All the way up the stairs, his elbow poked her side and her skin. Her body’s warmth made sweat beads roll down his arm. She didn’t notice any of it, she looked so absorbed in her thoughts.

  At the top of the stairs he abruptly tried to let go of her, but she clung on.

  ‘We’re up now,’ he whispered.

  ‘Help me to my room.’

  He steadied himself. They found their way to her bedroom. Inside, when she finally let go of his arm, he sank back against the wall.

  ‘Well… um…’ Midas was dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot more of the jellyfish now.’

  She sighed. ‘I think we should forget all about remedies tonight.’

  That confused him: he had thought the beautiful spectacle, would excite her with the prospect of a cure. She cleared it up by placing her hand lightly on his chest. His heart started beating hard, like it was trying to drive her away. She tilted her head and leant it towards him. Her lips were parted an inch from his.

  He jumped sideways, spluttering half-started excuses for why he’d best leave her to get much-needed sleep. She sat down on the bed and cast her eyes away. He wanted words to speak themselves. When nothing happened, he slipped from the room and closed the door behind him.

  Halfway down the stairs he ground to a halt. He had wanted to kiss her but when the moment arose his head had been yanked away as if nerves were a bridle. Remembering his father battling away from his mother’s embraces, he felt a sudden rush of hatred towards the man. He wondered how you could alter your gut reactions when your body overrode your control with the same power it used to jerk back your hand from a burning hot surface or throw you away from an onrushing crash. He clapped his hands to his head and screwed up his eyes.

  For a moment, Ida considered returning to bed, but she knew it would only be to lie there wide awake. She decided to take a bath, instead. Back on the mainland she had used to enjoy a blistering hot bath in the middle of the night.

  A spider hung in the corner of the bathroom ceiling, legs bundled around thin air as if clutching an invisible bead to its thorax. The thought of it scuttling over her naked body made Ida want to bruise it into the wall as she undressed and waited for the gushing water to fill the bath. She’d never been scared of spiders and she didn’t plan to become so now. It was just the way the little creatures were so nimble while her feet were like anchors. Nimble little Ida, that’s what Carl used to call her on the dives.

  She was probably just jealous of that octet of legs.

  She tested the water then climbed in. Steam clouded around her as she rubbed lather from fragrant soap across her belly. Her glass feet under the sudsy water were just blurs. The water lapping over her toes looked hotter than it really was, looked hissing hot like a volcanic pool. She thought of geysers whose spray had cloaked her when she’d hiked across Iceland. When she poked her toes out of the water, droplets wriggling down their surfaces, they belonged to a landscape of newborn rock and cloying mineral. Not here, on the end of her legs.

  She raised her legs further out of the bath. Their skin was horribly pale, and on her shins it was already a pithy white. When Carl had been helping her into Enghem Stead she had caught her leg against the side of a door. She had not complained out loud, only yelped, unnoticed by Carl, and looked to Midas for reassurance (he had been looking at his shoelaces). It had been only the gentlest blow, but now on the outside of her knee where she had caught it was a fingerprint-sized bruise. There wasn’t any blue in it, only a slate grey. She touched it and it was hard like a shell.

  The spider stretched three limbs simultaneously. Relaxed.

  Stupid, stupid Midas.

  The bath was too hot. She twisted the cold tap on. The bathwater had cooled. Now it was too cold. She swore and slowly pulled herself out so she could sit on the side, suddenly determined to remain as dirty as possible. Sweat and dead skin were all that held her together, all that made her certain she had a body to inhabit. She enjoyed the tightening of her cold flesh and the raising of hairs on her arms. Droplets ran down her thighs and explored her knees. That was as far down her legs as she could feel them. The skin of her shins was already that glazy white that was the first stage of the transformation. Funny how grateful she’d become for goose pimples and itches, for burns and scratches. She wanted it all. She wanted bad backs and arthritis, she wanted to go deaf and barmy if it meant she could stay alive for however many years it took her to tick off those things.

  She dried briskly and dabbed the water off her glass feet. She missed Midas even though he was probably nearby, agonizing about that failed kiss. He was an idiot, to puzzle his life away like that. She grabbed her crutches and used them to swing herself laboriously into the bedroom, where she dressed in her nightie.

  They gleamed in the dim light.

  She clicked off the lamp and went to bed. Dark was a fine thing: in the dark she couldn’t tell what her feet were made of.

  All she could feel was their absence.

  She thought of Midas’s lips coming closer then jerking away. She thought, suddenly of what she had invested in him. If soon she was immobile, half girl half ornament, then soon there could be no sex, perhaps no passion. She panicked that she had unwittingly picked him to be the last romance of her life, and that he would be too slow to trust her. She wanted to know him better and understand him, yes, but sleeping alone here in a strange bed, she wanted a warm body at her side and some recognition that she was alive. Could he ever give her that?

  As her thoughts metamorphosed into half-dreams, she translated the night-time noises of the house and heaters into the huffing of moth-winged cattle.

  27

  The fields and hillsides glowed white. Light dazzled off the windows of Emiliana’s house, tinting Midas’s cheek and waking him like a lover.

  The thick duvet slid off his chest as he sat up and rubbed his temples. Still in last night’s clothes, he felt sluggish and uncomfortable. His final memory of the evening was of swaying along the landing, gripping the banister tight, intoxicated by embarrassment as if it were wine. He groaned shamefully, rubbed his stubbly chin and got up. His room looked out over black rivulets evacuated by the tide. A concertina of icicles had formed above the window.

  He crept out of his room and along the hallway to a front-facing window, which looked inland. Driving here the evening before, he’d been too bent on the road to absorb the landscape’s changes. To the east and west were snow-brushed fields, and dead ahead a finger of woodland beckoning to the house. This was odd, because he couldn’t remember a single tree from the final part of the drive. It was as if the woods had crept up to Enghem Stead under the cover of night.

  A cup of water and a stretch later he was heading across the snow, adjusting his camera as he went. Faint clouds stealthily accumulated, urging him to make the most of the light before they abducted it. He picked his way into the woodland where plant quills poked up around interlocked trunks and branches. A crow rasped and sidled along its perch.

  He had not met anyone as he left the house but he’d heard Emiliana talking on a phone in the kitchen and crept past the closed door. He couldn’t miss this light, and he didn’t think the others would understand. Better they thought he was having a lie-in.

  He’d taken a wrong turn finding his way out of Enghem Stead and in doing so had stumbled into a room bare except for an ashy fireplace, an armchair and a coffee table on which a crumpled copy of a financial newspaper was strewn. Then, turning around, he came face-to-face with Hector Stallows. It was a twelve-foot painting on the wall. Hector Stallows, painted wearing a business suit and a frown, with a night-black beard and pitted cheeks. The paint had been applied with economic strokes and dated from nearly a decade before, but it was easy to imagine what time had done to its subject. Hector would have even steeper frown lines and imperial flashes of silver in his hair. By contrast the thin paint on the wall on which the picture hung had cracked, and the cracks had branched across the wall until the painting looked as if it were hanging on a tree.

  Now, crunching across the snow and into the woods, he was trying to forget his embarrassment. ‘Ida tried to kiss me,’ he said out loud, to try to understand. And he had failed to kiss her back. Among the trees, he hoped he could temporarily force both her and his embarrassment to the back of his mind with the distraction of prospective photographs.

  A white leaf was caged in evergreen needles. It was a dainty composition, so he approached to take a photo. He jumped when the leaf flew to another branch, then realized it was only a bird, wren-sized with white plumage. He approached with camera ready, but a stick cracked under his shoe. The bird took off and darted through the air, cheeping and touching down on another branch. He waited for its nerves to calm and then slowly climbed a tree to get a better angle. Ignoring scratching twigs, he ascended a forking trunk and squeezed into a parting of boughs, the bark cold and wet with snow.

  The bird glanced nervously this way and that. Midas looked around for anything to fear. There were only countless grey trunks. He licked his lips and lined up the shot, resting his camera against the tree. Another twig cracked. Snow pattered off vegetation.

  This would be a fine picture, the subject’s feathers unblemished against earthy bark. He judged the composition, zoomed a little closer, and had just taken the photo when he saw, segmented by the camera’s crosshairs, that the bird had white eyes.

  Something tapped his shoe.

  He fell out of the tree with a shriek and scrabbled about terrified in the snow, clawing his camera protectively to his chest.

  A tall, dishevelled man with a roughly cropped beard was leaning over him, propped up by a walking cane made from a polished narwhal tusk. He wore a creased charcoal suit, with patterns of mud dried up to its knees. Leaves caught in its creases and folds, as if he had slept burrowed under a pile of loam. His hair stood up in clumps, like immature antlers, and his face was leathery and as creased as his clothes.

  He raised his narwhal cane by way of greeting and spoke in a gravelly voice. ‘And what might you be doing in Enghem?’

  Midas got to his feet and glanced back for the white bird. It had vanished. ‘I’m… I’m… Midas Crook.’

  ‘I said what, my boy, not who.’

  Midas pulled himself together enough to feel freezing, wet and bruised from his fall. ‘Um…’ he said. ‘Photography.’

  The man raised his cane towards Midas and tapped its wavering point against his camera. ‘That’s a fine-looking thing you have there.’

  Midas clung to it warily.

  The tall man extended a hand. ‘I am Hector Stallows.’

  Midas thought he’d misunderstood him, though the man spoke with perfect diction. He remembered the oil painting in Enghem Stead and couldn’t quite merge the businessman it had portrayed with this crumpled stranger. ‘I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?’

  Hector ignored the question. ‘I used to be a keen photographer myself. But I let it go. I thought I would spend my retirement in Enghem photographing this and that, but cameras were something I became suspicious of. Digital cameras in particular. They were the most robotic and futile of things. A mechanical eye with a mechanical memory. It reminded me of… mistakes in the way I had seen the world.’

  Midas, confused, swallowed the lump in his throat. Above them a crow croaked and hopped from branch to branch, wagging its tail.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Hector, ‘my mind flits from thought to thought. I get ahead of myself. I don’t explain. The doctors say there’s something wrong with me, but it feels like my mind is more correct than ever it was in my business years.’

  He shook his head solemnly and rolled back his shoulders. ‘Forgive me, Mr Crook. My rambling I don’t have an excuse for.’

  Midas looked over his shoulder. The crow’s beak dangled open, a hungry triangle of pink inside. ‘You seem very collected to me, Mr Stallows.’

  ‘You’re too kind.’

  ‘So… it’s, um, it’s a fine day to be outside.’

  Hector leant closer to Midas. ‘There’s a creature I intend to hunt down.’

  ‘A creature?’

  ‘They say it turns whatever it looks on pure white.’

  Midas swallowed. He remembered the little white bird he’d caught with his camera.

  Hector swished his cane through the air. ‘Can you, as a photographer, imagine the world it leaves behind? Everything is in monochrome. Only the strength of the light can distinguish this thing from that.’

  He imagined it, for a moment, in reverence. ‘I saw a bird! With white eyes.’ To prove it he raised his camera and showed off the photo.

  Hector’s eyes widened. ‘Then the creature’s nearby!’ He stepped closer to the camera, the leaves in the folds of his suit crackling as he moved. ‘It has a den,’ he whispered, ‘somewhere in Enghem.’

  Midas became suddenly aware of Hector’s height. He seemed to loom as much as any tree. ‘And what, um, will you do if you find it?’

  ‘Blind it.’

  Midas couldn’t stop himself from gasping.

  ‘You think that’s barbaric, of course you do. But you’re young, and a photographer. When I first heard the stories of the creature, I was still a man of cameras. I wanted to trap it and have it make for me a black-and-white garden. I pictured myself strolling in the white woods, crushing the white grass underfoot. It would be like living and breathing in the monochrome photos a photographer loves so much. But those fantasies were a long time back, when I was young. I was just starting out on a long career, in which I had enormous success by anyone’s standards. I thought back then that a person achieves success through incremental gains. You could work your way up. For many years I held this belief. But then, one day, I learnt that a single look can change everything. And since then I have seen it countless times. I have grappled to understand it and failed. For instance, all it took was a look from another man for my wife to fall out of love with me. It baffles me that a simple alignment of eyes can cause so much devastation. I learnt of this the hard way, and as I learnt it the existence of this creature, this devil who can turn anything white with a look, became a foul thing indeed.’

  Midas thought it sounded unfair to blame all that on one animal. ‘You’ve met my wife, no doubt,’ continued Hector, scratching the tip of his cane across a tree trunk. ‘Nobody visits Enghem unless she invites them.’

  ‘Yes. She’s very, um…’

  ‘What? What did you think she was like?’

  Hector’s tone was demanding, but Midas couldn’t tell what kind of answer he was looking for. He had the impression that Hector both loved and hated Emiliana in equal measure. ‘She’s very,’ he faltered, ‘er, charming.’

  ‘Yes. She is charming. I miss her charm. Don’t think I hold it against her that she has turned her charm away. Studying this creature has taught me that. There is an astrology of eyes at work in the world. Looks can align like planets and, in this instance, the resulting eclipse shaded out yours truly. It is the fault of this…’

  Midas watched in alarm as Hector jabbed his cane accusatorily at his surroundings, but then he settled.

  ‘Do you know what it’s like to lose someone, Midas?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Someone you were in love with?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’

  ‘Erm…’

  Hector’s eyes narrowed. He grinned wolfishly. ‘You are at this precise moment! It’s written all over you.’

  Midas looked down at himself, as if expecting this literally to be the case.

  ‘If you are in love,’ Hector said, and his voice seemed deeper and flintier, ‘you should take her away from Enghem. You should take her away from St Hauda’s Land. There’s something in the very earth of this place.’

  As if to prove it he drove his cane into the soil and flicked up a sod of earth. All that lay beneath was more damp soil, and a worm twisting over itself to escape the sudden light.

  ‘I think…’ said Midas slowly, ‘I might be.’

  ‘Might be what?’

  Midas cleared his throat. ‘In love.’

  Hector threw his arms wide open. ‘Then always make sure you act like it.’

  With that he gave a kind of salute, turned, and marched away. Midas was left to find his way back to the house by getting lost in different directions. It was amazing how far the woods seemed to stretch, when there had appeared to be so few trees from the house. He wished he’d had a ball of twine, like in one of the half-remembered stories his father had told him.

  The plants grew at different heights over the uneven ground, and the half-path he followed wavered between them. Heavy branches creaked like masts. Roots grew outstretched like the arms of beggars.

  He was grateful when he saw an opening in the trees, and through it the house up ahead. He was almost at the front door when he heard his name called.

  Carl Maulsen was smoking a cigarette by the steps to the deck. He beckoned to Midas. ‘What were you doing out in the woods?’

  ‘Walking.’

  Carl nodded. ‘We didn’t know what had happened to you.’

  ‘The light was too fine to stay in bed.’

  He narrowed his eyes and dragged on his cigarette. ‘You shouldn’t have gone out like that, you’ve been gone for hours. We started the remedy while you were gone, even though Ida said she wanted you here.’

  Midas kicked at the shingle. He hadn’t realized he had been gone for so long. If he went to find Ida now he’d have to explain his disappearance as well as the failed kiss.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t apologize to me.’ He stubbed the cigarette against one of the stilts of the house.

  Suddenly something shot out from behind the house. Midas looked up in alarm as a hare weaved across the grass and sprinted into the wood.

  ‘You scare easy, Midas.’

 

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