She hurried back to the shallow bay area where they had arrived. The tide had risen while she had been here but was ebbing now. She stood on a slippery outcropping of rock that hung above the modulating sea and wrapped the skin fully around herself, first making sure her feet were covered, and then tossing the flap that hung down her back up and over her head.
Her heart chilled.
It wasn’t working.
The suit completely covered her, but it didn’t join together where she pressed it. She kept it around her and wriggled about in it, but nothing happened-she just got tired holding up the heavy skin.
With a gasp, she threw back the hood. Realising that she’d based her escape plan solely on the information of a young and possibly very deluded young girl, Gretchen was about to sit down and await her fate at the judgement of the beasts. Her consolation was at least they’d all be marooned on this lifeless rock until they could make new skins for themselves-and she might be able to see how it was done. It was small consolation, however. She’d likely have been long-eaten before new skins were created.
It was hot and uncomfortable in the skin, so she tried to push it off of her. That was more difficult than she expected. It seemed to be sticking to her hands and face. She brought one hand up to her forehead to see what the problem was and found that she had raised a fin. Then it struck her-the selkies had all been naked-it would only work on her exposed skin.
Gretchen pulled her hand out of the skin and with a wet sucking sound it emerged. She laid it aside. Then she timidly started to peel off her school jumper. She felt ridiculous as she folded it and put it in a neat pile near her feet.
She had almost unbuttoned her shirt when she heard the first scream of anguish from the selkies who had discovered their burning skins.
Now she couldn’t claw her clothes off fast enough. They would kill her as soon as they found her, and it was a race against her stripping down completely and any one of them discovering her in the small cove with the only remaining selkie skin.
There were more screams now, rising in angry chorus. Everything became heightened, and her hands moved like blurs. Her skirt was off, and she rolled her stockings down with it. She pulled her panties down and quickly started fumbling with the bra clasps behind her back. She cursed it over and over.
And then that was it, she was naked-exposed.
There was a shout from behind her, piercing shrilly through the wall of wailing.
“There! There she is! She’s kept one for herself!”
Another shot of adrenaline coursed through her body. She bent down and grabbed the skin, pulling it up over her. She heard a scrabbling on the rock behind her and in fear and desperation leapt into the dark and freezing waves of the night ocean.
Her leap was short and brought her nowhere near safety. Her feet were no longer separate now-they were joined at the ankle, it felt. Turning to look down at what had caught them-she thought it might be one of her pursuers-she found that the skin was working. She felt it cling tightly to her body as it wrapped itself completely around her hips, her belly, her back and shoulders, and her arms-enveloping her in flabby seal softness. It grafted to her face and encircled her eyes. She was now in the body of a seal, and she turned her head and flicked her tail but found that the water was far too shallow for her to swim in. She turned around and found herself staring into a swarm-practically an army, in fact, of angry, naked people who were fast closing in on her.
She flipped and floundered as hard as she could, gradually inching into deeper water. The closest selkies had their heels in the water now and were splashing quickly toward her.
The water was completely covering her and she started to swim using odd, full-bodied flipper movements that she was very unused to making. The cold hit her like an anvil, and for a moment she was winded and disoriented. The waves buffeted and spun her under the surface, and then she opened her eyes-her new, seal eyes-and saw the course through the rocks around the island, which she manoeuvred in and out of with surprising deftness.
And then, finally, she was in the open sea. She was free of the island and her pursuers. Her body quickly adjusted to the chilly aqueous environment and she swam for a time, losing herself in the currents, wondering where land lay. Then the sky started to lighten and within an hour the sun broke the horizon, giving her a bearing of east-southeast, and a vague direction of home. She started confidently toward it.
It was awkward, obviously, because she was living in a skin that was not her own.
But then, it was no less awkward than she usually felt in her own skin.
VII
Daniel sat in his cell, gripping the edge of stone plinth that served as a sort of bed and bench, fighting desperately to stay awake. He had tried everything he could think of-walking or running around the cell, pinching, hitting, and slapping himself, repeating his lucky words, doing mental arithmetic-but it was no use. The darkness and the exertion of the last days and hours, in particular, had drained him past human endurance, and he found himself sinking into sleep.
Although “sinking” was putting it mildly. “Plummeting” was more accurate a description. Plummeting into a terrifying, swirling blackness that was like the raging waves of a tempestuous sea. He would nod off and feel himself falling swiftly away and then force open his eyes. It was like being pulled out of a fall and having his feet placed on firm ground. But then no matter what he did, soon the flying darkness would pull at him, bent on taking him down.
Consciously, he knew he was still in his cell. In fact, he could feel the stone slab beneath him, but even that was fading away, becoming abstract. He told himself that it was all just in his head, the extreme feelings just a reflection of the extreme dark, but try as he might, he couldn’t convince himself that he was anything more than a tiny particle of fully conscious fear lost in a horrific void, and falling, falling, always falling. The cold stone beneath him, slick with sweat, seemed immaterially thin, more of a concept than an object, and then it was gone. . His surroundings had finally dissolved away.
Points of light started to appear around him. They moved fast, arcing past him and vanishing into the distance. He was hallucinating, obviously. But it was so persistent. . What could he actually trust as real? He let loose a long groan, but even his own voice was lost in the dark tempest, swallowed by the void. The number of lights grew, and trajectories started to alter, and the stars danced erratically around him.
Shutting his eyes made no difference at all-what was happening around him penetrated even his eyelids.
He didn’t know how long he could bear it all. He felt that at some point, something had to give; either the whole display would have to stop. Or what? Madness? Death, even? How long could his tiny consciousness survive while tumbling through the cosmos?
In the tumult, he noticed that two points of light remained fixed. One was a speck of bluish-white, the other a small speck of yellow. He flung out his arm-visible only as a black silhouette against the strobing stars-to reach them and found that he was able to draw them nearer, or himself toward them, whichever it was. At last, he thought; some aspect of his situation that he could control.
As he came closer to the stars, he was surprised to find that they were two mostly human forms. They were riders on horses, galloping away from him, tearing across the sky like comets. One was golden, like the sun; the other silver, like the moon.
As they galloped away, they also came closer to him, within the altered physics of his dreamscape.
The riders reared and he saw their full figures, every sparkle of light that shone from every edge of their armour. The golden figure’s armour was roughly burnished so that the colours of red, orange, and yellow swirled and mixed across it, seeming to produce light and heat. The other’s was buffed and reflected a luminescent, ghostly gleam of blue, white, and grey.