How hideous life is—revolting, simply revolting… And now her hat-elastic’s snapped. Of course it would. She’ll wear her old tam and slip out the back way. But Mother has seen.

“Matilda. Matilda. Come back im-me-diately! What on earth have you got on your head? It looks like a tea cosy. And why have you got that mane of hair over your forehead.”

She brushes her mother’s hand away. The force of it frightens her mother. She can see it in her eyes. But it would be worse for her to see the patch of scales on Matilda’s forehead that hasn’t changed back this time.

She hurries away down the hall. “I can’t come back, Mother. I’ll be late for my lesson.”

“Come back immediately!”

She won’t. She won’t. She hates Mother. “Go to hell,” she shouts, running out the door. Bogey is in the garden, hair whipping in the wind. He smiles at her.

“Wasn’t last night delicious?” he asks. He closes his eyes and tastes the wind, his tongue slipping over his lips in quick, darting movements.

“You know I hate it,” Matilda protests. The transformation has always been terrifying and painful for her. Bogey has never seemed to resist it.

“I heard them, Maddie. In the deep, calling to us. The time for us to go to them is coming.” Bogey opens his eyes and there is something cold, unblinking in his stare.

“I have to go,” says Matilda, the wind tearing at her. She has heard the voices from the deep too, but she cannot remember them, will not let herself remember.

“Soon,” Bogey calls after her as Matilda flies down the road. “It’s almost time.”

In waves, in clouds, in big round whirls the dust comes stinging, and with it little bits of straw and chaff and manure. There is a loud roaring sound from the trees in the gardens, and standing at the bottom of the road outside Mr Bullen’s gate she can hear the sea sob: “Ah!… Ah!… Ah-h!” The pull. It wants her close. It wants her to change, to claim her once more. But Mr Bullen’s drawing-room is as quiet as a cave. The windows are closed, the blinds half-pulled, and she is not late. The-girl-before-her has just started playing MacDowell’s “To an Iceberg”.