the house would be punctured with a collage of window squares. Quickly she retreated and flicked the wall switches that brought the dark inside.
When her eyes accommodated themselves she could see clearly enough to move around. She switched on the television. Immediately nodding heads with wide mouths filled the screen, and a babble of laughter and applause assaulted her ears. She found the remote control and aimed it at the noise so that it faded at once into silence, although her ears still rang with it. For a minute or two she gazed uncomprehendingly at the overanimated faces. The colour balance was off and the skins were greenish, the lips orange and puckered like weird specimens of marine life.
Oily waves of disgust heaved beneath May’s breastbone.
Colour bled out from the screen and lent the darkness an eerie glow.
She pointed the remote like a weapon again and the set clicked off. Now the refrigerator started into life with a low hum. Her ears were painfully over-attuned to the small noises of the house. There were the creaks of wooden boards and a tiny clinking, which might have been two pieces of crockery vibrating in harmony with the refrigerator motor.
May slipped to the stairs and crept upwards, setting her feet silently on each tread. The house was all in darkness now. She receded into her room and set the door open by the smallest crack, not wanting to shut herself in. At first there was no differential in the blacknesses contained by the hair’s breadth of space looking out into the hallway and within the room itself. But as she sat on her bed with her spine drawn rigid she was able gradually to pick out the chest that held her clothes and the bookshelves where Doone’s book lay in its place.
She reached out for it and held it. The red binding of the spine was peeling a little at one corner.
She knew by heart the last words Doone had written. She had been unable to forget them, ever since she had unlocked them with the help of Hannah Fennymore’s whaling story.
I feel so sick with myself and the world.
I love him, every bone in me loves him, and I will never have him.
I want to die. It would be best for me to die.
The sea fretted and whispered beneath the window. In May’s sharpened hearing the murmur grew louder and louder, swelling as if her head were empty except for the pearly whorls of a giant shell. Her legs were unsteady when she stood up and the floor dipped beneath her like the deck of a ship under way. It was a long way to the window, much further than the thirteen steps she knew it to be.
She looked out at the island. It was a black hump rising out of the silvery water but tonight there were lights on the crescent beach. There was a reddish glow near the waterline, a driftwood fire that would be sending bright sparks up into the salt air. There were smaller, dancing pinpoints round about that looked like torches. It was Ivy and Lucas and the others, Gail and Kevin and Joel and the rest of the cousins, and some of the kids from Pittsharbor. They had all gone out to the island and they were having a party.
May could hear their voices and meaningless laughter rising and falling within the sea-washed shell of her head. ‘Hey, Kevin. Just chill, willya? This grass is like, amazing. Whoo, unreal.’
And there was Lucas, with Ivy, their arms forgivingly wound around each other. Even now the physical imprint of him seemed burnt into May’s skin, and she shivered with the confusion of absence and jealousy.
I love him, every bone in me loves him.
The impoverished and eloquent second-hand words of Doone’s lament twined and echoed with the other voices.
Yet it wasn’t Lucas Doone had loved so tragically.
I’m not her, May whispered to herself – I don’t, I don’t have to submerge myself like Doone did – if only the sea were not so loud and the house so silent and shadowed. Lucas was beautiful but he was ordinary, too, a chip of reality; the sweaty scent of him stayed in the back of her throat and she knew for certain that he was unconnected with any of this mess of darkness and water.
But if Lucas had never been Doone’s fatal love, then who was it whose name she could never write even in her private diary?
Gently May laid the red-and-black book back in its place on the shelf.
She was standing at the window looking across the silver sheet of water towards the island when she heard the first soft footstep crossing the downstairs room. The old floor-boards creaked under an invisible weight. There was another step and then another, measured and unhurried. But no one had come into the house; she would have heard Ivy come in through the porch doors and John’s car hadn’t pulled up at the front of the house. The footsteps stopped and their hesitation froze her heart so that its beat faltered.
Something was coming for her, searching for her.
A liquid wash of terror poured through May. She couldn’t allow herself to be trapped here in Doone’s bedroom. Sometimes the door wouldn’t open, as though an invisible shoulder held it tight, but it was open by a hair’s breadth now, just as she had left it. She forced herself into motion, although fear locked her limbs. Her mouth dried with wordless gratitude for being barefoot as she slipped out of the room. The house itself had become a listening shell, the silence noisy with whispers and sighs. May hung for an instant in the black hallway, motionless as a suit of clothes in a wardrobe, all her being trying to focus on what the threat might be. There was someone near, she could feel it in the tiny currents that electrified her skin.
As silently as a moving shadow she flitted across the stairhead. She could see no one in the narrow segment of the room visible at the foot.
John’s bedroom door stood wide open. She melted into the blackness behind it and with her chest bursting and blood hammering in her head took the first breath since the footsteps had halted. They were moving again now. They came unhurriedly across the room to the foot of the stairs.
May retreated step by step until her knees came into contact with the edge of her father’s bed. The steps advancing up the stairs now sounded as loud as a drumbeat. There was a shaft of light, lapping up the walls outside and sending a moving slice of visibility around the angle of the open door and across a wedge of floor. She stared in mute horror at the pattern revealed in the rug, then like a leaf falling she crumpled sideways into the bedcovers. She drew her knees up to her chest and pulled a blanket over her head. Her eyes squeezed shut and her breath stopped in her chest as she lay and waited to be found.
The bedclothes next to her face smelled of her father’s body. When she was little she used to run into her parents’ bedroom and climb into the warm hollow between them. She remembered that her father’s smell was always strong but good, like hay or sawn wood. It came back to her now, and the memory of safety and security with it like a glimpse of a lost world.
The footsteps passed into Doone’s bedroom and the light swept away with them.
At the back of the house where May lay huddled the sound of the sea was muffled. The tiny noises that reached her from across the hallway were much louder. She heard a soft swish like clothing brushing against furniture and the bump of small objects being moved around. That these sounds were audible and yet inexplicable made fear tighten its tourniquet grip on her. She was locked into immobility, but she could feel the bubbles of a scream or a sob forcing their way up into her throat. She closed her eyes tighter and bit the inside of her mouth to contain it.
Suddenly there was a snap. A second later the steps were coming back again, much louder and firmer.
It
