He had no idea who Ewan was speaking about, but Seb got to his feet and began clumsily tugging on a pair of jeans with shaky hands. Socks and a hooded top followed. His shoes were downstairs. ‘What . . .’ Seb said, but was too shocked to finish the sentence. He finally managed, ‘Has it gone?’
Ewan seemed to notice Seb for the first time. Strands of greying hair were stuck to his bearded cheeks. He raised a hand to bid Seb be silent. ‘We have to get out,’ he whispered, and rolled his eyes to look up at the ceiling. ‘It will come inside.’
Seb suffered a sensation of his body dropping through thin air. When he regained his bearings, he felt weak and sickened with a fear that would not relent. Memories of the animal shrieks returned to his memory and resounded inside his skull. He went for the bedside lamp and clicked it on.
‘No,’ Ewan said, in a desperate whisper.
Seb ignored him and made for the main lights.
‘Idiot! If it gets in you’ll see it . . . properly.’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t want to do that.’
The receipt of this detail had Seb reaching for the chest of drawers to steady himself. His legs wanted to go out from under him. Ewan’s body odour served to revive him.
Trying to make as little noise as possible, he returned to the bedside table and turned off the lamp. When halfway across the room on his way back to the door, Ewan said, ‘In here. There . . .’
Ewan clawed his way around the door and disappeared, shutting the door behind himself, sealing Seb inside with the room’s most recent arrival.
Reluctantly and fearfully, Seb turned to see what had startled Ewan. And even though no electric light brightened the room, the air was now lighter than it should have been, or had been only moments before. Like the living area had been, the room was drained of any colour but that of a dull mercury, and the visible furniture was aged with the instantaneous affliction of antiquity.
The air billowed with an otherwise invisible presence. Though it didn’t remain concealed for long. In a far corner beside the bed an indistinct shape appeared close to the floor. Motion became manifest too, as each taut second passed to reveal the form, moving about on the floor in a series of jerks.
Before the paralysis snapped from Seb’s limbs, the shape rose and its sickly luminance cast a shadow. Impossibly, a silhouette appeared on the wall and the ceiling above the bed, and upon the other side of the room too.
The form expanded and contracted quickly at the edge of Seb’s vision, though whether this was from the weird atmospherics or from pure shock he did not know.
Seb yanked the door open.
A desperate sob became audible within the room that he departed. It was louder than before and filled with more distress than he’d known any living thing capable.
He closed the door behind himself, but as he’d turned he’d glimpsed movement in the mirror of the wardrobe, and received an impression of something sticklike but agile and too tall to be human. If that had been a head topping the form, the head had been covered. Seb suffered a notion that eyeholes had been cut out of whatever concealed the face. The suggestion of its arms extended and grasped at where he had just been standing.
As the noise of the apparition’s grief transformed into something doglike, Seb fled, barely keeping his footing on the stairs to the ground floor.
When he reached the hallway, Ewan was still fumbling with the front door keys in an attempt to get out.
10
Hinderers in the Passage
Bent double, and gripping knees that shook from the exertion of bolting from the house and running to a stagger, Seb stared at Ewan with all of the murderous loathing that his mind could summon.
Ewan lay on the grass beside him, facing the sky, insensible with exhaustion. His eyes were closed.
They’d stopped running a mile clear of the house. If Ewan was running then he should be too; that had been his thinking and had brought them here. The ragged jog had ended after Ewan collapsed upon the dewy grass, at the top of a path that led deeper inside the Berry Head Nature Reserve.
Beneath the lightening sky, the hedgerows and garrison fortifications formed the mounds that surrounded them. Elevated hundreds of feet above the sea, the atmosphere was thinner and colder.
Exposed to the vast sky and the expanse of the sea, the great spaces enlarged Seb’s fear until he doubted he’d ever felt as insignificant. He knelt in the grass. Moisture passed through his jeans and fired shivers across his back and neck. He’d grabbed shoes as he passed through the front door, but in his haste to escape he’d failed to tug a jacket free from the rack in the hallway.
Anxious at the movement of the nearest shrubs in the breeze, he stood up again, rubbing at the outside of his arms, and looked about himself.
Between his desperate inhalations of the cold air, Seb finally felt able to speak. ‘What was that? What was it? You brought that into my home . . . last night . . . that thing. Are we safe?’ The final question, and the way he’d said it, made him feel pitiful.