

The Nivashi

And Other Stories

by Linda Talbot

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Illustrations by Linda Talbot

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright Linda Talbot 2019

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes.

Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Contact blog: http://lindajtalbot.wordpress.com, where you will find a list and summary of all the works by this author, together with extracts. You are also very welcome to subscribe or add a comment.

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Table of Contents

The Nivashi – Intro and story

The Aloe

The Confession

The City

Shadow

The Encounter

An Eye for an Eye

A Solace for the Single Man

The Water Horse

The Silkie

Gwindennith

The Changeling

Woman from the Water  
Author's thanks, contact information and note

THE NIVASHI

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Introduction

This story tells of the Nivashi, a ghostly race of gipsies who have despaired of humanity and magically integrated with the elements. Earth has uncannily changed: buildings remain, people have vanished. But the gipsies have selected a few survivors from each country through which they have passed, hoping to magically draw them back to nature, where consumerism and an obsession with money no longer matter. And a prophetic prism is found by one of the survivors. Other people have in fact been rendered invisible within white webs woven by the Nivashi and the strange offspring of the survivors contribute to the eventual reconciliation of man and the natural world he had abused.

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Ileana looks from the high ground at the encampment below. The travellers are parked in a defensive circle, their horses grouped wearily within.

The caravans are every colour, created from various contraptions; crashed cars, reassembled and linked into long homes, scarred buses with seats removed and some built like early wagons from discarded wood. Paint, collected in deserted towns en route, is applied in swirls and depicts distorted images of a lost life.

Are there other travellers? wonders Ileana. Is every town abandoned; homes and shops with evidence of occupation, yet devoid of people?

She looks at the mottled rocks of the hot hills thrusting from ground scattered with a tough red growth like fire dried by a searing sun.

She strives to recall the land before the change. Dimly she glimpses the moment of darkness and is then reliving those days when briefly, the sun was obliterated:

A long, hard wind blows as though to wipe the world clean. Then silence settles like a shroud. The fields and the cloud-pocked sky vanish. She halts on the village track and seems to draw the wind protectively around her. As the darkness lifts and the wind dies, she sees the glimmering grey plain that has replaced her cottage and the fields.

She wanders, as in a dream where one moves yet gains no ground. The town she enters is hushed, car doors left open, in shops, goods half wrapped, in houses, meals partly eaten. But there is no power. The national grid has closed down and the living have been spirited away.

Then Ileana sees the group of survivors, milling in bewilderment on the edge of town.

"What happened? Where is everyone?" she asks.

A gaunt grey man says, "Everyone's gone. We've searched the town. They must have left in the dark. I'm Mark by the way. Meet - sorry I don't know your names."

He indicates the others.

"Maria." A sallow and unruly woman steps forward.

"Carl." He is fair, still in shock, his blue eyes in retreat.

"Jon." A dark young man, sullen and dishevelled.

"Pila." A fair woman of indeterminate age; shrewd, mouth pursed, irony in her pale blue eyes.

"I'm Ileana."

They stand assessing each other, unable to grasp why they have been spared, then gazing helplessly across the faceless plain to a horizon floating as though dislodged and flecked with green and gold.

Eventually they retrace their steps to the town. The desolation hangs like a tangible weight. They gather provisions from the supermarket and find a large house on the outskirts. Jon breaks the lock and they go inside. It is deserted.

But in the kitchen plates are stacked ready for washing, a child's pedal car appears to have forcefully struck the wall and a current newspaper reporting disasters that pale before what has happened, lies open on the table.

Ileana begins washing plates, then bends to unpack the food. As she straightens, she feels a restraining arm at her elbow. She spins round. No one. She moves to the plate rack and as she lifts her hand to take one down, hot breath strikes the back of her neck.

Maria cries out from the living room. Ileana runs in to confront the woman, who stands, rigid, staring at the window. "Look!"

They look at the heavy blue brocade draping the panes.

"Can't you see him?" Maria is hysterical. Carl helps her to a chair. "There's no one there," he says.

"He's gone - but where?" Maria scans the room in disbelief. "He was hunched, covered in a kind of white web. His eyes...." She can say no more.

The others exchange glances. The traumatic day is taking its toll.

Ileana does not mention her experience as they move into the kitchen and, without enthusiasm, begin to open the boxes and cans.

Pila chokes on the tinned meat she has placed on a piece of bread. She feels cold fingers probing her throat, preventing her from swallowing. She rises with a gasp, knocking the plate of food to the floor where it shatters No one else touches theirs.

"Let's leave," says Jon suddenly.

The group looks at him in unspoken agreement. The house now seems to release a profound sigh and as the survivors' eyes are involuntarily drawn to the walls, they begin slowly to pulsate. And over them, like a ghostly gossamer, spreads a fine white web.

The exodus from the house is swift. Looking back, Ileana sees it leaning, almost imperceptibly, in on itself, then slowly dissolve into the green gold air.

She has collected the remaining food and says, "Let's take two cars." The others look doubtful but Mark tries the door of one. Oddly it is unlocked and with Ileana and Maria, he climbs in.

Carl opens the door of another with equal ease and the others get in. It is as though they are intended to take the cars and leave town.

They drive onto the great grey plain, over the wiry red growth towards the restless curve of flecked sky.

"What time is it?" asks Mark. Ileana and Maria consult their watches. Both have unaccountably stopped.

The eerie light does not change. The chaotic roads lacing the country have vanished. Only intermittent and deserted towns remain.

Simultaneously the cars are about to run out of petrol. They are just entering a town. Identity is difficult. But it has a sixteenth century centre with the customary expansion of buildings through subsequent time. Cars stand abandoned in the streets. But there are no petrol stations. Finally the two cars run out of petrol and come to a halt on the outskirts of the town.

For centuries the gipsies had been persecuted. They had dispersed and gathered to them aspects of the lands where they had lived. But they had been moved on, until, as cities grew and the countryside diminished, they sought refuge - and vengeance - in magic.

The smelters, snake charmers, horse dealers and acrobats, changed shape. They reverted to the camouflage of rock and water, tree and corn.

They might have been glimpsed, like the fairies that flew through man's imagination in the past, crouched in corners, balanced in high branches, walking at noon, when no shadow falls, along a lonely road.

They absorbed the texture of earth, the wash of water; became one with sand, shale, loam, the surge of salt waves and the eddy of reedy rivers.

They became the Nivashi and the Psuvushi; the demons of magic, able to enter and influence humanity. They drew from the elements the means of binding their oppressors with fine white webs and of rendering them invisible.

They selected and spared a few people from each country through which they passed, to form the nucleus of a new gipsy race, their lands transformed into nebulous tracts, punctuated with rocks and insidious growth.

The ghost travellers who were once gipsies of flesh and blood, move through the subterranean dark, in communion with roots and rotting matter, or spellbinding molluscs and fish beneath sea and river beds.

And they watch the survivors, striving to grasp their predicament. The ghosts will ensure they leave the clutter of consumerism; the fought-for niche of petty preoccupation, from which man viewed the traveller askance.

Like their predecessors, the ghost travellers are earth and waterbound but the new race, thrown back on its own resources, will encounter the essence of the traveller; the proximity of harsh and healing nature, the cultivation of skills, released from technical and fiscal complexity. And the awareness of fundamental forces to be nurtured or assuaged.

The survivors survey the cars in silence. As though a vote has been silently taken, they eventually climb inside, open a few tins and eat as though bewitched by a spirit of slow and mindless motion. Finally they sleep.

Their dreams flow; shared and removed from the reality they had known before the Change and the unearthly enigmas that had since possessed them.

They are submerged in clear water; cleansed and drawn among the ambiguous shapes of mesmerised fish. Beneath the water lies a formerly unencountered earth, singing with unsullied voices, then charged with pervasive power.

On waking they find four heavy horses, harnessed, and grazing on the red growth near the cars. Without a word - mysteriously motivated - Jon leaves for the town, returning an hour later with two bags of tools. "I once worked in a garage. I think I know how to make these cars roadworthy," he says.

Within the hour, with Mark and Carl following his directions, he has the cars in sections and had reassembled them into a large wagon, complete with components attached as shafts. By trial and error the travellers harness the horses and, still bound by dream, set off over the grey plain.

One morning, when they wake, the plain has vanished. As though some sly scene shifter had come in the night, the flat expanse has been replaced by steep-sided rocks shot with bright minerals and rising from undulating ground. It is starred still by the invasive red growth, yet laced too by fast-running streams bearing shoals of flying fish.

The sky has cleared and reaches now to infinity; clear blue, whitening around a sun regained and ruthless, striking sparks on the voluble water and the metallic mineral inlays of the rocks.

"Let's stay here for now," says Jon, who has assumed leadership as the others gaze in silence at the transformation.

Temporarily settled, the travellers begin at last to assess each other and to establish a hierarchy of responsibilities.

Maria is undisciplined yet domesticated. She is soon adept at building a fire from brittle branches found in the red growth that burgeon into thickets by the water. To supplement the bland tinned food from town, and as though motivated by a primitive maternalism, she captures small mammals in her hands, having called and mesmerised them by gazing intently into their eyes.

She gazes too into the retreating eyes of Carl, who tentatively helps her with the fire and with washing clothes in the stream.

One morning, by a rock, rearing as though in protection, she draws him to her, enveloping his fear, until, paralysed with apprehension and a desire to be submerged, he slowly releases his shy soul to her. She murmurs and strokes; powerful where normally she feels inadequate. He is son and lover; a virginal protege to nurture.

But Maria follows each move made by Jon and hangs on his every word. He sees her solely as a homely means of maintaining domestic dignity. In his presence her habitual inadequacy returns.

Jon draws up basic regulations, accepting modifications from Mark for which he is secretly grateful. His impetuosity has hampered him before the Change and, while a slave to wilfulness, he is able to instigate other ideas, while making them appear to be his own.

Meanwhile, the spirits of water and earth move through the travellers' dreams, subconsciously directing their actions on waking.

Ileana has taken responsibility for the horses. Slung with large panniers made from matting, she takes them once a week for supplies to the nearest town, visible from a rise across the rock-littered land.

The horses are uncanny. As she walks with them, it seems they assess her, almost as though they can read her racing thoughts. Their eyes are violet, deep set and, if she had not known better, she would have said they were ironically wise.

One evening, she lies in the lilac light, letting fragments of the past float through her mind like pale flags marking places and events. Each day they flutter more feebly with less relevance to reality.

Jon approaches quietly but draws small sounds of acknowledgment from the horses. Ileana props herself on one elbow and turns to see him standing over her; a dark intention in his eyes.

He crouches and grasps her drifting hair. In one movement, like a lithe shadow, he takes her.

Ileana gains the respect of the men and is envied by the women. By day she is confined to the camp. But by night she is borne on the back of persistent dream to a place that on waking, she does not recall. But the sense of release is pervasive. She flies in freedom to the dawn and wakes refreshed, then oppressed, as reality returns.

"Aren't you happy?" Jon scrutinises her on waking. The shadow has settled in her eyes.

"Why are we here?" she asks.

He is silent. Then says, "None of us knows."

"It's hard to explain, but it's as though we're not alone," she says slowly, sensing even as she speaks, that she is being heard by some unseen presence.

"We must move on soon. Look for other survivors." Jon had not consciously thought of that until now. Since he had claimed Ileana, he has been by turn demanding and diffident. Beneath his bravura lies a fear of women. And he senses Ileana's restlessness.

Late one afternoon, she leaves the grazing horses and wanders away in the hot sun. She has devised clothes from fabrics found in town that, without her influence, form themselves into bright panels that swing as she walks. Her copious fair hair is caught under a long scarf, which protects her to some extent from the searing sun.

She feels compelled to leave the camp, to breathe the air beyond, to move unobserved. She walks to the east of the town. She wants to see what lies beyond. She passes the last bland buildings on the outskirts. Beyond, lies the same combination of rock and red ground cover, interspersed by streams. But about a mile away, tall blue trees rise in circles that might have been devised by man.

Ileana is involuntarily drawn to one, shimmering in a soft-edged dance. She enters a whispering shade where the sun is barely visible through the rhythmically rocking trees. On the ground grows a lilac moss, which despite the lack of light, is starred with the gold of trailing flowers. The trees murmur, barely audible, yet urging her to penetrate more deeply.

The man appears suddenly in her path. He is shabby, stubble-faced. Grey green eyes that might have seen beyond the improbable reality, meet hers.

"What are you doing here?" He is brusquely defensive.

"I'm from the camp," says Ileana, assuming hers is the sole group of survivors.

"There are others?" The man registers relief, shot with fear. "How many?"

"Six. Are you alone?"

"Yes. There were eight of us. We found horses and turned a bus into a wagon. But I quarrelled with the guy giving orders, so took one of the horses and left. I found a cave."

"Do you want to come back with me?"

"No, I don't mix well. I'll go it alone."

He tenses, like a wary woodland creature. "Would you like to see my home?" She notes his ironic tone and nods.

"What do you think happened?" she asks.

Again she has the sensation she is being overheard.

"Who knows? Did someone use that weapon that eliminates people, leaving buildings in tact?" It is as feasible an explanation as any. Yet the air is clear and they have developed no illness.

They reach the woodland's edge. The brightness is blinding. A few yards away a hole gapes in a large rock, gleaming with malachite. A bay horse grazes outside. They step inside the cave, which is dank but roomy and stacked with supplies from the town.

"Mateo." Holding out a hand, he introduces himself.

"Ileana. I'm glad I met you. But I must get back. I look after the horses."

"Come again."

"Yes."

When she reaches the crest of the hill she sees Jon waiting by the horses.

"Where have you been?" He grabs her arm.

"Walking." She shakes free, resenting the imposition.

Now Jon watches her every move. Her sole release is in the dreams that bear her beyond the claustrophobic group.

Pila and Mark now live together. Maria has been pregnant for several months. It is then that Mark reveals he was a doctor. The fortuitous nature of this strikes Ileana who is convinced now that they are set on some pre-destined course.

She does not mention the other survivors. She would have had to reveal her source and she sees Mateo as a possible means of escape, should the pressures of the camp grow too great.

The night is oppressive. The murmuring that Ileana had heard in the trees, increases. She strains to hear the words. But, they are never quite audible. The murmuring grows more urgent, drawing Ileana from deep sleep to a semi-consciousness laced with anticipation.

She is waiting, every muscle primed, while beside her Jon obliviously sleeps. Like a caress she feels water wash her skin. She touches her belly. It is dry. She tastes grains of crumbled earth, sour on her tongue but spits only saliva from her mouth. She yearns though for more; a potent inpouring of the elemental, rife with sensual suggestion and repletion.

Earth and water flow as one. They consume her, expanding her flesh, singing in her veins. She moves exultantly with their song.

Soon Ileana knows she is pregnant. And, as she is certain of this, she knows too the child is not Jon's. Some change has taken place in her since the encounter with earth and water. She no longer possesses a will. She is bound by some deep and inexplicable means to the past and the inner earth and she cannot influence her future.

Jon is outraged when she rejects him. The darkness that exacerbated the contradictions of his soul, surfaces. One night he strikes Ileana.

"You've been with someone else, haven't you?"

"Out here? You fool, you know we're alone."

The next day she tells him she is pregnant. "Listen to me Jon. The child's not yours."

He raises his arm again. She catches it with her hand. "Listen. There was this strange night. It was as though I was taken by some sort of spirit. It was to do with earth and water. After that I knew I would have a child."

Jon's arm remains suspended. Incredulous, he looks hard into Ileana's face. "You HAVE been with someone. Who was it? Carl or Mark?"

"No - truly," Ileana catches his hand once more. He throws her off and walks away; a wild creature swallowed by the white light of the sun.

One day after tending the horses, Ileana again walks over the hill. She is already aware of the physiological changes within her. And beneath her feet, the earth stirs, almost imperceptibly, but with small movements with which she feels entitled to communicate.

She sits on the ground near a stream and heeds the song of the water. Beside her rises one of the curious rocks shot with pyrite; the fool's gold dancing like a dervish in the sunlight. At the base Ileana notices a prismatic piece that might have broken from the main seam yet is precisely honed to a point and has reflective sides. She picks it up and thoughtfully turns it in her hands.

With a shock she has an overwhelming sense of the past imposing on the present. She is compelled to look deep into the prism with the sensation of being locked between earth and sky. The sun strikes a red hot blow, fire leaps at her feet in a frenzied wind and a fog swirls to freeze her limbs.

Ileana feels the earth striving to create a hollow to consume the warring elements. But the fire sears, the wind harasses. The fog envelops, earth and sky remain locked.

Then with a roar the earth erupts, throwing Ileana sideways and scatters the sun and wind. The fog and fire remain.

Slowly, as though passing through lost layers of time, Ileana regains the present. She steeps herself in the windless peace of the hot field. She picks up the prism which now merely reflects her face - anxious and darkened by exposure to the sun.

Meanwhile, Jon has cross examined Carl and Mark and felt their denial of having lain with Ileana valid. Darkly, he sets himself apart, avoids Ileana and sleeps beneath the stars.

Maria has a girl who clearly resembles her parents. Jon throws Ileana a look that says, "Why wasn't Maria visited by your spirits?"

Ileana often walks alone, straining to understand the earth and water voices. She stitches a pocket inside her skirt where she keeps the prism. One morning she takes it out and, standing it on the ground, gazes at her face in the reflective surface. Slowly her features dissolve and in their place, a hand appears. It is a woman's; sinuous, finely tapered, the fingers tautening as though in communication.

Simultaneously Ileana stretches and scrutinises her own hand; the nails broken, the skin discoloured from her work with the horses. When she looks once more at the prism, the hand has vanished.

"What will become of us?" Pila says one night, as the dark of the single season descends. Ileana cannot answer positively, yet she suspectsed that, in her subconscious, she knows.

"Let me see your hand," she says.

Pila laughs. "What's this - the gipsy's warning?"

Ileana is not sure. Pila stretches out her hand with an ironic smile. Ileana holds it; cold even in the warm night. An uncanny sensation passes to her from Pila's palm and in the centre are faint signs of motion; a figure perhaps, striving, yet unable to step beyond the hand's perimeters. The figure fades. Ileana is shaken. She does not know that, according to gipsy lore, when the Nivashi have possessed a woman she acquires magical perception and, with practice, more formidable powers.

The gipsies that have entered the earth stir beneath Ileana's feet as she leaves Pila. Already, in the prism, they have taken her back to the moment of creation as they were taught it happened; the conflict of the elements that had been further aggravated by the action of man.

Ileana waits the full term of nine months for her child, which Jon takes as confirmation that the father is flesh and blood. He retains leadership but avoids Ileana, spending much time in the empty town, returning inebriated and morose.

Mark sits with Ileana as she starts labour, instructing Pila and Maria how to help.

Again Ileana feels earth and water welling within. She feels the force of the child that prompts a perception though, not of flesh and blood but of the warring elements, surging to a final confrontation, then subsiding, reconciled at last.

She regains consciousness to see Mark looking intently at her. "Where's my baby?" she asks. Silently he moves away. She hears him talking to Maria in an undertone. Then he returns, holding a small shape in the crook of his arm.

Helped by Maria, Ileana sits up and reaches for the bundle. She pulls down the cloth in which it is wrapped. The small brown face with large eyes the colour of smoke, gazes into hers.

"It's a boy," says Mark.

Ileana returns the intent yet alien gaze of the child. He is not redly wizened like most newborn. His features are sharply defined. And they do not resemble those of Ileana or Jon. He does not move or cry or seek the breast. He seems fulfilled, content, uncannily self sufficient.

Ileana feels Mark and Maria scrutinise her but she cannot not take her eyes from the strange child.

Jon returns one night when Ileana is sleeping under the stars with the baby she has named Yeniche. He looks with loathing at the small face lit by the moon. He is still drunk from a visit to the town where he shared his distress with the ghosts whose presence provided eerie but unquestioning companionship.

Roughly, he rolls Ileana over. He grabs Yeniche and thrusts him into the woman's arms. Ileana, now wide awake, recoils and places a protective hand over the baby's head.

"Go to its father!" Jon shouts.

Ileana stumbles from the camp and over the white-lit ground. Instinctively, as Jon shouts in her wake, she heads for the ring of blue trees, rising like windless spectres in the moonlight. She enters their murmuring depths, the ghost voices louder now, their words almost audible. The trees take up the whispering like water rife with warning. Ileana is afraid but Yeniche stops crying and appears to listen, as though he grasps the whispered words. They reach the woodland's edge and instinctively move towards the cave.

The bay horse whinnies and as Ileana enters the cave's mouth, Mateo rises to meet her.

"I had to leave camp. My man thinks I've been unfaithful." She kneels, exhausted, placing Yeniche on the moss-lined floor.

"You can stay here," says Mateo. Seeing her distress he does not question her further. "Try to sleep. We'll talk in the morning."

Mateo touches Ileana in reassurance and moves to stretch out by the cave's mouth.

The next day Ileana tells him of the disturbing conception and birth of Yeniche. She is not sure he believes her, but he says, "Stay here. You'll be all right." He looks into the knowing eyes of Yeniche and fleetingly, feels fear.

Then Ileana shows Mateo the prism. He watches her turn it thoughtfully in her hands. She pauses, gazing hard at the surface, as slowly, the shape of a hand materialises and with inexplicable intuition she knows it has symbolic significance. She sees the angled thumb, signifying misfortune, the bold index finger of decision, the third finger relative to health and the fourth implying curiosity. But the middle finger, representing vocation in conflict with destiny, is missing.

And across the palm, as she had seen in Pila's, moves a restless figure - to and fro, unable to break the bounds of the mutilated hand. The image fades.

Jon walks towards the ring of blue trees. He is sober now and searching for Ileana in earnest. He enters the coolness but does not hear the whispering ghosts. The turmoil of his soul consumes him. The need for vengeance is a black wave that washes without alleviation. He will kill Ileana. He emerges from the trees. Ileana sits with Yeniche and Mateo at the cave's mouth. Rapidly Jon withdraws into the trees. The black wave gathers and breaks. He is oblivious to his surroundings. His pride bleeds. His fear of female domination rises. But he waits until nightfall. For he is a dark practitioner who does not trust the light. Like a bad omen, he suspects it will thwart him from his ends.

Darkness creeps across the rocks and slides into the trees. Jon tenses. Still he will kill her. Not Mateo. It is the woman who threatens.

Jon slips from the trees. He moves to the cave. At the entrance he hears Mateo breathing deeply. Jon steps over him. Darkness lies impenetrably but he can hear Ileana murmuring softly in her sleep. He draws the knife. He stabs. Yeniche screams. Jon backs away, reality restored by the unexpected sound. He blunders over Mateo, awake now, and into the trees.

Ileana lifts the dead body of her child and stumbles with Mateo into the moonlight. She unwraps Yeniche. The knife has severed the middle finger of his right hand as it plunged into his body. Ileana freezes.

"Jon," she utters and, silently, she weeps.

They bury the small body at the edge of the wood where the ground is moist. Here, unknown to them, water flows copiously underground, surfacing in the streams.

Ileana falls silent. She sits, motionless by the cave as Mateo takes the horse to town for provisions or she wanders unhappily through the hot hills.

Jon too refuses to communicate. Mark has assumed leadership. Jon crouches for much of the day in the shade; fearfully primed, beset by a menace he cannot name.

Now, as he rises occasionally from his rock, he feels beneath the scorched earth, faint stirrings of unease. He walks, trying to evade them. But each time he pauses, he feels their persistence. Then he hears the whispering. It is most prevalent in the shade; like a party of irrepressible conspirators, hissing at his heels.

He goes into town, taking a horse, whose hoofs drown the sound of the subterranean shades. The public house he frequents seems unstable in the white light. Its mellow bricks quiver, as though the foundations are being rocked by unseen hands.

He goes in and pours a large whisky. The optics dance, the glass shivers in his hand.

The frightened soul of the dead child leaves the buried body. It is accompanied by the whispers of the earth-bound ghosts as it moves through the murmuring wood. A child, the double of Yeniche, steps from the trees. He is silent, lost, but already able to walk on strong legs through the coarse red growth. He is a mulo; the ghostly replica of a dead person, in whose existence gipsies through the centuries, have believed.

Dawn spreads pale hands above the hills. The child vanishes.

It is midday; when shadow does not exist, when the sun passes from east to west through a dead moment of time. Jon lifts the glass to his lips. The whisky tastes sour. As he lowers the glass he hears a whimper from the doorway. He looks up. Radiant, as though wrapped in sunlight, the child stands, staring with empty eyes, his occasional whimper seeming an aspect of the golden air.

Jon climbs from his stool and walks slowly towards the child. With relief, he sees it is Yeniche. So he had not killed him. He reaches and draws the child to him. His body feels like pulp; a mass that is boneless and then Jon sees the middle fingers of both hands are missing. He recoils and the child is absorbed by the sun. Noon has passed.

Ileana looks long into the prism's depths. The images multiply; the unblemished face of a young woman surfaces which merges into a second, then a third. Each time she looks into the prism they appear; virginal yet expectant. Ileana senses that within them lies the means of her vengeance and with every fibre, she wills its realisation.

Jon finishes the bottle of whisky. Still shaken he leaves the public house, vigilant lest the boneless child is waiting in the sun struck street. But the late afternoon holds only rusting vehicles and spellbound buildings. The hoofs of his hot horse are the sole sound on the road.

His evening at camp passes in customary silence. He lies at last looking at the galaxies that alone, appear unaltered by the Change. He drifts through fear, incomprehension, a dread of the dark within and without. Ileana's voice mingles with the ghost whispers and the whimper of the child.

Suddenly, a woman - young, lithe and laughing, is above and around him. She caresses him and curves her cool flesh in the moonlight until he grasps her, in case she should escape. Desire vanquishes his fear of the female. He indulges her with delighted disbelief. At one point he senses she has multiplied. Is she one or three? He is borne beyond darkness and fear. But when he wakes he is alone, while temporally fulfilled.

Ileana gazes into the prism. The hand reappears and again, the lost figure moves to and fro. It is Jon. Ileana knows his fate has been determined and that he no longer poses a threat. She places the prism on the ground.

Jon does not move from the rock that day. His head is heavy, his limbs paralysed by fire; a desire too intense to assuage. The multiple woman has gone and Jon's fear of the feminine returns. But she has left her imprint on his flesh and in his soul.

He waits for her that night. Only the infinite galaxies hang above his head, while the fire flows more fiercely. By day he cannot eat. He barely moves. The sky and white hot hills turn to blood as he watches them with pounding head, and reaches as though to push them from him. Four days later he dies.

Jon's restless soul rustles through the night. Briefly Ileana wakes and trembles as it passes the cave. It moves on, above the haunted streams, the blackened hills, to a valley where the ghosts of violent deaths whisper and sweep to and fro, brushing the valley walls but unable to scale them.

And from their midst, Jon's cold soul hears the whimpers of Yeniche, distinct above the whispering. Jon's spirit flies to him and finds, on the stark grey ground, the naked child shimmering in the night. But he does not ask for comfort. He snarls at Jon, whose spirit double seems now to bear flesh. He pursues Jon as he ducks and dives, seeking a means of escape. But the valley walls close in, until the child who seems to grow grotesquely in the night, envelops and devours the man.

LOCOLICO

The dark twins appear late one afternoon. They stand, hands lightly linked, gazing at Maria who is skinning small mammals for supper.

She senses their penetrating presence and drops the slippery creatures as the twins slowly advance. She cannot know they are the children of the multiple woman who had coupled with Jon. They are the spawn of his vengeance. Slyly, they smile, then vanish, leaving two black circles in the glittering dust.

They are the harbingers of fear; that deathless sentiment the ghosts, moving with agitation now through earth and water, had hoped to eradicate with the birth of Yeniche. He was to have indicated a way that side-stepped fear towards a freedom fresh to those men and women plucked from the paralysed race of man.

But Jon had succumbed to vengeance and Yeniche, a free spirit comprised of sunshine and untainted air, was dead. Now his innocent anguish grows, impinging desolately on the camp and sliding like ice hard hands about those who remain.

Zarka, Maria's baby girl grows fast. She laughs a lot and is soon helping her mother to capture small beasts as they bask by the rocks.

One day she stops and looks up to see the dark twins smiling malevolently in the sun. They wear some blackly undulating stuff that seems part of their shadowy flesh and slowly they beckon to Zarka, circling her and edging out of the camp.

The little girl follows; fearful yet compelled. They move across the rock-strewn hills beyond the circle of trees, gliding as though propelled by a faerie force to the valley over which an unaccountable shadow hangs.

Zarka follows them out of the sun into the gloom. She feels the desolate soul of Yeniche haunting the valley with those of others who had prematurely died.

Maria calls. The child has vanished. She hurries from the camp. By a rock she sees the prism glinting in the late light. She stoops, picked it up and over its smooth surface, glide three children with linked hands. One is Zarka. The other two Maria recognises as the dark twins.

A chill wind worries as she reaches the valley. Shadows slide and disperse. Low moans move through the light that hangs greyly. Maria slithers down the steep slope.

She is not conscious of entering the passage. It is formed from dark strata of rock shot with seams of pyrite and quartz. They light the craggy path she is compelled to tread. Small rustlings issue from the walls. The rustlings become whispers, the words inaudible as the ghosts trapped here inadvertently, muster to warn Maria. But she cannot comprehend. She hurries to be rid of their insistence, until the passage widens into an octagonal chamber that shivers with intermittent light. The ground is unstable.

"Zarka!" Her voice is alien. In response, she feels an oppressive presence, a sensation of hot fur paradoxically generated by the cold rock. A low whisper envelops her; enticing, then insisting, forcing her to sink slowly to her knees. She pushes at the blackness but it presses closer; a lustful parody of love.

Briefly she sees the Locolico; men who had been demonically transformed, swarming towards her.

Maria fights. She struggles to her feet. She pushes against a formidable force, out of the chamber into lighter layers of rock lapped by a sullen lake. On its edge, black shapes scurry or slide slowly into the water. They are amorphous yet their presence is potent.

Again Maria feels the blackness about her. But this time it passes to settle on the water. Then from it leaps a golden toad which sits pulsating on the edge. Maria is convinced it is communicating with the blackness, which is concentrated now; a mass of malignant energy. The toad vanishes.

Maria is powerless to prevent the next assault. The blackness scoops up one of the amorphous beings and bears down on her, forcing her to swallow acrid slime mixed with fur. She loses consciousness.

In the depths from which she intermittently gropes for awareness, she once more gives birth. She feels the frantic fluttering of a bird, the slippery scales of a fish, thrusting with a man's head, the pain of a spiked ball, the wriggling of a hair-covered worm, the squirming of a creature with numerous feet. Then she sees the emergence of a many-headed beast whose tail is a coiled snake.

She feels the lustful dark recede in fear. Painfully she rises and warily treads around the lake, avoiding the darting and slithering forms that stir the surface.

"Zarka!" She seeks her first born to obliterate those who had come after. She feels the child's arms around her neck. But the sensation passes. She is alone in a wide way gleaming with an interplay of minerals. The whispering has ceased but the ground continues to tilt beneath her feet. Then the rock opens and she steps into the sunlight.

THE PHURDINI

She finds the camp in turmoil. She has been missed. Mark is searching the hills. She is unable to relate her experience and speaks in nonsensical outbursts. But through her distress, she learns that Pila has conceived and is unhappy.

Pila wanders disconsolately through the hot hills, recalling fragments of a former life. An orphan, she had learned to be devious and disclose little. So she does not tell Mark of the conception.

One morning, as she rounds a rock, she sees the prism dropped by Maria as she fled from the Locolico. Picking it up she feels it quiver, as though some small creature has passed briefly over its surface. She shrugs but keeps it with her as she walks unwittingly towards a clump of grey green foliage by a stream.

The sun darkens and musk hangs hotly on the air. Pila is paralysed, as a small creature; reddish brown with a short tail and snake-like neck, bounds out.

It fixes Pila with bright eyes. She is mesmerised. She does not recognise the Phurdini \- the weasel loathed as an ill omen by gipsies. Known as The Blower, gipsies encountering it pack up camp and change direction.

The beast begins to puff up. Pila is drawn into its essence and will to overwhelm. She is carried by its bounding through lurching layers of darkness. The weasel attacks a creature larger than itself and Pila feels the force of the death bite delivered to the back of its head. She hears the weasel's guttural hiss and from beyond, the short screaming bark of another. The beast digests the creature it has killed and Pila loses consciousness.

She finds herself suddenly back at camp. Mark hurries to her. "Maria's ill. Come quickly!" he says.

Pila finds Maria sweating and tossing ceaselessly on the matting. She speaks feverishly of fur and feathers; a consuming pain. The fever persists for three days, then abates.

But Carl is still distraught; short tempered with Mark and Pila and subject to dark dreams. Mark endeavours to maintain calm. Pila retreats, haunted by the weasel's gaze.

The Nivashi are disconsolate, aware of the dark valley's influence; the distrust and malicious intent that is disrupting the camp. They feel the coming of the wind; symbolised for the gipsies by the breath of the Phurdini.

They undulate evasively, permeating the strata of the earth; dissolving and reforming in the water.

Like an intruder seeking retribution, the wind comes to camp; probing the makeshift homes, harassing the horses. It whines in the bright heat of the day and throughout the tepid night, worrying the pysche and plucking at the flesh.

Pila is silent, lying for long periods in the van; her hands held over her ears in terror. The weasel's eyes are constantly with her. She smells the musk in the wind and, as it rises, hears the creature's cry.

"Let's move camp," suggests Mark one morning. The restless horses, now often overlooked since Ileana had left, are hurriedly harnessed and, seeking shelter, the group sets off towards the town.

As they approach it glimmers like a daylit ghost. On entering they see the buildings are now thickly bound in fine white web and appear to sway silently in the sun.

The horses shy. The wind persists, howling through the webbing, sending spirals of dust spinning down the abandoned road.

"We must restock," says Mark. He vaguely recalls where the supermarket stands. He draws up the horses. Everyone climbs from the wagon. The building pulsates in the sun. Mark thrusts apart the webbing and the automatic door glides wide.

They are not prepared for the people who stand there like statues. Wound in white, some have hands raised in the motion of taking food from shelves. Surreptitiously, moving between them, and as though under surveillance, the group selects supplies and rapidly retreats.

They settle on a hillside outside the town, where Pila gives birth. She knows she is watched by the weasel. She feels its unswerving gaze as she closes her eyes and pushes at the being from within. She smells the musk as the creature she has nurtured pauses, lodged as though reluctant to be born. She feels within her the weasel's bounding gait, as she eventually thrusts forth the being that has been silently expanding in her womb. As it fights for breath, she hears it scream.

Pila looks with trepidation at the being she has borne. To her surprise it is a boy, but as she takes him to her he surveys her with the wily eyes of the weasel. She thrusts him away.

Thinking of Zarka, Maria takes him. "Vaya," she names the child.

One day Ileana walks through the trees to where the camp had been. The wind has died. Sun envelops the empty hills. Her companions might never have existed.

She sees the glinting prism that had been dropped by Pila and retrieving it, is drawn suddenly within its surface.

A violence possesses her; the confrontation of opposing forces; aspiration and destruction, bound in spirals of dark intent. She is overcome, as though physically engaged but struggles free. She is exhilarated by the will to surmount and survive. The images in the prism surge and withdraw.

That night Ileana leaves Mateo sleeping and is compelled to walk towards the valley of disconsolate ghosts. She feels a shudder sending shock waves through the ground. And the voices of the Nivashi grow distinct in agitation.

She enters the darkened lengths of land and holds the prism to the moon. Over it pass images of Jon, Yeniche and the dark twins with successive shadows of despair.

As she looks towards the valley she sees her son and lover approaching through the white light, like creations forged on film, and, as in the prism, followed by the dark twins and shadows shifting in agitation.

Beneath her feet the Nivashi stir, thrusting from darkness through complexities of root and rock, until they swirl and bear Ileana before them through the night.

She is increasingly oppressed, whirled on by the wordless voices of the Nivashi to confront Jon, Yeniche and the twins. Around them rise the howls of misshapen shadows.

Ileana is swept by successive sensations of growth and decay. She is root, rock, sun, sky; the essence of the Nivashi; the antithesis of destruction.

Unable to contain the presence of the hopeful ghosts, Jon expands in a final black despair, then dissolves. The black twins wither. But Yeniche and Zarka step from the shadows, ringed by light.

The shivering ground subsides. Silence seeps back. Ileana moves towards the moonlit children.

Ileana and Mateo leave the cave in search of the newly established camp. They skirt the white webbed town and on the other side, see the encampment by a fast flowing stream.

Maria notices the couple first and, incredulous, on recognising Zarka, hurries uphill to claim her child. In camp Pila approaches Vaya, abandoned in the compound. Looking into his eyes, she no longer sees insidious hints of the weasel, but a bewilderment at which she smiles before picking him up.

That evening, the other survivors, whom Mateo had left, thread through the hills for supplies from the town. On their return, they encounter the camp. They are welcomed with relief. Even Mateo is reconciled to a shared future.

All are aware that some demon of destruction, whether within or without, has been laid and that they are intended to nurture a new life, founded on feasible freedoms.

Slowly, the Nivashi disperse. Rocks, roots, water and sky release a universal sigh. For several seconds, the people frosted by the moon, pause in their new found exchange. In the centre of their circle stands the prism; an object of unspoken awe.

Their new life lies formidably ahead. But now they know, as the Nivashi pass, imprinting their presence for posterity, they will not be facing the future alone.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE ALOE

In the narrow hall that leads to Leila's room, the shadows move menacingly, like the shades of people she once knew. They glide evasively out of her way and retreat to dim corners, where they gloat, undisturbed on her debility.

Within her room, where she is washed up like a nun; disowned and confronted by remorse, voices float in fragments, like conversation caught in flight; moments from the past, long dead, yet in death, permeating the present.

She remembers. Within four stained walls; propped in the creaking cane chair, looking, but not seeing through the one wide window onto a snow-covered garden, where cats who usually leave no trace have pock-marked the lawn like the aftermath of some mindless dance.

Ghost prints, like those marching through her mind. As a young woman she had grown like an ungainly plant in a dark place. As though ashamed of succumbing to the elements, she denied her femininity; a neutral creature reared in oppression, edging numbly through limbo.

Her adolescent body and undirected spirit were unco-ordinated, waiting to be coaxed into cohesion. Then she had met the man. Irascible, compelling, unaware that she still moved in fragments and was waiting for the pieces to be handled with curiosity, combined and cared for.

She was merely a diversion and had subsequently suffered a sense of deprivation; a physical sensation as if some vital organ had been removed. The realisation that the man had not regarded her as an entity striving for recognition was a shock she could not absorb. Consequently, she would defend that emergent identity; keep it hidden and vestigial.

Admittedly, when she met the man two years later, he seemed shrunken and unsure; no longer worthy of obsession. But in her isolation, she adopted a bold indifference, denying depth, routing relationships and decrying compromise.

The stained white walls retreat. The marred snow dissolves into the accumulative stuff of memory. She is back in a room that she rented fifty years ago. While luxurious, it has the calculating air of being briefly lent for the occasion.

She remembers the booking. YVES CARTIER. She smiles sardonically and applying heavy make-up, re-shapes her face, gazing as though at a ghost; pale skin, brown eyes and dense black hair pinned defensively on top.

The nightly ritual is a resentful claim to her self possession. In this stranger - a commodity, a buyable piece of accommodating flesh, she hopes to retain something of herself.

The bell. Emphatic, intrusive. She opens the door, her detachment lending her small frame stature. She sees a slight, sallow youth with dishevelled dark hair. Emanating doubt, he enters, and after hesitating, sits awkwardly on the edge of a chair. Leila smiles, faintly approving.

He drinks with unreasonable caution. She allows the strained silence to settle, then, switching off the centre light, methodically undresses and slides between the sheets.

She is prepared for his impotence. Yet his mumbled excuses draw from her a sentiment close to compassion. His shame becomes shy scrutiny. Where is the stranger tonight? The youth is about to expose her. Like an instinctive young animal he perceives her fear. They have met on mutual ground; her defences lowered, his curiosity close to concern.

There is the honesty of tentative hands. Her assertion slipping. The dim perception of sympathy shared, as she slows his caresses and he loiters thoughtfully over her body. She is voluntarily possessed.

The door bell. This time, distant, irrelevant. Leila leaps from the bed, then pauses in the darkness. Which is the reality?

She opens the door. "Leila?" asks a man's voice.

"No, I'm afraid she's unwell tonight."

"Then tomorrow?"

"I doubt it. You see, she won't be needing you any more."

Feeling a keen satisfaction at his confusion, she quietly closes the door.

She had married Yves Cartier. Yet he had retained his reticence and soon Leila could find no more resources on which to draw. Defying her rejection, Yves strove to keep pace with her extravagance.

Leila within four stained walls, considers other walls she has confronted; not of a room or in the streets of a familiar city, but those of the mind. The walls which close in possessiveness, doubt, indifference. Her misguided indulgence breeding isolation. Streets of routine with a faceless future broken by disillusion like the interjection of crass hoardings. And the spiritual wastes, as derelict as vacant lots.

From the wide window she sees the snow re-emerge, parts of it melting into the feline footprints, like illusions from the past. The snow becomes a scuffed reach of white sand along the southern coast of France. Leila is staying there with Yves and Myra, a friend.

In an effort to placate Leila, Yves had suggested the holiday. Fearing isolation with him, Leila had invited Myra who was flattered and unaware of the motive. Myra, with her hesitancy and anxiety to be liked, compels Yves to ponder and respond. She is an antidote to Leila's demands.

Behind the gaunt bones of half built hotels lies a latent hostility; a vegetation like a thirsty man lying motionless, mouth open but making no sound.

It seems to acknowledge Leila's progress through the dust; crudeness conserved in the broad curve of the agave and aloe and a soft derision weaving through the slender stems of bamboo.

Walking alone through the woods, she senses the innate hostility, like the base instinct behind the eyes of a southern man, tempered by domesticity, but retaining a silent alliance with the land.

The sun shines and she wants to be alone with it, her limbs loose as it penetrates her thighs on lonely white sand.

She sees the sallow, tight-lipped women in the town, shrinking from the sun's sensuality, while she walks through the stultified vegetation and senses its latent violence in her veins. A glow expands her flesh. She understands the crassness of the silent fronds and touches one, slowly and rhythmically stroking the surface.

The hostility settles insistently on her swaying thighs. She slows and saunters; untouched, in command, yet uncannily possessed.

Outside the hotel, Yves sits cautiously in the shade, while in her room, Myra is brooding. Although Leila shocks her, Myra is drawn by her overt sexuality and strives to live furtively in her shadow. Leila mocks her gently; protective, but also using her to accentuate her own sensuality. Strangely, Myra does not mind.

But she is not yet ready for a walk through that crude country that Leila describes like a licentious lover. She collapses quietly on the hard double bed and lies motionless, staring at the ceiling. Now her long fingers crawl like bewildered brown insects across the pink bedspread, reluctant to acknowledge her rigid body, retreating even from the sun spilling like a soft pledge into the room.

She rises and looks reluctantly in the mirror. Her blonde hair lies limply on her shoulders, the angular bones of her face are unsoftened by a sense of fun or fulfilment. She looks at the pile of modest clothes she has unpacked, as safe and colourless as each day of her life.

She walks to the window. She can see Yves in the shade and contemplates how, saying little, he follows Leila with large eyes, as she moves incisively from one need to the next. His sallow air of retreat is a kind of consolation. He too fears Leila's sensuality, sensing its rootlessness. He is aware that his conquest of her was incomplete. He was merely a respite in her search for the unattainable.

Leila sways through the small town subsiding into the euphoria of early evening. She feels the eyes of tired businessmen accepting her as part of their package deal; a relief from their red-faced wives, already unbecomingly blistered by sun.

The women sit as though in strait jackets; large plastic or raffia bags propped like barricades between them and their husbands. Leila relishes their irrelevance and the way she can monopolise their men.

It is high summer and the evening air still heavy with heat. Leila enjoys its oppression like the weight of a man on her lazy limbs. She thinks of Yves, seeking refuge in the shade of a cultivated palm, recoiling from the ruthless growth not a mile from the hotel. She thinks of Myra. Leila wants to take them to the woods and subject them to its scorn and the silent hostility of the aloes.

The man's eyes are sharp and dark with acknowledgment. At the cafe table Leila sits where she can hold his gaze to her advantage.

He comes to her and lowers himself like a large cat, conserving strength. His hands lie motionless on the table. His eyes do not leave hers. Slowly, she smiles.

"Leila, I'm so glad I've found you!" Suddenly Myra is standing by the table; her face sallow in the half light, her eyes wide with apprehension. Leila bridles, rigid with resentment. The man rises, sees it, smiles almost imperceptibly, then looks at Myra, her long fingers working nervously at her sides, her eyes as big as a child's clouded with doubt, then tentative trust. She looks at him in innocence turning warily to warmth, relieved she is no longer roaming the streets alone.

"Yves is not well. He's resting," says Myra. Leila shrugs. "Let's walk," she suggests.

They start for the woods. Three linked strangers, their silent needs locked in, like the crudeness conserved in the agave. Feeling the man's measured step, the slight impact of his hip on hers, Leila runs ahead, expecting him to follow. She weaves between the dark fronds, snapping dry stems like brittle bones. She climbs a low hill and pushes through the growth of bamboo. She calls out. Her voice comes back to her, urgent and suddenly solitary. There is only the scrape of dry leaves in the darkness.

Then they appear behind her; the man smiling now, but in amusement, not complicity. He is holding Myra's hand and she looks reassured, trusting.

"I'll race you to the camp," says Leila, referring to the settlement of desultory holiday makers at the top of the hill. Still he smiles but makes no move to drop Myra's hand. He looks at the pale girl, still and straight as though carved from ivory.

Unbelieving, Leila scrambles through the coarse vegetation and into the tawdry camp site. A middle aged man in beige shorts looks up from a tap, surprise in his tired eyes.

A dishevelled woman emerges from a tent, addressing him sharply. Leila has a sense of promiscuous isolation. Memories of the London room obliterate the darkening vegetation and she turns abruptly, aware that the man has seen through her veneer, sensing that she would even have crassly used and abandoned him.

She starts back but has already lost her way. Myra and the man have vanished. Her call is answered by an unlikely echo. Then silence.

Suddenly she hears the sea and realises she is near the cliff edge. The vegetation vibrates and Myra's voice rises like some lame spirit affronted and forced into startled response. Then Leila sees her, attempting to fight free of the man whose guttural indignation bizarrely augments her high-pitched protest.

Leila appears like a vengeful apparition in their path. With sudden resignation the man shrugs, releases Myra and as though he had been a figment of the night, disappears into darkness.

But Leila is consumed by the knowledge of his preference for the timidity and latent femininity he found in Myra; the challenge of possessing that, more potent than Leila's presence.

Myra is crumpled, misshapen, unable to absorb, and her request to return to the hotel almost inaudible. Slowly, Leila traces the savage implication of a leaf. Then with a deliberation, as chill as the wind that has begun to stir the trees, says, "Yes, but there's plenty of time - let's walk some more first in the wood."

Yves lies on the hard hotel bed, stultified by heat and hectic early evening sounds; the heady savour of the south. Beneath his stupefaction the need persists; sharp, unappeasable. As the air cools it takes possession; comes close to panic, defying reason.

He knows it is merely a matter of waiting. The hours will pass, nothing essentially changing, sleep at some stage bringing oblivion. Why panic and pursue a woman who is unreachable; who even now may be extracting like an optimistic predator, the sensuality of some stranger?

Yves splays his tired limbs, striving for a compromising calm, willing time to pass in an orderly way, within his control, until she opens the door and at least lies, sated beside him.

But he swings with sudden decision off the bed and with no clear idea of where he is going, hurries from the hotel. He is aware of a resolution unrelated to reason, directing his feet towards the darkening woods. There is mindless consolation in movement, in passing through waves of people seeking the potently brief diversions of a Mediterranean night.

The road narrows, climbs. The couples diminish and locals sit motionless outside cafes, or silently melt into ancient alleyways.

Unseen, in the rank vegetation, the cicadas possess the night. Yves perceives a narrow path still visible through the petrified agaves and the scent of pines is suddenly borne like a solace through the blackness.

Then a high pitched cry cuts the quiet air; a combination of anguish and surprise. From its direction, Yves can, for the first time, faintly hear the sea lapping at the base of the wooded slope. The path, now practically invisible, appears to wind towards the desultory wash of the waves.

Suddenly two women loom like ghosts against a cork oak. One is Myra, the other Leila, her strong body pinning fast the frail limbs of the smaller woman, whose arms are raised against the trunk as if in a parody of crucifixion.

There is a snap of dead wood and Leila turns to see Yves, awkwardly confronting them in his white city suit. Myra wrenches free and runs to Yves.

From the mountain road, the hustling holiday resort diminishes; a brisk but irrelevant eruption on the timeless tracts of country reaching inland from the coast. The road relapses into a silence that had merely been waiting for the men defeated by the land to depart.

Land that bred the southern man, whose ebullience on the coast is a fragile means of masking the iron engendered by the elements. In the face of drought and inordinate rain, he built and re-built crude stone walls to divide meagre fields of corn, grapes, olives. He absorbed, fought and finally rejected the elements, and beaten, left for the fertile plain, carrying his defeat within him to the faceless towns.

The car climbs towards the village, clinging - its tenacity confirmed by time - to the precipitous hillside. The Moslems and mercenaries have gone but the mellow ramparts remain, rooted in the rock from which they were built.

Yves parks the car. Leila draws breath deeply; inhaling the essence of the little town suspended in siesta. Myra steps shakily onto the flagstones gleaming like glass from the contact of countless feet.

Their pension is perched near the church, elaborately ensconced above the huddle of sun-struck houses. They climb the stairway, steep and pungent with the weight of time, beneath vaults and arches, passing ominous hallways dissolving into that close domesticity glimpsed only when it flows into the street, the voices rebounding from walls as though relinquished by the past.

The night hangs heavily on the ancient town. Evidence of the evening meal, conversation, aggravation, is exaggerated within the confined space; humanity's hectic denial of the harsh land beyond.

For Leila, the place's potency is already beginning to pall. Her instincts lie with the land and unkempt elements. But Myra warms to the town's simplicity. She is sustained by the mundane; the undemandingly familiar. She responds to the drying clothes strung across alleys, the placidity of black-clad women emanating shrewdness.

Yves is ill at ease, yearning for the briskness of his native Normandy town; the pain of no longer possessing Leila tempered by his increasing respect for Myra and his response to her need to be shielded from the unscrupulous, to be retrieved from her instinctive well of fear.

That night Leila disappears. She leaves no word. She is simply swallowed by the night. Yves and Myra search the covered ways, describing to sceptical inhabitants, Leila's air of impetuosity; her contemptuous walk, her feline affinity with the night.

Her light laugh shot with cynicism, seems to echo intermittently from the desolate edges of the town or it might be some derisory night creature that has evolved in isolation among the aloe and agave.

"We'll wait," says Yves, while suddenly aware that Leila has left for ever.

He sits with Myra outside a murmuring cafe. She is tense; her pale skin flushed by the sun, her long fingers poised as though prepared for flight.

Tentatively, Yves takes her hand and mutely she gets up, walking with him to the pension. They are locked in a belated liaison from which neither intends to withdraw.

Leila walks swiftly through the barbed vegetation, aware that, like this land, she is incapable of compromise. She is compelled to live alone.

Later, as Yves and Myra scour the hostile hills, Leila's laugh; its mocking now edged with melancholy, seems to hang for some moments in a void of her own making. But sickened by her incessant need, she has already moved in search of solace to the north.

With Myra, Yves too returns to the numb expanses of his native land. The vegetation is lush yet unexotic, fed by a rare and feeble sun. But one morning in spring, as Yves leaves the house, he stops by the gate. In the chill northern soil a young aloe has taken root. It is fleshy, vigorous, thrusting defiantly into the clear April air.

Yves does not mention the aloe to Myra, who is apparently unaware of its appearance. But he compulsively watches the plant's progress. It grows fast. Still Myra seems unaware of its presence.

One night the moon breaks through troubled cloud, spilling its cold light on Yves as he lies, sleepless and inexplicably perturbed. Slowly he is aware of a creeping clamminess, as though his body is being brushed by the leaves of some tropical plant.

He climbs from the bed, is compelled to cross the room to the window, and in the pool of moonlight, sees the aloe; distinctly defined, yet curving with the clear contours of a woman. Leila.

In his mouth, he tastes a bitterness, like the juice of the aloe. He can perceive in the plant, Leila's profile, her stance, what might be a proffered hand. As though in response, the wind rises from the north and wraps with a low moan, like a parody of her ecstasy, around the softly stirring plant.

Within her four stained walls, propped in the creaking cane chair, Leila sees that the snow has almost gone. Soon, in this northern garden, wild with commonplace weeds, she will indulge again in the fantasy she has nurtured; a substitute for the sensuality that rendered her a recluse. Greedily, she will gaze upon the fleshy folds of the illusory aloe, the bold connotation of male and female in the sensual petal and powerful rachis of the arum lily, the exotic ophrys, seemingly half flower, half insect; a coupling sustained until the petals fall.

Leila's flesh is folding into a travesty of the plants for which she pines. It has the overblown surface of some voracious species past its prime that, rootless, will be mysteriously sustained for a short time yet, then, drawn to the ground at last, disintegrate in death.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE CONFESSION

Window bars steeped in the sun's slow death. Bright as blood. The bars like thousands throughout Spain which protect, deny. All inside darkly; desires needing light but silenced in submission to the Church.

And Carmen in the same black dress thinking: I am trapped.

She leaves the house. Subdued. Inflexibly ordered. She walks streets close with conservation. Suspicious faces of the squat women who rapidly run to fat, their gossip elaborating folly and sullying innocence. The shrill voicing of banalities a compensation for what they fear to express. Thoughts which the priesthood cannot banish from the night.

And Carmen thinking: I must not grow like that.

Yet secret doubts that flower with fleeting beauty die in the light of the Church's assertions. The Jesuits argue with her gently. Logical? Where lies logic? Not in the household superstitions. Not in the loud processions ranged against the possibility of doubt.

Where tangibility? The market where they sell vegetables is tangible. Hot stones beneath thin sandals. A penetration of their hell? A climatic extreme like their elevation and desecration of man and god, derived from Moorish closeness to the earth and the urge to transcend it. She can only transcend within herself.

Because she is beautiful; dark like the others but her features softer, the women's response to her is cruel, carefully distilled by propriety, yet cold as crucifixion.

Returning their gaze, she has died so many times; quietly, unnoticed, each time more lost, more resentful, thinking: I'm out of tune with destruction driven within.

The destruction is not always apparent. She sees it flower; grotesquely, beneath cautious acquiescence. It is generated by a fear of moving too far from taboos and repeating the past.

She thinks of Carlos. Son of a shopkeeper. Square-built; a face unremarked, free of guile. Yet he is a source of ideas, with an urge to mould some meaning from their lives.

Unable to touch most of the town's women, he is intended for some tradesman's daughter, who will sacrifice to him and his modest mode of commerce, her vestigial self esteem.

Deprived, he visualises in women attributes that do not exist. Woman is an ideal, retaining a boundless means of fulfilment. Yet she is remote, her inaccessibility reflected in excessive respect for the Virgin. And with his desire and adulation comes a resentment of woman's reluctance to succumb. A sinister seed is sown which he strives to suppress in the presence of Carmen. She, the daughter of a banker. Their liaison is forbidden, so she slips from a side door to meet him in malevolent alleys after dark.

Now Carmen heads for the tawdry edges of the town. Carlos waits, unreal in the sun's reluctant death. Like her, he is charged with the need to leave the town and the eyes that follow them through foul alleys.

They turn to the hills; their Asturian green touched with gold that here is simply sunset. Only the town, its oppression depleted as it recedes in the valley, draws from it, sinister symbolism.

No word is exchanged. The couple's direction is predestined, as conspiringly, the night draws on. But, within, Carmen is hesitant, as they hurry, as though outrunning the town's morality.

The road is replaced by the implacable eyes of her father, a Basque whose independent soul has succumbed, doubt by doubt, to social pressure. The pecuniary nature of his profession has prompted a precision of movement, thought and assessment of her. He had survived the Civil War and now epitomises the cautiously calculating generation, cowed by conflict and twenty four years later, bent at any price on perpetuating peace.

Her mother, a Catalan; indolent and lacking her husband's finesse, confines herself to the dry directing of the house but supports her husband, should Carmen, their only child, warrant a reprimand. Carmen is constantly sent to confession, but having nothing momentous to confess, emerges unconsoled.

She longs to challenge assumptions fuelled by fear, from the taking of national decisions to irrational aspects of daily life.

Why, for instance, should only girls engaged to be married, ride with a man in the front of a car? Confined to back seats, like a second class citizen, she has heard her words of embryonic argument founder; their validity vanquished by dogmatic thought.

Why, after rare visits to the social club, must she be met by friends; at the age of twenty five forbidden to go home alone with a man? Why should books \- prolific elsewhere - be banned for alleged subversion?

Carmen considers her neighbours. Disgruntled, yet preferring Franco's regime to thoughts engendering anarchy. Carmen thinks of a future freeing political thought, with a proliferation of opinion, a written constitution. The crowning of Juan Carlos? Restoration of the monarchy? Ironical. Potential release from a notorious source of oppression.

Now the inordinate demands of home rout Carmen's resolve to rebel. She absorbs the presence of Carlos and the pressure of past weeks poised within him. But she is unable to mobilise her actions.

The ruined tower rears like an imposition in their path; its ragged bulk brooding; ill-omened, the remnants of violated power. Carlos stops by a shattered wall. Carmen is motionless. She struggles to summon resolve. Defiance. Indulgence. Emotions to be unleashed before love can be contemplated.

Carlos looks at her; darkly, as though entering another dimension. He steps towards the entrance of the tower.

Carmen moves, as if in dream, and, unseeing, follows Carlos inside. The air is fetid, as though it has already absorbed the illicit actions of others. The ground is scattered with sharp stones. Carmen hears Carlos draw breath. His face, when he turns, is taut, unfamiliar.

The assault is sudden, as he thrusts her onto the stones; forcing into her without discrimination or the need for reciprocation. Repeatedly he delivers his defiance; relishing, cursing, consumed by the need for release from suppression, until, with a cry, he lies limply over Carmen, who is crushed, emitting low moans - her fear and vestigial hope extinguished.

Carmen at home, contained and uncommunicative. Carlos, now unmet, an entity accompanying her in the house, the hostile street. She avoids confession, the prospect insupportable. She goes instead to the edges of the town charged with anticipation. A corporate body of rigid belief insidiously claiming Carmen.

In the knowledge of her violation, she shares the need for a release that only the Church can secure. So she will watch the procession for one of a mad succession of saints' days, as indiscriminate as flies. But a fatal fascination. A submergence in ritual.

The faces of procession are anonymous, the desire to be absorbed overriding identity. She sees the slow submergence into abstract worship; the women transcending their petty preoccupations, proceeding unevenly, already partly beyond themselves. The men in touch still with the hot earth, wanting to be relieved of the necessity for will, but temporally intense, absorbed. There is also dancing; the pace increasing, becoming a rhythmic assertion.

A man stumbles. It is Carlos, striving for alleviation, drawn to the apex of the ritual and Carmen, caring again, thinking: They are aware of him. Although they do not look. They can see him. He is an inspiration. They are no longer in control. They might kill him.

Carmen running forward, thwarted by the crowd. Hearing Carlos moan. Again. Then silence. The people about him pause as though confronted by an alien object impeding catharthis. Blood creeps from beneath his clothes and running down the steep camber of the road, glints in the dying sun as it glides along the gutter.

Carlos. Unconscious? Dead? Punished for his violation of her and she unable to contain its shame. Carmen runs into the nearest church. She reaches the altar, snatches the heavy cross and flings it on the cold stone. She bends, grasps it in both hands and as though it has no weight, beats it upon the stone. It remains whole; inscrutable, accusing. Its authority inviolable.

A priest steps from the shadows. He grasps her shoulders. He is trembling. His face is white, incredulous. He does not replace the cross. He takes her arm. She does not resist. He leads her to a small room. He lifts her, lays her on a wooden trestle.

He does not touch her. Now she is ready for confession, to be re-admitted to a regime where doubts are denied. In time, as the shock of violation recedes, his unmoving absorption will be a substitute for the weight of his unworldly flesh; an attentiveness indispensable to women who cannot keep from the confessionals. The compulsion to admit petty transgressions, precious in their prohibition; the logical conclusion of the illogical restriction.

The prison is prepared and Carmen, drained of will, is ready for forgiveness.

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THE CITY

Fog. Silence. No alleviation as she wonders which road he took. The young man she should have helped, but, angered by her indecision, she had left, sweeping home rife and helpless with regret.

Now she remembers. Early evening. The young man brooding in the backstreet bar where they sat; strangers aware of each other's presence in a public place.

He is darkly spare, apprehensively preoccupied. She, planning to pass through. But sensing her eyes on him, he speaks. He has come from the Navy, then the north. Devoid of work, while London is a pushover they told him. No problem.

But London releases the clamorous disregard she reserves for the newcomer; her derision, dissuasion, as she gasps for respite; arteries hard with the futility of a floating population. She offers the young man defunct phone boxes, negative responses to his plea for employment.

He runs short of cash. He has not yet received his last pay cheque. He panics. Phone numbers that were to have been infallible prove fruitless.

He slows with the weight of his suitcases, confronting a rising tide of faces that thrust through streets that are alien, abrasive, not yet having acquired for him the alleviation of identity.

The city conspires to impede him, directing him indiscriminately through history. Nelson unnoticed; incongruous above the foul flow of traffic, the urban rejuvenation of St James's Park unacknowledged. The palace; austere and irrelevant at the end of The Mall.

Pavements have the fickleness of sand, for the newcomer cannot grasp the perspective of the place. He cannot visualise her homogeneity in relation to himself. For him she has no shape. She moves in waves; abandoned, voracious, placing obstacles in his path, her raised voice as plangent as a fishwife's. The young man turns into the backstreet bar.

The older woman looks sympathetic. Beneath an air of fragility he senses strength; self containment. But to be trusted? At last he has to speak, the weight of the wasted day drawing words. She smiles. Listening. But is incredulous at his lack of foresight. She buys him a drink which emphasises his need for food. A hollow now inside, discouraging the effort for decision.

The woman points out how each generation repeats the folly; arriving in London practically penniless, expecting to be provided for by some bountiful spirit of prosperity imagined by those who stay in the provinces.

He wants to trust her. To be led from the street back to the womb. To stretch, to eat, to sleep in warmth, wrapped in her wry smile. To abandon himself to one who knows how to eliminate the humiliation of rejection.

She lets him follow her. He is bowed by his cases along Whitehall. Wide, apparently endless, its auspicious implications locked behind blank doors. It swims beneath his feet, before his eyes, like an unnegotiable river in full flood, as she crosses and takes him to another bar. She buys him a drink, asks his name and warns him to watch his cases.

Noise rises; the affectation of advertising executives, commercial artists, consultants in a myriad of manufactured fields. And an inane extension of the ebb and flow; salt waves of the sea in pictures on the walls.

Her words are lost as he looks at the poorly painted pictures; waves obliterating the human hubbub, their force as indifferent as the city's yet placing man in perspective, as with universal purpose, they move in conjunction with the moon.

The woman is suggesting they leave. Assuring him of shelter. But not with her. The impersonality of some hostel. But how, without money? More movement, away from the mindless sea. Into a taxi, along the Strand and in moments, reaching Fleet Street.

It seems subdued, receiving revolution, retribution and despair unobtrusively within buildings where wires bear the ultimate follies of conflict, deprivation, the consequences of power and pecuniary exploit.

The young man is unaware of this injesting, editing, the essence of unending action, but follows the woman numbly up steep stairs into an office. She asks about hostels, temporary floor space. Futile.

She speaks of going home. The young man recalls gentle roads, radiating from Portsmouth, his home town. A terraced house. One parent prematurely dead, the other under constant care. His decision to join the Navy; become a gunner. Then, having served his term, the promise of a more lucrative job in Civvy Street.

But the country cannot support the weight of unemployed; a government as uncaring as the city, promoting lack of purpose.

He precedes the woman downstairs. Waits dumbly on the pavement. He says he will go north, where there is no work, but at least friends on whom to fall. Or he will go back to the Navy. He wants the nearest road and the woman, worried now, leads him towards Euston, to leave him at the discretion of some northbound driver.

Farringdon Road. Faceless, debilitating. The cases now a deadweight. He senses the woman's indecision; concern replacing the brash pride and pleasure of being on terms with the profligate city.

Now a swaying train, plunging into Purgatory below ground. She gets out. He follows and sees her disputing the price of tickets, then flouncing, exasperated, up the steps and at the top, dismissing him roughly, waving the way to the road.

The next night there is fog; a cruel, clinging dissolution of the spirit. At home, alone, the woman is unable to retract, longing to rectify her action. Loathing the flouting of her familiarity with the city, thrusting her self assurance on one who, exhausted, asked only for sustenance.

For the city has a code, to which those who have suffered and survived her indifference, must adhere; to care when confronted by a newcomer's confusion. They should not dismiss him or resent the inconvenience of his demands. But there is mutual suspicion and his presence could prove an embarrassment or danger and might be awkwardly prolonged.

Yet the woman, motionless, is diminished, despising her callousness. She could have taken him home and temporarily provided the simple means of survival. She could have stimulated, enlightened, indicated directions, that, alone, he may not have perceived. She would not have imposed or over-protected, but might have rendered him resilient.

She knows she would have valued his gratitude which would have remained in retrospect when he was ready to dispense with her help. But beyond this need, her anxiety grows; a consuming concern, outstripping the pleasure of reward or the inconvenient implications of dependence. Angered at her impotence, she suffers his sense of shock and rejection, unable to reach and alleviate the bitterness that in him has already bred contempt.

He holds a mirror to her past. Her inability to grasp the moment so it might have grown and released the latent life within her. She would have warned him to reject the future; the belief that the moment when one might give unconditionally, would recur. She would have told him how evasion, coquetry, the social game of hard to get, backfire.

She would have explained how belated realisation engenders an insupportable sense of loss. She would have talked of the need to succumb and her habitual holding back, the fear of relinquishing too much, too soon. And the subsequent burden of regret, when she was abject in the knowledge that she could not rectify her act of reluctance, recall the moment when the gift of giving was hers.

The conflict in the Falklands proves a panacea for jobless young men. She watches the censored progress of the war and wonders. Finally, claiming to be a distant relative, she seeks the lists of dead and wounded. With the names of the dead, rise before her faces from which the flesh prematurely falls. Then the wounded, left a pale lease of life, fraught with futility.

She confronts a short section of the missing, presumed dead. Near the end, condemning her to doubt and confirming that this time he had sought a destiny more decisive than the disappointments of the most cynical city, lies his name.

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SHADOW

Varesa first sees the shadow in a corner of the lawn. The shape is herself; penitent in isolation. She turns from the long window; remembering. She had felt her patience with Tom painfully drain - silently sucked into a deep vortex of despair. He had taken the job for more money and prestige. But the job had possessed him - morning, noon and most of the night. Her glimpses of him were frustratingly brief, until she decided she would rather live alone. So she had left.

Tom was devastated, so steeped in sales figures, he had not realised how Varesa had visibly shrunk and paled, becoming waif-like and wide-eyed. Her last words fell on ears impaired by self absorption.

Tom stays in the cottage. Varesa moves to a garden flat where she writes educational books and makes tentative contact with other writers. But her heart is not in it.

That summer is sunny. Every day now she sees the shadow, crouching, curled in the foetal position or writhing in the grass. But it fades before the sun sets; moved by an inner volition, unrelated to light or shade.

My alter-ego? wonders Varesa. My imagination?

As the days pass the shadow becomes her dark companion.

It's my guilt, she decides. She often thinks of Tom but decides not to ring him, striving to start afresh rather than relive the pain of alienation.

Then one day, as she finishes her manuscript, confining the complexity of the natural world to five over-simplified sections, the shadow stands beside her in the dusk dim room.

Varesa turns and confronts the shape which is, yet is not, herself. It is motionless, yet she hears the faint intake and exhalation of breath. The shadow is about a metre from her desk.

Nervously she stands and, reaching an arm, touches its pitch blackness, yet feels only the swift sweep of a passing air current.

"Talk to me!" she begs. "Tell me I did the right thing."

The shadow flinches, floats further away and is lost in the window's darkening drapes.

Tom is about to go to work when he sees the shadow standing by the back door. Initially he thinks it is Varesa dressed in black. He peers in disbelief. The shadow is faceless yet has Varesa's body, her way of standing with one hand behind her back.

Tom is possessed by a sudden wish to harm her. She had gone without discussion or a second thought. She had not even rung him. He turns to the shadow and swings a punch at its featureless face. The shadow folds with a faint cry, then fades.

Varesa cannot write. She walks through neighbouring fields of ripening corn, climbs a low hill and looks towards the shuttered wood. She turns her face to the sun and, on an impulse, looks behind her. She has no shadow. It has become detached, lingers without her in the garden and haunts the house, although she has not seen it since yesterday. She knows primitive people believe this means the shadowless person will die. She feels faint, then has the sensation she no longer exists. She turns for home.

The front door opens of its own accord. The shadow stands in the hall. "No!" Varesa cries and rushes past, pushing at air. She collapses on the couch, head in hands. There is a swish, an indrawn breath, a low moan. The latter is hers, the prolonged melancholy swimming in the silence of the room.

Slowly Varesa raises her head, to see the shadow glide sadly across the room and through the closed window, to dissolve in the late light on the uncut lawn.

Varesa has a sudden searing head pain. She feels as though someone has punched her and as she tries to sit up, falls back, dizzy and disorientated on the couch. She lies there for two hours, unable to rise. At last, the pain recedes and she staggers to the bedroom.

Varesa hears that Tom is seeing his secretary - a woman with a loud lust for life, whose previous adventures are tirelessly related by a malicious neighbour. Varesa despairs, then one morning sees the shadow has sadly returned to her lawn. It sinks onto the grass like a silent sentinel.

Varesa is left a large legacy by an aunt and decides to build a small house on a piece of land owned by her late uncle. The plans proceed until the day comes for the foundation stone to be laid.

Gianni, Varesa's builder, who comes originally from Greece, gazes uncertainly at the stone. "You know we once sacrificed a man - put him living in the walls or crushed him under the foundation to give the building strength - and so his angry ghost would haunt the house and keep it safe from intruders.

"Then it was a cock, ram or lamb that was sacrificed - its blood left to flow on the stone and the animal buried underneath.

"In later years a man would be lured to the stone, his body secretly measured and the measurements put under the foundations. Or the builder might lay the stone on the man's shadow and the man would die within the year."

Varesa's mind had been wandering at these grisly recollections but on hearing the last, she turns to her builder and says, "Can you capture a shadow?"

He laughs, "Well sort of. There were once shadow traders who provided architects with shadows to put in their walls. In fact they measured the man's shadow - this is thought to be the equivalent of the shadow itself and buried the measurements. Then the man would die."

Varesa has grown so painfully introverted, she responds, "Can you measure the shadow of Tom Latimer of River Cottage? And bury the measurements in my foundations?"

The builder's eyes sparkle. He is pervaded by the superstitious power of the past. "Yes," he says.

In full sun, Gianni creeps silently behind Tom as he walks towards his car. Tom's shadow moves with him, but pauses as Tom bends to insert the car key. He has trouble with the lock and curses. Like lightening Gianni measures the prone shadow and backs swiftly away as Tom eventually turns the key and steps into the car. The shadow vanishes.

The measurement is duly laid on the foundation stone. Varesa watches, dubious now, aware of what she may have set in motion. Yet through her grief, she perceives the foolishness of the builder's notion. She feels vindictive, yet cannot believe this action will annihilate the man she still loves.

Tom is late. He drives fast. He does not see the car shoot without warning from the side road. He brakes hard, averting the worst of the impact. But both drivers are knocked unconscious.

Told by the police of the accident, Varesa rushes to the hospital. For four days she sits by Tom's bed, until he emerges from his coma and reaches for her hand.

"Seconds before the accident I had the strangest sensation - I felt someone was wishing me dead," he admits, "Then everything went black."

"What about Stella?" asks Varesa, referring to his secretary.

"That's over. She's pretty crass. How about you?"

"I love you Tom - but I can't compete with your job."

During the next days, they solder a solution. Tom agrees to change his job and spend more time at home. There are, anyway, rumours of redundancy. Varesa returns with him to the cottage.

"You know I'm having a house built?" she says.

"I had heard, yes."

"I've decided to sell it when it's finished. I want to live here again."

"That's fine by me."

Outside her garden flat, the shadow lies down softly in the long grass, drawing in a deep breath like a whisper of evening wind, and sleeps.

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THE ENCOUNTER

She had not wanted to come to the low land bleached by sun. She clings to the concept of days grown in green tranquility. But soon, by the soft hand of the south, she is lifted into limbo, suspended in sensation; her body made supple and primed for possession.

She is polite with her companion. He is ageing and locked in another limbo; bluff and defensive, voluble boyishness veiling despair. He too is polite, anxious for equilibrium; acquiescent.

Laughingly they lurch across the rutted island, lost but light as they take wrong roads and absorb the warmth of constant tillage interlaced by dry stone walls. Audacious domes curve hotly; landmarks bizarre as legend among humble limestone houses.

From the point overlooking the sea, the replica of the shipwrecked saint stands sun- struck through the white hot days; a mirage of immortality. The warmth loosens the woman's flesh, the tautness of preoccupation. Distraction slips away. The senses are drawn to a soundless centre.

Early afternoon. Silence except for the small stirrings of a placid palm. Then a cry of sleep-steeped despair. From his room. He wants to wake but sleeps on, held by dream. He opens the drawer, finds the lover's letters to his wife and on waking, recalls how his efforts to retrieve her, were repudiated.

She was lithe and querilous, when he yearned for solitude after travel; a retreat for recuperation, swimming with the green of rain-wet fields after parched outposts and the brittle exchange of business. He could not compromise, relinquish work that took him away from her for weeks.

He watches the other woman - almost a stranger - move softly about the house; low spoken and wary, while wanting to please. She exists on the periphery of his suspended senses, agreeable yet unallied, like a desultory shaft of sunlight that fades fast, barely noticed.

She is repelled by the weight of his years; a dimension outside her perimeters of desire, and uncomfortable with his habit of brusque authority.

Yet he is extrovert; friendly with the fishermen, their measured lives remote from his, when they come home, as they have for centuries, with a simple gift of silver fish. He enters the banter of their early evening and remains amiably ridiculous.

She believsd she needs only the sensuality of the elements; a retreat into their solace, no encounter with man's manipulation of the senses. She walks alone, bestowing her allegiance on one great rock rearing white against the wind-plucked blue. She relishes the rhythm of the water, the penetration of the sun, and seeks submergence. But the man's methodical yet restless movements monopolise her.

He is elegant; narrow sea blue eyes that focus with sudden penetration as he reiterates some detail of his past at supper by the conspiring sea. As a salesman he had constantly travelled and aroused unjustified suspicions of infidelity in his wife who had sought reassurance from a younger man.

Now he recoils from close encounter, yet is increasingly aware of the woman moving in self containment through the house and gows familiar with her unobtrusive habits, her small considerations.

She too is newly alone and recovering after a premature encounter with potential death, taking with equanimity what each day held, dealing with the details of existence, unable to conceive the long term since she cannot not now take it for granted.

Her illness places her on a pinnacle of possible extinction. She gaze at, but can notd not grasp, finality; a chasm come too soon, and meaningless, since she has no belief to alleviate its starkness.

Time passes. There are three days before departure. She no longer fears his assertion. From small courtesies a compassion begins to grow. She shares his isolation, carefully contained except in sleep, wanting to dispel the alienation of defence.

Softly in the night, in her separate room, unexpectedly, she cries; prepared at last for the implications of the flesh, seeking through the physical, a gratification of the spirit.

What is the demon nurturing desire? The need to be worshipped, wield power, not to lose a sad soul in transit? To offer solace and complete a contact belatedly begun? How potent her need for integration, more powerful than repulsion, fear, the fickle defence of indifference.

Without the integration the hot night harbours an unexpected sense of loss; illogical and rash. How to contain affection, sustain buoyancy within this brief span of time and application? We are not made for tiny measures of mortality. We weave illusion from the lonely flesh, mustering compassion from aridity.

She is acutely aware of what lies within reach; the frailty of the flesh whose continuance the most obdurate spirit cannot guarantee, the clutching at straws, the obligatory hope, because the alternative is inconceivable. And she begins to perceive the loveless centre lying within the man.

The island is laced with enigmatic stones of prehistory and the burial chambers that were once temples to frail flesh, sacredly sealed from the light of day. The cult on Malta os a mystery, at its core, the image of a gross woman promoting fertility or prophecy.

He walks through the dead chambers, peopled with the living, striving to envisage the past. He takes a step towards his death; the walls of spent experience and rebuffed effort, as implacable as the rock fashioned by forgotten hands.

Sheis restless. Watching him mustering the peace to be absorbed by a book, then boisterously regarding a routine whose predictability protecs against the void.

He needs some living contact; a challenge to release the flesh and elevate the spirit; a defiance of encroaching immobility. He decides to take a boat and seek the great fish he has seen borne exultantly ashore.

He rents the boat on a day when the wind is wandering from the south; that deceptively gentle breath that may gather in ferocious gusts. The hazard was appropriate, conspiring with the sea to defeat his mortal arrogance; a deliberate brush with the dark wings of death.

Heading towards the shipwrecked saint he dimly recalls fishing in the peace of English backwaters; the activity an extension of an emotional accord now irrelevant and unreal.

The water glimmers, lightly flecked by the gathering wind. He passes the bleached statue, his outstretched arms frozen in boundless benevolence. The saint diminishes, and as though beyond his protective power, the sea draws the boat strongly, taut waves running, teased by the rising wind.

Fish are were swimming thickly about the boat. He is unconcerned whether they are lampuka, dentice or cerna. He seeks the swordfish; to contend with a creature whose defencee is blatantly exposed, drawing from the man a need for assertion; exacting, uncompromising, yet an encounter carried out in solitude, witnessed only by the hindering elements.

He sees the first silver glint of the great fish as it rears and plunges below water. He prepares his tackle, braces in readiness. Then the fish is by the boat. Its head thrusts from the water. But it is not the head of a fish. Through the scales, silver against the blue, shimmers the face of a woman, her eyes penetrating, defying him to draw her in, her silver body as sinuous as that of his quiet companion, moving simultaneously somewhere on shore.

Can she be the challenge he is seeking? Does he need, not combat but consolation? Should he forgo the need for assertion and succumb instead to sympathy?

He brings the great fish up, deposits it writhing on the floor of the boat. The eyes glimmer, the mouth is pulled in pain, the sleek scales glint against the drab boat's bottom.

He cannot kill her but kneels, held by the softness of her eyes. They are sea deep, grey as the shore woman's, drawing him into their reflective depths where he sees himself; fearful, laughably obstinate, his defiance a bluff defence, as unable to survive the obstacles of age and isolation as he is to weather the rising sea.

The woman's eyes grow larger, rounder, then glaze with imminent death. The wind whines and the sky darkens and her fish-like scales return. The boat, borne towards the island of the saint, strikes a rock, the fish is thrown back into the sea, the man clings to the tilting craft.

He wakes to late afternoon sounds around the sleeping house. The woman sits beside him, concerned, a hand raised to his head.

"You cried out again," she says.

"A bad dream." He senses for the first time the extent of her isolation; patient and suppressed yet as insistent as his own. But she does not make defiant expeditions, goading fate, seeking instead the affirmation of life through the potential of the living.

"The wind's rising. Dangerous for fishing," she points out.

He takes the hand, proffered with warmth, for the first time.

"There's no need to go now," he says.

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AN EYE FOR AN EYE

"Now open your eyes ." The doctor's voice is low and as distant as George's sense of deliverance. He eases open first one lid, then the other. Before his left eye loom dim shapes that could be furniture and the vague outline of a window. But before his right eye drifts darkness.

He indicates alarm and with his left eye sees the doctor nod and say with infinite sadness, "Yes, Mr Crabb, it's as I feared. The operation has only half succeeded. You are blind in your right eye."

Now there can be no one to whom semi-blindness would not be a blow. But George Crabb is a private detective; shambling, sallow, his wispy grey hair always on end in places as though he is subject to some constant surprise.

And with only one eye, who knows what essential piece of evidence may slip by unnoticed, unpursued, prolonging an investigation for weeks?

Fourteen days later, on the corner of Goodge Street, his worst fears are realised, when he fails to notice a man - deep in adultery with the wife of one of George's clients - slipping from a side door and walking briskly away up the road.

Similar mishaps follow and soon George's confidence slips as his quarries move in and out of his reach like a well-drilled game of draughts.

In his shabby bedsit - the only aspect of his life he is happy to find eclipsed - he begins to dream. He contemplates George Crabb. Unmarried. Seedy and unambitious. Ten years ago, when he was twenty, he had been jilted by a girl with a hare lip. The next day he resigned from his job with a plastic toy manufacturer and to restore the spice that had left his life, became a private eye.

The faces of those he is tailing appear gloatingly before him. The eyes are blue, brown, green; liquidly alive, penetrating his inadequacy while the mouths move in soundless laughter.

The faces of women drinking a last draught of flattery before yielding to late middle age and the faces of men, disappointed or blatantly bored, seeking a fleeting sense of fulfilment with some callow female who is far too young. All slipping from his receding field of vision.

George stops work. He dozes on the single bed but is afraid to sleep. He shops in the corner store until the last of his money has gone. He considers social security, dismisses it as a dull alternative and resolves to return to work. But he remains in his room.

One Saturday, on the radio, George hears about the eye bank. A whole building on the outskirts of Hopton with hundreds of eyes laid in frozen rows, awaiting eyeless owners.

The faces of his quarries recede and he gazes in cold folds of thought at the wallpaper.

"No, I'm sorry, your right eye really is beyond replacement," says the doctor with an attempt at benevolence, yet clearly anxious to see the next patient.

"But among all those, there must be one that's suitable," objects George. He is broaching the subject of the eye bank.

"I'm sorry old man, but it's more complex than that. You will just have to learn to live with it."

George sighs and walks wearily away.

As his diet decreases, George sees spots floating before his left eye. As he looks, motionless on his unmade bed, the spots expand and each becomes a human eye; wide, unblinking and silently watchful.

Wherever he looks the eyes follow, possessing him, drawing into their liquid depths the last of his ebbing spirit. He moves stiffly off the bed and tries to walk, but is dizzy from lack of food and falls back with a sigh.

The eyes continue to scrutinise. Staring like he has stood and stared at windows, waiting for the figure of a man or woman to appear against the glare of a light or dramatically in silhouette.

That night he cannot sleep. Closing his left eye diminishes the eyes suspended in penetration, but the faint outline of their rims remains, ready to re-kindle and mock without mirth should he raise an eyelid.

It is about one in the morning when he slides from the bed, weaves unsteadily downstairs and across the street towards the Hopton road. Like a man possessed he follows the road for three miles until he reaches the outskirts of the village.

The eye bank is in a long low building across a cow pasture. As though directed by some secret source, George's feet follow the narrow path that runs across the field and stops by a low gate that unaccountably swings open with a sigh.

Still subject to some alien will he moves to a side door which opens to the slight touch of his hand and dimly he sees a steep flight of steps. George goes down. The surface of the steps is slippery, like the effects of damp, yet devoid of moisture. The silence is absolute.

George gropes through a passage, his hands moving along the walls with the same dry yet slippery surface as the steps. The passage curves and opens abruptly into a laboratory dimly lit and seeming to pulsate slightly, although it is silent and apparently empty.

Then George sees them. Row upon row of frozen eyes, laid in protective casing. Motionless, painstakingly preserved, incapable of closing.

Or are they? As George strains to see them, it seems a flicker of recognition passes among the frozen eyes. There is an almost imperceptible quiver and then the pulse again, possessing the room.

He steps forward and the eyes gleam. All are turned on him, unblinking and unnaturally bright. There are blue suspicious eyes with a liquid hint of being hurt. There are grey eyes like those of a man resenting unreasonable demands and the wide brown eyes of a girl who still laughs at life in the chill of the throbbing laboratory.

All stare, unremittingly and quivering in silent satisfaction.

"No!" George's voice shatters the silence and is thrown back at him by the slippery walls. He covers his face with his hands, then clutches his left breast with a sudden groan of pain.

"Heart attack!" confirms the doctor called by frightened assistants at the eye bank the next morning.

"How did he get in?" queries one, "The gate and the door were locked and they haven't been forced." George is pronounced dead from natural causes in unnatural circumstances.

Rumour has it that, unable to find anyone related to George, doctors later extracted his left eye and added it to their silent, unseeing collection to be kept carefully on ice until further notice.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

A SOLACE FOR THE SINGLE MAN

As Sophie leans motionless against the wall, Harvey savours the sightless gaze of her eyes, the tantalising tilt of her lips. The top of his balding head reaches her prodigious bust and his podgy hands press the small of her back.

She laughs brokenly, like a disappointed doll. Harvey stands on the tips of his toes and tentatively touches her lips with his. Then he lifts her off her bare feet and, hoisting her horizontally under his arm, crosses the room and lies her solemnly on the small bed in one corner.

She is silent, unresponding to his hot hands. He presses between her breasts. Her eyes fill with tears which roll rapidly down her pale face. Harvey sighs, and charged with protective zeal, slides his fat arms behind her back and squeezes her affectionately, until once more she laughs.

He strokes her red hair, glinting enticement beneath the bare bulb of the large lumber room where he lives, finding the dimensions manageable, instilling a long-sought sense of security.

He thinks of the three thousand women he has supplied to lonely men throughout the country. What better way to spend an inheritance after one has sought a woman of spiritual capacity and physical finesse, but encountered rejection, derision or debilitating defiance?

At home in Buckhurst Hill, there had been the daily who sneered at his suspenders and despised his dirty underwear. She lingered after his mother had made off with a soft drinks salesman and his father had died a dipsomaniac.

Cowed by exposure and the unpalatable memory of ill-matched parents, he had sold his father's house and sought a retreat in Notting Hill, where he drew a veil over his mother's dominance that had driven his father to drink and from which he had suffered by being shut, on the least provocation, in the broom cupboard.

His fair hair was falling out. His blue eyes had paled as though reflecting the retreat of his affronted soul. He over-ate to compensate for the affection he lacked, parading his paunch with a foolish swagger before Sophie's uncritical gaze.

Now woman would succumb to his whims. He would confuse and enthral her by following a good hiding with unstinted love. In fact he had designed her; ideal in wind and limb - the wind of prime importance, enabling her to be inflated when desired and deflated and folded away when her lover sought solitude.

Harvey went further. He launched her in a range of shapes, sizes and inbuilt inclinations, having seen men, unfulfilled, flabby and business-worn, watching lumpy girls revolve around a half-lit stage.

He pulls a thick wad of letters from a drawer; notes of gratitude from wan city workers of London and the North and smooth men of substance, faltering or in need of diversion when their private incomes have palled.

He imagines them caressing their lithe women; blondes, brunettes and his speciality, redheads. He sees the women; meek, obedient, laughing or crying to please their lovers, complying for hours at a time with extravagant desires; their bodies unsagging, smiles unfailing, complexions still fresh.

Sophie lies smiling on the bed, inviting him with her open arms, tapering into slender hands, ending however, in predatory nails, bright as blood.

That night, Harvey oils and caresses her clasping mechanism and lies blissfully locked in her arms. But the morning is ruined by an abusive letter from a Leicester business man, complaining that his brunette refused to respond to a smutty joke. Harvey hastily replies, suggesting ways of overcoming the difficulty and continues his day with a clear conscience. But the next morning brings another batch of letters.

Men are accusing him of fraud. Some cannot stop their women weeping. Other women have grown stiff about the arms or legs. Some are even losing their hair.

Harvey grabs Sophie, balancing her by the wall. He surveys her anxiously. She seems in tact; still smiling, her arms invitingly outstretched, her legs, long, strong and shapely.

He goes out for a drink. Compares Sophie with the women in bars; their faces imperfectly plastered, their legs bowed beneath full blown bodies, their voices shrill, argumentative. Men answered back; abused. Women competing with men and indiscriminately exercising their political voice.

Harvey would nurture men's virility and subject women to their will. Even if these women were reluctant to cook or clean, since that might diminish their charms, at least they would not nag or belittle their lovers.

Distraught, he elbows his way to the door past a large blonde who jangles with junk jewellery. Sophie is there to comfort him when he returns. Patient, undemanding, soundlessly accepting his soft caresses.

But next day the complaints continue to arrive. Women are not responding to persuasion. Harvey panics. If these women fail, the men will return to those who dominate and dally in the polling booths.

The first of his ideal women is returned while he is out competing at the counter of the corner shop with harassed housewives, observing with distaste their aggressive fall from femininity.

On the table lies a letter from Maurice, the woman's lover. He demands a refund, while the brunette sags against the wall, her brown eyes brimming with tears.

Maurice had requested a woman with the characteristics of Miss World. So Harvey had designed one with a vacant face and limited vocal range, programmed to repeat her intention of pursuing activities from patchwork to piloting a plane.

Maurice could have had a woman with a simulated will and the built-in capacity to retaliate when provoked. Instead "Miss World" proved malleable, tirelessly murmuring compliance.

Predictably, Maurice was unsatisfied. He upbraided her, petulantly poking the crying mechanism between her breasts. She had started to cry and could not stop. Since returning her, Maurice had resolved to risk a real woman with resilience and the ability to answer back.

The next woman, who cannot stop laughing, is brought by Cyril, a pale young man in a shabby mac, who hovers diffidently on the doorstep. Harvey greets her mirth with a frown.

"Let me have her for a few days," he says, resolved to personally assault the manufacturers of his masterpieces.

Cyril has a severe sense of inferiority. He imagines malicious sniggers in his wake and pitfalls in his path. So he had ordered a woman with a reluctance to laugh unless specifically instructed.

Harvey had dispatched a slender blonde with a frightened face. Released from reality, Cyril had grown assertive, but after two weeks, the blonde's apprehension had palled. Exasperated, he coaxed from her an inhibited laugh. But the button in the small of her back had stuck, the laughter inanely persisting. Now Cyril is prepared for a woman of flesh and blood who in time may laugh, not at him, but the quality of the witticisms on which he is working.

There is the punctured redhead who arrives inexpertly patched with plasters and is rendered knock-kneed as the air hisses gently from between her legs.

One brunette is borne in by a happily married man, embarrassed at having found her in his flowerbed. It later transpires that the neighbour to whom she belonged, had been about to seduce her at midnight on his lawn, when an unexpected gust of wind had wafted her away.

And finally, there is the blonde who was rejected for a Japanese model which would not inflate. When the blonde was retrieved from the back of a garage, she had perished, her personality obliterated. She arrives; a contorted corpse in a cardboard box.

Soon Harvey's room is full of defective women, lolling against the walls and sitting awkwardly on the floor. Sophie still has pride of place on the bed. But Harvey harbours unprecedented doubts. When will she rebel? His ideal women have proved as fickle as flesh and blood. Why? Inferior workmanship, materials, or some secret source of defiance? His eagerness to simulate desirable traits, endowing the inanimate with the mysterious means of will?

He considers it high time Sophie had a hiding to banish potential petulance. But as he raises his hand he is convinced her wide eyes blink and beseech him to refrain. He sinks, defeated, at the bottom of the bed and the room recedes as he succumbs to sleep.

He is next aware of Sophie's blood red nails resting on his pallid flesh and her face, contorted and cruel, next to his. He cowers, no longer in control and closes his eyes as he listens to the women around him; the intake and release of breath, or is it merely the air escaping from their faulty limbs? But he is assailed by the odour of feminine flesh and an unspoken resolve to retaliate and dispense with male domination.

Then he wakes, seeing the women limply propped around the wall. But the lid of the box containing the perished blonde is inexplicably lying on the floor.

Sophie sprawls on the bed, her hands harmlessly at her sides. But Harvey no longer trusts her compliant gaze. What if she should rebel while he sleeps, using like the other women, the ploy of wilfully developing some defect? He is impotent; convinced she is conniving with the resentful women.

Now he is sure they despise him for encouraging men to use them as a blatant means of pleasure. They have seen men's true nature exposed. Unable even to flinch, the women have suffered the brunt of their lovers' inadequacies; abuse, assertion, but seldom a trace of tenderness.

Harvey cannot sleep while these women are gathered conspiratorially around the room. He resolves to refund the money and abandon his business; maybe join some monkish order that is sunk in silence, having dispensed with the need for women. Meanwhile, those he has looked to for loyalty, laughter, the unquestioning fulfilment of masculine whim, must be destroyed. He will deflate them, weight them down with stones and dump them in the Thames.

He begins deflating a redhead, but she, then the others, are reluctant to relinquish what life they have left. Apart from a feeble hiss and splutter, they remain defiantly full of air.

Exasperated, Harvey orders a furniture van, resolving to glean bricks and stones from the nearest building site, truss the women in bunches and lower them into the river near Greenwich.

At last the women, intent on impossible postures, are settled in the van and the disconcerted driver, on the point of turning down the job, sets off under protest.

So on reaching a crossroads at the same time as a coach full of tourists, he wrongfully claims right of way. There is an impact, then an explosion. The grey afternoon is lit with fire which spreads rapidly throughout the van, while people pour like terrified ants from the wrecked coach.

Harvey is driving a few yards behind the van with Sophie beside him. Her head bounces hard against the windscreen as he brakes. A monstrous cloud of black smoke is rising from the van. The smell is atrocious. But Harvey happily watches his ideal women, made from the most pliable rubber, fitted out to laugh and cry and satisfy the country's most disappointed men, in the throes of premature death.

Suddenly the women burst out of the back door of the van, their faces crudely distorted as though by bad temper or despair. The staring eyes dissolve, the mouths drop in a half-witted way. Crumpled arms and legs dangle at strange angles. Blonde, brunette and redhead have hectic haloes of flame.

Harvey feels moisture on his arm. He turns to see Sophie crying, although he had not pressed the button. It must have been the sudden halt. Then she stops and as though having made a momentous decision, seductively she smiles and lowers one hand with the vermilion nails, to rest lightly on his knee.

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THE WATER HORSE

Laryse reaches the top of the sun-mellowed dune. Fine sand flies like fairy dust, fanned by a light wind from a marbled sea. Briefly the water washes inland to join a river flowing fast from the hills. And in it Laryse sees a man poised, the foam lapping long legs, a sea green shirt flapping in the wind. His lush mane of hair shimmers with sand and shells.

Laryse watches. He flings his arms wide, then draws them close, as though embracing the wind. He throws back his head to drink in the fresh salt air. Then he sees her. He is motionless, gazing. She is tall, wearing white; conspicuous on the dune.

Slowly he lifts his long legs from the swirling tide and climbs onto the spit of sand lying by the dune. He raises an elegant arm and beckons. Laryse turns to retrace her steps. But she feels him compel her to walk through the sifting sand to where he waits.

She reaches him. He smells of salt water and some other element not entirely human. Some animal she has known but cannot identify.

"Hello!" she ventures. He smiles. His lips are thick, his teeth exceptionally white, his eyes a little prominent.

"Hello!" He touches her arm. She does not withdraw. She feels unreal, as though her essence is being gently sucked out until she is dizzy and then dazzled by the man's virility and grace.

The blue green wash of water lifts her from her feet. She tries to find firm sand but is weightless and can barely breathe. She feels the man bear her towards the white-topped waves and the cold shock of whirling water.

Incandescent fish flash past. Weed with the intricacy of lace undulates and parts to let the man and woman dive to depths with the flashing instability of precious stones. From the mad motion, the spiralling form of a woman grows; spun from a rare spectrum of underwater light. Her eyes are piercingly black and penetrate Laryse's shy soul until she shudders with incomprehension.

"Come! You must lie with the Each Visge. But I will give you wise words."

Laryse feels the man lower her as carefully as fine china that might shatter. Above her weave branches of coral starred with brittle flowers. The lace-like weed strokes her wet flesh as she feels the man's hot breath on her salt-soaked face. The water woman bends like a sapling of the sea and whispers in Laryse's ear, "Banish the equine with the fruit of the sea wraith."

Laryse is bewildered and weak with the weight of the man. His feet stroke her bare leg, but it is not a foot she feels. It is a hoof. She opens her eyes and sees above her the long white head of a horse.

The thick lips curl back with desire, the nostrils dilate. The hair is a matted mane, the front lock falling thickly over his heavy head. Deep blue eyes meet hers with the uninformed instinct of a beast.

Laryse writhes, tries to free herself and utters a howl of horror. Alarmed, the horse rises and dances around her in distress. She struggles up and scrambles through a gap in the coral. It clutches and lacerates her, but she plunges on into the kaleidoscopic depths, her feet slipping on the sea's silty bed.

"Banish the equine with the fruit of the sea wraith!" The words wash on the waves. Equine. The horse. The horse man. Illusion? Real? She is dreaming in the dunes. It was a young man she saw in the water.

She hears a whinny of frustration. She looks back. The great white horse is swimming towards her - his long legs moving rhythmically above the sand. Laryse runs, unable to leave the sea bed, feeling the enormous weight of water above her. Now she recalls legends told by her Scottish grandmother. The tale of the Each Visge; the water horse that resembles a horse on land when he is not posing as a man with sand and shells in his hair. And she recalls the end of the story. He devours the woman he takes.

"Banish the equine with the fruit of the sea wraith!" Who was that waterbound woman and what did her words mean?

Laryse is drawn to a sinuous shape draped over a rock. A wraith-like plant, floating like a grey ghost with every whim of the water. At the end of each frond hangs a pendulous lilac fruit. Can this be what the water woman means?

Laryse crouches behind the rock and sees the white horse rear - confused - and swim away from her. She plucks a fruit from the ghostly stem. It falls readily into her hand. She plucks another.

She hears the swish of the white horse and sees him returning, sensing her presence. She steps cautiously from the rock and proffers a fruit in each hand. The beast tosses his head and thrusts it in indignation and wordless want, into her frightened face. She recoils from his fetid breath and again offers the fruit. It softly pulsates in her hand.

The horse sniffs, tosses his head again, then slowly lowers it and delicately touches the breathing fruit. He smells her flesh, needs it. He smells the fruit. It is more delicate, promising even deeper gratification. He takes one. Swallows. Takes the other.

He stands motionless for some moments. Then he sinks to his knees. He whimpers. He rolls on one side. His deep eyes plead.

Laryse feels sudden sympathy. She too kneels and reaches to touch his trembling neck. He shudders, longingly, hopelessly. His eyes slowly close. He stops breathing. His limbs contract. He turns, atom by atom, into the shell-encrusted young man, unmoving among the fish that come to taste the unfamiliar flesh and pass through the forest of his hair.

Laryse looks for the waterbound woman. She is blinded by a collusion of movement and light. The woman coils before her, turning within seconds, into a nacreous shell; reflective and vast. Laryse walks into its gaping mouth and feels its walls slide against her fingers like a woman's skin. The shell begins to rise, lifted softly through layers of lilting sea to the surface, subdued now in the setting sun. She is near the spit of sand by the river.

And as she shakily steps ashore she glimpses a scattering of shells in the sand. They wink in the sun's last light. She looks away and hurries through the dunes.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE SILKIE

Joe approaches the grim grey house sprawled like an architect's aberration on the unremitting moors. Inherited from his father, he intends to sell it after essential repairs. In a few days, surplus pottery and fabric from his sun-soaked home in the Mediterranean, will arrive to lift his low spirits while he supervises the work.

Two towers rise at each end of the faded facade. Long windows mourn the dying day. Joe unlocks the heavy front door and is assailed by dust and decay, although the housekeeper had covered the furniture in dust sheets while his father lay dying in hospital. The white humps loom in the late light - amorphous phantoms accusing him of neglect.

He climbs the creaking stairs, finds the room he used as a boy and wearily unpacks. There is a soft swish near the door. Swiftly he turns. The door is ajar but the room is empty.

"Doris?" Joe assumes the housekeeper has heard him upstairs. His voice echoes through damp passages and discarded rooms. He goes to the kitchen, once hectic with the wielding of pots, pans and cook's curses. An electric fire has been switched on and a selection of cold food laid on the long table.

Joe tackles a sandwich of thick ham and cream cheese, staring at the cracked floor tiles. Those will have to be replaced. Then his eye is caught by the sudden movement of a saucepan on the low shelf. Of its own accord, it lifts and sets itself down in an empty space nearby.

Joe's mouth drops open. Slowly, as though created from dim light and layers of kitchen grease and steam, a wizened old woman appears. She is naked, her skin sagging in dry folds, her white hair wispily ethereal. But she views Joe with piercing dark eyes.

"You here to stay?" she squeaks like some small mammal and at that moment, her old ears turn mouse-like. She hunches. From the sad folds of her behind, a reptilian tail emerges. She crouches and scuttles through a hole in the corner of the kitchen.

Joe gets a grip on the shaking sandwich in his hand. This must be the effect of the drawn-out journey, he assumes and, glancing twice over his shoulder, climbs the complaining stairs to bed. His dreams float with the compensating colours of the Mediterranean; a wishful filtering of sunshine through the nebulosity of the north. He wakes refreshed.

He spends the morning listing urgent repairs and contacting workmen. He wonders when Doris will come. Perhaps she is shopping. At one o' clock he goes to the kitchen. Maybe she has left food in the fridge. He opens the door to find it packed with meat, cheese and vegetables. And on the table, steams a steak and kidney pie and a deep dish of vegetables. Doris must have come in while he was elsewhere in the house.

He is halfway through the pie when he hears a murmur from the end of the kitchen. He looks up. A woman perches on an old pine chair, her face draped, as though in modesty, in a long grey veil. Slowly she lowers the flimsy fabric to reveal a face of fine yet faintly inhuman lines that have hints of the old woman he met the previous night.

"Who are you? Have you come instead of Doris?" Joe asks.

"You don't need Doris!" declares the woman, her voice deeper, yet unrelated to her face and the figure flexing through the voluminous veil. Her limbs have gained the elasticity of youth.

"Who are you?" Joe repeats.

"That depends on my mood and the time of day!" she replies and the veil drops to her waist, revealing the nubile breasts of a twenty year old. The contrast with her ancient face is unnerving. Joe has vague thoughts of veiling her face, while fondling her breasts, then, with a retrieval of reality, says, "Where do you live in the village?" She must be one of those in-bred freaks of nature, he thinks, forgetting last night's bizarre transformation.

She merely smiles, her lined face even more grotesque in assuming amiability. Joe shrugs, then says, "Thanks for the shopping and lunch." Her smile broadens. She pulls up the veil and in moments has shrunk, turning, not this time into a mouse, but a misty grey ball that bounces silently through the wall. Now Joe begins to doubt his sanity.

He goes upstairs to the library, intending to find some light diversion. But the volumes are weighty; psychology, philosophy, histories and biographies of pallid people. He sighs, then sees, on the bottom shelf "Folklore of the North Country - Traditions and Beliefs."

Casually he turns the pages and, as though pre-destined, one falls open at the illustration of a wizened woman, draped in a veil. "Silkie," it reads, "A sensitive, solitary being, half Brownie, dressed in grey or black, affectionately attached to a house which she will leave if offended."

"Hogwash!" Joe exclaims to the gloomy afternoon and the shadows shifting in the corners of the room.

He must find Doris. He leaves for the village as a light rain begins to drift from the moors. Bleak trees drag bare branches in the sodden grass. Rooks caw like demented prophets of doom.

Joe shivers in a coat too thin for the insidious fingers of moorland mist and hurries to the first houses of the huddled village. He finds Doris's cottage and stumbles through a collection of chortling plastic gnomes to her door. It is opened by her taciturn husband.

"Doris?" he counters Joe's query. "She went to the big house to get it ready for you three days ago. Haven't seen her since. She must have stayed over."

Joe shivers. Apprehension seeps in with the mist. "She's not there. Some other woman from the village has turned up." He describes her, omitting the transformations which he attributes to exhaustion. Doris's husband looks blank.

"I think I would have noticed HER!" he says, easing the door shut.

Joe returns to find a tempting tea laid in the kitchen. It is otherwise empty and the house sleeps.

As though drawn by faerie force, he goes back to the library and opens the book on folklore. There is a section on the fundamental community spawned by the fanciful fertility of man's mind. Remembering the Silkie is said to be half Brownie, he looks up the latter. They are small, wizened, shaggy, in rags or naked. They can be invisible and work willingly about the house. Or they can change shape and look for personal relationships, but if dissatisfied, are touchy and easily driven away. They may turn into Boggarts - mischievous Brownies, like a Poltergeist."

Joe shuts the book with a bang. "Rubbish!" he says loudly to the conniving shadows. He goes to his room, dozes, passing through a series of dust-laden dreams, then descends with trepidation to see if dinner has been laid. On the table stands a roast chicken on a flowered plate heaped with broccoli and carrots. There is no sign of the Silkie, so he eats, with a wary eye on the door and dark corners.

Finishing, he assumes the washing up will be magically managed as usual, so prepares to go back upstairs. Then he notices the door of the kitchen cupboard standing ajar. He opens it fully. Doris, wearing her familiar brown cardigan, green tweed skirt and a look of astonishment on her ashen face, falls out onto the cracked tiles.

Joe runs to his room and lies rigid in shock. Then, panic-stricken, he rushes back to the kitchen. He had not even felt Doris's pulse. But she has gone. Joe flounders from kitchen to drawing room, throwing open cupboards and looking under sofas and chairs. No one.

But at the foot of the stairs he sees a lithe woman in a sea green gown, stepping towards him. She holds out pale arms dripping with aquamarine. Red hair floats on slim shoulders. Her green eyes match her dress and dance with playful implication.

"Come!" she precedes him upstairs. And, as though a balm has been laid on his battered soul, Joe follows her into his room. She is sensual, inventive and as sinuous as a being bred for swimming to great depths or, on wings of buoyant bewitchment, achieving heady heights. Joe frolics, tosses, twists and turns, revelling in every nuance and new move.

Around dawn, as the first light filters through the window, Joe looks at his lover's face. And recoils. It is wizened and creviced like sea beaten rock. It grimaces, while trying to smile. The woman's body slowly starts to sag and fold like old parchment.

Joe leaps from the bed and runs from the room. In the hall he frenziedly looks up the number of the nearest hospital. Perhaps they have a psychiatric department. No reply. Too early. Slowly he calms, remembering the tile layer and plasterer are due that morning.

He returns to the bedroom. The bed is empty and has been meticulously made.

Two days pass. Workmen come and go. Meals appear. Joe repeatedly searches cupboards and corners in case Doris is still around. But she has vanished.

Joe's optimistic pottery and colourful cushions arrive. He is momentarily restored by recollections of a sane, sun-filled life. But why has he sent for them? He plans to rapidly return.

The work on the house is almost finished. There has been no sign of the "Silkie". Joe telephones his woman waiting by the southern sea.

"I'm coming back next week - I'll put the house in the hands of the agent," he tells her. He feels a sharp nail break the flesh of his arm. He drops the receiver and turns with a sensation of having his face slapped by a rush of damp air. The hall is empty.

Joe is suddenly awake. Thuds come from the kitchen. Then the clatter of a utensil being thrown against the wall. He runs downstairs. In the kitchen, saucepans, plates, dishes and pans are flying through a swirling mist that might have infiltrated from the moor.

"STOP!" he shouts...... "The disgruntled Brownie might turn into a Boggart and behave like a Poltergeist," he recalls. The Silkie had heard him on the phone, planning to leave.

"I WON'T GO!" he yells. The clamour ceases and, sitting in the centre of the chaos, is the red-haired woman, now wearing a transparent blue shift and dangling chains of green olivine.

"Truly?" she queries.

"Truly," he murmurs, "If you will stop changing shape. I do like your cooking, not to mention your buttocks and breasts! But where's Doris?"

The Silkie flushes and purses pink lips.

"Not far away. Just put on hold."

"But she fell out of the cupboard!" Joe points out.

"What's put on can be taken off!" says the Silkie. Joe looks longingly at her shift. But she is referring to spells.

"Come!" The Silkie leads him to a window in the drawing room.

"See!"

Joe looks across the lawn where the rising sun is laying long fingers of light. Doris, in her brown cardigan and green tweed skirt is sitting on the wrought iron chair by the pond, contemplating the water like some element from a land she has just left in spirit while her inert flesh stayed in the kitchen.

"Where's she been?" Joe asks.

"Just over the hill. She'll find another job."

As though mystically moved, Doris gets up and walks away through the garden gate towards the village.

Within two weeks the rest of Joe's exuberant belongings arrive. And the woman on the southern shore wanders, bewildered for a while, before finding a matchless Mediter

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GWINDENNITH

Ian looks at Babu, the red-faced doll lying in the arms of Shona, his daughter. Shona's cheeks are ashen. She breathes with small gasps as she clutches the implacable doll. She is suffering from an illness, not yet identified by the doctors and grows weaker each day.

Ian tucks the sheet under her chin and sighs. Then he is seized with sudden rage. He wrests the doll from Shona's arms. She whimpers and turns over. The doll, with its flushed face, symbolises good health. He hates it. He runs into the garden and flings it behind the chrysanthemums' pompous yellow heads.

Slowly, he walks back and settles in the large chair by the bed. He remembers Zelda, his wife who died two years ago and, sighing again, closes his eyes. He sees the doll's face and the crudely twisted neck as he flung it down. Gradually it blurs; eyes, nose, mouth, run and converge; flowing into the vortex of his pain.

He is walking in the garden among the flowers. He is dazzled by their dancing yellow heads; an expression of joy, accentuating his anguish. Beyond them he hears a murmur in the tangle of green growth. Pushing them impatiently aside, he sees the doll; transformed and assessing him with insolent eyes. On its head is a glittering gold and diamond jewel, round its neck, a band of rubies and pearls and in its left hand a filigree gold wand. At its feet sits a small replica of itself behind a golden box studded with turquoise over which is spread a green necklace.

"She's ill, isn't she?" asks the clear-eyed doll.

"You know she is," replies Ian, "What happened to you?"

"Not all dolls thoughtlessly thrown out rot in the leaves!" retorts Babu, "We have our own hierarchy you know. Mistress Gwindennith was spirited three years ago from a dustbin and now bestows powers on discarded dolls from here to Earthsend, wherever that is!"

Ian sees the jewel blinking, the small mouth opening and closing and hears the voice speaking, but he does not believe his ears or eyes.

"You don't believe in me, do you?" states Babu.

"Well - no!" confirms Ian, yet knows in that instant, Babu is real; glittering, audacious, resurrected by heaven knows what.

"If you want Shona to get well, you must seduce Gwindennith," says Babu, "I am a messenger with the power to spirit you to her. But the rest is up to you. You can take her the necklace from this box if that will help. Gwindennith is sick of sycophantic dolls. She longs for a real man. Don't worry, she can change size at will. I'm sure you will find her highly satisfactory. And in gratitude, she will help your daughter back to health."

Ian is dazed. Has Shona's illness unhinged him? He bends, picks up the jade necklace and thoughtfully fingers the smooth stones. Who wore it? What could it tell of feminine vanity and caprice? He slips it into his pocket.

"I'll do it!" incredibly he hears himself say. Can he really be conversing with a doll?

"Right. Stand very still and hold your breath!" orders Babu. Ian complies. A tingling sensation spreads from his feet, through his thighs and chest, up to his head. He feels as though spun by buoyant hands; fast, faster, until the golden chrysanthemums rise, fall and fling petals in a sea of premature celebration. Blackness and the sound of air forcing through a fairy funnel. Colours mix and pour in tumbling torrents through his head. Then stillness. Silence.

Ian opens his eyes. He sprawls on an expanse of green grass. Around it, on three sides, stands a building, leaning lugubriously and compiled it seems, from a mad mosaic of twisted toys; chipped building blocks, screenless computers, spewing once miraculous membranes, coloured kites spread across awkward gaps. But no dolls. These have presumably been rescued and magically resurrected by Gwindennith.

Ian looks at a sky of metallic blue, as though painted by a child who has not yet learned the subtlety of colour blending. As he struggles up, the sun bounces off the building's kaleidoscopic walls. He stumbles through the grass and looks for a door.

A white-faced clown with floppy feet, leans out from the wall and makes a deep bow.

"Turn me!" he says, stretching his bulbous red lips in the parody of a smile. Ian clutches his body and twists his legs and chest. The smile becomes a grimace and a door opens. A red light glows within. The walls comprise picture books which turn their pages silently, revealing the essence of childhood; wizened witches, bow-legged dwarves, crenulated castles, horses borne through stars on gauzy wings. Ian pauses to look. Some pages are familiar. Has he read these stories to Shona? What are they doing here?

He reaches a room monopolised by an enormous bed, draped with dancing black and white cats - a bedspread identical to one he has bought for Shona. But it is not his daughter who lies underneath.

A long hand with the pale texture of plastic lies loosely over the edge. Ian creeps close. Fair hair is splayed on the pillow. The face is turned from him. As though sensing his presence, the head moves, heavy-lidded eyes open. The inhumanly blue eyes of a doll. Coldly they assess him. He fumbles for the necklace and lays it on the dancing cats. She sees it - a placid peace offering - and a plastic hand reaches to grasp it. Then she sits up, her fair hair tumbling in artificial tresses like soft snakes that have lived too long underground. Her cheeks are flushed - an apparent requisite for a doll. She blinks.

"What a good looking man you are!" she utters, her voice surprisingly enticing. "Have you come to seduce me?"

Ian blushes. "Well - er..." He helps fasten the necklace round her plump neck.

"You ARE Gwindennith?"

"Of course. I had telepathy with Babu. I was expecting you."

Almost imperceptibly, she begins to grow. Her face broadens, her shoulders, clad in slippery blue silk, slope with the appeal of polished marble. Her hands expand. One moves towards Ian. He raises his right hand in response. Hers is clammy, unrelated to human flesh, yet urgently seizes his.

He has the same sensation as when he was waiting to be spirited from the garden. His head spins as Gwindennith draws him onto the bed. Now she is life size; the curves of her body as convincing as a woman's. Ian rolls to one side and draws back the bedspread.

The blue silk undulates like a wayward river of light along Gwindennith's body. Ian strokes the slippery folds, feeling the strange plasticity beneath. Gently, he pulls up the nightdress and - horrified - sees the dull moulding of her breasts; the nipples barely perceptible and the sealed, hairless expanse between her thighs.

He looks into her cold blue eyes. Her mouth is prim and tightly closed. She is waiting. Ian lays a finger lightly on one breast.

"I'm sorry - I can't .." he stutters, withdrawing his hand.

"Can't or won't?" snaps Gwindennith.

"Does this mean Shona won't get well?" Ian utters hoarsely.

"What do YOU think?" Gwindennith shakes her stiff blonde hair, so the snakes fly, then tangle in frustration. Ian feels the room wheel and tilt like a manufactured fairground thrill devoid of fun. Helplessly, he slides from the bed.....

He wakes. He is slumped in the large chair by Shona's bed. Stiffly, he rises to look at her sleeping face. Today there is a hint of colour. She stirs.

"Babu!" she murmurs.

Ian rushes from the room into the garden, thrusting aside the chrysanthemums and retrieving Babu, coated with earth and wet leaves. In the kitchen he washes and dries him and hurries back to Shona.

She takes him in her arms and, looking at Ian, smiles. "I feel better this morning," she says. Ian smiles too, inwardly laughing as he recalls the failed seduction.

Gwindennith was, of course, a demented dream. So why is a jade necklace coiled around the cats cavorting on Shona's bed?

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THE CHANGELING

"I'm too old. I creak. I smell!" grumbles the old fairy. She has been ordered by the malignant matron of Fairyland to take the place of a child on the Fennysons' farm.

There is a demand for healthy human babies. Fairies fade. They need replenishing.

"But a changeling at my age!" The old fairy surveys the haggard hollows of her ancient face in a piece of mirror glass stolen from a bedroom. She is amazed how it turns in a twinkling into that of the snatched child. Mothers seldom knew she was an intruder. She had come and gone in cradles for much of her long life, while human children had grown in the dreamy depths of Fairyland. But sooner or later they had returned and she too had gone home.

Mrs Fennyson lays Lizzie, her fair-haired daughter in the hand-made cradle. The child blinks her blue eyes and gurgles. Her mother smiles, suppressing a maternal fear that some misfortune will befall Lizzie before she grows up. She waits until the child falls asleep, then quietly leaves the room.

The switch is like lightening. One moment Lizzie lies asleep, the next she has vanished and the fairy crone snores in the cradle.

In the first morning light Mrs Fennyson opens the bedroom door and sees the changeling who now resembles Lizzie, still asleep.

Lizzie opens her eyes to a flurry of fairy wings. The pinched faces of fairies gaze at her with grey, inhuman eyes, petulant mouths and pert noses that twitch like those of small mammals. They twitter and point. Lizzie squirms. Twelve fairies carry her across the ground soft with green moss to a leaning toadstool. They place her precariously on top, where she grows dizzy, sways and starts to sob.

The fairies surround her, stroking her cold legs under the lacy nightdress and reach for her bare arms. She whimpers for a while, then looks with large eyes into their curious faces.

They leap and laugh and she begins to smile, wanting to join their game. They lift her down and chase her round a thick green flower stem, until she gasps for breath and lets them tickle her ribs as they roll her in the moss.

Fed on sweet fairy food, she grows languid, her limbs filling out, her face amiably round. She laughs a lot but is too plump to run out of the fairies' reach and lets them pummel and exotically explore her.

The changeling retains Lizzie's form. She blinks and gurgles. She murmurs, "Mama!" But in moments when she reverts to an old crone, she is cramped in the cradle. She shuffles and grumbles and longs for the damp depths of Fairyland where she performs malicious deeds on helpless creatures bewitched by her foul spells. She delights in the silent suffering of the defenceless, relishing silky pulses that race beneath her claws.

But at dawn she assumes Lizzie's form to greet Mrs Fennyson. Then one morning Mrs Fennyson thinks Lizzie's smile is not so sweet. A sourness lingers at the edges of her mouth. And her eyes have lost their sparkle. They are older, more knowing.

"Lizzie?" Mrs Fennyson peers into her face. "Yes, mama?" the fairy crone's voice squeaks.

Mrs Fennyson steps back, clapping a hand to her mouth.

"You're not Lizzie!" she gasps, "Who are you?"

The fairy crone grins malevolently.

"Leave her in the dung heap. She'll turn into her true self if she's a changeling!" suggests a neighbour.

"There are no such things as changelings today!" protests Mrs Fennyson. But she wonders.

The fairy crone is relieved to be have been discovered. The stress of pretending to be an innocent child is too great. She is the despoiler of innocence. There are formidable misdemeanours in Fairyland at which humanity would be appalled.

She thinks: People created us. For children we are the magical manifestation at the end of the garden. But adults have endowed us too with their frailty, lust and ill intent. We are as diverse as the foibles of human nature. Our enchantment is marred with discontent and the limits of mortality. So we need to draw on the qualities of childhood. We cherish its vitality and lack of guile.

Yet we have a fleeting conscience. Having taken what we need we do return the child. She will look and behave as before. But she will have lost her innocence. She will grow with an insight that is sad but which will stand her in good stead - an early knowledge of her peers.

Lizzie is unaware of leaving Fairyland. She sheds her superfluous flesh, wakes in her hand-made cradle and gurgles when Mrs Fennyson comes in. The woman peers at her as she had the fairy crone and knows Lizzie is back. She holds her fast and is surprised at the dampness of her skin. But she is satisfied.

The fairy crone breathes the tainted air of Fairyland. Her fellow fairies have revived. They are glossy, fleet-footed, their fresh spells irrepressible. The crone crooks a long finger to poke an unsuspecting dormouse. Her own measure of existence is mean. She is too old to revive and weave new wonders. But she too is content until called on again to dally and deceive.

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WOMAN FROM THE WATER

She walks down the beach into the sea mist; that mystic alliance of sand, sea and sky, bringing the sea deceptively close. She walks, endlessly it seems, into infinity. Piece by piece her body is absorbed by the mist; a gentle, drifting obliterator of substance, leaving within the man, sitting by the breakwater, a hollow sense of having been deceived.

Somewhere she is there; an integral part of that alliance. He, no doubt, dismissed from her mind. In her absence her strange presence pervades him; features that seem a soft aspect of the atmosphere. Her eyes avoiding his. They might be governed by the sea, shifting from blue to pearl grey, influenced by clouds. And the way she walks, as though treading air.

Poised in the glistening grey desert, the man feels of no more consequence than the hard-backed crabs, scattered like scabs on an implacable back. A sensation of insupportable emptiness bears him in a moment like a bird, defenceless across the sand towards the sea. He is seemingly weightless.

He remembers the rock and that day at the sea as a child. The rock rose from this same grey sand, at once a challenge and an assurance; its shape like that of a woman, her head inclined as though in tenderness. In the warm sun it had felt good beneath his small fingers. Substantial, Safe. To be touched, loved, relied on.

Then he had gone home. To the unhappiness and disregard that stretched through the interminable days of wrecked routine and turmoil, that left him trembling inwardly and outwardly, as silent as the rock he could not forget.

Now he has returned, ostensibly for a holiday, but remembering the rock and looking for it as though it might dispel the shadow that pursues him like a sly ghost; sliding beneath his feet so that the trembling returns and sends him like the hard-backed crabs, scurrying for refuge.

Is woman the answer? Will she give him substance, be resolute as the rock he cannot find? Won't she want him to be rock-like, relying on him to supply her needs, perhaps creating in their child a recurrence of his childhood despair?

He can deduce little from the woman he has met, now absorbed by sea and sky. He had found her perched on a breakwater; gleaming faintly as though composed of moisture. She might have been relinquished by the sea.

They had spoken as though drawn by some predestined bond. Yet when he questioned her closely she averted her face, fell silent. Some domestic complication he assumed, deciding not to probe. He would simply accept her, until from duty or desire she disappeared as mysteriously as she had come.

The salt air lulls his senses into superficial sleep. He relives that first night with her in his rudimentary room. The way in which she set him gently at a distance. She lay as though cast up by the tide; close, yet cold to his tentative touch, as though the blood had seeped from her body.

Looking at her, he perceived an inhuman hint of paleness in her face. But, breathing deeply, she slept. By day, he scrutinised her. She registered no positive sign of pleasure or pain. Her colour was restored. It had been an illusion, he concluded; a distortion of the limited bedroom light. Her mouth was mobile, ironic, already forming words.

"May I have some water?" she asked. He filled a tumbler, watched her drink insatiably.

He feels the insidious chill of early evening and, unable to detect the woman on the sand, begins to walk from the breakwater. Then he sees the outcrop of rock rising some distance away, its shape like that of a woman moved by tenderness. He walks faster, passing people gliding like ghosts in the half light.

The rock draws no nearer. It seems, on the contrary, to be growing smaller. He forces his feet through the sand, flinging the fine particles at random. Not one footprint remains. He is filled now with an inexplicable foreboding. The top of the woman's head has already been drawn into the darkening sky. He stops, breathing hard. Darkness is falling with unnatural swiftness, as though the day cannot wait to be done. The rock is reduced to a shadow and minutes later is lost in the gathering gloom.

The man turns to retrace his steps. Now at the sea's edge he watches the water play desultorily with the wet sand, suggesting male exploration of the female; tentative yet backed by force. A querulous wind warns the female sand of violation and she shrinks, her minute particles tumbling into tiny cavities.

Silently the woman steps from the gloom, fully dressed and moving with an undulating grace, as though propelled by water.

That night, leaning from the window, she gazes seaward. The man prepares food. The knife slips, grazing his hand. Instantly the woman is by his side. He is startled by her swift response. She smiles, wrinkling her nose, but not in playfulness. She might be absorbing hints of his mishap on the air.

Having eaten mere morsels of food, she slides into bed. The man reaches for her pliant flesh. He might have stumbled on stone. He turns on the light. Her face is pallid, the lips slightly parted as though paralysed on the point of speech.

She suggests strange alchemy of which he has read; creatures created by thought and ritual, materialising with the pale intricacy of sea horses. Shrouded in incense and prayer, they grow minute nails, beards. Pallid fish-like lips press against the glass behind which they are sealed. When rain falls they thrash frantically like rare fish with human features, until they are replenished with rain water. Sometimes one leaps out and, like a fish, gasps feebly, emitting a curious smell and flailing rubbery limbs. Usually it dies.

Slowly, submerged in these images, the man submits to sleep. When he wakes, the woman is smiling, her flesh translucent. Fluidly, she moves from the bed and filling a glass with water, drinks in deep draughts.

At work in his urban office the night is drawn prosaically into perspective. The man sees himself dispassionately; unmarried, middle-aged, dull brown hair receding as rapidly as his ambition to rise from the clerical department. Yet the stability of his job fails to alleviate an innate insecurity. This he knows requires the reassurance of some person, or sense of purpose. But he vacillates within a vacuum; intermittent resolve relenting to his fear of confronting the unfamiliar. His decline has caused an emotional need that is colouring his response to this woman. He wants to draw her inexorably to him. Yet, mystically, she manipulates him.

Evening. About to meet her, he experiences unprecedented unease; seeds of an inexplicable dread that the potency of her presence does not dispel. He says, "I must know. Where do you come from? Why did you come to this town?"

They are walking near the lake, darkly dominating the late summer park. She leans, looks into the lake, raises eyes, that focused askance, are as incalculable as the water. She smiles, says simply, "I was compelled."

That night he looks with the sudden shock of love and need for affirmation into her face. She smiles again, as though supplying the confirmation that he seeks and he senses his concern drawing from her at last a hint of sentiment.

She turns onto her side and for the first time he notices a faint line, running from the base of her neck to her flank. Tentatively, he traces it with one finger. Its texture is strange on the smooth surface of her back. Perturbed, he turns off the light and the room sinks, as though relieved, into silence.

The woman gasps, fighting for breath. He fumbles for the light, looks at her and recoils. The bones of her face stand out starkly beneath a fragile layer of skin whose surface shines as though with moisture and her swollen lips work strangely. He places one hand beneath her head. She has stopped breathing.

It is as though the weight of his mortality is responsible; an affront to her unworldliness. By some alien insistence, he is compelled to lift her brittle body, the line along her back gleaming now, and carry her from the airless room.

The crooked street - its hazardous houses pitched seawards - is deserted, yet charged with anticipation, as though the wind-scoured stones are absorbing the man's motions. He craves for the weight of a truly dead body; flesh, bones, blood, collapsed in the awkward attitudes of death.

Unearthly images of siren and mermaid possess him. The woman is neither. She has walked the high street; reticent and often unremarked. But he ponders on that ridge along her back and her uncanny sense of smell. They are characteristics of the fish.

The man reaches the steep steps leading to the beach. Now the sea audaciously possesses the sand, no longer exploratory, but male domination of the female. Ironic, for the man is deprived of will. Immobile, the woman compels him towards the sea.

They reach the water's edge. Involuntarily the man kneels, lapped by the fickle foam that having broken, disintegrates in flecks; spent and ineffectual.

The woman trembles. Her palor is replaced by a faint glow and there is the barely perceptible movement of a pulse close to her ear. Her full lips stir, not in attempted speech, but to draw in the sharp salt air. Only her eyes, now the colour of encroaching dawn, remain implacable, apparently sightless.

Abruptly, she slithers from his arms. With a rush of water she streaks beneath the waves; her legs locked, her skin shot with a silver sheen that is swallowed in seconds.

Incredulous, the man remains motionless, unable to take his eyes from the water, as though awaiting her re-emergence. But he is merely mesmerised by the great gathering of the waves, as unconsciously compelled as he to fulfil a seemingly pointless end. Having broken, they are sucked back to repeat the process; like the man each day; rising, striving, resting and failing to find substance.

He rises from harsh ribs of sand. Then distantly, as though in dream, he sees the rock. The head of a woman inclined as though in tenderness. Labouring through fine sand, he is heavy with fatigue, yet resolved to reach the rock. To feel once more the solid surface, no longer sun-warmed but reliable; a momentary dispenser of doubt.

This time the rock draws near. The sky is growing light and the woman's profile is clearly defined. Child-like, the man thrusts into the wind which rebuffs his progress, as though intimating disappointment. But the rock is now almost within reach. It is massive - the forceful strata of its surface locked in time, its bulk defying the onslaught of the sea.

He runs eager hands over its surface and looks up to see the woman's face bowed above him. Then recoils. Seen closely, it is a maze of mad fissures, riddled with erosion. Wind, sea and sun have fashioned the face of an old woman; bowed, not in tenderness, but with the weight of weather and time.

As the man watches, further fissures begin to spread, obliterating the eyes, disfiguring the nose, turning the mouth into a cruel line of disdain. It is as though the molten mass of the inner earth is thrusting beneath his feet, dislodging even the stability of the rock rising with apparent permanence from its surface.

The inner earth, like the maelstrom of man's emotions, prevents him from maintaining an even keel, routing resolve and embryonic ideal. Even the sea may be subject to the movement of the land. Land has risen, seas have drained away, then flooded back when the land sank once more. But in rocks are found the remains of sea creatures, fossilised and, as long as the rock stands, immutable. Will the woman from the water in time be entrenched in rock, her mercurial nature finally made fast?

The man turns to retrace his steps, unaware of sand, sea and the potential of the dawning day. His progress is impeded along the precipitous street. He panics. Opens his eyes. He is lying in the narrow bed. Stretched beside him is the woman. Her face is fragile; the skin gleaming yet not drained of colour. Gently he rolls her over. The early sun casts a long shadow from the base of her neck to her flank.

From the moment she had turned on her side before apparent death, he has been dreaming. Yet the potency of the delusion displaces the optimism of early morning. He cannot dismiss the possibility of the dream materialising and of being deprived of what substance he has found.

Immobilised, as though forced to relive the recent past, the man sees the woman slide from the bed, sinuously cross the floor and fill a tumbler to the brim with water. Fearful now, he watches, as voraciously, she drinks.

Thank you for reading this book - which I hope you have enjoyed.

If you would like to read my other work, please return to your favourite ebook retailer. For a complete list of my work with a short summary of each, click this link to my blog http://lindajtalbot.wordpress.com. There are also sample extracts from many of these works. You are welcome to subscribe or add a comment.

A review of any of my works at smashwords.com, or elsewhere, would be much appreciated.

Author's Note

Linda Talbot writes fantasy for adults and children. She now lives in Crete and as a journalist in London she specialised in reviewing art, books and theatre, contributing a chapter to a book about Conroy Maddox, the British Surrealist and writing about art for Topos, the German landscape magazine. She has published "Fantasy Book of Food", rhymes, recipes and stories for children; "Five Rides by a River", about life, past and present around the River Waveney in Suffolk; short stories for the British Fantasy Society, and stories and poetry for magazines.

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