At the lookout, the fog blurred the edges of the view. The sea was a deep, hollow roar, its churning faintly visible through a layer of mist; the Ministry of Fisheries was a ghostly outline of walls and right angles. I stood for a moment, drinking the salty air, feeling the wind brush my damp cheeks, and then I fumbled with the camera.
I sank to one knee on the rocky ground and placed the camera on my other knee to steady it. I took off the cap, advanced the film, and bent to the eyepiece, framing the misty ocean in my view. I snapped a photograph, then moved back to get a wider shot, knelt again, and took another.
“Where are you?” I shouted into the wind.
I changed my angle as the wind rose in the trees behind me. The dawn light was just perfect, making the edges of everything soft, the mist diffusing the rising sun. A single boat on the ocean drifted into my line of vision, and I bent to the eyepiece again, watching the dark speck move on the lonely expanse of ocean, placing my finger over the button.
Something moved on the path behind me.
I straightened, the hair on the back of my neck prickling. “Frances?” I called.
There was no answer. Slowly, my clenched muscles protesting, I twisted my body and looked back over my shoulder at the path into the woods.
There was nothing there.
As I gripped the camera and stood, pain stung my knee where it had been pressed into the hard ground. I turned and faced the path, my back to the water now. Still there was no sound, no movement, but I sensed her watching me. I took a few cautious steps, my breath held in my chest, my boots quiet against the damp ground.
She was not on the path. I had nearly reached the first bend when it occurred to me to raise the camera to my eye and look through it.
I held the camera unsteadily to my face and squinted through the eyepiece. I saw the path, the woods around it, the tatters of mist. Nothing else appeared. Slowly, I pivoted on my heel, my damp, icy hands gripping the leather of the camera, my arms shaking as I held it in place at my eye. My breath was loud in my ears as I swiveled carefully, my lens taking in the pattern of tree trunks, turning back to look at the clearing and the water. The wind kicked up, and I heard the rustle of dead leaves.
She was there. Standing where I had just been, her skin the color of parchment, her eyes watching me from their dark recesses, staring, the hem of her dress unnaturally still in the rising wind.
I made a strangled sound in my throat and jerked my face back from the camera, my slick hands nearly letting go. I blinked and stared at the space I’d just seen through the lens, my vision clearing. There was nothing there.
“Frances?” I whispered.
Before I could lower my eye to the camera again, the leaves in the clearing kicked up in the wind, swirling. I stood hypnotized as dead leaves funneled up from the ground and down from the branches overhead, moving like motes of light. It was beautiful and terrible, unnatural. The icy wind howled.
High over the trees, shrill and imperious, came a long, unearthly whistle.
I turned on the path and ran.
I pounded over the muddy path, my clumsy boots slipping. I still carried the camera, held close to my chest in both hands. My fingers struggled to keep their grip and my breath came in gasps as the camera banged clumsily against my body.
The whistle sounded again—it split my brain, like a long-ago train whistle had on the worst day of my life—and a bolt of panic shot down my spine. She is calling him, I thought. I changed direction and left the path, scrambling down an incline tangled with brush, no longer aware of my direction or which way led back to Wych Elm House. I hit the bottom of the incline, the thorns of something in the underbrush tearing my stockings above the top of my boot, and kept running.
Far behind me in the woods, the birds went silent, as if they sensed something coming.
I staggered down another incline and found myself on a dirt path, wide and flat, bordered by thick brush. I could see no distance either up or down it—the fog was too heavy. In the spin of my panic I realized this was the same path I had stood on the morning I had met Robert. I was at the other end of it, far on the opposite side of the woods that spanned the Forsyths’ property.
I jogged along its easy length for a moment, feeling the jagged pinch inside my rubber boots and a trickle of blood warm on my calf. Cold rain had begun, dripping in the trees and spattering my mackintosh. My breath was sawing in my lungs, and cold sweat slicked down my back beneath my layers, but I did not stop. If I could take the road far enough to get back toward the house, to familiar ground—
Something moved in the trees far behind me. Without thinking, I ducked off the road, struggling through sticky underbrush again. My hands slipped on the camera, but I did not let it go. I slid down an incline into a valley of dead leaves, then scrambled up the other side.