The trees broke and the landscape altered. The pines had ended with a virile finality on the brink of a rolling grass lawn quilted with heathers and gorse. The sea spread below and the heath above, away and away. She could see distant coves, the cliffs green-ankled and ashed by spume. And too the swell and tumble of the land, pale green and woven brown, the odd tree standing like a mast and closer to hand, a great tilted stone like a descended lightning bolt.

Rachaela walked towards the stone. It was old as the trees, far older very likely. Perhaps it had been here when the Romans assayed these coasts. Perhaps they had marched by and marvelled at it or muttered to their own gods.

Rabbits feeding on the turf shot away as she approached.

The stone was smirched white and carious. Its curious lightning shape hinted at legends of violence. These, like the marching Romans, did not count at all. Words mean nothing, Sylvian had said. Of course, nothing did.

Even this. Even Rachaela standing here in her black hood of hair and her London coat, and her white face that was still that of a young woman, even she did not count, or what became of her.

She would catch the virus of age off them. She would grow ancient, gaunt and friable and tough, like them. Perhaps her hair would turn grey, her breasts drop like withered sacks. She would not lose her teeth, for they had not. There was no evidence among the Scarabae of any crippling disease, no arthritis, no limping and twisting. Their metallic snows of hair were as thick as her own. Their eyes more concentrated and feral.

It was stupid to ask herself what she did here. It had been inevitable. Her mother’s nagging voice, which never quite went away, continued to warn Rachaela against the Scarabae, but even the warnings had driven her, so it seemed, into their lair. Her horror of them had now melted. She was trapped.

And when she was old like them, what after that?

She was not like them. She was the unlike one. That was her purpose.

Rachaela went round the stone. She had noticed strange ripped places on the trunks of some of the pines, and in the soil under the stone were long claw marks, as if from a rake.

Could she walk from here to the village? Six or seven miles. How long would it take her—the going looked very uneven. And she did not know the way.

A bruised cloud, which had been creeping from the horizon, covered the sun. Dark light obscured the heath. She would walk to that hill there and look out. Then she would be tired, for she was not practised in walking. She would go back to the house for food, climb up to her room and switch on her radio for music. Tomorrow she would walk further.