The Wasp Factory Page 0,71

ridge of low hills started, topped with whin and stunted trees shaped by the wind. I trained the binoculars on them, waving flies away, my head starting to ache just a little and my tongue dry despite the warm water I had just drunk. When I lowered the glasses and put the Polaroids back down I heard it.

Something howled. Some animal - my God, I hoped it wasn’t a human making that noise - screamed in torment. It was a rising, anguished wail, the note produced only by an animal in extremis, the noise you hope no living thing ever has to make.

I sat with the sweat dripping off me, parched and aching with the baking heat; but I shivered. I shook with a wave of cold like a dog shaking itself dry, from one end to the other. The hair on the back of my neck unstuck itself from the sweat, stood. I got up quickly, hands scrabbling on the warm wood of the house wall, binoculars bumping on my chest. The scream came from the ridge. I pushed the Polaroids back up, used the glasses again, bashing them on the bones above my eyes as I fought with the focusing-wheel. My hands shook.

A black shape shot out of the whins, trailing smoke. It raced down the slope over the yellow-spangled grass, under a fence. My hands bounced the view around as I tried to pan the binoculars to follow it. The keen wail sounded over the air, thin and terrible. I lost the thing behind some bushes, then saw it again, burning as it ran and jumped over grass and reed, raising spray. My mouth dried completely; I couldn’t swallow, I was choking, but I tracked the animal as it skidded and turned, yelping high, bounding into the air, falling, seeming to leap on the spot. Then it disappeared, a few hundred metres from me and about as much down from the ridge of the hill.

I swept the glasses quickly back up to look at the top of the ridge again, scanned along it, back, down, back up, along again, stopped to stare intently at a bush, shook my head, scanned the length again. Some irrelevant part of my brain thought about how in films, when people look through binoculars and you see what they are supposed to be seeing, it’s always a sort of figure-of-eight on its side that you see, but whenever I look through them I see more or less a perfect circle. I brought the glasses down, looked about quickly, saw nobody, then I sprinted out of the shadow of the house, leaped the small wire fence that marked the garden, and ran towards the ridge.

On the ridge I stood for a moment, head down to my knees, gasping for breath, letting the perspiration drip off my hair and on to the bright grass at my feet. My T-shirt stuck to me. I put my hands on my knees and lifted my head, straining my eyes to look along the line of whin and trees on the ridge’s top. I looked down the far side and over the fields beyond to the next line of whin, which marked the cutting the railway line ran through. I jogged along the ridge, head sweeping to and fro, until I found a little patch of burning grass. I stamped it out, looked for tracks and found them. I ran faster, despite my protesting throat and lungs, found some more burning grass and a whin bush just catching. I beat them out, went on.

Down in a small hollow on the land side of the ridge some trees had grown almost normally, only their tops, sticking out over the lee of the line of small hills, leaned out from the sea, twisted by the wind. I ran into the grassy hollow, into the moving pattern of shade provided by the slowly swaying leaves and branches. There was a circle of stones around a blackened centre. I looked around, saw a piece of flattened grass. I stopped, calmed myself, looked around again, at the trees and the grass and the ferns, but could see nothing else. I went to the stones, felt them and the ashes in their circle. They were hot, too hot to keep my hands on them, though they were in shade. I could smell petrol.

I climbed out of the hollow and up a tree, steadied myself and slowly inspected the whole area, using my binoculars when