The Haunted Storm

by Philip Pullman

  With a shock he realised that the vessel was heading straight for the Spur. In fact, no sooner had he realised it than it struck, and he caught the breath in his throat with dismay. It had lifted high on a wave – a little less than a hundred yards out now – and come down, with a crash, on the rock. It hung there, at an angle, and then a second wave, even higher, lifted it and forced it further on to the flat top of the Spur – and there it stayed. The light still glowed in the wheelhouse; he could see no movement on board.

  Nothing happened for a minute. Puzzled, he sat down on the shingle, drawing his knees up and clutching his coat around him, watching the boat closely. It did not budge; it was too deeply wedged on the rock. He thought he saw someone in the wheelhouse, but he was not sure. Waves broke against the far side of it, and the spray burst into the air and streamed over the deck and down the side. The tide was fully in; the boat couldn’t possibly be lifted off. When the waves receded it would be left stranded on the rock.

  The light of day had mostly gone, and the storm was dying away, but it was raining harder than ever and the clouds were still thick and black. The light was gone from the sky, but by some freak chance of the air, things – all things – appeared to glow with their own luminosity. The black sky hung over everything, and everything was visible in immense detail, from the fingers of spray down the side of the boat to the tiniest pebbles at his side. He could even read the name of the boat: Jeannette. All the stones, every single one in the steep beach below him, and each tiny ripple on the tossing black-green sea, were outlined with a weird clarity in black and silver and deep green.

  He breathed in deeply, and turned his face up to the pouring sky, partly in prayer and partly in a deep excitement that things were happening. At the very same instant, when he had his eyes closed, he knew with absolute certainty that someone had appeared from nowhere and sat down beside him.

  He brought his head down nervously, and looked to his left – and yes, there was a figure there, seated just a yard to his left. He wasn’t sure, in that first few seconds, if the figure was male or female. The light, strange as it was, was clear enough, but there was a subtle ambiguity about the way he or she was sitting – or something, perhaps, in the face – at any rate, his first thought was, “Where the devil has she appeared from?”

  Now it was clearly a girl; how could he have wondered?

  “How long’s she been following me?” he thought.

  She was extraordinarily beautiful. The slight boyishness which had made him unsure of her sex was at a second glance one of her best features; it made her slim, and it made her look tough and challenging. Her hair was dark – he couldn’t be sure of the colour – and about as long as his own, and thick and wavy. The wind off the sea blew it round and forward on both sides of her face, which was isolated in darkness. Her eyes were dark and heavy-lidded. Her nose was firm and very slightly Roman, with proud and finely arched nostrils. Her cheekbones were high and wide and her cheeks pale, the skin drawn tightly over them. Her jaws were clenched and her chin seemed to be trembling. Her mouth was wide; the upper lip was full, and curved proudly like a lion’s. There was little or nothing of ordinary femininity in her face – no submissiveness or passivity, no gentle weakness, but a harshness and strength that roused Matthew to a pitch of excitement and which he seemed in an obscure unconscious way to recognise and greet like an old friend. Her expression in one way was disconcertingly familiar; and in another, it overawed him; it was open, and rapt, and trembling, as if she were staring out over abysses of revelation, and there was such passionate conviction in the way in which she looked not at, so much as through and around Matthew that the very solidity of the earth beneath him seemed suddenly false and perilous.

  With difficulty he took his eyes away from her face and looked downwards at her body. She was wearing a raincoat, buttoned at the neck, and sandals, and nothing else that Matthew could see. Her legs were bare, and the sight of her naked skin, slightly goose-pimpled with cold and streaming with rain, made his flesh burn with a strange blend of lust and compassion.

  Their eyes came together again and held each other for about half a minute, without a word passing between them. In that time a subtle weighing-up seemed to take place on both sides – Matthew with a dozen questions racing through his mind, and she, to judge from the look on her face, under a pressure at least as great as the one that burdened him.

  From the very beginning, too, there was a wild and tender eroticism in the air between them – an urge towards the flesh in the meeting of their eyes and also, because of the suddenness of the meeting and because of the intensity with which they both felt it, in the cold air itself, and the rain, and the hard pebbles beneath them.

  She shifted her weight on the shingle as if she were uncomfortable, and then, her eyes fixed on his with an expression half-mocking and half-pleading, she opened her legs a little and drew her knees up.

  This gesture jarred on Matthew; it seemed gross… but then, he realised several things at once, as she spoke.

  “You can touch me if you like,” she said.

  Their minds seemed to come into sudden contact. Firstly, this was an invitation, as he saw, which was meant to blunt the edge of his lust by its coarseness – as it had, for a second. He knew that it was deliberate, and knew that she knew that he knew; and knew, deeper than this, that there was a powerful magnetism between the two of them, deeper than any words on the surface, and that the invitation was really an admission of it – and really an invitation.

  His eyes on hers and his heart racing, he put out his hand towards her – and then she spoke again.

  “You can touch me with one hand only and you mustn’t come any closer than this. And you can put your hand anywhere you like and do what you like with it, but when I go, you mustn’t follow me.”

  He nodded, agreeing, and slowly reached out and put his hand on the bottom of her left shin. He was sitting tensely, with his knees drawn up like hers, a small stone tightly gripped and forgotten in his right hand.

  Their eyes hadn’t left each other for minutes. A multitude of expressions crossed hers; there was no mask between her and the world – or between her and Matthew – for he saw, instantly, all that possessed her. He sat tight, just looking at her, and said nothing. The suspicion gradually left her eyes.

  She put both hands to the side of her head as if she was trying to shut out the infinite noise of the storm and the clatter of the shingle, and shut her eyes and pushed the hair back from her face. Remote and frail and weary she looked in that gesture, and Matthew’s heart melted altogether.

  She looked suddenly at him, seemed to say “Shall I start?” and seemed to read agreement, for she settled herself more comfortably on the shingle, and started to speak.

  “You look just like him,” she said abruptly, and then paused a second; “my lover, I mean. Your eyes are the same as his but his are stronger. I don’t care if you don’t want to hear. I want to talk. Yes, just then when you put your hand on my leg, your expression was the same for a second, but it’s not now. I think I can feel what’s going on in your mind. But I’m going to tell you about my lover.”

  She spoke quietly, but her voice was so clear – and there was such urgency in it – that Matthew heard her quite distinctly over the storm. She sat leaning forward slightly, with both hands on the shingle at her sides, playing with it distractedly. He found himself wondering dazedly at the beauty, firstly of her face and figure, and secondly of her voice; of all strange things, this limpid trembling beauty of hers was the most unreal.

  “I was on my own on the moor – because behind the house and the church the moor comes right down, and you can leave our garden and walk straight on to it – I was on my own because it was a fine day and I was doing nothing, so I went out on to the moor to get away from things, and I was quite happy at last. Then – well, there he was. I don’t know where he appeared from. He might have come out of a cloud. I thought he was a workman, because he was dressed in rou
gh clothes and he seemed coarse, not coarse spirited but coarse-bodied, as if he just used his body and never enjoyed it. Without one word said we were lying down together and we made love, or rather – I did nothing at all and he made love to my body while I, the central part of me, watched and watched and kept watching to see that – to see that he didn’t hurt himself, or demean himself in any way – I would have protected him, because already I was in love with him.

  “Probably that means very little to you. Probably you’ve never known what it is to set eyes on someone and fall immediately in love so deep that you’d give them anything straight away, without even speaking. You’d let them do anything to you. You’d prostitute yourself and care only that they didn’t hurt themselves or shame themselves in what they did. What happens to you – hurt or shame – doesn’t matter a bit anymore; and you’re no more important than a speck of dust. Suddenly you’re outside yourself and scattered, and the most important thing there is, is this stranger.”

  He had been concentrating on her words, puzzled beyond measure by what she was saying and why she was saying it, and her leg lay forgotten under his hand. Now he thought of it again and felt it wet and warm where his hand had been; but an inch away, the flesh was cold. He stroked her shin, and the softness of her calf where his fingers brushed it made his body run like water inside with lust for her. She saw it in his eyes, and in the middle of her words she smiled at him. He tried to smile back, but too many emotions got into the smile and spread it out in a foolish grin, and he looked away with embarrassment. On the underside of her right knee, where his hand rested, he could feel a small pulse throbbing like a tiny bird.

  Now they were both insulated from the storm. Even the rain that fell on their bare heads did not really touch them; and in the fastness of the mental ark that had formed around them, they faced each other intently. Matthew sensed that she was about to speak again. Down on the Spur, the boat lay stranded; but he had forgotten it.

  “So that was what I did. Or what I set out to do in the first few seconds. But something else happened and I found it all very different – all of it from the uttermost tiny thoughts in my head to the distant things like the horizon or a lark high above me. It was that suddenly I was thrown – no, I don’t mean quite that – I suddenly found it to be a whirlpool, you know, but it was in nothingness and it produced matter. Not nothingness – the spirit, rather. But it threw out matter and all matter was somehow generated in this whirlpool that I was in. I don’t know if you understand what I’m getting at. But I don’t suppose it matters. Only about three things matter at all – matter – that’s the word. Do you see? And now there’s a sort of mixed-up area between us, that includes all the beach and storm and sky and all that you bring to it – to me – and all of what I’m saying – it’s all mixed up now – I did so want it to be clear – oh God; it’ll come clear in a minute.”

  An extraordinary ambivalence, like a fiery two-edged sword, came from this girl and pierced Matthew to the heart. All questions such as “who was she? where did she come from?” were torn away on the wind and lost in the dark sky, and all that was left was the fact of her. And this fact affected Matthew in two ways, making him a total slave to her – in much the same way as she had described her own relation to her lover – and also a wise and kindly father confessor, anxious to hear, comfort, and forgive. Yet as far as she was concerned, he might have been a brother – or a guardian angel – because she would at times look at him to see, not if he was listening, but if he was agreeing, as if she were recounting the history of something common to them both. And such a passionate sensual-mystical mood now lay about them, and so charged was the air, that it seemed only proper to move his hand from her shin and caress the inside of her left thigh.

  “Love inside my body and brain; that’s what it was – I’m just rambling now. No, I’ll try harder. He was middle height with blond hair. His hands were rough and dirty. He was quite stocky – very strong – and his eyes were absolutely still – powerful – iron! Do you know what they contained? – And for the matter of that –” she leaned forward and put her face close to his; Matthew felt his jaw trembling – “what yours contain? Morality!” She leaned back again, and stretched her right leg out in front of her. Matthew’s hand was moving up and down the inside of her thigh. “It was like an extra kind of vision that he had that showed him good and evil. He never said a word about it but I could see in his eyes the split-second he saw evil or good in the world. As for me… I just melted, all the rigid ness of me, twenty-two years of it; I’d never had a lover before and I’d grown hard. No! No-one had made love to me! I hated it! I hated it because it seemed to be so gross and earth-like and I was completely, oh, utterly spirit! What’s spirit? It’s everything that isn’t matter. It’s dreams and ideas and feelings – ghosts – devils – fear and love, too, though I didn’t know anything about love. Anyway, I was spirit and I hated matter and then, meeting him, I suddenly changed and started to yearn for matter, still being spirit. Because now I was bereft of something. For a minute I’d been at the centre of the matter-creating whirlpool, and then I was thrown out of it. I wanted to cuddle matter, like a baby. I wanted to feed it at my breast. I was pregnant with it, I, the transparent one, the tenuous vaporous empty one, the one the wind blew through and the stars shone through! I was bearing matter in my womb and then it was taken from me. I was robbed of my baby the world… All this is very roundabout… It’s not feminine, is it. All this image-making, I mean; I ought to be giving facts and dates. But I know them all right. Do you think I haven’t remembered the date I first met him? March the twenty-fourth! And every single date since then, like a schoolgirl. Oh, yes, but the central thing is this loss…”

  Her voice became wistful, and her eyes softened; she looked down at the shingle. After the initial shock of finding her there and the confusion of emotions afterwards, Matthew found one feeling now predominating, and that was nothing more or less than total identification with her. He knew with his body and mind exactly what she meant when she talked about matter; the same obsession troubled him. He too felt hollow, transparent and lost in what she called the spirit, and had the same doubleness of feeling towards matter – that it was hateful, and that it was infinitely desirable and to be cherished. Slowly the odd suspicion grew that this passionate and spirit-dominated girl was his own shadow, his doppelganger, come to warn him of death. And again came the crazy drift of suspicion as to her sex. Was it a girl? Yet the infinite softness of her thigh against his palm, and the subtle warmth of her belly, were intensely female. He strained to listen; she was talking again.

  “It was just before Easter; and now I haven’t seen him for six weeks. He left. But the yearning for matter and the loss of it – that’s been going on for months. Only the first time, I was really there, and perhaps once or twice at other times, because he had a special touch that could bring me to it – oh, to what I mean by matter – not just a climax but a general sort of penetrating, uniting, completely, I felt complete – oh, that’s nonsense; no, I didn’t feel complete but I felt alive at least and with matter, the solid earth, flesh, skin, bone, blood, grass, wood, stone, matter! It was friendly and not alien! Then I drifted – oh, what’s going on down there?” she interjected suddenly. Matthew was staring at the boat down on the Spur; he was not sure, but somebody seemed to be moving on the deck. The waves continued to crash against the far side and break streaming over the top. The girl twisted her head round momentarily; “what’s going on?” she said. “Is it important?” Matthew shook his head. He squeezed the flesh of her left thigh with his palm, and pressed the back of his fingers into the softness of the other. He was poised, balancing carefully, between three forces: her flesh; her words: and the boat. By pursuing any of these too far he would lose all of them. He had somehow to maintain this balance and let all three carry him to – well, to whatever pitch he was destined to reach. The simple motion of his fingers pressing in and out of the flesh of her thigh made him tremb
le with lust. He leant forward to listen carefully and concentrate on what she was saying.

  “I saw something – I forget what it was – a bottle or something like that – shake and shake, just because he wanted it to. He – it was in his room, that’s right, he had a room in the town and I stayed a few times with him and slept with him. It was empty, I mean he had no luggage or belongings or anything except a few books. They were mostly about economics. He knew all about politics. He belonged to a party. I don’t know which one; I don’t think it was the Communist party but I don’t know… politics, oh it’s so earthly too – not earthly in the sort of precious, you know aesthetic sense – no! – but there’s a harshness and solidity about it, and earthiness; yes, really it’s the highest phase of matter, I suppose, where matter’s densest.”

  Matthew, balancing, took his eyes off her and looked down the beach again. It was not easy; in motion, and especially when she was searching for the right phrase to describe what she meant, her face was so animated, and with such a passionate withdrawn mystery struggling in it – the very same, identically the same mystery, he was convinced, which ravished him – that he was in love, and so deep that he could not move or look away without an effort. But when he did, he saw movement on the beach. A hundred yards or so to his right, lit by the omnipresent lightness of things themselves under the gloom of the streaming sky, he could make out six or seven men struggling along against the wind towards the Spur. They did not seem to be on the same beach; hardly on the same planet. There was no question of acknowledging their presence, far less of trying to conceal what he was doing. He watched them come, and continued to caress her, moving his hand gradually closer and closer to the top of her thighs, and to listen intently to what she was saying.