I make it home just as the sun sets and my heart feels as though it is trying to burst through my blouse. My hands shake on the steering wheel. I can't believe I have been so stupid, so reckless. My mind whirls through the possibilities: If my car had broken down, if I had become lost, roadworks; The slightest delay and I wouldn't have made it in time. I think about that, about what would have happened had the sun set with me still on the road, and my stomach feels heavy. I have been so careful, but it only takes one mistake, one error of judgement and it's over.
I know that's what he's waiting for.
It always surprises me just how quickly the day passes. Winter had been the worst; the days so short I could feel the night pressing in on both sides. But I was always sure to be back in plenty of time. The fact that I work largely at home, in my studio, was a blessing, but you need to leave the house sometime.
I tap the wheel nervously as my garage door takes its own sweet-fucking-time to open. The groan it makes is of a tortured beast slowly waking up, while behind me the sky is a bleeding wound. It feels like my own vision is fading with the light. Finally, the door opens wide enough for me to drive in and I press too heavily on the accelerator, the car jumping forward before I gather control. At last I am over the threshold, that's the important thing. Even with the garage door open he still can't cross the boundary into the house. Whether it's manners or compulsion, rules are rules. I let out the breath I seem to have been holding in since the airport.
Sometimes I have to remind myself it has only been six months. I think back to last year and it's like looking into a past life. The life I was leading seems unimaginable to me now in its normality, it's sanity.
And it all changed with a press of a button, that's what I can't get my head around.
I had been taking photos of the canal at night as inspiration for my painting. This wasn't new, I had been spending my evenings exploring the city's waterways for months. I enjoyed the mix of shadows, the quiet, the way the moonlight glimmered on the black surface of the water.
On the night it began I had driven out to an industrial estate on the city's edges. It offered just the right mix of bridges, canals and shadowed walkways. I had set up the camera pointing at a low concrete bridge straddling one of the major canals. The underside of the bridge was hidden in solid darkness but I was hopeful my flash would reveal some of it's secrets. One click of the button, one bright flash, and I entered another world.
I hadn't even known they were there, the couple beneath the bridge, hidden in the shadows. The flash of my camera was bright but fleeting; a lightening strike, but the revealed image burned itself into my retina so that I could see it long after the darkness had reclaimed the night: A tall pale man with white hair holding a woman in his arms, his face buried into her neck.
When my night vision returned I could make them out as dim shapes in the darkness. I saw the pale face of the man as he regarded me for a long moment, over the still water of the canal, before returning his attention, to the woman in his arms.
I was embarrassed, but nothing more, believing i had simply disturbed an amorous couple. I imagined I had startled them more than they had me. I thought nothing of it until I got home and set to work in my darkroom. It's probably my favourite part of using photography: the gentle lapping of liquid as the image slowly emerges on a blank white paper. It's like magic.
It took me a moment to even notice anything was wrong with the image that formed before me: it showed the canal, looking fathomless and flecked with starlight, the grey solidity of the bridge, and the woman, standing limply with her head thrown back. The camera had caught her face as a pale blur, a smear of shadow showing her parted lips. But, although I clearly remembered her in the arms of another man, she stood alone, leaning backwards against the stone wall. He was nowhere to be seen.
I think I knew then, although I would never have admitted it. There are moments now when I still struggle. I tried to dismiss my memory of him as a trick of the light. I am blessed, or would that be cursed, with an active imagination and I am forever seeing faces in clouds and figures in water. I did try and convince myself that I had simply imagined him. Surely no-one could have been as pale as he appeared, so inhuman.
But, like I said, I think I already knew on some level, even before I saw him again the next evening, standing across the road from my house, sheltered beneath the large oak tree. It was dark and he stood there in the shadows, but it was him. I watched him for a full hour, my fingers hovering over the number 9 on my phone screen. I still wonder why it was I never made the call.
He looked as though he had stepped out of the last century. He wore the type of knee-length frock coat you often see in Jane Austen adaptions, dark over a white frilled shirt, open at the throat. But it was his face that was striking. The first time I saw him clearly, I took him for an albino, his skin was the colour of bone and his white hair fell down the length of his back like milk. There was no colour at all in his face except his eyes which were a pale blue, not the bloodshot look I expect from albinism. He was tall and thin and otherworldly. I think even then I had already grasped what he was, although he would shortly remove any doubt.
I close the doors before I get out of the car. This is always the worst part, the moment where I think he will show himself. But there is still light in the sky and, as the descending garage door blocks out the outside world, I finally allow myself to breath.
It occurs to me that he may have moved on. I had, after all, been gone nearly a month. Long enough, surely, for him to have turned his attention elsewhere. But I don't believe it. He has the scent. My scent. Part of me thinks he probably knew the moment my plane touched down. I know relatively little about him, but I suspect time is different for his kind. Unimportant. And I don't think he ever forgets. It's also possible that he is not used to being denied, that this only fuels his hunger, makes him ravenous.
I had seen him a number of times over the next few weeks, always at night. Sometimes he would watch from a distance; I once saw him standing on the roof of an office building in the town centre, silhouetted against the moonlit sky; very dramatic, if not something of a cliché. But there were times he came much nearer. I think he wanted to catch me alone, something I was always careful to avoid.
