Lori pressed her fingers to her lips, tried not to move, not to make a sound, not to be. She must not let them know that she was there, these dark things, or they would vanish, and she would never understand what kind of creature they were.

Amoebic blobs of darkness, dancing at the edges of the inadequate illumination from a few well-spaced street lights, it was hard to make out any form in them, and Lori felt a sense of wrongness, but did not know if it was coming from her own uncertainty or from the things themselves.

She had encountered a lot of strangeness, but nothing like this before. Walking home alone at almost one in the morning on a moonless night was worrying enough. Her keys were in hand, their ends projecting between the fingers of her fist, and the self-defence moves learned years ago, but never used in anger, were uppermost in her mind. None of this any use against dancing pieces of some deeper night.

Then the street lights went out.

The council called this their dark skies project, but really it was just a money saving strategy. At one o’clock every night, all of Shuckleigh’s street lighting was turned off.

And Lori could see nothing at all.

She stood still, waiting for her eyes to adapt. Gradually she became aware of movement again, just where they were before, or a bit closer? It was hard to tell. In the sky a multitude of stars glittered. further up the street two windows showed dim, curtain-obstructed, light. None of this was much help. Lori unzipped her bag as quietly as she could and fumbled for her phone. At this slight noise, all the dancing things stopped, drew together, and began to move towards Lori.

She got the phone out and found the torch setting, jabbing at the screen. The street ahead was suddenly illuminated and all the dark things scattered into the gloom at the sides of the beam. Lori swung the patch of light around but they, whatever they were, always stayed just at the edge of the light. Then her phone lost charge and shut down.

She was there in the dark, her night vision ruined by the bright phone light. Ah, well, blobs — who knew what that was all about? She set off to walk the rest of the way home, keeping a hand out in front of her and going slowly until she could see a bit better.

Her cheek was brushed by a soft, velvety something, warm and yielding, and then another, and another. Startled, she swiped at them with her fist, forgetting the keys bristling between her fingers. There was soft pop as one of the blobs burst under the unintended assault. then they came at her all at once, and the world was blacked out by soft, suffocating bubbles of night.

Lori would have yelled for help, but she was afraid of swallowing one of these things, and what might happen if she did. Flailing with desperation, she fought through them, aware that she was popping more of them, but unable to resist the panic, until she could see the faint window lights ahead, when she began to try to run. The things clung to her, dragging on her legs and body, but she managed to make some progress.

A motion-activated security light flashed on and the bubbles were gone at once, but she knew they were waiting just outside the pool of light. If she stayed still, the light would go out at any moment. Lori decided to run for it.

Home was only five minute’s walk away, but she made it in two, with fear at her heels. Up the stairs, in the door, shut it, lock it, turn on all the lights.

Her hands and arms were covered in a fine black powder. When she brushed at it, the dust shivered, fell away, and disappeared. Lori felt a sudden chill of guilt. Were they living things? Had she, in her ignorance and panic, killed some of them without even understanding what they were?

The last of the black dust scattered in the air and vanished. Lori was left remembering the soft impact of the unknown against her face, and wondering what kind of encounter she had allowed fear to destroy.

‘I don’t know what to do about it,’ he said, glancing at the rearview mirror to make eye contact with the pale young woman in the back seat. ‘I ought to tell him why he’s wrong, you know, but I don’t want to lose my job.’

He had just driven across the old bridge over the River Lost on his way into town, going slow because there were often animals in the road after dark, and he hated running things over. Suddenly all this work related stuff flooded into his mind and he just wanted to tell someone. The passenger gazed back at him and said nothing.

‘No, you’re right,’ he said. ‘I have to keep my mouth shut. I can’t afford to get fired, but I’d just like to tell him what I think of him. When I find a new job, after I’ve got a reference, then I’ll tell him.’

He glanced into the mirror. She gazed back at him.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re right. I’m never going to say word. I don’t have the guts.’

He smiled ruefully. The outskirts of town came up. He looked into the rearview mirror, but there was no-one there. After a moment of confusion he realised that of course there was no-one there. He must just have imagined a passenger because he needed to get all that anger and frustration off his chest.

*

As the motorcyclist rode across the bridge over the River Lost, he felt her arms tighten around his waist.

‘I’m glad you’re there,’ he thought. ‘I really missed you.’

She squeezed him a little more and he felt comforted. he could feel her arms around him, her body against his back, her slight weight altering the performance of the bike. Not alone after all.

As the street lights of the town approached the feeling faded until she was no longer there. He choked up.

‘I miss her so much, I imagined her with me,’ he thought. ‘I’ll call her, ask her to forgive me. No— I’ll write her a letter. Better that way, to get down exactly how I feel.’

*

‘I just had to get out,’ said Prim, ‘even if it did mean walking three miles on a dark road to get home. I’m so glad you’re here. It’s better to have someone to walk with.’

The river rushed by under the bridge and the pale woman walking by Prim’s side smiled.

‘I expect you feel the same,’ said Prim. ‘Walking in daylight is one thing, but at night you just think every car has a mad rapist at the wheel, don’t you? And I’ve had enough of creeps for one night. I swear, I’ll never go on a blind date again.’

They walked on in silence. Prim admired the shimmering dress her companion wore, just like flowing water.

‘That’s a beautiful dress. Been to a party, I suppose? Aren’t you cold, though?’

The woman smiled.

‘Well, It’s a warm enough night,’ said Prim.

The first of the street lights were just coming up. ‘Almost there,’ said Prim, but her companion had gone. Prim assumed that she lived in one of the houses they had just passed, but thought a goodbye would have been nice.

*

A woman was in the lorry cab next to him. She appeared as they went over the bridge, and It was all Will could do not to slam on the brakes. She was pale, wearing a thin silky dress and she was dripping wet.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, though he could not understand where she’d come from. Had she been hiding in the back of the cab?

It seemed to him that she was asking if he was all right.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Never better. But what about you —.’

There was no-one there. He pulled over and stopped. There was no-one there. The seat was perfectly dry, too. He sat for a minute or two, his heart racing.

‘There was no-one there. I imagined it,’ he thought. ‘Why?’

Will drove on, but the vision of the pale woman and her silken clothes flowing with water would not leave him for days.

*

Ron gripped the steering wheel of his car and tried not to think, not to remember what had just happened.

It had not happened. He would take the car through the car wash first thing tomorrow and forget all about it. A moment’s distraction, that was all it was. Could have happened to anyone. But it did not happen.

He was just driving across the bridge when he knew he had a passenger. In the rearview mirror she looked at him, blood and water running down her face. Panic took him, and he braked too hard, the car struck the kerb, tipped and rolled over and over. Darkness.

Flashing lights, a policeman looking in at him, the car door opening. He tried to look around, but his neck hurt.

‘Stay still,’ the policeman said. ‘The ambulance will be here soon. You shouldn’t move.’

‘What happened to her?’ Ron said.

‘Who?’

The police spent some time looking. They noticed the blood on the radiator and the bonnet of the car.

‘Could be a deer?’ said the policeman.

His partner took a flashlight and searched the bridge, back to where the skid marks began, but she found nothing. She looked over the bridge, down into the river, and for a moment she saw a woman beneath the water, pale and fluid, dark hair trailing in the current, but when she shone her light into the river, there was only water weed streaming with the flow.

A different ambulance sped past them, and reports of a hit and run incident followed over the radio.

As she walked back to the accident, the police officer saw, from the corner of her eye, a woman standing on the bridge, pale and cold, water streaming from her hair. The officer knew that if she turned to look there would be no-one there, but she also knew that the river woman was watching.

Noises in the house walls has to be rats, right? Or mice? Or maybe beetles?

I mentioned to our neighbour that we were calling in pest control, and she gave me one of her looks.

‘Might not be living things,’ she said.

“What?’ I struggled to think what she might mean by that. Crumbling mortar?

‘No,’ she said, looking at me as though I was some kind of fool. (I’m sure she thinks exactly that, she looks at me this way every time we have a conversation.) ‘Elementals, or poltergeists, something like that.’

I did not give her the ‘you’re clearly a fool’ look back, but some of it may have leaked through my attempt to appear politely surprised.

‘You’ll see,’ she said in a doom-laden voice. ‘You’ll find out.’

She turned away with a dismissive wave and went back to dead-heading her roses.

‘I’ll let you know what we find,’ I said, hoping that it would not be beetles. Rodents I can cope with, but little scuttling things freak me out, and the gulls. They were getting particularly noisy. We are nowhere near the sea, but like everyone these days we have gulls, and a whole flock of them had taken to sitting on our roof.

I told Danny, ‘Mrs Watson think we have poltergeists.’

‘That would be a poltergeist. I don’t think you can have more than one of those,’ he said, but he didn’t take it seriously. Neither did the pest control man. He went about the house, lifting floorboards, examining skirting boards, listening at the walls. Finally he went into the attic. I went up there with him and watched while he poked around in all the dusty corners.

‘No,’ he said.

‘No what?’

‘No sign of rats, mice, beetles, wasps, bees or ants. Not even any spiders. Cleanest house I’ve ever been in.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘There should be something. This isn’t a new house. There should be something. It’s not normal for there to be nothing.’

‘But what is causing the noise in the walls?’

He shrugged.

‘Maybe the water pipes? Never heard anything like it myself.’

Danny and I lay in bed at night listening to the sound in the walls. It had a sighing quality to it, and was like a thin stream of sand running over a rough surface.

In the morning I came into the living room and found Danny with his ear pressed to the wall.

‘It’s louder here,’ he said.

I put my ear to the wall and heard what sounded like waves pulsing onto a shingle beach.
That night I had a dream. It seemed very real, but it must have been a dream.

I woke to the sound of waves, louder, closer, and the cries of the gulls overhead. The gulls were so noisy that I could not get back to sleep. I wondered what was upsetting them so much in the middle of the night, the one time when they were usually quiet. I got up to get a drink of water to relieve the dryness in my mouth. The sound of waves had grown much louder, as if it was coming from outside, not in the walls. I opened the bathroom window to look out.

A great sea stretched to the horizon, and waves broke against the stony bank on which our house was perched. Cold moonlight illuminated the waves. A gull cried once and swooped away into the far distance.

Not understanding what I was seeing, I went downstairs and opened the front door. The street was gone. The town was gone. The house stood by itself on a rocky outcrop, surrounded by shingle, surrounded by sea. I walked all around the house. Rocks and sea were all I found.

Far on the horizon, in every direction, dark shapes moved. It was impossible to make out what they were, but they were coming closer, and I was afraid. I ran into the house and got back into bed.

In the morning, there was no sea, but I remembered the smell of it, and the cold breeze on my skin, and my lips tasted salty.

Mr Watson was out in the garden again, and she asked what the pest control man had found.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

She nodded wisely, ‘You mark my words—’ she began.

‘It’s the sea,’ I said.

She frowned at me and shook her head.

‘There’s no sea.’

‘It’s in the walls,’ I said.

She backed away from me, and went into her house. We don’t have conversations any more.

I often wake to hear the sea at night, and a low, loud, booming, far away but getting closer. I never go to look because there is nothing I can do. They are inexorably approaching. What will happen when they arrive? I try not to think about it. It’s only a dream. Isn’t it?

A ghost passed through me. An icy mist shivering through the spaces between the atoms of my body. With it came the fleeting image of a garden, like a memory, but not mine. Someone else’s.

I was visiting my Aunt Julie and this happened just as we were stepping into her garden. I hesitated for a moment, and she asked if I was all right. I told her I was, and dismissed the sensation.

Julie had made a beautiful garden, filled with roses now in late June, but in my mind I saw a darker garden with heavy evergreen trees and—

‘Was there ever a sundial?’ I asked, moving towards the end of the garden.

‘A sundial? No. Oh, there was one once.’

‘Here,’ I said, ‘where I’m standing.’

‘Yes, I think it was about there, before you were born.’

She laughed.

‘It was rather ugly, and no use because—‘

‘Because it was always overshadowed by a big holly bush,’ I said.

‘Yes, but how do you know? Have you seen some old photos?’

I shook my head.

‘I must have done, I suppose. You’ve made it much more beautiful.’

‘Thank you. Decades of work from me and the plants, that’s all it took.’

We went back into the house. My parents had moved to Scotland before I was born, so I hardly ever saw my aunt or cousins. Now Mum and Dad were gone, i felt the need of other relatives.

We were drinking tea and chatting about the past when Julie got up and brought out a stack of old photo albums.

‘Where is it? Ah, this is the one.’

She opened a small brown album, the cover crumbling at the hinge.

‘There,’ she said, laying it on my knees, ‘that’s the garden as it was when your Uncle Phil and I moved in here.’

The photo was black and white, of dark looming trees, the white shape of a sundial just visible in the shadows, but the memory I had was in colour. Dark greens and browns, and a stormy sky above. Yet I had never before visited this house, or this town, even.

When I looked up from the photo, another false memory smeared itself across the sunny room with its bright furniture and flowers on the window ledge. The remembered room was all shades of brown and dark maroon, heavy furniture, ornaments on every surface, an aspidistra gathering dust in a dark corner, an upright piano against one wall with a row of fat plaster cherubs lounging on top.

‘What is it?’ said Julie, then she snatched back the photo album and closed it with a snap.

I came back to the present and dusted fragments of the album’s binding off my lap, then thought better of it and began to pick them up from Julie’s clean red carpet.

‘It’s not old photos you remember, is it?’ she said.

I shook my head, but doubtfully.

‘It couldn’t be anything else, could it?’ I said. ‘Were there photos of the inside of the house, too?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘there weren’t. Your mother never told you why they moved to Scotland, did she?’

‘Dad got a job up there.’

‘No. Well, yes. He got the job because they had to move away from Shuckleigh.’

I felt a twisting nausea in my stomach. Had to move. Some horrible family secret was coming.

‘You should go back to Scotland now, and not come back here. We’ll come up and visit you, the way we always have.’

‘What is it Aunt Julie? I would like to know why we never came to visit you when there’s so much family here.’

Julie stood up and walked across the room to put away the album. I looked down at the little crumbs of leather cupped in my hand, and waited.

‘Our family have been here a long time. Probably since before there was a town. Well, you know the place is known for odd goings on? No? She didn’t even tell you that. Perhaps she thought it would interest you too much.’

She stopped, contemplating whether she ought to go on. I could see the hesitancy in her eyes. She took a breath.

‘Some of us have always been a bit sensitive. I see things myself from time to time, but I ignore them. Your mother, Angie, saw things almost all the time. There were days when she couldn’t tell the present apart from the past in front of her. We tried to hide it, make excuses, but once she was at the doctor’s for her swollen tonsils and she saw an angry black cat in the consulting room. It wasn’t there, or at least not then, but the doctor started talking about hallucinations, schizophrenia, medication.

‘Your Dad, Jack, he understood the family history. They’d go on trips away and she’d be fine. It was something about this place. That was when they decided to move, and he got the job in Glasgow.

‘Now look at you. You’ve been in town an hour and you’re already seeing things. Stay here and drown under the weight of it like Angie almost did, or go back to Scotland and live a normal life. That’s your choice.’

‘There’s a woman in the corner,’ I said. ‘She’s wearing a long white dress, and I think she’s trying to say something.’

Julie followed my gaze, then stood between me and the vision.

‘Ignore her. Whatever she’s trying to say is something long gone and of no importance any more.’

Julie hustled me out of the room, and called for a taxi. Within half an hour I was standing, holding my overnight bag, outside the station. Everything looked normal, but if I tried to really see, other shadows came into focus. The past, or stray thoughts? I did not know, but if I left, I never would.

I turned away from the station. Across the road, I saw the woman in white reaching towards me, mouthing words I could not hear. I started to walk towards her, stepped into the road, leapt back to the kerb just in time as a bus bore down on me.

The adrenaline of the near miss cleared my mind. There was a train in five minutes, and I was going to be on it.

Beth was afraid of shop window dummies. Their fixed distant gaze, their frozen attitudes their almost-but-not-quite humanness, all these made her shudder. What she hated most was the shock on releasing that what she thought was a person, was not.

This only became a real problem when she opened her own dress shop.

It was a tiny shop, just off the High Street, and everything in it was her own work, from original designs to reworked vintage pieces. She needed a window display. Starting with a couple of pieces on hangers suspended from the ceiling was okay, but looked amateurish. Then a friend told her about a sculptor working in basketry.

Ella was a magician with wickerwork, and she made a beautiful, tightly-woven, figure of a woman for Beth. The mannequin stood a little taller than Beth, in a graceful pose with its arms by its sides as if they were just about to be raised to the world. The wickerwork was smooth enough not to snag on clothing, and the arms were detachable for easy dressing. Importantly, the face had no features. it was a perfect womanly form without being too human.

Beth was very happy, and quite comfortable with this solution. She dressed the figure in a red dress and black velvet coat. They both sold very quickly, and people kept on coming in. Everything was going better than she had hoped.

There were times when no customers were in the shop, and Beth would go back into the little sewing room to work on new pieces. She would hear the occasional creaking sound from the shop, but when she looked out nothing was amiss.

One day, changing the clothes on the mannequin, she noticed that one arm did not fit back into its place quite as it should. It had raised a little, as if reaching for something. Just the basketwork drying in the sun, Beth supposed. She finished dressing the window and went back towards the sewing room. a loud creak sounded behind her. Turning around, she saw that the mannequin’s arm had raised a bit more. The early morning sun must be warming it, she reasoned, hoping that it would not warp too much, thinking about phoning Ella to ask for advice.

Beth forgot all about it during her busy day of selling and making, pleased by the success of her venture. At the end of the day, she was reaching for the door on her way out when there was another creak from the mannequin, and she thought its head had moved, just a little, to look in her direction.

‘It doesn’t have eyes. It can’t look,’ she told herself. ‘It’s just cooling down now the sun isn’t shining on it any more.’

She got out of the place as fast as possible, though.

In the morning as she came in, she could not help looking over at the mannequin and saw at once that its head had turned far enough to appear to be looking directly at her. She shut the door and moved quickly to the back of the shop, to turn on the lights.

Her heart was pounding, but she calmed down quickly. The wicker was drying, that was all, or the shop was too humid. Some change in the atmosphere had caused the warp and weft of the woven structure to twist.

Beth went back to the shop door, changed the sign to ‘Open’ and looked directly at the mannequin. Nothing to be afraid of.

Later on she phoned Ella to describe what had happened and to ask if there was anything she should do. Ella laughed.

‘It’s no problem,’ she said. ‘I like to weave a little life into my sculptures, that’s all.’

Afterwards, Beth wondered exactly what Ella meant — and that odd laugh — but set it aside and got on with her work.

Clearing up in the sewing room at the end of the day, she thought she heard something in the shop, but paid no attention. Then she heard it again, a noise like something dry being dragged across the floor.

Picking up a large pair of scissors, trembling, she edged into the shop.

The mannequin was no longer in the window, but stood in the middle of the floor, between Beth and the door. She sucked in a quick panic breath and held it, frozen, looking at the thing. It reached out towards her with both arms. She let the breath out in a ragged scream and ran forwards, stabbing at the mannequin over and over. It fell, crumpled and crumbling, at her feet and she took hold of it, dragging it to the tiny back yard space where the bins were kept, pausing only to grab some matches she used for testing fabrics.

Dropping the broken mannequin on the concrete, Beth struck match after match, letting them fall onto the dry basketwork figure. It did not take long to catch fire. She watched it crackle and burn, its head twisting in simulated agony, flames giving the face a mouth and eyes at last, the arms reaching out, trying to touch her.

Beth stood until nothing remained but a drift of smouldering ashes. Amazing how fire could make something seem alive, she thought, but it was only movement caused by combustion, wasn’t it?

A piece of singed fabric fluttered in the hot air, and she briefly regretted the fate of the dress the mannequin wore. Then she turned away, went inside, shut the door and carefully forgot that the thing had ever existed.