The last time Michael had been there, the telephone box was a lustrous red. They stormed past it. Michael strode ahead. Sam jogged to catch up but remained a few steps behind. The box was a sallow and dirty version of its old self, so grimy it was impossible to see the phone inside. Its faded pink paint had blistered and broken into brittle flakes.

  As a boy, Michael would always check for change whenever he passed. He’d heave open the heavy door and slide two fingers into the little steel flap at the bottom of the black telephone casing. It was nearly always empty. But sometimes, just sometimes, there sat a ten pence piece. Or sometimes a twenty. Or on the rarest of occasions a chunky fifty pence coin. Every time that happened, it was like finding treasure. Those little discs of metal were infinitely more precious than change of the same value handed over by Mr Brown the shopkeeper or the warm coins Michael’s father would snatch from behind his ear. Telephone box money was the most valuable because it had a trace of magic on it, and if it wasn’t magic, then it was luck. To a small boy, magic and luck are siblings in the pantheon of unexplained forces that govern their universe.

  The flash of foolish memories was so powerful, Michael closed his eyes for a step and shook them off. They were like old friends he’d outgrown, but now he’d returned they wanted him to slip back into being a person he wasn’t anymore. When he opened his eyes again, there it was, the beach house.

  He stopped in his tracks.

  Sam was right on his shoulder and almost bumped into him. ‘Is this it, then?’

  Michael’s mouth was suddenly dry. More memories, like the morning tide, rushed in before drawing back out to sea again, sucking his feet into the sand, pulling him on and yet rooting him to the spot. He ran his tongue over his lips and swallowed, attempting to work up some spit, but it wouldn’t come.

  After a long silence, he finally managed, ‘Yeah, this is it. Looks like Nush, the agent, has gotten lost as well.’

  With those words, his feet broke free of the past. Maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe he was still caught in its tide, and he, Sam—and the whole world, in fact— were all moving in the same direction at the same time, thus camouflaging the forces of fate. Maybe. But then, in that moment, Michael had other ideas, one of which was that fate was bullshit.

  The house was the same, a little weather-worn, but nothing like the telephone box. It appeared to be a wide, dormer-bungalow at the front, clad in white-washed planks, raised off the ground by a basement, whose windows peeked above the dusty gravel drive. Shutters covered the ground-floor windows. The cladding needed a fresh coat of paint. A few terracotta slates were loose, but the roof looked in a good state of repair, considering it must have been at least ten years since his mother had last risked coming here to check on the place. The seaward facing side of the house might be another story altogether. It would have endured the brunt of the weather, and the relentless sandpapering of the wind whipping across the dunes.

  The thought of the dunes sent an involuntary shudder through him. It was the place all the magic of his father ended. No more tricks. No more coins conjured from behind his ears, or cards appearing in a snap of fingers.

  The driveway, more of a wide courtyard, flanked by trees and unkempt bushes, opened out from the track. It trapped the sun and reflected it back up at them, pressing heat in from all sides. The beach house performed its uncanny trick of looking modest enough from a distance, but up close it was wider and more imposing than it first seemed. And that was only its initial sleight of hand. Michael put a foot on the bottom step and realised they’d left everything in the car. The step creaked as he looked back.

  Sam seemed to read my mind. ‘Did you leave the keys behind?’

  ‘That and everything else.’

  ‘Should we go back?’

  The boy sounded unsure. Michael couldn’t blame him. He doubted that another run in with a mildly racist yokel would be appealing to Sam, especially as he wasn’t to know what the people around here were like. For all he knew, this could be the English equivalent of Deliverance country, although perhaps Night of the Living Dead would be accurate from his point of view. Michael felt his father in those references. And Sam’s mother too. In that regard, Michael could have handled things better last night when no words, except meaningless ones, seemed to come to him concerned his former girlfriend.

  The step groaned again, seesawing in time with Michael’s thoughts. ‘Let me check something first.’

  Each of the seven steps up the stoop groaned at his return. The smell of ozone, salty-sweet seaside decay, and damp wood grew stronger with each stride. After mid-day, the stoop provided little shade from the sun. It blazed on his back, mottling his white shirt with sweat. Homemade wind chimes made from pieces of wood and stones hung without moving. Leaves and sand dusted the floorboards, gathering in corners and under the old bench, whose wrought iron frame was rushed red. Covering the front door, the fly screen hung off-kilter, its frame warped and torn in places. Every bit was the same as ever it was, everything exactly where it had always been, and yet different. Older, tired, unloved.

  Michael traced along the back of the stoop from the door to the left, where three cobble-sized rocks lay. They were sea polished and painted by a seven-year-old version of himself with daubs of colour, a rainbow, and to adult eyes: a ninja turtle. He approached them and bent down. He lifted the white, misshaped one with a hole right through it and found the key. The dull rattle of old bones almost startled him. Sam stilled the wind chimes and Michael noticed the flicker of curiosity on his face.

  ‘Witch’s’ Stones,’ he said.

  Now it was Sam who seemed startled. ‘Huh?’

  Michael gestured with the key at the wind chimes. ‘The stones with holes in they are called Witch’s Stones. It’s a local superstition. They’re thought to ward off evil spirits and provide protection from spells. Farmers put them in the corners of their fields, and everyone has at least one in their house. They’re all over the coast around here. Although, they are really only flint, with a weather-worn hole through the middle.’

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Sam let go of the chimes and stuffed his hands back in his pockets with a muted gesticulation that was neither a nod nor a shrug. Had that been a spark, a flicker of connection? If it had, it was now gone, and the boy was looking at his trainers.

  Michael filled the quiet. ‘The key was in the old hiding place.’

  The fly screen bounced back against his shoulder when he pulled it open. It never used to the do that, but everything else was the same, as if he’d travelled back in time. He could have been late home from playing in the fields, grazes stinging his knees, or stomping up the driveway home from boarding school after someone in the village picked him up and dropped him at the bottom of the lane. With the ghost of a thousand memories whispering to him like the sea, he slid the key into the door.

  Surprisingly, the key turned with ease and the door popped ajar.

  ###

  Despite the house having lain empty for so long, there was no post. There were no supermarket flyers with gaudy price drops, credit card companies fishing for debtors, catalogues for the more mature consumer—all faded, their edges curling like brittle fallen leaves for the door swept them aside—waiting for the prodigal son—or was it now sons? Indeed, there was only the emptiness of the house to great them.

  ‘Woah!’ Sam muttered.

  ‘It looks smaller from the outside, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  Like a church nave, the beach house had a broad central room-cum-corridor, stretching from the front to the back of the building. As a small boy, Michael had tried to play football and cricket in that space. Until his mother caught Michael and his father hiding the shattered pieces of her favourite Beate Kuhn ceramic sculpture.

  The floor was a herringbone parquet of English oak. There was a large central fireplace half-way down and off to one side. The angular stone chimney protruded into the space as an upended funnel. It was a relic of high interior design from the 1970s, when Michael’s father and mother rebuilt the family home after a lightning strike raised the castle to the ground atop Lorimer Hill.

  Opposite the fireplace, across the nave, was a nook with easy chairs. Then, on either side of the central area, were doors leading to unseen spaces. A mezzanine looked down on them from the final third of the building, but how to get up there was a secret hidden from a visitor’s view.

  A bright shaft of light followed them inside, cutting through the interior gloam. More light came through the back of the building and its glass conservatory. Michael’s mother always called it “the orangery”, which led to a back garden and then to the dunes beyond.

  ‘Come in. Have a look around. I’ll see if the phone is still connected.’

  Michael shepherded Sam with a light touch on the back. The gesture felt forced. He closed the door behind them and wandered over to the nook. Sheepishly, Sam looked around. He seemed so lost and unsure, and Michael didn’t have a clue what to do about it. Finding out you’ve a son would have been hard enough at the best of times, but right now, it was a bloody nightmare. The sale of the house had to go through. His entire portfolio hung on it, which was to say his new son’s entire fortune. Everything relied on freeing up the equity in this building and, more importantly, all the land attached to it. That would buy him enough time for the Chinese investors to warm up their cold feet and jump back into the project. The week before, it was just himself Michael had to worry about. Now, it was him plus a son. Even if, no, especially if they were going to come to the logical conclusion that Sam would be better off at boarding school, they were going to need the money. What did Michael know about raising a kid? Long ago, he’d decided never to have children. He’d always been adamant on the subject. That was probably why Tara never told him, not after that one stupid argument. That was so long ago, but regrets were a bit like junk mail in that regard, mixed in with all the other post life sent you. Did that make Sam junk mail, or the other kind? All these thoughts sprinted through his head as he picked up the phone.

  Halle-fucking-lujah! There was a ring tone, which was more than he expected. The phone was of the avocado green analogue variety, with its unruly cord twisted in multiple gordian knots, connecting the receiver to the rotary-dialler body. He rested the receiver between his head and shoulder and began to dial the number from his mobile’s contact list. As each digit rolled back, it began to occur to him that the phone shouldn’t be connected, and the house wasn’t covered in dust sheets. In fact, it wasn’t that dusty at all. Everything was as he remembered it. The phone, the position of the furniture, paintings, ornaments. Nothing had changed since his mother had last lived here, which was a touch longer than Michael. After his father’s funeral, neither of them wanted to come back.

  To be honest, he’d only thought about the place a handful of times over the years. One of those was with Tara, when she defended his father with an acolyte’s fervour, only a movie-nerd fangirl could justify. It led to an argument, and Michael storming out because she defended the indefensible. That shouldn’t have been the end, but pride and stubbornness meant he’d never called, and neither had she. He’d always been sad about that. He loved her. He really did. But eventually, that love faded, and she drifted from his mind, much like the beach house and Hernshore. It was sort of a gift Michael had. He could let things go and move on.

  He thought about all this while dialling because that’s how crap rotary phones were. And with two final digits remaining to be dialled, Sam shuffled up to the fireplace across from the nook. The boy fingered a small brass ornament of a boxing hare on the mantel and then caught sight of the oil painting hung on the chimney breast. Michael followed his son’s gaze. The skin of his scalp tightened, and a cold prickle of nettle stings flushed down his spine.

  ‘Hello, Bate- an- Prim-’

  Michael snapped back to the emergency at hand. The line was terrible.

  ‘Hello! Yes, it’s Michael Lorimer. I was expecting to meet Nush at my property at noon. However, we were a little late, and she doesn’t ap-’

  ‘-orry–an’t -ear you. Hel- hello?’

  Michael tried to make himself understood, as did the receptionist on the other end. It was probably Judith Bateman, one of the partners’ daughters, who was getting some summer working experience during the university holidays, in preparation for the business she would undoubtably slide into once graduating. She was nice enough. Not the sharpest pencil in the case, but that hardly mattered when your father was a founding partner in one of London’s most successful boutique real estate brokers, Bateman and Primrose. Judith couldn’t hear Michael, and that worked both ways. In the end, he gave up and put down the phone. He wasn’t beaten yet. He should have tried it on the way to the house, but he was so angry at Toby Tunstall he’d stormed right by it.

  ‘The line is terrible. I’m going to try the phone box at the end of the road.’

  Sam turned slowly from the oil painting. A quizzical look played across his features, and with a pang it reminded Michael of the boy’s mother. He could guess what Sam might want to ask. But questions about the macabre picture would have to wait.

  ‘Have a look around. Check out the old place. Just don’t...’ He stopped mid-stride.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘Never mind. I won’t be long. I’ll grab our bags from the car while I’m there.’

  The heat and bright light hit him on the steps of the stoop. He rolled his neck to loosen that tight feeling across the back of his skull. Then he alighted the creaking steps and huffed through his nose at what he’d nearly said to Sam.

  Just don’t go into the dunes.

  Stupid! Why was he finding this such an unsettling experience? All these memories he’d forgotten had been stirred up from his past. He told himself this was why he didn’t come back here. And he believed it.