Chapter Seventeen

Christmas Eve, Afternoon

The sun was shining when they reached the turning into the woods. The trees enclosed them, but it was still light under the leafless branches. Lori nosed the car cautiously along an even narrower track that ran off to the side, that they’d learned about at the village shop. In summer the farm workers apparently used it to get to a hut, where they stored tools and chainsaws and other equipment, for use on that side of the wood, but in the winter the building was cleared and empty and the place deserted.

The owner of the small store in the village had explained all this, when they were buying milk, after a long and involved conversation with Misty about the fairy properties of silver birch trees.

‘If she wants to visit again, that old track would be shorter for little legs. It gets you right in amongst the trees. There’s a clearing where you can turn the car around and we’ve had no rain lately, so it shouldn’t be too muddy. ’

‘I don’t have little legs,’ Misty protested indignantly.

The shop owner grinned. ‘I was thinking of your auntie, pet.’

Now tall, pale trunks loomed on either side of the car. And there was the clearing, as Misty’s new friend had promised.

Lori turned the car carefully, to face the way they had come, and stopped. The ground was dappled by sunlight under the trees, which showed ruts where another vehicle had parked recently in the same spot. Misty was chattering excitedly about mistletoe and fairies.

‘In a minute, sweetheart.’

Lori opened her door, leaning out to check the state of the ground. Not soggy enough to cause problems getting the car out and no problem at all for two intrepid mistletoe hunters equipped with stout wellingtons.

She could see that the trail was much narrower leading out of the clearing on the other side, presumably towards the equipment hut, and then up over the hill behind, but someone had made a rough job of pushing back the undergrowth on either side, breaking it and bending it out of the way.

Lori looked up at the fragments of sky she could see though the branches, and then at her watch. They probably had about an hour before it started to get dark.

Plenty of time.

‘Come on, trouble.’ She helped Misty out of her car seat. ‘Let’s go and look for those fairies.’

He’d finally lost it. He was hallucinating. There were voices coming towards him and then receding.

Two voices.

Singing.

Christmas carols.

He was hallucinating.

Good King Wenceslas and his page were coming for him, through the woods.

Drew jerked upright from the half doze he’d been lost in. The voices were still there. It wasn’t a dream. The page was warbling now, in a high treble. The singing was real.

Oh God.

He stumbled to his feet, leaning against the wall of the hut, as close as he could get to the source of the sound. His heart was thumping so hard it took him two attempts to find his voice, and then it came out as a hoarse rasp. Frantic, he tried again.

‘Hello! Can you hear me?’ That was better. ‘I’m here, in the hut. I can’t get out. Can you hear me?’

The voices had stopped. The silence stretched, ominously. Was it kids? Had he scared them in to running away?

He tried again. ‘Hello?’ There was a humiliating catch in the word.

‘Hello?’ A voice answered him. A grown-up voice, not the page.

‘Hello.’ Relief was making him dizzy. And repetitive. ‘I’m here, in the hut. I can’t get out. I need help. It’s not a joke. Please. If you can just open the door.’ The unhappy thought that the door might be padlocked raised its ugly head. ‘If you could try.’

He strained to hear. There seemed to be a muffled conference going on, too low-pitched for him to make out the words.

‘Who are you? What are you doing in there?’

The location of the voice had changed. It sounded as if she, he thought it was a she, was standing closer. In front of the hut. Oh God, a woman and a small child?

‘My name is Andrew Vitruvius,’ he said the words carefully. ‘I got locked in here … by accident. If you could just open the door.’ He tried to make his voice as reassuring as he could. The dry rasp was no help.

‘Andrew Vitruvius?’ Now the voice sounded suspicious. ‘The writer?’

‘Yes. If you could open the door …’

More muttering. He thought he could hear the words ‘stupid joke’. Panic flared. ‘It’s not a hoax, at least, not on you. Please.’

Relief like he’d never experienced before threatened to swamp him at the sound of a hasp being lifted.

No padlock.

The door opened, outwards, very slowly and cautiously, and scraped to a standstill. There was a long beat, and then a silhouette appeared in the opening, with a much smaller figure bouncing around behind it. The child, a girl, if the pink bobble hat and mittens were an indicator, stopped bouncing to sneak closer, peering at him from behind her mother’s legs.

He blinked to clear his vision. Two sets of identical grey eyes stared at him, out of two heart-shaped faces.

The little girl spoke first. ‘Is it Jesus?’