He glanced back, saw a glint of white where the rental car was parked, straightened and walked on.
There was a footpath here. Hardly a path, really; just a trail where turf and bracken had been flattened by the passage of not-many feet. He followed it, stopping when he came to a large upright stone that came up his waist. He looked to one side then the other and saw more stones, forming a group more ovoid than circular, perhaps thirty feet in diameter. He ran his hand across the first stone—rough granite, ridged with lichen and friable bits of moss that crumbled at his touch.
The reek of manure was fainter here: he could smell something fresh and sweet, like rain, and when he looked down saw a silvery gleam at the base of the rock. He crouched and dipped his fingers into a tiny pool, no bigger than his shoe. The water was icy cold, and even after he withdrew his hand, the surface trembled.
A spring. He dipped his cupped palm into it and sniffed warily, expecting a foetid whiff of cow muck.
But the water smelled clean, of rock and rain. Without thinking he drew his hand to his mouth and sipped, immediately flicked his fingers to send glinting droplets into the night.
That was stupid, he thought, hastily wiping his hand on his trousers. Now I’ll get dysentery. Or whatever one gets from cows.
He stood there for another minute, then turned and retraced his steps to the rental car. He saw a pair of headlights approaching and flagged down a white delivery van.
“I’m lost,” he said, and showed the driver the map that Evan had given him.
“Not too lost.” The driver perused the map, then gave him directions. “Once you see the inn you’re almost there.”
Jeffrey thanked him, got back into the car and started to drive. In ten minutes he reached the inn, a rambling stucco structure with a half-dozen cars out front. There was no sign identifying Cardu, and no indication that there was anything more to the village than the inn and a deeply rutted road flanked by a handful of granite cottages in varying states of disrepair. He eased the rental car by the mottled grey buildings, to where what passed for a road ended; bore right and headed down a cobblestoned, hairpin drive that zigzagged along the cliff edge.
He could hear but could not see the ocean, waves crashing against rocks hundreds of feet below. Now and then he got a skin-crawling glimpse of immense cliffs like congealed flames—ruddy stone, apricot-yellow gorse, lurid flares of orange lichen all burned to ash as afterglow faded from the western sky.
He wrenched his gaze back to the narrow strip of road immediately in front of him. Gorse and brambles tore at the doors; once he bottomed out, then nosed the car across a water-filled gulley that widened into a stream that cascaded down the cliff to the sea below.
“Holy fucking Christ,” he said, and kept the car in first gear. In another five minutes he was safely parked beside the cottage, alongside a small sedan.
“We thought maybe you weren’t coming,” someone called as Jeffrey stepped shakily out onto a cobblestone drive. Straggly rosebushes grew between a row of granite slabs that resembled headstones. These were presumably to keep cars from veering down an incline that led to a ruined outbuilding, a few faint stars already framed in its gaping windows. “Some people, they start down here and just give up and turn back.”
Jeffrey looked around, finally spotted a slight man in his early sixties standing in the doorway of a grey stone cottage tucked into the lee of the cliff. “Oh, hi. No, I made it.”
Jeffrey ducked back into the car, grabbed his bag and headed for the cottage.
“Harry,” the man said, and held the door for him.
“Jeffrey. I spoke to your wife this afternoon.”
The man’s brow furrowed. “Wife?” He was a head shorter than Jeffrey, clean-shaven, with a sun-weathered face and sleek grey-flecked dark brown hair to his shoulders. A ropey old cable knit sweater hung from his lank frame.
“Well, someone. A woman.”
“Oh. That was Thomsa. My sister.” The man nodded, as though this confusion had never occurred before. “We’re still trying to get unpacked. We don’t really open till this weekend, but…”
He held the door so Jeffrey could pass inside. “Thomsa told me of your loss. My condolences.”
Inside was a small room with slate floors and plastered walls, sparely furnished with a plain deal table and four chairs intricately carved with Celtic knots; a sideboard holding books and maps and artfully mismatched crockery; large gas cooking stove and a side table covered with notepads and pens, unopened bills, and a laptop. A modern cast-iron woodstove had been fitted into a wide, old-fashioned hearth. The stove radiated warmth and an acrid, not unpleasant scent, redolent of coal smoke and burning sage. Peat, Jeffrey realised with surprise. There was a closed door on the other side of the room, and from behind this came the sound of a television. Harry looked at Jeffrey, cocking an eyebrow.
“It’s beautiful,” said Jeffrey.
Harry nodded. “I’ll take you to your room,” he said.
Jeffrey followed him up a narrow stair beneath the eaves, into a short hallway flanked by two doors. “Your room’s here. Bath’s down there, you’ll have it all to yourself. What time would you like breakfast?”
“Seven, maybe?”
“How about seven-thirty?”
Jeffrey smiled wanly. “Sure.”
The room was small, white plaster walls and a window seat overlooking the sea, a big bed heaped with a white duvet and myriad pillows, corner wardrobe carved with the same Celtic knots as the chairs below. No TV or radio or telephone, not even a clock. Jeffrey unpacked his bag and checked his phone for service: none.
He closed the wardrobe, looked in his backpack and swore. He’d left his book on the train. He ran a hand through his hair, stepped to the window-seat and stared out.
It was too dark now to see much, though light from windows on the floor below illuminated a small, winding patch of garden, bound at the cliffside by a stone wall. Beyond that there was only rock and, far below, the sea. Waves thundered against the unseen shore, a muted roar like a jet turbine. He could feel the house around him shake.
And not just the house, he thought; it felt as though the ground and everything around him trembled without ceasing. He paced to the other window, overlooking the drive, and stared at his rental car and the sedan beside it through a freize of branches, a tree so contorted by wind and salt that its limbs only grew in one direction. He turned off the room’s single light, waited for his eyes to adjust; stared back out through one window, and then the other.
For as far as he could see, there was only night. Ghostly light seeped from a room downstairs onto the sliver of lawn. Starlight touched on the endless sweep of moor, like another sea unrolling from the line of cliffs brooding above black waves and distant headlands. There was no sign of human habitation: no distant lights, no street-lamps, no cars, no ships or lighthouse beacons: nothing.
He sank onto the window seat, dread knotting his chest. He had never seen anything like this—even hiking in the Mojave Desert with Anthea ten years earlier, there had been a scattering of lights sifted across the horizon and satellites moving slowly through the constellations. He grabbed his phone, fighting a cold black solitary horror. There was still no reception.
He put the phone aside and stared at a framed sepia-tinted photograph on the walclass="underline" a three-masted schooner wrecked on the rocks beneath a cliff he suspected was the same one where the cottage stood. Why was he even here? He felt as he had once in college, waking in a strange room after a night of heavy drinking, surrounded by people he didn’t know in a squalid flat used as a shooting gallery. The same sense that he’d been engaged in some kind of psychic somnambulism, walking perilously close to a precipice.