Midnight is a Lonely Place by Barbara Erskine Page A

clothes she ran down the stairs on ice cold feet and looked into the living room. There the curtains were still closed. After drawing them back she opened the doors of the woodburner and stared at it, depressed. The fire was out and the metal cold.
    ‘Sod it!’ She looked down at the single log. It was barely scorched from last night’s paper blaze. To light it she would need firelighters, twigs, more paper …
    Of course there would be no hot water either. Shivering, she abandoned the idea of washing and pulled on a pair of jeans. Thick socks and a heavy sweater and she was ready to forage once more in the log shed.
    The outside world was bitterly cold. The garden – no more than a piece of rough turf and a couple of small bare flower beds – appeared to surround the cottage in a small compact circle; beyond it in the cold early-morning light the grass grew wilder and more lumpy and matted before almost at once giving way to the dunes and shingle banks which backed the sea.
    As she stepped out of the front door a movement at the side of the cottage caught her eye and she stopped, astonished to find that her heart was beating faster than normal again. The fear in her dream was still with her and the silence and emptiness of the woods unnerved her. Forcing herself to walk outside she peered around and realised, relieved, that what she had seen was a rabbit. Three rabbits. They all straightened for a moment as she appeared, their ears upright, their eyes bulging with terror and then they bounded back into the trees. She smiled, amused and not a little embarrassed by her own fear. She was going to have to take herself in hand.
    In the doorway of the shed she stopped. The spade was lying across the threshold. Stooping she picked it up. There were clods of wet muddy sand attached to the shoulders of the blade. Someone had used that spade recently – certainly since she had come out to the shed last night. She surveyed the woods but as far as she could see they were silent and still. Even the rabbits had gone.
    Shrugging her shoulders, she gathered up another armful of logs and, this time spotting the pile of neatly stacked kindling in the corner of the shed, filled her pockets with twigs and small slivers of wood to help light the fire.
    Hot coffee and a blazing furnace in the woodburner did much to restore her optimism as did the discovery that there was an electric immersion heater in a cupboard in the bathroom as a backup to the more esoteric uncertainties of hot water from logs. She ate a bowl of cereal and then set about unpacking in earnest.
    Several times as she glanced through the windows she noticed that the day was clearing. The mist was thinning and the sun had gained a little in strength. By the time her bags and boxes were empty and she was storing them in the spare bedroom, the sea was a brilliant blue to match the sky.
    Turning from the curtainless window her eye was caught by a stack of canvasses behind the door which she hadn’t noticed earlier. They stood, face to the wall, in a patch of deep shadow. Curious, she turned one towards her. The painting was of the sea – a strangely surrealist, nightmare sea. With a grimace she pulled out another canvas. It repeated the theme as did the next and the next. Then came two more, scenes of the cottage itself, one in the autumn where a bland chocolate-box house was surrounded by a curtain of flame, the other a representation of the house as it would look beneath the nightmare sea. She stared at the latter for a long time and then with a shudder she stacked it back against the wall. They were all painted by the same hand, and a hand which commanded a great deal of talent and power, but she did not like them. They were cruel; twisted in their conception.
    Closing the door with a shiver she ran down the stairs and back into the sun-filled living room where her books and papers were laid out on the table ready to start work. Putting the paintings firmly out of her mind