The Ferry Log

I logged the crossing as I had logged hundreds of others. One mud-spattered 4x4 heading east towards the anglers' cabins. Time, direction, vehicle registration number. My pen moved across the page, the angler's taillights disappeared up East Bank Lane, and that was that.

Most nights I filled perhaps two pages. Some nights I filled none. I set down the pen and looked up from the logbook.

The ferry platform was sitting on the western bank, 37 metres away across the black water, dry and still on the wrong side of the river.

The crossing had just ended on the eastern side. The platform should have been beneath my feet.

I rose from the folding chair, stepped out of the booth and walked to the edge of the eastern landing, checking the hauling cable where it passed through the guide roller. The cable was there, taut and properly tensioned, running straight across the River Avel to the western anchor assembly.

The platform stood empty at the far landing, waiting.

I hauled it back by hand. The cable came in smooth and heavy, hand over hand, exactly as it always did. The platform travelled across the water without resistance.

When it touched the eastern landing, I tied it off and checked both mooring cleats, starting on the east side. Then I crossed the platform and checked the western connection where the cable looped through the guide. Thirty-eight metres of braided steel cable, anchored into concrete on both banks. The tension was correct.

The river was high after the previous week's rain, but the current was nowhere near strong enough to drag the platform sideways against a tensioned cable. Nothing was wrong with anything I could measure.

I returned to the booth and opened the logbook. The last entry was the angler's 4x4, the one I had just recorded.

On the next free line, I wrote, "Platform displacement - no cause."

I stopped with the pen still touching the paper, then began turning back through the entries. There it was again, three days earlier: Platform displacement - no cause. Another two days before that. Another on Saturday night. A fifth entry appeared nine days back.

Five unexplained displacements in nine days. Five times I had written precisely the same phrase.

I turned the pages slowly, studying the recent logs.

The paper was wrong. The sheets were smudged and slightly buckled, the way paper goes after it has been soaked and allowed to dry. I ran my thumb across one page and felt the ripples left by water damage.

But the booth had stayed dry.

There had been no rain since last Tuesday, and even then the plywood walls had kept everything inside bone dry. The earlier pages were clean and flat. Only the entries from the past nine days had that damp, wrinkled look.

I closed the logbook and sat back in the folding chair, looking through the booth's open window at the river.

The water was black and smooth, broken only by an occasional ripple where the current pressed against a submerged branch. The platform rested quietly against the eastern landing. The cable hung in its usual shallow curve between the banks.

I thought about the man who had come through on three consecutive nights.

Each time, he had arrived on foot out of the darkness where West Bank Lane ended at the landing. Beyond it stood the locked gate to a Forestry England track which ran roughly 1.5 kilometres into the conifer plantation before stopping. There was no settlement out there, only a small Forestry England car park, plantation spruce and disused extraction tracks that had not seen machinery in years.

The first time he appeared, I thought little of it.

It was late, perhaps 23:00, when I heard footsteps on the western landing before I saw him. He looked about forty-five and wore a grey waxed-canvas jacket. He had no bag and there was no vehicle waiting behind him.

He asked to cross east.

I asked his name for the log.

"Peter Varga," he said.

His voice was flat and even. Not unfriendly and not strange in any way I could then have named.

I took him across. He sat on the platform rail and said nothing during the journey.

When we touched the eastern landing, he stepped ashore and walked up East Bank Lane towards the anglers' cabins. I recorded his name and the time, and that was the end of it.

The second time he appeared, I recognised the jacket. The same grey waxed canvas, the same absence of a bag, the same solitary walk out of the plantation track.

I asked his name and again he said, "Peter Varga."

I nearly asked whether he had crossed the previous night, but did not. People came out of the plantation on foot from time to time. Wild campers, stalkers and walkers who left their cars in the Forestry England car park and went farther into the woods than they had intended.

It was not my job to interrogate them.

The third time was that night, shortly before the angler arrived in his 4x4. The same man, the same jacket, the same name. This time I watched him more closely during the crossing.

His jacket was soaked through. Not merely damp, but saturated as if he had been standing in heavy rain for hours.

It had not rained that night.

He did not shiver. He did not appear cold. He simply sat on the rail and stared towards the eastern bank for the entire journey.

When the platform touched the landing, I bent to secure the stern mooring cleat. When I looked up, he was gone.

He was not walking along the lane. He was simply gone.

There were about 9 metres of open gravel track before the treeline, with nowhere he could have disappeared during the two seconds my eyes had been off him. I had stood there for nearly a minute, staring at the empty lane, before returning to the booth and recording the crossing.

Peter Varga | west to east | 22:43.

Now I sat with the closed logbook in front of me, its pages carrying the faint smell of damp, and repeated the explanations I had been giving myself for the past nine days.

The platform had moved because the current had caught it at an odd angle. The pages had become wet because I had spilt something without noticing. The man had walked out of the plantation for reasons of his own, and those reasons were none of my business.

I looked at the black water and did not believe a word of it.

At 23:46, the western bell rang twice.

I looked up from the logbook and saw him standing at the western landing. The same grey waxed-canvas jacket. The same posture. The same absolute stillness.

He was not shifting his weight or looking about like someone who had been waiting. He was simply there.

I left the booth and walked to the hauling cable. The River Avel lay flat and black between the banks, with no current visible on its surface.

The platform made its usual noises as I hauled it across: the scrape of steel over water and the creak of the cable passing through the guide rollers. Thirty-seven metres took about three minutes at a steady pull. I kept my eyes on the western landing throughout.

He stepped aboard the instant the platform touched. No hesitation. No glance in either direction. He walked to the rail, sat and faced east.

I secured the stern cleat and straightened.

"Name for the log."

"Peter Varga."

His voice was flat. Not cold or unfriendly, simply flat, the voice of someone stating a fact which required no elaboration.

I nodded and began hauling us back towards the eastern bank.

The crossing took three minutes. I had made it thousands of times, and I knew exactly what three minutes felt like on that river. That night it seemed longer, perhaps because I was watching him instead of the cable.

His grey waxed-canvas jacket was soaked through. It was not dark merely around the shoulders, as it might have been after a brief shower. Water saturated the fabric across his chest and arms.

It had not rained that night. It had not rained since last Tuesday.

He was not shivering. He did not rub his hands together or tuck them beneath his arms. He did nothing at all.

He sat on the rail and stared at the eastern bank. He did not blink, shift his weight or look down at the black water passing beneath the platform.

I had seen passengers withdraw into themselves during a crossing. People became tired. People became quiet. This was different.

Peter Varga seemed to be staring at something particular on the far bank, something fixed, and nothing in the world could have made him look away from it.

The platform met the eastern landing with a soft bump. I released the cable and bent to fasten the stern cleat. Two seconds with my eyes lowered and my hands on the rope: loop it round, draw it tight.

When I looked up, he was gone.

He was not walking up the lane or vanishing into the treeline. He was gone.

About 9 metres of bare gravel lay between the landing and the alders and willows, and the night was clear enough for me to see every part of it. There was nowhere to go in two seconds. Nowhere to hide and no time to run.

The lane was empty.

I stood holding the rope and staring at the place where he should have been walking away. Three consecutive nights. The same man, the same jacket, the same name and the same impossible disappearance.

I secured the cleat and returned to the booth.

My hands felt steady, but my chest had tightened. It was the constriction that came when you knew something was wrong but could not yet give it a name.

I sat down and drew the logbook towards me.

Peter Varga | west to east | 23:47.

I printed it in the same neat block capitals I had used on the previous nights. The same name and the same direction. The nib scratched across the paper, unusually loud, as though the booth had become quieter around me.

Three nights. The same name.

I told myself he was staying at one of the anglers' cabins. I told myself he walked out of the plantation for reasons of his own, and those reasons did not concern me. I told myself East Bank Lane contained shadows I could not see from the booth, places into which a man might slip unnoticed.

I did not believe any of it.

In the margin, I added: Passenger left eastern landing - subsequent direction unknown.

The pen felt heavier than it should. My handwriting looked wrong, the letters too careful and deliberate.

I set the pen on the open logbook and stared out at the empty lane. The ink remained wet on the words subsequent direction unknown.

The storm arrived around 01:00.

I had been sitting in the booth, staring at that marginal note, when the wind rose and the temperature fell by about 6 degrees C in what felt like seconds. The alders and willows along both banks began thrashing, their branches striking one another, while the plantation spruce bent behind them.

The river changed from black to muddy brown as the current churned sediment from the bed. The single bulb in the booth flickered once, twice, then steadied.

Through the window, I checked the platform. It was still on the eastern side, exactly where it belonged, tied to the landing behind me.

The council radio crackled.

"Ferry Post 14, this is Highways control. Come in, Daniel."

Elaine Brooks's voice.

I checked my watch. It was 01:14.

Elaine never called after 21:00. In two years of operating the ferry, I had never heard from her after dark unless something had broken or the council was closing the crossing for maintenance.

I lifted the handset.

"This is Ferry Post 14. Go ahead."

"Log no more crossings tonight," she said. "Regardless of who arrives, keep the platform on the eastern bank."

Her voice was careful and flat, the way someone sounded when reading out a decision already made, after considering precisely what to say and deciding in advance that there would be no explanation.

I looked at the empty river. The rain had not yet begun, but the air carried the metallic smell that came before it.

"Understood. May I ask why?"

The radio remained silent for a moment.

Then Elaine said, "The Met Office has upgraded the severe-weather warning. Secure the platform and remain in the booth until the storm passes."

It made sense, except that a weather warning did not explain why she had rung me personally at 01:14 or why she had said regardless of who arrives. If control had received an emergency update, she would normally have said so at once.

I pressed the transmit switch.

"Elaine, the name I've been entering in the log. Peter Varga. The same man, three nights running. Grey waxed-canvas jacket, no vehicle, walks in from the Forestry England track. He crossed again tonight, and I didn't see where he went after the platform reached the landing. Do you know who he is?"

Nothing.

The silence lasted long enough for me to check the green signal lamp. It remained lit. The radio was working.

When Elaine's voice returned, it was quieter.

"That name is in the council archives," she said. "Don't look it up."

I stared at the handset.

"What does that mean? What's in the archives? Why shouldn't I look?"

The radio erupted in white noise, so loudly that I pulled the handset away from my ear. I tried adjusting the council channel, but the storm had swallowed the signal.

It was gone.

I placed the handset back in its cradle and looked towards the river. Wind gusted hard enough to make the booth creak.

That name is in the council archives.

Don't look it up.

I tried the radio once more. Nothing but static.

The western bell rang twice.

I froze.

The double ring was the signal for someone waiting to cross. I did not move the ferry.

I had confirmed less than two minutes earlier that it was on the eastern side. I turned towards the booth window and looked at the eastern landing.

The platform was there: steel deck, guide rollers and the modern Gloucestershire County Council river emblem painted on the stern rail, exactly where I had left it.

The bell rang twice again, with the same rhythm and interval.

Then it stopped.

I stood slowly and walked to the doorway, gripping the frame.

Thirty-seven metres of black, storm-churned water separated me from the western bank. Rain began falling in scattered drops, heavy enough to sting my face.

I looked at the western landing.

The ferry platform was there.

Full-sized, steel and unmistakable. The same platform that stood behind me at the eastern landing.

I turned and checked the east again. It was still there. Platform, cable, everything apparently normal.

I looked back west. The other platform remained at the far landing.

My hands began to shake.

I told myself it was the cold. The temperature had fallen suddenly and I was not dressed for it. But that was not the reason.

I had worked this crossing for two years. I knew the ferry. I knew the cable. I knew the distance between the banks. And I knew a steel platform could not occupy two places at once.

Yet I could see it on both banks.

I stepped out of the booth and approached the eastern landing as the rain thickened. At the edge, where the cable should have stretched taut across the river, I found it lying in coils at my feet.

Loose. Slack. As though somebody had unreeled all 38 metres of braided steel cable and abandoned it on the wet planks.

I stared at the coils, trying to force them into sense.

The cable ran from a concrete anchor on one bank to another on the opposite side. Thirty-eight metres of 6 mm braided steel, tensioned across 37 metres of river to haul the platform between them.

It could not become slack unless the distance between the banks had somehow collapsed to nothing.

I looked up. The river remained in place, moving beneath the rain. There were still 37 metres of black water between the landings, the current swollen by the previous week's rainfall.

The cable could not be slack, but it lay before me like a dead snake.

The western bell began ringing.

Not the normal double signal. It rang continuously, the same blow repeated without pause or variation.

I stood with the coiled cable at my feet while the bell hammered across the water, unable to move. My legs would not answer me. Everything felt wrong: the rhythm of the bell, the shape of the coils, the smell rising from the River Avel.

I forced myself to turn and return to the booth. My hands were shaking so violently that I had to grip the door frame to steady myself.

The logbook remained open on the desk where I had left it.

Every line on that night's page was filled.

The entries were in my handwriting, the same record repeated over and over:

Peter Varga | east to west | time not recorded.

I counted them.

Fourteen lines. Fourteen crossings.

I remembered making none of them. I remembered writing none of them. Yet the handwriting was mine.

I knew the way I formed the capital P, the angle of the V and the short vertical strokes I used between the name, direction and time. Every entry bore those marks.

But I had not written them.

The bell continued ringing.

I needed to stop it. I needed to inspect the mechanism and discover what had gone wrong. But to do that I would have to bring the platform across and step onto the western bank.

I returned to the landing and took hold of the cable.

It was taut again.

Normal tension. Normal resistance.

The river was 37 metres wide once more. The cable stretched between the banks as if it had never been otherwise.

Hand over hand, I hauled the platform across. The cable passed through the rollers as it should, the steel deck riding level above the current.

The bell ceased when the platform touched the western landing.

I tied off and stepped ashore.

West Bank Lane was gone.

In its place, a narrow, unmade track led between the trees. It was deeply rutted, with standing water in the hollows. It was not a road, not even the gated Forestry England route I knew. It looked like an old extraction track, perhaps from the plantation's earliest days, perhaps older still.

The air smelt wrong.

Brackish water. Tidal mud. Salt marsh at low tide. The smell of the Severn Estuary, though the crossing lay about 65 kilometres inland.

I turned towards the treeline and the bell mounted on its post.

A woman's voice came from the darkness.

"You keep carrying people who have already crossed."

I knew that voice as surely as I knew my own name, as surely as I knew the beat of my own heart.

It was my mother's voice.

She had been dead for three years.

"You need to stop."

I could not move. My legs locked and my chest constricted. I stood at the edge of the western landing with the ancient track before me, the stink of salt marsh in the air and my dead mother's voice among the trees.

Headlights swept across the eastern bank behind me.

I turned. A saloon car was waiting at the eastern landing. Someone wanted to cross.

When I looked back west, the council-maintained lane had returned. Unmarked tarmac, a narrow single-track carriageway with passing places and white roadside marker posts. The rutted track was gone.

The air smelt only of the river.

I boarded the platform and hauled it east, my hands shaking so badly that I nearly lost my grip twice.

The saloon car rolled onto the deck. Its occupants were a man and a woman in their thirties, apparently travelling to the anglers' cabins for the weekend.

They said nothing. Neither did I.

Despite Elaine's order, I carried them across in silence, secured the platform at the eastern landing and entered their crossing in the log without looking directly at either face.

Then I took out my mobile phone.

Five minutes later, the couple's taillights had vanished along East Bank Lane towards the anglers' cabins and their gravel car park.

The booth was quiet. The storm had moved east, leaving the air thick and still, the sort of silence that made me conscious of my own breathing.

Elaine had told me not to search for the name.

I opened the Gloucestershire archives online catalogue and typed Peter Varga into the search field.

The site loaded slowly. One result appeared: a scanned accident report from 1988.

I opened it.

The writing was difficult to read. Parts of the scan were dark and others faded, as though someone had photocopied a photocopy before placing it in the archive. The heading, however, was clear.

Gloucestershire County Council Highways.

Incident report.

3 September 1988.

I scrolled down.

A man named Peter Varga had drowned at that crossing on 3 September 1988. During a flood-stage crossing, the chain ferry's western anchor assembly had failed. The platform had swung sideways in the current.

Peter Varga, the sole passenger, had fallen into the River Avel. He was forty-four years old. His body had been recovered two days later, roughly 2.5 kilometres downstream. He was the only casualty.

The council had rebuilt the ferry the following year with reinforced anchor assemblies.

I read the account twice, then continued down the page.

There was a grainy black-and-white photograph, apparently taken from a driving licence or work identification card. A man in his mid-forties stared directly into the camera with the blank, neutral expression people adopted for official photographs.

He wore a grey waxed-canvas jacket.

I put the phone on the logbook and stared at it for a long time.

Then I picked it up and read the report again.

The western anchor pin had pulled loose during flood stage. The platform had swung sideways in the current. Peter Varga had entered the water. His body had been found two days later, roughly 2.5 kilometres downstream, caught in a tangle of fallen timber near the district boundary.

I thought of the man who had stepped aboard on three consecutive nights. The grey waxed-canvas jacket. The flat voice. The way he stared towards the eastern bank throughout every crossing and vanished the moment the platform touched the landing.

The photograph on my phone showed the same jacket.

I opened the logbook.

That night's ordinary entries were where they should have been: the angler's mud-spattered 4x4 and the saloon car carrying the couple. Before them were the three crossings I remembered, one on each consecutive night, all bearing Peter Varga's name.

But there were more.

I turned back through the previous sixteen days, scanning every page. Most records were routine: 4x4s, vans, saloon cars, the occasional motorbike and pedestrians bound for the cabins or plantation.

Scattered among them were eleven additional entries.

Peter Varga | west to east | time not recorded.

Eleven crossings I did not remember.

The handwriting was mine. I recognised the shape of the capital P, the angular V and the way my final letters trailed below the line. My pen, my hand, but no memory of writing any of them.

Some entries appeared on pages which should have been blank, on nights when I was certain nobody had crossed. Nights when I had sat in the booth for eight hours without hearing the bell once.

Yet the records were there, dated and written in my own hand.

The first unremembered entry had appeared sixteen days earlier. Before that, the log contained only ordinary crossings.

There were eleven forgotten entries in all, separate from the three visits I consciously remembered. Every one gave the same name and the same direction.

I sat before the open logbook while the photograph from 1988 glowed on my phone.

The booth seemed smaller than it had an hour before. The single bulb overhead flickered once and steadied.

The man in the photograph wore the same jacket as the passenger I had carried on three consecutive nights, and apparently on eleven other occasions I could not remember.

Peter Varga had drowned at that exact crossing in 1988, thirty-six years earlier, while trying to reach the eastern bank.

I thought about the way he sat on the rail. The way he never spoke except to give his name. The way his jacket was saturated but he never shivered and never looked cold.

He had not looked like anything.

I thought of his fixed gaze towards the eastern bank and the way he vanished as soon as the platform arrived.

I placed the phone face down on the logbook and looked towards the dark river, the photograph of the grey waxed-canvas jacket still shining beneath the screen.

The mist rose without warning.

One moment I could see the landing planks and the black line of the cable crossing the water. The next, I could see nothing. Not the booth walls. Not the window frame 15 cm from my face. Not my own hand when I raised it before my eyes.

I stepped backwards and struck the folding chair, nearly falling.

The air was wrong. Too thick. Too cold.

I could not tell whether my eyes were open or shut.

I reached for the plywood wall, but my hand passed through empty space where the wall should have been.

My boot struck something solid. I looked down, trying to see what lay beneath me.

The deck was there, but it was no longer steel.

It was made of old wooden planks, rough-sawn timber that would have filled a palm with splinters if touched carelessly.

I took another step and the platform shifted beneath me.

It was not the slight settling movement I knew. It lurched violently sideways, forcing me to seize the rail.

The rail was there, but it was not the modern one. The metal was thinner. The joins were crudely hand-welded.

On the stern post was an obsolete county highways crest painted in white, an oak tree at its centre instead of the modern council river emblem. That crest had been replaced in 1996. I had seen it on old Highways signs and equipment.

The River Avel was in flood, higher than I had ever seen it. Black water raced beneath the platform, deafeningly loud. The current struck the wooden hull with a hollow booming that made my teeth ache.

The platform lurched again and threw me hard onto one knee.

The cable was pulling wrongly. I could feel the changing tension through the deck and sense the western anchor assembly slipping.

Someone was shouting.

A man in a grey waxed-canvas jacket clung to the rail about 3 metres away. His knuckles were white and his face was turned towards the western bank.

He was shouting at me, but the river swallowed his words.

I forced myself upright. The platform swung sideways again, more violently than before, and I saw what he had been trying to tell me.

The western anchor pin was halfway out of its receiver. The cable remained threaded through the guide, but the pin holding the assembly together had risen by roughly 25 mm. Each hard pull from the current worked it farther free.

If it came out, the platform would swing loose. The current would carry it downstream towards the Severn Estuary, with nothing to arrest it.

The man in the grey jacket shouted again, and this time I heard him.

"The pin! Get the anchor pin back in! It's pulling out! Get the pin in!"

I threw myself across the deck.

My boots slipped on the wet planks and I fell onto my stomach, sliding towards the anchor assembly, my hands scrabbling for purchase.

The pin was within reach, half out, its steel surface glinting in the darkness. I seized it with both hands and shoved down.

It did not move.

The current struck again. The entire platform tilted, and the pin rose another 50 mm.

If it cleared the receiver, we were finished.

I braced my boots against the deck and drove the heel of my palm against the top of the pin with all my strength.

It seated.

The sound was clean and final, steel striking steel. The platform swung level and held.

Agony flared through my palm.

I drew back my hand and saw a clean cut across the base of my thumb, where the pin's sharp edge had sliced through the skin. Blood ran down my wrist.

The man in the grey waxed-canvas jacket turned towards me.

His face was wrong.

All its features occupied the proper places, but it did not move as a living face moved. There was no flicker in the eyes, no breath and no alteration of expression.

It was perfectly still, like the face in the archive photograph, as if something printed had been raised before me.

He did not speak. He did not blink.

The mist returned, thick, white and cold.

When it cleared, I was standing inside the booth.

The plywood walls had returned. The window, the folding chair and the logbook were all where I had left them. Outside, the River Avel was calm, a flat expanse of black water with no flood current. The ferry was steel again and rested quietly at the eastern landing.

My palm was bleeding.

The cut was real, in precisely the place where the anchor pin had torn my skin.

Blood ran between my fingers and dripped onto the floor. I pressed my palm against my shirt, but the wound remained wet and would not stop bleeding.

Then the western bell began to ring.

It did not stop.

I looked through the booth window towards the western landing.

The ferry platform was there, and it was crowded.

Roughly two dozen people stood packed together on its steel deck. Every one of them wore wet clothes. Every one stood motionless. Every face was turned towards me.

No one hauled the cable.

I pressed my bleeding hand harder against my shirt and watched.

The cable tightened by itself.

The platform began moving east across the river with no operator at the hand pull and nobody touching the hauling cable. The figures did not move. They stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the booth and watching me.

I understood that they were not multiple versions of Peter Varga.

Peter Varga was the solitary passenger who had appeared night after night, asking to cross. He was the man who had drowned in 1988 and had been trying ever since to reach the eastern bank.

These others were different.

They were the other people who had drowned in that stretch of the River Avel, reaching back farther than I could account for. They were using the crossing as the living used it, because the eastern bank rose towards higher ground and that was where the ferry went.

The platform travelled steadily across the black water. No current pushed it. The only sound was the cable running through the guides.

It met the eastern landing with a soft bump.

I left the booth. At first my legs did not seem to work properly, but I forced them forwards.

At the edge of the landing, I stood with my bleeding palm pressed to my shirt and watched the figures begin to disembark one by one.

They passed without looking at me. Their clothes were saturated, water streaming from jackets, shirts and trousers, yet their feet made no sound on the planks.

They walked up East Bank Lane towards the anglers' cabins and the council road beyond, a slow procession of drenched, silent figures vanishing into the darkness and climbing towards higher ground.

I did not move. I watched them pass.

One figure stopped beside the booth window and placed a hand flat against the glass.

It left no mist, condensation or mark.

Then the figure lowered its hand and followed the others up the lane.

The last of them stepped from the platform.

The bell stopped.

The silence which followed was absolute. There was no wind, no sound of water and no night birdsong. Only the empty ferry at the eastern landing and the lane stretching dark and still towards the trees.

I returned to the booth.

The logbook was on the desk where I had left it.

I sat in the folding chair and opened it to the current page.

Every page was full.

Not only the entries from the past nine days or the previous sixteen days. Every page, back to the first record of my two-year tenure, was covered in writing.

The handwriting was not mine.

The entries were crossing records: names, directions and times. I turned the pages and saw that they extended farther back than the physical capacity of the logbook allowed. There were more entries than pages, more names than the book could possibly contain, all written in the same unfamiliar hand.

Neat. Careful. Endless.

I closed the logbook and set it on the desk.

Outside, the cable fell slack.

Through the window, I saw it lying in loose coils on the planks as it had earlier. Then, slowly, over the course of a minute or two, it tightened until its normal tension returned.

The platform settled against the eastern landing.

The river was calm. Flat black water, without current or movement.

The sky began to brighten in the east, grey light spreading across the alders and willows and touching the plantation spruce on the far bank.

The storm was over.

I remained in the booth with the impossible logbook before me, the sky paling, the River Avel flat and quiet and East Bank Lane empty.

Elaine arrived at 06:00 in a council Highways pickup with Gloucestershire County Council livery.

I heard its tyres crunch over the gravel, then the engine stopped. A door opened and closed. Her boots sounded on the landing planks.

She entered the booth and picked up the logbook without asking.

She opened it to the first page, examined that and the next, then began turning the pages more rapidly until she reached the back.

Every page was full. The handwriting was not mine. Names, directions and times occupied every line from beginning to end, with records extending beyond the number of pages the book could hold.

Elaine closed it.

She did not comment on what she had seen or ask me to explain. She tucked the logbook beneath her arm and looked at me with the expression of someone who had no intention of offering an explanation.

"The council is decommissioning the ferry," she said. "A proposal for a bridge over the River Avel at this crossing has been approved. Construction begins in October."

I stared at her.

"The same proposal that's been submitted and stalled for twenty years?"

She nodded.

"That's the one."

I waited for her to continue. She did not. She merely stood with the logbook beneath one arm and her keys in the other hand.

"You knew what was at this crossing," I said.

For a moment, she looked at me without any change in her face.

"The council knew."

That was why the bridge proposal had repeatedly been filed and stalled. Someone had always found a reason to delay it.

Elaine lifted her keys.

"It's done now."

I wanted to ask what that meant. I wanted to know precisely what the council knew and how long it had known. I wanted to ask whether other attendants had seen what I had seen, whether they had written names they could not remember writing, whether any of them had returned from an accident thirty-six years in the past with a fresh wound in their hand.

I asked none of it.

Elaine was not going to answer.

"Get your things, Daniel," she said.

"I'll take you back to the council highways depot."

I nodded and turned back towards the booth. My flask was on the desk where I'd left it. I picked it up.

Otherwise, the desk was empty. The council radio was switched off. The cable diagram was still taped to the wall above the window. Everything else belonged to Gloucestershire County Council.

I turned to leave and stopped.

A grey waxed-canvas jacket lay folded on the operator's chair. It was dry. Not damp, not drying, but dry, as if it had never been wet. I stood in the doorway holding my flask.

My palm was still bandaged where the anchor pin had cut it. The bandage was tight around my hand, the gauze clean and white. Beyond the window, the River Avel lay flat and ordinary in the early light. The ferry platform was at the eastern landing.

The cable was correctly tensioned between the two banks. Elaine was standing beside her Council Highways pickup, the logbook tucked under her arm, waiting for me.

I looked at the jacket on the chair. Grey waxed canvas, without stains or marks, folded neatly in the way someone folds a jacket they are leaving behind for the next person to find.

I left it on the chair and walked out of the booth. The landing planks felt solid beneath my boots. The air smelt of river water, mud and wet alder. The sun was rising over the treeline on the eastern bank, casting long shadows across East Bank Lane.

I walked along the eastern landing towards Elaine's pickup. I did not look back at the booth. I did not look at the chair inside, or at the jacket folded upon it. The grey waxed-canvas jacket remained where it was, on the operator's chair in the decommissioned booth.

I stepped off the eastern landing for the last time without looking back.