The village pile was the only one Freddie sorted by who, not what.
The others he could file by weather, or by smell, or by what the sea had done that night. This one would not go that way. Every time he went back to one of these stories, what he remembered first was a face, and then where he had been sitting when he saw it.
Señor Tiempo, who for sixty years could hear what a clock needed just by listening to it tick, and then woke one morning to find that time no longer made sense. His clocks now keep their own hours. One of them only chimes when something beautiful happens.
Francisco the Octopus, who keeps a library under the old dune, every object the sea ever handed over, each with its own hand-lettered card. Freddie found it by falling through the ceiling. His crown went sideways. He adjusted it.
Horatio the turtle, on the broad rock above the tide line, making a picture out of what the beach had given him. He would know what it was when it was done. Freddie spent the afternoon fetching sea glass in the right shade of green and still could not see the picture from the ground.
Captain Coral, who came in at low tide to settle a debt, and paid it with an old shell that holds the sound of this coast as it was before the lighthouse had its current lamp.
And Pedro, who landed on the garden wall at breakfast with a summons scratched into driftwood. The Coastal Seagull Parliament wished to see him about the shiny-thing incident. He needed a character witness by eleven. There might be a gavel.
Five neighbours. Listening back to them was the closest Freddie gets to paying calls in the evening, which is a thing he approves of in principle and rarely manages in practice.
An hour of it. Five tellings, back to back, as one night: the keeper says hello once at the top, and after that it is only the stories and the sea underneath them. It opens in the clock shop and ends on the cliff above the harbour, with the parliament in session.
Set a sleep timer or let it run. There is no order you are supposed to be in.
The longer night
There is a longer version of this on The Settle Premium. The same five neighbours, each story told once and then once more, slower, so that the second time you already know how it ends and there is nothing left to stay awake for. Nearly two hours, no ads, with the sea running on after the last one.
You can have it free for seven days.
The piles are getting smaller. There are a handful of nights left that did not fit anywhere, which Freddie considers a point in their favour.
As for the next season, you will be the first to know.