It was a windmill.
A windmill by the sea! 'My grandparents lived here,' he blurted.
'Oh, did they?'
'You don't understand. They lived near that windmill. It's the same one, I know it is.'
He still wasn't sure whether she felt his confusion. Memories rushed him, as if all at once afloat: he'd been lying on the couch in his grandparents' decrepit trailer, the huge head had loomed at the window, vague with dawn. It must have been a dream then too.
He followed June down the path. Chill fog trailed them, lapping the point. His thoughts drifted, swirling. What did his discovery mean? He couldn't remember his grandparents at all, not even what they'd looked like. They had been his father's parents - why had the man never mentioned them? Why hadn't he remarked that they'd lived here? The sun slid along the rim of the sea, swollen as though with glowing blood. Had his grandparents also been witches?
'Did Mike's grandparents live here, then?' June said. His mother stared at her. The spoon and saucepan she was holding chattered like nervous teeth. He was sure she was going to scream and throw everything away - the utensils, her self-control, the mask behind which she'd hidden to protect him: for how long? For the whole of his childhood? But she stammered, 'How did you know that?'
'Mike told me. The windmill just reminded him.'
'Is dinner ready?' Michael interrupted. He wanted to think everything out before questioning his father.
But June was opening her mouth to continue. The trailer was crowded, suffocating. Shut up! he screamed at her. Get out! 'Were they born here, then?' June said.
'No, I don't think so.' His mother had turned away and was dishing vegetables. June went to hold the dishes. 'So why did they come here?' she said.
His mother frowned, turning her back; within her frown she was searching. 'To retire,' she said abruptly.
His father nodded and smiled to himself, squeezing forward his ruff of chins. 'You could retire from the human race here,' June said sourly, and he wheezed like a punctured balloon.
As the four ate dinner, their constraint grew. Michael and June made most of the conversation; his parents replied shortly when at all, and watched. His mother observed June uneasily; he read dislike in her eyes, or pity. He felt irritably resentful, her uneasiness made his skin nervous. Night edged closer to the windows, blank-faced.
His father leaned back as if his weight had toppled the chair, which creaked loudly. He patted his quaking stomach. 'Just storing it up for the winter,' he said, winking at June.
His arms flopped around her shoulders and Michael's. 'You two go well together. Don't they, eh?'
But his wife said only, 'I'm going to bed now. I'm very tired. Perhaps we'll see you again,' which sounded like dutiful politeness.
'I hope so,' June said.
'I know we will,' Michael's father said expansively. Michael walked June to the bus stop. 'I'll see you at the club,' she said through a kiss. Smoldering cones of yellow light led the bus away, and were engulfed. As he walked back, twisted shapes of fog bulked between the trees. Nearby in the dark, something shifted moistly.
He halted. What had it been? Blurred trees creaked with a deadened sound, thin trails of fog reached out for him from branches. He'd heard a shifting, deep in the dark. A vague memory plucked at him. He shivered as if to shake it free, into the chill clinging night. A restless moist shifting. He felt as though the depths of the forest were reaching for his mind with ambiguous tatters of grey. He strode rapidly towards the invisible light. Again he heard the slow moist shifting.
Only the sea, he told himself. Only the sea.
As he emerged into the open, the clouds parted and the moon rolled free. The enormous shape in the open space glistened with moonlight. The unstable head turned its crawling face towards him.
The dream trailed him to Liverpool, to the central library, although the space and the head had faded before he could make them out - if indeed he had wanted to. But a rush of rain, and the bright lights of the library, washed the dream away. He hurried up the wide green stairs to the Religion and Philosophy Section.
He pulled books from the shelves. Lancashire Witches. North-West Hauntings. Ghostly Lancashire. The banality of their covers was reassuring; it seemed absurd that his parents could be mixed up in such things. Yet he couldn't quite laugh. Even if they were, -~›hat could he do? He slammed the books angrily on a table, startling echoes.
As he read he began to feel safer. Pine Dunes wasn't indexed in North-West Hauntings. His attention strayed fascinated into irrelevances. The hanged man's ghost in Everton Library. The poltergeist of the Palace Hotel, Birkdale. Jokey ghost stories in Lancashire dialect, ee lad. Rain and wind shook the windows, fluorescent light lay flat on the tables. Beyond a glass partition people sat studying, library staff clattered up and down open staircases, carrying scraps of paper. Reassured, he turned to Lancashire Witches. Pine Dunes. It was there, on three pages.
When he made himself search the pages they didn't say much. Over the centuries, witches had been rumoured to gather in the Pine Dunes forest. Was that surprising? Wouldn't they naturally have done so, for concealment? Besides, these were only rumours; few people would have bothered struggling through the undergrowth. He opened Ghostly Lancashire, expecting irrelevances. But the index showed that Pine Dunes covered several pages.
The author had interviewed. a group the other books ignored: the travellers. Their stories were unreliable, he warned, but fascinating. Few travellers would walk the Pine Dunes road after dark; they kept their children out of the woods even by day. A superstitious people, the author pointed out. The book had been written thirty years ago, Michael reminded himself. And the travellers gave no reason for their nervousness except vague tales of something unpleasantly large glimpsed moving beyond the most distant trees. But surely distance must have formed the trees into a solid wall; how could anyone have seen beyond?
One traveller, senile and often incoherent, told a story. A long time ago he, or someone else - the author couldn't tell - had wandered back to the travellers' camp, very drunk. The author didn't believe the story, but included it because it was vivid and unusual. Straying from the road, the man had become lost in the forest. Blinded by angry panic, he'd fought his way towards an open space.
But it wasn't the camp, as he'd thought. He had lost his footing on the slippery earth and had gone skidding into a pit.
Had it been a pit, or the mouth of a tunnel? As he'd scrabbled, bruised but otherwise unhurt, for a foothold on the mud at the bottom, he'd seen an opening that led deeper into darkness. But the darkness had been moving slowly and enormously towards him, with a sound like that of a huge shifting beneath mud. The darkness had parted loudly, resolving itself into several sluggish forms that glistened dimly as they advanced to surround him. Terror had hurled him in a leap halfway up the pit; his hands had clamped on rock, and he'd wrenched himself up the rest of the way. He'd run blindly. In the morning he'd found himself full of thorns on a sprung bed of undergrowth.
So what did all that prove? Michael argued with himself on the bus to Pine Dunes. The man had been drunk. All right, so there were other tales about Pine Dunes, but nothing very evil. Why shouldn't his parents go out at night? Maybe they were ghost-hunters, witch-hunters. Maybe they were going to write a book about their observations. How else could such books be written? His mind was becoming desperate as he kept remembering his mother's masked fear.
His parents were asleep. His father lay beached on the bed, snoring flabbily; beyond his stomach his wife could hardly be seen. Michael was glad, for he hadn't known what to say to them. He wheeled out the bicycle he'd bought from his first month's wages.