The late afternoon gale blew straight onshore. The February temperature was notionally forty, but the wind chill was near freezing. Nothing else living was above the sand, and I wouldn’t be there long. It was like bathing in ice water without toweling off.

Kitty Hawk was a cheap place to over winter, and I’d needed cheap for years. The disability pension kept me from starving but also from eating very well. Kitty Hawk in the cold months and Florida in the months when I percolated in my own sweat. I managed pot and beer money by being a live-in custodian to otherwise unattended houses. I lied to those who asked by saying I was a writer. Mostly, nobody asked.

I was joined in Kitty Hawk by a couple thousand overwhelmingly white folks who were retired, maintained infrastructure or lived off seasonal earnings. The Indians had named the area Carotank, or place of the geese. Since they still hunt geese in the fall and winter, I’ve always wondered why the name got changed.

The salt spray and sand particles started crusting my eyes and nose, and I retreated behind the dunes and into my elderly car. The beach was harshly beautiful, but I was too fragile to enjoy it. The car thankfully started and I drove down the beach road behind the dunes to Awful Arthur’s for my once a week, relatively low-priced dinner out.

Only regulars ate there in winter, and we nodded and said hello to each other. The odors were beer and seafood. We perched at the bar and exchanged gossip about missing members before subsiding into drinking and eating. That night a woman, a stranger, climbed onto the stool next to me and looked at a menu.

She was rugged looking, not ugly, but weathered like she worked a fishing boat. She ordered raw oysters and boiled shrimp. I ordered the rock fish. I half guessed that she was gay, but then she came onto me.

“My name is Alicia. Conrad, is it not?”

“With a heart of darkness.”

“Sorry? I did not understand that.”

Her accent was like a Slav speaking Victorian English, the vowels straining to find a home. I smiled. “Apologies, it’s just an old tired joke of mine. Are you local?”

Her own smile deepened the facial creases. As she leaned in to be better heard I got a whiff of salt and sea weed. It was pleasant. “Not really. But I am very familiar with the area. And I have learned a fair amount about you.”

That triggered an alarm, but anything I could have been arrested for was well past the statute of limitations. “Why would you bother?”

“You are more interesting than you give yourself credit for. But let us talk about other things. Did you enjoy the beach?”

“In a masochistic sort of way.”

We both laughed. Hers was honest and loud. We continued talking and laughing our way through another beer, then through a few beers and shots, and then back to the house I took care of, down a side street from Arthur’s.

The sex as I fuzzily remember it was really good— energetic and accommodating. I hallucinated at one point though, because I thought she picked me up by my armpits and swung me back onto her groin. Impossible of course, I must have outweighed her by fifty pounds.

Alicia was still there in the morning, statuesque and naked, brewing coffee. I decided it would be unmanly to put on clothes if she hadn’t, and quickly regretted the decision. This damned leaky old house let in the February chill.

“You were not as bad as I feared,” she said.

“Thanks, my mother would be proud.”

“Rejuvenate yourself with this drug, then we will talk.”

We drank two cups of coffee and ate the odds and bits of food that I had on hand. Then she pushed her plate to one side.

“You are a chamberlain, I believe, a custodian.”

I wanted to exaggerate, to self-aggrandize, but I had the feeling she already knew too much about me. “I just take care of houses while the owners are away.”

“As I said. My current factotum, as short-lived as your kind usually is, is mentally and physically infirm and must be put to pasture.”

Alicia had lost the corruptions of modern language usage and sounded, breasts swaying gently, like an out of date goddess. Or she was crazy.

“Ah, Alicia, it was a wonderful night and I hope we can get together again, but you should know that I can’t run a stash house or move drugs in and out for you.”

Her expression darkened and I could have sworn that the room darkened with her. “Save me from this cynically riddled age. You will do nothing of the sort, just the reverse, you must lead a mundane life, unnoticed by officials. In return I will provide a trust that enables a thoroughly enjoyable life and will occasionally return to cohabitate with you”

I decided to play it along. “In return for what?”

“You will, every day, visit a gravesite in a local historical cemetery. Every day without fail or there will be painful consequences. You will recite a short orison I will provide. You will not understand it, but it is phonetically spelled for easy reading. And you must live locally, without leaving the area for even a day, until you become too infirm to do these things.”

I smiled sadly at her. Alicia was charming and exciting and completely mad. A relationship I didn’t want to get into. “I’m sorry Alicia, but your terms are too stringent, a paid-for life sentence. But perhaps we could see each other again sometime.”

Her expression was inscrutable. “I think not. You have disappointed me but I will not exact vengeance. Live uncomfortably with your ignorance.” With that she stood and moved like drifting silk into the bedroom.

I stared at the cups and plates for a few minutes thinking I’d thrown away a really good thing, then also got up and went into the bedroom. But she wasn’t there, which was impossible. One doorway, windows nailed shut. I checked the tiny closet and under the bed—nothing. Just the lingering funk of sex and a whiff of salt and sea weed.

I went a little gaga of course and scoured the house. That evening, I went back to Awful Arthur’s and asked everyone from bartenders to busboys to regulars if they’d seen her or knew her. No one had.

After a few weeks I stopped asking questions, but started visiting centuries old cemeteries. Not to try and find a grave. To try and find a visitor.

***

Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had 550 stories and poems published so far, and twelve books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories where he manages a posse of six review editors, and as lead editor at Scribes Micro.