The House of the Wicked

The Return



He yanked hard on the reins, so much so the horse reacted by throwing its head back and complaining loudly.

The cart came to an untidy halt, harness tinkling brightly, stones crunching under the ponderous wheels. It fell silent save for the breeze that brushed the trees and caused the leaves to hiss. Feeble evening sunshine made a last brave effort to paint a little cheer on the day’s end and puddled the track ahead. Into the patches of sunlight stepped a lone, gloomy figure that appeared to glide quietly towards the cart. Tunny could not make out any features at this distance, but the manner in which the man walked, the very shape of him, was unmistakable. It filled him with a quaking fear, for he was seeing a man long dead.

He began to say a prayer under his breath, his heart now beating fast, the nails of the fingers that clutched the reins digging into the palms of his hands as he clenched his fists ever tighter. The terror that bound him to his seat rose up inside him and made him feel sick.

It was he! The man had come back from the grave!

He let go the reins, felt the horse shuffle apprehensively, the cart lurching back a pace or two, and he prepared to leap from the vehicle and bolt from the approaching spectre. But the figure stepped into a band of light and knew at once that the apparition was in fact made of flesh and bone, the image of the dead man but not the same.

“Jowan?” breathed Tunny as the man came close to the horse.

He stopped, still some distance away. Stared at Tunny.

“Who wants to know?” he said coldly.

The voice, the same as the father, and it caused Tunny to catch his breath. “Are you young Jowan Connoch?”

He eyed Tunny, shrugging his heavy bundle into a more comfortable position on his shoulder. He said nothing and began to walk, drew level with the cart.

“It is you,” hissed Tunny. “You’re not welcome here in Porthgarrow. No Connoch is.”

The young man stopped. His weathered face turned to the old man astride the cart; chilled blue eyes fringed with blonde lashes stared defiantly up at him. “I know you,” he said evenly. “It has been thirteen years, but I haven’t forgotten what happened, and your part in it.”

“Turn around and make your way back to whatever hell spewed you out, Connoch! Take your evil name and everything it stands for back with you!”

“Evil!” he screeched. “I look upon evil!” Jowan stabbed a finger at Tunny’s ashen face. “I shall travel where I will and bide where I have a mind. You have no power in denying me entrance to my birthplace.”

“You will not be accepted. They will hound you out, as you deserve.”

Anger flamed Jowan’s cheeks. “As you hounded me out once before? As you gave away my baby sister?” He held his temper in check, slung his bundle into place and resumed walking down the lane towards Porthgarrow. He tried to ignore the old man at his back.

“Evil runs like poison in the Connoch blood, no matter what age. It ran in your ancestors’ blood, it ran in your father’s and so too it runs in you!”

He spun on his heels. “Then you had better beware, old man Tunny, lest I come for you in the dead of night!” He held up a clawed hand which scratched the empty air, then carried on his way.

Tunny, his entire body alight with rage, cracked the reins on the back of the horse.



* * * *



“Follow the road as it bears left,” she instructed.

He stopped dead in the street and turned sharply around. “Mrs Carbis,” he said, “this is plainly ridiculous! Why not come and walk beside me?”

She was standing some ten yards away, her face bearing an expression of tolerance she’d probably give to a small boy that didn’t understand. “I have told you, Mr Denning, men and women do not walk together side by side in the main street except on Sunday, a feast day or launch day. A man must also not pass a woman in the street, and if unavoidable she must turn away to face the wall. It is bad luck.” She wagged a fat finger, partly chiding, partly directional. “Now please turn left!”

Denning shook his head, not enough for her to see, and was poised to say something. He changed his mind. It was pointless to argue. That much he was already learning, so he obligingly turned left as indicated where the road soon became pinched into a narrow alley. He felt the cottages leaned rather too precariously towards him, their upper gables and roof tips almost touching overhead. Cold rainwater cascaded down onto him from the slates and thatch, splashing at his feet. The shine on his boots had soon faded; he curled up his nose at the thought of what he might be stepping in. The water and filth standing in puddles on the cobbles, coupled with the steepness of the road as it snaked its way down to the cove, made him wary of losing his footing and tumbling into the noxious mire.

They encountered an empty cart being dragged up the hill by a ragged old donkey, the man leading it yanking hard on a rope to encourage the beast. He noticed the cart bore the name Hendra Seine Co in painted red letters. Denning squeezed into the narrow opening of a doorway to let it pass. The man’s face was hardly visible under his oilskin hat and behind the raised collar of his heavy oilskin coat, but his quick darting eyes paid Denning a look of mild amusement. He offered a friendly nod to the rather frustrated-looking young outsider. Denning did not hear a word pass between the man and Mrs Carbis, whom he noticed was also standing in a doorway, but she had her face almost flat to the door. When the cart had trundled past her she stepped out of her cubby-hole.

“This is one of the oldest streets in Porthgarrow,” she explained as they started on their way again, as if nothing unusual had happened.

It looked it, thought Denning. “What is it called?” he asked casually, not looking back as his attention was on what might lay underfoot.

“They don’t have names,” she said.

Of course they don’t, he thought. How foolish to think they did.

There appeared to be no sense of reason behind the construction of Porthgarrow’s streets and houses, though he presumed there must be some basic logic to be found somewhere. Each cottage was different from its neighbour, each looking to have been constructed in the old manner of using the eye rather than mechanical aids, and as a consequence leaned, bulged or tottered according to their design and age. A number had stairs to a door that was some feet above the level of the street, and the majority had small, multi-paned windows staring out from walls scarred by evidence of repair over repair carried out across countless years. He noticed a small number of wooden and wicker window baskets in which a few rain-bedraggled blooms struggled to reach the light.

“You have not yet told me why you reacted so to the dog, Mrs Carbis.”

“I have no more to say on the matter,” she responded flatly.

He could almost see her pursing her lips behind him. “I have removed him from the house,” he assured her. “He gave in to the lure of your ham, but even so he was reluctant to abandon the cottage.”

“And all the better for you. Now turn right here.”

They entered a short alley, darker and even narrower. “He has taken up his position outside again.”

“That does not surprise me; he has been there thirteen years.”

Denning stopped. “What? Really? A full thirteen years? Surely not!”

She had also stopped, a good fifteen yards away. “We are never going to get there at this rate of knots, Mr Denning!”

“Thirteen years – both day and night?”

“Day and night.”

He raised his brows. “How remarkable. Why?”

She sighed in exasperation. “If we are late Mr Wilkinson will blame me.” Seeing he wasn’t about to move, she said: “It belonged to a man who lived there. He died, the dog remained. It has been there ever since.”

“Pining for its owner?”

“Many believe it guards the house and is awaiting its master’s return. Begging your pardon, Mr Denning, I don’t want to talk about it. It is unlucky to do so. Can we proceed now and finish with such questions?”

In deference to her agitated state he began to walk again. “So tell me, who is this Mr Baccan you spoke about? Was he the owner, the one who died?”

For a while the only sound he heard from her was the clatter of her boots on the cobbles behind him. “Baccan is not a ‘who’, but a ‘what’. And Baccan can never die.”

She had anticipated his reaction and was waiting to receive his response as he turned yet again. “I’m sorry, I’m not following you. So who, or what, is Baccan?”

“It is not wise to talk of Baccan at dusk,” she said, her hand pointing ahead for him to proceed. When he didn’t she folded her arms and, he thought, looked as annoyed as he felt Mrs Carbis was ever likely to get. “Another time, Mr Denning. Please let’s not keep Mr Wilkinson and Mr Hendra waiting. It will not do.”

Her gaze presented an impassable barricade so he shrugged resignedly, continuing down the hill. “So who is this Hendra fellow?”

Before she could answer they emerged from the gloom of the alley and out into the mouth of the cove itself. They were more or less stood at its centre, the cove an almost perfect half circle, book ended on either side by high headland, shadowy monolithic cliffs topped with grass and scrub, waves creaming white and phosphorescent at their base. Atop the headland to his right he made out the shape of the small building he saw as he first arrived, the one with the structure that looked like gallows. The headland to his left rose higher and craggier, and had a more menacing aspect, fast becoming a black band against the sky as dusk fell. His eye was drawn to a ragged pile on its summit, an ancient ruin gilded by the fading dregs of a weak sun. The monastery, he presumed, of which Tunny had spoken about. Beyond the ruin, in a charcoal smudge that was a strip of woodland, he made out the twinkling of lights – oil lamps and small fires, thin pennants of smoke rising into the sky above and being gently shredded by the wind.

Looking almost incongruous about halfway up the headland, close to the edge of the cliffs themselves, was quite a large, square house, painted white with lights burning at the windows. It had obviously been set intentionally some distance above and beyond the humble cottages of Porthgarrow. These ramshackle affairs ended pretty much at the base of the headland and ran all along the fringe of the cove, almost stepping onto to the steeply shelving shingle beach itself.

Not far out to sea, or at least it appeared so, there was a great mound of rock, which dominated the horizon and rose on a steaming bed of foam and glassy green waves like the back of a colossal sea creature. It had a certain air of foreboding about it that he could not explain. Even he, totally inexperienced in the ways of the sea, saw the danger it must present to anything entering or leaving Porthgarrow.

The shouting of a man, his voice muffled by distance, brought his attention back to the beach. Denning was quite amazed at the many boats packed onto the shingles, for it wasn’t a large beach by any means. He did a quick calculation and arrived at around one hundred, most sharing the same lines and dimensions of about thirty feet in the keel and twelve feet in the beam, looking like huge, tar-black rowing boats, canvas stretched over some of them to keep out the weather. He could scarce see a foot or two of beach between them. And only the brightly painted marks on prows and hulls – a combination of circles, dashes, wavy lines, dots and squares, done to denote the various owners, he surmised – broke the black monotony. There were at least thirty smaller vessels sharing a similar design moored in the bay or tied to an ancient stone harbour, all gently rocking to a greasy swell.

Men were busy amongst them, quiet spectral shapes floating in the gloom, and he could smell the sweet tang of tar drifting on the sea breeze towards him. Beside one boat there was a flaming brazier and men were dipping into tar pots with long-bristled brushes, applying a fresh coating of tar to the hull. The glow of many oil lamps, like fireflies flitting along the beach, lit up tiny knots of men working similarly amongst the stranded fleet.

“Last minute preparation of the boats ready for tomorrow’s launch,” explained Mrs Carbis. “And you ask who Mr Hendra is; he is the owner of much of this.”

“Really?”

“And the palace there.” She pointed out a significant rectangular building sitting close to the beach, about three stories high and studded with windows, large double doors at one end.

“It doesn’t look much like a palace,” he said.

“Its local name. It’s where the fish are baulked and barrelled. He even owns the capstans.”

He’d not noticed them. Two large capstans, similar in size to that you’d find on a huge ship to hoist the anchors, were stationed at either end of the cove. Their drive spars were missing as yet but he guessed they would take a good many men to manage them. “And is that significant?” he asked.

“Everyone pays Mr Hendra to use them,” she said, but in truth he had no idea as to their exact use. “They pay him for everything. He is Porthgarrow’s most powerful man and the Hendra family the most respected and influential.” She said it with a good deal of respect, but he detected something else; a touch of fear maybe? “Do you see that white house yonder?”

“One can hardly miss it. Let me guess – it belongs to Hendra.”

“Along with a great piece of Porthgarrow. Even your cottage is owned by Mr Hendra; he possesses a good many properties hereabouts.”

He studied the house, slowly being enveloped by the dusk. It appeared to stand over the village like a watchful beast, one of the last things visible in the dark. “I look forward to meeting him,” said Denning. “Tell me, what are those lights? Up there on the headland.”

“When the spare rooms in the village fill up, those people who came in looking for work and find themselves with no place to stay have traditionally camped out for the season in the woods above the cliffs. They use tents and all manner of makeshift shelters. It can get rowdy – drinking, singing – goings-on you would not care to hear about. We have Irish, Yorkshire women, Scots – foreigners galore. But we need the extra help so much during the season it is an irritation we have to put up with. The people of Porthgarrow tend not to go there, leaving the incomers to themselves. There are less of them nowadays; the catches have been dwindling year on year.”

“Talking of my cottage; why has it remained empty so long? There must have been many who would have been grateful of the place during the season.” He gave a cursory nod to the people on the cliff top.

She appeared to freeze. Her eyes glanced out watchfully to the ocean, where the falling night had welded the sky to the sea in a profound inky blackness, punctuated at intervals by the sounds of angry unseen waves dashing hidden rocks. “People have their reasons,” she said. Before he could interject she carried on: “I cannot cross the beach whilst the men are at work. It is unlucky for a woman to do so.”

He laughed. “Is there nothing that might bring good luck, or is every effort in Porthgarrow expended on avoiding the terrible kind?”

She did not see the humour in it. “You must make your own way Up Cliff until you reach Mr Hendra’s house. The way is plain enough. They are expecting you. Goodnight, Mr Denning. And tread with care on your return; it falls very dark and there are many things in Porthgarrow that can befall the unwary.”

She left him alone with the hushed, ghostlike figures on the beach. He fixed the Hendra house in his sights and set off along the narrow perimeter of the cove.



* * * *