Behind the building, the brambles thinned out. The torch’s beam was hazy, making the world appear full of pale mist, but it revealed a clearing of sorts before the woods began: a wall of trees and shadows that defeated the light. And just before they started, in the corner of the clearing, there was a well.
The silence continued to ring.
Then broke softly as Hannah began walking slowly through the long grass. Leaving the missing skull of the farmhouse behind. Moving closer towards the edge of the forest.
The well was at least as old as the building, and it was almost lost now: a cylinder of brick wrapped in the grass. The remains of three wooden struts poked up from the undergrowth around its circumference, the wood broken off at knee height. The lip of the well itself had crumbled away in places and, if there had ever been a cover, it had eroded long ago. The whole thing was only a metre across.
Hannah leaned carefully on the edge, pointed the torch in and peered down its mossy throat. Far below, a semicircle of water reflected the torchlight back at her: a shimmering moon, as small and distant as the one in the sky above. She moved the beam a little and found a thatch of something. She couldn’t tell what. It was like the flotsam that collected on the sea by the wharf: a dirty froth of splinters.
She knocked a stone loose. It rattled and ticked off the inside of the well, then hit the water with a sound that made her think of tumbling coins. The moon down there shimmered and swam, settling gradually.
Okay
.
Now what?
She leaned back. It might be possible to do something with the bucket, she thought – attach a rope to the handle and lower it down, see what, if anything, she could scoop out. That didn’t seem like the most efficient method of accomplishing anything, but what else was there? Tie the rope round her waist and belay down?
Whoever’s daughter you are, you’re not doing that
.
She wasn’t really considering it as a viable option, but still, she turned the torch in the direction of the wood anyway, wondering if there was anything to secure the rope to. The beam passed across the man standing beside her.
There was a sudden flash of light. Hannah stumbled backwards in shock, the beam zagging down over the man’s legs but then the back of her calf got tangled in the grass, and she felt herself falling. It happened almost in slow motion; she couldn’t stop it.
Fuck
. She landed on her elbow. The grass cushioned her from any real injury, but the impact jolted her heart.
Baton baton baton baton
.
She fumbled at the clasp on her belt, at the same time angling the torch back towards the wood, sweeping the beam from tree to tree. Nothing.
Gone.
Immediately, she stopped moving. Listened. In-between the quick, heavy thuds of her heartbeats, she heard it: a distant cracking and trampling sound. Someone moving quickly away through the forest.
Well. Don’t just fucking lie there, DS Price
.
She heaved herself forward, up onto her feet. The baton extended with a click. And then she went straight between the trees after him, slashing the torch sideways, back and forth, trying to catch a glimpse. She caught flashes of the trees, snatches of undergrowth. Shadows that hung like bats, unfolding their wings as the light moved away.
A moment later, she stopped and listened.
This time, there was no sound at all.
Okay
.
Let’s not be stupid
.
She took a quick glance around, judging the terrain as best she could, then thumbed the button on the torch. Everything went dark – almost pitch-black – but Hannah moved quietly to one side. Just a short distance from where she’d been, but enough so that if he’d been watching the light he wouldn’t know where she was now. Then she crouched right down, opened her mouth slightly, and listened again.
Again, nothing.
Not human noises, anyway. But beyond the galloping thud of her heart, she became aware of the sound of the forest. The little cricks and buzzes; the whisper of the breeze in the branches high above.
But he
was
here somewhere. He had to be.
So Hannah remained crouching, as still as her thigh muscles would allow, and tried to remember exactly what she’d seen. There hadn’t been time to take in much: she’d seen black jeans and boots, a dark jacket. It wasn’t a rough-sleeper. No, it was someone who was out here for a particular reason. Maybe even the same reason as her. He’d caught the torchlight and the sound of her trampling down the side of the farmhouse, and just taken a step back between the trees. To watch her. Or else …
Or maybe the activity drew him
out
from the woods
.
Hannah shivered at the idea and took a better grip on the baton. The woman who’d gone to the viaduct with Dawson was still missing. So was she sure the person she’d just seen was a man? Hannah thought so. She scanned the night-black woodland for any sign of movement and couldn’t see a thing. Whoever it was, they had to have a torch, didn’t they? You couldn’t move in this mess without one. But there was no light. And the forest remained quiet, sounding only of itself.
She considered her options. Even with the baton and the
torch, she didn’t fancy going much further forward in the dark. The alternative was to wait it out: see which of them had the most patience. Or she could get the hell out of here instead, but she wasn’t going to do that.
So you go forward
.
All right, then. She stood up, intending to do just that, when red lights flickered between the trees a short distance ahead of her. And then she heard the noise. A car engine.
A crackling of pebbles.
Shit
. She flicked the torch on and moved quickly through the undergrowth, not frightened any more. Determined now. But it was no good. She stepped out onto a wide dirt trail cutting through the forest. Dark and empty in both directions now, although the smell of petrol still hung in the air.
The flash
, she thought.
When she’d first seen him, there had been a flash of light. Had that come from a torch he was holding? Her imagination?
Or had it been something else?
Hannah stood there for a few moments, her heart thudding, as an awful possibility occurred to her.
Had that flash come from a camera?
For the first time ever, Cartwright was woken up by the pain.
He had been dreaming about a tree. It was old and gnarled, growing twisted out of the ground like a thick length of silver rope. His father had planted it, or his grandfather, or possibly even his grandfather’s grandfather. The tree was thick and strong at the base, so that you could imagine its roots spreading away metres underground, tonguing through the soil and hooking the tree solidly into the earth. Further up, though, it dwindled, the trunk thinning as it rose. The branches stretched out without buds. Leaves flickered here and there, but the bunches were tiny and weak. At the top, where the main trunk resembled a broken bone, a few hopeless branches reached higher, tapering to vicious points.
In the dream, Cartwright looked at the tree and thought it resembled a malformed skeleton, stretching up to the gods for acknowledgement that had never arrived. It stood motionless, backdropped by a blue sky filled with swift, stop-motion white clouds.
He was woken, abruptly, by the fresh life the tree lacked.
The main tumour was pulsing against his ribs, so hard it threatened to slip between them and sprout suddenly, pushed out through his side like a fanned deck of cards.
This pain was too much to ignore. He sat up, and clutched at his chest and then his abdomen. Clawing like he couldn’t find
the source. But at least he managed not to cry out, not to disturb the room full of silently slumbering bodies. As he fought for his breath, he breathed in the stink of disease. It filled the room. He was sweating it out. The rank, old duvet below him on the floor was wet with his dew.
He was dissolving.
Cartwright waited for the pain to subside. It took a lot longer than it normally did. By the time he finally turned his body, his heels knocking, stuttering, on the bare floorboards, dawn was lightening the shuttered window on the face of the house. He heaved himself upright. His limbs felt heavy, even though he was little more than skin and bones now. He rubbed the greasy sweat from his face, and then his body trembled as he stepped falteringly over the sleeping forms of his family, and out into the corridor.
Downstairs, moving more easily now, he opened the front door and stepped out into the misty darkness on the porch, then stood listening for a moment. The world was numb, and the farm was mostly silent. Even the chickens were quiet. But shortly, ahead of him, a shadow loomed amongst the shadows.
His eldest was stalking through the treeline, returning to the house with a log over his shoulder. He often patrolled the compound at night. Sometimes he went out into the fields to hunt. But never far, not by himself. For the most part, his entire existence was circumscribed by the fence around the farm, while the outside world was hazy and difficult: a place to hunt different prey, and to be hunted in return.
What will become of him? All of them?
When Cartwright pictured the future, he felt an ache of a different kind in his body. He saw this place sealed tight, surrounded by armed police. He saw his family hunted down from a wide circle to a tiny dot: one that, finally, blinked out of existence altogether. In teaching his family about the reality of the world, he had failed to prepare them for the illusion
everyone else believed. Those that believed it would discover this place when he was gone, and they would overcome it.
His eldest approached him across the dusty front yard, and grunted as he dropped the log at Cartwright’s feet in the dust.
‘For the fire,’ he said.
Cartwright nodded, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Now that he was near the end, the other thing he couldn’t stop thinking about was his daughter. It was a question of the past, rather than the future.
What has become of you?
he wondered. At least he had an image of her now – her startled face at the viaduct, before she had turned and ran, leaving Dawson to stand in their way – but that wasn’t enough. He wanted to know more. Did she have children of her own? Had a seed from this life blown away on the wind and started a patch of its own elsewhere?
You belong here
.
‘Are you all right?’
Cartwright blinked. His son was looking at him, frowning slightly. None of the family knew about his illness, but he would have been disappointed if they hadn’t picked up something, especially his eldest, who had always seemed attuned to his teachings. The illness was seeping out through his pores and whirling around him like dust in the air. It would have been strange for his son not to notice the change taking place, more and more quickly.
‘I’m fine,’ he said.
His eldest wasn’t convinced.
‘Tell me?’ he asked.
‘I’m just thinking about her.’ That would be enough. Cartwright knew the boy missed a sister as much as he missed a daughter, that time had not dulled her absence for either of them. Brother and sister had been very close at the time she ran away, even if, he imagined, they had grown into very different people since.
Cartwright rested a hand on his son’s shoulder.
‘Do you know? I think she’s coming home today. Can you feel it on the breeze? I can sense her.’
His eldest paused, then cocked his head as though sniffing the air, but his expression remained blank. No, he couldn’t sense it. For a moment, Cartwright wondered whether he’d even meant it himself, or if he’d just said it to distract the boy. Sometimes it felt like their whole existence here, the philosophy behind it, was hand-to-mouth, a story being made up as it went along, passed down through the generations, with sections filled in as needed. On that level, it didn’t really matter what Cartwright said, so long as they all listened and believed.
No
, he thought.
That’s not the case
.
There are patterns
.
‘Well, I can sense her.’ He tried to sound more decisive. ‘I can sense the pattern. Try harder.’
The eldest looked around for a few more seconds. He closed his eyes and breathed in the world. Then said, ‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe.’
Cartwright repeated it derisively, as though the boy wasn’t trying hard enough. He believed it himself now; if he repeated something enough, it always seemed more solid, more likely to be true. He said, ‘It will happen. It has to.’
His eldest nodded, and Cartwright was pleased. So pleased that he wasn’t thinking about patterns any more, and didn’t consider the grand scheme of things as he said:
‘I’m going out this morning to the hardware shop. We need some things. The charity shop too. Some clothes for our new arrival.’
The boy nodded again, but looked miserable.
‘What is it?’ Cartwright said. ‘Tell me.’
‘What if she doesn’t come home?’
He was doubting him again, which should have annoyed Cartwright. But as the pain slowly throbbed, beginning to bloom in his side, he was too distracted to be angry.