Night fell, the breeze died and the damp blanket of fog clamped down. I could feel the wetness of it on my eyeballs, my oilskins clammy with moisture and water dripping off the boom as though it were raining. I pumped the bilges dry and had some food. When I came up on deck again there was the glimmer of a moon low down, the boat’s head swinging slowly in an eddy. And then I heard it, to the north of me, the soft mournful note of a diaphone – the fog signal on Sumburgh Head.
The tide had just started its main south-easterly flow and within an hour the roost was running and I was in it. The sea became lumpy, full of unpredictable hollows. Sudden overfalls reared up and broke against the top-sides. The movement grew and became indescribable, exhausting, and above the noise of water breaking, the sound of the sails slatting back and forth.
I was afraid of the mast then. I had full main and genoa up. I don’t know how long it took me to get the headsail down and lashed, the boat like a mad thing intent on pitching me overboard. An hour maybe. And then the main. I couldn’t lash it properly, the movement of the boom was too violent. Blood was dripping from a gash in my head where I had been thrown against a winch, my body a mass of bruises. I left the mainsail heaped on deck and wedged myself into the quarter berth. It was the only safe place, the saloon a shambles of crockery and stores, locker doors swinging, the contents flying.
I was scared. The movement was so violent I couldn’t pump. I couldn’t do anything. I must have passed out from sheer exhaustion when I suddenly saw again the figure standing over the quarter berth, and the thing in his hand was a winch handle. I was seeing it vaguely now, as though from a long way away. I saw the man’s arm come up. The metal of the winch handle gleamed. I saw him strike, and as he struck the figure in the bunk moved, rolling out on to the floorboards and coming up in a crouch, his head gashed and blood streaming. There was fear there. I can remember fear then as something solid, a sensation so all-pervading it was utterly crushing, and then the winch handle coming up again and the victim’s reaching out to the galley where a knife lay, the fingers grasping for it.
I opened my eyes and a star streaked across the swaying hatch. I was on the floor, in a litter of galley equipment, and I had a knife in my hand. As I held it up, staring at it, dazed, the star streaked back across the hatch, the bottom of the mizzen sail showing suddenly white. The significance of that took a moment to sink in, so appalled was I by my experience. The star came and went again, the sail momentarily illumined; then I was on my feet, clawing my way into the cockpit.
The sky was clear, studded with stars, and to the north the beam of Sumburgh Light swung clear. The fog had gone. There was a breeze from the east now. Somehow I managed to get the genoa hoisted, and inside of half an hour I was sailing in quiet waters clear of the roost.
I went below then and started clearing up the mess. The quarter berth was a tumbled pile of books from the shelf above, and as I was putting them back, a photograph fell to the floor. It showed a man and a woman and two children grouped round the wheel. The man was about 45, fair-haired with a fat, jolly face, his eyes squinting against bright sunlight. I have that picture still, my only contact with the man who had owned Samoa before me, the man whose ghostly presence haunted the ship.
By nightfall I was in Scalloway, tied up alongside a trawler at the pier. I didn’t sell the boat. I couldn’t afford to. And I didn’t talk about it. Now that I had seen his picture, knew what he looked like, it seemed somehow less disturbing. I made up my mind I would have to live with it, whatever it was.
I never again used the quarter berth – in fact, I ripped it out of her before I left Scalloway. Sailing south I thought a lot about him in the long night watches. But though I speculated on what must have happened, and sometimes felt he was with me, I was never again identified with him.
Maybe I was never quite so tired again. But something I have to add. From the Azores I headed for Jamaica, and as soon as I arrived in Kingston the boat was the focus of considerable interest. She had apparently been stolen. At least, she had disappeared, and her owner with her. Hi-jacked was the word his solicitors used, for a merchant seaman named O’Sullivan, serving a six-year sentence for armed robbery, had escaped the night before and had never been heard of since. The police now believed he had boarded the boat, hi-jacked her and her owner and sailed her across the Atlantic, probably with Ireland as his objective.
I didn’t attempt to see his wife. My experience – what I thought I now knew – could only add to her grief. I sailed at once for the Canal. But though I have tried to put it out of my mind, there are times when I feel his presence lingering. Maybe writing this will help. Maybe it will exorcise his poor, frightened ghost from my mind – or from the boat – whichever it is.
Ringing in the Good News
Peter Ackroyd
Location: Acton, London.
Time: Christmas Eve, 1985.
Eyewitness Description: “He stared at her. ‘Kevin, darling, have you gone deaf?’ And as be looked at her grey mouth he wondered whose voice it was he had heard, a voice which in memory no longer seemed human at all
Author: Peter Ackroyd (1949–) is a graduate of that hothouse of the ghost story, Cambridge University, where he attended Clare College. After further study at Yale, he worked for the Spectator, serving as literary editor and film critic. Since his first publication Ouch in 1971, Ackroyd has written a series of inventive biographies and diverse fiction that has often revolved around the city of London: haunted and animated by its past and its characters, real and imaginary. This is evident in Hawksmoor (1985), about a 300-year-old doppelganger; the story of the famous Elizabethan alchemist, The House of Doctor Dee (1993); and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) in which the ghosts of music hall characters are mingled with a series of grisly East End murders. Ackroyd’s admiration for Charles Dickens as a master of the supernatural can be traced through his novel, The Great Fire of London (1982), a reworking of Little Dorritt; his controversial biography of the author published in 1990; and also his perceptive foreword to The Haunted House (2003). It seems hardly surprising, therefore, that he should have chosen to continue Dickens’s practice of a ghost story for Christmas with one of his own for The Times, 24 December 1985, “Ringing in the Good News”, about a new father haunted by mysterious phone calls that repeatedly announce the birth of his son.
. . .the army of spirits, once so near, has been receding farther and farther from us, banished by the magic wand of science from hearth and home.
– J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough
Kevin returned home from the hospital in a state of mild imbecility; his wife, Claire, had been about to give birth for the past 12 hours and he had not slept or eaten as he waited. He blamed the delay upon his mother-in-law, Vera, whose presence always seemed to reduce his wife to a kind of nursery torpor. And it had been Vera who had eventually ordered him away.