Sea Change (14 page)

He stared at
John, and John could not meet the gaze from those eyes. There was
life in them, but also something more, or maybe something less.
Elias sniffed again, like a dog catching a scent. Then he muttered
some words to himself, and at first John thought that he could not
hear them properly, but then he realised that they were not in
English, and did not sound like any language that he had heard.
Elias leaned forward, sniffing again deeply, as if the words that
he had spoken had been the key to opening a world of scent. John
recoiled, thought to himself, what is this, what is he doing? Then
Elias spoke.

“Liar!”

"No—I mean—I'm
not—"

"I smell it on
you. You lie to me." Elias reached up an arm and his hand came
towards John, twisted fingers like bunched sticks moving to take
hold of him. John was frozen for a second and then instinct punched
through his fear and he was ducking under Elias's hand, running off
along the cliff path.

"Liar!" Elias
shrieked. "You dare! Boy, you dare lie!”

Chapter
Twelve

John kept
running, not daring to look back. The shouting carried on, Elias's
voice was pure rage. "You lie! I smell it on you!"

Then he went
quiet, and John's stomach twisted hot inside him. He glanced back
over his shoulder. Elias was not chasing after him, just standing
in the middle of the path, head bowed, one spindly hand reaching
out to touch the standing stone as if he were making a connection
of some kind. John got the distinct impression that Elias was
talking, not to him, he could not hear a word, but the old man was
talking to someone. Or something.

Then, all
around John, the grass began to rustle. It sounded as if a hundred
snakes were writhing alongside the path. Twigs and tufts of grass
whipped round and round as if they were caught in a whirlwind. John
skidded to a halt on the path, scared that Elias was creating a
wind that would push at him, forcing him closer and closer to the
edge of the cliff that was only a metre away, closer to the long
dark drop down to the beach.

The grass still
shivered and whirled, and the sticks still danced, but John felt
nothing. He slowed and looked back. Elias was still by the stone,
hands now weaving around each other as if he were trying to
untangle thread. John started to run again, and the rustling
receded for a moment or two, but then grew louder. The path rose
up, and as he reached the top John saw the warm lights of the
village, dotted in the hulking embrace of the bay. They seemed like
a very long way away.

John saw where
the noise was coming from. It was not getting louder, it was
getting closer. Moving along the path towards him, picking up
speed, was a spinning, shifting shape, leaves and grass and sticks
and stones coalescing, becoming something vaguely man-shaped and
yet not quite like a man. As it grew, it lost the fragility of its
component parts and changed, became more solid, but still something
constantly shifting and moving, rustling and creaking and
cracking.

John was
terrified.

He ran faster,
feet slipping and skidding on the path, but still the thing pursued
him, a terrible shushing rustle that sounded like claws scrattling
on stone, that sounded like arms reaching, like the way he thought
the Wild Wood sounded when he read Wind in the Willows as a small
boy, and could not sleep for hours after because of the thought of
the trees, reaching, stooping, trapping.

He ran faster,
faster than he even knew that he could, but his legs were tiring
and his lungs were burning and the rustling was getting louder and
closer. He dared another look over his shoulder, and realised that
he could not out-run the thing behind him. The cliff-top path went
on for hundreds of metres before it reached the village, and he
could not run that far, not this fast. He was tiring already. To
his left was scrubby moorland, full of dips and straggling plants
to trip the unwary. To his right was the sea, a rolling expanse of
water that John knew was a place that something made from plants
and sticks and Elias's dark magic could not go, but the sea was at
the foot of the tall cliffs, and the cliffs might as well have been
mountains, so the sea that John could hear breaking and crashing
might as well have been an ocean on the far side of the world.

Then he
realised where he was. In front of him the path sent off a spindly
offshoot, barely visible in the moonlight, that looked as if it
disappeared over the edge of the cliff. But John recognised it,
remembered it. It was the path down to Hob's Hole. And beyond Hob's
Hole, there was the beach. And beyond the beach, there was the sea.
As he reached the path he flung himself off to the side, not
wanting to give any warning to the thing behind him, hoping that he
might confuse it, not even knowing if it could be confused, could
see, could think. He also hoped that he was right, that it was the
path, because at the speed he was running, he did not know whether
he would be able to stop if it were not. The ground gave way and
for a moment he felt the great space in front of him, a brief,
blind rush of terror, and then he was running down the side of the
cliff, on a path no more than a metre wide, half-running, half in
flight.

The path was
littered with loose earth, and with small chunks of rock that had
fallen from the cliff face. Several times John sent one of them
skittering off into space, and each time it reminded him of how far
there was to fall—and how far still before he reached the foot of
the cliff. From above he heard an angry rustling scuffle, like two
dogs fighting in the undergrowth. John slowed but did not stop, and
as the path curved he looked back and saw that the thing was
following him still, moving down the path like a whirlwind of
debris blown along by a gale.

A few steps
further and he knew that he could not reach the bottom of the cliff
before the thing behind him caught him. His breath was gone, his
legs were starting to become jelly, and although adrenalin had
taken him this far, it could take him no farther. The rustle grew
louder, until it sounded as if someone were running through deep
autumn leaves just behind him. John stumbled, nearly fell, and put
on one last turn of speed that took him around a corner of the path
and, for one more moment, away from the thing that followed him. To
his right, black against the dark rock of the cliff, was Hob's
Hole. Without a thought he ducked in, feeling his way along the
wall until he was a few steps away from the entrance.

I've just
trapped myself, he thought, but he knew that he had no alternative.
Trapped in the cave, trapped on the cliff path, it did not really
matter. He pressed himself back against the cold stone as a shape
whirled past the mouth of the cave, heading on down towards the
beach. John realised that he had been holding his breath since he
had been in the cave, and his chest felt as if it was on fire. He
took a couple of slow, shallow breaths, trying hard not to make any
noise.

He thought that
if the thing, whatever it was, was down on the beach, maybe he
could make a run for it back up to the cliff top. But he knew that
this was foolish; he was exhausted and would find it a struggle to
walk up the path, let alone run up it. The thing might just be out
of sight around the corner, and it would catch him within seconds.
At the top of the cliff was Elias, and for all John knew he was
coming down the path now, coming to see what his creation had left
of its victim. There's nothing I can do, John thought, but hope
that I was right, that this thing can't cope with the rocks and
shifting stones of the beach, that it will fall apart into the dead
things that it was made from. Then there was a sound outside the
cave, and all of John's hopes were dust.

It was moving
slowly now, the thing, as if it knew that there was no hurry, that
there was nowhere else that its prey could go. It paused at the
entrance to the cave. The dark shape looked like a man, but John
knew that it was not.

The thing
quivered into the cave, moving slowly, and then it halted. It
reached out a crackling arm and extended one twig finger. The
finger pointed to one side of the cave, moved to the other, back to
where it had started, then back in the general direction of John,
moving slowly from side to side until it came to a halt pointing
directly at him, like the needle from a magnet settling slowly on
north.

John backed
away a step, scraping along the rough damp rock behind him. The
thing shivered forward, finger still extended. John kept backing
off, hoping to draw the thing far enough into the cave that there
would be room for him to dodge past it, to sprint out and away, but
he knew that it was a forlorn hope. The thing followed him, slow
now, tracking him around the curve of the cave wall. After another
pace, John felt rock on two sides of him, and knew that he had
reached the back of the cave. Behind him, was rock. In front of him
to one side, the slowly advancing thing. In front of him, to the
other side, the blackness of the Hole itself, like a pool of ink
amidst the shadows of the floor.

"Come on," he
said to the thing. "Come on then. Think I'm scared of walking
compost? Come
on
."

The thing
carried on its slow, steady progress towards him, not showing any
signs that it could hear or understand. He tested it, taking a pace
out towards the centre of the cave. Immediately it changed
direction slightly, so that it was still moving towards him, finger
outstretched. John stepped back again, and again it changed course.
It was very close to him now. Closer, John thought. Must be closer.
The cave smelt damp, like a forest floor after rain, a smell of
leaf mould and fungus. John waited, until the pointing finger was
only a half a metre away from him. He could see the centre of the
creature moving, could see the moonlit cave entrance through gaps
in the spinning mass of its body.

"Come on," he
said again, "dare you," and he took a step to his right, still
facing the creature. If it did not follow him as exactly as it had
so far, his plan would not work and he would be lost. He took
another step back, and another, and the thing followed. John risked
a quick glance behind him. One more step. Get it right, he thought
to himself. For once in your life don't be clumsy. He stepped back,
keeping his foot as close to the wall as he could, and placed his
foot on the narrow shelf of rock that ran behind the hole that fell
deep into the earth, so far down that you couldn't hear a rock hit
the bottom.

Easy, he said
to himself. The local kids do it. Easy. Yes, but they don't do it
backwards, and they don't do it in darkness, and they don't do it
with some thing from their nightmares chasing them. Still, it beats
the alternative. Step. Step. Now both of his feet were on the
shelf, and it was so narrow that he could feel the drop beneath the
outside of his back foot. A cool draught drifted up from the depths
of the earth.

The thing took
a step forward towards him, and then another. The hand reached out,
dry stick fingers curving like claws, reaching. It came closer,
closer.

John stepped
back again, and his back foot slipped, and he thought that he was
going to fall. There was nothing to hold on to, nothing to do but
sway on the spot, regaining his balance, hoping that now was not
the moment when the creature was going to grab. He steadied
himself, stepped back again. The thing stepped after him, and now
it made its move, the hand lancing toward his face like a snake
striking for its prey. It lashed out towards John and he shrank
back against the rock, sliding his back foot farther back along the
narrow ledge.

Thin stick
fingers snapped together only inches from him, nearly catching in
his clothes, but then fell away from him as the creature toppled
into Hob's Hole, its arms and legs flailing to get a grip on the
sides but failing, leaves and earth and wood whirling round as it
bounced off the sides and down into the darkness, the rustling
threshing growing fainter until in the end John could not hear
anything at all except the boom and crash of the waves outside.

He stepped
carefully back around the hole until there was rock floor under the
width of both feet. There, he thought. "Bring me luck Hob, bring me
luck." He listened over the hole in the ground but nothing came out
other than a soft, cool breeze. John turned and walked out of the
cave, treading carefully so as not to make a sound, wary that Elias
would be there waiting for him, or that he might have sent some
other terrible creation in case the first had not done its
work.

There was
nothing but the waves breaking over the beach, a thin line of
foaming white in the darkness that was much closer than John had
expected. He did not want to go back up the cliff path and face
Elias up there. The only way back to the village was along the
beach. And the only way that he could do that would be if the tide
was still out far enough to let him through the small cove before
the harbour. If it was in, he would be trapped between the sea and
whatever waited for him on the cliff tops.

John walked
down the beach, treading carefully, not wanting to turn his ankle
over on a loose stone, not wanting to draw attention from anyone
who might be watching from above. The waves were close. And coming
closer. The tide had not just gone out, it was on its way in. He
did not have a lot of time.

The journey
along the beach was like a dream journey through some strange world
in which everything was at once familiar and different. The
darkness rendered everything strange; distances did not seem the
same, John could not tell how far he was from the cliff face, or
how close the sea was to him, except that it was always getting
closer. Once, he thought that he saw a figure on the cliff top, a
darker, deeper black against the night sky, and he froze, crouching
down near a rock that walled a small inky pool. The shape did not
move, and John decided that he was mistaken, that it was a stunted
tree or one of the standing stones. He carried on, but for quite
some way he crouched down low and kept turning his head to look
back up at the cliffs. After what seemed like half a night of
walking, the cliff curved out in front of him.