Dark Echo by F. G. Cottam Page B

deck for the companionway. It was a dark, rectangular maw leading below. All around me, canvas screamed and shuddered. I smiled. It had been a tonic already to see my father’s money well spent rather than cynically squandered.
    The steps of the companionway were tricky. I could not hear them creak in the noise of the storm, but could tell from their spongy feel under my feet that they had not yet been replaced. I was descending on old and perished wood and did so gingerly. And there was something else. As I descended into the dark interior of the vessel, I began to feel an irrational instinct of fear and even of incipient panic. The boat roared with the exterior life of the storm and the smell of must strengthened and grew in complexity and characteras I continued to descend the short flight to the cabins and galley area. The descent took much longer than it should have. Too many steps, I thought. Too great a distance down, it seemed.
    At the bottom of the companionway it was very dark. And there was the complexity of smells. The smells were so strong that I was reluctant to turn on the torch in the blackness for fear of what I might see. I could smell a feral, canine smell, like the hair and spoor of a wild dog, that made my balls shrink and the hair on the nape of my neck prickle and chill. The roar of the storm, the buck and ripple of canvas under assault, had receded. It was quiet down here and so oppressively fearful that I struggled to control my bladder.
    ‘Relax, old chum,’ a voice said.
    I switched on the torch. There was nothing there. I was in the master cabin. There was nothing to see except the gutted, dripping interior of an old boat undergoing restoration. Except that there was a small brass-bound mirror screwed to the right of the door leading to the smaller cabin beyond. I frowned at the mirror. The Maglite beam played in my shaking hand beneath it. And then I looked at what it reflected.
    There was an impression of red leather and purple plush tassled in gold; of cigarette smoke and a man’s buttoned boot moving out of sight with the speed of a cobra recoiling. And there was a woman’s face – the make-up Jazz Age pale, the hair raven and geometric, the mouth crimson – and the rictus of terror so real and raw in the eyes and drawn-back lips that I bolted before this awful vision had even clarified in my mind. I fled. I pounded up splintering stairs and tore the nails from my fingers scrabbling for a breach in the stiff, unyielding weight of the tarp securing the boat. And when I found one, I scrambled through it. And despite the hurl and havoc of the storm, behind meI heard laughter, male and laconic. I lay on the quay. I recovered my breath and composure. I stood finally and looked towards Hadley’s office for reassurance. But the yellow bars of brightness between his blinds had been extinguished. In Frank Hadley’s boatyard, it seemed now that all the lights were out.
    At the wheel of the Saab, I saw that my hands were dripping blood from my torn nails. Gradually, my fingertips began to throb and then to sing with pain in the aftermath of the shock of what I’d seen and felt. In my seat, soaked and shivering, I found the presence of mind to fumble on the heater switch. I concentrated on driving. The rain cascaded down the windscreen, making driving difficult in the fierce strength of the shifting gusts once I was back on the exposed open road. I tried not to think about the scene in the cabin. The thing was, it was not the first time I believed I had been in the presence of ghosts. But I believed it was the first time I had been in the presence of spectral malevolence. And my raw nerves and the jumping muscles under my skin told me that the ghost of Harry Spalding was a spirit of pure spite and bottomless hatred. I drove. Eventually, London grew closer. Lambeth approached. I parked the car and wiped the caked blood from my hands with a rag from the boot and, with my clothes still drying on me,