Page 40 of Witchlore
“I grew up in rural Cornwall,” he says with a tight smile. “This is nothing.”
“Okay.” I nod, trying to ignore a couple who have walked past us and turned their heads back to stare. Bastian’s back is rigid but he doesn’t acknowledge them, glancing curiously down the road.
“I wonder if anything interesting happened here,” Bastian muses, his casual tone hiding any discomfort he feels.
“You mean apart from the drowned town?”
“Let’s get a coffee,” Bastian says, jerking his head toward a tiny place that sells typical seaside tat, watercolor paintings of buckets and spades and candles that are supposed to smell like sea salt. Maybe he wants to get away from prying eyes or is just as freezing as I am. Perhaps a hot drink will thaw some of the coldness that seems to be infecting my blood, that old feeling of numbing my emotions to get through something. Not even my old navy wool peacoat, an item that used to belong to my father and was purchased in the thirties, is keeping out the chill.
“Oat latte?” Bastian asks me.
“Yes, please.” I watch through the window as he enters the coffee shop, trying to distract myself from thoughts of the past by examining him. I have that weird moment when you look at someone you sort of know and observe them from the outside, see them as a stranger again; more than a stranger, see them asstrange.There’s an oddness to everyone, even gorgeous people like Bastian. I notice the length of his neck, how his eyes are a little uneven, a scar I hadn’t noticed on the back of his hand. Yet all of it makes him charming. I watch how the initially unsure barista is clearly falling in love with him by the second. I stare at him and wonder how he does it. It’s sort of like Elizabeth, who was always kind, even when she was just buying coffee. Then I feel weird, looking at Bastian and thinking about Elizabeth.
“Here you go,” Bastian says, handing me a coffee. I’m grateful as the warmth of the paper cup seeps into my fingertips. “There was an old photograph in there. Did you know there was a military hospital here during the First World War?”
“No.”
I did. My parents bought their house here in the eighties but before that, my father lived in St. Annes as a child in the early 1900s, when they still wore long bathing suits and people favored those Victorian changing huts striped in red and white and looking like miniature circus tents. He’s 113 now, late middle-aged for a shapeshifter, and even though I don’t want to, I think about the town as he would have known it: bicycles and old-fashioned cars, milk floats and horses. In a way, his words made that St. Annes more alive to me than the one I grew up in, the one I mostly saw through a window, passing me by.
I need to get out of here,I think.Right now.
“Let’s get on with it,” I say, leading the way to the only part of my hometown I really know. The sea.
We stand on North Beach at St. Annes, staring out at the Irish Sea, whipped into a cold foam. I had hoped that being by the ocean would help snap me out of my growing unease, but the beach is deserted, the sand is gritty and stinging, and it’s that kind of fierce diagonal rain that is soaking through the back of my trousers. It’s miserable and I feel like I am shrinking back into my childhood self: frantically escaping my parents’ house, running down here, lungs aching with despair to scream at the uncaring ocean. It was the only thing wide enough to absorb my fury. Today it’s particularly melancholic with Bastian standing in front of it, a solo figure against all that gray. He stopped in the town and bought a bag of crab bait. Bastian has his fingers spread, doing some kind of witchcraft, but his hands keep trembling and he has to stop, shaking them out, the feeling of himmaking magic, of heat around him, failing and chilling down with every attempt.
“Selkies?” I say, looking at the piles of bait in disgust. “That’s your plan? Selkies.”
“Well, yeah, it’s a drowned village and we need a bone from it.” Bastian launches another handful into the crashing white waves. “And they’re seals, they like fish. The spell is like a lure: when they eat it they’ll be drawn to us.”
“How do you know?”
“I read it in a book. It’s like the boggart, we’ll get it on board.”
“It’s absolutely nothing like a boggart,” I snap at him, folding my arms and holding my body close against the driving rain. Boggarts are nasty little buggers and selkies are majestic. As I look at the water, I think about all the times I’ve seen them here. All the times they’ve seen me. The past and the present are jumbling uncomfortably together inside my head.
“How would you even know?” Bastian snaps back. I don’t want to tell him but I’m cold and annoyed and he has such a manner of an insufferable know-it-all man that the words are tumbling out of my mouth before I can stop them.
“I know this isn’t even the best weather for them! They like things flat and glassy and, if possible, misty and frosty, so they can dip and sing without being noticed, and I know they absolutely would never be taken in by a lure or a witch trying to manipulate them!”
It’s abruptly really frustrating that he can be so smart and not know all of this, and suddenly I’m pissed off at myself, too. This is the second time I’ve gone into something simply trusting Bastian’s plan and why? Because he’s confident and erudite? What’sso wrong with me that I don’t think I could bring something valuable?
“And how the fuck do you know that?” Bastian demands.
“Because I grew up there!” I point down the beach in the direction of Lytham, to the semidetached house on the front that was my home and my prison for sixteen years. “I grew up by the sea. I’ve seen selkies swim on this beach since I was young. Yeah, I’ve never read a book about it, but Iknowyou don’t just fling pitiful handfuls of crab bait into the bloody ocean to get their attention! They’re dangerous and wise and they are NOT like fucking seals!”
Bastian stares at me. His hair is damp with rain and his denim jacket is turning from a faded acid wash to a damp dark blue. He looks taut with the cold and very, very irritated.
“You didn’t tell me,” he says. “That’s pretty unhelpful of you.”
A familiar despair, the crush of criticism, washes over me, and my body just does what it always does: turns tearfulness into anger.
“You want to talk about unhelpful?” I stamp my feet to try to keep the warmth in them. “You told me not to worry, that you had it under control. You didn’t give me achanceto give you any input and my past ismybusiness! I don’t have to tell you anything!”
“Yes, you fucking do!” Bastian exclaims angrily. “I don’t give a shit about your past, but you have to tell me how to deal with selkies so we can get this spell done so you can get your bloody girlfriend back!”
For Elizabeth,I think. This is why we’re doing everything, for Elizabeth, but even knowing that, a part of me wants to get back in the car and drive away and not be on this beach that I’ve been on thousands of times before. I don’t want to stand here in mymemories, with Bastian and his questions. I’ve worked for the last two years to keep all of this here, away from my Manchester life. But then I think about how much I wanted to bring Elizabeth to the beach. I never mentioned it to her—I worried she’d think my upbringing was weird—but I fantasized about how it would be to have a day at the seaside with her, sleeping in the dunes, playing in the sea, getting sunburned and eating fish and chips out of paper, doing something lovely to erase all the ingrained tragedy. All of it culminates in one piercing conclusion:I would do anything to get her back.So I pull my coat off and drag my jumper over my head.
“What are you doing?” Bastian asks as I unlace my boots and stand on the sand, my toes curling against the chill of it.
