Contact.

Yesterday I went to the holiday cottage where my storyteller says there’s a ghost. It’s on the old side of town, up one of the narrow alleys that duck off the main street. At first there’s a tunnel under the first floor of the shops, and then on the left there’s a room, not quite a shed, that sells hand painted tiles and clay faces for putting plants in. After that it opens up, as though this is the real meaning behind the town's façade. There are low, one up one down cottages, that used to be for fishermen, and are now for five hundred a week. Beyond the few cottages, the pathway from the street becomes stairs up, abbeywards, presumably to actual homes.

I waited at the mouth of the alley for a while, pretending to admire the novelty tiles. It was an odd sensation, as though I’d fallen in a hole while the world walked over me, the constant foot traffic on the main street, muffled and kaleidoscopic. Occasionally I had to move to one side, as a woman with bags from the co-op squeezed past and beyond to the houses up the stairs. She came back down again, still carrying the bags, so maybe she was making a delivery. And then she went back up a second time, after I’d been there for half an hour, looking at me suspiciously. Eventually I gave way to a middle aged man in an anorak, who went up to the last cottage on the left. The door was opened for him by another man, who looked left and right over his beard, and only saw me. They disappeared into the house in question, and I went back to the hotel.

After seven, I went back to the east jetty, slowing as I passed the alley to the haunted cottage. I didn’t stop this time, except to see that lights were on inside. The apology note I wrote had been taken the night that I left it, and the stone still lay where it had been. I threw it into the sea, losing sight of it long before it hit the water. I’d given up on seeing them again, and was cursing them in mumbles for being so precocious. The whole set up was like an after school club that got locked in a cupboard for three years. There were places I’d meant to go, that now I had no time for, because of hanging around in the dark and the bitter cold, hoping to get the password to their gang hut.

When they appeared, at first just faces in the shadows, I thought I was imagining it – having hoped they’d come so much. I greeted them but only got silence back, adding to the sense of delusion. They surrounded me, as I kept talking, repeating the apology, unsure that they’d found it. In synch, they took a step forward, closing the circle, with the blonde holding me with the glimmer of his stare in the darkness. I had no sense of threat until they grabbed me. They seemed so ineffectual – I’d joked that their dark was worse than their bite when talking to Norman – but they pulled me in all directions, bullying me off balance, lifting me, knocking me, scratching my arms and my neck. I was on the floor, trying to get up, before I noticed my legs were being held in the air, and I was dragged to the edge of the pier. They turned me, so that my head and shoulders hung over the edge, the waves crashed beneath me, the spray covering my face.
“Will you abandon your friend?” The blonde was at my ear.
“Which one?” I didn’t know if he meant Sebastian or Challoner.
“Your companion. You’ve disappointed me. I thought you could see beyond your prejudices, to see what we're becoming.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you still want to know about David Challoner?”
“Yes.” I wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
“Then you will betray your friend.” I felt the blonde’s knee push into my back. “This isn't a test of loyalty. You'll be required to betray him before we can trust you again.” They lifted me to my feet, for a second I hovered over the sea. “There’ll be three tests. Starting tomorrow.”
“I don’t get it.” I said, looking at each of them for a sign that they weren’t sure either.
“You will have to give up something that you believe in, to know what it means to be us.”

It will be dark in a few hours, and I’m to meet them again on the jetty for my first task. I needed to tell Sebastian that I’d seen them, so that he’d know why I hadn’t gone home, but I don’t know what to say when he asks what we’ve talked about.