The Blood dimmed Tide by Anthony J. Quinn

Author:Anthony J. Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: No Exit Press
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

Three of Cups

CAPTAIN Oates experienced his flight from terror as a dreamless passage through derelict mansions, rocky cliffs and gurgling tides, with the dead girl’s haunting breath always on his neck. He spent wild mornings stumbling over rock pools and under steep cliffs, or in the hinterland of overgrown estates, searching for a new hiding place. He still had his wits about him, whatever people thought, but his mental apparatus had served him poorly. He realised that now. Straightforward military intelligence was useless against the adversary he faced. God might have been of assistance, but he had turned his back on Him, after witnessing the sight of soldiers’ bodies stacked like countless sandbags in the trenches of Verdun and the Somme.

Nevertheless, he had almost cried out in prayer when he first saw the ghostly figure of Rosemary O’Grady, gasping and struggling as if she were drowning in air. From the start, he had tried to rationalise what was happening. The spirits are people like ourselves, a housemaid with the second sight had once told him. Earthbound souls who believe they are still alive, but are condemned to repeat over and over again the painful moments of their death. They should be treated like guests and offered hospitality and sympathy.

He had grown used to the ghost’s presence, and that of her companion spirits, the swaying forms of their bodies, their anguished cries, and the wailing drift of their voices as they cried out his name, driving him out each morning to the sea-whipped extremities of the Sligo coastline. There his mind took refuge in the sound of the drowning surf.

It frightened him greatly that he was able to feel their deathly cold hands. He had run up against them in his panic the previous night; light, delicate hands, but substantial all the same, and ice-cold, pushing him to the side as he tore through the darkness. That night had been the worst in a succession of cruel hauntings that seemed designed to test his fragile sanity. It had finally dispelled the lingering possibility that the whole thing might be taking place inside his head.

He had sat huddled over a fire in a single room cabin at the back end of an overgrown estate, when, shortly after midnight, the wind picked up and rattled through the cabin with the sound of rotten bones knocking together. And then something fragrant and sweet hung in the air, along with the laughing sound of young women’s voices. But what women would be abroad at such a time in the night, or in such a place? He sidled to the left of the fire, where an angled mirror gave him a view of the door, allowing him to see who was entering without them noticing him. Immediately, he pulled his head back. The ghostly faces of several young women had appeared upon the mirror’s surface, their eyes darting in all directions, as though they too were using it as a window to peer into the room.

He lay down and pretended to be asleep, watching with apprehension through his half-closed eyes.

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