"Foulness" by Stephen Barnard

Foulness

by Stephen Barnard

Brandon’s first lie was that he had a speed boat. It turned out to be nothing more than a fibreglass rowboat with a motor. They bounced uncomfortably over every wave, a quarter mile from the coast. 

The four of them. His second lie. 

He’d told Courtney and Kelly he was going to show them something cool. He hadn’t mentioned company.  The girls hadn’t seen Ash since leaving school three years previous, and hadn’t missed him. Brandon justified it by saying it gave the boat stability. Kelly was worried that what she’d taken to be a voyage of exploration was turning into something else.

A secluded beach. A secret cove. An impossible location if it was situated somewhere between Trimingham, where Brandon had picked them up, and Cromer. Kelly, Norfolk-raised, knew her local geography and had only agreed to come because she expected it to be a mistake. She told Brandon. ‘There’s no hidden cove between here and Cromer. You can walk all the way along the beach, past Overstrand.’ She pointed along the thin line of coast in the distance.

‘That’s what you think!’ Brandon replied, grinning. He guided the motor so that they cut the waves in a slightly altered direction. They bounced erratically; Ash put hands on Courtney to help her keep secure, but he was soon discouraged.

Kelly watched the coast line to stay rooted on what she recognised. But then the boat got much faster, the waves choppier, and she momentarily lost it in an eruption of North Sea spray. ‘Here we go!’ Brandon yelled.

After she blinked away the briny water and rubbed her eyes, what she saw of the land was not how she remembered it. It was no longer a straight ruler of beach, but irregular rock, jutting out into the sea as if it was trying to take the fight back to the waves. ‘Where are we?’

‘The secret place!’ Brandon said. ‘There used to be headland here, centuries ago, before it fell into the sea. But it’s come back!’

‘Jesus,’ Courtney muttered, gripping the boat’s side. ‘What’ve you been smoking?’

‘See it for yourself!’ he replied, and turned the boat inland, towards a cove that shouldn’t have been there.

**

Ash jumped out first, to guide the boat up onto the sands of the secluded cove. When it was shallow enough, the girls splashed out into the clear water. Brandon killed the motor and let the boat drift in. Then he jumped out and pushed it from the back so that it was firmly banked. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Foulness Cove.’

‘Foulness.’ Kelly knew the local history. Foulness was one of the settlements, like Whimpwell, that disappeared into the North Sea five hundred years ago.

‘Our own private beach,’ Ash said, in a tone less enticing than they all expected. He was right though; there was not another living creature anywhere near, and no sounds of life, of anything, save for the waves. The boys sprinted up onto the sand, flanked on either side by large rock, a sheer cliff in front of them. The girls followed, more cautiously.

**

Brandon’s third lie soon became apparent. His announcement of ‘Wow – take a look at this!’ confirmed what Kelly suspected: he’d never actually set foot in the cove. When she challenged him he confirmed he’d only seen it from the boat; it had been Ash who’d told him all about it.

She quizzed him. ‘So it’s you that’s decided this is a lost settlement from half a millennium ago?’

Ash shrugged. ‘Go look at what’s got Brandon all over-excited.’

Brandon was at the cliff wall, pointing to a rusted chain coming out of the rock. By his feet it was attached to a square lump of stone, the size of a footstool. ‘He’s not wrong!’ Brandon said. He pointed down at it. Faint – weathered and worn in the stone – was an inscription: Foulness.

‘So what is it?’ Courtney asked.

‘I bet Kelly knows,’ Ash sneered.

She thought she did. She looked at the rock from which it came. It ran down in a vertical seam, whereas everything else in the stone ran horizontally, irregular lines revealing millennia, speaking their history. She tracked the seam with her finger, pointing all the way up to the cliff top. ‘That’s the channel of a very old and very deep hole.’

Courtney screwed up her face. ‘And that big old stone and chain was buried at the bottom of it?’

‘Not just them.’ Kelly knew the myth. She walked around the stone. That’s when she saw Ash moving back towards the boat. But then Courtney was pushing her for more and she got distracted by the opportunity to tell a story. ‘Foulness was a headland, but coastal erosion got to it, like it’s going to get every little beach town here eventually.’

‘But this?’ Brandon planted his flip-flop on the stone.

‘Legend suggests that it wasn’t erosion that did for Foulness, but the witch they threw down Northrepps Well. Maude Mellor. They made sure she wasn’t getting back out of it too.’ Kelly nodded to the chain, going into the rock.

‘Shit!’ Brandon responded. ‘Are you saying she’s in there?’ He patted the seam. Shale crumbled behind his fingers.

Kelly crouched by the rear of the stone block. She saw a second faded inscription: Mellor. She also saw Ash push the boat back out to sea. ‘Stop him!’ she yelled. 

The other two didn’t react fast enough. The tide had come in an uncommon amount and he got it out much easier than how it came in. Ash was away, without comment, before any of them could splash out towards him. Now they stood, the three of them, knee deep in the North Sea, wondering what the hell they were going to do.

Behind them, the vertical seam of packed earth and stone inside Northrepps Well fell away in a localised landslide. And once again, there were four of them on the beach.