by Tim Weaver
I headed to Google Maps and found Princetown. It flipped to a satellite shot full of green hills and a series of yellow B-roads snaking in from different directions and meeting at the centre of the village. To the north was the famous prison, its buildings fanning out like the spokes of a wheel. To the south, Google had dropped an ‘A’ pin into a square mile full of dirt tracks, forested hillsides and walled-in farmland.
Long Barn Lane.
Switching to Street View, I landed myself at the end of it. The sun was low in the sky, a prism of colour distorting the view, but, as I edged around, things became clearer. It was a short stretch of road, lasting for no more than a quarter of a mile, fields on either side. I moved along it. Initially, there were no houses at all, anywhere, but as I got towards the road’s end, I spotted a turn-off into a thin, gravel driveway. I moved forward. The driveway wasn’t mapped in Street View, so I couldn’t go any further.
But I didn’t have to.
It looped in, past a knot of fir trees, and then came back on itself, stopping at the front door of a dilapidated house sitting forty feet back from the road. It hadn’t been lived in for months. Maybe years. Which meant the phone calls hadn’t been made from the house itself. But, in the distance, my eyes had already seen something else.
It was perched on a bank, about fifty feet further on, along the main road.
A red phone box.
23
Two miles further on from the pub, the coastal road climbed to an apex, drifting closer to the edge than at any point during my journey home. Four yards to the left of my car, the world dropped away three hundred feet, down to the shingle beach that would go on to trace the rifts and hollows of the cliffs, all the way back to the village. Beyond the brow of the hill, as the road began its descent back to sea level, I glimpsed the Ley – a sprawling grey mass, utterly still from this distance, like a sheet of polished concrete – and, briefly, spotted Mum and Dad’s cottage, nestled in the hills beyond, half disguised by old trees.
But, before all that, there was another village.
Miln Cross.
It was barely visible to passers-by unless you knew where to look, the ghosts of its fourteen houses perched in the shadows of the cliffs and sitting on a platform of rock that had, over forty-four years, begun falling away to the sea. As the coastal road snaked right, taking me away from the edge, it disappeared from view, apart from the spire of its church, the tattered remnants of some kind of flag rippling in the breeze at its summit.
Signs for the village appeared a quarter of a mile further on, blistered and rusting, high grass disguising the N in Miln and the R and O in Cross. There were no tourist trips out to it, no reason to be there other than morbid curiosity, so when I pulled off the main road, the narrow lane almost seemed to close in on me, high hedges and overgrown grass whipping against the car all the way down to the bottom, where it suddenly opened out on to a crumbling square of concrete and a rickety wooden jetty. There were no boats.
I’d been here only once before – as a child – when my dad had brought me down, eight or nine years after the village had washed away. I didn’t remember much about it, but I remembered the view: Miln Cross was elevated, built on a plateau of rock about thirty feet up from where I was standing, so all you could see were the first couple of houses and, across their rooftops, the spire of the church. Forty-five years ago there had still been a bridge connecting the village to the rest of civilization, but now there was nothing left: the middle of the bridge had fallen away to the sea, leaving two disconnected walkways.
I walked right to the edge of the concrete square, sea lapping at its edges, and then up on to what remained of the bridge on my side of the water. The gap was about one hundred and twenty feet. Too big to attempt a jump. I glimpsed more of the village: a gently curving main street, full of broken cobbles, and more buildings – mostly houses – looking like they were folding from the inside. Whole roofs were missing from some, the windows empty and dark like open mouths, and walls were perforated with holes where the sea had punctured them as the storm raged. There wasn’t much evidence of the landslide externally, the mud and debris washed out to sea over the course of four and a half decades, but inside the houses hardened silt spilled out of the gaps, frozen like some kind of sculpture. On countless walls throughout the village, DANGER – KEEP OUT! signs had been pinned.
As I stood there, watching the rain drift through the walls of the village, I thought about the anonymous call police had received: I’m calling about that family that went missing – the Lings. I saw the husband and wife at Miln Cross today. You should go down and take a look. Nothing about that made sense. In order to even be in the position to see Paul and Carrie in the first place, the eyewitness would have had to make a specific journey down here – and why would anyone do that? Perhaps to take some photographs, as a tourist. I couldn’t think of any other reason. And that didn’t answer the real question: if Paul and Carrie were in Miln Cross, for whatever reason, how did they get across? The bridge was a memory, and the village’s harbour – the place where the fishermen, who’d once lived and worked here, had moored their boats – was built into the rocks on the other side of the village, out of sight. You could launch a boat from the jetty I was standing next to, but if that had been the case, if the boat had been mid-point across the water between here and the village, and the Lings were on board, why not mention it?
I lingered there for a moment, trying to understand why or how the Lings might have been taken to Miln Cross, then I returned to the car and headed back up the hill.
After a quarter of a mile the coastal road opened out and there was a lay-by, cut into the cliff, a high five-foot wall tracing its circumference to stop people falling off the side. I pulled in, got out of the car and went to the wall, trying to get a better view of the village.
Three hundred feet below, Miln Cross was like a child’s play set, the remains of fourteen homes, a pub, a shop and a chapel crammed together on a shelf of land no bigger than a football pitch. The main street ran from the broken bridge, in a gentle C-shape, all the way to the harbour on the other side, where a jetty had half collapsed into the sea, leaving the steps down, carved out of the rock itself, and some lonely planks of wood. It was possible the man who’d called the police had seen the Lings from here, but somehow I doubted it: you’d certainly be able to make people out below if they were moving through the centre of the village, but it would be hard to identify them. Unless you had a pair of binoculars. That was a possibility, especially when there were such stunning views out across the water. Or you knew who they were already. I studied the village, turning that last thought over. Maybe that was the reason he kept the call anonymous. He knew Paul and Carrie, knew what they looked like, even from three hundred feet away. So if you were a friend or even if you only knew them in passing, why would you be reluctant to give your name?
I looked at my watch.
Three-forty-five. An hour until sunset.
I drove on five minutes to Strete, a village halfway between Dartmouth and home, where I remembered there being a general store. There was nowhere to park, so I bumped the car on to the pavement outside, stuck the hazard lights on and headed in. A woman was standing at the back of the shop, pricing up kids’ bucket-and-spade sets.
‘Can I help you, love?’ she asked, turning to me.
I nodded. ‘What’s the biggest dinghy you’ve got?’
24
Forty-five minutes later, I reached Miln Cross. The sea was rough, especially this close to the cliffs, and rowing my way between the two broken pieces of the bridge in a six-foot dinghy with a couple of forty-inch oars was hard. I’d bought an electric pump from the general store, just to quicken the process, but it took me almost half an hour to get back to the place I’d been earlier, inflate the dinghy and get it ready. I still managed a wry smile as I got to the other side, though, able to appreciate how I must have looked: a 42-year-old man setting sail in a kid’s dinghy.
> Beneath the bridge on the Miln Cross side was a natural platform, smoothed and carved out from the rock by the sea. I rowed close to it, reached out and dragged myself in, clambering out of the boat and on to the rocks. In the car I’d had a length of tow rope, which I’d brought across. Once I was out of the boat, I pulled the dinghy up, on to the platform, and looped the rope through the rowlocks, securing the raft and both oars to a gnarled arm of rock six feet from the water’s edge. Then I climbed the rest of the way up to street level, and stood and looked down the main street.
On the left-hand side there were six stone houses, all in a line, tracing the gentle curve of the road at their front. Behind them, though, the rock fell away sharply, ragged and brittle, their foundations exposed, like the bones of a body, iron pillars breaking out of the earth and reaching up to the floors of the buildings. As I moved forward, the street uneven and fragmented beneath my feet, I could see the chapel on the same side, and then another house right at the end, set back from the others, next to where the harbour was. On the right, under the looming edifice of the cliff, was the rest of Miln Cross: seven houses, consigned to oblivion, a tiny inn, its white walls blanched by four decades of sea salt, and what once had been a shop. There was hardly anything left. The cliffs weren’t grey, they were black, blanketed in a wall of hardened mud. This was the epicentre of the landslide: it had moved right through the middle of the village, right to left, and into the sea, taking the shop with it. The only memory of the shop now was three half-broken external walls, and a floor of mud and concrete.
As I got to the first of the houses, the whine of the wind seemed to fade away into a gentle whisper, a strange, disconcerting sound like voices – deep within the roots of the buildings – talking to one another. There was a sudden stillness to the village, its street protected from the breeze coming in off the water, even from the sound of the sea itself: there was no roar from the waves any more, just a soft slosh as they grabbed and shoved at the plateau the village rose out from. When I paused for a moment at the open window of the first building, it hit home: Miln Cross was a graveyard, its hushed silence the same as every place I’d ever been to where people had been taken before they were ready. In those places there was always a residue, a feeling that echoed through it.
Inside the first house was the decaying reflection of a living room, the fireplace still visible at the back, the wall to its left gone completely. At one time there might have been a picture hanging on that wall. Now there was just a view of the sea. The wall that had once divided this room from the kitchen was a memory, reduced to nothing but a pile of bricks, the interior walls of the kitchen rotten through to the support beams, criss-crossing in sodden, blackened struts. There was no second floor and no roof.
I moved on, past other houses.
In some, just like the first, daylight poured through big holes in the roofs, through gaps in the outside walls, illuminating interiors in a weak kind of half-light. In others, where the roof and the walls were still, somehow, intact, there was nothing but darkness, windows like the eyes of a skull, doorways like widening jaws, black and hermetic.
I stopped at the inn and looked through its big front windows into a building with no roof and no walls on three sides. It was like something from a film set, a facade, and beyond its only vertical surface was a mass of ossified mud, clawing its way across the remains of the floorboards. On the other side of the street the chapel was the same: one side of its high vaulted roof had fallen into what remained of the building, its two stained-glass windows had blown out, and its door had been carried out to sea at some point long forgotten.
I checked the time. Four-forty.
There was about thirty minutes before it was completely dark.
I quickened my pace across the cobbles, heading past the chapel and the inn, and down the gentle curve of the street to the harbour. It was a harbour really only in name: a set of steps was carved out of the rock, leading down to a small, L-shaped concrete jetty, which, of all the structures in Miln Cross, had probably survived the best. Huge nails fixed the jetty to the plateau itself, rust leaking out of them and running down the rocks to the water. On this side of the village the cliff face folded around on itself, creating a natural cove, which was probably why they’d built the harbour here. In years past there would have been space for three or four trawlers, maybe some smaller boats too; once they’d got this side of the village, the cove would have calmed the water for them and they’d have drifted in year after year, unhindered and impervious, until the night the storm came.
The furthest house down was right next to the jetty, angled so that it looked over it. Famously, Miln Cross had had a harbour mistress: this must have been her home. It wasn’t lined up next to the others; instead it was set away, built on a separate plateau of rock about six feet below the level of the main street. Out front was a small square of lawn, reduced to a patch of sea-soaked mud, and, behind it, some kind of extension that seemed to be teetering on the very edges of the rocks. The main part of the house was like all the others in the village, the interior filled with rubble, dwindling light stabbing through the tears in the roof, the upstairs gone completely, the living room divided from the kitchen by a tiny sliver of a wall. However, at the back of the kitchen were three walls, all relatively intact, one with a doorway through to the extension.
I moved inside the house.
The smell of damp was overwhelming, an earthy stench eating its way through the house. There were countless punctures in the wall, whole slabs ripped clean away, and, from the roof, water fell in a constant drip, drip, drip, soaking its way through patches of what remained of the ceiling. At my feet was a layer of debris: plaster, brick, glass, sand, a twisted, gnarled fire grill fused to the floor in the centre of the living room by mud as hard as concrete. When I passed through to the kitchen there were still the skeletons of a worktop and a cooker in place, doors ripped from it. Apart from that, it was empty. I could vaguely make out old, floral wallpaper, and through the only window – now just a square opening in the wall, dusted with glass – was a view of the jetty.
Halfway across the kitchen, I suddenly felt a gentle suck beneath the soles of my boots, and when I looked down saw that the layer of dust and debris had been replaced by half an inch of water. The floorboards were soft, like sponge, bending under my weight, and as I moved further across the room towards the door, I could feel the boards bending even more and see water running into the house from outside.
I stopped at the open doorway.
The extension might once have been some kind of storage room, but it was hard to gauge exactly how big. Thirty feet from where I was standing, it basically ceased to exist. Beyond that point, the floor and what was left of the walls and the ceiling had been ripped away completely, destroyed by the ferocity of the storm. I stepped into the room and felt it shift slightly, left to right to left again, and when I looked back, I saw that, gradually, over time, the extension had begun to lever away from the house, popping free of the bolts that had once bound it to the main building. The sea was about six feet further down, immediately beneath the point at which the extension ended. In the moments when it was still, it was far enough out of reach; when it got rougher, when the wind started to pick up, the waves sloshed up into the open mouth of the extension and ran all the way through it, into the kitchen. There was the smell of fish, of sea salt, and of dust and age, but mostly there was the smell of damp, picking at the house like a vulture.
Dum. Dum.
A noise from somewhere.
I stood there, right at the end of the extension, feeling it shift and move around me as the sea spilled in, but the sound didn’t come again. To my right, out through a hole in the wall, I could see a small back garden, a similar sort of size to the front, awash in mud and rock and water, and beyond that the harbour area. Suddenly, I realized how little light there was left in the day, the sky stained grey, the sun dying somewhere out of sight.
Dum. Dum.
/> The same noise again. It sounded like it was coming from inside the main house. I moved through the extension, back into what had been the kitchen, and stood there in the advancing darkness, listening. A breeze picked up for a moment, passing through the cracks and fissures of the house, and it made an immense creak, like it was about to fall in on me. More water ran in, under skirting boards, through the holes in the wall, creating a pool of stagnant water, and a DANGER – KEEP OUT! sign, nailed loosely to one of the walls, flapped in the wind as it died away again. Yet even as it faded, something of it remained: a gentle whisper, almost like a chant, and off the back of it, more distant now, I could hear the same unnerving rhythm: dum dum dum dum dum.
I moved out on to the main street.
In the twilight, definition was starting to wash out, the interiors of the buildings fading to black, their white walls becoming ashen and indistinct. I waited for the sound again. Ten seconds. Thirty. After a minute I started to move slowly along the road, back towards the place I’d left the dinghy, but then – as the wind picked up again, funnelled through the broken chasms of the village – a strange, unsettling sensation passed through me.
I stopped.
I wasn’t cold, but I could feel goosebumps forming, scattering down my arms and along the ridge of my spine. For no reason I felt compelled to turn around, as if part of me sensed I was being followed. But when I looked back down the street, towards where the harbour mistress’s house was, there was nothing but stillness and silence. High up on my right, on what remained of the chapel’s spire, I spotted a crow, sitting alone, the tattered remnants of the flag shuddering in the breeze. It looked at me, unmoved, frozen.
Then, finally, it took off, into the night sky.
25
