Nobody watches the hand that isn’t holding the hat. That was the whole trick, eighteen Halloweens running, and I had believed nobody ever would.
It was never difficult. You dip, you stir, you let the paper the hat offers you slide back off your fingertips and come up with the one you folded into a triangle in your kitchen that afternoon. Bookselling is mostly sleight of hand anyway; you put the right book face-out at the right height and people believe they found it themselves. I was Tamsin Pryce, thirty-eight, owner of the second-hand bookshop on the front and of a felt witch’s hat older than some of my stock, and in eighteen Hunts I had paired off seven couples, two of them now married, one divorced but amicably, and every year I had kept my own name out of the hat.
I had started planning this one in August, the night Nadia told us about Belfast. Pete and Sunita, because they were the reigning champions and Pete would sulk otherwise. Fran and Nadia, because Nadia was going in January and Fran had gone white when she said so. Ruth I added in October: she had eaten toasties alone at the end of the Sloop’s bar for seven Thursdays, and Bryony had asked me about her on every one of them. Tonight Fran came straight from work, still in her lanyard, and looked at Nadia across the room the way people look at a book they sold me years ago and want back. I knew I had it right.
Fran and Nadia were out of the door within a minute of being drawn. Bryony took Ruth off like a prize. I watched them go and felt the thing I always felt at this point in the night, a tired, pleased emptiness, like the last customer leaving. In September I had told the group chat that this Hunt would be the last. I hadn’t told them why: I couldn’t stand at that bandstand with a flask for one more year, watching other people arrive together.
“Well,” I said. “That’s everyone.”
“There’s one more,” said Sunita.
She was holding the hat. I’d let her, this year, because her hands were steadier than mine and because I had stopped watching her somewhere around the second drink. She held it out to me now in both hands, with a face so straight it was practically a confession. Pete, behind her, was looking at the ceiling.
There is no such thing as one more. I count the slips. I put my hand in anyway, because Sunita was watching, and there was one: folded in half, where mine are triangles, in Sunita’s round handwriting.
Tamsin Pryce and Owen Gilchrist.
Owen hadn’t come. Owen, who could be down the lifeboat slipway in the time it takes to boil a kettle, had texted Sunita, apparently, at half eight: running late, start without me. I had been looking at the door all night and telling myself I wasn’t.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” said Sunita, and gave me an envelope.
I knew the handwriting before I had the card all the way out.
Everybody knows Owen’s capitals. He prints the way he fills in the lifeboat log, square and careful, every birthday card a small incident report. But I had seen his joined-up hand exactly once. It was in our second year at Leeds, in October, on three sides of blue paper in fountain pen, and it had been pushed under my door with my name on the front. I still had it. I had read it so many times I could have recited it at gunpoint, and I had never answered it, not in any way he could know.
Not before half past ten, the card said, in that hand. You always give everyone else a head start. Then go where the dead wait.
My own words, near enough. I had sent people to the lychgate four Hunts out of eighteen. I wondered then, and several times more before the night was out, how he knew.
I sat in the back room of the Sloop for an hour and fifteen minutes with a whisky I didn’t drink, while Sunita and Pete played dominoes with exaggerated calm and refused to discuss it. “We’ll do the bandstand,” Sunita said once, not looking up. “Somebody has to give the Turnip to Pete.” Pete said that was very gracious of her. I told them I hated them both. They agreed that this was fair.
At half past ten I put my coat on.
The wind had gone round to the north-east and was building, the way the forecast had promised, with the worst of it due after midnight on top of a spring tide. You learn to listen for that in a seaside town. The streets were empty and loud with it, every loose gutter knocking, and up on the headland St Hilda’s stood black against a sky that was moving fast. The lychgate creaked on its hinges. My own card, from the afternoon, was still pinned in the beam where I’d put it, a little damp, with the faint marks of someone’s fingers on its corners: good. Beside it was another. Same slanting ink.
You never put your own name in.
I stood with it in my hand under the gate roof for a while. Next door, the light was on in Nadia’s kitchen. Through the gap in the blind I could see two coats on the hook where there had only ever been one, and I put my hand over my mouth and laughed into it so they wouldn’t hear. Then the tower above me hummed, a long, low note, the bells answering the wind through the louvres. I knew perfectly well what it was. I was down the lane before it had finished, all the same.
I took the card. Rules are for players.
Up Skelby Beck the water was louder than I had ever heard it, and at the mill something was wrong.
The wheel was stopped. That was fine; it should be stopped. But the red lifebuoy box on the mill wall stood open and empty, and the buoy lay on the stones at the top of the race in a wet heap with its line strewn out behind it like something dragged, and on the footbridge the slimy green boards at the edge showed one long, fresh smear where a foot had gone out from under someone. The twine I had tied to the bridge rail that afternoon hung there snapped, and my card was gone. My card. My route.
His wasn’t. It was tucked into a crack in the handrail, in that slanting ink. Seventeen Hallowe’ens. I kept every one. Next: where the first one ended. I put it in my pocket with the others without properly reading it, because I had organised eighteen of these. I had done risk assessments. I had walked every route in daylight with a torch and a notebook, and I had walked this one, and I had thought, the race is high, but Bryony knows the mill, and I had not thought anything more than that. I stood on the footbridge with the torch shaking in my hand, the race black and dead still under me behind its shut gate and the beck roaring beyond it, and I couldn’t make my legs go anywhere.
There was a light in the volunteers’ office.
I went along the front of the mill towards it. Before I reached the window I could hear voices behind the thin curtain, low, under the sound of the water: Ruth’s, careful and quiet, saying something I couldn’t catch, and then Bryony’s, unmistakable, warm, entirely alive. “How’s the year going?”
I stopped outside the window. The voices stopped too. Behind the curtain the stove light flickered and nobody inside moved, and I understood that they had heard me, and that to them I was a footstep in the dark outside a mill on Halloween. I didn’t knock. I stood there long enough to stop shaking, and then I went quietly down the path towards the town, and I found I was crying, which was stupid, and also that I didn’t mind.
I knew where the first one ended. I had been avoiding it for seventeen years.
The first Hunt was the October of our second year. I brought the Leeds lot home with me for reading week to sleep on my mother’s floors, and on Halloween I sent them out in pairs around Skelby with a hatful of clues I had written in a single sleepless night. Every route ended at the same place: the end of the pier, on the pavilion door, where I had taped the last card. The answer word was on it. Whoever got there first would read it out to everyone.
I had paired Owen with Pete. Pete was quick. They would have been first.
When they got there, the door was bare. Nobody ever found the card. Nobody finished, nobody won, and everybody trailed home cold and cross and had chips. I told myself that the sea had answered for me. I never put my own name in the hat.
The pier had been shut for seven winters. The gate at the town end was eight feet of iron railings with a chain round it.
The chain was hanging loose.
Beyond the gate the deck ran out into the dark, two hundred metres of it, over water I could hear but not see. The lamps on the posts had been dead for years. Out at the end, in the landward window of the old pavilion, a small orange face was grinning at me.
I went through the gate.
For the first fifty metres it was only cold, and the wind, which leaned on me from the right and made the deck hum through the soles of my boots. Spray came over the rail in fine sheets and my torch turned it to sparks. Boards were missing here and there, whole sections roped off with faded tape that snapped in the wind, and I went round them, slowly, because I am a coward about edges. Through the gaps I could see the sea under the pier, not far under, white and heaving round the iron legs, much closer to the deck than it should have been.
Halfway, the first big one came over.
I heard it before I saw it, a deep slam against the legs below me, and then the sea stood up over the right-hand rail in a black wall with a white top and fell on the deck. It hit me at the knees and took my feet clean away. I went down on my side in a slide of icy water and it carried me, fast, across the boards, towards the left-hand rail and the gap beside it where the boards had gone, and I grabbed. I don’t know what at. A lamp post. Cold iron, ridged with paint. The water poured past and through the gap and away down into the dark, and I lay there hugging the lamp post with my cheek on the wet deck, the torch swinging from my wrist on its loop and lighting nothing but sea, and my whole body ringing.
“Tam!”
Owen was running towards me down the deck from the pavilion in his lifeboat smock, and he was shouting something about the sets, about waiting for the sets, and I could see the next one building behind him, out past the end of the pier, a long dark shoulder lifting out of the sea.
He didn’t see it. He was looking at me.
There wasn’t time to think about the lamp post, so I didn’t. I was up, and running at him, and I had his smock in both my fists, and I turned us both and pulled him down behind the solid iron base of the next lamp post and held on to it with one arm and to him with the other as the wave came over the rail and hit us. It was heavier than the first. It tried to take him; I felt it pull him, felt his weight go sideways towards the gap, and I held on to his smock and the lamp post and did not let go of either, and then it was past and pouring away through the boards, and we were both still there, soaked to the skin and gasping.
“Now,” I said. I had been counting. “Now, before the next set.”
He wouldn’t let me run on those boards. We went the rest of the way fast and low along the sheltered rail, his hand on it and his other arm locked through mine, my torch held out in front of us, steady, because it was the only thing I could keep steady. The pavilion door was open and he had wedged it with a chair, and we fell through it, and I kicked the chair away and he shot the bolts, top and bottom, and we stood dripping onto the boards with the sea knocking under the floor and stared at one another.
“You were meant to wait inside,” I said.
“I had you down for half eleven,” Owen said. “Before the worst of it. I checked the tide four times.” His voice was shaking. “Where were you?”
“At the mill,” I said. “Frightened.” I didn’t explain. “I’m sorry.”
“I thought it would be romantic.” He was thirty-eight years old and soaked through, and he looked so stricken that I started to laugh and couldn’t help it, and after a moment he did too. His turnip lantern sat on the landward windowsill where he had left it, grinning out at the town, a battery tea light inside it because he was Owen and he had thought of the wind. His long dark coat hung sodden off the stack of folded chairs.
The pavilion had been a tea room once, and before that, by the look of the ceiling, a ballroom. Now it was a long dim room with boarded windows on the sea side and the stack of folded chairs and, in the corner, an old fortune-telling machine in a glass case, a wax lady called MADAME SYBIL, in a turban, who had stopped working before either of us was born. Owen had brought a camping stove, a box and two foil blankets.
“High water’s at two minutes to midnight,” he said. “Tide won’t drop enough to make it safe back along the deck before half one. Maybe later.” He didn’t look at me. “There’s tea.”
I took a foil blanket and didn’t put it on. I was looking at the box.
It was a shoebox, an ordinary one, gone soft at the corners. Inside were cards. Hundreds of them. My capitals, seventeen years of my capitals, in neat bundles held with elastic bands, a year written on each in his square print. Every clue I had ever written. I had thrown them in the recycling every November.
“You kept every one,” I said.
“Your mum’s recycling, and then the shop’s,” he said. “Neither of them is a hard bin to get into.” He rubbed his jaw. “I didn’t mean to start. The first year, I just wanted— I wanted something you’d written. And then it had been five years and stopping seemed worse.”
“Owen.”
“I know. I know how it sounds.”
“Owen. The letter.” My voice came out wrong. “Second year. Under the door.”
He went very still.
“I answered it,” I said. “That was what the first Hunt was. That was the whole point of it. I couldn’t say it to your face, so I built a game that ended at the end of a pier, and I paired you with Pete because Pete was fast and you’d be first, and the last card said—” I had to stop. The sea knocked under the floor. “And then the door was bare. And you looked at me over the chips, and I looked at my chips, and I thought, there. That’s the answer. That’s what happens if you put your name in.”
Owen sat down on the chair I had kicked away from the door, quite suddenly, as if his legs had decided for him.
“I thought you’d read it and been kind enough not to mention it,” he said. “For seventeen years. I thought you were being kind.”
“I was being a coward.”
“You’ve just run at a wave,” he said. “For me. I saw you.”
I put the shoebox down very carefully on the floor. Then I crossed the room and stood in front of him, and he looked up at me in the lantern light, soaked, his hair flat to his forehead, and he was the most frightening thing I had ever wanted, and I had just been under the sea.
“You know the rule,” I said. “You photograph the cards. You don’t take them.”
“I know the rule.” He swallowed. “You made it.”
“I’m taking this one,” I said.
“Take it,” said Owen, and I did.
I kissed him the way I had wanted to across a table of chips at twenty-one, and across every table since. He breathed in hard against my mouth and his hands came up to my waist and held on, as if the floor might still go out from under us, and I climbed into his lap on the chair, which complained, and neither of us cared. He tasted of salt. We were both so wet and cold that every place we touched turned warm, and I wanted more of those places, all of them. I pulled the smock off over his head and dropped it on the boards with a slap, and pushed my hands under the shirt underneath, over his ribs, his heartbeat going like a fist against a door, and he said my name, the whole of it, Tamsin, like something he had been keeping for best.
We got my coat off between us, and my jumper, and the wet shirt under it, and the cold air hit my skin and then his mouth did, on my throat, my collarbone, lower, until I arched into it with my hand on the back of his head. When I reached for his belt he went quite still for a second, and then he was helping me, clumsy and urgent, and then there was nothing left between us at all, and I was over him on the chair in the lantern light with the sea going under us, and we stopped at the same moment and searched each other’s faces, very close, checking it was really happening.
It was. I moved, and he groaned and held my hips, and I set the pace and kept it. It wasn’t graceful. The chair creaked like a ship. At one point he laughed, helplessly, his face in my shoulder, and I laughed too and didn’t stop moving, and then I wasn’t laughing at all; I was holding on to him with my arms locked round his neck while it went through me in long, rolling waves, my mouth open against his ear. He followed a moment after, holding me so hard the chair finally gave up and folded, and we went down onto the foil blanket on the floor in a heap, tangled, the sea thumping under the boards like applause.
Afterwards we lay under both foil blankets, which crackled every time either of us breathed, and he told me what his letter had said, in case I’d forgotten. I hadn’t. I let him tell me anyway.
At half past one the sea had dropped away from the deck, and the noise under the floor had gone back to a slow, sulking wash. Owen went to the door to check the sets. I got up to find my jumper, and my way to it took me past the glass case of the fortune-telling machine.
Madame Sybil’s card slot was a little brass mouth at the front of the cabinet, green with age. Something white was sticking out of it.
“Did you put a card in the machine?” I asked.
Owen turned round. “What card? I was in here an hour waiting for you. That slot was empty.”
I pulled it out. It was a plain index card, gone the colour of weak tea at the edges, the kind I had bought in packs of a hundred, when I was twenty-one, from the stationer’s on Bridge Street, which had closed fifteen years before. It was dry. Completely dry, in a room where our own seawater still lay pooled on the boards, on a pier nobody had walked for seven winters. It had a strip of very old tape across the top, gone brown and brittle, and it was written in black marker, in capitals, in a hand I knew better than anyone’s because it was mine, the way I wrote at twenty-one, before I learned to keep the letters straight.
Owen came and stood behind me and read it over my shoulder, and I heard his breath catch.
“Tam,” he said. “I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. Pete and I got here first that year. The door was bare. I’ve never seen it in my life.”
I knew. I knew he hadn’t. I held it up to the lantern anyway, to be sure of every letter.
LAST ONE. WELL DONE. THE ANSWER IS YES.
