Seb didn’t suggest a return to the car. That would involve going back the way they had come. Instead, as they were almost clear of the trees, they could follow the coastal path into the harbour.
They continued towards the cove until Becky stopped again. ‘There!’ Her voice was quiet, but tense and insistent. ‘God, it made me jump.’
‘It?’ Seb stared at the ridge above them. ‘Where?’
‘I’m not pointing,’ she whispered, as if nervous about drawing even more attention to herself.
‘Someone is up there? Where?’
‘Watching. Looking right at us.’ Becky seemed to retract her head into her shoulders as if suddenly cold. ‘Do you see? Or am I imagining it? Jesus, what is that? Something over their face?’
‘Who? I can’t see . . .’ And then Seb did see something that he had initially mistaken for a profoundly twisted tree.
Surely people can’t grow so tall. Though if that was a person, then it was someone that must have been standing behind a groping branch, with a body that matched the trunk’s woody contortions, while peering down at them.
Or were they? It wasn’t easy to see who was up there, nor easy to guess why anyone would be on the ridge. And if that was a man, then his legs must have been obscured by the thick nettles between the trees. What was visible, however, made Seb think of Ewan.
Becky touched his arm. ‘I don’t know . . . Seb?’
His concentration rewarded him with a suggestion of a figure in dark clothing, even a formal suit that was tight on a pair of impossibly long arms. And if he could see a hand then the hand was pale enough to be mistaken for limestone, or fungi attached to dead wood. The hand was positioned as if a long arm had been extended to grasp the fallen timber before it.
The only other detail that struck Seb was a covered head. Was that a head? If it was, there was something about the position of the head, and how it was cocked but held still, that made him feel unwell with fear. And whatever was looking at them from within the hood compelled Seb to look away. A meeting of his eyes with those distant and indistinct black holes was too great an ordeal.
Becky sucked in her breath. ‘Oh God. It’s moving.’
Seb flinched, then looked up again and saw a flurry that later reminded him of a dancer able to swing the upper body to one side while their feet remained planted on a stage.
‘Who do you think . . . ?’ Becky began to ask, and then stopped as the indistinct shape seemed to slide, or maybe withdraw backwards, and so quickly that Seb almost missed the movement. Sideways it went, briefly, as if on runners, and the manoeuvre issued no noise. But Seb’s next impression was of the form not so much moving away, but shrinking into the undergrowth.
‘A deer?’ Becky muttered. ‘Sometimes they . . .’ But she never finished the suggestion. Neither of them had seen a deer. And what they had glimpsed was no longer there at all.
There had been a vigorous breeze in the tree canopy when they’d entered the wood, but there had been no sound around them on the path during the sighting. Birdsong was audible again, and the reintroduction of sound made Seb realize that they’d both been transfixed in a soundless glade of the wood, for several seconds.
‘The birds,’ Becky said, in confirmation that something strange had occurred for her as well. She looked to the treetops, that now swayed and loudly swished their leaves once the unnatural pause in the air currents ended.
A pressure of fear pushed through Seb’s eyeballs.
Becky didn’t seem to be faring much better, even though it was over. ‘I really didn’t like that,’ she said. ‘They didn’t look right.’
Seb didn’t have anything to add. Had that been Ewan, though, with his appearance altered?
Had he not seen a similar form scampering through the sawdust of a bad dream? Whatever had been watching them, and perhaps even waiting for their approach, must be connected to Ewan’s sudden reappearance in his life.
Becky’s collaboration as a witness failed to produce any relief. Whatever was now happening to him was worse than losing his mind, because if that thing . . .
‘Now you know,’ he said.
They hurried to the cove, not exactly running, but walking uncomfortably close to a jog until they were standing on a pebble bank.
Listening to the surf roll stones up and down the beach, they caught their breath and stared at the water as if the bay presented a barrier across their escape route.
‘Sorry, but is there another way back?’ Becky asked, almost formally.
‘On the coastal path. There’s a track up there.’
He now hated himself for asking her to visit. He may have put her in the path of harm, without understanding the threat beyond receiving a sequence of murky and elusive impressions that came by night and day.