The Lonely Shadows: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos by John Glasby Page A

escape his fate, no one can.”
    I gripped him by the arm. “Goddamnit, man; I’ve seen that boat. It’s all rotten. He’ll never survive.”
    “If she wills it, he’ll survive. Only to go through with it again and again whenever the storms come.”
    Towards the ocean, there was very little visible. Huge waves pounded the beach. Spray stung our eyes as we tried to peer into the pitch blackness.
    “He’ll not come back yet,” Rohan yelled. “He’s out there somewhere, riding the storm, waiting for her and hoping against hope that the boat founders and he goes down with her. But she won’t let him.”
    We must have stood there for almost an hour watching the white horses rolling in from the ocean, hammering against the jetty until it seemed that even the obdurate stone must surely crumble.
    Then Rohan’s hand gripped my shoulder as he pointed a shaking finger towards the sea.
    “There!” he shrieked. “Do you see them?”
    Dashing the teeming rain from my eyes, I stared in the direction of the rocks. For several seconds, I saw nothing. Then the entire sky lit up in a glaring sheet of white and I saw everything.
    The sails were merely long shreds of cloth, flapping like pennants around the masts. Trevelyan was there on the deck, his hands around the wheel.
    And there was another figure beside him.
    It was the slim figure of a woman, dressed all in white, her long hair streaming in the wind. Both were struggling violently on the canting deck, hands clamped around the wheel; one striving to turn the vessel onto the rocks and the other, her dress billowing in the gale, struggling to guide it through the narrow gap so that Trevelyan might continue to live with his endless burden of guilt.
    “She’ll win,” Rohan screamed in my ear. “She always wins.”
    Darkness rushed in to blot out the hideous scene, to erase it temporarily from my sight. I could only stand and try to visualize what was happening just beyond the clawing barrier which waited to tear the bottom out of any hapless vessel unfortunate enough to smash into it.
    I could no longer doubt the veracity of the old tales circulating in Corvellan. I knew I was not hallucinating or imagining what I had seen, limned in that lightning glare. Somehow, that boat would drift safely into harbour and Ben Trevelyan would have to live with the memory of cold-blooded murder on his soul.
    But then, even above the banshee shrieking of the gale, we heard a sound that neither of us expected. It was the unmistakable splintering of wood. When the next flash came, it revealed only the raging turmoil of the ocean, funnelling between those two narrow headlands.
    Rohan made a curious sign with his left hand, then turned and made his way back along the jetty. I followed him quickly, not wanting to stay another minute in that accursed place.
    The next day, I decided to cut short my holiday and leave Corvellan. Something very terrible had happened there two decades earlier and the final act in the drama had been played out the previous night.
    In the clear light of day, on that fine, sunny morning, it all seemed like a bad dream. Had I really seen that second figure or had I, in those few seconds when that lightning flash had lit up the scene, merely imagined it? Had it been nothing more than an image conjured up by my overwrought mind, already filled with a chaotic confusion of thoughts brought on by everything I had been told, After packing my things, I went down to the jetty for one last time. By now, the sea was calm and the tide almost out. There was nothing to remind me of what had happened during the night.
    Then, just as I was about to retrace my steps, I noticed something in the water. It was nothing more than a plain piece of wood, bobbing gently in the swell. But then an incoming wave suddenly flipped it over and I saw what was on the other side.
    It was part of the bow of Trevelyan’s boat. But what sent a sudden chill through me and had me hastening from that terrible