I hiccup, and as if that it enough to tip some balance, I trip and tumble and roll over in the grass, the breath thumped out of me. I kick off the rubbery galoshes and am barefoot, but I am not cold now. One second I crouch there on hands and knees, and then I am up again, running even faster now, and when my bare foot comes down on a hidden stone in the grass the pain of it is scarcely felt.
Into the trees again. I slow down to try and get some breath back. The roots and leaves are like knots and needles under my feet, and jabs of pain spear up my legs. The wood is open, not like Wytham, and I can still jog along clutching my side. I am running along the flank of a hill, following the contours through the wood – but soon it is open fields again, hedges and bare furrowed earth.
Where have all the lights gone? The world is dark, as if I am alone in it but for those chasing me.
I cannot go much farther. Once I stop, and have to bend over and vomit, and up comes the stew they served me earlier.
I am stumbling and staggering across the ploughed earth like a drunk. The soil is frozen stiff and when I trip and go down again it feels like falling onto heaped stones. I look back, and I see the light of a lantern on the edge of the wood behind, not a quarter of a mile away. The moon is high and bright and leering at me, an enemy. It casts my own shadow black before me, rippling over the furrows. There are clouds in the sky, coming in from the north.
Oh, Christos, help me. God, help me now.
I start running again, though the pain in my side is a sharp shriek and my feet feel bruised and gashed. There is open country ahead, perhaps a mile of it, and just for a moment I glimpse the moon-bright glitter of water. A river. My mind dredges up what Luca said about running water. There is nowhere else to go, anyway.
I stagger on, through a hawthorn hedge, the thorns scoring my face and hands and legs. Then over a barbed-wire fence, and into ankle-turning ruts where a tractor has mashed its way. I break through the ice of a puddle and my foot goes in the freezing water and the bite of it nearly makes me cry out, but I grind my teeth on it and pick a way through the ruts and the deep holes cows’ feet have made when the earth was soft and wet. It is like playing a horrible kind of hopscotch, and it eats up the last strength I have.
I have to stop. I cannot go on. I must have covered several miles, and none of it on a road or path. Perhaps I have a few minutes’ grace...
I totter into the base of a hedge and draw myself in there. I want to curl up in a ball and close out the world, but instead I lie panting and stare out at the night, and the panic comes and goes in my brain like a bobbing silver balloon.
I have never been so afraid, not ever, not even when we were on the burning quay and Pa was holding my face tight against the awful howling grief as Mama was taken away.
And then I hear, clear as a train whistle, a high, lonesome howl in the night. It is the sound of a wolf. I have never heard one in my life before, but I know what it is as surely as night follows day.
And another answers.
It is a terrible thing to hear, alone and exhausted in the darkness. I understand now all the fairy tales, those that talk of the dangers of the deep forest, and the beasts that lurk there. All those fears were true. I know them now. I am in the middle of one such story, and all I want is out of it.
I take Pa’s watch out of my pocket and click it open. I cannot see the face in the lid, just a blur.
‘Mama,’ I whisper. I think of her, and Pa, and my brother Nikos, and I wonder how in the world I ended up here, so far from home, cowering under a hedge in an English winter and waiting for the wolves to catch up with me.
‘Now you understand,’ a voice says.
And I am not at all surprised to see a white face before me, hovering in the dark.
Strangely, I am not as afraid of him as I am of the wolves howling in the night, though his eyes shine like shillings, and his ears are as pointed as those of a hairless dog.
‘I do understand,’ I say quietly. And I run my sleeve across my face.
He smiles. ‘Dearest girl, did I not tell you that it would be so? It is the way all desperate things end. And you are far too young for this. It is not right that you should have to shoulder such things on your own. And sweetheart, you are very much alone.’
There is a smile. I know it is there. I can feel it like ants crawling across my scalp.
‘All you have to do is take my hand.’
And he holds it out to me.
I fight back the tears, and the hiccupping sobs that are crowding out my breath. I almost reach for it.
Then I hear the ticking of Pa’s watch. And I cannot believe how loud it sounds – louder than the beat of my own heart. That is my life, ticking past.
It is not much of a life, all things considered, but it is my own, and I am beholden to no-one for it, not anymore.
I owe the world nothing, and whatever the world gave me it has taken away again. I do not even have shoes to wear, or Pie to hug.
And that knowledge is suddenly a terrible relief to me. Whatever else happens, I am free.
‘No’ I say to the thing in the night. And I wipe my eyes on my sleeve again.
The eyes sharpen, and an edge creeps into the hemlock voice.
‘Do you know who I am, child?’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Then you know that I can give you what you want. It is here for the asking.’
‘It wouldn’t be real, whatever it is you think you can give me.’ My voice shakes a little. ‘I won’t take anything from anyone. Not now. And if I die I want to go to heaven, and meet them all again. In the meantime, this is me, here, and it is all I am. And you can’t have it. No-one can.’
The hand is withdrawn, and the silver eyes stare at me – so cold – like there is an arctic waste blowing behind them.
‘I have seen brave strong men who do not have half the heart you possess, girl,’ the thing says. It hunkers down before me, its knees level with its ears.
‘And that is what makes you so precious to me. You are a strong soul, full of your mother’s courage. And your father’s failings have only made you stronger. How fine you are.’ He reaches out the white, long-fingered hand once more, and I feel his black nail trace down my cheek, as chill as the point of an icicle. ‘We will let it go at that for now. You have some life yet in front of you; it may be minutes, it may be years. But when you come to the end of it, I shall be watching. I will always be there, for there is something of me in your blood. You will find that to be true, in time. For now, I bid you good luck with the wolf.’
And he is gone, the after-images of his bright eyes hanging in the air for a second. And my heart is still thumping as loud as Pa’s ticking watch.
B
UT
I
HAVE
my breath back, and though I feel heavy and tired still, the stitch in my side has gone and the suffocating fear has drawn back into its dark hole.
I can think again. I know I cannot just lie here. They’ll find me, sure as anything.
I crawl out from under the hedge and straighten up. I have lost my bearings, and I have to look up at the sky and find the Plough, the Pointers, and the North Star just as I was taught. The cloud is thickening now, but it has not yet touched the moon.
North is where I must go, to the river. After that, I have no other aim in mind, and no idea what to do. But I will not just lie down and wait for them. I will not give up.
I start to hobble on again – my feet are almost completely numb, and they are covered in mud and the black shine of blood. Just as well they’re numb, I think. I don’t want to look at them too closely.
There is blood on my face too, and my legs. The hawthorns scratched me good and proper.
I touch the knife in my pocket. They tried to steal everything from me and make me one of their own. But they shall not have me, not even for Luca.
I must get to a police station, or at least to a town. Who would have thought that the heart of England could be so huge and empty in the dark?
I
am across
the furrows of the ploughed field now, and through another hedge which strips hairs out of my head and covers me in fresh scratches. But it is open pasture after that, and along one side of it there is the sound of running water, a little stream flashing bright under the moon. It must run to the Thames in the north. The slope is downhill, and I follow the stream and get my second wind, jogging along through withered grass that has the frost beginning to sparkle across it like a carpet of crushed glass.
I stop to look behind me every so often. The lantern has disappeared now, and there is no more hallooing and shouting in the night. Perhaps they have given up. Perhaps I have lost them. I want to believe that, but know it is not real.
There is a clump of buildings on my right with tall dark trees growing around them, but not a light to be seen. The whole world is asleep. It has turned its back on me. I blink back tears, swallow down the panic. Queenie spoke of a bridge. Perhaps I can find it. I wish I had a map. I wish –
The wolf howls again, so much closer now. I feel a thrill of absolute terror go through me, as cold as it someone had tipped a glass of water over my head.
I start running again, as fast as my numb bloody feet can go. I am travelling over an open plain of flat land with lines of hedges running across it, the river lost again.
There is a wide track, rutted and full of frozen puddles, and my feet follow it without any more thought. Perhaps someone, somewhere in this empty place is awake, and will open a door for me and then shut it against the night. Perhaps –
I hear a snarling behind me and I twist to look, but then something smashes into my back and I am knocked to the ground, sprawled across the track.
I lie dazed for a second, but then catch my wits and roll onto my hands and knees – it is right there with me, the wolf, and I can smell it and feel its heat.
Its jaws fasten on the collar of my coat and it half-lifts me off the ground like a terrier shaking a rat, and its hot slobber runs down my neck. I twist in my coat, and see a bright, raging eye and try and get my elbow at it, but the thing is moving too fast. It drops me, and then clamps its jaws around my ankle and I scream out at the pain and the crushing vice-grip of the teeth. Then it begins to drag me up the path, and the stones tear at the back of my legs. I kick my bare heel into its face. Nothing works; it is not going to let go.
It is over. I am going to die here, tonight. The wolf will have me, in the end.
But not without a fight.
I reach into my coat pocket for the little penknife – at least I might be able to hurt it first – and instead my hand comes out with a ragged twig, and there is something shining upon it.
The wolf opens its jaws and snarls at me, the black lips drawn back from its teeth. Its eyes are as yellow as lemons and full of hate and triumph.
This is Job, white-muzzled, grey-backed. The older wolf, the man who murdered my father.
My terror flits away, and in its place there is that boiling rage, the same which made me stab Queenie. I hobble to my feet, staggering like some drunk chucked out of the Jericho.
‘Come on then – are you afraid? What are you waiting for you rotten, filthy old man. Come and get me!’ And I bare my own teeth at it like I am an animal too.
The wolf springs, maw agape.
I thrust out my hand, and my knuckles are ripped open by the thing’s teeth as my fingers plunge into its hot mouth. It knocks me on my back, but I thrust my arm out stiff, and my hand goes deeper, fighting the twist of the tongue. The jaws are trying to snap my hand off, but half my arm is down the wolf’s throat now, and in that hand is the twig from my coat pocket with its pearl-bright berries.
It is a mistletoe sprig. The sudden knowledge of that floods me with defiance and hope, like some remembered dream.
If what Luca told me about it is not true, then I know I will be dead in a few seconds.
The wolf chokes, and shakes his head until I think my arm is going to break. It rolls off me but I follow it, hugging the great head with my free arm and jamming the mistletoe as deep down its gullet as the fingers of the other can force it. I have never felt such hatred for anyone or anything in my life before. I am snarling like the wolf itself as I hang on, and the animal’s teeth saw into my upper arm like knives, shredding my coat and the flesh beneath. But I will not give up or give in.
The wolf gives a horrible choking squeal and the paws scratch at me and the hind legs come up and kick me in the stomach.
I fall free of it, gagging, my right arm covered in blood and slime above the elbow. But the mistletoe is still in the wolf’s black throat.
The beast yowls as though it is being burned, and thrashes around in agony. It beats its head on the ground and claws at its ears with its forepaws.
If I did not know who this was and what he had done, I think I would pity it. It looks as though it is burning up from the inside – gouts of hot breath billow out of the jaws like steam from a whistling kettle.
And it changes. The fur shortens even as I watch. The paws splay out into black-nailed fingers. The long muzzle snaps in with a crack of bone. There is a naked old man writhing on the track now with blood trickling out of his mouth, and he is clawing feebly at his bearded face.
I watch him die. It is a terrible thing, but I do not look away for a second. I did this, and I have to see it out to the end.
Our eyes meet, and there is no more hatred in his, just a wild fear. He reaches out a hand towards me, but I stand motionless with blood trickling steadily off my fingers.
‘The Devil will come for you now,’ I say quietly to Job. I look up at the black and silver sky.
‘He is not far away. I have spoken to him already tonight.’
Job gargles blood. His eyes stay fixed on me, until they freeze in place. Then he slumps back, rolling onto his side.
That much is done, at least.
I nudge the body with my bare toe and it is like prodding a raw pork loin. He is dead meat now, no more.