The Night Air

Calling us, from the frosty boats adrift on the nightened waters, softly the voices of children drifted across our encampment.  Alice cooried-in closer to my side and shivered with shakes as violent as earlier when I had rescued her from those same depths early that night.

Mists had ended the day when, at five, the foghorn sounded and an insipid Sun had shrugged off my hopes and vanished. Still with but one fish in my pail, I wrapped my line in canvas and stood to pull my bones towards a pauper's meal and bed. Bolts upon my door to keep the sherriff from barging-in and flustering my modesty.

Yet, as I stood: a sigh, a splash! A plunk of considerable weight. I had seen a shape bob past only minutes before, in fact that was what had finally stirred me to pack and go lest I was caught poaching by an estate manager. I took the braver choice and shouted a muten 'hello?'  No response but strangled mewls. I put the bucket down and ran beneath the waves.

Alice was coming round with the small fire I had built in a copse above the storm-line. I had done my best with drying her, closing my sight against her succulence as I stripped her half-conscious form from her rags. I sat in my underthings and robed her in my own, dry things.  Hers upon poles in the firelight to steam as best they could this foggy evening.

We had, I think, both begun to slumber. A light supper of fish roast upon this insipid blaze doing something at least for us. We had begun to slumber, and then the voices woke us.

Our names both, 'Alice.... Alice... Clem... Clem... We miss you. Come to us.' Alice cooried-in and I held her, as much for my own fear as to assuage what she felt. We had exchanged a few simple facts about each other after I saved her and had carried her up the beach. She was of local origin but had only moved back for marriage last year. The marriage had not lived up to its promise and so she had sought to end it out in those icy waters. But who drowns themselves at night? The terrible suck of the tide was all the more scarisome to me in the cloak of dakness. Proof of which, if needed, came now.

'Clem... Clem... Alice... Come and play our game.' I screwed-up my een and tried to see what waas out there. Forms. At least three, though only two had spoke. As I squinted other shadows moved, writhed, upon the barque. Entrails of mist kept floating between us and the ghostly playmates. 

Alice began trembling even more. I rubbed her shoulders. I shouted at the wraiths to leave us be. Yet they dropped one by one into the swell and floated even closer. I grabbed a burning brand from the flames as the first child stepped ashore. There was little to him, as if he too were made of the mists about us.

I ran towards him, tears streaking my face from fear. Whatever it is that gives us the power to face our terrors in such situations ran high in me that moment. But he smiled at me and, with one powerful breath, put out my fiery stave. I sank kneewards before him and opened my arms wide, accepting what fate was to be mine.  But our journey was simply beginning.

Alice stood, radiant. The three children who had shored themselves formed a ring of roses about her and began to dance in the firelight. She looked towards me, her face changed from the drownling I had nursed. 'Join us, Clem,' she stated, in that same sing-song tone of the children. They gathered around me and her and danced widdershins. My flesh flashed red in the heat from the flames. The woods, and the beach, and the mists vanished and the children  gripped my hands and took me into their world.