But I stepped back, and when I sat up I was in the wood and the night had gone into some impossible place deep in my grinning skull. I’d been biting this nail for three hours now and still never never never getting to what I was biting for. My head was too full. They’d turned the noise up.
Babbling fools. ‘Shut up,’ I tried to say, but I couldn’t get the words out. Hundreds and hundreds all splurging their stupid thoughts. Will they just shut up. Shut the fuck up. One of the walls crumbled greyly, off to the side. It made a sound like an iceberg breaking off. A few small stones shot out and rolled across in front of me in the moss and vetch. I picked one up but it was hot so I dropped it. I wanted to stop my head and all these voices so I walked out of the wood and it was like pushing through seaweed under the sea, drifting to the outer edge where the trees meet the big fields and the big slopes rising up towards the Long Wights. I walked up to a high ridge and lay down in the grass with my hands behind my head, watching meteorites streak across the sky. One high above, then another a few minutes later, lower down over Copcollar. All the people grew quiet. I waited ages, half an hour, I don’t know, willing another one, and at last it came, busting out of nowhere and dashing itself out in a long lonely streak across the west.
They started whispering again, in a soft inviting way, making me know that something was coming. Not like the things in my head, Lily’s teeth, her eyes; this was something to be seen perhaps, something slowly bursting from the cocoon between there and here. I turned on some high ridge and looked back, scared in a way I’d never yet known.
Someone was walking up the hill. I couldn’t tell who. My eyes closed. Handless Jenny. No. She doesn’t come around here.
I opened my eyes. It was still walking up the hill. It seemed to carry with it some element of the fog that had now settled and lay low in the hollows. The darkness obscured its face. For a long time it seemed that it walked but never came any closer. After a while it walked on by below me and disappeared around a protruding shelf of land at the highest point of Gallinger’s field.
I’ve ripped a great strip of skin off my thumb and it hurts. The rim where the end of the nail meets my cuticle is bloody.
I was alone on a hillside somewhere under a picture-book sky with a gorgeous crescent of a moon, God’s sickle, and a refined scattering of perfect stars, and I was in a moment of pure naked terror. There was a watcher in the woods; I felt its eyes and I didn’t know that it might not be some evil thing. So I ran further up till I reached the Stones and got right in the middle, thinking this would either be safe as a ring of salt or very dangerous. There I sat down and waited for my breathing to steady and my heart to die down. It made my ears pound. Someone passed between two stones on the outside of the circle, right on the edge of my vision. The fear shock was like electricity, the dentist’s drill on the spasm of a raw nerve. This was not a safe place. My feet, as if directed by some other will, walked across the empty moonlit ring, but there was nothing there, nothing there.
When I turned back, something too white was crawling into the ring from the other side. A cold hand nipped the scruff of my neck. It came not quickly but steadily. One shoulder pointed forward. Low to the ground one arm, one leg, reaching together. It came at a crooked slant across the grass towards me, right up like a slow dog, face to the ground so that all I could see was the top of a cold bald head, sickeningly round like the head of a worm. Three feet away it stopped then turned up its head to look at me. Its neck grew disgustingly thin, stretched up and up towards me like a snake standing on its tail, with a round blank head on the end of it, white and faceless.
I screamed till I was mad and hoarse and woke up at the high point of nightmare, alone somewhere on the hillside below the stones, facing towards the woods and shivering like a dog.
37
All the cats came inside that night, all together, even the ones that never came in, even the ones that didn’t like each other.
That disturbed him. It seemed to mean something. What was out there freaking them out? He tried turfing some of them out the door but they just ran round the front and got in again through the old pipe.
He stood at his back door looking out towards the trees, couldn’t sleep. He didn’t want to know that stuff she’d told him, about her daughter. It had nothing to do with him. Now he felt awful. And the other daughter (you can’t believe a word she says) and Madeleine, back tomorrow they said. He felt like closing and locking all the doors and just pretending he wasn’t in when anyone knocked. He hadn’t asked for any of this. Honestly, you do your best and keep on and all this gets thrown at you. What the fuck was up with those cats? Skittering about like loonies.
‘Shut up!’ he yelled. His own voice was an affront to the
