'Hugh.' When this brought no response she leaned out so precariously that she was afraid her weight would overbalance her. 'People,' she cried.
A wind did its best to return this to her mouth. She had to repeat it before Hugh followed the latest evacuation of clay out of the tunnel. 'Where?' he demanded.
'Up here. Coming this way.'
'Get rid of them. I'm seeing more in here.'
He vanished into the tunnel without giving her time to reply, and she turned to see the foremost woman stooping to release her dog from its leash. Ellen imagined the animal racing unchecked across the common and down the path to join Hugh. It might dig faster than he could, not to say unstoppably, and what would happen once the woman followed it? 'Excuse me,' Ellen protested, which had no effect. 'Don't,' she shouted and tramped across the grass, waving her blurred blobs of hands on either side of her face.
The woman who had yet to emerge from the gap in the hedge spoke to her friend, who peered towards Ellen and to some extent straightened up. 'Can we help you?' she rather less offered than said.
'Don't come this way,' Ellen cried. 'Don't let your dogs.'
'We're allowed to let the dogs off here.'
'Not down the cliff. It isn't safe.'
She was dismayed to be reminded how that might apply to Hugh. The sounds of the spade were inaudible now. The women shaded their eyes as harsh light spilled from beneath the cloud. 'We can't hear you,' said the woman who had nearly unleashed the dog.
'Not safe,' Ellen came close to screaming, and floundered after her massive shadow as it flopped towards her audience. 'Not safe.'
'What isn't?'
'The path. It's gone.'
'Still can't hear you.'
'You heard me just before.' Ellen had begun to feel that her voice was as feeble as a cry in a nightmare. Was only the wind stealing it? The unquiet grass fluttered the outline of her shadow as if it were preparing to grow more misshapen. 'No path,' she cried with all her breath.
'Where isn't there?' the woman enquired, stooping to her impatient dog.
'To the beach. You can't go that way to the beach.'
Ellen was about to claim to be helping the rangers in case this lent her credibility when the woman shaded her eyes once more. She stiffened and then stood up fully, yanking at the leash. Whatever had changed her mind affected her friend too. Without speaking, both women retreated, dragging their dogs through the gap in the hedge.
They must have seen Ellen clearly at last. Her hideousness was some use after all. She turned to trudge back to her post and was instantly blind. The cloud had lifted above the sun, which was all the more dazzling because of the blackness. Ellen shielded her eyes and kept them lowered so as not to see her hand in any detail. 'They're gone,' she called as she reached the edge of the cliff.
Hugh didn't respond, surely only because the wind had borne her voice away from him. She was about to lean over when she heard a dog bark. She swung around, but it wasn't as close as the wind must have made it seem. It wasn't on the common. Just her shadow was, and the shadow of the hand that was about to take her arm.
'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
