Robin Hood’s Bay is not arranged like a place that expects visitors.
It behaves more like a conversation between cliffs and sea that occasionally allows people to interrupt.
We arrived at the top of the village in late afternoon, where the road stops pretending it can continue any further and simply gives up into a steep descent of narrow streets and uneven stone steps.
Jack looked down first.
“That’s a long way,” he said.
Esmeralda smiled. “It always is here.”
Pedro was not with us. The absence felt normal in a way none of us commented on.
We began the descent together.
The houses leaned slightly inward, as though listening to the steps as we passed. The air changed every few turns—saltier near the bottom, quieter near the middle, and oddly reflective near the top, as if deciding whether it wanted to be sea air or not.
Twinkles noticed the first anomaly halfway down.
“The steps are numbered,” she said.
Jack frowned. “That’s helpful.”
“Not like that,” she replied.
She was right. The numbers were carved into the stone, but not sequentially in a way that matched our descent. Some repeated. Some skipped. Some appeared to belong to different routes entirely.
Esmeralda crouched to examine one.
“These weren’t made at the same time,” she said.
The stone beneath her fingers was damp.
Not wet from rain.
Wet in a way that suggested it had recently been underwater and was still deciding whether to admit it.
We continued downward.
At the bottom, the beach opened suddenly—wide, flat, and scattered with stones that looked as though they had been arranged and then politely left in place.
The tide was far out.
Too far out for comfort.
Jack checked the tide times on instinct, then stopped halfway through.
“It’s not matching,” he said.
Twinkles walked forward onto the wet sand.
“It feels like it’s already been here,” she said quietly.
Esmeralda joined her.
“Or like it hasn’t decided if it should arrive again.”
We walked across the exposed bay.
In the distance, the cliff face curved around the village like a protective hand that had forgotten whether it was holding or releasing.
Then we saw them.
More steps.
Not the ones we had just descended.
These were cut into the rock at the edge of the beach, leading down into where the sea would normally be.
Except there was no sea there now.
Only damp stone and the faint sound of movement beneath the sand.
Twinkles crouched at the top step.
“They go further,” she said.
Jack shook his head. “They shouldn’t go anywhere.”
Esmeralda looked out across the empty bay.
“They used to,” she said.
We stood there for a long time.
The steps did not change.
But the air above them did, slightly, as if remembering pressure from something that had once moved through it regularly.
Eventually, we turned back toward the village.
As we climbed, I noticed something I had missed on the way down.
Some of the steps were still wet behind us.
Even though the tide had not returned.
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