The Scallops of Rye Bay

By Ben Gilbert

Fourteen Short Stories of Dark Fiction and Non-Fiction. Tales of Night and Ice, interwoven with the Supernatural. A modern reflection of sparks that lurk within the dark. Murder, Mystery and Sex!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ben Gilbert
• Release date: Feb 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005188719

Ben Gilbert

Founder of TheBlueSpace Guides Co-operative, Nepal and a consultant to Child Space Foundation, Nepal. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Published Books: The World Peace Journals (Garuda Books 2013), No Place Like Home (Garuda Books 2013) and Mumbo Jumbo (Garuda Books 2015), The Scallops of Rye Bay (Garuda Books – 2022). Submissions Reader: The Masters Review, Bend, Oregon, USA. Jan 2020 - Jan 2024 In Journals: 1. Poached Hare Journal (2019: Identity Theme) 2. Scarlet Leaf Review (Nov 2019, April 2020, Oct 2020, Jan 2021, Nov 2021, Jan 2022, Feb 2022) 3. Fear of Monkeys (Dec 2019, Dec 2020 , April 2022, Fall 2022, April 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024) 4. Twisted Vine journal, Western New Mexico University (Dec 2019) 5. Bookends Review (April 2020) 6. pacificREVIEW , a west coast arts review annual sdsu (2020, Synchronous Theme) 7. Literary Veganism: an online journal (May 2020, Sept 2020) 8. Dead Mule School of Southern Literature (July 2020) 9. The Masters Review (August 2022, Jan 2023)

Book preview

Map No. 1

© Fiona MacGregor 2021

Map No. 2

The Scallops of Rye Bay

Published in Scarlet Leaf Review, December 2021, and Fear of Monkeys, April 2022

4.30 on the rough, that’s what she said…where is she, she should be here by now…

It’s all a rough now, she could be anywhere on these overgrown greens. But all he sees are dark shadows of the night and the faint menacing glow of the burnt-out power station jutting out to sea in the distance.

Turning around, he takes the full brunt of driving rain and westerly wind. On Fairlight hill, the blurry sight of the red light on the coastguard mast seems to flicker. Directly below him, under the dunes, the harbour lights flash green and red along the river’s edge. Upstream, the town is in blackness, the power cut for days now.

Where is she? He understands her need for secrecy, they all have secrets, but it’s always him that has to wait, get soaked or frozen to the bone, while waiting for her to slip out under cover of the night.

He stares at the old clubhouse: that’s where she lives. Is she there? She’d moved in, commandeered the place once it was obvious that no one would ever play golf again. He knows he can’t knock, and sometimes when the weather or the waiting gets too much, his resolve weakens, forcing him to leave.

Hanging on, pacing the greens, he sees a lantern swing in an unseen hand as it leaves the clubhouse. A minute later, he hears the sound of an old diesel turning, spluttering, before starting up. Tyres crunching on the gravel road, the truck slowly drives away; it no longer has any headlights.

With her husband gone, she’s straight out onto the greens.

‘Inspector French…’

Shouting over the blustery wind, knowing no one else in their right mind will be around, she wanders across the greens towards the sea. Hearing but not seeing her, he heads towards the house. They pass each other, she ending at the dunes, he near the house. Damn, this always happens and he reluctantly gives a flash of his torch. Feeling like a fugitive, he smiles; after all, they are all fugitives.

‘There you are,’ she exclaims, slightly out of breath.

Staring, trying to make out each other’s features in the dark: her messy black hair blowing with the wind, and he with an unkempt beard. Both are thin, as any others left alive in the Zone. It’s better in the dark, he thinks: hiding, not seeing, not showing.

‘He’ll be back at sunrise, preparing the boat for tonight, that’s not much time.’

There’s never enough time for this; besides, her husband’s always preparing the boat and always back by sunrise, everybody is.

Grabbing his hand, she hurries them to the clubhouse. It’s even darker in the house. It reeks of fish.

Wasting no time, he pushes her back into a tattered armchair, one he knows well, one they had always used when things were good. That was a year or more ago. He can’t remember exactly, before the lockdown and before the power station blew. Now they are cursed, creatures of the night.

It’s better in the dark.

Half-undressed, he sits at the kitchen table. It’s cold. No one has heating anymore and the only hot water for bathing comes from a once a week shower session at the old swimming pool. That’s if the power works; it’s less frequent these days. He starts to dress, his warm body quickly cooling.

He can make out her pale body, legs hunched up, still in the chair.

‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘After that!’

Her features start to become visible and he looks out the window to the east. A light sliver on the horizon, cutting the night sky, tells him to move.

‘The light, he’ll be back soon and I don’t want to get sick,’ he blurts out.

‘Or have a fight…do you have anything?’

From his sodden coat pocket, he takes a small metal box.

‘Here, help you sleep.’

‘And forget…’

The growl of the diesel sends him to the back door and out onto the greens. She had said that she had something for him: important information. It would have to wait.

She shouts after him:

‘Later, at the church…’

He’d thoughtlessly lost track of time in the clubhouse and now, as the dark beneath his feet starts turning green, he begins to run. Two minutes later, as he opens the harbour office door, the sun sparkles off the river. He slams the door shut. The blinds are down, moving gently with the wind as it pushes through broken window seals. Soft light flickers through the room, but it’s safe enough.

In the semi-darkness he changes, hanging up his soaking clothes to dry.

This two storey box is home: high enough to be out of reach from flooding tides and out the way enough to be secure. Not that security is an issue anymore…but there was time. He glances at the desk under the lookout windows. Covered in dust, his police gun lies there. He hasn’t picked it up in half a year. It feels a life away, but he can never shake what had really happened.

*     *     *

A virus happened, tearing through the country, battering communities. There had been a lockdown, each area keeping to itself. Containment seemed to work. Out of a population of nine thousand, Rye had about a hundred deaths. At the time it seemed a lot, but nothing compared to what came next.

As head of the local police, his job became easy: crime almost disappeared. But then, due to lack of manpower or just incompetence, the aging nuclear power station at Dungeness had a small explosion. It flared bright for a day and night before suddenly reducing to an iridescent glow that has never gone away. As the wind blew in from the west, it was said that little radiation fell on Rye. This false sense of safety was soon cut short.

Four days later, people started dropping like flies. Radiation and the virus didn’t mix together well, unless it’s to wipe out an entire population.

Rye became toxic.

It had been chaos. Paranoid of some super-virus developing, the military cordoned off the area with barbed wire. Armed patrols, in full radiation protection gear, shot anyone leaving, and there were many. Shops were looted and some smartarse sabotaged the sluice gates along the rivers Rother, Brede and Tillingham, jamming them open, thinking that if the marshes were flooded, any radiation would soon be washed out to sea and things return to lockdown normal. After some heavy rainfall, the first big high tide pushed through the sluice gates, flooding the entire marsh and lower town; even the railroad was underwater, the level rising to within an inch of the platform edge. In fact, only the small town on the hill, cut off as a small island, and a few high points like the clubhouse and the harbour office stayed dry. It had made matters worse not better. Infuriated authorities even ordered dogs and sheep wandering out of the Zone to be shot. Day and night, he’d heard gunfire.

Inspector French remembers his staff, all good people: dead by the end of the second week.

The authorities had quickly put him in charge. Now that the power station was down and irreparable, they promised to reroute the supply and deliver food. Insisting on a head count first, he’d lied, telling them two thousand, maybe more. He didn’t know the number, maybe five hundred, maybe less. Rye was desperate, some people having been murdered for a can of beans looted from the flooded supermarket by the station. As an official figure, he had been blamed and accused: somehow this was his fault. After a gang of locals threatened him, he feared a witch hunt and barricaded himself in the police station. Pulling the blinds, he hunkered down with a gun and few supplies.

The promised food drop never materialised and his radio soon went flat.

When his food was finished, hunger and panic forced him to venture out. The town was deserted. The receding tides had left bodies everywhere. The place stank and rats were rife. Daylight had an odd other-worldly hue, a yellow glow that made him sick and dizzy, sending him back to the station. That night, he tried again. He needed to charge the radio – but how?

Visibly holding the gun to show moving shadows in the night he was armed, he tried starting the police cars in the yard. They had all been flooded out, batteries dead. He cautiously wandered into town, uphill where the water hadn’t reached. Trying every car door, he found one open, keys in ignition. There were no bodies here, they must have been moved, and the road was clear. Someone had taken charge and that scared him.

One man, if he were still alive, knew everyone and everything, but it was risky. Desperation drove him on, across the bridge where some minutes later he stopped outside the clubhouse. Just do it, he thought, and was soon banging on the door.

Hillary’s husband answered. Inspector French saw her silhouette standing in the room. Although dark, he sensed her blushing.

‘French, what do you want? I hear you’ve been hiding from the lynch mob.’

He stood looking at the man whose name he had now forgotten but still frightened the living daylights out of him. He had a reputation.

Hillary’s husband looked down at the dark shape of the gun clasped tight in French’s hand.

‘Like that, is it…?’

‘No, no…It’s not safe, can I come in?’ He felt pathetic.

Hillary stepped forward.

‘Of course, are you hungry?’

He nodded.

‘Scallops and seaweed, help yourself.’

‘You eat sea-food, isn’t it full of radiation…they let you fish?’

‘Not glowing in the dark yet, besides, those other things didn’t kill us…been eating them for weeks, up to you.

Coastguard dropped flashing buoys three miles out, signage reading:

Boats passing beyond this point will be destroyed.

It’s not a big area, but big enough for the three boats still working… saw a boat blown clean out the water, pushing its luck. Fool.’

Hillary’s husband struck a match, the flare momentarily lighting up the room. He lit a candle on the table. French avoided looking at Hillary and focused on her husband. In the flickering light, as shadows danced across his scary face, French noticed that he had a glow: not of radiation but of health.

‘You don’t look so good French, you succumbing?’

Without thinking, he picked up a plate of food and started eating. Hillary’s husband gestured to the armchair. It felt so wrong, but to avoid suspicion he sat down anyway, glancing at Hillary who quickly turned away. The seat was warm and he immediately stood back up.

‘I need power for the radio,’ he urgently blurted out through a mouthful of food.

‘Can you get us food, electric?’

‘Do my best.’

‘The harbour lights use wind and solar, got that working. Why not stay at the harbour office, it’s empty. Be safe there, you can a get small amount of power from the console and water from a well we sunk out back.’

‘Who’s been cleaning up the town?’

‘People, got their patches, not safe for the likes of you, not now, and before you ask, we all feel funny in the daylight…we’re relying on you.’

*     *     *

And that’s how he’d arrived at the harbour office, soon learning that he was a very ex-police inspector, his very existence depending on securing food and power and the grace of Hillary’s husband. With the radio charged, that’s exactly what he did. Food was regular but the power intermittent.

By greatly exaggerating population numbers, he’d managed to horde a huge amount of food, storing it in the church at the very top of town. Now, with numbers dwindling, there only being around a hundred people left, no one is interested in Inspector French anymore; well, only one but that’s still a secret.

Today is a food drop day, or rather tomorrow morning dead of night. The authorities sensibly insisting the drops take place in total darkness. They too had learned to stay far away from the local light.

He wakes before the alarm; it’s not yet dusk. He opens a tin of mixed beans and tears off a piece of smoked fish. With all the driftwood floating in from sea, the fishermen had made a smokery behind the jetty, a stone’s throw from the harbour office.

Dipping the fish into the can of beans, he licks it clean and takes a bite while watching the orange glow of the winter sunset fade around the edges of the window blinds. They are grey by the time he’s finished and near black when he grabs his coat to leave.

At first, being out all night seemed wrong, against nature itself. But now he craves it, even gladly suffering the howling winds of winter. The long summer days had been intolerable. He had spent most of them at the abandoned leisure centre, mindlessly exercising behind blacked-out windows in the gym, or, before it broke, cooking in the sauna. He’d never known such boredom, and nothing brought relief. Now, in the dead of winter, he rarely wastes a precious moment of the night indoors…unless he’s spending it with Hillary.

The waxing moon illuminates the jetty. The hum and rattle of the boats below tells him that they’re ready for work, just waiting for the tide to rise. They always go together, staying close, as their radios and phones no longer work and the life boat’s long been without a crew.

Here, a year ago, the moon showed bodies floating out to sea.

Leaving the river and flashing harbour lights, he mounts a bike and slowly cycles through the inky night. On the road, behind the high barbed wire fence to his right, is the distant glow of the power station.

Dismounting, he leaves the bike under the old stone archway. Walking up the potholed road towards the church, he turns left, passing his favourite coffee shop. It’s now a ruin: its bay side-windows completely demolished where he had once misjudged the corner, driving the tractor clean inside.

Outside the