A Blackwater Inn Story (Dietrich Sloane)

They called it a quiet night, but Dietrich knew better. The estuary had a certain tension to it—the weight—a stillness that meant someone, somewhere, was moving under cover of it. And in Appledore, stillness this complete was rarely innocent.

He had come to Northam Burrows to investigate a series of old smuggling routes for the next entry in the Ledger, expecting history and dust.

Instead, he found activity.

Fresh prints in the sand. A boat drawn too high up the shingle. And a lantern hung low beneath the lip of an eroded embankment—shielded from the road, but not from anyone who knew where to look.

A signal.

Not Victorian. Older.

Dietrich crouched, feeling the packed earth beneath his boots. To the untrained eye it looked like a fisherman’s emergency landing. But the rope coils were too tidy, the knots too uniform, and there—half buried in the sand—lay a shard of green glass worn smooth by decades.

Wrecker glass.

These shores had a long memory, and some families had longer. Dietrich pocketed the shard just as a faint whistle sounded from the mist line toward Westward Ho!.

A second whistle replied from behind him.

He wasn’t alone.

He moved quickly along the dune notch until he reached the old gun emplacement—one of the concrete forms left to rot since the war. Someone had opened a pit hatch inside it. A rope ladder descended into blackness.

A smuggler’s bolt-hole. Not used for decades. Until now.

He climbed down.

The tunnel beneath smelled of salt and damp rope. Wooden struts supported the ceiling, many freshly replaced. Someone had restored this place with care. Torches guttered along the corridor, their flames low, almost blue.

Then voices.

“…Revenue cutters are sweeping east tonight—keep it tight.”

“…Lantern’s out. He’ll make the run at slack tide.”

Dietrich pressed himself into the alcove as three men passed. Oilskins, boots thick with estuary mud, hands calloused. One carried an iron hook; another a short-barrelled flare gun for signalling. The third carried a ledger—the kind smugglers used to track buyers, not goods.

He caught only a glimpse of the page:

“Harbour Office – infiltration window confirmed. Old wrecking channel viable. Sloane interference likely.”

Dietrich exhaled through his teeth.

So this wasn’t history repeating. It was history revived.

And they were expecting him.

He moved further down the tunnel until it widened into a cavern where brackish water pooled through cracks in the stone. A small boat lay hidden there—black hull, muffled oars, the name PILGRIM’S GHOST painted faintly along its side.

A smuggling skiff. Light, silent, fast.

Movement rippled across the water.

A man emerged from the shadows, lantern shielded half-closed.

“Thought you were one of the boys,” the stranger said.

The blade came first—silent, precise. Dietrich caught the wrist, twisted, and the knife clattered into the water. The man lunged again; Dietrich countered with a shoulder strike that drove him into the stone wall.

The man slumped.

Above ground a whistle shrieked—urgent. Then cannon-fire from the estuary—warning shots from a Revenue cutter.

The raid had begun.

Dietrich grabbed the lantern, sprinted up the incline, and pushed out onto the dunes just as the night erupted into shouts, running feet, and distant oar-splashes. Smugglers scattered. Revenue men surged inland. A skiff overturned in the surf.

Dietrich kept to the ridgeline, invisible in the shadow of the dunes. He watched as the lantern signals flickered in complex patterns across the beach.

Wrecking codes. The very ones used here two centuries ago.

Someone in Appledore had revived a system the coast had buried—and perfected it.

When the night finally went still again, Dietrich stood alone on the ridge, the estuary dark as iron below him. The smugglers had vanished. The Revenue men would file their reports at dawn.

But only one thing stayed with him.

The ledger entry with his name.

They knew he was watching. And they weren’t afraid.

He turned back toward the village lights—a small cluster glowing in the deep stillness.

This wasn’t about contraband.

It was about control.

A Blackwater Inn Story (Dietrich Sloane)

The storm rolled in without hesitation—no build-up, no warning—just a violent wall of rain and wind smashing into Appledore like a fist from the dark. Windows rattled along Irsha Street. Boats groaned on their moorings. The estuary rose in lurching, uneven surges that slapped against the quay like something alive.

Dietrich knew storms. But not like this one.

This one had purpose.

He’d stepped out of the Blackwater Inn barely five minutes before when he heard the scream—sharp, swallowed by thunder, coming from the direction of the slipway. By the time he reached the cobbles, he saw a dark van fishtail around the corner, its tyres skidding across sheets of rain-water. A door slammed. A figure inside struggled.

Kidnapping. And in this weather.

They were counting on the storm to hide them.

Dietrich sprinted after the van, boots splashing through an inch of fast-moving water as wind tore at his coat. The van barreled toward the Burrows road, its brake lights jittering red in the gale. Another scream carried on the wind—fainter now.

He forced himself faster.

THE BEACHES

The van veered off the tarmac and lurched onto the sand, heading toward the dark length of Westward Ho! beach. Waves, swollen by the storm, punched the shore with enough force to shake the ground. Wind knifed sideways. Rain stung like grit.

Dietrich followed on foot, lungs burning.

Thunder cracked overhead—white and total.

For a moment he saw it clearly:

A silhouette in the back of the van. Hands bound. Head jerking toward him.

Then the darkness swallowed it again.

The van powered across wet sand, fishtailing wildly as the storm tried to rip it apart. Dietrich chased it until the engine whine shifted—higher, strained. They were stuck between two tide ridges, wheels spinning.

He sprinted.

But the kidnappers abandoned the van, dragging their captive toward the rocks at the northern end of the beach. Lightning split the sky, illuminating them as black cutout shapes hauling someone limp but alive.

Dietrich followed, slipping, scrambling, soaked through to the bone.

THE COVE

The kidnappers disappeared behind a curtain of spray where waves smashed into a narrow cove mouth. It was barely accessible in calm weather—tonight it was suicide. The sea flung itself at the stone with enough power to break a man in half.

Dietrich pressed in anyway.

Inside the cove the world narrowed to a tunnel of noise—wind roaring, water erupting against rock, the storm’s voice amplified tenfold. He caught the kidnappers’ torchlight bouncing off slick stone walls ahead.

When they saw him, one man fired.

The pistol shot vanished in the storm’s roar, but the muzzle flash lit the cove like a dying star. Chips of rock spat past Dietrich’s face.

He ducked behind a boulder, waited for the next lightning flash— Then moved.

He hit the gunman full-force, both of them skidding across algae-slick stone. The torch hit the water and died. A wave surged in, dragging the gunman away with terrifying ease.

Dietrich didn’t watch him go.

The others were hauling their captive up a steep path cut into the cliff.

He followed.

THE BURROWS

The storm hit the Burrows like an angry god, flattening grass, tearing at the dunes, turning the sand into needling sheets that scraped skin raw. The kidnappers’ lantern jerked wildly ahead of him as they staggered inland, the wind reducing them almost to silhouettes.

Dietrich felt the ground shift beneath his feet—floodwater running in rivulets, channels overflowing, familiar paths erased. The dunes became a maze of moving shadow and white water.

A scream carried again—closer now.

He forced his way up the next rise just as lightning carved the entire Burrows into stark, skeletal outline.

He saw everything:

The kidnappers. Their captive. And a waiting car on the far track, engine running.

They were seconds from escape.

Dietrich threw himself downhill, half-running, half-falling. The wind hammered him sideways, nearly flipping him over. The kidnappers saw him, shouted, drew something metallic.

He didn’t stop.

He hit the first man like a breaking wave, knocking him straight into a flooded gully. The second swung at him with a length of steel ladder tubing. Dietrich blocked it with his forearm, pain snapping up to his elbow—but he held on. A punch. A second. The man collapsed.

The third kidnapper shoved the captive into the back of the waiting car and jumped into the driver’s seat.

The headlights flared. Tyres spun. Mud sprayed.

Dietrich dragged himself upright, breath shuddering.

He had one chance.

As the car skidded past him, he lunged, grabbed the passenger door handle, and was nearly torn off his feet. For a moment he dangled sideways above the mud, body screaming, storm clawing at him.

He hauled himself inside.

The kidnapper’s eyes widened. They struggled—violent, desperate, blind in the rain. The car fishtailed, slid across the Burrows track, hit a rise—

—and rolled.

THE LANES

Dietrich crawled from the wreckage into a world of darkness pierced only by screaming wind. The captive lay dazed but alive beside him. The kidnapper was trying to limp away toward the narrow lane leading back to Northam.

Dietrich followed, stumbling over uprooted grass and debris.

Lightning lit the lane.

The kidnapper froze.

For a moment they faced each other— Dietrich’s silhouette framed against the storm, the kidnapper soaked, desperate, finished.

He bolted.

Dietrich caught him before the next thunderclap.

By sunrise, the storm had passed. The Burrows steamed. The estuary gleamed with silt and debris washed up from the night.

But the captive was safe.

And Dietrich—exhausted, bruised, coat torn and heavy on his shoulders—walked back into Appledore knowing one truth:

A Blackwater Inn Story (Dietrich Sloane)

The night carried a salt-heavy stillness, the kind that settles over the estuary before a weather change. Overhead, the sky was smeared with low, unmoving cloud—no wind, no tide churn, just a dense hush that made every footstep sound too loud. It was the sort of atmospheric pause fishermen used to call the weight, a pressure shift that made animals restless and locals superstitious.

Dietrich felt it pressing at his temples as he crossed the derelict boatyard at Pitt Lane, following the fragile trail of references he’d collected: miscatalogued land surveys, vanished Admiralty notations, an 1801 drainage plan someone had clearly tried to bury twice.

All signs had led here.

And now the weight was getting heavier.

A rusted padlock hung from a warped timber door on the side of the old outbuilding overlooking the mudflats. On the beam above it, in faint carpenter’s pencil, someone had once written:

“Lower hydraulic chamber sealed. Original function uncertain.”

The same wording he’d seen in archives across London, Paris, New York.

But this was Appledore. And no one had ever spoken of a hydraulic chamber beneath a forgotten local boat shed.

Dietrich pried the door open

and stepped into stale cold darkness.

Inside: dust in ridges, rotted trawler nets on the floor, and a series of stone steps he had not expected—descending. Victorian on the surface, but older in the way the edges rounded as if worn by hands long vanished. The steps led into a vaulted space far too large to exist beneath the boatyard unless entire foundations had been excavated and then forgotten.

Copper conduits—seamless, jointless—ran the length of the ceiling. Every twelve feet, a pressure valve gleamed faintly green with age.

He counted the spacing.

Twelve feet, to the inch.

Just like the suppressed diagrams he had been studying for months.

Dietrich moved deeper. The fog above seemed to echo here in the hollow of the chamber, filling its air with cold resonance. He whispered into it:

“Who built this?”

The reply came not in words but in footsteps. Quick. Hard. Coming fast.

He dove sideways just as a blade swept through the dark and grazed his ribs. A figure, hooded, silent, lunged again. Dietrich slammed him into a copper pillar—felt the pressure valve strain—and elbowed the attacker’s throat until he dropped. No time to see his face. More footsteps approached.

Dietrich ran.

The chamber’s far end narrowed into a shaft—vertical, copper-lined, rising upward into the unseen, exactly like the drawings from Victorian stations repurposed over older Tartarian hydraulic systems. He hauled himself up metal rungs until pistol cracks shattered the stone around him.

He climbed faster.

A bullet ripped his sleeve. A second rang like a bell off the copper wall just inches from his skull.

Above him the shaft opened into a torchlit workspace in the attic of the old boatbuilder’s loft—a room no local had set foot in for a century. There, on a trestle table, lay blueprints so old the ink had turned sepia. Mathematical grids. Hydraulic dome cross-sections. Copper-lining specifications. Pressure-differential equations referencing “pre-existing foundations.”

And one sheet labelled:

“Appledore Transfer Station – Atmospheric System Node. Hydraulic network: active.”

The paper was dated 1801.

Footsteps rose behind him. Dietrich grabbed the documents, vaulted through the attic window, and fell straight into the estuary mud. Cold shock hammered his lungs. A lantern beam swept across the water.

“Don’t move!”

Shotgun.

He moved anyway.

Bullets slapped the mud as he slid into the channel, letting the incoming tide drag him under the jetty timbers. He surfaced only when he felt the water shift above him. At the surface he heard the click of a lantern turning away, then silence.

He drifted half-drowned beneath Coldharbour until he reached the moorings. Only then did he crawl out and collapse beside a rowboat.

But the worst was yet to come.

The Folly Burns

Two nights later, he tracked the same attackers to The Folly—a long-demolished entertainment hall that once sat on raised ground outside Appledore. The ruins still existed only as blocked-off foundations, but someone had dug into them recently. A temporary wooden shack covered a stairwell going down.

Dietrich stepped inside. The door slammed behind him. Then—fire.

Accelerant splashed across the walls. Flames raced up the beams. A trap. Smoke clawed at his eyes as he forced himself down the stairs instead of up—counterintuitive but necessary. Below, the Folly’s cellars opened into another vaulted space. Larger than the one in the boatyard. Copper valves everywhere.

A second Tartarian chamber.

Not myth. Not rumour.

A network.

And Appledore was sitting on top of it.

But there was no time to study it. Flames tore down the stairwell like a lit fuse. Dietrich found a drainage culvert—too small, too black, too cold—but it was life. He crawled. Fire roared. Air dwindled. The passage spat him out into a ditch half a mile inland.

He lay there, smoking, coughing, staring at the sky.

Someone had tried to kill him. Not once. Not twice. Four times now.

Because he’d found something.

Something he wasn’t meant to.

Back at the Blackwater Inn

Lila poured him a whisky and said nothing. Dietrich unfolded the salvaged blueprint. Lila’s eyes narrowed:

“What is that?”

Dietrich traced the 12-foot grid pattern with a trembling finger.

“A map,” he said.

“A map of what?”

He looked toward the estuary window, where fog pressed like a living thing against the panes.

“A system built long before any of us,” he whispered. “Buried. Repurposed. Sealed. Erased. And someone in Appledore is still using it—or guarding it.”

“Why?”

“That,” he said, “is what they don’t want me to know.”

Lila glanced toward the door as the fog deepened outside, swallowing the jetty lights one by one.

“Dietrich,” she murmured, “you need to leave this alone.”

Dietrich sipped the whisky. The liquid burned down into the fresh wound at his ribs.

“No,” he said softly. “They tried to drown me, stab me, and burn me alive.”

He folded the blueprint carefully.

“That tells me I’m close.”

Outside, a copper hum rose beneath the ground—low, rhythmic, mechanical— as though the buried system, long dormant, was waking.

Dietrich looked toward the estuary with dread and resolve.