It had been a dark night, hadn’t it? Yes – the moon away on business, the stars obscured by cloud. He had been alone hadn’t he, and very far from help? Yes again – he was out on the dunes, sea on one side, moorland on the other. Tufts of marram grass scraped his legs as he trudged, wading through endless dry black sand. It had been profoundly dark, come to think of it. The sea was one particular species of murk, a noisy marine variety, while the moors were a silent land cousin. Neither seemed much differentiated from the overcast sky. The variousness of the world was not his eyes to tell anymore.
One thing was certain: something stalked him. Something whose eyesight the dark had not dulled.
At first, though, he hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t even been apprehensive. No primal disquiet troubled him, no dread sense of being something’s quarry. He was actually meditating on the dryness of the sand, which poured smoothly off his feet as he lifted them from it: this dryness, and this feel of flow down his skin, defined it as a phenomenon, now that he could barely see it. And the differential between the silence of the moors, and the low hubbub of the sea: that was how he was orientating himself, how he knew he was walking a straight path along the coast to eventual civilisation. For a non-nocturnal creature, he was adapting nicely. In the care of caretaker senses, he would be –
He heard it land in the sand behind him. Very definitely land. Did he spin round, or did he break into a run straight away? Because if he’d spun, that would be interesting: a failure of instinct to be informed by circumstance, or a vain hope that scared eyes could pierce the gloom. But he had no chance of discerning the threat; only eluding it. Most probably, he had set off at the sound of something landing, as surely as at a starting gun.
The next part he remembered well enough. It had been immediately apparent he was not designed to run through sand. It dragged and dragged at his desperate legs; jealous, possessive, spurned now that its attention-grabbing consistency was no longer his thesis. And the marram grass was cutting him. He felt he would be caught in seconds; his back tensing in anticipation of contact with terrible claws and limbs. Even without the sand, had he any hope of getting away?
It was futile to run, and yet somehow, as a doomed prey animal, he had an absolute obligation to flight. The motions of escape must be the last thing he observed. He crashed on through the sand, wringing what little speed he could from this terrain.
Seconds passed: he felt himself going downhill, over a dune, and for a moment gravity seemed a feasible rescuer – provided he could keep his balance under its assistance.
Did he trip? Or was he at that moment brought down?
He recalled pirouetting at one point. Somewhere in the sequence of events, he had been stranded on one leg and sent through 360 degrees. And the surprising lack of cushioning, as on his back he hit the sand: that wasn’t in doubt. Nor was that breath in his face; the sudden and dreadfully emphatic contribution of the olfactory: salt and ozone and something like being downwind of a washed-up whale. It was coming from the thing’s mouth. It brought an awareness of teeth directly above him: he put his hands over his face, and at the same time, he felt sure, a mass pressed on his chest that was there to restrain him. For the kill. What could he have been feeling? How had his mind prepared for death? He didn’t know. He had pushed his hands up towards those teeth… maybe they’d find an eye they could gouge, a throat they could grip…
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