Crimson Shore

“My pleasure.” There was something about this fellow that Lake found curiously attractive: the keen marble face, the black suit, the austere look… and, not least, his avidity for oysters.

7

Morris McCool departed the Captain Hull Inn, feeling quite expansive despite the shepherd’s pie that lay heavily in his gut. While the meal had been a travesty of the real dish, he was quite surprised at the fine range of local beers and ales now available in America; on his last visit, twenty years before, he’d been hard-pressed to find something other than Coors.

McCool was an enthusiastic walker. Back in his village in Penrith, Cumbria, he always took a walk after dinner to aid digestion. He was a great believer in fresh air and exercise, and it was on these after-dinner walks that he’d had many of his historical insights and ideas.

But this would be a walk with a purpose. Taking a hand-sketched map from his pocket, he perused it, oriented himself, and started toward a silvered wooden staircase leading down the bluffs to the beach below.

The rollers came in on a regular cadence, thundering and hissing up the strand, withdrawing in a sheen and repeating. Keeping to where the sand was still firm from the dampness of the retreating tide, he continued down the beach toward the broad marshes where the river Exmouth flowed into the bay. The infamous “greenheads,” which dominated the heat of the day, had retired for the cool October evening.

He inhaled the salt air with satisfaction. He was so close now… so very close. While there were still some puzzling — indeed, quite inexplicable — aspects, he was sure he had solved the main mystery.

The beach was deserted, save for a small figure behind him enjoying a similar evening stroll. The figure seemed to have appeared rather suddenly, out of the marshes. McCool was not pleased that someone might note where he was going, and he quickened his pace to leave the fellow traveler behind. Even as he walked, the lighthouse on the distant bluff began winking on and off, no doubt automated to come on as the sun set. And the orange globe of the sun was sinking down into the skeleton pines along the verge of the marsh.

The beach turned inward where a ribbon of the Exmouth entered the ocean, the current flowing out of the broad estuary with the ebbing tide, exposing dark gray mudflats. There was a rich but not entirely unpleasant smell coming off the flats. As he made the turn, he glanced back and was considerably startled to see the figure behind him was much closer. The man must have been walking briskly, perhaps even jogging, to have gained on him that much. Was he trying to catch up? Even from a distance McCool didn’t like the look of the man.

A faint trail led through the marsh grass along the edge of the trees, and he quickened his pace even more. The man was perhaps a hundred yards behind now, dressed in rough-hewn and rather obscure-looking clothing. Or at least that was McCool’s impression from a quick glance.

He walked along the trail, checking the rude map. The nineteenth-century working waterfront, long abandoned, was around the next bend of the estuary. As he turned the corner, it came into view: a series of old wooden pilings extending in parallel rows of stubs into the bay, the decking long gone. Massive granite pilings, formed of rough-cut blocks, still stood along the shore — and would stand to the end of time — the granite foundations of loading docks and wharves, along with a ruined fish-processing plant. McCool had carefully mapped this area, using historical documents and photographs to re-create the waterfront of the 1880s. This was where the draggers and seiners and coasters had plied their trade, having endured a long economic decline from the whaling heyday of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The moribund waterfront had finally succumbed to the infamous “Yankee Clipper” hurricane of 1938. The modern waterfront had been rebuilt farther up the estuary, in a more protected location. But the town had never really recovered.

As the rotting piers came into view, McCool heard a sound behind him and turned to find the man approaching him at a determined rate. And now he noticed what a peculiar and frightening figure this was: with a strangely warped face, a Brillo-brush of wiry red hair, disturbing wet lips thicker on one side than the other, a splotch of diseased-like freckles, a three-pointed beard, and a projecting brow with a single bushy eyebrow straight across. McCool thought he knew everyone in town, but he had never seen this fellow before. He was the stuff of nightmares.

He carried a bayonet in one hand, which — as he approached with fast stride and gleaming eyes — he unsheathed with a zing of steel.

With an involuntary cry of confusion and fear, McCool turned and ran toward the old piers. His pursuer also broke into a run, keeping pace, not closing in or dropping behind, almost as if driving him forward.