Sunday, October 23, 2022
👻🎃Sunday's Short Stack🎃👻: A Distant Drum by Amy Rae Durreson
Christmas is coming… but Alex is running away.
Panicked by the prospect of spending Christmas with his boyfriend’s disapproving parents, Alex flees to the old houseboat in the Norfolk Broads his uncle left him. But when a freak snowstorm traps him there, Alex soon realises he’s not the only heartbroken lover haunting the shores of Halsham Broad.
Two hundred years ago, drummer boy Jack Sadler drowned skating over thin ice to meet his lover. Now, whenever the Broad freezes over, he returns and brings a curse with him.
And every night Alex spends trapped in the icebound boat, he hears the beat of a distant drum draw closer…
OMG!!!! Nothing says Christmas like a good old fashioned ghost story and Amy Rae Durreson definitely has a doozy of a one with A Distant Drum. I stumbled onto it by accident and I am so glad I did!
I won't say too much because I don't want to give anything away, this is definitely one story you have to experience yourself to fully appreciate the creepified factor. Snow and ice storms can be spooky enough(believe me I know I'm a lifelong resident of Wisconsin) but throw in a little history, doomed lovers, and you have a recipe for a very scary Merry Christmas😉 The details the author adds to the distant drums from the title, well let me just say I swear I could hear every beat, every scrape, every chill in the air.
So if you love holiday romance but are looking for something different, a little grit to your Christmas cookies than Amy Rae Durreson's A Distant Drum is right up your alley.
RATING:
1. Thursday Night
The houseboat door was stiff, the wood a little swollen with the damp and the lock hard to see in the grey winter twilight. I eventually managed to shove it open and step inside, navigating the steps down from the deck more from memory than anything else. It was cold inside, and dark, and I dropped my backpack hastily and fumbled across the well—three steps forward and a shuffle left before my knees bumped the wall, and I realised that I’d been shorter last time I came here.
The houseboat door was stiff, the wood a little swollen with the damp and the lock hard to see in the grey winter twilight. I eventually managed to shove it open and step inside, navigating the steps down from the deck more from memory than anything else. It was cold inside, and dark, and I dropped my backpack hastily and fumbled across the well—three steps forward and a shuffle left before my knees bumped the wall, and I realised that I’d been shorter last time I came here.
It still smelt the same—petrol, wood polish, and under it all the cool, faintly salty bite of the water below. Did it smell like this in summer, when the tourists came to rent it out, or was it only in winter that the old scent of the place came rising out of the woodwork? I half-expected to catch a hint of over-brewed tea, or Gabe’s roll ups.
My eyes were adjusting to the light now, and I hadn’t been far off—the mains switch was right in front of me. I reached up and flicked it on. The fridge began to hum in the galley, something groaned and stuttered in the hull, and a red light came on somewhere high on the wall of the saloon which opened from the well. I leaned back and hit the light switch by the door on the second attempt.
The saloon didn’t look the same. It was a hell of a lot cleaner than it had been when Gabe lived here, for a start. It was probably weird to feel nostalgic for overflowing ashtrays, dog-eared paperbacks, and tea-stained mugs, but I did.
Ah, fuck it, I might as well come out and admit it was Gabe I missed, the old git, and now I could spend the whole of Christmas weeping into the lining of my coat.
Partly because I wasn’t going to take said coat off until I’d got the heating going. Back when Gabe had lived here, there had been a single crappy plug-in heater which ate electricity like Gabe went through a bag of Tetley’s, but I’d signed off on the installation of a proper furnace last year, on the advice of the rental company. It would extend the season at either end, they had told me, and I’d been both too busy with work and aching from the loss of the last family member who liked me. I hadn’t wanted to deal with anything about the boat myself.
She’s got a name, numpty, Gabe grumbled in my memory. She’s a lady, and even a lad with no taste for the lasses can show her some respect.
The rental company had given her some twee name in line with their company policy—Halsham Dancer, I thought, or maybe, Halsham Dreamer. I’d never been able to keep it fixed in my head. To me she was, and would always be, Lovely Lily.
I said now, slipping back into childhood habits, “Hey, Lily, milady, help me out. Where’s your heating switch?”
The wind sighed through the reeds along the side of the creek. An owl called, long and eerie. Somewhere out in the darkness, on another boat or, more likely, in a passing car, someone had their music on loud enough that I could just hear the beat, even out here in the darkness.
I sighed and went back to get my bag. If I could get a phone signal, I could check the emails about the installation and find out where—
There was a leather folder sitting on the low bench beside my bag. Embossed letters on the front read Guest Information.
It had probably been there before. It had been dark when I’d come in, and I hadn’t been looking for it. All the same, I remembered all the stories Gabe had told me when I was a kid, and ducked my head, muttering, “Thanks, Lil.”
The switch was in the kitchen. While the boat slowly heated, I stashed the groceries I’d brought with me in the fridge—nothing but beer and service station sandwiches, in proper Gabe style—and wandered through the rest of the not-quite-familiar rooms. It was all very clean and charming, but it felt a little too sanitised to be the Lily. There was even a plaque on the wall outlining her history in an antique font—from her wherrying days on the Thames in the 1930s to her presence at Dunkirk to a mastless retirement here on the edges of Halsham Broad. Most of it was new to me, and I patted her wall fondly, feeling an odd swell of pride in the old girl. “Gabe always said you were an old trouper. Guess he was right.”
As the air warmed, I began to feel more at home. I’d never been here in the winter—even Gabe had been reluctantly dragged away to endure a family Christmas, but I’d been released to Gabe’s care every Easter and for a week every summer. I could still remember the relief of that train ride, each rattle of the tracks drawing me farther away from the boy my parents wanted me to be, until I exploded off the train at Norwich to hurl myself at Gabe and his dog—first Frodo, then Galadriel, and last of all Elrond, all of them smelly, shaggy, and of thoroughly mixed lineage, none of them allowed to visit the London-dwelling parts of the family.
It was only now that I wondered what favours Gabe had traded to get those weeks.
The darkness was different at this time of year. There was none of that lingering light that clung to a summer’s night even when the sun was down, or even the fresh vastness of a starry April night. In December, the darkness felt heavy, clustering close around her windows. I filled the kettle, put it on to boil, and then went back outside, drawn by that absolute darkness.
The air tasted so crisp and cold it stung my mouth. Looking out where I knew there was water, I could see nothing but the black depth of night. To the north, where the village of Halsham clustered around the marina, a couple of lights showed, but it was hard to tell how far away they were. Farther to the south-east, I could just see faint glimmers from the coastal village of Gorsey. The moon was the barest thin crescent, offering no light. Under my feet, the deck was already slick with frost and I couldn’t hear or feel the usual sway of the water beneath the Lily. Had the broad frozen?
The owl cried out again and I could hear that faint beat of music stripped of all its grace by distance.
I wasn’t expecting the sudden shrill of my phone, and jumped enough that I almost went skidding across the deck. I’d left it inside and rushed to get it despite the sudden clench of guilt in my gut. I should have known a hasty text message wouldn’t have been enough, and I’d been relying on the fact that I’d never known a signal at Halsham Broad before to put off what was going to be a monumental reckoning.
“Hey,” I said, closing my eyes.
“So you are alive then?” Nik snapped. “I’ve been trying to contact you for the last two hours.”
“Didn’t you get my text?”
Nik took a long breath and then let it out in one furious huff. “Yes, I got your fucking text. But for your information, needed some time—back in the New Year does not actually tell me anything useful. Like, for example, where the hell you are!”
“I’m fine.”
“Fine is not a place in England.”
“I’m sure it’s a place somewhere, though. I mean, there’s Finland and Finchley, which are both close.” I could usually get a laugh out of Nik if I babbled enough, and I didn’t want to fight. Nik wasn’t stupid. He knew why I wasn’t there.
He didn’t laugh. “Are you in Finland or Finchley?”
“No.”
He grated out, “So, where the fuck are you?”
“I’m—”
“Because you should be here, packing your bags to go to my parents for Christmas.”
“Your parents hate me.”
“Oh, for fuck’s—” He stopped himself and said, “My parents do not hate you.”
“They absolutely hate me. They think I seduced you away from being their good little heterosexual Catholic son.”
“Hate to break it to you, darling, but you were hardly my first.”
“Yeah, but I was the first one they met, right? And it was a disaster.”
“Not that much of a—”
“Disaster,” I emphasised.
Amy Rae Durreson is a quiet Brit with a degree in early English literature, which she blames for her somewhat medieval approach to spelling, and at various times has been fluent in Latin, Old English, Ancient Greek, and Old Icelandic, though these days she mostly uses this knowledge to bore her students. Amy started her first novel a quarter of a century ago and has been scribbling away ever since. Despite these long years of experience, she has yet to master the arcane art of the semicolon. She was a winner in the 2017 Rainbow Awards.
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