Short story · 4 min read ·
The Lifeboat Crew's Hundredth Call
The Skerry lifeboat is turned out for a distress flare that has been seen on the same black water every November for a century, and this year the crew decides to answer it.
The Skerry lifeboat has been called out on the night of the first gale of November for as long as anyone in the village can remember, and for as long as the village has kept its records, the call has come from the same place: a flare, low on the black water a mile past the outer buoy, burning white for ten seconds and then gone. The coastguard log lists ninety-nine launches. Ninety-nine times the crew has gone out in the teeth of the weather, found nothing, and come home cold. The hundredth year is the first year anyone has asked why.
Ruth Hallam is the coxswain now. She inherited the boat from her father and his before him, and she does not believe in ghosts, but she has read the log all the way back to its first page, and she has noticed that every entry says the same thing in a different hand. *Flare seen. Proceeded to position. Nothing found. Returned.* On the page for the year 1908 someone has added, in pencil, *Nothing found, as before.*
On the hundredth November the flare comes up at twenty past eleven. Ruth sees it from the lookout hut, a small white bloom that hangs over the sea and sinks. She calls the crew. Six people come down the slipway in oilskins, shaking, and climb aboard without speaking. The engine coughs and catches. They pass the outer buoy in a rising swell, and Ruth takes the wheel and holds her course on the flare's last position.
"We could turn back," says Thomas Quill, who is the youngest of the crew and has a wife in the village who will be awake.
"We could," Ruth says. "Then we'd have to read the page again."
They run a mile and a half and cut the engine. The sea is calm inside the squall, as if the storm has drawn a line around them. The water is black and very still. Then, low on the surface, the flare goes up again: white, steady, ten seconds, close enough to show them the faces of the people in the water.
There are eleven of them. They are standing, not swimming, on the flat surface of the sea as if it were a floor. They wear clothes of a cut nobody has worn in a century, long coats and high collars, and their hair is wet and flat. They are not drowning. They are looking up at the lifeboat with the patient, expectant faces of people who have been told someone will come.
Ruth's throat closes. She has always thought she would feel fear, or grief, or the old pride of the service. She feels only a terrible, ordinary tiredness, the tiredness of a rope that has been pulled too many times in the same direction.
"Throw the line," she says, and her voice sounds like someone else's.
Thomas throws. The line goes out in a long curve and lands on the water beside the nearest figure, and the figure takes hold of it, and the rope goes taut and wet and steady in the crew's hands. They haul. The figure comes up over the gunwale without any splash, without weight, and stands on the deck dripping salt water that does not pool. Its face is a young man's, very calm. He nods at Ruth as if he is thanking her for a seat on a bus.
They bring in all eleven. Each one steps aboard, and each one nods, and each one stands quietly on the deck until the boat is turned for home. Nobody speaks on the way in. The squall lifts behind them and the stars come out, and by the time they reach the outer buoy the figures are no longer on the deck. Ruth looks down at the planking and finds only a scatter of fine grey sea-sand, and a line of wet footprints that stop at the mast.
At the slipway the crew sit in the lifeboat for a long time with the engine off. Then Ruth climbs out and goes up to the hut and takes down the log. She writes the date and the time, and the position, and under *Nothing found, as before* she writes a new line in her own hand: *Eleven brought home.*
Next morning, the coastguard calls to ask about the callout. Ruth tells them. They say the records show no vessel lost on that stretch in the last hundred years, and no distress call logged, and no incident to report. She says she knows. She says the boat came back full, and that it always has, and that she would like the other entries amended to say so.
The coastguard does not amend them. But the following November, when the first gale comes in and the flare rises at twenty past eleven low over the black water past the outer buoy, the Skerry crew is already on the slipway, waiting for the line to be thrown.