abandoned boat at the foot of the cliff was composed of wind and sand. He'd grown so concerned to separate the landscape from his uneasy perception of it that he didn't realise he had strayed ahead until Ellen called 'Where do you think you're going, Hugh?'
'Wherever you are,' he promised and saw that she'd halted by the path they'd all climbed to the common. 'Is he up there?' he said almost too low to be heard.
Ellen's mouth seemed reluctant to let out her voice, even though she was standing well away from the cliff. 'There,' she murmured and snatched her hand back.
She'd pointed at a hole in the cliff, a few inches lower than her head. In the midst of his apprehension Hugh wondered whether it had been in the photograph he'd found on the Internet. Otherwise the stretch of cliff was unchanged, and he didn't like to think what else the power behind this might be able to do. Ellen ducked to glance in and immediately recoiled, pushing at the air with both hands and then gripping them behind her. 'There,' she said again, and more loudly 'Hugh –'
He lifted the spade like the weapon it could certainly become and tramped fast towards the cavity. It was big enough to stick his head in, not that he intended to, which meant it was equally capable of producing a head. As he came within arm's length – only his own arm, he hoped – the hole, which was too close to perfectly circular for his liking, emitted a wordless moan and a trickle of earth. Hugh faltered until he realised these must be caused by the wind. In any case, if the worst the hole could bring forth was the kind of noise an old-fashioned ghost might have emitted, how much courage did he need? He'd used hardly any yet, and it should be nowhere near running out. He dug the spade into the sand and leaned on the handle while he crouched to peer into the hole, and a face peered out at him.
Darkness seemed to close not just around his vision but over him, and to hold him as fast as earth. He couldn't lift the spade or use it to thrust himself backwards – and then his helpless immobility gave him time to see the truth. The face in the depths of the burrow bared its teeth as Hugh grinned before straightening up. 'It's all right,' he told Ellen. 'That's not him.'
'What isn't?'
Perhaps she hadn't glimpsed the item. 'It's glass,' Hugh said, letting go of the spade to reach in.
'Don't,' Ellen cried, but his fingertips had bumped into a thin bare object – a bone? No, it was a handle, and he strained his arm further, pressing the side of his face against the clammy surface of the cliff. He must have snagged the handle, because it tilted into his grasp, so that he was able to ease his find out of the burrow. 'See,' he said, 'it was just a mirror.'
The oval glass was about the size of a baby's face, and set in black wood. Clay stained the glass and the handle, which was banded with marks that might have been left by thin fingers. As Hugh rubbed the mirror clean with the back of his hand it showed him the black sky. Indeed, the image was dark enough for midnight, and flaws in the glass made the sky appear to be sprinkled with unblinking stars. 'Ellen,' he said. 'Look.'
She did, but not at him, and still less at the mirror. She crouched to glare at the cliff and shrugged, unless it was a shudder. 'He isn't there,' she muttered.
'I told you he wasn't.' Though Hugh hadn't quite, he felt entitled to the claim. He would have moved his prize into her line of vision if he hadn't been engrossed. The space between the points of light was infinitely black, but was one of them more than a point? As he squinted and lifted the mirror towards his eyes he could imagine that the spark in the depths was composed of flecks of light. He couldn't look away, but beckoned to Ellen, murmuring 'Come and –'
'Don't you understand what that means?'
'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.'
