with a pose of candour, a hint of defiance.
‘Naturally. Your father seems very taken with her. She is a most unusual woman.’
‘She moves like water,’ Fern said, ‘like a twisting stream, all bright deceptive reflections, hidden currents, dangerous little eddies. She might be very shallow, she might be very deep. She’s much too unusual for my father.’
‘I am sure she knows that,’ Javier responded with that faint mockery in his tone.
Fern was not entirely reassured.
It was something of a relief to be leaving for Yorkshire. Fern’s two closest friends were going on holiday early and although she would miss London it was hot enough for the country to have its attractions. Robin might spend part of the week in the metropolis on business but long weekends at Dale House, rifling among the hotch-potch of Ned Capel’s collection, would provide both distance and distraction from urban perils. He evidently anticipated the visit with a brand of schoolboy pleasure which even exceeded Will’s. Fern found it more difficult to analyse her own emotions when she saw Yarrowdale again: there was no obvious surge of gladness, rather a feeling of acknowledgement, a falling-into-place of her life’s pattern, as if she had returned to somewhere she was meant to be after a careless and unscheduled absence. The grim façade of the house seemed to relax a little; recognition peered out of the empty windows. She went up to her room and, with a doubt bordering on fear, scanned the hillside for that strange-shaped boulder. It was there in its place, a silent Watcher, maintaining surveillance through all weathers, unmoving as the rock it resembled. But it is a rock, Fern reminded herself, afraid to find she was no longer afraid; it was never gone; I imagined that.
She slept undisturbed by birdcall or badger and in the morning, encouraged by a lightening breeze and a brightening sun, they walked the half mile or so to the coast. Yarrowdale was not one of the Dales, being situated on the edge of the moors between Scarborough and Whitby, where a series of steep valleys wind down to a rocky shore buffeted by the storms from the North Sea. That day, however, the sea was blue and tranquil, the waves tumbling gently onto the beach and melting into great fans of foam, while a coaxing wind seemed to take the fire out of the noonday heat. The Capels strolled along the wide sweep of beach and smelt the sea-smell and removed their shoes to paddle at the waves’ edge—‘The water’s freezing,’ said Fern, and ‘Got to be careful swimming,’ Robin added. ‘Mrs Wicklow’s right: currents are chancy round here.’ There were few people, no litter. Scavenging gulls skimmed the shoreline in vain: their lonely cries sounded harsh as screams and desolate as the ocean’s heart. Yet to Fern they seemed to be a summons to an unknown world, a growing-up unlike anything she had planned, where her mind and her experience would be broadened beyond the bounds of imagination.
* * *
On Monday Robin set off for London with a car full of paintings which would undoubtedly prove to be worth a fraction of his optimistic valuations, something that would in no way damage his hopes for the rest of Great-Cousin Ned’s jumble. Mrs Wicklow had agreed to assist with cooking and housekeeping and Gus Dinsdale’s wife had promised to drive Fern to Whitby for essential shopping. Will had started on cleaning the ship’s figurehead. As Mrs Wicklow had said, there was a sizeable section of ship attached. ‘See,’ Will told his sister, ‘she’s got a name. When I’ve got the rest of those barnacles off we should be able to read it. I wonder how old she is?’
‘This is really a job for a professional,’ Fern remarked.
‘We haven’t got a professional. Anyway, I’m being careful.’ He proceeded to notch a kitchen knife against a particularly stubborn crustacean. ‘She’s been on the sea-bed a while. She must have survived much rougher handling than anything she’s getting from me.’
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Fern, abandoning her careful indifference to succumb to the lure of a mystery.
After about an hour of rather awkward chipping the name emerged, semi-obliterated but legible. Fern had known what it would be all along, with the strange prescience which comes from that region of the brain they say is never used, a zone of thought still unconscious and untabulated. Seawitch, ran the lettering. The carving did not resemble Alison, for all its flowing hair and parted lips: the improbable bosom was outthrust, the belly a sleek curve, the face as knowing as Dodona. Nonetheless, Fern was unsurprised. Her awareness was touched with an elusive familiarity, but whether from the future or the past she could not tell.
‘She’s wonderful,’ said Will. ‘Those tits look like nuclear warheads.’
‘You’re much too young to notice such things,’ his sister said loftily.
‘You’re just jealous,’ said Will.
That evening Mrs Wicklow left around five. Fern made omelettes and they ate in the kitchen listening to Will’s ghettoblaster pumping out the latest from the Pet Shop Boys. Even when Robin was with them, they never sat in the drawing room: it was always a degree colder than the rest of the house and the stone idol squatted there wrapped in its secret gloating like a diminutive Moloch. Fern did her best to keep the door closed, hindered by Mrs Wicklow’s penchant for opening both doors and windows at every opportunity, in order, so she said, to let in air. ‘There’s air in here already,’ Will had pointed out, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t be breathing.’ But Mrs Wicklow believed air had to be specially admitted.
The sky had clouded over and by the time they went to bed the night outside had grown very dark. ‘We ought to have candles,’ said Will, ‘guttering in the draught, making huge spidery shadows on the wall.’
‘Don’t talk about spiders,’ said Fern.
Slightly to her surprise, she fell asleep immediately, untroubled by nightmares.
She woke abruptly in the small hours to find herself sitting up in bed, intensely alert, her nerve-endings on stalks. The curtains were half drawn but the space between was merely a paler shade of black, barely discernible against the velvet dark of the room. There was no wind and the absolute quiet, without even a distant rumour of traffic, was something to which she had not yet become accustomed. The silence had a quality of tension about it, as if the night itself were holding its breath, waiting for a board to creak, a pin to drop, the warning screech of a bird. Fern’s pulse beat so hard that her whole body seemed to shake with it. And then came the snuffling, just as she had expected, horribly familiar and so loud it might have been directly below her window-sill. The rasping, stertorous breath of some creature that left never a print, an incorporeal hunter who had no existence except to scent its prey. The reluctance that held her back she recognised as fear, a fear that was not only inside her but all around her, a dread that was part of the room itself: she had to thrust it aside like a physical barrier. The floor made no sound beneath her tread; the window, thanks to Mrs Wicklow, was already ajar. She leaned out into the night.
There was something at the foot of the wall, something that was darker than the surrounding darkness, a clot of shadow whose actual shape was impossible to make out. Not a badger: the white bands on its mask would have been visible at that range. Besides, although she had no idea how large a badger was supposed to be she was sure this must be larger, larger than a fox, larger than a sheepdog. It moved to and fro, to and fro, as if worrying at the wall; then suddenly it stopped, and the sniffing was accompanied by a furious scrabbling, the unmistakable sound of paws burrowing frenziedly in the soil, as though seeking to unearth the very foundations of the house. Afterwards, Fern knew she must have made some slight noise to betray her presence. The thing below her froze, and lifted its head. She saw neither form nor feature, only the eyes, slanting ovoids filled with a glow that mirrored nothing around them, a livid flame that came only from within. The terror that rushed over her was beyond all reason, a wild,
