The Old Pier
It was a quiet night. There had been too many of those lately; they were beginning to add up not to weeks, not to months, but to the first beginnings of years. Ever since Crawford Cove had started its metamorphosis from the lowly grub of a working fishing village into the small social butterfly of a town which it had become, with its new suburbs of red-tiled white villas stretching out along the emptiness of sand which used to be the Long Beach. Ever since the summer people came, and started driving away those who had been living there for countless calm years in the comforting grip of their own tragedy and joy.
Terry's bar, once packed with jovial fishermen in to celebrate a good catch or drown the sorrows of a thin one, had been increasingly sparsely populated until it was down to this, now - old Adam looking for tuna in the bottom of his whisky glass at the darkest corner of the long counter, Will and Georgy arguing pointless politics - for neither had voted in any election, ever - perched on the edges of their tall stools, Sam Sharkey telling a dozing Jake for the umpteenth time about his encounter with the Great White (Terry knew the story almost as well as Sam; without thinking, she'd catch a phrase and her mind would run on mechanically, choosing words which would, as if by magic, come falling out of Sam's mouth a moment later), and John and Tom Grey playing their everlasting chess game which never seemed to end, with Tom Wiggins offering the same hoary nuggets of wisdom to one or the other from the sidelines without ever taking a hand himself.
Terry's was the first bar people came to when returning to the center of town from the piers, but not one of the summer people had ever stepped inside - perhaps it was just too uninviting, with its drab, peeling paint and the faint smell of liquor hanging about outside, hinting at an establishment which served "rough trade". Terry had to smile at the thought. Thinking of any of the old faithful fishermen who still came to drink her rye as rough trade was more than funny, it was ridiculous. They were all, in a way, relics, left-overs from a past which, perhaps, the summer people didn't care to contemplate. But Terry had long since stopped expecting someone from the other side of the great divide to deign to darken her door. That was why she was so surprised when the door did darken - she wasn't expecting anyone else, all her regulars were already ensconced - and the sight of the young, tanned youth wearing a pair of denim shorts and a loud Hawaiian print shirt (like Magnum, P.I., Terry thought; she watched a lot of television) struck her with a ludicrous sense of surprise which could hardly have been topped if it had been Tom Selleck himself who had walked in.
The unexpected visitor looked a bit pale beneath his tan, though, and Terry was, after all, a businesswoman. She coaxed a smile onto her face.
"Can I offer you something, sir?"
"Brandy," he gasped. She had been right, he needed that drink. "Make it a double."
Sam Sharkey had been interrupted in the middle of his story and watched the new arrival with a jaundiced eye; Jake had roused from his Great White induced stupour and himself warily watched the young stranger stumbling towards the bar. Terry put a glass in front of him, and he reached for it and poured it down his throat as if it had been water.
"Hey, steady," said Terry, almost involuntarily. She wasn't usually in the business of mothering her customers, but this one seemed to cry out for it. "What seems to be the trouble, youngling? You look like you've just seen a ghost."
The face that he turned to her made her literally step back. All at once, she knew; turning, she poured another glass of liquor and plonked it down forcefully on the counter before him.
"This one's on the house," she said firmly. "Sit down. You've just met our Sally, haven't you?"
"Your Sally?" The youth's voice was still not quite steady, but he was beginning to come back to himself, here in the comforting earthiness of Terry's half-empty bar with its workaday smells and sounds.
"Yep," said Sam, quite distracted from sharks. Sally was a topic not raised in the bar for a long time. "A girl with funny, chopped short hair? That darned flowered dress she always used to wear, flapping about her ankles?"
"She ain't been around for quite a stretch," said Jake slowly.
The young man laughed shakily, running a hand through his thick, dark hair. He eyed the three people who had addressed him, and then seemed to plumb for Terry as the most reliable, turning back to her. "Sally?" he prompted.
Terry was half-turned away, straightening a row of bottles on the shelf behind the bar with unusual fussiness. "Sally died in 1933," she said at length, briefly, when the pause seemed to stretch too long. "Sally Munro. She was twenty nine, unmarried, and quite mad."
Jake ventured a wheezy laugh at that trenchant summary. "I remember her," he volunteered suddenly, "just. I was five when she died. And her Pa was fishing mates with mine. He mourned old man Munro for a long time."
"Old man Munro?" The visitor's eyes had swivelled over to Jake's leathery brown face, weather-beaten into a mask. "I thought it was his daughter who died? Why did your father mourn the old man?"
"Oh, he died first," said Terry. "Him and Ma Munro. But first of all, Mikey died."
"Who's that?"
"Her brother," said Sam Sharkey.
"Her son," said Terry, in the same breath.
Tom Wiggins, overcome with curiosity, had finally drifted over to the bar under the pretence of wanting another drink. Used to offering advice, he took the glass which Terry tendered him, settled down comfortably on the stool on the other side of the new arrival, and came up with another nugget of the same.
"Why don't you just tell the poor fella the whole story, from the beginning?" he suggested serenely. "It ain't every day you see a ghost, and y'all are just making things a sight worse."
Everyone seemed to look to Terry then. They had been fishermen; and after that, they were drinkers. Terry was the educated one, the one to tell the tale, even though most of the men there had had a personal brush with the story and Terry herself hadn't even been born when Sally Munro had died. But Terry sighed, parked her elbows firmly on the counter, and leaned her full weight on them. "I suppose you'd better know," she said.
The life of a fisherman's wife was a hard and tough one; drudgery wore the women out fast. But Sally Munro was not yet a wife, and she was still young enough to be beautiful - she had been only a few weeks shy of nineteen when Lazarus had come to the village. They called him that because he had been snatched back from the sea, brought back from the edge, so nearly dead that a lot of his mates found it hard to believe that he was still with them, plying the same nets. Perhaps it was because of that near-death that he had been so wild, so reckless; he took without thought for the consequences, because he had been vouchsafed a glimpse of the end of the world and now lived only to delay its second coming for as long as possible and to cram as much living into the rest of his days as was humanly possible before he would be finally called to account. Sally was eighteen, fresh and pretty, and Lazarus was there, young, headstrong, charismatic. By the time Sally found out she was pregnant, Lazarus was gone.
They hid the pregnancy; instead, Sally's mother put padded cushions under her clothes as Sally grew large, eventually pleading a bad pregnancy and withdrawing more or less completely from the public eye. Only a very few knew the identity of the real mother-to-be; and people whispered a bit about the strangeness of it all, but by and large the baby boy who made his appearance in the Munros' hut in due course was accepted as being Sally's little brother.
His real father and his grandfather, whom he called Pa, both earning a living eking out a silver harvest from the sea, it wasn't surprising that young Michael (that had been Lazarus's real name, and Sally had insisted, but that was the last decision she got to make about her child) soon took it for granted that this was in his own future, too. He began pestering his "Pa" to let him go out with the men on the fishing boat when he was as young as five. Sally said he was too young; her parents agreed. But he asked the next year, and the year after that, and in the year he turned nine his Pa's answer changed.
"I suppose you're old enough to be useful," he had said.
"He's too young," said Sally desperately.
"Pa said I can go! Pa said I can go!" lilted the boy, dancing round the kitchen. It was the best birthday present, ever, he assured his parents when he was put to bed that night. If he groused a little at being waked before sunrise the next morning, the bad mood was soon swept away by the excitement. Sally watched in morose silence from the door of the cottage as her father and her son walked away into the whitening darkness of impending morning.
The boat limped back after the sudden storm which had swept the coast, crippled, no longer fully manned. Three crew they had lost in the ocean's fury. One of them was Michael Munro, who had turned nine a few short hours before. Sally's father had suffered a broken arm trying to save him, but it had been impossible to hold on. He returned, to his wife's tears and lamentations and the dry-eyed, burning gaze of his daughter. The man who'd helped Pa Munro home remembered later the words Sally had flung like rocks at his feet, words which he had been puzzled by:
"You killed my son," she had said. Only that.
"She must have repeated what the missus had been saying," the man would tell his wife later, snug in their own bed. "Mikey was her brother, we all know that."
Sally may have had to come to terms with the deception her life had had to embrace, she may have ceded Mikey to her parents, because she could see that had been the only way. But if she had given up her son's life, she could not forgive his death. Her parents had both indulgently said that Mikey could go on that fishing trip. But she, Sally, she had known he was too young. The fact that death came impartially to the fisher-folk, that two other men, both grown, had also drowned, was something she had pushed to the back of her mind. All she could think of was that her parents had said yes, and Mikey had died; her parents had killed her son.
While those who had been spared gave thanks for their deliverance in the only way many knew how - in the bar, then kept by Terry's grandfather, or in the bed of either wife or one of the two painted "ladies" whose trade, in a tumbledown little house at the far end of the village, was well-known to all - Sally's father was dying in his own bed, stabbed twice by the sharp gutting knife Ma Munro used for cleaning fish. And Ma Munro herself was already dead beside him, the blade which, in her hand, had slit so many fish bellies now turned against her own.
Sally left them there, in the bloody bed, the knife dropped beside them on the floor, and wandered barefoot, in the long, shapeless floral dress she had taken to wearing constantly, as if to hide a voluminous secret about her body, towards the old pier. She'd hacked off her long hair, quite mindlessly, without even thinking about it, just before she had turned the barbering blade on her sleeping parents - the cottage kitchen floor was awash with long, tangled dark strands; perhaps she was trying to convince herself that it was Sally who was really dead, and she was no longer the girl but Mikey, her son, the boy claimed by the sea. It hadn't worked. That was when she must have turned the knife on her parents. She looked a bit of a scarecrow, the chopped hair, the flapping dress, the huge dark eyes in the white, pasty face.
She stood there for a long time, at the far edge of the pier, shivering in the cold wind that blew in from the sea, as though she were waiting for a boat to come in. For Mikey. But Mikey would never come home again. And then, sometime towards dawn, she simply stepped off the pier into the element which had taken her son. They found her body washed up a mile or so down on Long Beach the next day.
"By this stage it was all known, of course," Terry said. "Lazarus, the seduction, the baby. The village blamed her for what she did when the boy was lost, but they wouldn't have blamed her for conceiving him. At least that's what my mother always said."
"She knew them? The Munros?"
"No, not really; second-hand hearsay, most of what she knew. But I think she was right. The place wasn't half as mediaeval as they liked to make out, not even back then."
"And what happened after?"
"Well," shrugged Terry, "you've seen the 'after'. She wanders on the pier sometimes. We haven't seen her for a while, but hers is an unquiet spirit, and do you blame her? Still, she's never harmed anyone... after she was dead, I mean. And there's no ill omens, nobody dies after she's been seen, or anything like that. She's a sad little thing."
The young man sat in silence for a while after that, pondering the story over yet another glass of brandy. Terry drifted away to attend to her nightly duty of rescuing old Adam before he fell quite asleep and off his stool, doing his old bones an injury. Sam seized his chance and sidled over, muttering something about "this place" having plenty of good stories, and did the visitor know that he, Sam, once faced off a Great White shark - man eater, that was... Jake left the counter in disgust, nursing his drink, crossing over to where the nightly instalment of the chess game was beginning to be drawn towards its usual inconclusive end to offer advice diametrically opposed to that of Tom Wiggins, annoying the latter considerably at this intrusion into what he considered to be his own private territory. The visitor, to whom, after all, the oft-told shark tale had the virtue of not having been heard a hundred times before, listened with commendable patience, and Sam blossomed under the attention.
He was all set to start again when he reached the end, but the young man said he had to go. So they escorted him outside like royalty, Terry and Sam and Will and Georgy, who had left off politics for the night and were best friends again, and Terry asked him to drop by again, and he said he would, although they both knew he would probably be gone by the end of the weekend, back to the big city where he wore a grey suit and programmed computers for a living - or something like that. He was, after all one of Them, the summer crowd, the weekend people who drifted in and out of the town, who had taken the place from those to whom it had always belonged but who were themselves, nevertheless, insubstantial wraiths, as much ghosts in their tenuous presence as the hapless spirit which haunted the old pier, empty now of even the ghosts of the old fishing boats which bobbed there once.
This had occurred to Terry as she was cleaning up that night, after closing time. She was strangely disturbed by the evening, almost as if it had been Sally Munro herself who had troubled the peace of her establishment rather than one of the witnesses to Sally's sudden reappearance on her pier. Terry's head ached oddly, a dull pain behind her eyes, and she decided to take a walk before bedtime, just to clear her mind. She wasn't altogether surprised when her feet took her unbidden towards the old pier; and perhaps even less so to see the rather too corporeal shape of her erstwhile young visitor sitting on the edge, dangling his feet over the dark water lapping quietly around the wooden piles supporting the jetty. Waiting for the ghost, perhaps, from whom he had fled so hastily. Or just watching the dusting of stars on the quiet ocean in the quiet night.
What Reviewers Say
Midnight at Spanish Gardens: "Alexander's language is lovely and poetic...the imagery is beautiful, the setting is compelling...But it's the characters that drive this story, in all of their imperfection, in all of their passion or disconnection or feeling of failure." - Alana Abbott, Flames Rising
The Secrets of Jin-shei: "Vivid and involving'... both an exotic journey into the imagination, and a graceful exploration of the heart." - SF Site
Changer of Days: "Powerful characters and a powerful setting help to deliver what I am thrilled to say is a great bloody book." - Altair
Gift of the Unmage: "This latest book seems as if it is going to be your standard coming-of-age magician tale, but then you realize it is so much more. It is philosophy, it is science fiction, and it is beautiful." - Kelly A. Ohlert
Other books by Alma Alexander
Dolphin's Daughter and Other Stories (Macmillan, UK, 1995)
Houses in Africa (David Ling, New Zealand, 1995)
Letters from the Fire (Harper Collins New Zealand, 1999)
Secrets of Jin Shei (HarperCollins, USA, 2004/2005)
The Hidden Queen (E
os, USA, 2005)
Changer of Days (Eos, USA, 2005)
Embers of Heaven (HarperCollins , UK, 2006)
Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax, (Kos Books 2010)
Midnight at Spanish Gardens (Sky Warrior Publishing 2011)
WORLDWEAVERS Series
1) Gift of the Unmage (HarperCollins, USA, 2007)
2) Spellspam (HarperCollins, USA, 2008)
3) Cybermage (Harpercollins, USA, 2009)
Alexander Triads
Once Upon a Fairytale, Kos Books 2011
Cat Tales, Kos Books, 2011
Haunted, Kos Books 2011
Contact Alma Alexander
Website: http://www.AlmaAlexander.com/
Blog: http://anghara.livejournal.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander
Email: [email protected]
About the Author
Alma Alexander was born on the banks of an ancient river in a country which no longer exists.
She began telling stories as a child and never stopped. To date, Alma has written close to three million words in more than a dozen published books.
Her novel, The Secrets of Jin-shei, has been published in 14 languages in more than a score of countries. Her popular Young Adult Worldweavers series features New World magic and a heroine who is as American as Harry Potter is British.
The woman underneath the author likes books, embroidery, music ranging from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" to Dvorak's New World Symphony, animals, coffee, chocolate, snow, velvet -- and, in people, kindness, intelligence and an off-the-wall sense of humor.
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