by Unknown
We went onto the beach as planned. It was bitter cold, the wind coming off the sea with nothing to break it. The beach itself was dirty dark sand banked up against these big chicken wire cages filled with stones that were someone's idea of sea defences. They were half-buried now. Every so often we saw the ends of posts, rotting black, sticking up from the sand where there had been wooden barriers cutting up the length of the strand. The beach was eating it all up, in its own time.
Bridling Spa had been big news a hundred years ago, Walther told me. ‘Victorians? They couldn't get enough of it. Piling down here on the train, all the comfortable middle classes. Bathing machines and donkey rides. And that. Lovely, isn't it. Gothic.’
That was the pier. Bridling Pier had been particularly impressive once, and there was still a kind of gaunt grandeur to its wrought ironwork and fluted supports as we approached it. Closed, of course. It had been closing down for decades. Ten years ago the endmost section of it had broken up in a storm, and since then it had just sat there, too big to destroy or overlook, trusted by nobody, the last melancholy scar of the good old days. Its top was still rife with little sun-bleached wooden buildings that had been shops, fairground attractions, a theatre.
‘Quite a fuss when they built it. They didn't have your Woo-waa back in eighteen ninety-eight, but there was a local paper. Front page news, this was. They pushed it through. Past objections.’
He always wanted to be the showman. ‘Objections?’ I asked dutifully.
‘Sure, objections. After all, when you dig foundations, you never know what you might find.’
‘A body? This is a haunting?’
‘More and less. No body, no, but something… Beaches move, inland and out.’
We were at the pier now, in its shadow. There was a rickety looking iron staircase spiralling up, with a chain slung across it and a sign saying ‘No Admittance.’
Walther looked back and smiled at me. ‘She was here, you know.’
‘The girl? Gina Brown?’
‘Right. Her mother said that she was playing here, under the pillars. Nobody else around.’
‘She went into the sea?’
‘It's possible.’ Walther didn't think so, from his tone. ‘That's what they thought, at first.’
He would never be hurried. Learning that had allowed me to work with him. Otherwise I might have strangled him before now.
Then he had grasped the metal banister of the stairs and vaulted over the chain, making good time up the spiralling steps. They shook, and I was covered in flakes of rust almost immediately, but I followed. It all creaked and rattled with every step, and I hated it. Heights aren't my strong point.
At the top of the steps was a barred chain-link gate, which seemed odd, as though the locals thought anyone who had found their way onto the deserted pier should be prevented from leaving it at all costs. Walther clambered over it distastefully, his suit already striped with brownish-red smears. Again, I followed. He was on his own recognisance now, and all I could do was to look out for him.
The promenade of the pier was all that decades of weather and no care could have made it. The wood creaked beneath my feet. The paint everywhere was peeling, off the doors and window frames of the kiosks and shop fronts, off the signs, and the vacant housings of fairground rides. It put me on edge. Something about all that decayed jolliness, that flaking cheer, got on my nerves.
‘Children get up here, you think?’ Walther called back to me. He was strolling down the pier, rolled umbrella like a cane and his other hand restraining his hat.
‘Get most places,’ I said. ‘So what? She got up here and fell off the end?’
‘It could happen.’ Again it was obviously not what he thought. He paused at the front of the pier’s theatre where a sun-faded poster behind cracked plastic announced the last performance of The Amazing Mysto and Rita. It made me shudder for some reason. A fat man in a fez and a tired woman in spangles, trapped there forever, washed paler and paler, year in, year out. I wondered if the advertised performance had ever happened or whether the collapse of the pier end had closed them down.
‘Cave art,’ said Walther, meaning graffiti. Some local bloods had left their mark about the theatre’s side, although even the abandonment had not given them courage to deface the front. In fact the graffiti Walther had found stood out because there was so little of it. Perhaps even the thugs of Bridling Spa could not be bothered with this place.
‘When they were excavating for the pier, they found something interesting,’ Walther said. ‘The Victorians were unreliable archaeologists, though, so I can’t be sure.’
‘Sure of what?’ You have to tease these things out of him piece by piece, like cloth from a bullet wound.
‘It was a site. A henge,’ he said. ‘A wooden one. If someone had discovered it independently it would have been in the literature, but as it was, it was just in the way. They turfed it up and carried on. Thankfully some local bookworm made a note of it. Some drawings. There was more on paper at the time, but it’s not here. I haven’t found it.’
‘A henge on the beach?’ I asked him. ‘What were they, holidaying cavemen?’
‘Beaches move,’ Walther said patiently, turning back to me. ‘I’ve told you. Coasts change.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘That this might be a site. Ritual significance.’
I knew what that meant. ‘But there’s a whole town here now. Someone would have noticed something. More than just some missing people. And that only in the last twenty years, Hawker said. It’s not exactly ancient history.’
Walther’s face was without expression. It meant that something had occurred to him. He lifted a hand for quiet.
‘Hear anything?’ he asked, after a moment. I shook my head. He went to the nearest boarded-up shop front, the faded painting still advertising ‘Candy Floss, Do-Nuts, Bridling Rock,’ and put his hands to the ancient paintwork. He was testing boundaries.
‘You like rock? The sweet kind?’ he asked.
‘Take it or leave it. Rots your teeth.’
‘But it’s so very clever. It just goes on and on, and yet there’s something hiding inside, from the very beginning, something shot through its very core.’
He was being clever as well, and I generally left him to it on those occasions. When he had something plain to say, he’d say it. Seeing I wasn’t rising to it, he grinned. ‘What’s written in the middle of the rock, Michael?’
‘The place,’ I said. ‘The name of it.’
‘The place,’ he agreed. ‘On and on, hidden and forever. You’re right, of course.’
We turned back then. He had decided that we were not going to get anywhere – not going to get in as he always put it – that day. I felt uncomfortable, because that usually meant coming back at night. I felt worse when Walther said, ‘I’ll need the heavy kit for this. Reconvene next Saturday.’
*
Over the week I reeled in two dog-ends of information, and this was with me searching the Woo-waa every spare minute. Oh there was more; on the net there always is. I had a mountain to sift through, because my terms were so vague, but I’m good at the sifting. Bridling Spa turned up on the usual sites about missing people, either alone or lumped with other seaside resorts. There was nothing new there.
The University of Southampton’s archaeology department swam up, though, in one of my searches. There was just an abstract for a paper from the early eighties, but in it was ‘…and the similarity of this site to others at Thornbeck and Bridling Spa…’ and that was the hook that had caught on Google’s feelers. I mailed the link to Walther, and two days later I got a photocopy of three pages of the original by snail. Walther had scrawled an introduction at the top, and highlighted what he thought was important in green. This was some reconstruction of a site in Hampshire and, as the man had said, apparently it was similar to several other recorded sites, including Bridling Spa. There was no reference to where the author had got that information, which had obviously anno
yed Walther no end. What we did get, though, was a picture.
It made me very uncomfortable just to look at it. I couldn’t tell you why. The ‘henge’ that Walther had mentioned was more like a complete wall of wood, according to the reconstruction, with odd gaps in it at all heights which some athletic pagan could have squeezed through. Inside the wall was a tree stump, and the tree stump was upside down, roots in the air, to make a kind of altar or table. It looked as though the tree was actually growing upside-down in the earth, and it upset me a lot, for some reason. It just looked … wrong, more wrong than any little academic’s sketch should have been able to convey.
Walther must have felt the same way. He had put an arrow to the picture and the words ‘Isn’t it, though?’
Buried in the sand, underneath the pier. Was it still there? Or had it all been hauled up and thrown away, rotten and black like the buried pilings.
My other unexpected piece of luck was tracking down The Amazing Mysto, or sort of. He spun off from a Bridling Spa search, and after a little digging I got a number for him that I thought was his agent’s.
I rang it. Why not? A tired-sounding woman answered. I told her I wanted to get in touch with the Amazing Mysto and there was a pause.
‘Is this a gig?’ Although that was the line I had been going to play, something in her voice didn’t encourage it.
‘I, er, actually, I just wanted to ask him something, to talk to him.’
‘You’ll be lucky,’ she told me. ‘Know a good medium, do you?’ It sounds harsh, written down, but she was still upset about it, in her voice. Of course the instant thought that came to me was, ‘Now you come to mention it,’ but it wasn’t the time to bring up Walther.
The Amazing Mysto, also known as Frank Tuxley Ward, had died two years before, and I was speaking, apparently, to And Rita.
‘Bridling Spa,’ I said. ‘That was all.’
Another long pause. I tried to remember the face of the spangly woman on the faded poster and couldn’t.
‘He hated that place,’ she said. ‘We both did.’
‘Why did you play there then?’
‘You think we could just turn work down?’ she asked me. ‘You think we was doing so well, if we had to play Bridling Pier?’
I asked her what was wrong with it. Was it a tough crowd?
‘It weren’t the crowd. It were the place. It was hard. People dropped out all the time. Couldn’t take it. It drove you. Sometimes people dropped out, you never saw them again. It was like … if you didn’t get the crowd, if you didn’t do well…’
A longer pause. I was looking down at the archaeologist’s little sketch and thinking that Walther was right again, yet again.
‘It was hungry,’ said the woman’s voice on the phone. ‘You’d feed it, one way or the other. That place.’
I tried to ask her more, but she hung up, and then kept the phone off the hook for long enough that I stopped trying.
*
Saturday next: meeting with Walther at his place to help manage the heavy kit. I said hello to his mum, and had half an hour of talk with her carer before Walther was ready. His mum has no idea what he does, when he goes off of a weekend. She doesn’t really get most things going on around her, really.
The heavy kit came in an old suitcase, which we hauled to the train station and set off for Bridling Spa. Walther was quiet most of the way, nose in a newspaper.
‘Night work,’ he said. ‘Going to have to be. Too obvious otherwise.’
‘Tomorrow night?’
‘Tonight.’
I opened my mouth to remind him it was still Saturday but his eyes, over the top of the newspaper, stopped me. ‘The point of the Sunday is that, while it means nothing to me or much to you, it means something to … some things. They remember. Because this country has been Christian for a long time. It won’t make any difference in this case.’
‘Because the ghost’s too old? All that archaeology stuff?’
‘Half marks,’ he told me. ‘It’s not a ghost. There’s all the difference in the world.’
*
The heavy kit is well named. Walther’s light kit is pocket-sized: dowsing rod, runestones, mirror, some antique coins, chalk and a little child’s windmill. The heavy kit fits in a suitcase and is for every eventuality, including industrial-strength ghost-raising. Except it wasn’t a ghost. I had the idea that Walther was not sure how to go about this, and would be shotgunning it a bit, throwing a big net to catch what he could. In our room at the B&B he went through the case sorting out what we would actually take. I packed it all in my rucksack: the big electric motor and the wire, the instrument desk, the silver and the copper rods and the rest. The only stuff he was leaving in the case was the religious stuff: the exorcism kit and the holy water, all that. It was like he said, the religious bit was all very well if your ghost believed in God, but he was looking at something older here, whatever it was.
Even with God left out, it was all still pretty heavy. Outside, the sky was going orange, the streetlights and the neon of the amusement arcades taking over from the sun. Bridling Spa was dead on arrival as far as a tourist spot went, but at the same time it never really stopped. Even this late in the year it was lurching on like a restless corpse. When we got to the pier there was a gang of yobs out on it, bellowing their wordless cries to the vacant sky, and throwing cans and curry cartons into the sea. Walther and I waited on the beach for them to go, in the shadow of the pilings themselves. They gave no indication they were going to, and I expected Walther to be annoyed. Instead he was waiting, listening, expecting something.
There was a shout from one of the youths up there, a shout of surprise and perhaps more. Then there was an argument, a scuffle, and between the echo and their own drunken force there was still not a word clear in it.
‘Morlocks,’ muttered Walther, huddling into his jacket more. The youths were fighting now. I had the impression one of them had been ribbed about his sudden reaction, and had taken it badly. A minute later and we heard them chasing thunderously down the length of the pier, yelling obscenities. When they reached the chain-link gates that cut off the main entrance to the pier we heard them shake and rattle them, climbing up them and whooping, and from there their voices only receded.
‘What happened?’ I asked, because Walther obviously thought something had.
‘There’s something here,’ he said. ‘It heard them. They must be out-of-town boys. I’ll bet the locals don’t come here.’
‘What are we dealing with here?’ I asked him. For answer he was clambering up the metal stairwell again. It made a hell of a lot of noise, me coming up after him with the lay-version heavy kit, but after the yobs I didn’t think anyone would really notice.
At the top, Walther was standing in his usual hand-in-pockets slouch, staring down the length of the pier towards the untidy scaffolding that marked its termination. I could tell that he could feel something. To me it was just dull: the crippled flagship of a dying seaside resort, cold with a cutting wind that came from off the sea, smelling faintly of sewage and rot. There was a moon out, most of one. It showed the shabby little husks of better days that time had left behind. Walther began stalking between them, with me following behind.
‘If it isn’t a ghost, then what is it?’ I asked him.
He grinned round at me. ‘What if I told you it was Old Mr Predrick the funfair owner all the time?’
I shrugged. ‘If you want.’
‘What’s a ghost, Michael?’
I didn’t say ‘a dead person’ or ‘someone’s spirit’ straight off, because I was trying to remember what little he told me the other times, when it had been a ghost. ‘A memory,’ I said. ‘Only more than that.’
‘Succinctly put. An autonomous memory, perhaps. A ghost is an imprint of an individual, recorded in the psychic matrix of the world.’
‘Right. What I meant,’ I said. He had stopped outside the candy floss stall and his grin increased.
‘The moti
ve force for the imprinting is emotion, of course, and as people often feel quite emotional about, say, dying unexpectedly, ghosts are usually of the dead, at the moment of their deaths, but not always.’ He frowned. ‘Ghosts of the living don’t last in the same way. I think they get reabsorbed into the donor psyche. There hasn’t been much study...’
‘Why are we talking about ghosts if it isn’t one?’
He was on the move again, this time poking ahead of him with the umbrella. When he stopped, on and off, I thought he was listening.
‘Because you should appreciate, the world is a recording device for emotional stress. Ghosts are simply individualised spikes on a general background track. Imagine a place, if you will, where people have expended and invested emotion, importance.’
‘This henge-thing, with the tree.’
‘What did it make you think of? The sketch?’
‘I didn’t like it. You think they killed people there?’
‘Impossible to say, but to build up a really strong standing wave of emotional investment, a little death goes a long way.’ He stopped. We were outside the theatre. ‘So places can have ghosts, too. Genii Loci. Spirits of place. Household gods. Guardians of brooks and streams and trees. And … whatever we have here. Would you be so kind?’
I kicked in the theatre door. It had barely been secured. The foyer beyond still had some old posters, layered with dust. The face of the Amazing Mysto goggled at us, along with some kind of music act and a wrinkled comedian.
‘On the stage,’ Walther directed. It was easy enough to find. The place sat about a hundred people at most. The seats were threadbare, rotted. The ironwork of their frames was eaten away by the salt air.
‘Doesn’t look like they stripped this place,’ I said. There was even one of those electric keyboard organ things, lying long-dead in a pit in front of the stage, that I’d have thought would have been worth something ten years before.
‘I wonder…’ Walther was kneeling with the heavy kit, while I set up an electric lantern so he could see what he was doing. The light was white and harsh and seemed to drain away without touching the walls. ‘Maybe,’ Walther said, ‘the cost of getting it out was too high. Or maybe…’
