No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories Read Online Free

fool, “let’s go and see Lily-Anne’s grave.”
    “Good!” Garth slapped my back. “And no more diversions—we go straight there.”
    Following the paved path as before and climbing a gentle rise, we started walking. We angled a little inland from the unseen cliffs where the green, rolling fields came to an abrupt end and fell down into the sea; and as we went I gave a little thought to the chain of incidents in which I’d found myself involved through the last hour or so.
    Now, I’d be a liar if I said that nothing had struck me as strange in Easingham, for quite a bit had. Not least the dry rot: its apparent profusion and migration through the place, and old Garth’s peculiar knowledge and understanding of the stuff. His—affinity?—with it. “You said there was a story attached,” I reminded him. “…To that horrible fungus, I mean.”
    He looked at me sideways, and I sensed he was on the point of telling me something. But at that moment we crested the rise and the view just took my breath away. We could see for miles up and down the coast: to the slow, white breakers rolling in on some beach way to the north, and southward to a distance-misted seaside town that might even be Whitby. And we paused to fill our lungs with good air blowing fresh off the sea.
    “There,” said Garth. “And how’s this for freedom? Just me and old Ben and the gulls for miles and miles, and I’m not so sure but that this is the way I like it. Now wasn’t it worth it to come up here? All this open space and the great curve of the horizon…” Then the look of satisfaction slipped from his face to be replaced by a more serious expression. “There’s old Easingham’s cemetery—what’s left of it.”
    He pointed down toward the cliffs, where a badly weathered stone wall formed part of a square whose sides would have been maybe fifty yards long in the old days. But in those days there’d also been a stubby promontory and a church. Now only one wall, running parallel with the path, stood complete—beyond which two-thirds of the churchyard had been claimed by the sea. Its occupants, too, I supposed.
    “See that half-timbered shack,” said Garth, pointing, “at this end of the cemetery? That’s what’s left of Johnson’s Mill. Johnson’s sawmill, that is. That shack used to be Old Man Johnson’s office. A long line of Johnsons ran a couple of farms that enclosed all the fields round here right down to the cliffs. Pasture, mostly, with lots of fine animals grazing right here. But as the fields got eaten away and the buildings themselves started to be threatened, that’s when half the Johnsons moved out and the rest bought a big house in the village. They gave up farming and started the mill, working timber for the local building trade…
    “Folks round here said it was a sin, all that noise of sawing and planing, right next door to a churchyard. But…it was Old Man Johnson’s land after all. Well, the sawmill business kept going till a time some seven years ago, when a really bad blow took a huge bite right out of the bay one night. The seaward wall of the graveyard went, and half of the timber yard, too, and that closed old Johnson down. He sold what machinery he had left, plus a few stacks of good oak that hadn’t suffered, and moved out lock, stock, and barrel. Just as well, for the very next spring his big house and two others close to the edge of the cliffs got taken. The sea gets ’em all in the end.
    “Before then, though—at a time when just about everybody else was moving out of Easingham—Lily-Anne and me had moved in! As I told you, we got our bungalow for a song, and of course we picked ourselves a house standing well back from the brink. We were getting on a bit; another twenty years or so should see us out; after that the sea could do its worst. But…well, it didn’t quite work out that way.”
    While he talked, Garth had led the way down across the open fields to the graveyard wall. The