Stephen had no feelings of aversion or horror because Marianne Price had lain dead over there. He felt as he always did on the moor, and especially on this spot and on Big Allen, peaceful, without care, without self almost, at one with nature and the past, and as if nothing that happened down there could hurt or vex him any more.
The rays crept across the slab with its skin of yellowish lichen. The granite was gradually being dyed carmine by the progress of the dying sun. And now, as Stephen looked at his watch, the tide of red colour crept to touch that central point where the rune was. For a moment the rune gleamed in a pool of red light. The shadows of the stones stretched to their maximum length, while the sun seemed to rest on the horizon. It was poised there, a rosy ball, and then it began to dip below the rim of the land. Down in Chesney St Michael-in-the-Moor tolled the hour — six, seven, eight, and on the last note, the red light glimmered and failed, the harp-like shadows fled and the Altar became once more a sheet of half-buried stone. For another year the sacred meeting of the rune and the sunset was over.
With the departure of the sun a breeze came, making ripples in the turf and bending the ling to the ground. Stephen made his way down and crossed the Hilderbridge road a little south of Chesney. The road bisected Vangmoor, and north of the village the Loomlade road crossed it, thus dividing the region roughly into four quarters. This south-eastern quarter was to Stephen’s mind the least beautiful, but it was some weeks since he had been there and he liked to keep the whole of the moor under surveillance. It consisted mainly of a large area of more or less flat heathland that was in places marshy and out of which rose the only hill to be found here, the broad, low Knamber Foin that looked from a distance no more than a heap of stones. Away in the distance, beyond the foin, the land became fertile and fields began, enclosed by dry stone walls.
Stephen went first to Knamber Hole where they had found Marianne Price’s bicycle. Not a trace of the search or the find remained — or not as far as he could see. Dusk was fast approaching. All colour had gone from the landscape, leaving the ground a kind of shimmering, bright grey on which every bush and stunted tree appeared as a black silhouette. The sky was pallid and clear between the encroaching tides of cloud. You could not have called it grey, it was of some colour that had never been given a name, and it glowed as if the moon and stars were behind the skin of it, waiting to break through. But whatever lit it was not the moon, for this Stephen now saw slowly rising out of clusters of cloud on the rim of the moor, a reddish, mottled orb like the ghost of that sun. It seemed bigger than the sun and it sailed with a peculiar swiftness up into the heavens, growing paler and brighter as it did so until it lit up the plain with a dull, yellow light. He was glad of the moon, for he had been walking away from the road and the quarry for a long time and had reached the rising, stony ground at the foot of the foin.
At this point he decided to turn back, for even now it would be eleven before he was home and it was seldom he stayed out as late as that. Lyn would worry. To the north and west, in the right angle the roads made, lay a tree-dotted plain called the Banks of Knamber. It was covered with birch trees, thousands of them, small and frail, none of them much taller than a man. There was gorse as well and of course the omnipresent bilberries. It took Stephen about half an hour to reach the banks and he began to head across them towards Chesney.
In the dull moonlight, which seemed to paint the landscape with phosphorescence rather than illuminate it, the region resembled a pale sky scattered all over with puffs of black cloud. And from time to time the moon dulled even further as thin wracks of cloud and then denser masses passed across its face. Once it disappeared altogether, and although a fair degree of brightness remained in the sky, the land became very dark and in this pathless place it was not easy for Stephen to find his way.
It was when the pale flood of light returned that Stephen saw the man. He was quite a long way off, not far in from the road, and he was standing quite still as if waiting for someone or watching. There was no reason why this man shouldn’t be out on the moor on a fine spring night, except that hardly anyone but Stephen ever was. What was more remarkable was that he was not walking but standing still. The figure remained absolutely still among the little birch trees and right in the path Stephen had mapped out for himself to take. He walked on steadily. Although nothing could be seen of him but a silhouette Stephen was sure the man was looking at him, staring insolently at this approaching form across the intervening, pallid, tundra-like land. Stephen perceived that he had no torch, or that if he had one he wasn’t bothering to use it, which meant he must know the moor well, as well perhaps as Stephen himself did. He felt a mounting resentment. Although he could see no more than the man’s black outline, he sensed it was a rival he was moving towards, one who saw himself as having rights in the moor, even rights of possession over it.
Stephen had no clear idea, no idea at all really, as to what he would do when he and the man encountered each other. Now no more than a hundred yards separated them. He wasn’t afraid, though the man was evidently waiting for him, not moving at all. To defy the man, to show him, he began to run this last lap. The man went on waiting, almost as if he were teasing Stephen, and when at last he did move, it was suddenly and with a strange dancing skip. It seemed to Stephen that he was skipping among the trees.
The moon went in. At one moment the Banks of Knamber were bathed in pale light, at the next a gush of cloud had obscured the spotty yellow orb of the moon. As it vanished, absorbed in the veils of blackness, Stephen stumbled over a twisted root and fell headlong.
He wasn’t hurt. But when he picked himself up he was shivering in the darkness. Where the man was, gone or waiting for him behind the next tree, he had no idea. It was now impossible to see more than a few yards. He knew roughly where he was, or he knew in theory, and he stumbled slowly along in a westerly direction, sometimes holding onto the trunk of a birch tree. Once he thought he heard a movement among the trees to the left of him, as of footfalls rustling the grass. He stood still and listened but the sound came no more. Then, it seemed hours later, when he sensed or smelt or somehow divined that he was almost at the road, there came, as likely as not out of his own imagination, the delicate sound of an indrawn breath.
It was midnight when he came home to Tace Way. Lyn was in bed but not asleep. She came down to him and made him a hot drink and felt his forehead which was burning hot and covered in drops of sweat.
In the past Stephen had sometimes been like this after being out late on the moor, feverish next day and light-headed. Lyn left him in bed and took the car to work, promising to be back early to give him his lunch. It was to salve her conscience, she thought, and make up for her obsessional preoccupation with Nick Frazer.
Although she hadn’t seen him again, he was always in her thoughts. In her mind she talked to him, telling him about her life, day-to-day things, carrying on with him a long intimate dialogue. It was in vain that she told herself he was a stranger, a man who had probably by now forgotten her. This revolving of him in her mind led invariably to the same end, the same fear, that he would go away from Hilderbridge without her seeing him and then she would never see him again.
When her morning’s work was finished she thought, as she thought every day, that she would walk along the Mootwalk to Bale’s and at last set her mind at rest. But she didn’t do this. She drove home. She was afraid Nick might treat her with coldness and pretend he had forgotten who she was.