting at the shingle, waiting for her boyfriend to turn up. She could do with a cup of tea. She had often wondered what the clapboard fishermen’s cabins were like inside and, anyway, he wasn’t a complete stranger; she’d met him twice before.

  ‘Hang on a moment. I’ll come with you.’

  She ran after him.

  ‘Alastair,’ he said.

  She was disappointed; she had half hoped he would be called something more romantic. Eagle. River. Thunder.

  He said, ‘It’s easier to walk along the low tide mark, where the shingle turns to sand.’ His drawl contained the trace of a Cornish burr. ‘People used to wear flat wooden clogs so they could walk across the stones. Back-stays.’

  She grinned, relaxed. She liked a bit of history, so long as it wasn’t hers. So did he, it seemed: he reached the ends of his sentences when he talked about the past. He gestured at a rotting boat, beached above the high tide mark like a decomposing whale.

  ‘There’s been a fishing community here for centuries. There’s never been a harbour, though. The boats are hauled across the shingle. The fishermen stayed here in the winter then sailed round the coast to East Anglia for the summer. They had fishing rights there too. Den and strand. Rights to land and dry their nets on the beach.’

  ‘Do you fish?’

  ‘Me? No. I wouldn’t know where to start. The only time I’ve caught anything is when I won a goldfish at a fair when I was a kid.’

  He turned inland, treading an iron boat rail track embedded in the stones, the path marked by bleached driftwood spears, shards of twisted metal. They clambered over the ridges until they were on the flatter ground where the shingle was carpeted with prostrate broom and the beach blurred with flotsam gardens: poppies, blue glass floats, gale-battered roses, red-capped gnomes. They reached a black plank-clad cabin, its sombre windows overlooking the sea, bamboo wind chimes clinking in the breeze.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’

  ‘About a year. I rent it from an old lady, a fisherman’s widow. She moved to a care home after she had a fall. She’s not ready to sell the place yet.’

  A rusty can with a long nozzle had been placed in front of the door.

  She pointed. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a funt. A smuggler’s lamp. You only see the light when you are looking directly at the spout. You can make Morse code signals with your hand. Places that are good for fishermen are good for smugglers. If you can land a fishing boat you can land a carrier.’

  Smuggling. Drugs. Of course, that made sense – he was a small-time drug dealer, she reckoned; how else would an ageing hippy make a living out here at the end of the world if he knew nothing about fishing?

  He said, ‘I use the funt to let people know whether I’m in or not. If it’s out the front, they can knock on the door; if it’s round the back, I’m not at home.’

  He produced a key from a pocket, twisted it in the mortise. ‘I don’t know why I bother locking up. The back door is buggered. Anybody could walk in that way if they felt like it. It’s the damp rot. The older cabins are made from driftwood – some of the timbers must be ancient, reused down the centuries.’

  He reached for a paraffin lamp hanging on a hook by the door, struck a match, twiddled the wick. The light guttered, flicked shadows around the timbered walls.

  ‘The storm last week,’ he said. ‘It knocked my power out and nobody has been round to repair it. It’s ironic, living next to a power station and being without...’

  She finished his sentence. ‘Electricity.’

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on. Milk?’

  ‘Yes please. No sugar. Thanks.’

  He walked through an arch to a tiny galley kitchen, sent the gas whooshing as he ignited the stove. She stood still and listened to the noises of the night; wind sighing under the floorboards, gulls crying, and then another sound she couldn’t identify. Tap tap tap. Silence. Tap tap again, this time on the other side of the room. A call and answer. Alastair seemed oblivious, he was gazing out the back window, head haloed by the solar glow of the power station. The tap tap ceased. Ancient timbers creaking in the wind perhaps.

  She surveyed the shadowed room; wooden apple crates and cardboard boxes stacked against one wall as if he had only just moved in, or was forever poised to pack up and run. Not much furniture apart from a couple of chairs and a hefty oak desk strewn with notebooks, magazines, glass ashtray probably swiped from the pub. A school science lab test tube rack complete with six cork-stoppered test tubes sat awkwardly among the papers. Amateur drug-making kit? Best not to ask. He walked through from the kitchen holding two steaming mugs and she looked away from the desk, didn’t want him to catch her staring at his equipment.

  ‘Death watch,’ he said.

  She twitched.

  ‘Tap tap.’

  ‘Oh. Death watch beetles. The tapping.’

  ‘Yeah, they only call each other in the evenings. It’s the old timbers, damp wood – an ideal home for death watch beetles.’

  ‘Does the lady who owns the place know she’s infested?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s worth bothering her. You can have death watch for centuries before the timbers collapse. She’ll be long gone before this place crumbles. Sometimes it’s easier not to know.’

  She parked herself in a dilapidated armchair by a makeshift splintery crate table, its surface cluttered with animal remains: a line of bleached bird skulls and a selection of feathered wings, carefully arranged in descending size order. Below the wings, an unmacerated skeleton of some unidentifiable small animal, the bones still fused, shreds of skin and cartilage attached. She poked the pile with a finger, flinched at the feel of the rubbery flesh. He walked over, removed the decaying carcass and placed it in his pocket before he set her cup down in the space he had cleared.

  ‘It’s a toad,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna leave the bones outside so the ants can strip them clean.’

  She pulled a face.

  He said, ‘It was dead already. Like the birds.’ He gestured at the beaky skulls and wings. ‘I find lots of dead birds out on the marsh. I don’t know what it is about the marshlands, they attract death. That’s where the toad came from too – caught by a crow most likely – they can’t stomach the skins. Toads taste as bad as they look. The crows only eat the innards. Even rats leave the skin of the toad.’

  ‘Why do you want the bones?’

  ‘I’ll wait for a full moon and throw them in a stream. That’s how the Toad Men acquired their magic powers.’

  ‘Toad Men?’

  ‘Old English sorcerers.’

  Toad Men. Sorcerers. She had been right, he was a Magus, a practitioner of the occult. Her hand went to her birthmark.

  *

  She retracted it when she realized what she was doing, hoped he hadn’t noticed.

  ‘White or black magic?’ she asked.

  ‘Toad Men? They could be either. That’s the thing with magic, the ancient powers. You can start off with good intentions, but you get drawn in, you have to defend yourself against the accusations and curses, find some way of turning them around, reversing them, and before you know it, you are on the dark side.’

  He caught her eye. She looked away.

  ‘It goes with the territory,’ he said. ‘You have to learn to live with it.’ He retreated to the chair at his desk. ‘Anybody who thinks life is black and white is kidding themselves anyway. Nothing is ever that clear.’ He blew the steaming vapours across his mug and stared at its conten
ts; a scryer searching for prophecies and omens in the tannin liquid. She selected one of the wings from his crate-top collection and examined its golden topside, ran her fingers over the outer blades, the comblike edge of the outermost feather. Barn owl, she decided, designed for silent, ghostlike flight. She brushed its downy softness against her cheek, realized Alastair had finished examining his cup and was watching her. She replaced the wing on the crate hastily.

  ‘Spliff?’ he asked.

  She nodded. He opened a drawer, removed a plastic bag of weed and Rizlas, rolled in silence, flicked a lighter, leaned back in his chair and inhaled. The smoke gathered, hung around his brow. He flipped the joint, angled the roach to her. She inhaled, exhaled. Inhaled again. The weed hit her harder than she had expected. The room pitched, the cabin like a gently rocking boat, becalmed in mid-channel, going nowhere.

  ‘Good stuff,’ he said.

  He twisted the silver skull ring on his left index finger, tipped his head at her coat, the Che Guevara badge she had fished out from the bag of her dad’s belongings and pinned to her lapel above her nuclear power no thanks badge.

  ‘Revolution,’ he said.

  There was something odd about the way he was looking at the badge, as if he could divine that she’d nabbed it from the dressing-up box of a dead undercover cop. The dope was adding to her paranoia.

  ‘I reckon you’ve got the powers.’ He rocked back in his seat, assessed her. ‘I can sense that kind of thing.’

  His observation took her by surprise; she opened her mouth to speak, emitted a puff of smoke.

  He said, ‘Some people don’t know they’ve got them. I’ve known since I was a kid. I hear the voices. Calling me from the other side.’

  A cold breeze brushed her neck.

  ‘You can’t deny the powers – all you can do is try to master them, otherwise they can be dangerous. You have to learn the techniques – sorcery, witchcraft. A spirit guide can help.’ He lifted his head, gazed into space. ‘We live with the dead. The ghosts walk among us. Some people are just better at seeing it than others.’

  And as he spoke, the House of Levitation filled her head, the day of the corpse, crossing the threshold, bright light, flight, cold air on her skin. She could hear the dead calling, see the hands reaching. He was right; the ghosts were always present.

  ‘I have a spirit guide,’ Alastair continued. ‘A person. It doesn’t have to be a person, though; could be a bird, an animal of some sort. You need another being outside your head who can help you channel what’s going on inside. Show you the way. Something to give you focus.’

  Focus. She had to focus. Stop her mind wandering. She concentrated and gold-tinged wings fluttered in front of her eyes.

  ‘If I had a spirit guide it would be a bird,’ she said.

  ‘I knew it. An owl, I bet.’

  Good guesser.

  He bent forwards. ‘Let your mind travel; wherever it goes, your body can follow.’

  She leaned away.

  ‘So who is your spirit guide?’ she asked.

  ‘John Allin. He was a philosopher of the occult. A seventeenth-century sorcerer.’

  A spider dropped from nowhere, landed on her hand, then launched away on a gossamer thread and disappeared.

  ‘How did you find Allin?’

  ‘I didn’t. He found me. That’s how it happens. You can’t go looking, but you can’t stop it either.’ He nodded at her. ‘Like you and the barn owl.’

  Barn owl? She hadn’t told him she was thinking about a barn owl. He must have seen her fondling the wing.

  ‘I was at the local records office when it happened, searching for stuff about witchcraft trials. I got chatting to the librarian, and she dug out this box of old court papers. Accusations of maleficence – women turning their neighbours’ milk sour, widows cursing newborns, cavorting with their familiars.’ He pressed his chin with his index finger. His nails were long. ‘At the bottom of the box I found a bundle of letters, each one sealed with a red wax skull and crossbones. Memento mori. I touched the seal, rubbed the skull, and I felt a presence.’

  She jumped; a tingle on her arm, a fingertip running over her skin. She looked for a spider, but there was nothing.

  ‘Did you sense something?’ he asked. ‘Somebody touching you?’

  ‘No.’ She rubbed her arm. ‘So the letters were from John Allin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he live in Dungeness?’

  ‘He lived near here. He was a dissenting priest in Rye during the Civil War, the years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. This area was a hotbed of radicalism, power to the people. These things, they go hand in hand. Dissent, smuggling, sorcery, witchcraft – rebellion. When the monarchy was restored after the Civil War was over, Allin had to go on the run. He disappeared in London, Southwark.’

  His head was nodding to a silent beat, as if he had a Bob Dylan track playing in his brain, a hard rain’s a gonna fall.

  ‘1665. That was when the plague hit town. People thought it was a curse, blowback from the attempted revolution. Punishment from an authoritarian divinity for daring to rebel.’

  ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’

  He smiled. ‘Exactly.’ He toked, blew grey smoke slowly. ‘Allin worked as a physician, a plague doctor.’

  She pictured a caped figure in a black-beaked mask, a crow-man in a darkened street of red-cross-marked doors. She shook her head, trying to rid herself of the image, uncertain where it had come from.

  ‘Allin concocted pills and medicines. But his real skills were on the mystical side. He had a gift for magic: seeing spirits, reading the signs, alchemy.’

  She coughed, the dense fug of the spliff too much, reached for the barn owl’s wing, fanned the air.

  He said, ‘That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below. Hermes Trismegistus, the Emerald Tablet, the source of all alchemical wisdom, the godfather of science.’

  She was finding it hard to follow his thread. ‘The godfather of science?’

  ‘Newton had a translation of the Emerald Tablet. He knew its importance, understanding the rules, the patterns that shape and govern.’

  His drawl lulled her, his words washed around her brain.

  ‘We are a microcosm of the universe. We are made of the same matter. Master ourselves, master the universe.’

  Her head drooped, the owl’s wing slipped, fell on the floor. She snapped back to her surroundings. He was still talking.

  ‘Alchemy is the transformation to a higher plane. Purification.’

  She managed to formulate a sentence in her head and transfer it to her mouth. ‘I thought alchemists were interested in making gold.’

  ‘Well, making gold from base metal was a means to an end. The real prize was spiritual growth, mastery of the supernatural powers governing ourselves and the universe. Allin was searching for spiritual cleansing and healing to soothe the pain of the failed revolution here on earth. Alchemy was the opposite of black magic, it was about purification, positive transformation.’

  His features tensed, he raised a dirt-scuffed warning finger. ‘Of course, alchemy is no different from any other of the occult arts. Once you unleash the powers, they can be flipped, used for malign purposes. What starts off as a blessing may become a curse.’

  The word curse stirred her. ‘Reverse alchemy,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘The downward spiral. The sinistral spin. That’s when the spiritual becomes separated from the material, we lose control and become corrupted. The darkness takes over.’

  He lifted a glass test tube from the school science rack, chucked it in the air so it twisted, glinted in the flicker of the hurricane lamp, round and up, floated above the smoke cloud for a few seconds then flipped and plummeted, down and down. He didn’t move and she thought he was going to let it smash, but he stuck his hand out at the last moment and caught it, cradled the vial in his palm.

  ‘How do you contact Allin?’ she asked.
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br />   ‘He comes and he goes. I can’t always command it. Like a signal, an interference in my mind. Sometimes his voice is flaky and I can’t tell what he’s after. Sometimes it’s clear. Insistent. When people are in trouble of some kind or another...’ He stretched out an arm, selected a white tern’s wing from the avian ossuary on the crate, fanned it in front of his face, scrutinized her through the wafting grey vapour. ‘Do you want me to see if I can contact him for you?’

  She folded her legs up in the chair, feet on seat. ‘No thanks. I’m fine.’

  She grabbed her mug of tea, slurped, swished the tepid liquid around her mouth, swallowed, conscious of the noises she was making.

  ‘You’ve lost something,’ he said. ‘I can sense it.’

  She shook her head, alarmed at his clairvoyance.

  ‘Seriously. Maybe I can help. What are you searching for?’

  She squirmed around in the chair, tried not to watch the white wing fluttering, and then she thought, why not give it a go. Perhaps he could help.

  ‘A person actually.’

  ‘Oh? Who?’

  ‘Luke. My boyfriend. I was supposed to meet him down here this evening and he hasn’t materialized.’

  ‘Luke. The guy who organized the meetings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s your boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were supposed to be meeting him this evening?’

  ‘Yes. We were going to drive down together but then something came up.’

  ‘Drive? Did he drive down alone then?’

  ‘Yes.’ His questions irritated her, she couldn’t see the need for his tone of surprise. ‘He drove down this morning. I was going to meet him on the beach at six, but he didn’t turn up. Misunderstanding, I think.’

  ‘Misunderstanding, yeah, must have been.’

  He sounded wary now. Uncomfortable. He thought she’d been stood up, she was sure. She wanted to correct him, let him know it was nothing like that. ‘We missed each other. He must have had a different meeting place in mind.’ She was annoyed with herself for blurting, her voice cracked with emotion.