The Red Collection (41 page)

‘Shall we walk then?’

They headed for the beach by silent mutual consent. Again, no telepathy. Lois just seemed to know that was the right place to head for.

The full moon was high as they walked, and she found herself stealing glances, again and again, at her companion, and tightening her fingers around his.

He was so real. And that perplexed her utterly.

How could she love a man who didn’t really exist? A man she’d known for barely more than a day? A man, but one who was nothing more than a magical construct, made up from fragments and images in her mind, an amalgam of many other men?

And yet she did. Mad as it seemed. She simply did.

The sand was firm beneath their feet and, in the brightness from the moon, they could see it stretching away ahead, along the shore, unnaturally white and scattered with driftwood and skeins of dark seaweed.

‘What’s that? Over there?’

By the edge of the lapping waves lay a small dark bundle. Clothing, what looked like a pair of boots and the glint of glass.

With Robin padding behind her, Lois ran to the bundle. She recognised her neighbour’s warm coat, his beanie hat with a watch laid neatly on top of it, and an empty bottle that had once contained Glenfiddich whisky beside them.

‘Where is he?’ She scanned the water, and then turned to Robin. ‘Surely he’s not gone swimming at this time of night? In this cold and full of booze? The water must be freezing.’

Her companion was peering out into the bay, his eyes narrowed. ‘He’s out there.’ He pointed to the waves. ‘He’s swimming now, but I don’t think he will be for long.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I believe he’s trying to end his life. I sensed it in him before, but I thought that it was just a fleeting notion, not a real intention.’

Oh, God, she’d sensed the neighbour was unhappy, but not this bad.

‘But we’ve got to try and help him! He’s been drinking … He’ll feel different when he’s sober.’

She surged forwards, kicking off her shoes as she went, and flinging off her coat, but the water knocked the breath out of her before she reached waist depth it was so cold, so bitterly cold.

‘Fucking hell!’ she gasped, staggering and almost falling into the waves.

But, before she capsized, strong arms grasped her, and lifted her up on to her feet.

‘Go back into the shallows! I’ll get him,’ Robin commanded her. He’d already flung off his long coat and his boots. His face was hard and determined in the moonlight. ‘Go back to safety now.’

‘But Robin, I can help … Help drag him in.’

The bitter irony of the moment suddenly crashed in on her with more power than the biggest of the waves.

It was almost midnight. These were their last moments before eleven months apart, and yet she knew the man out in the bay stood his best chance of being saved if she let her lover plunge into the water after him.

‘Go back, my love, I’ll get him.’

For one brief second he crushed his lips against hers, and then he put her from him and threw himself forwards into the dark and bitter water.

9

Robin had never swum in human form before, but like all natural skills it came to him effortlessly and he struck out hard in the direction of where they’d last seen Lois’s neighbour, the man known as Edgar.

But was he too late?

Edgar had already slipped beneath the waves and was descending into the depths, his lungs waterlogged and his hold on life ebbing. Plunging down after him, Robin grabbed for his shoulders.

The reaction was predictably violent. Just as a normal man would have struggled for survival with every last fibre of his being, Edgar seemed bent on struggling to achieve his death and he thrashed and struggled, kicked out and punched with what remained of his strength, and even Robin found it difficult to hold on to him.

Let me help you! Please don’t do this! It’s not the way!

He spoke directly into the man’s mind. It was the only way. It was too late now to worry about the niceties of explaining who he was … and what.

A life was at stake. A precious life. A
human
life – something he would have cherished, at all costs, if he’d had it himself.

And, in this strange, unnatural hinterland between life and death, Edgar seemed to accept the fact of unspoken communication.

Leave me alone! Let me go! She’s here … I want to be with her …

His thoughts were weak, yet Robin understood. He didn’t know what to do, and his grip on the rapidly ebbing Edgar faltered.

The dying man wriggled feebly and slid away.

Robin grabbed for him again.

No! Please! Let me be with her!

Such desperation. Such love.

Robin felt the keen pain of it. He felt it himself. Wouldn’t he undertake the most drastic and most extreme act in order to be with Lois? And it could well be true. Edgar’s lover might be here in spirit, somewhere close.

Disassociating momentarily, Robin sent out his consciousness.

Yes, indeed, he sensed a hovering presence, watching, waiting.

The weight of human sadness, passion and love descended on him. This was how they lived, and it was terrifying, yet still it seemed worth all the tumult if it meant a life with the one you adored. A woman like Lois.

Robin hesitated.

Life was sacred. He couldn’t just let Edgar die.

He attempted to reach for the fading man, and found he couldn’t.

No!

Midnight, the perennial witching hour, had just this moment passed.

It was June, and he could no longer assume the form of a human man.

But could he still persuade Edgar to live? He reached out again, this time in intangible form, searching for Edgar’s mind.

Too late. He was gone. Robin felt a rising, rushing surge in the ether as the human’s spirit swept up, flying to meet the one who waited, and, at the same time, his mortal shell began to descend.

Robin watched the body dropping in the water.

Until moments ago, it had been hale, hearty, strong and alive. A perfect vessel.

Could he? Dare he? Would it work? His people spoke of such things, passed down tales, stories … but had such a phenomenon ever really been achieved?

The vision of Lois seemed to shimmer before him, and he sensed her back there on the beach, distraught with worry and fear, readying herself to wade into the water again.

He had to try it. He had to try. Even at the risk of his own extinction in the process.

‘Robin! Robin! Are you all right?’

Lois had never shouted louder in her life, and it was making her throat sore and her lungs hurt, bellowing out into the bay again and again. But she couldn’t see anything. There was no sign of her lover or her neighbour at all now, just the waves and the glitter of moonlight glancing on their crests. She waded out into the water, thrashing and struggling, then realised it was pointless. Not the strongest of swimmers,
she’d
never had any lifesaving training, and she wasn’t even sure what direction to go in.

‘Oh, Robin! Please!’ she howled, staggering backwards and falling in a heap on the sand beside her neighbour’s abandoned clothes.

What about rescue? Was there a lifeboat she could summon or something? Struggling into a sitting position, she felt in her pocket for her mobile, and discovered she’d left it in the cabin.

‘Fuck!’

What about her neighbour? Did he have one? Plunging into the pile of clothing, she rummaged in all his pockets, but found nothing.

‘No! No!’

Tears streaming down her face, she sprang to her feet again, staring out into the empty bay and the waves.

The cabin. There was a landline there. She could phone from there.

But, just as she was about to set out, something caught her eye. Or, more correctly, the
lack
of something.

Where was Robin’s coat? His boots? They’d been flung out on the sand, next to her neighbour’s stuff … and now they were gone.

‘Oh noooo!’ she keened again. ‘Robin! Robin!’

He was gone. Turned back, along with his clothes, into whatever he’d been before.

What if it’d happened under water? What if he’d drowned too?

Could
he drown? Maybe he was still around here somewhere?

‘Robin! Robin! Robin!’ she yelled, shouting now to the intangible presence, not the man.

As she stared out over the surface of the waves, shielding her eyes against the almost unnatural brilliance of the moonlight, she suddenly saw a shape breach the surface of the water.

A head!

Someone was coming. Wading towards her.

‘Robin!’ she screamed, plunging back into the cold sea, floundering towards the human figure that was labouring in her direction, staggering to his feet when he hit the shallows, then falling into the surf again.

‘Robin,’ she sobbed in a small broken voice when she reached the naked retching figure, who knelt on all fours, coughing up seawater and gasping for breath.

Not Robin
, she thought, her heart bereft as she slid her arms around her neighbour’s bare shoulders and helped him half crawl and half stagger towards the safety of dry land.

Robin, where are you?

Lois sat in the armchair by the stove, cradling a cup of tea in her hands as she tried to warm up. It had a hefty slug of brandy in it, in an attempt to fire her up from within, but, so far, it wasn’t making much in the way of an inroad into her inner chilliness.

It was over an hour since she’d half dragged and half carried her neighbour into her cabin and helped him on to the bed then rubbed him dry with towels and spare blankets. He’d seemed virtually comatose on his feet, and unable to speak, and had lapsed into what could be unconsciousness or maybe just sleep almost as soon as he was horizontal.

When she’d decided it was safe to a leave him for a moment, Lois had run back down to the sand, calling for Robin – in vain, she knew – and scouring the moonlit ocean
for
any sign of him. She’d even peered up into the sky, hoping to see him in the gull-like form he’d assumed before.

But there was nothing. No trace of him either physically … or intangibly.

With a heavy heart, she’d scooped up her neighbour’s clothing, and, on returning to the cabin, had discovered from a postcard in his jacket pocket that he was called Edgar.

She stared at Edgar now, sleeping the sleep of a baby, in her bed.

I wish you were Robin!

Immediately, she felt guilty. She wished that
both
of them had come back out of the water, improbable or impossible as that might have been. She padded over to the side of the bed and sat down on the hard chair bedside it, staring down at the slumbering man, something keen twisting painfully inside her as she observed certain aspects of his appearance that reminded her of her supernatural lover.

‘Well, he did say he took some “bits” from you,’ she muttered, recognising a certain line to the jaw, and perhaps the shape of an eyebrow, the tilt of a cheekbone.

Edgar was older than her beautiful Robin, though, and stockier, and his drying hair was frosted with grey rather than highlights of gold. Under other circumstances, she might have found him attractive, especially now the colour was coming back to his cheeks and he was starting to look healthy and normal again. But it was all she could do, at the moment, to battle with the resentment she felt against him, and her own guilt at thinking ill of him.

God, the man had been unhappy enough to want to take his own life, and here she was near to hating him because he’d snatched away her last few minutes with Robin. The
fact
that it’d been the final precious fragment of time they’d share for eleven months was bad enough … but the possibility that something had gone wrong, and that was it for good, for all time, forever, she couldn’t bear to think about.

Even thinking about it made her groan with pain and, as tears filled her eyes, she just gave in and slumped slowly forwards, across the sleeping man, weeping.

The sobs wrenched at her. It felt as if someone was pulling at her soul and mangling it up. The idea of never seeing, or even sensing, Robin again was agonising. She clutched at the inert body and arms of Edgar for blind consolation.

Moments passed, or maybe hours, but suddenly, as her tears were beginning to subside out of pure weariness, the man beneath her moved, and sighed, and she felt the very lightest touch of fingers on her head, slowly stroking.

‘Oh, you’re awake,’ she said awkwardly, straightening up, unable to look at the rousing Edgar, not quite knowing how to greet him. ‘Are you all right?’ She fussed with a blanket, tweaking it a bit further up his chest. ‘Er, would you like a hot drink or something?’

‘Lois?’

The voice was soft and strained, as if speaking was still an almost insurmountable effort, but the single word seemed to twinkle like a silvery bell, ringing beautifully through her consciousness. There was deep exhaustion there, but also – familiarity?

Slowly, fearfully, she turned and looked down into Edgar’s waking face …

And saw a miracle.

Yes, it was the face of her taciturn fellow holidaymaker, who’d barely spoken to her … and yet it wasn’t him. A subtle
metamorphosis
seemed to be under way, perceptible perhaps only to someone who knew what to look for, but the features of Edgar were beginning to change into those of her beloved Robin.

The exhausted eyes were still a little dull and weary, but, already, they were no longer the nondescript hazel they had been.

The left one was blue, and the right one was brown.

‘Robin?’

Joy, confusion, fear, relief, a jumble of belief and disbelief suddenly rushed through her like a tidal wave.

She flung herself forwards to kiss his strangely mutable physiognomy and threw her arms around him. His body was warm, deliciously warm, and, when his arms came around her, the sensation was so sweetly that of one coming home after a long and dangerous journey that she burst into more tears, sobs of wrenching relief, and could not speak.

They hugged for quite a while, and as Robin – she supposed she must call him that now, despite the lingering resemblance to Edgar – gained strength, he sat up and drew her on to the bed beside him.