Bedtime Story

This time of year, when it gets dark before it gets light, when the Cornish rain fizzles in the street lights and soaks you through before it even touches you, when all the visitors have gone home and only the locals are left behind, this one night of the year we lock our doors and close our curtains and wait for the dawn that one of us will not live to see.

For on the night of Halloween, every year he comes and takes one of our kind with him to that place from which no one but he returns.

On a high tide when the wind moans and rocks the boats tied up in the harbour, and flecks the black water white under a full moon, he emerges from the sea on the final stroke of twelve. The steps he climbs from the harbour to the Wharf have been no more than a memory for two hundred years. He is tall and stooped under the weight of the water that streams from his salt-caked oilskins and the long boat hook he carries over this shoulder. Wrapped around his body and trailing behind him as he begins his terrible walk is the tangle of netting they say dragged him to his death.

He walks with slow, heavy steps, the water pouring from his laden seaboots. The few who have seen him have described a discoloured face bloated by the sea, the eye sockets empty holes beneath a mildewed seaman's cap, the lower jaw and lips completely gone. No one knows what this sightless face searches for, as he makes his slow deliberate way up one of the steep, narrow streets that lead up from the harbour. Those who lie awake in terror behind locked doors for his passing hear the scrape of his boots, the tapping of his boathook on the cobbles and the heavy, rotting net dragging behind him.

A couple of years ago the old woman who lived next door to us was found dead in her bed the morning after Halloween. They say that when they went into the house the carpets downstairs were soaked, and there was a trail of water all the way up the stairs and across the bare floorboards of her bedroom. The room was filled with the stench of rotting fish and mildew, and her bedclothes were stiff and white with salt and seawater. The old woman lay in bed, her grey hair wet and matted across her face, her mouth wide open in a soundless scream. Her papery hands were held up in front of her as if clawing at the air. And you know what, says my dad, who swears he was one of the men who found her, her face and neck were covered in criss cross marks as if she'd been caught in a fishing net.