In the dark she picked out a thick fog bank rolling down the mountain slope, bound to obscure what little visibility they had in a matter of minutes. It was hopeless trying to find someone out here at night, but she knew it was better than sitting in moldy rooms listening to people prattle on about each other. In the dark and the quiet, it was peaceful. Here David punctuated a snide remark with “am I wrong?” She ignored him.
Emma could see the grass rustling around her, and at a distance she could make out the occasional glint of a waving tuft that reflected the moon light. Keeping her eyes on the movement of the grass, she could follow a gust by the disturbance it made in the grass, as if a mole was burrowing under the surface. The rustle and murmur would travel in a straight line downhill for a while, then turn and whip itself into little circles before returning to its seaward course, slightly faster than a person could walk.
A pressure on the back of Emma’s neck made her turn around. David was a few feet to one side, bracing against the wind and trying to find a dry place to put down his foot. In front of her the wind stirred the grass until leaves and dirt made little swirls in the air, but she did not feel it on her skin. The movement in the grass came to within a few feet, then parted around a stationary patch of mud close to where she stood. Then the still patch was gone. The cold wind rushed in to fill the gap, and she realized how warm it had been a moment ago when the wind was blocked.
The chill didn’t bother her. In the quiet and the dark it was peaceful, even pleasant. Emma took a moment to enjoy the feeling of being completely alone. She was not prepared to see someone coming towards them over the tussock grass.
She caught a glimpse of a figure out of the corner of her eye and jumped. She tried to focus on what she saw but couldn’t find anything that looked like a person.
Emma turned to her husband and gave him a pointed hand gesture. “Be quiet, there's someone up there and I can't hear a thing with your complaining.”
She turned back to shout at the figure, but there was no trace of it. She looked to the left and right, but aside from the mountain and the sea there were no obstructions around, nothing a person could hide behind in a hurry.
“David, did you see a person up ahead just a moment ago?”
“Where?”
“Up ahead, I just told you. Don't do this to me right now.”
“If there was anyone close, we'd see them. There's nowhere to hide. And if they're far away, we could never hope to see them in the dark.”
Very reasonable. Reasonableness did not suffer such things as disappearing figures on foggy nights. David could always be counted on to shine a dentist's light directly into the eyes of irrational fear.
Emma sighed, which was David's cue to start being useful.
“How do we know Steve's here?”
“Well, he would have routinely gone through this area to get to the village from his house.”
“But nobody checked this area.”
“Right.”
“But what if he's in his house?”
“Well, surely someone would have checked on him if he were at home.”
“But to get there, they have to go through...”
“Jesus Christ if I were any stupider, I could run for office. Of course nobody came out to check on him. The only person who ever came out here was Ned, and he's indisposed. Come on, it's not far down this road.”
Emma stared with laser focus at the point where the horizon ought to be. She was not looking at the ground when her foot landed on a loose rock, ground smooth and slippery by the rain. It slipped out from under her. With half her weight on the crumbling rock, her footing gave way.
The rock disappeared into a narrow crevice she hadn’t even noticed a moment before. It was a few feet wide and snaked parallel to the route they had been walking as if it were stalking them. She couldn’t see the bottom, but she could see the jagged edge, lined with jutting rocks under a thin veneer of glittering slime. Emma had just enough time to feel her body tip toward the ravine when a tug at her arm pulled her back.
She whirled her body around and grabbed David with her free arm. To reach her he had bent over at the waist and was struggling to pull her back from the edge. His own feet were a few inches from the edge of the crevice. Emma heard pebbles crunch as he tried to shift his weight. It only caused his shoes to slide closer to the drop off.
Emma grabbed both of his arms and launched herself toward solid ground with the leg still on good footing. It flew out from under her and hung over empty space, but not before pushing her onto the flat, mossy ground. The movement pulled David with her, and they collapsed in a pile, their arms painfully braided by the uneven impact with the ground.
A moment went by in which Emma did not dare open her mouth or her eyes. Eventually she peeked at David. He was breathing heavily and staring back at the crevice.
“Jesus, that cunt came out of nowhere!”
“Get up. We have to move.”
He stared at her.
“Don’t give me that look,
