The Quiet Sea

ENTRY TEN

I am not reassured.

Though the ruin was but thirty yards from my path and I started early, the sun had reached its zenith in the sky before I cleared a way to the cottage's doorway. Damp with the sweat of my labours, I felt an immediate chill as I stepped into its shadow. The thickness of the growth should have been a comfort – it was obvious that no large man or beast had travelled this way in years – and yet I fought an odd malaise, a reticence of movement, as if my body were telling me that this path was one that should remain untrodden.

A foolish notion.

With the roof mostly demolished, there was no true darkness within the walls, just clinging shadows and a filtered light that leached vitality from the picture. Lichen and the weeds that had taken up residence should have brought colour to the interior, but everything within appeared grey and lifeless.

I wish I had left then, having established that the cottage was as it appeared: abandoned to the elements and plants some thirty years before.

I didn't, though. As in my own cottage, there was a second room adjoined to the first, its empty doorframe thin and not that high, and I ducked my head under it to look into the room beyond, thinking if I was to go about chasing shadows, I might as well see it through to the end.

This room was darker and smaller than the one I'd entered through, with a tangle of brambles growing in one corner that made it smaller still. It was the brambles I saw first, for the bones against the far wall were as dull and drab with age as the stone. But then I did see the bones, and had to clutch at the granite to steady myself.

They weren't human bones, as had flashed through my mind the instant I processed what it was I saw; no, these bones, lying in a disorganised pile, were the bones of an animal. The creature's skull was propped on its side so that its aged eye socket looked out at me hollowly. I can claim no expertise in mammalian anatomy, but I think, with some certainty from its size and the history of the island, that the remains belonged to a cow.

And I also know, with equal surety, that no animal of this size could have fitted itself through the narrow doorway whilst alive.