Anna retired early; experienced busy dreams, in which her new bathroom,  relocated to the station concourse at Waterloo where it drew the late afternoon commute like a football crowd, became filled with water in the azure depths of which flickered real fish; and woke tangled in her damp nightdress in the deep night, convinced that a strange light and heat, coming and going Chinese red and sunflower yellow outside her window, had winked out the instant she opened her eyes. Feeling as if someone might be staring in at her, she struggled up out of bed and went down to look out of the back door. Only the lawn and flowerbeds, suspended in the cool, milky late-summer dark: but in the distance, somewhere the other side of the river, she could hear the long, belling cries of dogs. Cool air flowed around her ankles. Everything out there was very still. James sat in the middle of the lawn like an illustration; turned his head to look at her, then, as she left the house, stretched amiably and walked off. The sound of the dogs became clearer. Musical but inexplicable, detached from anything you might expect to happen on an ordinary night, it was a sound distant and very close at the same time. It wasn’t coming from across the river. It was coming from Anna’s summerhouse.

Originally stained a colour Tim Waterman  had called ‘Serbian yellow’, which faded over the years to the faintest lemon tint in the fibres of the wood, the summerhouse  stood as leached and grey as a beach hut, the earth at its base rioting with exotic flowers again – huge foxglove-like bells in pale transparent  pastel browns and pinks, round which fluttered hundreds of dusty-white moths. ‘How beautiful!’ Anna thought,  though  now the sound  of dogs was loud and  close. Suspended between delight and  dread,  she approached the summerhouse and pulled at its door, which stuck then gave. She had time to hallucinate a rolling endless landscape of tall grass, under  a lighting effect from the cover of a science fiction novel, and hear a voice say, ‘Leave here. Leave here, Anna!’ Then the dogs were on her. It was hard to count  them, jostling and snapping, white teeth and lolling tongues, long hot muscular bodies brindled fawn and violet. It was hard to see what kinds of dogs they were. Before she knew it, the sheer weight and strong smell of them had knocked her off balance, she had stumbled back from the door, she was down on her back on the lawn in the dark, laughing and gasping as they licked her all over. ‘No!’ she said. She laughed. ‘No, wait!’ Too late. The nightdress was up around her waist.

14 Enantiodromic Zones

FOURTEEN

Enantiodromic Zones

The Halo is rich with hauntings  of one sort or another. They occupy many different kinds of space.