The thunder smote the house like an engine of demolition. The house shook.

Rachaela opened her eyes, lifted herself. The darkened window pulsed and quivered with rain, the wind and the sea between them made a noise in which ancient screaming and the collapse of walls might distantly be made out.

The air was galvanic, a sheen on it like sightless fire.

Rachaela wished she could see through the window to the storm. She sat upright in the bed and waited for the lightning. It came. The picture in the window flashed a ghostly blue and ochre and imprinted itself upon the room, on Rachaela’s white arms and features. And in a chair across the room something sat, facing her.

The light was gone.

Had she mistaken it—some trick of shadow?

She reached out slowly and found the matches, the candle on the bedside table. She must strike this primal glow into being, and see.

Rachaela struck the match.

A man sat in the chair, black on blackness, pallor on the black.

Uncle Camillo... Camillo the trickster had broken into her room.

Her hands numbed, she put the match to the candle and took it up. Its light soaked out and the man was really there.

It was not Camillo.

He said, ‘You like storms.’

‘Yes, but I don’t like finding strangers in my room.’

‘Not a stranger, Rachaela.’

Even seated, he was tall. She could not make out what he wore, dark things. His hair was black, outlining his face, doing no more than that. The face itself was an image of light and shade, clear bones cloaked in skin. He was not old, her age, perhaps. But his eyes were not like the eyes of any of them, black and still as pools of paint.

‘I don’t care,’ Rachaela said, steadily, ‘I want you to get out. Now.’

‘But I’m looking at you. I’ve had to wait nearly thirty years. I’m interested.’

His face was devastatingly familiar. It was like her own.

‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘One of the Scarabae?’

‘The last, but for you,’ he said.

‘You’re telling me,’ she said, ‘that you are my father.’

‘There’s nothing to you of your mother. Did she never reproach you that you looked like me?’

Unbidden, her mother’s face rose up in her brain, the unliking look, the hostility always there. A mother who did not confide, never consoled, told stories of dark things, the wolf that blew down the piggy’s house...

‘You’re much too young to be my father.’

‘I look younger than I am. As you do, Rachaela.’

He said her name as if he tasted it.

She would not pull up the sheets to cover the nightdress, would not look away.

‘You must be mad,’ she said. ‘Mad if you are my father, mad if you aren’t.’

‘Where else would I be but here?’ he said.