Mags suggested that we tell the police, just in case that dark, sinister shape really had been a German U-boat, but Michael Baron said there was no point as they wouldn’t believe us. He tried to persuade her to take him out in the boat straight away so that he could see it, but I fixed my sister with such an ‘I’ll tell Pa’ look that she took me home instead.
I couldn’t decide what was more horrifying – the idea that I’d stepped on to the scaled skin of the Wyrm in my struggle to get out of the water, or that what I’d felt beneath my feet had been the top of an enemy submarine.
There were certainly rumours of U-boats in the Channel. Some of the fishermen came home with stories of having spotted them lurking beneath the water, but most people dismissed the sightings, just as fishermen’s tales of mermaids and sea serpents had been dismissed for thousands of years.
Could the enemy really be that close to our coast? Could they be watching us? Since those first reconnaissance planes on the day we finished painting the lighthouse, everything had been eerily quiet – no bombs or gas, none of the things we had been warned about – just air-raid drills and false alarms. Someone on the wireless had called it the ‘Twilight War’. Perhaps the promised darkness is never going to come, I had thought. Perhaps all the trouble is just going to fade quietly away . . . But now it seemed possible that the darkness was much, much closer than we’d thought. I didn’t know it at the time, but its shadowy fingers were already reaching into the very heart of my family.
A couple of months after the disastrous crabbing competition, a stubborn fog settled over Stonegate. Pa was under strict instructions not to light the lamp. He only lit it now when he received a telephone call, telling him that the light was needed for the safe passage of a particular British convoy. The foghorn was not sounded very often either – again, only when the telephone rang or Pa received a radio message. This was to make sure that we were not accidentally helping any enemy aeroplanes or vessels that might be near our coast.
On the third foggy morning, I was up in the lantern room writing the weather report in the logbook for Pa: Temperature: 41°F, I wrote. Visibility: very poor . . . I stared out at the sea of cloud that swirled below us, trying to estimate how many feet ahead I could see, but the fog moved in slow, white waves. It was as if the lighthouse were the bridge of a ship, and my Pa was the captain, sailing us all away from the real world, away from the war, out into the peace of the misty ocean . . . Then the telephone started ringing in the service room downstairs.
I stopped writing and listened. The telephone is only to be used by the lighthouse keeper. I’m not really supposed to know, but Mags told me it is a direct line to the Admiralty. A lighthouse keeper is a very important person in wartime – it is a reserved occupation, so you cannot be conscripted into the army.
I heard Pa’s brief responses to whatever orders he was receiving, then the click and jingle of the telephone as he hung up. His footsteps descended the stairs. A moment later, the lighthouse door opened and closed as he went outside to the foghorn shed, and a few seconds later a deafening blast of sound. No matter how many times I heard the foghorn, it still made me jump. I squeezed my eyes shut – as if that would help somehow. There must be a ship stranded in the Channel, I thought. Lost in the fog – drifting near the sandbank . . . The sound stopped at last. Then I heard Pa coming up the spiral staircase, but he wasn’t whistling as he usually did when he went up and down the stairs. His footsteps gradually became louder until he appeared in front of me in the lantern room. He looked very smart, as always, in his lighthouse-keeper’s uniform. With his square shoulders, his neatly trimmed beard and his polished brass buttons, I thought he looked like an admiral in the Navy (albeit an admiral with sticking-out ears). He was carrying a very serious-looking envelope, which he tucked inside his jacket pocket. I saw that it had been opened and then closed again, the long edge folded tightly over.
‘Top-Secret Lighthouse Keeper’s Business?’ I asked.
He hesitated for a moment, then he tapped his nose. ‘Top. Secret,’ he said. I felt a little surge of pride at how important my Pa was.
He consulted his watch. ‘One minute, please, First Mate,’ he said. ‘Do you want to help?’
I smiled and saluted him. ‘Aye, aye, Cap’n,’ I said.
He passed me the heavy iron handle for the optic. I fitted the handle carefully and wound it around, bending my knees with each rotation to crank up the clockwork mechanism.
Pa counted under his breath, then he said, ‘That should do it.’
Soundlessly, the optic started turning. It looked like a huge lampshade or drum with alternating panels of glass and wood – a giant zoetrope. As it rotated smoothly around the lamp, it gave the effect of the light flashing.
Pa pulled down the switch to light up the lantern and the beam of light shot out into the fog. We both watched the slow-flashing light as it attempted to penetrate the misty air. Each beam looked almost solid, I thought – a blinding-white rod of metal, a spear for a Greek god . . . Then there was a heavy click. I blinked, and the light had gone. The lantern seemed to glow for a moment – electric-orange, then red – and then the world was colourless once more.
Pa stood still for a while, his ocean-blue eyes fixed forward, as if in a trance. With the fading of the lamp, something seemed to have faded in him too. I stared out of the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the ship lost in the sea fret, but the world below was nothing but a smoky swamp.
Then, from somewhere out in the Channel, we heard the sound of a distant foghorn, and I felt an unexpected spasm of panic: Are we helping the right ship? Pa knew his job, of course; he knew his signals – but fear of the U-boat lurked just beneath the surface of my thoughts. What if the enemy had other vessels out there too, hiding in the fog?
The sound of the foghorn brought Pa out of his trance. He gave me a distracted little smile, kissed me on my forehead, then went back down the stairs. There’s something on his mind, I thought. He is very worried about something. Something important. I wondered if it was connected to that envelope he had just put in his pocket.
Silently, I added this to the list of puzzles in my head: the hidden photograph, the dark shape in Dragon Bay, Kipper’s accusation, my sister’s weird behaviour . . . And now Pa. A whole shoal of secrets, writhing in my mind like fish in a net.
The fog did not lift all that day, and it was still there the next morning, cloaking the cliffs in stillness and secrecy. Our Castle was a castle lost in the clouds.
The chill seeped into my bones as I tiptoed from the front door of the cottage and out into the pearl-grey gloom.
I was following Mutti.
Mags had gone out early – probably down to the harbour to work on her boat, as she often did early in the mornings – and I had been lying there in bed, unable to get back to sleep. When I heard the kitchen door opening and closing again, I crept to the window, lifted the blackout blind and peered out into the mist. I could just make out Mutti’s shadowy figure moving down the path towards the gate. What was she up to? It must have been around seven o’clock, and it was still quite dark. Mags sneaking out of the house to work on her boat was perfectly normal, but I’d never known Mutti to go for an early-morning walk – and certainly not in weather like this. And there was something about the way she had opened and closed the kitchen door. So softly . . .
I pulled the collar of my coat up and huffed into my scarf to try to keep my face warm. My hands were tightened into fists in my coat pocket and I wished I had taken a second to find my mittens. I trod carefully, trying not to make a sound. The figure of my mother was about twenty paces ahead of me. Every now and then the fog became so thick that I couldn’t see her at all. We were out on the cliff path now. In the darkness and fog, so near the cliff edge, it would have been dangerous for anyone else, but I had grown up here – I knew every twist and turn of these paths, in the same way that I knew the ruts and potholes of the track to Stonegate and the wobbly steps of the spiral staircase in the lighthouse.
We passed the turning that would have taken us down to the harbour and instead we kept going, climbing the path that led up to the south cliff. The army had started to build something up on these cliffs. There was a tall barbed-wire fence and, beyond it, several half-built concrete structures. Amongst the bare wilderness of the clifftops, the wire and the concrete were so ugly, so out of place. The half-built shapes looked eerie in the mist – squat and sinister, like crouching toads. There was nothing else up here at all, just windswept gorse bushes and frost-bitten grass. The fog was thinner up here, and Mutti’s shape became clearer. As she walked, ribbons of mist swirled around her feet like snakes. Why is she going up here?
I thought about that cryptic accusation from Kipper Briggs – She’s been seen. Had he been talking about Mutti? What was she doing out on the south cliff in the darkness and fog?
The light was changing now – the black dissolving into a rusty grey. The sun must be rising. But there was a light ahead of us too – a pale, yellowy glow – then it was gone again, like a door or a curtain opening and closing. And then I remembered. There was something else up on the south cliff: Spooky Joe’s cottage.
Spooky Joe had moved into the crumbling little house at the beginning of the previous summer. Everyone had assumed he was renting the cottage for a holiday, but months later he was still there.
I’d never actually seen him – he kept himself to himself and was rarely seen in the village. Pa had told us about him – said that his name was Joe and that Mags and I should ‘leave him well alone’, so naturally this made us all the more intrigued, and we started making up stories about him being a smuggler or a murderer or a spy. I can’t remember which of us came up with the nickname Spooky Joe, but it seemed to have stuck.
Whenever we walked up this way, we always kept an eye out for him, but he was never more than a shadow at the window, a puff of smoke from the chimney, or a pair of black boots disappearing through the doorway.
When Mutti was about fifty yards away from the cottage, she stopped quite suddenly and ducked behind a gorse bush. It was then that I realized we were not alone on the clifftop. There was another figure too, just ahead of Mutti. It was a wraithlike shape, distant in the mist. Then the bizarrely comical truth of the situation became clear.
I had been following Mutti, but she had been following someone else.