Both were silent, and deep in concentration. Alfie was sitting there, hunched over the line, gazing intently down into the clear blue-green of the sea below, the fronds of weed waving mockingly up at him. That was when he heard something calling. The sound seemed at once strange to him, out of place somehow, not right. Alfie looked up from his fishing. It came from the island, a hundred yards or so away, from somewhere near the shore, a soft cry, a whimpering. A seal pup perhaps. But it was more human than that.
“YOU HEAR THAT, FATHER?” Alfie said. “Just gulls, Alfie,” Jim replied. And, sure enough, there was a young seagull on the beach, scurrying along after its mother, neck outstretched, mewing, begging to be fed. But Alfie realised soon enough that wasn’t at all the sound that he had heard. He knew gulls better than any other bird, but he had never before heard a young gull cry like that. The crying he had heard was different, not like a bird at all, not like a seal pup either. It was true that gulls were known to be good mimics – not as good as crows, but good enough. Alfie was perplexed, and distracted now entirely from his fishing. The two gulls, mother and fledgling, lifted off the beach and flew away, the young bird still pestering to be fed, leaving the beach deserted behind them, but not silent. There it was again, the same sound.
“Not gulls, Father. Can’t be,” he said. “Something else. Listen!”
It came from somewhere beyond the shoreline altogether, from the direction of the old Pest House, or from the great rock in the middle of the island. Alfie was quite sure by now that no gull, however clever a mimic, could possibly cry like that. And then it came to him. A child! A child cries like that! Gulls didn’t cough, and Alfie could hear quite clearly now the sound of coughing.
“There’s someone there, Father!” he whispered. “On the island.”
“I hear it,” Jim said. “I hear it all right, but it don’t seem hardly possible. Can’t see no one there, nothing but gulls. There’s hundreds of them, and all watching us. Like I told you, Alfie, I don’t like this place, never did.” He paused to listen again. “Can’t hear nothing now. Ears playing tricks on us, that’s what it was. Got to be. Can’t be no one there anyway. I didn’t see no boat anchored off shore as we came in, and there’s nowhere else you can land on St Helen’s, except right here on this beach. This is an uninhabited island, deserted. No one’s lived here for years, for centuries.”
As Jim scanned the island for any sign of life – footprints on the sand, the telltale smoke of a fire perhaps – all the stories about St Helen’s came back to him. He remembered landing there before, a few times. He had walked the length and breadth of it. It was no more than half a mile from end to end, a few hundred yards across the middle, an island of bracken and brambles and heather, a shoreline of great grey boulders and pebbles, with that one spit of steep, shelving sand, and the great rock he remembered so well rearing up behind the Pest House. The Pest House itself had long since fallen into ruin, roof and windows gaping, walls crumbling. But the chimney was still standing.
Jim had gone there first as a small boy, with his father, collecting driftwood for the fire, piling it up on the beach to bring home, or scouring the beach for cowrie shells, ‘guinea money’ as they called it. He’d climbed the rock once with his father, dared himself then to climb it again on his own, got to the top, but had been scolded for it by his father, and told never to do it again without him.
Jim had never really liked the place even as a small boy, had never felt at ease there. St Helen’s had seemed to him even then an abandoned place, a place of lost souls, of ghosts. There was something dark and sad about the island, and he’d thought that long before he’d ever been told the stories. Over the years he had learnt about its grim history bit by bit, how once long ago it had been a holy island, where monks, seeking solitary, contemplative lives, had lived out their years. The ruins of their chapel were still there. And there was, he knew, a holy well just beyond the Pest House – his mother had told him that much. He’d gone looking for it once with her in among the bracken and the brambles, but they had never found it.
But it was the story of the Pest House itself, why it had been built, and how it had been used, that had always troubled him most – so much so that he had never told Alfie about it. There are some stories, he thought, too terrible to pass on. In years gone by, in the days of the great sailing ships, St Helen’s had once been a quarantine island. To prevent the spread of disease, any sailor or passenger on board, who had fallen sick, with yellow fever or typhoid, or some other infectious illness, was put off on St Helen’s, to recover if they could, but much more likely to live out their last wretched days in the Pest House. The sick and dying had simply been left there in isolation, abandoned, and with little hope of survival. All his life Jim had been horrified at the thought of it. Ever since he’d been told about that Pest House, he had thought of St Helen’s as a shameful place, an island of suffering and death, to be avoided if at all possible.
Quite definitely now, and there could no longer be any doubt about it, Jim was hearing the sound of a child crying. Alfie was sure of it too. Neither said a word. The same unspoken thought occurred to both of them then. They had heard tales of ghosts living on St Helen’s – everyone had. Scilly was full of ghost stories. There were the ghosts on Samson Island, the ghost of King Arthur out on the Eastern Isles, and everywhere, all over the islands, there were stories of the spirits of stranded sailors, pirates, drowned sailors. Stories, they told themselves, just stories.
Coughing interrupted the whimpering. This was no ghost. There was someone on the island, a child, a child wailing, whimpering, and still coughing too. It was a cry for help they could not ignore. As they hauled in their lines, in a great hurry now, Alfie found there were three mackerel dangling on his hooks. He hadn’t even felt they were there. But the fish didn’t matter any more. Jim pulled up the anchor, and Alfie rowed hard for the shore. A few strong pulls and they felt the boat beaching. They leapt over the side into the shallows and hauled the boat up higher on to the sand.
Standing on the beach, they listened once again for the sound of the child. For some reason, they found themselves talking in whispers. All they could hear was the sea lapping softly behind them and the piping of a pair of oystercatchers that were flying off low and fast, their wingtips skimming the sea.
“Can’t hear nothing, can you?” Jim said. “Can’t see nothing neither.” He was beginning to wonder now if he had imagined the whole thing, if his hearing had deceived him. But the real truth, and Jim knew it, was that he did not want to venture any further. At that moment he was all for getting the boat back into the water, and rowing home. But Alfie was already running up the beach towards the dunes. Jim thought of calling him back, but he didn’t want to shout. He couldn’t let his son go on alone. He took off his jacket and laid it over his catch in the bottom of the boat, to hide their fish from any sharp-eyed, marauding gulls, and then, reluctantly, followed where Alfie had gone, up over the dunes, towards the Pest House.
A chill came over Alfie as he stood on top of the dunes, looking up at the Pest House, and he knew it wasn’t only the cold. Gulls, hundreds of them, the island’s silent sentinels, were watching him from rocks everywhere, from the walls of the Pest House, from the chimney, from the sky above. After a while, Jim was at his side, and breathless.
Alfie called out. “Anyone here?” There came no answer.
“Who’s there?”
Nothing.
A pair of gulls dived on them then, screeching and wheeling away, first one then another. The rest glared at them darkly. The message was unmistakable. You are not welcome here. Get off our island.
“There’s no one here, Alfie,” Jim whispered. “Let’s go home.”
“But we heard someone, Father,” Alfie said. “I know we did.”
Becoming more fearful now with every passing moment, it was Jim who called