Over the years The Squid and Teapot has entertained its fair share of peculiar visitors, but none quite as unsettling as the person who arrived one fog-choked spring evening. He didn’t walk through the door, neither did he knock. He simply… appeared, sitting stiffly at a corner table, his presence a gaping wrongness in the dimly lit tavern.
Philomena Bucket was the first to notice him. One moment, she was wiping a table clear of some suspiciously sentient mould, the next, a figure was simply there; pale and emaciated, and dressed in clothing that seemed a little too fashionable for Hopeless, Maine. The problem was that the fashion in question was a century or two out of date. While wearing a high-collared coat over a long, embroidered waistcoat, knee breeches, buckled shoes and faded cravat might be seen by the average islander to be reasonably respectable apparel, it is most unlikely that these would all be worn exclusively; throw in an army greatcoat, a Fair-isle sweater, a stovepipe hat, a pair of purple socks and winkle-picker shoes, and you might be nearer the mark. Hopeless fashion relies upon flotsam, jetsam and the contents of the attics of The Squid and Teapot. Haute couture it is not.
Rhys Cranham regarded the stranger warily, slightly discomfited by his expressionless eyes and smooth, waxy face. Rhys has long learned that some things are best left unacknowledged. Not everyone, however, shared his circumspection. Some patrons began whispering, and eventually Seth Washwell cleared his throat and said, “I take it that you’re new to the island.”
The stranger did not immediately respond. Instead, a slow, dry creak – a sound that held all the warmth of a shifting coffin lid – echoed through the room, as he turned head a fraction.
……………………………
“That character was bad for trade,” grumbled Philomena, sweeping brush in hand. “It must have been midnight before he left.”
“I can’t say that I actually noticed him leave,” remarked Reggie Upton. “One minute he was there, and by the next, he wasn’t. Gad, he was a rum ‘un, and I’m dashed well not sorry to see the back of him.”
But Reggie had spoken too soon. At sometime, during the course of the next evening, the uninvited guest arrived once more and remained until midnight. It was not as if he suddenly appeared and disappeared; it was more a case of his being in evidence, and then not. No one could later put hand on heart and say that they definitely saw him come or go.
This strange state of affairs carried on for the next few evenings. Tenzin, the young Buddhist monk who was now resident in the inn, noticed that his arrival seemed to coincide with the rising of the moon, and he would stay until exactly midnight.
Throughout all of his visits, the stranger did not move. He remained at his table with his hands folded, gazing fixedly at some unknowable point in the distance. He neither ate, nor drank; he did not even blink. And yet, every time someone looked away, he seemed… slightly different. Was his coat now a shade darker? His waistcoat a little more ornate? And his expression – inasmuch as he had such a thing – was just a touch more knowing than before.
Philomena whispered to Rhys, “I could swear that he wasn’t wearing gloves earlier.”
Rhys nodded. “I didn’t think that I would ever hear myself saying this, but this is one time I wish that Durosimi O’Stoat was here. He’d know what’s going on.”
Durosimi was the self-appointed expert in all things eldritch and unpleasant, and would doubtless have attempted to communicate with the man at the table using a variety of obscure and potentially dangerous incantations.
“Well, according to Doc Willoughby,” said Philomena, “Durosimi seems to have disappeared, so we’ll have to manage without him. We could try sprinkling salt around the windows and doorway. That might work.”
And that is what they did.
To no one’s surprise, it achieved nothing.
……………………
A week passed, and by then, The Squid and Teapot had become unusually quiet. The regular patrons each found good reasons to be elsewhere. While Philomena, Rhys, and Reggie pretended not to be perturbed by their uninvited guest, Tenzin decided to indulge in some extended meditation practice in his room. The formerly convivial atmosphere in the bar had lapsed into a silence that was becoming noticeably thick, not to say oppressive. Then, finally, almost impossibly, the figure moved.
He gave a slow tilt of the head, and with a voice not unlike the rustle of the wind through dead and dried leaves, he declared,
“This is not my place.”
“You’re damned right it isn’t,” thought Reggie, but wisely kept this observation to himself.
With painful slowness, the stranger reached into its coat, to withdraw something small and round. It was an old, tarnished pocket watch, the glass at its face was cracked, and the hands unmoving.
Philomena, usually unfazed, swallowed hard.
“Y-you’re lost?” she asked, not really expecting an answer.
There followed a long, somewhat anguished, pause.
“I was not meant to wake,” he said.
And suddenly, to Rhys, it all made a dreadful sort of sense.
Trembling, he recalled an old tale that had been related on the island for generations. It told of a shipwreck, which, in itself, was not unusual on Hopeless. Among the handful of survivors was a foppish gentleman passenger who, for reasons best known to themselves, the superstitious crew blamed for their misfortune, and they wasted no time in meting out their own brand of justice by hanging him from the nearest tree.
Ironically, each of his assailants perished quite horribly within a week or so. Who says that the island of Hopeless hasn’t got a sense of humour?
When the foppish gentleman was eventually discovered, his corpse swinging gently in the breeze, the islanders cut him down and laid him in an unmarked grave.
With this in mind, Rhys said, “Then it’s high time you went back, my friend.”
The gentleman inclined his head, then slowly, deliberately, placed his watch on the table.
Events had become so strange lately that no one gave it a second thought when the glass repaired itself with a faint crack, and the hands began to move.
And suddenly, although no one could exactly swear that they saw him leave, the man was gone.
One by one the regular patrons of The Squid and Teapot gradually returned but, strangely, no one mentioned the uninvited guest. The table he had occupied remained empty for weeks, and the watch, despite Philomena’s suggestion that it should be thrown into the sea, found its way into Reggie’s pocket.
“Just in case our gentleman wants it back,” he reasoned.
Sometimes, just before the clock strikes midnight, a faint creak can be heard in The Squid and Teapot, a sound not unlike the shifting of a coffin lid.