“Kelp,” David said again, thoughtfully. “Isn’t that the weed people used to gather up and cook into a soup?”
Foster wrinkled his nose. “Hungry folks’ll eat just about owt, ah suppose, Mr. Parker—but they’d not eat this muck. We carl it ‘deep kelp’. It’s not unusual this time of year—Roodmas time or thereabouts—and generally hangs about for a week or so until the tides clear it or it rots away.”
David continued to look interested and Foster continued:
“Funny stuff. Ah mean, you’ll not find it in any book of seaweeds—not that ah’ve ever seen. As a lad ah was daft on nature an’ arl. Collected birds’ eggs, took spore prints of mushrooms an’ toadstools, pressed leaves an’ flowers in books—arl that daft stuff—but in arl the books ah read ah never did find a mention of deep kelp.” He turned back to me. “Anyway, boss, there’s enough of the stuff on the beach to keep the lorries off. It’s not that they canna get onto the sands, but when they do they canna see the coal for weed. So ah’ve sent the lorries south to Seaton Carew. The beach is pretty clear down there, ah’m told. Not much coal, but better than nowt.”
My friend and I had almost finished eating by then. As Foster made to leave, I suggested to David: “Let’s finish our drinks, climb down the old sea wall and have a look.”
“Right!” David agreed at once. “I’m curious about this stuff.” Foster had heard and he turned back to us, shaking his head concernedly. “It’s up to you, gents,” he said, “but you won’t like it. Stinks, man! Arful! There’s kids who play on the beach arl the live-long day, but you’ll not find them there now. Just the bloody weed, lyin’ there an’ turnin’ to rot!”
II: A Wedding and a Warning
In any event, we went to see for ourselves, and if I had doubted Foster then I had wronged him. The stuff was awful, and it did stink. I had seen it before, always at this time of year, but never in such quantities. There had been a bit of a blow the night before, however, and that probably explained it. To my mind, anyway. David’s mind was a fraction more inquiring.
“Deep kelp,” he murmured, standing on the weed-strewn rocks, his hair blowing in a salty, stenchy breeze off the sea. “I don’t see it at all.”
“What don’t you see?”
“Well, if this stuff comes from the deeps—I mean from really deep down—surely it would take a real upheaval to drive it onto the beaches like this. Why, there must be thousands and thousands of tons of the stuff! All the way from here to Sunderland? Twenty miles of it?”
I shrugged. “It’ll clear, just like Foster said. A day or two, that’s all. And he’s right: with this stuff lying so thick, you can’t see the streaks of coal.”
“How about the coal?” he said, his mind again grasping after knowledge. “I mean, where does it come from?”
“Same place as the weed,” I answered, “most of it. Come and see.” I crossed to a narrow strip of sand between waves of deep kelp. There I found and picked up a pair of blocky, fist-sized lumps of ocean-rounded rock. Knocking them together, I broke off fragments. Inside, one rock showed a greyish-brown uniformity; the other was black and shiny, finely layered, pure coal.
“I wouldn’t have known the difference,” David admitted.
“Neither would I!” I grinned. “But the sea-coalers rarely err. They say there’s an open seam way out there,” I nodded toward the open sea. “Not unlikely, seeing as how this entire county is riddled with rich mines. Myself, I believe a lot of the coal simply gets washed out of the tippings, the stony debris rejected at the screens. Coal is light and easily washed ashore. The stones are heavy and roll out—downhill, as it were—into deeper water.”
“In that case it seems a pity,” said David. “—That the coal can’t be gathered, I mean.”
“Oh?”
“Why, yes. Surely, if there is an open seam in the sea, the coal would get washed ashore with the kelp. Underneath this stuff, there’s probably tons of it just waiting to be shovelled up!”
I frowned and answered: “You could well be right…” But then I shrugged. “Ah, well, not to worry. It’ll still be there after the weed has gone.” And I winked at him. “Coal doesn’t rot, you see?”
He wasn’t listening but kneeling, lifting a rope of the offensive stuff in his hands. It was heavy, leprous white in the stem or body, deep dark green in the leaf. Hybrid, the flesh of the stuff was—well, fleshy—more animal than vegetable. Bladders were present everywhere, large as a man’s thumbs. David popped one and gave a disgusted grunt, then came to his feet.
“God!” he exclaimed, holding his nose. And again: “God!”
I laughed and we picked our way back to the steps in the old sea wall.
And that was that: a fragment, an incident unconnected with anything much. An item of little real interest. One of Nature’s periodic quirks, affecting nothing a great deal. Apparently…
• • •
It seemed not long after the time of the deep kelp that David got tied up with his wedding plans. I had known, of course, that he had a girl—June Anderson, a solicitor’s daughter from Sunderland, which boasts the prettiest girls in all the land—for I had met her and found her utterly charming; but I had not realised that things were so advanced.
I say it did not seem a long time, and now looking back I see that the period was indeed quite short—the very next summer. Perhaps the span of time was foreshortened even more for me by the suddenness with which their plans culminated. For all was brought dramatically forward by the curious and unexpected vacancy of Kettlethorpe Farm, an extensive property on the edge of Kettlethorpe Dene.
No longer a farm proper but a forlorn relic of another age, the great stone house and its out-buildings were badly in need of repair; but in David’s eyes the place had an Olde Worlde magic all its own, and with his expertise he knew that he could soon convert it into a modern home of great beauty and value. And the place was going remarkably cheap.
As to the farm’s previous tenant: here something peculiar. And here too the second link in my seemingly unconnected chain of occurrences and circumstances.
Old Jason Carpenter had not been well liked in the locality, in fact not at all. Grey-bearded, taciturn, cold and reclusive—with eyes grey as the rolling North Sea and never a smile for man or beast—he had occupied Kettlethorpe Farm for close on thirty years. Never a wife, a manservant or maid, not even a neighbour had entered the place on old Jason’s invitation. No one strayed onto the grounds for fear of Jason’s dog and shotgun; even tradesmen were wary on those rare occasions when they must make deliveries.
But Carpenter had liked his beer and rum chaser, and twice a week would visit The Trust Hotel in Harden. There he had used to sit in the smokeroom and linger over his tipple, his dog Bones alert under the table and between his master’s feet. And customers had used to fear Bones a little, but not as much as the dog feared his master.
And now Jason Carpenter was gone. Note that I do not say dead, simply gone, disappeared. There was no evidence to support any other conclusion—not at that time. it had happened like this:
Over a period of several months various tradesmen had reported Jason’s absence from Kettlethorpe, and eventually, because his customary seat at The Trust had been vacant over that same period, members of the local police went to the farm and forced entry into the main building. No trace had been found of the old hermit, but the police had come away instead with certain documents—chiefly a will, of sorts—which had evidently been left pending just such a search or investigation.
In the documents the recluse had directed that in the event of his “termination of occupancy”, the house, attendant buildings and grounds “be allowed to relapse into the dirt and decay from which they sprang”; but since it was later shown that he was in considerable debt, the property had been put up for sale to settle his various accounts. The house had in fact been under threat of the bailiffs.
All of this, of course, had taken some considerable time, during which a thorough searc
h of the rambling house, its outbuildings and grounds had been made for obvious reasons. But to no avail.
Jason Carpenter was gone. He had not been known to have relatives; indeed, very little had been known of him at all; it was almost as if he had never been. And to many of the people of Harden, that made for a most satisfactory epitaph.
One other note: it would seem that his “termination of occupancy” had come about during the Roodmas time of the deep kelp…
• • •
And so to the wedding of David Parker and June Anderson, a sparkling affair held at the Catholic Church in Harden, where not even the drab, near-distant background of the colliery’s chimneys and cooling towers should have been able to dampen the gaiety and excitement of the moment. And yet even here, in the steep, crowd-packed streets outside the church, a note of discord. Just one, but one too many.
For as the cheering commenced and the couple left the church to be showered with confetti and jostled to their car, I overheard as if they were spoken directly into my ear—or uttered especially for my notice—the words of a crone in shawl and pinafore, come out of her smoke-grimed miner’s terraced house to shake her head and mutter:
“Aye, an’ he’ll take that bonnie lass to Kettlethorpe, will he? Arl the bells are ringin’ now, it’s true, but what about the other bell, eh? It’s only rung once or twice arl these lang years—since old Jason had the house—but now there’s word it’s ringin’ again, when nights are dark an’ the sea has a swell to it.”
I heard it as clearly as that, for I was one of the spectators. I would have been more closely linked with the celebrations but had expected to be busy, and only by the skin of my teeth managed to be there at all. But when I heard the guttural imprecation of the old lady I turned to seek her out, even caught a glimpse of her, before being engulfed by a horde of Harden urchins leaping for a handful of hurled pennies, threepenny bits and sixpences as the newlyweds’ car drove off.
By which time summer thunderclouds had gathered, breaking at the command of a distant flash of lightning, and rain had begun to pelt down. Which served to put an end to the matter. The crowd rapidly dispersed and I headed for shelter.
But…I would have liked to know what the old woman had meant…
III: Ghost Story
“Haunted?” I echoed David’s words.
I had bumped into him at the library in Hartlepool some three weeks after his wedding. A voracious reader, an “addict” for hard-boiled detective novels, I had been on my way in as he was coming out.
“Haunted, yes!” he repeated, his voice half-amused, half-excited. “The old farm—haunted!”
The alarm his words conjured in me was almost immediately relieved by his grin and wide-awake expression. Whatever ghosts they were at the farm, he obviously didn’t fear them. Was he having a little joke at my expense? I grinned with him, saying: “Well, I shouldn’t care to have been your ghosts. Not for the last thirty years, at any rate. Not with old man Carpenter about the place. That would be a classic case of the biter bit!”
“Old Jason Carpenter,” he reminded me, smiling still but less brilliantly, “has disappeared, remember?”
“Oh!” I said, feeling a little foolish. “Of course he has.” And I followed up quickly with: “But what do you mean, haunted?”
“Local village legend,” he shrugged. “I heard it from Father Nicholls, who married us. He had it from the priest before him, and so on. Handed down for centuries, so to speak. I wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t stopped me and asked how we were getting on up at the farm. If we’d seen anything—you know—odd? He wouldn’t have said anything more but I pressed him.”
“And?”
“Well, it seems the original owners were something of a fishy bunch.”
“Fishy?”
“Quite literally! I mean, they looked fishy. Or maybe froggy? Protuberant lips, wide-mouthed, scaly-skinned, pop-eyed—you name it. To use Father Nicholls’ own expression, ‘ichthyic’.”
“Slow down,” I told him, seeing his excitement rising up again. “First of all, what do you mean by the ‘original’ owners? The people who built the place?”
“Good heavens, no!” he chuckled; and then he took me by the elbow and guided me into the library and to a table. We sat. “No one knows—no one can remember—who actually built the place. If ever there were records, well, they’re long lost. God, it probably dates back to Roman times! It’s likely as old as the Wall itself—even older. Certainly it has been a landmark on maps for the last four hundred and fifty years. No, I mean the first recorded family to live there. Which was something like two and a half centuries ago.”
“And they were—” I couldn’t help frowning “—odd-looking, these people?”
“Right! And odd not only in their looks. That was probably just a case of regressive genes, the result of indiscriminate inbreeding. Anyway, the locals shunned them—not that there were any real ‘locals’ in those days, you understand. I mean, the closest villages or towns then were Hartlepool, Sunderland, Durham and Seaham Harbour. Maybe a handful of other, smaller places—I haven’t checked. But this country was wild! And it stayed that way, more or less, until the modern roads were built. Then came the railways, to service the pits, and so on.”
I nodded, becoming involved with David’s enthusiasm, finding myself carried along by it. “And the people at the farm stayed there down the generations?”
“Not quite,” he answered. “Apparently there was something of a hiatus in their tenancy around a hundred and fifty years ago; but later, about the time of the American Civil War, a family came over from Innsmouth in New England and bought the place up. They, too, had the degenerate looks of earlier tenants; might even have been an offshoot of the same family, returning to their ancestral home, as it were. They made a living farming and fishing. Fairly industrious, it would seem, but surly and clannish. Name of Waite. By then, though, the ‘ghosts’ were well established in local folklore. They came in two manifestations, apparently.”
“Oh?”
He nodded. “One of them was a gigantic, wraithlike, nebulous figure rising from the mists over Kettlethorpe Dene, seen by travellers on the old coach road or by fishermen returning to Harden along the cliff-top paths. But the interesting thing is this: if you look at a map of the district, as I’ve done, you’ll see that the farm lies in something of a depression directly between the coach road and the cliffs. Anything seen from those vantage points could conceivably be emanating from the farm itself!”
I was again beginning to find the nature of David’s discourse disturbing. Or if not what he was saying, his obvious involvement with the concept. “You seem to have gone over all of this rather thoroughly,” I remarked. “Any special reason?”
“Just my old thirst for knowledge,” he grinned. “You know I’m never happy unless I’m tracking something down—and never happier than when I’ve finally got it cornered. And after all, I do live at the place! Anyway, about the giant mist-figure: according to the legends, it was half-fish, half-man!”
“A merman?”
“Yes. And now—” he triumphantly took out a folded sheet of rubbing parchment and opened it out onto the table—“Ta-rah! And what do you make of that?”
The impression on the paper was perhaps nine inches square; a charcoal rubbing taken from a brass of some sort, I correctly imagined. It showed a mainly anthropomorphic male figure seated upon a rock-carved chair or throne, his lower half obscured by draperies of weed bearing striking resemblance to the deep kelp. The eyes of the figure were large and somewhat protuberant; his forehead sloped; his skin had the overlapping scales of a fish, and the fingers of his one visible hand where it grasped a short trident were webbed: The background was vague, reminding me of nothing so much as cyclopean submarine ruins.
“Neptune,” I said. “Or at any rate, a merman. Where did you get it?”
“I rubbed it up myself,” he said, carefully folding the sheet and replacing it in his pocket. “It
’s from a plate on a lintel over a door in one of the outbuildings at Kettlethorpe.” And then for the first time he frowned. “Fishy people and a fishy symbol…”
He stared at me strangely for a moment and I felt a sudden chill in my bones—until his grin came back and he added: “And an entirely fishy story, eh?”
We left the library and I walked with him to his car. “And what’s your real interest in all of this?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t remember you as much of a folklorist?”
His look this time was curious, almost evasive. “You just won’t believe that it’s only this old inquiring mind of mine, will you?” But then his grin came back, bright and infectious as ever.
He got into his car, wound down the window and poked his head out. “Will we be seeing you soon? Isn’t it time you paid us a visit?”
“Is that an invitation?”
He started up the car. “Of course—any time.”
“Then I’ll make it soon,” I promised.
“Sooner!” he said.
Then I remembered something he had said. “David, you mentioned two manifestations of this—this ghostliness. What was the other one?”
“Eh?” He frowned at me, winding up his window. Then he stopped winding. “Oh, that. The bell, you mean…”
“Bell?” I echoed him, the skin of my neck suddenly tingling. “What bell?”
“A ghost bell!” he yelled as he pulled away from the kerb. “What else? It tolls underground or under the sea, usually when there’s a mist or a swell on the ocean. I keep listening for it, but—”
“No luck?” I asked automatically, hearing my own voice almost as that of a stranger.
“Not yet.”
And as he grinned one last time and waved a farewell, pulling away down the street, against all commonsense and logic I found myself remembering the old woman’s words outside the church: “What about the other bell, eh?”
What about the other bell, indeed…
IV: “Miasma”
Half-way back to Harden it dawned on me that I had not chosen a book for myself. My mind was still full of David Parker’s discoveries; about which, where he had displayed that curious excitement, I still experienced only a niggling disquiet.