Thieving Fear

THIRTY-TWO

'Look at it now,' Hugh protested and swung around, brandishing the shattered mirror, but there was nobody to accuse of the damage. He was alone on the beach.

The cliff seemed to loom over him as the landscape borrowed blackness from the sky, unless his vision was growing as dark as a tunnel. He was scarcely aware that the mirror had slipped from his fingers. If he didn't hear it fall, no doubt that could be blamed on the amplified pounding of his heart, which was pumping his face hot as shame. He'd driven Ellen away by not caring how sensitive she'd become about herself. He'd been so determined to make her look in the mirror that he'd neglected to consider how threatening she might find it. 'Ellen, I'm sorry,' he called, but the wind was as good as a gag. At least she couldn't have gone far while his back was turned, however little she might like him to find her. The only concealment within hundreds of yards was a vertical ridge of the cliff just a few paces away, and now he noticed a trail of marks in the sand. At first he hadn't realised they were footprints because they were so partial, but they led from beside him to the far side of the ridge. 'There you are,' he said and followed them.

He thought he was answered, but not as he might have expected. He heard a stuttering hiss like a thin surreptitious giggle behind the ridge, and had to assume it betrayed how nervous he'd made Ellen. 'I'm sorry,' he murmured. 'You mustn't hide from me.' How desperate was she to do so? Hugh could have imagined there was only space in the niche for someone much thinner than even Ellen had grown. 'I didn't mean –' he said as he stepped forwards, but there was no reason to continue. Nobody was behind the ridge.

As Hugh stared at the expanse of clay he heard the shrill sound again. It was an intermittent whisper of sand that was trickling over the edge of the cliff. Ellen couldn't have gone up there unobserved, but she'd had as little time to hide anywhere else. All the same, he had lost her or – perhaps worse still – had overlooked her. It left him feeling unutterably lost himself.

'Ellen,' he cried and heard the mocking whisper of the sand. Another shout that left his throat raw started bones rattling restlessly together, unless it was the wind clattering the branches of shrubs on the cliff. A supine shape reared up at the water's edge and split into airborne fragments – a flock of birds. A distant form threw itself flat in the water and went under, crushed by the fishing boat of which it was the reflection. A thin silhouette was standing in wait for Hugh when he moved away from the ridge. It was the spade, and its having remained where he'd left it suggested that it might be the solitary fixed point he could rely on. He dashed to it and clutched the handle with both hands. 'Ellen,' he yelled.

Suppose his shouts were driving her away? She could well have had time to dodge out of sight while he'd been wandering under the delusion that he could find his way again. Could she have taken refuge in the abandoned hulk of a boat? Surely she didn't loathe him so much that she would lie among the rubble, but wasn't it more a question of how much she loathed herself? He was clinging to the spade while he craned on tiptoe in an attempt to see into the boat before he risked making for it when the rudiments of a body sprang up beside him.

He nearly lost his grip on the spade, not to mention any sense of where he was, in the moment it took him to realise that the faceless shape was his shadow on the cliff. The sun had prised up the lid of black cloud above Wales, spilling light across the beach. It seemed to delineate movement near the water. Not just the pools left behind by the tide but every trace of moisture on the sand had grown as blinding as the exposure of the sun, so that Hugh had to slit his eyes in order to distinguish the blurred silhouette at the river's edge.

It could only be Ellen, even if he didn't understand how he'd overlooked her. The loss of perception was so close to unforgivable that his face blazed with more than sunlight. As the outline of the silhouette began to flutter, he was afraid she was shivering until he realised that her clothes must be flapping around her thin form. The spectacle of her standing alone, surrounded by trembling clumps of grass on the beach as harshly bright as scraped tin, distressed him so much that he could barely speak. He let go of the spade and cupped whichever hand it was by that side of his mouth. 'Ellen, come back. It can't be safe.'

Although she didn't turn, she must have heard him, because she took a pace away from him. How treacherous might the sand be if it was as wet as the light made it appear? He snatched his other hand off the spade and was about to yell more of a warning when he grasped that the mere sound of his voice might be intolerable to her just now. Instead he padded as fast as he stealthily could across the beach.

The route was even less direct than it looked. The sand around the numerous pools exuded water just as deep if he strayed too close. Rocks that promised to act as stepping-stones across expanses of mud proved to be lumps of it into which his feet sank. More than one narrow elongated stretch of water pretended to be shallow enough to walk through until he was nearly at the margin, and then he had to tramp the entire length of the obstacle, because all the points where he thought he could jump across turned out to be too wide. Whenever he was diverted away from Ellen he had to keep glancing back for reassurance that she hadn't disappeared again. She seemed not to have stirred, and he would have liked to think she was waiting for him. He was still unable to distinguish her as more than a bony sketch against the intensifying sunlight. How could the wind be fluttering the outline of her head? Of course, it was her hair.

The shoreline was by no means as close as the perspective made it seem. In any case the dazzle that had settled on the beach, collecting in the furrows of the sand as well as permeating every scrap of water, rendered his vision nearly useless. He almost trod in the next extensive pool until he saw how wide and deep it was. The detour would take him hundreds of yards further from Ellen, and he seemed no closer than he had been five minutes ago. He was growing desperate to speak to her, to persuade her to come back – and then, blushing at his stupidity, he understood that he didn't need to shout. He dug out his mobile and keyed her number.

There was no immediate response, and he wondered if the cliff was blocking the signal. The display showed a call in progress, however. A wind blundered into his ears, so that he was barely able to distinguish Ellen's ringtone, which sounded like a shapeless cry. For a moment he assumed the wind was also why it sounded more remote than Ellen appeared to be. Then the wind subsided, and the twitching clumps of grass did, and there was no question how distant her phone was. Not only that: it was behind him.

Ellen must have dropped it in her haste to flee. Hugh saw her realise as he did. At least, the figure turned sideways towards him and the sound. Its profile was alarmingly unstable with the fluttering of hair blurred by the light on the river. Then the light finished jittering as the wind dropped, and Hugh was able to make out the profile, such as it was. The head was as hairless as a skull. The material that had kept flapping was all that remained of the face.

Hugh was staring in paralysed fascination as the entire outline of the silhouette recommenced flickering with the wind when Ellen's ringtone ceased, having completed its word and the next few jolly bars. He clutched his phone to his ear and had begun to gabble a warning that was almost incoherent with panic before he heard the automatic message. 'Stay where you are,' he could hardly wait to plead. 'Call me and say where you've gone.'

Was the silhouetted figure listening? Except for the instability that outlined its bony shape, it hadn't moved. It might have been waiting for him to stray within range – and suddenly Hugh realised how easy it had been made for him to come this far, particularly given the state of the beach. He'd been too grateful for his sense of direction to suspect why it had been returned to him. How long would it stay with him if he retreated? The only way to find out was by turning his back on the figure at the shoreline. He thrust the uncommunicative mobile into a hip pocket and had to remind himself how far away the figure was before he could face the cliff.

He was dismayed to see how far away it was – considerably farther than the river's edge. His extended shadow slanted towards it, petering out at a pool that drowned the shadow of his head. The spade was standing guard in front of the hole in the cliff, some distance upriver. The route to it was a maze of water and glistening sand that the lurid light rendered indistinguishable from mud. Which path had he originally taken? He was so far from identifying it that he could easily conclude there wasn't one. A pace in the direction of the spade sent his shadow forwards, and he was terrified that it would be joined by a companion. He twisted around, shading his eyes. The shoreline and the beach along it were deserted.

At once he sensed a presence at his back. He even thought he heard the surreptitious flapping of its ragged skin. As he spun around so wildly that he almost sprawled into a patch of mud, a black shape jerked out its hands. It was his shadow, but had the figure at the shoreline cast one? In any case it might be thin enough to hide behind him without betraying its position. He imagined whirling helplessly in a desperate attempt to locate his tormentor while it continued to dodge out of sight, his gleeful partner in a nightmare dance that would snatch away the last of his sense of direction. Could the apparition on the shoreline have been designed to lure him away from his only weapon, or from Ellen, or both? Perhaps the panic that was close to shutting down his mind was meant to keep him where he was. With an inarticulate cry that might have expressed rage or determination if the wind hadn't stifled it, he dashed towards the cliff.

He could barely see his footing, but this drove him heedlessly onwards. He slithered over mud, flailing his arms as his shadow mocked his efforts not to topple headlong. He waded through pools that filled his shoes with water and pasted his trousers to his shins. He stepped on rocks that gave beneath his weight, revealing they were lumps of mud that hung onto his feet and relinquished them with a sound like the smacking of satisfied lips. All this appeared to bring him no closer to the spade or the cliff, which shone beneath the black sky as though it and its bristling grassy scalp had just been dug up. Whenever he was tempted to detour around an obstacle, he imagined turning aside to find the ruin of a face at his shoulder. Even when he reached dry sand his feet sank into it, so that running felt like floundering in slow motion through a medium that ought not to have existed outside a dream. Only the sight of the spade, and the impression of a pursuer that was delighted to bide its time until it chose to seize him, kept him struggling onwards as if he could catch up with his faltering breath. His shadow parodied his labours and taunted him with how much closer it was to his goal. It was on the far side of a pool through which he had to splash; it was supine on a stretch of mud that didn't yield beneath it, instead waiting to give way underfoot; it was pretending that an extensive brownish slab was as solid as a rock. At last it touched the expanse of dryish sand on the far side of which the spade was printing a T on the cliff. Hugh's shadow lurched for it, and as he followed, the hole in the cliff gaped to remind him that its tenant was elsewhere. He grabbed the handle and swung around, wielding the tool like a scythe. Nobody was behind him, or behind him, or behind him.

Then where was the figure he'd seen? Had it followed Ellen, wherever she was? Hugh clung to the spade and faced the mouth of the river as he groped for his mobile. He was using the wrong hand for whichever pocket it was, but he was afraid to let go of the weapon, if indeed the spade could function as one. He only just managed to extract the phone without dropping it, and then he had to key Ellen's number wrong-handed. He brought the mobile to that side of his face and heard his call arrive. He lowered the phone and strained his ears, to no effect beyond tuning in the sound of his unnerved heartbeat. He could hear the shrivelled ringing of the mobile in his hand, but there was no sign of Ellen's ringtone.

The hole in the cliff emitted a derisive whisper, and he couldn't be sure it was soil shifting in the wind. Ellen's mechanical message came to an end as he pressed the phone against his ear. 'Call me back,' he pleaded. 'I need to know where you are. You could be in danger. I'm not just saying that. Don't stay away. We need to be together.'

He'd run out of words. No one who could be any use to a writer would have, but he hadn't time to bemoan his inadequacy. He terminated the call and thumbed through the list to Charlotte's name. She wasn't replying either. She must be inside the hospital, but her unresponsiveness aggravated his panic. 'I've lost her. I've lost Ellen,' he confessed, but how did that help? 'Call her when you get this,' he tried urging. 'Tell her she's got to call me. Call me if you speak to her. Call me anyway. Somebody call me.'

His words were letting him down again before deserting him. He had an unhappy sense that they were playing tricks on him. How long might he have to wait to hear from Charlotte? At the very least until she made her way out of the hospital and listened to his message and contacted Ellen or gave up the attempt. He shouldn't leave her to try to raise Ellen. He redialled Ellen's number and lifted the phone, and then he snatched it away from his face. Her mobile was singing, faint with distance but increasingly unmistakable, somewhere above him.

Did this mean she was coming back? Hugh opened his mouth to shout, but the risk of scaring her off silenced him. He shoved the mobile into his nearest pocket and sprinted to the path. As he began to scramble upwards her ringtone fell silent. He hoped she might call to discover what he'd wanted, but his phone stayed mute. He climbed faster than he'd ever climbed in his life, digging the spade into the path for extra speed. It couldn't have taken him much longer than a minute to reach the top and crane his head above the edge of the cliff. Nevertheless the common was deserted.

Hugh levered himself onto it with the spade and leaned on the handle as he took out his mobile again. He jabbed the redial key, and in just a few seconds he had his answer, somewhere ahead. The crescendo and its conclusion weren't as distant as they'd seemed; up here they were more obviously muffled. He advanced a tentative step, and another faltering one, and then he was hurrying across the common, almost blind with the light on the grass and with panic that his shadow mimed by brandishing its spade. Ellen's phone wasn't in the distance. It was under the earth.