Page 29 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

He could smell the salt works before they came into sight. They were burning seaweed, and smoke was pouring out into the sky. There was something odd about the way it moved. The smoke coiled sometimes like something was nudging it. There was no wind. The quiet made the shore eerie. It should have been full of seagulls and sandpipers, but there was nothing.

He thought the birds must have just flown somewhere safer. It was wishful. Before long, he saw them all in the tideline, downy corpses washing up against the mess of seaweed and pebbles, the softer, lighter feathers masquerading as foam. When he went to look, the weed was swarming with spider crabs having the time of their lives with the carrion. Not much further along the beach, other people had noticed too. They were lifting the crabs out into buckets. Children mostly, with old pails and grey clothes. The smoke from the salt works drifted through them too much for him to see how many. Still unhappy, Hotaru stayed close to him.

The salt works were set up on what looked like a natural tumble of rocks. He climbed up carefully, his gloves catching on old limpets. At the top, a broad figure with a rake paused and watched him through the smoke and the whirling cinders.

‘Afternoon,’ said Thaniel. ‘I’m from the big house. Are you Mr Yoshida?’

‘Who’s asking?’ the man rumbled. He had an inhumanly hoarse voice. He must have spent his life breathing the smoke. Just beside him was a deep pit, full of burning seaweed that hissed and popped as its air pockets burst.

‘Your boy’s had a bit of a fright, he’s upset.’ He touched Hotaru’s shoulders to put the little boy in front of him. ‘Is his mother here?’

‘Why, what’s happened?’

‘He says he saw a ghost.’

‘What do you mean, he says?’ the man said crossly. ‘If our Hotaru says he saw one then he did. We all have.’

Hotaru had turned small and still, his eyes fixed on the ground.

Thaniel frowned. ‘All right.’

The man grunted at him and then called back to a woman. She came by without a word, only a cringing nod that probably didn’t do her husband’s bullishness much good, and hurried Hotaru away. Thaniel wished he hadn’t brought him, and wondered if Suzuki had been trying to tell him, in his stuffy way, that it would make a bad day worse.

‘You said you’d all seen them?’ Thaniel said to the salt burner.

‘So?’

‘Where?’

‘Here. What do you care?’

‘Would you show me?’

‘They don’t come just because some cracker wants them to.’

The smell of the place was something between charcoal and seaweed. Thaniel would have liked to go closer, but the rocks were uneven and he couldn’t see a path through the burning pits. ‘Why are there ghosts here?’

‘If you don’t believe me you should just say that and get on your way.’

Thaniel could imagine that if you made your living burning seaweed in these grit clouds, not many people would want to hear what you had to say about anything. ‘Did something happen here?’

The salt burner was still at first. Thaniel waited. However odd he found the salt burner, he must have looked stranger himself. He was a full head and shoulders taller, and his coat was shroud grey.

‘Ask the Baron at the big house,’ the man said at last.

‘Why?’

‘Started when we knew he was coming back.’ He wrung his hand once around the handle of his rake with a scraping noise of bad wood and calluses.

‘What does it matter that he was coming back?’

But the salt burner had had enough. ‘Look, fuck off, you’re distracting my men.’

Thaniel looked around. There were men all around, paused by their own fire-pits to listen, leaning on rakes. They had scarves over their faces. He could have mistaken any one of them for a ghost.

‘I told you they were odd people,’ Suzuki said when Thaniel traipsed back. ‘You’re covered in ash,’ he added. ‘Don’t walk it into the house.’

Thaniel went around the courtyard instead. There was a pine tree whose middle branches were still hung with ancient, decaying prayer cards, from when the house had been a monastery. It was broad and old, the ridges in the bark as thick as saplings themselves, its boughs starting low, about chest height, and covered in dark moss. The needles shushed in the wind.