Spooky Challenge 2024 — Day 6
It’s day 6. Tomorrow is Halloween. I have cat fever. I’ve been looking at shelters, looking at cats, someone talk me down.
Will PLM end up with a cat crew? Maybe. Very well maybe.
Today, I’m using a prompt I received from my podcast co-host, Carson Winter, who also participated in this challenge with me! Yeah, if you didn’t know – Carson and I have a podcast called The Dead Languages Podcast
Carson started before me so he finished already, collecting his seven stories into a fun little book, A Cold Wind in Autumn – and you can actually read it for free (one of the stories is based on a prompt I gave him!) Check it out here:
The prompt for today:
“A gothic horror kaiju story.” – Carson Winter
The Widow’s Walk
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hughes.” Mr. Sullivan, the town’s butcher, didn’t actually look sorry. Just uncomfortable. “This’ll be the last I can deliver ‘til you pay your tab.”
Henrietta tightened her clasped hands, letting her nails bit into her palms. “Sir, you know my husband will make right just as soon as he’s back.”
The butcher sucked his teeth, shifting uncomfortably as he glanced over his shoulder at the crashing gray sea visible past the cliff’s edge. Today the sky was as colourless as the water, both seemed to merge seamlessly at the horizon creating a dizzying illusion of a heaven’s high wave.
“Happy to start deliveries again.” He wouldn’t look at her. “Once the tab’s paid, ma’am.”
Mr. Sullivan held out the small crate he carried and she took it. Normally a servant would receive the deliveries but there were none. The last of them had left two weeks ago when Henrietta had let them know she couldn’t afford their pay.
Her husband had been gone for nearly a year now.
The crate felt woefully light.
She watched the butcher pull himself up to the front of his wagon – the new one that her husband had gotten for Mr. Sullivan when his old one had broken down – clicking his tongue at his chestnut nag, and left without a look back.
#
Henrietta opened the narrow door that stood between the bay windows in her bedroom. A walkway extended out, surrounded by pretty white railings. She knew people called them widow’s walks. Places where forgotten women haunted, waiting for their loves to return.
She walked down, standing at the end, peering out at the ocean. Vicious waves crashed against the side of the cliff with resounding thunder. Henrietta could feel the salt spray on her face even where she stood.
Above, the clouds remained heavy and constant, hanging low over the land like a shroud. The sun had drowned long ago. It had been weeks since Henrietta had last felt sunshine on her face.
Her belly rumbled with hunger.
#
Lying in bed, Henrietta watched the ceiling. The lighthouse’s cold light swept across it at regular intervals, creating deep arching shadows that then disappeared.
She rolled to her side, reached out, brought her husband’s pillow to her chest. Squeezing it tight, she buried her face in it, but his smell was gone. Long gone.
Antony was supposed to have returned long ago. Owner of the Horizon Shipping Company, Antony’s business had helped the town through so many hard times – providing jobs, boosting businesses. A sailor at heart, he often went on shorter trips. To network, shake hands, make connections – that’s what he’d called it.
The year had been bad for storms. Henrietta had begged him not to go.
“Wait for me, my love,” he’d said. “I promise, after this, I’ll return and settle.”
“What if you don’t return? With the storms – ”
“Death himself could not keep me from you,” he’d said. “My love for you would drink the oceans and swallow the sky.”
#
“I understand your…troubles, Mrs. Hughes,” Mr. Doyle, the banker, said, nodding vigorously. “But it wouldn’t be fair to keep…adding to your debt without further payment in sight. What would my other clients think?”
Henrietta looked down at his hands, covered in gold rings and gems. “Sir, you know that my husband will return your kindness ten-fold if you would just—”
“Have you thought of…selling some things?” he interrupted. “At least to tide yourself over until your husband returns?”
She nodded, though there was nothing of value to sell anymore.
“Or perhaps…seeking alms from the Church?” Mr. Doyle cleared his throat, bowed, and retreated through the thin fog back to his horse.
#
Standing at the end of her widow’s walk, Henrietta scanned the sea for the Light Runner. She knew what the townspeople thought.
Beneath her, the land was swathed in fog. It crept about like eels. From where she stood, Henrietta couldn’t see the road, the town, or even her back garden. Only the sea and a hazy horizon sliced open by the lighthouse’s beacon.
“Come back to me, Antony,” she cried. “You promised!”
#
The house creaked in the night and Henrietta opened her eyes with a shiver. Her husband’s pillow was wet with tears, crushed against her face.
In the brief illumination from the lighthouse’s beam, she saw fog curling across the floor.
The door to her widow’s walk was open, she could taste the sea on her lips.
The night wind gusted in and out through the door, tossing the curtains, making loose papers dance across the room, filling the halls and rooms like deep, calm breaths.
Henrietta got up, feeling dizzy. She went to the door and looked out.
The waves crashed loudly against the cliff wall and the night was dark, so dark.
She shut the door and returned to her empty bed.
#
“We’ve not much to spare, I’m afraid,” Father Reed said, handing over a basket of tomatoes. “It’s been a bad year for everyone.”
Henrietta took the basket, stared at the priest’s new leather shoes.
“We are praying for you and Mr. Hughes every Sunday,” Father Reed said. “You should try and attend a service. God provides.”
She didn’t bother to reply.
He cleared his throat, looked out at the sea. “They say the storm of a century is coming. Be safe, my child.”
Henrietta watched the priest mount his horse and gallop away, as if afraid she would chase him down. The fog was thicker now and swallowed the thin man up instantly.
#
Something towered in the fog, in the water. Taller than the lighthouse, taller than anything Henrietta had ever seen before. It was miles out, where the ocean would be deep. It did not move with the waves. It stood and watched her.
Its features were obscured by the fog, which grew ever thicker each day, but its two round eyes were dark and unwavering.
Hands gripping the sea-damp railing, Henrietta waited for it to move, to disappear like a figment in the fog. She watched until the invisible sun set and doused everything in darkness.
#
The deep hungry ache in her belly woke her. The townspeople had been true to their word. No one had come for her in weeks. Her bones stretched her skin, her head spun when she stood too fast.
Henrietta sat up, pushing herself against the pillows.
The door was open again and fog had flooded in.
“If only I could eat the fog,” she whispered, her eyes prickling with tears.
The night wind rushed in and out, sounding like Antony’s deep, gentle sleep breaths. Henrietta stood, knees shaking, hands gripping the bedframe for support. She went out onto the walk and stared out at the sea.
The lighthouse flashed by, revealing the towering leviathan closer than before. The brief light caught the briefest angles of many limbs, the sleekness of an endless flank, the curve of a vicious tail, and black eyes as deep and fathomless as the ocean itself.
Warm wind rushed over Henrietta, chasing away the midnight chill. She stayed on the walk, waiting for more glimpses as the light passed by, hunger forgotten for just a little while.
#
The cupboards were empty, the icebox barren. Henrietta held the last crust of bread she had, stale now. She took it and a glass of water up to the widow’s walk. It took a long while to ascend the stairs. She rested every third one.
Her head spun, as light as the fog that now filled every room of the house. It had taken her several hours, resting frequently, but she’d opened all the doors, all the windows, to let the fog in.
Now, hanging over the edge of the railing, Henrietta dipped her bread in the water to soften it.
She savoured the texture of the food on her tongue.
Out in the ocean, it waited, a storm raging at its back. Lightning spiked out around it, slicing sizzling wounds into the water, which had drawn away from the shore in the night. Dying fish flopped in the thousands on the newly exposed seabed. The wind howled, waiting to be released with the rain. Its eyes watched her as she slowly, resolutely, ate the last of her food.
She wasn’t worried. She only needed strength for a little while longer.
The bread finished, Henrietta drank the water, catching lost crumbs on her tongue.
Fog curled up her dress, her arms, her neck, danced through her hair and caressed her cheeks.
Henrietta looked at the lurker in the fog.
“Go,” she said.
#
The storm raged the entire night and, even through the thunder and wind, Henrietta could hear the savage rending of houses and the screams of those who had turned their backs on her.
She stayed on the widow’s walk, where this last hidden reserve of strength came from she did not know, but it allowed her to watch the sun rise for the first time in months and burn away the fog.
The town was gone, now a flooded graveyard of splintered walls and shattered stone. The lighthouse was cracked in half, its beacon in shards on the beach.
The way revealed, Henrietta took the cliffside path down to the pebbly beach beneath her home.
The tide was low, crabs raced by with claws full of fish flesh.
There, tucked under the cliff, was the battered, barnacle-encrusted hull of the Light Runner. For as he had promised, Antony had returned to her and, in the golden light of the reborn sun, Henrietta laid herself down on the broken shell of her husband’s ship and died.
x PLM
