Under a Watchful Eye(17)
‘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.
‘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.