The Secret of Fellmouth Bay Pt. 01

(With thanks to MagicaPractica for taking the time to edit.)

Part 1

The town of Fellmouth, situated on the east coast of Northern England, has a reputation for being one of the most haunted places on the map. This is only to be expected. After all, the residents of the town had spent a lot of time, money and effort selling this side of its history to draw in the crowds. Any visitor to the town barely has time to step from the coach before being bombarded with a bewildering array of spooky, occult activities to choose from including ghost walks, witchcraft museums and alternative shops. In the town's defence, there was certainly enough in its history to justify at least some of this. During the 17th century the craze for witch trials had focused, for a brief time, directly on the sleepy fishing port. The resulting incarcerations and executions of men, women and children had provided enough macabre material for even the most jaded spook hunter and this particular period was heavily referenced in the names of pubs, restaurants and shops. You just couldn't get away from it.

Of course, this was the image that Fellmouth tried to sell to tourists, but it was all a distraction, a front. Keep the punters happy by flogging them tourist guides, crystals and paintings of broomstick-riding hags and just pray to God they never ask about anything real

Fellmouth, more than anything else, was a town of secrets.

There were events in the towns' history that were not recorded in any of the tourist literature or museums. Events that the locals would prefer to be lost and forgotten. Any visitor to the local library would search in vain for the reason why, up until the late nineteenth century, every window in every house had been covered with heavy iron bars, even on the upper floors. The evidence of this could still plainly be seen around many of the windows in town, but it was never commented on. There was also no explanation as to why, while the local church and graveyard were heaving under the weight of organised ghost walks once night fell, there were no such tours to the Blackfell house, a broken-toothed ruin of a building sitting on Hob's Hill, on a barren rise of ground overlooking the sea front. It was a dark, brooding shadow that could be seen from every corner of the town. Any inquiries about it were met with non-commitment shrugs and evasions. Just because you couldn't avoid looking at it, that didn't mean you had to talk about it.

Fellmouth kept its secrets close. To find them, you would have to search for them.

Helen had been in the town for nearly three months and she was only now getting a sense of something dark hiding beneath the fake, gothic facade. Nothing more than a faint odour but enough to intrigue and excite, even if she couldn't actually name it. She had known within weeks of arriving in the town that she had made the right decision to come.

It had been an easy choice after being made redundant from her research job at a bargain basement television company specialising in "true" stories of the supernatural. The speech marks around the world "true" were so large they could have encompassed the moon. In Helen's experience, her employers would take the testimony of even the most obvious charlatan or lunatic, slap an eerie soundtrack over the top and broadcast it as "incontrovertible evidence of the other world." Not that her employers believed any of this shite, of course, but it was cheap to produce and always found a buyer. It was a compromised career and, looking back now that it was over, she was disgusted with herself for sticking with it for so long. She had clashed with, pretty much, every member of staff and had found the work itself uninspiring and repetitive.

She would be the first to admit that she hadn't made it easy for herself. She had the tendency to be abrasive and she had little patience for the polite niceties that working in a team required. Above all, she hated anything artificial or fake, not a character trait that endeared her to others in an industry built on artifice. She had worked there for nearly six years and had welcomed the announcement of her redundancy as an act of long-delayed mercy, a sharp kick up the arse booting her out of the rut she'd been stuck in since leaving university. It did still grate that the decision to leave had not been her own. Ideally, she would have liked to have gone out in a blaze of glory, telling them all where to shove their dowsing rods and Ouija boards, but the important thing was she was out.

Of course, once she had gained, or rather been granted, her freedom she now had to work out what the hell she was going to do with it. Whatever it was, it needed to be herself alone. She had no desire to be an employee again. She had always planned to write at some point, and she now found she no longer had any excuse not to at least give it a try. Her redundancy pay out was fairly pitiful but, considering the industry she was in, and the penny-pinching nature of her employers, she was lucky to have walked away with anything other than what she could pinch from the stationary cupboard. Meagre as it was, it was enough for her to finally act on an idea that had been percolating for some time: an expose on the ghost industry. And where better to start than with Fellmouth? It was, if not the Disneyland, then certainly the off-season Blackpool for witch hunters. She had no family, her last relationship had fizzled out in a stale blaze of mediocrity six months before and, although she had a number of people she classed as close friends, she had never been the sort of person who needed to speak to them every day.

She had used her pay-out, along with her savings, to move into a seafront cottage not far from the town's south pier. Her original plan had been to find work in one of the local bars or restaurants in the town. However, she quickly found that, although the locals were more than willing to welcome visitors who were staying for a few weeks tops, they were less accepting of strangers who rented out a cottage on a six month lease and appeared to be attempting to lay down roots.

Her appearance counted against her, as she always expected it would. She was in her early thirties, attractive, if a little intimidating, with long blonde hair spilling out untidily past her shoulders. She had an artistic air about her, and her clothing had something of the gothic about it, although she resisted any such labels. What really stood out about her, however, were her tattoos. She had spent the entirety of her twenties at work on an entirely personal artistic project . . . herself.

The centrepiece was hidden by her clothing, and she was justifiably proud of it. The dark shape of a bare hawthorn tree rose up from the left side of her lower back, it's roots stretching down like fingers over the swell of her bottom. It's trunk curved over across her spine before sweeping back, it's dark, thorny branches flowing over her left shoulder to gather, in a black, barbed tangle at her chest. She had been inspired after visiting an art gallery in Manchester. Amongst all the surrealism, portraits and impenetrable sculptures, she had been drawn to a winter landscape photograph of a skeletal hawthorn tree standing alone on a rise of ground overlooking frosted moorland. The image had managed to be both bleak and breathtakingly beautiful; The tree an image of independence, resilience and a dark, desolate beauty. It appealed to her own nature and those of her friends who knew her best regarded it as nothing less than a accurate portrait of her.

Her arms too were covered in long, black designs that snaked down to the backs of her hands. Most people could not see the full extent of the design, of course, but they saw enough to intrigue them.

At first, after moving to Fellmouth, she had covered up these designs, assuming that the average local would be far too conservative and reserved to appreciate them. As it turned out though, many people had been fascinated by them, and she quickly put away the long sleeved shirts and jumpers, in favour of her usual choice of t-shirts and scoop-neck tops. She attracted the attention of more than a few of the local men, not something she necessarily objected too, but certainly not something she encouraged. She was here to work, after all and it would be silly to add unnecessary complications. Besides, as fascinated as the townspeople were, they did not want her serving bar, or waiting tables. And so she had needed to look elsewhere, finally picking up a few shifts at a small restaurant in the next village.

When it came to her real work, as she liked to call it, initially she had been frustrated to find that she could make no headway at all. The locals had their tired, cliched spook stories and they were sticking to them. It was only when she accessed the local library that she began to catch glimpses of the real history of the town, hidden below. Although her initial plan had been to write an expose of the ways in which the town had spent the last few decades milking the gullible of all their hard earned cash, she began to become aware of another, possibly more interesting story hidden behind the plastic skeleton masks.

What first sparked her curiosity was an absence, a void in the historical records that seemed to centre on the old ruin she could see every morning from her kitchen window. It wasn't that she had found anything of interest amongst the dusty archives lining the basement of the old, blackstone library building, it was that she hadn't. Despite spending every day ploughing though the records, she could find not a single reference to the Blackfell House. Nothing at all.

There was nothing in the local newspapers, the local land registry, even the obituary notices. If the only thing you knew about Fellmouth was what was written in its official records, you would have no reason to think that there was even a building there at all, staring balefully down at the town from Hob's Hill. And yet there it clearly was, for everyone to see, its one remaining wall stretching up a crumbling finger to the sky. It drew the eye no matter where you were in the town. But evidence of how it was built, she could find none. , Neither could she find out who had lived there, nor why it was allowed to rot on a hillside overlooking a town whose main bloodline was tourism. It made no sense.

And it wasn't just the lack of paperwork on the building. She may well have given up her search, had that had been all, but there was something about the way people from the town reacted when she mentioned the house, a shifting in their features and bearing that suggested they were suddenly on their guard. She couldn't explain it, but there it was, time and again, particularly among the older residents. There was something juicy there, she could feel it. And whatever it was, it was real. That was what excited her. She had spent so much time on bullshit that she ached to find something genuine and important to sink her teeth into. So long as it was true. So long as it was real.

And so, one night after finishing her shift at the restaurant, she had taken a detour along the cliffs to examine the ruin under the cover of darkness. As no road led up to the house she had needed to make her way across several fields, forcing her to scale a number of dry-stone walls before she came upon a line of stones, pressed into the grass, which seemed to delineate the outer shell of the house.

Even by the limited beam of her torch it was clear that the almost total eradication of Blackfell House had nothing to do with natural weathering and decay. Somebody had tried very hard to wipe this entire building from the face of the earth. It was as if someone had taken a huge wrecking ball to the whole structure. In fact, looking at the lumps of masonry strewn over the uneven ground, Helen began to suspect dynamite. The spotlight of her torch picked out furniture amongst the debris: one half of an old, wooden rocking chair, the wood so rotten it looked as though it would fall apart in your hand if you tried to pick it up. There was a heavy wooden table, resting upside down with the withered stumps of its legs pointing up into the night sky. Helen had the impression that no-one had returned to the house since its destruction.

She was puzzled as to why, considering the almost total devastation to the rest of the house, the east wall was still standing like a rock stack surrounded by the ocean. The beam of her torch was not quite powerful enough to illuminate the upper reaches of the structure. but she was stunned to see what looked liked stained glass reflecting dimly from the windows looking out over the sea. It seemed incredible that, considering the damage to the rest of the house, something as fragile as glass could have survived.

There wasn't a breath of wind in the night air and even the hushed breath of the sea appeared to have been stilled. As she approached the wall she could make out parts of the surface were still smooth with a dark wooden veneer. Again, she wondered why the house had simply been left to rot. There was money here, if people had been quick enough to salvage it, instead of simply leaving it to the mercy of the North Sea wind.

There were markings on the veneer and she moved closer to get a better look. Somebody had clearly been here then, doubtless some local youths probably, eager to leave their mark. A series of crosses had been gouged deeply into the wood along with more intricate, swirling marks.

As she leaned forward, trying to make out the intricacies of the design, she stumbled and felt a sharp pain in her leg just below the knee. Swearing to herself, she swung the beam of the torch down to see what had happened. Shit! She could see a rusty nail protruding from a stack of wood to her side. She had been so fascinated in the wall that she had barely given it a second look. The nail had cut through her jeans and she was alarmed to see the dark material grow even darker as a stain began to spread.

"Jesus," she muttered to herself, kneeling to roll up the leg of her jeans. The cut looked ugly and deep in the unsteady light of torchlight, and the blood almost resembled a trickle of oil. As the dark liquid welled and dripped onto the ground, she shrugged off her backpack, removed a spare t-shirt and tied it tightly around her leg.

Taking this as a sign she should call it a day, she limped back across the field towards the road. Once her phone had picked up a signal she had used it to call for a taxi. Three hours, seven stitches and a tetanus shot later, she was back in her own bed wishing that she had access to enough high explosive to finish the job someone else had obviously started, and blow the fucking Blackfell House sky high.

She slept through the next day, and most of the way through the following night, thereby missing the first earthquake tremor the town had experienced in living memory. In global earthquake terms it was barely worth noticing, even by British standards, but it provided enough excitement to deserve a front page headline in the local paper.

Helen slept through the whole thing. Although, when she finally climbed out of bed in the early hours of the night for a glass of water, she noticed that several of the paintings were askew on her walls.

Standing at the kitchen window she looked out into the night. Usually at this time she would only have been able to make out various shades of darkness. Tonight was different. As she stood there feeling the ice cold water send a chill down her body, she could clearly see lights moving about on Hob's Hill in the spot where she knew Blackfell House stood - where she herself had stood only the night before. The lights were tiny, but Helen knew what they were. There were people up there with torches. Helen wondered if their visit had anything to do with her own night time expedition.

She knew that this could all be a coincidence, but she didn't think so. She had suspected her investigations had not gone unnoticed. Now, she knew it for certain. She had the unsettling feeling, deep down in her stomach, that she had unwittingly triggered an alarm.

She was alone in a strange town, and she was beginning to think that, without being aware of it, she had made some enemies.

"Fuck it," she muttered to herself in the silence of the kitchen, experiencing a sudden thrill of anticipation. "Bring it on!"

Part 2

On the night the secret of Fellmouth finally revealed itself, Helen was working a late shift at the restaurant.

"It wouldn't hurt for you to crack a smile now and again, think of the tips," Lucy said.

Helen grimaced at the suggestion. She was here to take orders and dole out plates of food. She found the idea of plastering on a fake smile to beg for treats a little hard to stomach.

There was a reason why she had avoided the customer service industry her entire life, at least until now. Nevertheless, she conceded to herself that Lucy had a point. After all, it wasn't as if she was flush with cash, and part of her reasoning in taking the restaurant job in the first place was to mine the local gossip. She looked at her younger colleague. "Why don't I go all out and invest in hot pants and roller skates?" She said.

Lucy grinned. "I think if you did that David would just hand over his pay packet." She nodded towards a man sat at one of the more rowdy tables made up of a party of police officers.

Helen had already noticed David's gaze following her around the room. He was very good looking, in an overly-serious kind of way, but she had avoided returning his looks. That wasn't really what she was here for.

"Please," she replied skeptically, "I'd eat him alive."

Lucy raised an eyebrow. "I suspect that he might just be okay with that. Everyone has to go somehow. And besides, you need to be careful. Just because we haven't burned a witch in three hundred years, it doesn't mean we've forgotten how."

Helen laughed. "Anyone comes near me with so much as a sparkler, I'll burn the town to the ground."

Lucy was trying very hard to keep her face straight. "Such violence! Seriously, chill out and take up knitting! Although, if you do want someone to take out all that aggression on, you could do worse than David. Just saying."

"Is he nice?"

"Very, he's one of the good ones."

Helen made a loud snoring noise. "Then keep him the hell way from me."

"You know why I don't think your a cold-hearted bitch?"

"Getting some practice in for your psychology degree? Okay, I'll bite. Why?"

"Because you put far too much effort into being one."

Helen gave her colleague the finger as she went to deliver a table their bill. Later, when she performed the same service for the police officers, she met David's eye, just for a second. It had been a while, and while nice wasn't really what she was looking for, it didn't hurt to keep her options open.

At closing time she had chosen to walk the coast road back into town. She had initially hoped to be alone but, on a whim, Lucy had decided to join her. Helen hoped that it would at least provide an opportunity to get to know her younger colleague better and, perhaps, gain some additional local knowledge.

Lucy was a intelligent, pretty girl with long black hair flowing loose and long down her slender back. She was about 12 twelve years younger than Helen but, despite the age gap, the two women had become friends in the time they had worked together. Helen had found that, underneath the slightly studious exterior, Lucy had an appealing dry sense of humour as well as having no illusions about the town she lived in.

She had been living in the Fellmouth all her life, although she was shortly to attend University in Scotland. She couldn't wait to leave, she told Helen, and she vowed that, once gone, she would never return, not even for holidays. "Mum and Dad will just have to get off their arse and visit me," she said cheerfully. "I've done my time."