Midnight is a Lonely Place. Barbara Erskine

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       XV

      Alison had stood for a long time on the edge of her excavation surveying the damage the wind and tide had wrought on her carefully exposed soil face. The dune had almost broken up. Half the wall she had left the day before had fallen. It lay, a tumble of wet sand and soil in the bottom of the declivity, strewn with tangled seaweed and shells and the rotting half-eaten corpse of a large fish. At the sight of it she pulled a face. Stacking all her equipment on the edge of the hollow she jumped in. She lifted the dead fish out on a spade and hurled it back onto the beach with a shudder. Moments later a screaming gull was circling over it, its claws outstretched for a landing.

      She turned back to the shambles before her and stared round. She had already spotted several more pieces of that strange red earthenware lying around in the loose soil and there were other things too. Small round things. Black. ‘Coins!’ Her shriek was echoed by the gull which danced into the air for a moment before returning to gorge itself on the cold white flesh of the fish.

      There were thirteen that she could find. Wrapping them carefully in pieces of soft tissue which she had optimistically brought with her for just such a purpose she stowed them in the pocket of her haversack, then she turned back to the dig.

      It was the silence she hated. A silence which seemed to block out the gentle constant noise of wind and waves. It was threatening. It entered her aching head like an entity, battering against her brain. She was pretty sure that it had given her the migraines which were the reason for her missing school, but this time she had thought of a way of defeating it; of keeping the headaches at bay. Half an hour later, to the deafening sounds of The Sex Pistols, she was intently sifting through the heaps of sand with her fork and trowel, systematically separating out anything of interest, when she paused, looking down at the patch of dark sand in front of her.

      The dagger was half buried still, the hilt and transverse hand-guard badly corroded, but not so badly that it was not instantly recognisable. For a long moment Alison stared down at it without moving, then she dropped to her knees and reverently she began to scrape away the surrounding sand. The dagger was some fifteen inches long, the blade two inches wide at its broadest. She sat for a long time with it in her hands, staring at it, awed, as the voice of Johnny Rotten blasted across the beach, torn by the wind and dissipated across the water. When at last she stood up, she held her trophy awkwardly aloft and she reached for her haversack again.

      The blast of ice cold wind took her completely by surprise. Whipping the haversack with its precious cargo out of her hands it flung it down the beach as, blinded by flying sand, she tried desperately to catch it. Her broom fell sideways in front of her and was blown away to end up wedged into the shingle at the end of the dune and her cassette player subsided slowly into the loose soil, where it continued to blast out its music into the roar of the wind before the heavy soil depressed the switches on the top and it fell silent.

      The squall had gone almost as soon as it had come. Pushing her hair out of her eyes Alison scrambled out of the hollow and stared up the beach. She could see her haversack, lying in a dayglow heap amongst the tangled seaweed, fifty yards along the tide line. Running to it she caught it to her chest, panting. Then she turned.

      Above the dune the sand was still spinning crazily in a whirling spiral which extended about four feet into the air. For several seconds she watched as it spun out of the hollow and away from her down the beach towards the inlet into the bay. Then as swiftly as it had come, it disappeared.

      She swallowed nervously. This place was getting to her badly. She forced herself to walk back and stared down at the spot where she had been working so peacefully only five minutes before. All her hard efforts had been undone. The sand was piled randomly once more, her broom and spade lying beneath it. Her trowel had gone. Her cassette player was half-buried and silent, her picnic – two chocolate bars and a can of Coke – had fallen into a pool of sea water.

      ‘Shit!’

      She jumped down into the hole. Salvaging her belongings she heaped them on the edge. Switching on the music again she was comforted to hear it blast forth apparently unharmed. The Cure did a great deal to restore her equilibrium. Tearing the wrapper, thankfully intact and seemingly undissolved, off a chocolate bar she began to eat it.

      Two yards to her left, unnoticed and almost invisible in the clay from which it protruded, a human hand, clawed and shrivelled, began, in the cold damp air, the process of disintegration.

      Behind her, a faint shadow hovered over her; when at last she looked up and saw it, it was the size and shape of a man.