Vampire Stories to Tell in the Dark by Anthony Masters

Author:Anthony Masters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

7

Family Thirst

Jack and I live near Newquay and we got a holiday job fixing up an old fishing trawler that was hauled up on the beach. She was called Grey Eyes and had been accidentally rammed in a storm. The family that owned the trawler, the Michaelsons, were quite happy for us to carry out the repairs, even though they were quite extensive. We were both delighted, because the job was worth a good deal of money and we had been promised payment at top rates.

When we talked to the locals they told us that the Michaelsons didn’t use their boat for fishing, just to live on, and scoffingly dismissed them as ‘water gypsies’ and ‘ageing hippies’, but it didn’t matter to us. They were our first clients and we wanted them to be really pleased with what we did.

While Jack and I carried out the work, the family rented an old beach hut in which they proposed to live. The Michaelsons moved their possessions overnight and never came out during the day, only emerging in the early evening, dressed in home-made clothes and certainly looking rather weird. Leslie and Arabella were the parents, somewhere in middle age, and Emelia was their teenage daughter. She was beautiful, and I know Jack was attracted to her – and she to him. They would walk up and down the beach in the twilight, talking and holding hands until I realized, with a twinge of envy, that my brother had fallen in love.

One morning, while the Michaelsons were in their hut with the door locked as usual, old Frank Lombard, a local fisherman and well-known Nosy Parker, came up for a gossip. He was full of some story the coastguards had told him.

‘There’s been more disappearances at sea on this part of the coastline than any other – that’s what they’re saying.’

‘Been bad weather for a long time,’ Jack reminded him, and I said, ‘You sure of that?’ Frank was a real old yarn-spinner and we didn’t like him to get away with anything – which he did most of the time.

He shook his grizzled head and packed a pipe with blackened tobacco with obvious relish. ‘Those ships were like the Mary Celeste,’ he said, his eyes gleaming. ‘Empty, drifting. God only knows where the crews went. Nothing to do with the weather.’

‘I haven’t seen anything in the papers,’ said Jack suspiciously.

‘That’s because they’re hushing it up.’ Frank’s eyes were full of morbid delight. ‘Just in case folks get too frightened of their own shadows.’

‘Since when have the papers hushed anything up?’ I asked, but he ignored me. Frank didn’t like interruptions.

‘There’s been a couple of disappearances recently – but there’s going to be many more.’

‘How do you work that out?’ I asked.

‘There’s something out there.’

‘A sea monster?’ Jack almost laughed, only just managing to hold back his disbelief.

‘Maybe. There’s something preying on seafarers and that’s the way I see it.’ Eventually he ambled off, and we immediately dismissed the whole business. He

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