There was a sort of path leading away up the hill from the signpost, veined with roots and scattered by pine needles. In summer the undergrowth would be thicker, the path perhaps invisible.

In the darkness Rachaela began to walk away from the car. She heard its engine start and the sounds as it reversed on the shingly road. She did not look back.

The cases were heavy as lead, but they contained all that had seemed essential to her. She heaved them on.

She was weary, and the nervous fear slid under her exhaustion, nearly extinct. Did the house not exist, as in half of her daydreams?

She rose above the pines, and cedar trees and massive oaks with mossy, glowing peridot trunks climbed from the soil, great pillars upholding a tracery of dull panes, less light than contrast to darkness.

In such a spot, from among the trees, anything might come at her.

The path eddied from the wood.

She was high up. She heard the rush of the sea.

It was twilight, the sun had gone out inland. The sky was closing. She saw two stars, and away over the open land before her, a building.

There was a tower with a cone of roof. Crenellations and walls slanting. Some last hint of light cast a weird burnish on to ranks of slender windows. It was a large house, and in the dusk it became a masonry vegetable. Beyond its shape the land gave way. Below the sea dashed itself against rock and gulls or silence cried.

Here? She was to confront them here? To confront what?

Dizzy with her tension, she had put down the two slabs of lead.

She must cross the formless ground between herself and the house. She must ring a bell or knock some primitive knocker, and then one of them would come. She would go in and so begin to know.

It was cold on this headland. Now she could see seven, eight tinfoil stars, burning icy, thin and hard.

She took up the cases and wands of pain struck at her shoulders. She walked towards the house, stumbling a little on stray stones, the tufted wintry grass.

The house came nearer, drifting over the navy dusk.

She reached an outer wall broken by two posts. No gate. The way was open wide but not necessarily inviting.

Above her, afloat over a tall crowd of garden trees, a window lit up in the house.

Rachaela stared. The light was dull but the window became a fruit of coloured glass, liquid crimsons, dense purples, and damson green.

What did the window propose? Anything? Nothing?

It was not a welcome, rather a shutting out.

The path from the wall to the house was straight. There were massive ancient yews on either side, cemetery trees, where darkness lurked and rustled.

The house too, but for its one lit window, was faceless and black.