Paper Napkins

A smile crawled across his lips. The sort of smile that came during those in-between, horribly momentous occasions. When he was young, one such moment had followed his workings with a wax crayon on the back of an old cereal packet; It was on the event of his sixth birthday party. The cake had collapsed into a great quivering globule of uncooked batter as his mother pushed the mother-of-pearl handled carving knife into the frosted monstrosity. She’d fled from the room in tears whilst his father called her grotesque names through the obscured glass of the dining room door. His school mates had cried and stuffed chocolate finger biscuits up their noses.

Nathan had relished the nightmare as it unfurled around him. The corners of his mouth had turned as he silently watched Terry Green suffer a dreadful reaction to a peanut as Lizzy Smith choked on the string tail of a blue sugar mouse that he’d helped his mother make that morning.

Now, he sat in the run down cafe on Merepool seafront and smiled into the chipped teacup that contained the dregs of a weak pot of tea. He took another paper napkin from the stainless steel dispenser and pushed his black biro across its surface. The marks ripped through the paper in places, in others they were bold and dark. Just marks.

Through the steamed up windows, dripping with condensation, he could see the promenade across the road. There he could make out the figure of the laughing clown as it clambered out of its huge glass display case. The red painted woodwork was splintered and worn, the glass smeared by dirty hands and excretions of small children and inebriated adults.

The clown, in a green and purple harlequin costume of synthetic silk, fixed its eyes towards Nathan in the coffee shop window. It was grinning. A dirty, fat smile of nightmares that reached its bulbous red nose and caused its cross shaped eyes to disappear into the creases of its elongated forehead. The clown reached for its pointed hat and doffed it, bowing slightly as it did so. The two ridiculous tufts of yellow hair on its otherwise bald head, shone wet in the November drizzle, before the clown straightened its back and replaced the hat.

As the glass door of the display case banged in the stiff breeze, Nathan watched as the clown’s expression changed. The forehead relaxed, the eyes widened and the jaw dropped low into a macabre yawn.

***

On the south pier, Sally Dupres was trying her best to eat the huge stick of candyfloss that Billy Knowles, her steady boyfriend, not long released from a custodial sentence, had bought for her. The wind was making it impossible, anchoring strands of the sticky spun sugar in Sally’s equally frizzly blonde hair as the rain left dark pink indentations in the wispy confectionery.

Sally giggled as she watched Billy throw the blunt darts at the battered dartboard, determined to win an oversized stuffed toy for his girl. The stallholder looked on, knowing this was more easy cash for him.

Billy was limbering up with his final dart. All the others had hit the board and bounced back off. They now lay on the oily old boards by the stallholder’s feet. Feet that were suddenly nailed to the spot.

His sneering grin crumbled to the pier’s dark boards as his eyes drifted past the pretty girl with the candyfloss and fixed on something else. Something that belonged in the battered old glass case on the promenade.

Billy threw the final dart with as much force as he could muster. He jumped and shouted in full animation when the dart hit the bullseye, and stayed there.

“Look at that Sally!”

Sally gave a squeal of delight and threw her free arm around Billy’s broad shoulders, planting a sticky pink kiss on his stubbly cheek.

“We win a big one for the bullseye don’t we mister?” she said, glancing up and down at the bizarre collection of stuffed toys on display.

The stall holder said nothing. His small dark eyes were still transfixed on something behind the celebrating couple.

“I got the bullseye,” laughed Billy, “even with those blunt old darts! So, what have we won?”

But his laughter trailed off as he noted the fixed stare of the other man. He then spotted the small wet pool that was forming on the boards at the man’s feet.

“Sylvester cat, I think,” said Sally, still thrilled at Billy’s success.

It was then that the couple both heard a sound coming from behind them. A sort of giggling, like the noise that small boys make when they’ve done something they shouldn’t have. The giggle deepened in tone and began to increase in volume, until it became a menace-tinged, raucous cackle.

Billy put an instinctively protective arm around Sally and as it became obvious to both of them that something was not quite as it should be, they turned to face the source of the insane laughter.

***

The tide was out at sea, and beneath the pier, Declan and Gracie from the Swinging Seagull bed and breakfast were searching for shells and other treasures in the wet sand.

“Mermaid’s purse!” shouted Declan as he held the leathery egg sack up before dropping it into his plastic bucket. His sister stuck her tongue out and continued to try and dislodge a limpet from its rock with the heel of her shoe.

Across the beach, a lone man threw a ball for his dog, its barks drifted across the expanse of sand, then were lost amidst the heavy dampness of the morning.

***

Nathan ordered a second pot of tea and took another paper napkin from the dispenser. He wiped a porthole in the misted window and kept his watch on Merepool promenade and the people that walked there.

***

Declan had found a crab with just three legs and was debating what to do with it, when his sister ran over, a mass of bladderwrack in her hand. She held it out to him.

“Look at this Declan, it’s disgusting.”

“It’s just slimy old seaweed as usual, don’t you have anything better than that?”

“But look, it’s all red and sticky, not like it normally is.”

Gracie held out the dripping green clump and, as Declan peered closer, they both noticed that the red seepage was not from the bladderwrack at all. Declan followed Gracie to where she’d found the strange offering from the sea.

“Look, up there!” Declan pointed up to the boards of the pier high above their heads. A dark liquid was running down from above them, threading itself between the gaps in the wooden planks of the pier. It had formed in a dark, thick pool on the sand, glinting strangely in the weak light.

“Is it paint?” Gracie asked, though the words sounded wrong even as she spoke them.

Before Declan could answer, they both froze. Through a hole where a knot was missing in the boards above, a huge eye had appeared. Cross-shaped, dark and glassy, it fixed itself on them, unmoving, pinning them both in place on the wet sand. The eye bulged unnaturally against the timber. And then it blinked… slowly.

Gracie let out a gasp and stumbled back, dropping the bladderwrack at her feet. Declan grabbed her arm and pulled her further away, both of them staring upwards in dumbfounded horror. A low scrape echoed across the planks overhead, followed by the faint screech of something, dragging, shifting, moving. Then there was silence.

***

Down the side streets that ran at right angles to the promenade, the rain persisted in its veil of thin drizzle. Breathless from running, Gracie and Declan ducked into a narrow gift shop front to escape the damp and the horrors of the pier.

It was the kind of seaside shop that hadn’t changed for decades, stacked with trinkets made from shells, faded boxes of cheap toys, and stands full of postcards and kiss-me-quick hats. The bell rattled like an old beggar’s cough when the door closed behind them.

An old woman stood behind the counter. She was small and slightly hunched and under the line of her hair, drawn into a tight grey knot, her eyes were sharp and watchful. As the children wandered the narrow aisles, she didn’t move. She quietly observed.

“You shouldn’t be down by the pier,” she said suddenly, her voice low. “Not today anyway.”

Neither Declan nor Gracie answered.

The woman’s hands, spotted with the brown marks of age, moved over the counter top, tapping faintly against it, keeping time with something only she could hear. Her gaze flicked to the door, then back to them.

“You’ll find that it will follow you.”

“What will?” Gracie whispered.

The woman’s mouth twitched into what might have been a smile but she said nothing more.

The siblings quickly left the shop, glancing back with the sudden conviction that home was the only safe place to be. The drizzle had thickened and a mist was rolling in from the ocean. For a moment Declan thought he saw something purple and yellow shift quickly past the end of the street. He took his sister’s hand and tugged her in the direction of the Swinging Seagull B&B.

***

In the cafe, Nathan’s sickly smile lingered as he pulled the black biro across another flimsy napkin. The pen scrawled jagged arcs and scratches, tearing at the paper as though the surface resisted the peculiar marks.

It put him in mind a little of the time in the boys’ toilets at high school. Crouched in the graffiti covered stall, he’d drawn the marker pen over the surface of the toilet paper that hung limply from its holder.

The peculiar events of that afternoon and departure of the head of the geography department had been the subject of classroom speculation for many months that followed.

The greasy haired girl behind the counter, young and pale, with shadows under her eyes, was trying not to watch him.

But she couldn’t help it. Each scrape of the biro seemed to draw her attention, each movement of his hand making her chest tighten in unease. When Nathan glanced up, catching her eye, she looked away quickly and started wiping down the counter with a grey dishcloth.

Nathan’s smile widened.

***

In the Pirate’s Cabin Amusement Arcade, the air smelled of overheating electrical equipment and cheap disinfectant. The owner, Bernard, a broad-shouldered man in a frayed cardigan, was emptying coins from a fortune telling machine. It was one of the old ones - temperamental but still popular, with a gypsy woman’s head and torso, her eyes rolling back into her skull whenever a coin rattled into the slot.

As Bernard emptied the coins into a bag, a card suddenly clattered out of the machine onto the little tray where fortunes were dispensed. He frowned, he hadn’t put any money in. Picking it up, he turned it over. The words, printed in uneven type, read:

“The actions of a fool may determine the fate of the ignorant and unaware.”

Before he had time to ponder over it, a sound whispered close behind him. A swish, soft and deliberate, the unmistakable rustle of fabric brushing past. He spun round. No one was there.

But the gypsy’s painted eyes were now staring straight at him, and her wooden hand which normally lay across her chest, was pressed against the glass case.

As Bernard looked past the gypsy woman, at his own reflection, he could see a shape behind him. He heard a snigger and felt the brush of cold skin across the nape of his neck.

***

Later, the cafe was empty except for the lone shape of Nathan sitting at the table in the window. The condensation blurred the outside world into smudged lights and movements. Nathan remained, a pile of biro-marked napkins in front of him. He folded them carefully, one by one, his smile never wavering.

Through the steamed glass he saw the clown again. Now, the lumbering creature was climbing back into its case. The door swung open on stiff hinges. The figure hunched, contorted, then slid itself behind the glass pulling the shuddering door closed behind it.

Inside, the hideous harlequin’s face froze once more into its permanent macabre grin.

Nathan rolled his biro across the table towards him, then picked up the last napkin, folded it into a neat square, and set it at the center of the pile. His fingers pressed down, flattening it slowly.

The girl behind the counter shivered, though she could not have said why.

Nathan nodded in the direction of the girl, collected together his things, put them in his duffle bag and slipped on his anorak. He left silently, the door barely making a sound as he stepped out into the damp fading light.

He headed towards the promenade, his hands shuffling in his pocket as he crossed the road, scurrying between cars and puddles, his face hidden within his hood.

As he reached the glass case, dripping with the day’s precipitation, he pulled a coin from his pocket. The slot was gunked up with chewing gum and he picked it away before sliding the coin into the space within the metal.

The machine clattered, the huge panes of glass shuddered, and the clown’s painted grin seemed to quiver, just slightly.

Nathan leaned close to the smeared pane, his breath fogging the surface. On the inside of the glass, a hand-print gradually appeared, palm to palm with his own. And then all at once, the clown burst into its puppet-like automation, jerking and twisting, and its equally sinister laughter and taunting fairground music began, ringing out into the salty air.

Nathan smiled the smile and touched the side of his duffle bag. Then he turned and wandered his way down the promenade, disappearing into the mist - towards his accommodation for the night, at the Swinging Seagull bed and breakfast.