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and keening, almost joyous now, as if they knew that they could catch me.
I started running in earnest now. But how fast could they go? Perhaps they
could easily outstrip me, and they were simply keeping their distance for the
sport of it. Still, I couldn't worry too much about that. The only thing I
could do was to get back to Quaker Lane Cottage as fast as I could.
And then what? I thought. Jane's apparition found it easy enough to get
inside. This evening, she had opened the front door without even touching the
handle. I heard my breath whining and my trouser-legs jostling against each
other as I ran, and I thought to myself: don't even consider the possibility.
Just run.
I glanced to my right. The grisly apparitions were keeping well up with me,
dancing and turning in the wind. On my left, the shoreline began to narrow and
to edge in closer, and I could see the apparitions distinctly, running towards
me in mesmerizing slow motion, and yet easily catching up. I didn't dare to
look over my shoulder, be-
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cause the keening behind my back had seemed to be closer than ever, and I
could have sworn that I heard the sea-grass whispering as the apparitions
rushed through it.
I was only 200 yards away from Quaker Lane Cottage when I realized that I
couldn't possibly make it. My legs felt as if they were clumsy prosthetics,
carved out of heavy wood. My breath shrieked in and out my lungs, and I was
smothered in ice-cold sweat. And all the while, the blue-white apparitions
were rushing after me, with decayed and inhuman urgency, the beggars of the
night.
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I felt something claw at my hair, like a bat or a half-rotted hand. I
frantically beat it off, and started running faster again, forcing my legs to
take me up the sloping hill, forcing my knees through the barrier of total
exhaustion and total pain. The rushing noises came nearer, until I knew that
the apparitions were almost at my shoulder, keening and crying and whispering
to me, stop, stop, join us, don't leave us, come back.
I felt myself suddenly lifted up - physically lifted up off the ground - and
then tossed and tumbled head over heels on to the rough grassy hillside. I
tried to scramble to my feet, but then I was hurled on to my back by some
completely invisible force, hurled so forcibly that I heard my vertebrae
crack, and the air gasp out of my lungs. I tried to get up a second time, but
I was slammed back to the ground yet again, and this time I was paralyzed,
pinned against the grass and the rocks as if some enormous weight were
pressing on to me.
The apparitions gathered around me, the fading electrical power that had once
been their spirits crawling like glow-worms across their scaly and ulcerated
faces. They made a noise, like soft old tissue-paper, crumpled and recrumpled
over years of use; like the breathing you can hear in an old and deserted
attic, when there's no-one there. And there was a distinctive odour, too, not
so much of fleshy decay, but .of burned electricity terminals, and rotting
fish.
They surrounded me, but they made no immediate move to touch me. I lay where I
was, pinned down,
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panting for breath, scared out of my mind and yet still wondering what the
hell I could do now. Even in the throes of a scarlet panic, the human mind
still plots and schemes and programmes for its own survival.
The apparitions stood back a little, and Jane appeared, very tall now, her
face stretched out almost beyond recognition.
'You are mi-i-i-ne,' she said, blurrily. I felt as if time had slowed down, as
if the atmosphere had turned to glycerine, and even my struggles against the
unseen weight that was holding me down seemed to take endless minutes.
Jane spread out her long-fingered hands, and electricity crackled from one
fingertip to the other, like a Van der Graaf generator. She seemed to have
built up more power now, because her body was flickering and flashing, and
processions of sparks teemed off her shoulders and out of her hair as if she [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]