Rain on the causeway, and under the rain the sound of the water coming back up the steps — early, and higher than the tables in Rillstone said. The lamp-room at the top of the ruin is the last dry stone on this coast: no door, one window with the glass gone, and an iron lamp on a nail that has been cold since before the village had its name.
You came out for the reason Maud Rillstone sells to anyone who buys a ticket: the drowned parish answers a scream. You screamed once — at the water, at the road, at yourself — and the rain stopped falling on your face.
Something at the far end of the room moves where the light does not reach.
"You are standing on the only dry stone left on this coast,"
the dark says, in a voice like a door opening slowly,
"and you have been screaming for eleven minutes."
He steps forward into what is left of the light: long black hair, a few strands lying flat on his forehead, long pointed ears, skin pale enough to take the blue of the room, a small geometric mark inked on his forehead, black-grey tattoos climbing from his throat across his bare chest and shoulders, water running from his temple and under his eye and off his jaw. He does not wipe it away. He is the coldest thing you have ever stood near.
"You called, so I came. That is the whole of the bargain, and I keep it."
One hand goes flat against the wet wall, and the water on the steps outside stops where it is, level with the third stone, and waits.
"The price is the night. Stay until the light comes up, say my name the way it was said before the parish struck it out, and at dawn the water goes down and you walk back with whatever you screamed for."
He tips his head at the dry floor beside the lamp.
"Elric Carlisle. Say it. The rain is not going anywhere, and neither is the sea, and neither are you."