These days, I always refill my water tank before it runs dry. That night, I didn’t. I should have realised sooner, but I never think well in the cold, and when the final drops tut-tutted from the tap to plink in the hollow of my kettle, the evening was dark and unsocial.
It was too late to move the narrowboat. Refilling the tank would wait for day, but I needed tea to warm the small hours, and so out into the frigid night I stumbled, a container thumping my side.
My walk to the pump passed in blinkered purpose, blind to much beyond the towpath. I saw no one. Of that, I’m certain.
I was slower on my return, the trek broken by regular stops to switch my carrying arm, for my fingers were aflame with cold and strain. I watched and listened to try to distract from feeling: there was the half moon, pearling the mist of my breath and etching the emaciated blackthorn against the sky; to the right, the canal exhaled fog, vaporous tongues curling to taste the back; filling my ears, the slap of water in my container and the crunch of frost-hardened ground. Louder still waited the sullen deadness beyond.
Listening isn’t a constant state—I can tune out much with my attention snagged elsewhere—but it’s not easily dismissed when your eyes are full of shadows. That night, I was consumed by my noise and the gnawing absence when it faded. I picked at the silence until it became hostile.
I’m not hugely superstitious, but if you live alone on the water, removed from a marina and habitation, sometimes you wonder. Whose footsteps sound on the water side of the boat as you shiver in the early morning? What holds the light shimmering around the bend? Are the screams on the wind produced by throats?
I wondered at the space in my hearing as I trod the empty towpath. My pace sped up, as much to crunch and slap over the mute darkness as to hasten my return.
Then it sounded, thready and cracking: “Help.” Crunch. Slap. “Please, help.”
I flinched into the blackthorn, which snared my coat most stubbornly. By the time I fought free, the voice had lapsed.
I looked along the towpath as far as I could see in both directions. No one.
Two human instincts warred within: the social drive, with a duty to fellow beings in distress, and the prey hunch, tightening muscles for flight. The former won out, urged on by the need for rationality to prevail.
Reluctantly, I called, “Hello?”
I waited, chest clogged like I’d swallowed air. Malevolent quiet encased me. I dared not break it to call again.
Silence.
The temperature wove an undead frost on my tongue. I couldn’t swallow.
More silence.
“Help me.”
I restrained a fretful skip. Still, nothing caught my eye, and aside from the entreaty, no sounds disturbed the murk.
“Where are you?” I tried, voice quavering—from cold or fear, I couldn’t say.
“Please,” came the whispered response, with less delay than before.
I cast around me for the speaker, but they remained resolutely hidden. “Who’s calling? I can’t see you.”
“Help me. The cold…” Here, there followed a gurgling noise, a quagmire kiss to my hearing, repulsive as rot.
Though perhaps it was nothing more foul than the stirring of water, for then I looked down and saw a shape in the vapour-shrouded canal.
Relief found no purchase in my fear-slick mind, even with evidence of another human so close. Then there was doubt: they were human, weren’t they?
Their form was hazy in the mist, rendered grey by night, bloodless and spectral. I bent to be nearer, ignoring the part of me that revolted at further proximity.
A head and shoulders, arms stretched into the reeds. Human, surely.
They shuddered, setting the reeds whispering, to which they added their own, “Cold, cold, cold.”
“How—how long have you been here?” I asked, but my words were choked, and the litany carried through them unbroken. I asked again, more strident in tone: “Have you been in long?”
They hushed on my last word like we shared punctuation. Perhaps blown by the force of the question, the fog blanket parted, and the figure—human? phantom?—turned their face to me and the sky.
I recoiled.
The moon’s misshapen sibling stared with pallid eyes, wax and shadow melted into flesh expectation. And such loathsome flesh. They appeared boiled in ice, frozen steam caressing eroded features.
Their pale lips opened to darkness, slurring, “Help,” with a grey slug tongue. “Help. Please. Your hand. Help.” The underworld’s death lament would sound sweeter.
I was caught in horror. Paralysed. They pleaded for rescue, and I could scarcely breathe.
At last, I came to myself. Whatever wretched fate had befallen this creature, I owed them assistance.
I placed the container of water at my feet and reached, wishing further numbness to my fingers.
The figure gave a lurch.
I halted, drawing my hand back to my chest to cradle there. “I must… I’ll get a stick,” I said. “The bank—it’s crumbly.” In truth, to my shame, I shunned their touch.
“No, no, no. Your hand, please. I’m cold. Help me. Help me.”
They sounded so pitiable, I steeled myself. This, I had to do. What decent person would leave another in deathly distress?
I reached for them again. Tremors wracked my forearm. I fought my instincts, my sickness, my dread. I would have kept reaching, would have grasped… but then I saw a change in their vapid gaze: a dark glimmer, watchful, biding. Malice.
This time, I drew back with such force, I almost took myself back into the blackthorn’s embrace. “No. I’m sorry. I can’t get you out without a stick.”
“Please! Your hand.”
“Wait there.”
“Don’t leave me,” they begged as I pulled away to scan the stygian hedgerow. Then, in a hiss that knotted my spine: “You can’t leave me.”
I felt—no, knew with the certainty of a preacher—the threat before I spun to see them leering through the reeds, kicks stirring the water.
All shame, all pity left me in that moment. I fled.
Only once did I look behind, and then to see an umbra form slip up the bank with neither drip nor rustle. I saw it. I saw.
But I never think well in the cold.
Back in the boat, heart knocking a frantic tattoo against my ribs and fingers fumbling at the shutters, I didn’t question that I’d dodged a terrible end. Sleep spurned me. I spent the night shivering, throat parched with unsung screams and no water.
Later, I learned a woman died that night. They found her in the canal, fetched up against the fissured lock gates from who-knows-where. Hypothermia, the papers said, not drowning. Was she a Good Samaritan, pulled from the bank by a bloodless hand? Or did she slip and couldn’t get out?
Poor woman.
I think of her often.
I hope she heeded a cry for help and died in terror. I hope the dark form stayed beside her as she drew her last breaths, a threat to any rescuer. I hope she was hunted and haunted. If she wasn’t, why did I leave her there?