The Wreckers by Iain Lawrence Read Free Book Online Page B

was called away to see the parson.” She sat up. “And if that won’t convince you, then I suppose nothing will.”
    At that moment I believed her. How could I not? He was her uncle, and Mary seemed so sure of him, so loving. Of course I believed her.
    “Now, come on,” said Mary. “We’ve a fair distance to go yet.”
    “To where?” I asked.
    “Why, to the Tombstones.”
    We rode south, and met the road at Coffee Cove. But when it turned inland, we kept to the cliffs, and soon came to our destination.
    We pressed the ponies right to the brink. It scared them to stand there. They shied away, their eyes rolling as they tossed their heads. Mary kept hers steady while mine pranced sideways and pawed at the ground.
    “They never like it here,” said Mary. “They smell the fear and the dying.”
    Below us, the sea looked gray and cold. In endless rows, the waves gathered themselves, towering high, then rushed at the rocks in a heaving crash of surf and spray. The water whirled among those spikes of stone, leaping up in great white spouts, blasting into sheets, flying as spindrift across the cove. There was nothing left of the poor
Isle of Skye
; it was as though the wreck had never happened. But high on the beach, where the waves reached like fingers to the cliffs, were the same heaps of rope and shattered wood. And the gulls still circled round and round.
    “They always gather where there’s been a wreck,” said Mary, seeing the way I stared. “People say when a sailor drowns that his soul becomes a gull.”
    It was a nice thought. I studied them, the birds turning gray, then silver, as they flashed across the sun. Could one be old Cridge, another Danny Riggins, the foretopman, free now to spin through the sky?
    “I hate this cove,” said Mary. “It’s the worst place of them all.” The wind lifted her hair, and above her the gulls cried like babies. “It’s haunted, John.”
    Her uncle had said the same thing, with the same little shiver in his voice.
    “You can feel it, can’t you? The sadness.” With a pressof her heels, Mary let the pony move back from the edge. Mine went with it; I couldn’t stop it. “You see corpse lights here,” she said.
    “Ghosts, you mean?”
    “Not as you’d think of them.” She looked at me, and her eyes were as gray as the sky. “All you see are lights. Pale blue lights that move along the beach or across the cliffs. At night and in the fog. Slowly, slowly they go: like a funeral march.” Suddenly she laughed. “Oh, it makes me scared just to think of it. When people see the corpse lights, they run away.”
    “Have you seen them?”
    She shook her head. “Years ago—before I was born—people heard a ship come ashore. It was a full moon, and flat calm, but in the village they heard a shout—a scream—and then the smashing of a ship. They all came, the whole village, and they stood right here along the cliffs. They stood and listened to the screaming, to the crack of wood and the thunder as the masts came down. But the bay was empty, John; there was no ship.”
    I looked down at the Tombstones, and I saw that the sea was changing. We watched the wind ripple across the surface, black bands that thickened and thinned as they raced toward us. Behind them, whitecaps bloomed.
    “The air was deathly still,” said Mary. “The sea was flat as a field, but they could hear the roar of heavy surf. And then, for a moment, they did see a ship. It was a ghost, a pale, shimmering hull, and they could see right through it to the Tombstones and the moonlight on the water. An old man of the village—he’s been dead twenty years—said,‘The
Virtue
! She wrecked here eleven year ago.’ ” And as they watched, the corpse lights came. They rose up from that ship that wasn’t there, and came across the water.”
    Mary shivered. “The people ran away. They all turned and ran, except for one man who stayed behind. He shouted after them; he taunted them. He was going down