For Death Comes Softly Read Free

sun seemed even hotter here, not like November at all. I basked in it, just like the seals beneath me. The minutes flashed by, the cabaret was fabulous, the sea roared below – and yet I felt so at peace. I may have dozed off. I glanced at my watch. Almost an hour had passed. Time to return, pretty sharply. I felt guilty about Jason waiting on the other side, and also I was suddenly aware of a distinctly autumnal chill in the air. It was just after 3.30 p.m. Darkness comes swiftly halfway through the afternoon in November and the day was already not quite so bright. The brief journey back through the tunnel seemed easier, though, perhaps because there was a certain familiarity now. It felt damper and colder than before. I shivered. Not a place to be stuck, I thought, and teased myself about what I would do if Jason and his boat were not there.
    It did not really occur to me that this could be a serious consideration, and I was smiling as I stepped out onto the small ledge on the landing side and looked out to sea ready to wave and holler. But there was nothing to wave at. No boat. No Jason. I scanned the horizon. Not a dot.
    The water was lapping at my feet. The tide had already risen three feet or more. Soon it would flood the bottom end of the tunnel and there was nowhere else to go on this face of the rock. I contemplated going back to the far side of the Pencil to the higher ledge which I realised the incoming tide would not reach for some time. I quickly decided against it, though. It would be practically impossible for a boat to reach me there, and logic told me Jason would soon be back. Something rational must lie behind this. Even though the light was fading fast, I was sure that I should wait where I was and not panic.
    By the time I began to think better of my decision, it was too late. The bottom of the tunnel had now flooded. I crouched on the far end of the ledge, slightly above the tunnel entrance, but the tide was already lapping at my feet, and quite vigorously too. The sea had got up with the sunset. Occasionally more robust waves cracked ominously against the sheer sides of the Pencil and I was getting drenched. I was cold and wet and very frightened. I felt the panic rising in spite of my efforts to suppress it. The position of the Pencil was such that no vessel was likely to pass close to it by chance and in any case it would soon be too dark for anyone to spot me. I had my torch, of course, but it was not a very powerful one and the batteries would not last for ever.
    Maybe Jason had had an accident. Maybe he wasn’t going to come back at all. Maybe nobody was coming. I tried not to think about that. Logic – again – told me the staff on Abri would miss me at dinner and launch a search party. But nobody knew I had gone on this foolhardy expedition to the Pencil with Jason. Why should they come here? And in any case, could I last that long?
    The cold and the damp cut me to the marrow. I began to realise that both my movements and my ability to think had slowed. The panic mounted with the increasing darkness. Within an hour of my returning to the ledge the sky had turned completely black. I was not sure if the luminous hands of my watch were a comfort or a reminder of the inevitability of tide and time. The sea rose higher and higher.
    By five o’clock on that bleak November evening I had been forced to somehow scramble up the sheer side of the rock as high as I could manage to escape the approaching threat of the sea. I clung to rocky outcrops with fingers I could no longer feel, and I had no idea how long I could hang on. More by luck than judgement my feet found a kind of misshapen crevice into which I managed to half crouch. But I still had to hold on somehow to the rock face with both my numbed hands. Six o’clock came and went. I tried to think only in minutes. One more minute, and then another, of life.
    Curiously, my panic had subsided a little. I was quite certain now that I