Thieving Fear

'I don't understand what this does.' As he brought the mirror within inches of his face he saw that the distant mass of pale light was a nebula if not a galaxy. How much of this was an illusion? The blackness within the glass appeared to have begun an endless fall, and Hugh felt on the brink of one, as if the egg-shaped glow at the centre of the mirror were eager for his company. The impression made him blurt 'Maybe you –'

'He's got out, Hugh.'

Hugh supposed he ought to feel as disturbed as Ellen sounded, but not yet – not until he identified the appearance in the mirror. Perhaps it was shaped less like an egg than like an eye. 'He left this, didn't he?'

'We don't want it. We don't want anything to do with it. Drop it, Hugh. Get rid of it. It's just an old mirror.'

Hugh tilted it towards his face. To his surprise, however nervous, he couldn't see himself. He seemed unable to see anything except the ill-defined shape of an eye – more like a simile or a substitute for one, all that his mind was able to encompass – in the midst of infinite darkness. It must be an eye, since it was widening as if to help him comprehend its essence. 'It's more than that,' he insisted, because it seemed crucial that Ellen should see – so important that he managed to relinquish the sight in order to hold the mirror out to her. 'Really, look.'

She turned her eyes away, but not fast enough. Her face convulsed so violently that he might have imagined it was desperate to take a different form, any form. When she grabbed the mirror he thought she meant to risk another glance, and then he saw her plan. 'Ell –' was as much as he had time to protest before she flung the mirror past him to smash on a rock.

'What have you done?' he cried and stumbled to retrieve the mirror, which was lying face down on the rock. When he picked it up no glass was left behind, and he thought it might not be broken after all. As he turned it towards him, however, the mirror gave way, though it seemed less to shatter than to ripple like dark water into which an object had just sunk. He even thought he saw glittering blackness spill out of the frame to glisten for an instant on the sand. 'Look at it now,' he complained and swung around, brandishing the empty frame. Then it dropped from his hand, although he didn't hear it fall. There was no sign of Ellen anywhere on the beach.

THIRTY-ONE

It wasn't a rubber mask, grotesque enough to give children nightmares and sufficiently rotten to disgust anyone. The eyes were part of its discoloured substance, which quivered like a misshapen lump of jelly as if to prove it was alive, however little it deserved to be. It was Ellen's face, one glimpse of which was enough to make her hurl the mirror away. 'What have you done?' Hugh cried.

He cared more about his find than he did about her. She couldn't blame him, even for turning his back as if he'd been waiting for an excuse to finish enduring the sight of her. How might he look when he had to face her again? Which would be worse – unconcealed revulsion or another instalment of his pretence that she wasn't as hideous as he'd just betrayed she was? She didn't think she could bear either. She floundered away as fast as her swollen legs would work and stumbled behind a vertical ridge of the cliff.

It was prominent enough to hide her bulk, but how long would Hugh be fooled? She felt pathetically childish, like both an inept competitor at hide and seek and an outcast sent to stand in a corner. She could see nothing but brownish clay, a section of which was faintly stained by an almost formless blotch, her shadow. Her nostrils were growing clogged with the smell of moist clay or of herself. If only the night of which the sky was a promise would fall and render her invisible! She heard Hugh utter some remark, so muffled that he seemed not to care if she heard, and then he called her name.

While she didn't press her face into the clay, she hunched her shoulders as if this might somehow make her less apparent, a kind of magic only a child would believe. Hugh's next shout was more worried and more distant, and she was afraid he might lose his way without her, except how could he on a beach? He didn't, because in a few seconds she heard him behind her. 'There you are,' he said.

She inched into her dark corner and felt as if she were speaking to the clay. 'Can't you just let me be?'

'What are you being?'

'You tell me, Hugh. Go on, the truth.'

'A worm.'

Perhaps after all she hadn't wanted so much truth. 'Well, thank you,' she complained.

'You're welcome.' After quite a pause Hugh added 'In a manner of speaking, I mean. That's what you look like, what I said.'

It seemed that his refusal to see how she'd changed had been her last defence. 'Well then,' she said bitterly, 'take a good look.'

'I am.'

'Can't you stop?' Ellen pleaded, not just about looking. 'Don't you understand anything?'

'I'll stop if you stop being a worm.'

This was too much, and she twisted around to confront him. 'How do you suggest I do that?'

'You have now. You looked as if you wanted to crawl inside the cliff.'

Was he secretly amused by her reaction or by his own wit? If she'd persuaded him at last to be less wary of her feelings, she wished she hadn't tried so hard. 'Maybe I did,' she said.

'Don't crawl in yet. You're meant to be helping.'

'Remind me how.'

'You can make sure nobody comes along while I'm digging.'

'Have you forgotten what I told you?' Ellen said as that fear came flooding back. 'He's got out.'

'Unless he's gone further in.'

At once she was aware of the cliff at her back. She imagined hands sprouting from the clay to drag her close to whatever face might burst forth. As she lurched away from it, Hugh recoiled an extravagant step. 'What's wrong?' she was shocked into asking.

'Nothing really. Come to think, that's exactly what we need.'

'I don't understand you.'

'You can do that if anyone wanders along. Chase them away. Scare them off.'

'You think I'm that bad.'

'I just want you to feel you're some use.'

He could have been offering her an illusion to distract her from her state, though she wasn't far from feeling he no longer cared whether he convinced her. If he'd had enough of her at last, she could only blame herself. All these thoughts gave way to panic as he took hold of the spade, which was standing to attention in the sand. 'If he can move about,' she whispered, 'how do we know what he'll do?'

'That's what we're here to find out, isn't it?' When she met this with silence Hugh said 'Or do you want to leave Rory how he is?'

'There's no need to be so aggressive. It isn't like you.'

'Maybe it is. Maybe I've got to change as well.' Before Ellen could decide how this referred to her, Hugh stalked away to brandish the spade at the hole in the cliff. 'Are you in there, Pendy?' he shouted. 'Going to show yourself?'

The hole and the clay around it seemed to shiver, and Ellen prayed that only her vision had. 'Hugh,' she cried, 'you shouldn't –'

'Then we'll have to come and find you,' he declared and rammed the spade into the cliff.

The burrow gaped in protest or an equally silent warning. It grew more than twice as wide when he dug out a spadeful of clay in which a thin object was writhing – not a crumbling finger, a worm scaly with earth. Hugh turned as if the loaded spade were the needle of a compass. 'Don't come any closer,' he told Ellen.

'Why not?'

'You don't want to end up looking like a pile of mud.'

He flung the contents of the spade away, spattering the beach. He must have had this sort of careless action in mind, but how insensitive was his task going to make him? As he drove the spade into the cliff again she didn't know whether she was more afraid of seeing deeper into the hole or of having no chance to from where she stood. Hugh swung around with the spade heaped high, and she saw a dark mass drop out of the cliff behind him. It was only a lump of the roof of the burrow, and she managed to keep her cry behind a grimace. Nevertheless once he'd slung the spadeful in the general direction of the aloof river and frowned at the collapsed section of earth he said 'Go a bit further.'