Dark Dance Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    Across level fields Rachaela saw the sudden sun, watery and veiled, sinking down into the western valleys.
    Bold hills rose straight up from the ground, some with white chalk masks, like the heads of phantom animals, leering, smiling, grimacing, holes for eyes. Trees trailed over rock. Ivy grew along the earth, and festooned old broken walls. Once there had been houses. Now, nothing, Gone away.
    ‘Empty old place,’ said the driver, venturing once more into Rachaela’s silence, making her start. ‘See the sea soon.’
    This alliterative phrase snagged on her mind.
    She had not known they approached the coast. She was ignorant of everything. The whole world had stayed undiscovered for her, strange names and languages on her radio.
    The shop in Lizard Street would be closing shortly. The buses would be scuttling down the highways. A planet away. Lost, gone.
    Some seagulls passed across the view.
    The road pulled itself up and over, and a sudden break revealed the fish-grey glitter of the ocean. A white cannon-shot of foam discharged itself below. Rachaela’s heart rose with it, fell back fatigued and fearful. The sea did not reassure.
    They drove above the water and sometimes a stretch of sinuous beach appeared, and once a great tanker was on the horizon like a slowly swimming dinosaur.
    ‘Now there’ll be a turn-off here, if I read that map all right.’
    Again the voice of the driver snapped at her nerves. ‘A turn-off,’ she repeated. But he was not now inclined to converse.
    The turn presently appeared on their left, winding in amongst a vast bank of trees. Black pines rose along the hill, a sort of forest from a fairy book, in miniature. They sped from the sea, and a cave of boughs brought them shadow. Branches struck savagely at the sides of the car. It was a poor road, bumps, and shingle spraying up as if from machine guns.
    ‘Rough on my tyres,’ said the driver.
    Rachaela did not say she was sorry.
    He said, ‘Never told me it’d be this bad.’
    They swerved through the forest. Sheer blackness coiled under the trees. The sun broke through with a flash and vanished again.
    The road curled over and came to a stop against the flank of a crumbling hill. It was dark, the trees massed all about, listening. The Cortina stopped and in the stillness birds twittered and chimed, a curious primeval noise.
    ‘Look there.’
    Rachaela looked and saw a stone signpost. There were two words on it: The House . Nothing else, not even an indicatory arrow.
    ‘Must be up the top of the slope.’ The driver turned and grinned at her, showing after all the anticipated face of the enemy. ‘I can’t get the car up there. There’s no road. You’ll have to walk.’
    They went to the boot and he drew out the two heavy cases, which she had ported all day, already spent by them.
    ‘Can you manage?’ he asked, unhelpful, recalcitrant.
    ‘What do I owe you?’ Rachaela asked.
    ‘Taken care of. They have an account, the Simons. Don’t know why, they never seem to use a car, until now. First time any of us has been out here. Mind how you go.’
    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