I kept my head down, expecting at every breath to hear the roar of the rifle, to feel a bullet in my back, but she let us go.

We saddled up the horses and gathered our packs without daring to look back. As we swung up in the saddle, I looked up at the blushing sky.

“Should we go back for Jo? He might still…”

“He’s dead,” Jim said flatly. “What came out of that earth ain’t Jo no more.” Jim kicked his horse on and took off up the road.

I took a last look at the green paddock and the line of weeping willows by the creek, and then cantered on after him.

A bend in the road, and the whole place disappeared.

The Wind Blows

Suddenly—dreadfully—Matilda wakes up. What has happened? Something dreadful has happened. She looks at her arm. Under the previous night’s moon-light her skin had warped and twisted, her hairs retracting and the webbing between her fingers expanding. Not for the first time she had lost all semblance of humanity and become a thing of the sea, a monster. She remembers it as if through a mist, shrouded memories of slipping into the water alongside her brother Bogey, of devouring sea creatures, of power. Now the soft skin is once more pale pink flesh. She has not become trapped in that other form. It is only the wind shaking the house, rattling the windows, banging a piece of iron on the roof and making her bed tremble that has startled her so.

Though the wind blows and shrieks outside, it has not claimed her for good this time. Leaves flutter past the window, up and away; down in the avenue a whole newspaper wags in the air like a lost kite and falls, spiked on a pine-tree. It is cold. Summer is over—it is autumn—everything is ugly. A white dog on three legs yelps past the gate. Could it all be over? Could she be free? The wind that tears at the house is surely the night-wind, the wind of change, yet the hideous transformation has come to an end. Could it be? No, impossible. Her cursed fate is tied to that wind and the waves, but always at night. She mustn’t think it, she mustn’t hope, and she begins to plait her hair with shaking fingers, removing strands of sea-weed and not daring to look in the glass until the last possible moment. Mother is talking to grandmother in the hall.

“A perfect idiot! Imagine leaving anything out on the line in weather like this… Now my best little Teneriffe-work teacloth is simply in ribbons. What is that extraordinary smell? It’s like shellfish and old socks. Oh, heavens, this wind!”

She has a music lesson at ten o’clock. At the thought the minor movement of the Beethoven begins to play in her head, the trills long and terrible like little rolling drums… Marie Swainson runs into the garden next door to pick the ‘chrysanths’ before they are ruined. Her skirt flies up above her waist; she tries to beat it down, to tuck it between her legs while she stoops, but it is no use—up it flies. Matilda stares at her through the window and wonders what it would be like to be a normal girl, to live without the fear of the ocean and wind claiming her forever. No one escapes the wind.

“For heaven’s sake keep the front door shut! Go round to the back,” shouts someone.

And then she hears Bogey: “Mother, you’re wanted on the telephone. Telephone, Mother. It’s the butcher.”

The butcher. All that sliced, long-dead meat. Nothing fresh, nothing wriggling.