The Essex Serpent(24)
But something had changed in the course of their ritual: she had a curious impulse to glance backward over her shoulder as if she might catch out the tide in reversing its direction, or see the waters split open as once they had for Moses. She’d heard, of course, the rumours that something lived now in the estuary depths, and was responsible for the taking of a lamb and the breaking of a limb, but thought little of it: childhood was so rife with terrors that it was useless giving more credence to one thing than to another. Wanting to see again the sad pale face of the lady in the moon, she looked up, and there was only the gathering of dense clouds stacking up above the marsh. The wind had dropped, as it often did at dusk, and up on the road above them the earth would be hardening with frost. John, evidently feeling his own unease, forgot his increasing years and put his hand in hers; and even Naomi, who’d never once been seen to look afraid, sucked fretfully at her coil of hair and drew closer to her friend. As they made their silent way past the dying embers of their fire, and past Leviathan as it shored itself deeper for the night, they glanced repeatedly over their shoulders at the black water creeping closer across the mud. ‘Girls and boys come out to play,’ sang Naomi, not quite managing to keep a tremor from her voice: ‘The moon does shine as bright as day …’
Much later – and only when pressed, since it had all seemed to be a part of a ritual of which the children felt strangely ashamed – each claimed to have seen a curious thickening and rising of the water in a particular place, just where the salt-marsh ended and the riverbed shelved steeply down. There’d been no sound, and nothing as comfortingly frightening as a long limb or rolling eye; only a movement that was too swift and directionless to be the casting of a wave. John claimed that it had had about it a whitish look, but Joanna thought that was only the moon peering out and brightening the surface with her gaze. Naomi, the first to speak up, embellished the event with such a flourish of wing and snout that it was generally accepted she’d seen nothing at all, and her testimony was discarded.
‘How long until we’re home, Jojo?’ John, tense with a longing to run home to his mother and the dinner he imagined going cold on the table, tugged at his sister’s hand.
‘Nearly there: look, see the smoke from the chimneys and the sails on the boats?’
They had reached the path – their teeth chattering, with the sudden chill and with unease – and up ahead the oil lamps set in the windows of World’s End had the charm of a Christmas tree. They could see Cracknell making his rounds for the night, cuffing Gog and Magog into their pen, and pausing at the gate to bid them goodnight.
‘Girls and boys come out to play,’ he sang, having heard them coming, thudding the gatepost for emphasis: ‘And though I note it’s a full-face moon you’ll have no daybright shining what with the light being borrowed only, and that paid back at interest, and losing its value month by month, which accounts for the dimness of the thing. Eh?’ Pleased with this line of thought he grinned, then beckoned them closer, and closer still, so that they smelt the earthy dampness rising from the pockets of his coat, and saw the stripped bodies of the moles hanging by their heels.
‘Keen to get home, ain’t he?’ Cracknell nodded at John, who was an old friend of his, and would not usually pass up the chance to sit astride Gog or Magog and circuit the shack, and after eat honey straight from the comb. John, who by now imagined his supper being passed to the dog, scowled, and it was perhaps this that made the old man scowl in return, and grasp the boy’s ear. ‘Listen up then, the three of you – it’s not just girls and boys come out to play in these times which I do wonder but might well be the last and you’ll hear no regrets from me on that score, even so come quickly Lord Jesus as I might have said when I had truck with such talk … join your playfellows in the street, as the song says but it’s a strange playfellow you made down there in the Blackwater black water, don’t think I don’t know and haven’t seen it myself twice or thrice when the moon’s bright …’ He gripped John’s ear a little too tight, and the boy yelped. Cracknell looked at his own hand in surprise, as if it had operated without his permission, and released John, who rubbed his face and began to cry. ‘Well, then. Well, then: what’s this noise for?’ Cracknell patted his several pockets, but found nothing that might placate a child in need of his mother’s lap, and a hot meal. ‘I only speak kindly, only kindly, as always I hope I do, and wouldn’t wish the snapping and the creeping and the watching on any of you or any of yours.’ John had not yet stopped crying, and Joanna feared for a moment that the old man might cry also, out of shame and something she suspected was fear. She reached over the mole-strung fence and patted the greasy sleeve of his coat twice, and had begun to cast about for something soothing to say when Cracknell stiffened, thrust up his arm, and roared: ‘Halt, now! What goes there?’
The children flinched: John buried his face in his sister’s waist; Naomi spun on her heel, and gasped. A dark misshapen creature was coming at them along the path, moving slowly, making a low sound in the depths of its throat. It did not creep, but stood on hind legs; it almost had the shape of a man – it held out its arms – it might have been a threat, but the noise it made seemed almost laughter. It was a man, surely; indeed, there was something in the unhurried gait that was almost familiar – nearer it came to the light cast by Cracknell’s lamps; it paused, and she saw its long coat shedding thick flakes of mud, and its heavy boots. The face was obscured by a hat pulled low to the brows, and by a heavy scarf – everything about the creature was coated in mud that showed black with damp in places and dried pale in others; only there were parts of the filthy hat which showed the original scarlet of the wool.