Read The Shorecliff Horror and Other Stories Page 4

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  It was early April when I first arrived at Shorecliff. There were new leaves on the row of birch trees which hid the house out of sight of the driveway that led up to it, and scattered tangles of late, wild daffodils grew across the large front lawn. By the time October came around, and those trees were growing bare again, virtually all of the work I had to do on the house was complete and I began to find myself with a few spare hours on my hands. One or two months earlier this might have caused me some difficulty, but by now I realised I was growing ready for a break from the hard, arduous routine I’d set for myself. My mind was beginning to clear. The dark fog that had been clouding my thoughts when I left the city had lifted a little. Without quite realising I was doing it, I found myself relaxing, taking an interest in my surroundings again, paying attention to my appearance, to what I was eating, showing more affection, even, to poor old Lovecraft (when he would allow it). I’d come to Shorecliff in the hope that hard work and isolation would cure me of the sick despair I’d fallen into during my earlier life. During those wet, cold October weeks, I began to feel as though my experiment was proving a success. My spirits so lifted I pledged to venture out of the house a little more, to explore and properly appreciate this odd place I’d settled into.

  Shorecliff House itself was an unremarkable building. Constructed of the same light grey granite with which many of the region’s houses were built, its design was simple and utilitarian, it’s gardens set to a plain, open lawn which stretched from the face of the house to the very edge of the black cliffs which tumbled down to the North Sea below. It was located at the end of a long, private driveway running for miles along the coastline, far, far away from any main roads or thoroughfares. Nobody else lived along this road. Nobody else ever used it. There was no reason to. The road didn’t lead anywhere other than Shorecliff and for years nobody other me had had any reason to go there. All this had made the place an odd corner of the country, an ignored peninsula, unvisited and unwatched for decades. Its isolation was complete and utter.

  Only now, when I was slowly growing more aware of things around me did I really begin to perceive the full extent of just how remote the region was, how removed from the rest of the country this corner had become. I remembered the odd looks on the faces of the workmen I hired when they made their way out there, the confused conversations I had with suppliers when I tried to explain where I wanted their deliveries made. For the first time I began to feel a strange, unhealthy edge to this isolation, far removed from the comfort it had provided when I first arrived.

  There was a path I would often follow which led from the edge of the garden lawn, down the face of the cliffs via a steep and twisting walkway to the beach below. Standing on the shore at the foot of this path, I marvelled at the sight of the giant, black cliffs rising over me, their faces dark and impassive, permanently glistening wet with spray from the sea and the waters that leached from the great moors above. For months I had been strangely reassured by this sight, pleased by the thought of the house I was restoring being built on top of such a massive, ancient structure. Now, however, the same view began to bring forth a very different response. Though not wishing to, it was as though my mind’s attitude to Shorecliff and its environment was turning. Where previously I had felt at home and safe in its bleak, darkness, now I perceived something purposeful and malevolent in those very same characteristics. Far from being solid and reassuring, I saw in the face of those black cliffs an unpleasant watchfulness. Somewhere in the angles and curves made by the rocks emerged an unhappy coincidence of shadow and shape, a chance meeting of stone against sky that suggested an old intelligence staring back at me. The cliffs leaned back against the sky in a great, craggy V-shape whose apex pointed directly towards Shorecliff House. They bared their teeth and reared their head in a gesture of arrogant glee. This is not a place to be lived in, they seemed to say. This is not a place for people, or for life.

 

  I tried to tell myself this was nothing but imagination playing tricks on me, the effect of too long spent in isolation. I tried to shrug it off, saying that it was my mind working to fill in the gaps left by the loss of normal social interaction, but I couldn’t convince myself. The feeling of something evil and inhuman lurking in those cliffs and the surroundings of the house was too strong to set aside so easily. Just as I was recovering from the long depression that had brought me to Shorecliff and beginning to open my eyes again to the world around me, so I seemed to find myself in surroundings just as dark and unforgiving as my illness had been. It was as though the bleakness of my mood when I left the city had reached out and found a landscape to match it perfectly, a place that promised to be yet more difficult to escape from than I could imagine.