'Hugh, are you trying to scare –' None of this had even left her mouth as she turned to confront him. The sun glared around him, blotting out his face and appearing to char his silhouette thin – altogether too thin. She was able to cling to the notion that it was Hugh until the figure darted forwards, its skin flapping in the wind, to demonstrate with its embrace how skeletal it was. It might have been whispering a parody of affection in her ear, unless that was simply the wind in its gaping face. Certainly the hiss grew sharper as her captor drove her backwards. Its spidery weight shouldn't have overwhelmed her, but terror did. Perhaps it took away her sight as well, or perhaps that was the sun.
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.