Everly's Walk: Part Five

On the sea shore, where everything is gray and green and the living is hard, nothing lasts. The paint on the circus tent would fade to dusty pastels. The houses would grow water-logged or rust. And the relationship between Caspian Blythe-Cameron and Everly Carrigan was bashed in by a south wind known as Elsbeth Deveraux whose father’s surname had been Crane. She preferred the French though, she told everyone in her snide accent. 

Where had she come from? the people of Everly’s Walk (which was not then called Everly’s Walk but rather “Carrigan Beach”, a title that made no sense since there was very little beach and quite a lot of jagged rocks on the Carrigan coast line) wondered. They knew, of course, that she had come in on a tug boat, making it look dull and busted with her beauty and class. She wore a shimmering dress of many layers and folds with a bodice far too tight and a neck line too low. 

Everly hated her, obviously, but she greeted her with a smile. It was not the custom of the Everly Carrigan to greet every stray who came in from the green waters, but she happened to be down on the docks at the time giving one of the captains, a drunkard with an impressive black beard, an earful. 

That was how Elsbeth first saw the crazy woman with red hair, waving her (admittedly very pretty) hands about insanely, fire in her nearly-violet eyes. She hardly noticed the rather frightened looking man, all brawn and sea-hardened leather skin. She was the type of woman who only notices a threat.

And it was not so much a greeting that Elsbeth received as a snapping-at, but then Elsbeth was not really such a nice girl and she undoubtedly deserved it for some crime or another.

Anyway, Elsbeth inquired where she might find the Blythe-Cameron home. Wasn’t she surprised (and loudly displeased) to find that she’d come in at entirely the wrong port and she should have to go all the way down the coast to reach Blythe-by-the-Sea? After Elsbeth stopped shouting loudly in French and Everly stopped shouting just as loudly back, the tug boat captain was able to have his voice heard long enough to offer the pretty Elsbeth a lift down the coast.

For the first time that day, Everly’s brow clouded; she enjoyed a good fight far too much to have let that bother her. But she did not want this Elsbeth Deveraux (Crane) getting away and taking all her secrets about Caspian with her. So she offered to take her herself.

Everly's Walk: Part Two

Blythe-by-the-Sea was a prosperous ocean town, built on seafood and surf. Made of white houses that dotted the shores like shells, it was a pretty enough place, a fond destination for families on holiday. Even the gulls dared not soil the pristine streets of Blythe, and the sun always shone there, making the water a clear blue-green.

Everly’s Walk was a preposterous ocean town up the shore from Blythe. Built on tug boats and trade, everything in Everly’s Walk was green or gray. The ocean, the glass, the seasick faces of the town’s people (who were notably averse to sea travel), sometimes even the skies, were a pale, unattractive sort of mint. Nothing grew in Everly, and so the ground was always charcoal stone. The houses were old, bent by wind and warped by storm, and, of course, gray. But it was outside of unfortunate Everly, not Blythe, that the once grand Carrigan House lived.

The Carrigans were the sole owners of Everly’s tug boat industry, and the town grew up from their money (which was also green). Though they still made far more than any townsperson in Everly, the Carrigan’s business had faded by the time Araby was born to the dusty glamor of things outraced. No one ever left Everly, and people rarely came. And the people who did come to Everly’s Walk were often the not-quite-right types. That was because the townspeople of Everly’s Walk did not deal in fish or fineries, trinkets or trifles. In Everly’s Walk they traded one thing and one thing only: tales. Not the lovely sort. Well, lovely in their way, but rather melancholy, nasty, stomach-roiling, even upsetting in their own right. 

And there were many tales to tell, most especially the tale of Everly Carrigan.

Comments, anyone? I'd love some feedback.

Everly's Walk: Part One

Part 1

Carrigan House was a crumbling old manor, perched on the edged of a cliff. Or it used to be. Rather, the cliff was perched under it. And then it wasn’t. Chunks of gray stone slipped from their precarious positions and plummeted to the green sea below, and parts of Carrigan House, that once stately mansion, went with them. Over time, the green sea collected enough souvenirs from Carrigan Cliff that a little island began to grow below, bathed in sea foam. 

The right wing of Carrigan House fell into the sea directly, when the first of the cliff began to go. Alice Carrigan, even then an old lady, had always said that the right wing was for those with no spine. That was probably because the right wing was the new wing, built on top of an old graveyard. To Alice Carrigan, the destruction of a graveyard was no fault, it was the cowardice of living on something so safe as hallowed ground that got to her. And all those modern conveniences as well.

The smallest dining room, remaining guest rooms, and half the ballroom fell away with the rest of the straggling cliff pieces. Alice Carrigan, who was fond of cliff diving, went with that batch as well. She left a message making it clear that she would be back when she recovered her home from the sea’s greedy, green fingers and not a moment sooner. Her granddaughter, Araby Carrigan, thought that her grandmother could simply not bear to watch her library tumble into the ocean with the rest of her life, and so she made it watch her leave instead.

They dragged the corpse of Alice Carrigan from the deep, mint pools of shallow water near the rocks that marked the edge of Carrigan Cliff. Araby could see it all from where she stood in the half-destroyed ballroom, wind wrecking her scarlet hair and howling along the jagged marble edges of the fallen-away floor. She refused to look as they removed the body, but still she caught glimpses of the limp, white-clad form, dripping and dead and covered in stony sand. She’d never seen Alice Carrigan look so frail or so free.

The beginning of my new short story, still under editing.