The Silver Witch(35)

Such exciting progress cannot be interrupted by mundanities like food and rest, so that all accepted rhythms to her day are slowly shed. She no longer bothers to fashion something from the dwindling store cupboard into a meal, but snacks and browses on whatever comes easily to hand, remembering to find something for her long-suffering dog when she does so. She does not go to her bed, but naps in the chair in her studio, or curled in a sleeping bag on the hearth with Thistle. She does not bathe, nor brush her hair, and even her running is abandoned. The act of creation is everything now, and she will not step out of it for a moment. For such a blissful state is an elusive and flighty thing, and could be gone in an instant. So it is with something approaching panic that Tilda eventually realizes she can go no further. Her own lack of planning, her refusal to face up to and deal with what has been happening to her, and the effects these changes have had on the way she lives, these things now force her to stop. For the next step is to test her dreamed-of glazes and fire her pots. And still she has no power for the kiln.

Draining the last of her mug of tea, she moves stiffly over to her sleeping bag and wriggles inside it. Her hands are dry and rough from working with the clay. Her shoulders ache from hours hunched over her workbench. Her stomach growls from lack of sensible food. Thistle comes, wagging, to snuggle up beside her, and within minutes the pair are drifting into a restless sleep. Just as the sharp edges of wakefulness begin to dull, Tilda is jolted awake. At first she thinks she has heard something, but then she realizes, with a flash of fear that sends adrenalin shooting through her veins, that she has sensed somebody close. Somebody is in the studio with her. Thistle lifts her head and begins to whimper. Nothing could so effectively have increased her mistress’s alarm. In the half-light of the winter’s afternoon, Tilda scans the room, not daring to move even her head as she does so. Slowly a shape in the far corner comes into focus. It is a figure, a woman, judging by the heavy skirts. There is little else to identify her as such, as she wears a hooded cape and her face is obscured, partly by the heavy cloth of the hood, and partly by the shadowy quality of the available light. At her side, Tilda feels Thistle tremble. Cautiously, she inches her way out of her sleeping bag until she is kneeling on the rag rug, never for one second taking her eyes off the motionless, gloomy figure in the corner of the room.

Is it the woman from the boat? Is it her? I can’t tell. I can’t be sure.

Whoever it is, Tilda is certain that her visitor did not enter via the door. She never did anything as ordinary and reassuring as lift the latch and tread the frosty day onto the concrete floor of the studio. There emanates from the figure a vibration. An energy that, whilst it is most definitely human, is not of the real and everyday world. Tilda searches for her voice and her courage. She forces herself to speak.

‘Who are you?’ she asks. ‘What is it you want?’

The figure does not answer, but straightens slightly, seeming to become taller as she does so, and moves forward on silent feet. Tilda wants to flee, to scramble from her vulnerable position on the floor and turn and run faster than she has ever run in her life. But she finds she cannot. It is more than fear that keeps her pinned down. It is as if the approaching apparition has exerted an invisible, vicelike grip upon her, so that she is unable even to stand up. Thistle crouches low on her belly and has ceased her whimpering, her ears flat against her head, her whole body tense, whether for flight or attack Tilda cannot tell. Soon the looming figure is fewer than two strides away.

‘What do you want!?’ Tilda demands again.

Now the visitor lifts her head and the light of the dying day that falls through the patio doors reveals her face. Tilda lets out a shriek of horror. This is not the first time she has seen this terrible face. It appeared to her once before. This is not the lithe, youthful woman from the boat, but the brutalized, bloody and smashed face that showed itself as Tilda looked through her binoculars. It is an image she has been trying to forget ever since, but such a thing is not easily erased from memory. The nose has been broken, so that it is both flattened and twisted. One eye is closed with blood, the other bulges in its socket, sickeningly bruised and swollen. The lower jaw has been smashed by some terrible force, so that white bone can be seen through the mess of a mouth that remains, the teeth either broken or at impossible angles. The woman’s skin is a ghoulish gray only where it is not black or purple from bruising and swelling. Matted hair, encrusted with blood and dirt, falls forward from beneath the hood of the cape, which Tilda can now see is saturated with blood.