Still magnificent upon her bier, the enchantress lay back between the great wings. Motionless for so long, she had at last been galvanized into life, and a jerking syncopated rhythm rippled through her body. The wings shook uneasily, and a series of tremors disturbed the base of the catafalque, so that the woman’s feet danced an exquisitely flickering minuet, the toes darting from side to side with untiring speed. Higher up, her wide smooth hips jostled each other in a jaunty mock tango.
He watched until only the face remained, a few disconnected traces of the wings and catafalque jerking faintly in the darkness, then made his way out of the tomb.
Outside, in the cool morning light, the time-wardens were waiting for him, hands on the hips of their white uniforms. One was holding the empty canisters, turning the fluttering strands of tape over with his foot as they drifted away.
The other took Shepley’s arm and steered him down to the car.
‘Traxel’s gang,’ he said to the driver. ‘This must be a new recruit.’ He glanced dourly at the blood around Shepley’s mouth. ‘Looks as if they’ve been fighting over the spoils.’
The driver pointed to the three drums. ‘Stripped?’
The man carrying them nodded. ‘All three. And they were 10th Dynasty.’ He shackled Shepley’s wrists to the dashboard. ‘Too bad, son, you’ll be doing ten yourself soon. It’ll seem like ten thousand.’
‘Unless it was a dud,’ the driver rejoined, eyeing Shepley with some sympathy. ‘You know, one of those freak mortuary tombs.’
Shepley straightened his bruised mouth. ‘It wasn’t,’ he said firmly.
The driver glanced ‘warningly at the other wardens. ‘What about the tape blowing away up there?’
Shepley looked up at the tomb spluttering faintly below the ridge, its light almost gone. ‘That’s just the persona,’ he said. ‘The empty skin.’
As the engine surged forward he listened to three empty drums hit the floor behind the seat.
Again at night Mason heard the sounds of the approaching sea, the muffled thunder of breakers rolling up the near-by streets. Roused from his sleep, he ran out into the moonlight, where the white-framed houses stood like sepulchres among the washed concrete courts. Two hundred yards away the waves plunged and boiled, sluicing in and out across the pavement. Foam seethed through the picket fences, and the broken spray filled the air with the wine-sharp tang of brine.
Off-shore the deeper swells of the open sea rode across the roofs of the submerged houses, the white-caps cleft by isolated chimneys. Leaping back as the cold foam stung his feet, Mason glanced at the house where his wife lay sleeping. Each night the sea moved a few yards nearer, a hissing guillotine across the empty lawns.
For half an hour Mason watched the waves vault among the rooftops. The luminous surf cast a pale nimbus on the clouds racing overhead on the dark wind, and covered his hands with a waxy sheen.
At last the waves began to recede, and the deep bowl of illuminated water withdrew down the emptying streets, disgorging the lines of houses in the moonlight. Mason ran forwards across the expiring bubbles, but the sea shrank away from him, disappearing around the corners of the houses, sliding below the garage doors. He sprinted to the end of the road as a last glow was carried across the sky beyond the spire of the church. Exhausted, Mason returned to his bed, the sound of the dying waves filling his head as he slept.
‘I saw the sea again last night,’ he told his wife at breakfast.
Quietly, Miriam said: ‘Richard, the nearest sea is a thousand miles away.’ She watched her husband for a moment, her pale fingers straying to the coil of black hair lying against her neck. ‘Go out into the drive and look. There’s no sea.’
‘Darling, I saw it.’
‘Richard—!’
Mason stood up, and with slow deliberation raised his palms. ‘Miriam, I felt the spray on my hands. The waves were breaking around my feet. I wasn’t dreaming.’
‘You must have been.’ Miriam leaned against the door, as if trying to exclude the strange nightworld of her husband. With her long raven hair framing her oval face, and the scarlet dressing-gown open to reveal her slender neck and white breast, she reminded Mason of a Pre-Raphaelite heroine in an Arthurian pose. ‘Richard, you must see Dr Clifton. It’s beginning to frighten me.’
Mason smiled, his eyes searching the distant rooftops above the trees. ‘I shouldn’t worry. What’s happening is really very simple. At night I hear the sounds of the sea, I go out and watch the waves in the moonlight, and then come back to bed.’ He paused, a flush of fatigue on his face. Tall and slimly built, Mason was still convalescing from the illness which had kept him at home for the previous six months. ‘It’s curious, though,’ he resumed, ‘the water is remarkably luminous. I should guess its salinity is well above normal—’
