‘That was just someone . . . someone out . . . We had a bad night, Bex. I said too much yesterday. And we drank a fair bit. It’s made us jumpy. Innocent things are starting to look sinister. The other day on my balcony . . . the towels . . .’ He didn’t believe a word of what he said, though the thing in the trees may have been nothing but a glimpse of someone wearing a baggy linen hood, with eyeholes cut into the front. But why would they do that?
He didn’t examine the idea verbally, and he also believed it unfair to share an impression that the hood had been similar to the bags that were tugged over the heads of the condemned on the gallows, in times long gone.
‘Yes. Maybe,’ Becky said, as if she were speaking to no one in particular.
The return journey via a new route around the wood was uneventful, though on the section of the path parallel to where they’d seen a figure on the ridge, Becky moved closer to the stone wall opposite the encroaching trees. Seb only noticed because he’d done the same thing.
‘Seb, will you take me to the station?’ she said when she saw his car.
‘But lunch—’
‘I want to go home. Now.’
7
The Same Event in a Converse Direction
Ewan was on the drive.
Seb alighted from his car and fell backwards, casting an arm across the roof to keep his feet.
He closed his eyes, counted to three and reopened them.
Ewan remained, grinning. He stepped forwards and the gravel crunched beneath the soles of his shoes. He was there.
It was him, and the strange aural effects accompanying the previous sightings were absent. Things were going to be different this time.
Seb’s first impression confirmed the continuance of an old theme, inebriation embellished by neglect. Even then, the changes in the man’s appearance since London were shocking. Ewan had been to places and done things that Seb could only imagine.
The man’s greatest burden in life may have been a grotesque head. A large skull, flat at the back, atop a flabby neck showing no definition to the shoulders. The squashed upper section of his face, with a low brow and near-porcine nose, quickly and regrettably became familiar. Sometime during the intervening years his eye sockets had suffered a lumpy reformation with scar tissue, from knocks or tumbles. That bit was new and made the entire spectacle freshly monstrous.
The tired complexion now showed the effects of poison or liver damage. Between the cap’s peak and the moustache, across the cheekbones and forehead, the sallow skin was blotched with broken blood vessels. Greasy white patches streaked the unkempt beard as if individual moments of crisis had bleached clumps of his facial hair.
Seb’s biggest aversion yet was reserved for the mouth. The last time he’d seen Ewan there had been something disconcerting about the terrible condition of his tobacco-stained teeth, but at the threshold of his home in Brixham, he experienced the same disgust he’d once endured when confronted by the genitals and anus of a baboon in a zoo.
Ewan’s mouth was feral and grotesquely genital. Perhaps it was the unkempt fringe of black beard that made those lips appear so bruised and engorged to emphasize the square, gappy teeth. And they were stained brown-yellow, like two rows of dried corn inside the smirk that hadn’t changed since he’d appeared on the drive.
This was the worst face that Seb had seen in his life. Finer feelings seemed to have been blunted, and the sensitivity to the nuances of another’s discomfort erased. There was nothing contemporary about Ewan any more. He was a savage.
Trying to keep the tremor from his words, Seb heard himself croak, ‘What do you want?’
‘You’ll find out,’ Ewan replied in a voice that had always been too high and thin for his appearance, near effeminate in tone and public-schooled. His voice had also altered, was now roughened by catarrh and deepened by age.
Despite his fright, Seb still suffered a mad desire to laugh at this visage before him. To howl desperately at the oily hair, near dreadlocked and hanging like old rope from beneath the baseball cap that was jammed onto the crown of the big head.
Not wanting to become trapped against a wall, and needing a space in which to think and to evade an assault, he abandoned the car and angled himself away from the house.
Intent on pursuing the effect of surprise, Ewan anticipated the manoeuvre and steered Seb towards the front door, one hesitant step at a time.
Had this scene been in one of Seb’s novels, there might have been a scuffle and a strong show of resistance from the lead character. But this was no novel, this was his life and he was no fighter. The situation made him understand how we imagine we are people that we are not.
‘Sebby, my old mate.’ Ewan tittered and held out a large hand, the skin red and marbled like corned beef, the nails black with dirt. His eyes were still dark enough to make the pupils indistinguishable from the iris. And with him so close, the intensity of his stare was made worse by its hint of sadistic amusement and need.