The Haunted Storm Read Free Page A

angle, and then a second wave, even higher, lifted it and forced it further on to the flat top of the Spur – and there it stayed. The light still glowed in the wheelhouse; he could see no movement on board.
    Nothing happened for a minute. Puzzled, he sat down on the shingle, drawing his knees up and clutching his coat around him, watching the boat closely. It did not budge; it was too deeply wedged on the rock. He thought he saw someone in the wheelhouse, but he was not sure. Waves broke against the far side of it, and the spray burst into the air and streamed over the deck and down the side. The tide was fully in; the boat couldn’t possibly be lifted off. When the waves receded it would be left stranded on the rock.
    The light of day had mostly gone, and the storm was dying away, but it was raining harder than ever and the clouds were still thick and black. The light was gone from the sky, but by some freak chance of the air, things – all things – appeared to glow with their own luminosity. The black sky hung over everything, and everything was visible in immense detail, from the fingers of spray down the side of the boat to the tiniest pebbles at his side. He could even read the name of the boat: Jeannette. All the stones, every single one in the steep beach below him, and each tiny ripple on the tossing black-green sea, were outlined with a weird clarity in black and silver and deep green.
    He breathed in deeply, and turned his face up to the pouring sky, partly in prayer and partly in a deep excitement that things were happening. At the very same instant, when he had his eyes closed, he knew with absolute certainty that someone had appeared from nowhere and sat down beside him.
    He brought his head down nervously, and looked to his left – and yes, there was a figure there, seated just a yard to his left. He wasn’t sure, in that first few seconds, if the figure was male or female. The light, strange as it was, was clear enough, but there was a subtle ambiguity about the way he or she was sitting – or something, perhaps, in the face – at any rate, his first thought was, “Where the devil has she appeared from?”
    Now it was clearly a girl; how could he have wondered?
    “How long’s she been following me?” he thought.
    She was extraordinarily beautiful. The slight boyishness which had made him unsure of her sex was at a second glance one of her best features; it made her slim, and it made her look tough and challenging. Her hair was dark – he couldn’t be sure of the colour – and about as long as his own, and thick and wavy. The wind off the sea blew it round and forward on both sides of her face, which was isolated in darkness. Her eyes were dark and heavy-lidded. Her nose was firm and very slightly Roman, with proud and finely arched nostrils. Her cheekbones were high and wide and her cheeks pale, the skin drawn tightly over them. Her jaws were clenched and her chin seemed to be trembling. Her mouth was wide; the upper lip was full, and curved proudly like a lion’s. There was little or nothing of ordinary femininity in her face – no submissiveness or passivity, no gentle weakness, but a harshness and strength that roused Matthew to a pitch of excitement and which he seemed in an obscure unconscious way to recognise and greet like an old friend. Her expression in one way was disconcertingly familiar; and in another, it overawed him; it was open, and rapt, and trembling, as if she were staring out over abysses of revelation, and there was such passionate conviction in the way in which she looked not at, so much as through and around Matthew that the very solidity of the earth beneath him seemed suddenly false and perilous.
    With difficulty he took his eyes away from her face and looked downwards at her body. She was wearing a raincoat, buttoned at the neck, and sandals, and nothing else that Matthew could see. Her legs were bare, and the sight of her naked skin, slightly goose-pimpled with cold