The Inland Tide

What it looks like, and what it does

A stone cellar with a flagged floor, ankle-deep in clear salt water. A lantern on a hook. A shoal of silver fish turning in the corner. A high-water line on the whitewash. A tide table pinned to the door in a farmer's hand.

Fills and drains on the lunar cycle. Higher at the new and full moon. Warm in winter.

What is known

The cellar of Long Acre fills with sea water at intervals of twelve hours twenty-five minutes. It rises to the knee, smells of kelp, carries sand and small shells, and recedes without leaving a damp mark.

The family eats well: the cellar yields mussels and, in spring, a sweet small flatfish. They have not had to buy salt in forty years.

What it can do

• Fills with seawater on a tidal cycle far from any sea
• Carries marine life up the cellar steps

Where it stops

• Affects only the cellar, never the rest of the house
• Follows the tide of one particular coast

An encounter

Kovacs checks the water at four every night with a stick. The night of the great storm the sea in the cellar rose to her waist, cold and fast, and carried a sailor's cap down the steps. She kept the cap. She learned the next day that a surge had struck the coast that night, and a trawler had gone down.

Hilda Kovacs, farmer, Long Acre farm, cellar, A spring night, 04:10

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Fourteen months of readings match the tide tables for a named harbour to within four minutes.
• rumor: That the cellar once flooded with a different sea.
• incomplete: The cap has not been returned. The family cannot decide whether it should be.

Still unresolved

The cap bore a name stitched inside. The trawler's register has a crewman of that name, who survived. He asks for it back each year.

Where it has been recorded

• Long Acre (confirmed) — Recorded by Hilda Kovacs, farmer.

Connected entities

• Slack Water — Both are tides that arrive where there is no shore. One lies still at the turn. The other turns into a cellar.
• The Patient Flood — Both bring the sea or a river into a house. The Tide is regular and kind. The Flood is neither of those things, and is the more careful.