Chapter Ten
Rotten Wood. Henchman’s Coppice. Ashes Hollow. Torchlight across the map revealed the nature of our surroundings. As I ran my fingers over its ominous terrain, I counted up my mistakes so far. There were plenty. “Burn-the-witch, burn-the-witch,” I heard in the groan of the trees. I kicked out at a log and watched the writhing underworld revealed.
My body ached when I sat still. I strode around the campfire, just to burn off some of the black acid inside me. It was building up in my stomach again, and whenever I felt Billy—the absence of him—it rose up my gorge, threatening to choke me. His name rang through my head like an alarm: I couldn’t switch it off, and it wouldn’t let me think of anything else. My mind filled the space where Billy should be with all the horrific fates that had befallen him. I walked in circles until my leg throbbed, and then I lay down and contorted into positions where I might get comfortable, but there was no relief, so I walked again.
Joni still wasn’t back. For the umpteenth time, I followed the path to the edge of the forest, hoping she would be driving down the dirt track, ideally with Lola and Billy on board. Or at least ready to let me go out searching again. For the umpteenth time, I looked back at the tents and bit my lip over whether to leave the sleeping kids alone and go hunting for Billy. I didn’t trust myself to make the right choice. There was no right choice.
The forest was going about its usual night business, indifferent to our petty human concerns over individual lives. The trees gossiped in their rustling, old-hag voices. “Welcome to our world,” they were saying. There are no simple choices for us. Mother Nature can’t afford favorites.
I picked up a stone and threw it into the branches. It disappeared without a sound into the black velvet. I grabbed another one and lobbed it as far into the trees as I could, throwing my whole weight behind it and grunting with the effort. I picked up a handful of stones and threw one at a time to punctuate my words: “Callous. Judgmental. Supercilious. Fucking. Bitch.” The last handful of gravel pattered onto the undergrowth with the sound of water on a duck’s back. I was still standing there, panting and glaring, when a light arced over the trees. Horatio gave a warning gruff and appeared by my side. A few seconds later I heard a car bumping down the dirt track.
I was tempted to slap her across the cheek. “Calm yourself, Jonelle,” I would say, using her trashy real name. “Pull yourself together.” I didn’t slap her, though. I waited while she snotted on her sleeve, and I focused on the black pit in my stomach, which had started to plop and gurgle. I waited while the heat crept down my arms to my fingertips. Finally, it seethed up and flooded over me, and I jumped on board and rode the wave.
“My son”—I started with a pointed finger right in her face and a jumpy voice—“is three years old, and he’s out there somewhere, and you fuck off for hours so I can’t go after him and—”
“I’ve been out there. Looking. For them both,” she whined. “Lola’s missing, too.”
“It’s hardly the same. Billy’s three—three!”
“I thought I would find them.”
“And did you? Did you find them?”
She shook her head, still crying.
“Or did you just dick about wasting more time? Billy could be dying—”
Joni drew in a long shuddering breath and wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. She sagged for a moment and then looked up at me. “You left him behind to make a point. This is on you, Marlene.”
The trees rustled.
When I didn’t reply, Joni heaved herself to her feet. “I thought she would be here when I got back. I was sure.”
“She’s not here,” I managed.
“I’ve looked everywhere. What am I going to tell David? I wish he was here.” Joni drove both hands through her hair and wrenched her head back. “I’ve lost both of them.” Her face clenched as a scream got trapped behind her teeth.
I’d felt the same draining of hope, the same free fall into the void it leaves behind. But my hollow insides echoed now with a clanging urge to fight. The din was too great to find words for Joni. The only word in me was Billy.
Joni barely noticed my hand on her back, pushing her toward the yurt, into bed. Rest. She hardly heard me promise that I’d find them, whatever it took, both of them. I ushered Horatio into the boot of the car and raced off up the dirt track to find my boy.
Lola had gone out from the camp and simply not returned. Billy disappeared in the village. On the map, I had drawn a circle between the two sites that took in a number of remote farms. As the Beast rolled down the driveway of the next farm on the short list, there was no sign of the Wild Things. Only gangrene hanging in the air from the cowshed and the claggy sound of the cows’ labored breathing. The beam from my headlights bounced over a dirt-encrusted road that offered no telltale tire marks or footprints. Just a smooth sheen of mud that the rainstorm had washed from the verge like an incoming tide. In another few days, the road surface would disappear altogether from view.
My eyes watered with tiredness as I checked the map for the next destination—a stand of trees marked with the symbol denoting a ruin. It was a possibility. All the locations I had identified lay within a modest radius of our camp and the supermarket. I would have to make the final approach to the ruin on foot, and the contours on the map suggested it was steep. I thunked the car into drive, and the Beast found its grip on the muddy surface.
The radio was scrolling through dead air again, an electronic pip followed by white noise. I hummed along with the monotonous tune. It sounded like a car braking heavily, and then I was braking heavily as I spotted the silhouetted crenellations of a tower up on the hill. I had to squint to focus on the map. It seemed like the right place. The red light of the clock said 3:14 a.m., and I didn’t have enough memories to account for the hours I’d been searching. I wondered how many nights I’d been without proper sleep. It must be Wednesday by now; five nights we’d spent in the woods. But then sleep didn’t matter anymore: I couldn’t stop if I wanted to.
Ahead of me, the hedge broke for a wooden gate. I drove up to it and jumped out, leaving the engine running. The crowbar made short shrift of its chain, and I drove into the field, stopping to engage the four-wheel drive, before heading in a direct line for the ruin. The Beast ate up the slope. The dense grass gave us traction, and we powered up to the tree line. I pulled on the hand brake and turned off the engine. Silence dropped around us like settling flies.
The shattered turret loomed over us, a black rent in the sky, its corners collapsed into the shape of an eyetooth. I knew at once this wasn’t the place. Even the most brazen of children wouldn’t dare. I didn’t dare. But I slid out of the car, leaving the driver’s door open and the headlight warning alarm binging, and forced myself up the rest of the slope. I had to be brave for Billy. I had to turn over every last stone if I was ever to sleep again. Horatio was close behind me as we entered the wood, his paws padding lightly as though he, too, were on tiptoes.
The torchlight threw the trees into Gothic shapes. I recoiled from a fox that seemed about to spring from the undergrowth, but saw it was a root. I gulped air, and my breath clung heavily around my head as though I were breathing inside a helmet, the atmosphere crushing me as surely as water or space. It is just fatigue, I told myself, tiredness letting my brain lower its defenses so the demons could sneak out to play tricks on me. I laid a hand on Horatio’s shoulder and put one foot before the other until I reached the hole in the side of the tower that passed for an entrance.
The space inside the ruin was so black that it seemed all the fearful dark that surrounded me had gushed from its depths. The darkness repelled me like a magnet. Even the light of the torch was swallowed, revealing nothing but more darkness. Behind me, Horatio shifted his weight and gruffed. It was too much. My legs took control and carried my senseless body back down the path, covering the distance with uncanny speed, and I was back inside the car, fumbling the door closed and locked, punching the button to start the engine, and pulling the gear stick into reverse. The Beast shot backward down the hill, and I screamed when a dark shape passed through my headlights—Horatio. I swerved to avoid him as he came round to my flank, and the steering wheel wrenched out of my hand as the car jackknifed into a violent right angle.
We hung, the Beast and I, for teetering seconds, suspended on two side wheels over the steep slope. Horatio galloped away into the dark space beyond the headlights. The car gave a furious roar as my foot slipped and over-revved the engine. The two wheels that now grasped for traction in thin air gave a bitter whine. How do I stop the car rolling? I thought. Steer into it? Or is that a skid? I’m so very tired. And then the grass retreated from my driver’s-side window and was replaced by the starry night sky.
From far away, a voice wakes me. “You’re lost,” it says. My mother is walking away across the savannah, not looking back. I run to catch her, red grass stinging my cheeks. Exhausted, I fall back, my eyes blurring with dots and darkness.
Red grass whips me awake. My mother is far now. But she is dead; she can’t be here. On the horizon, she turns and says, “You’re lost,” and steps off.
I see only dots and darkness.
Find yourself.
Dots. The dots are in the car, on the ceiling. I’m in the car.
Open your eyes.
The air burst with screaming—crows or rooks, big black birds with ragged witch-cloak wings, bickering over carrion. The world was too bright. I could only open one eye; the other was glued closed. I scratched my eyelashes out to free it and shivered in a dawn chill that came straight out of the earth. I was lying across the front seats, my head bent to the side against the passenger door. When I moved my shoulders to sit up, pain shot down my neck. I capitulated and stayed down.
The Beast had rolled down the hill. The sky was in the right place, though, so we’d landed on our feet. I hauled my legs up to my chest, and everything seemed in order, so I rolled onto my side and pushed up with my arms, sliding back into the driver’s seat. A loud thud was my Burmese Nat, the heavy silver figurine that I’d picked up as I left my house, slipping from my legs to the floor. I wondered if he was responsible for the egg rising on my forehead. I pushed him back under the front seat with my foot. Outside, Horatio gruffed. I got out, carefully stretching my head side to side, and rubbed both our necks as we walked round the car.
The Beast hunkered at the base of the steep slope. As well as a broken window, the bonnet and roof were crushed, and both sides were concave, bent to the contours of the land. One headlight drooped on wires from an empty eye socket, like a pair of comedy glasses. I lifted the light and inspected it; I hadn’t realized in the brightness of the morning, but the lamps were still on. I slotted the unit back into the eye socket and shoved. It clicked into place, fixed.
I put my head back and let out a whoop into the sky—The Beast lives!—a loud “fuck-you” to the universe. The crows or rooks or whatever they were joined in.
Up on the hill, the ruin looked much reduced against the bone-white sky. I realized it wasn’t a tower or a turret or anything so mysterious, just a squat brick building: some kind of abandoned industrial relic, perhaps an old mine head, whose roof had long since fallen in and no one cared enough to clear it up. Even the trees around it looked scrubby and juvenile in the cold morning light.
I turned my attention to my injuries. In the glove compartment, I found wet wipes and cleaned my forehead, which was cut open as well as swollen. The blood had gummed up the one eye, and I already had a blue bruise that would spread nicely. But I’d escaped quite lightly, all things considered. The Beast growled back to life with an emphysemic rattle, and the clock showed it was just after 6:00 a.m. My mouth was parched, and I could smell myself. I loaded up Horatio and headed for the next place on the map.
I clicked the radio on and hummed along even though the white noise shushed me. “Peep, shush, peep, shush” went the radio, flailing around for stations that didn’t exist. At the top of the dial, it fixed on a frequency, and the car filled with pips. It was more irritating than the white noise—insistent, nagging—so I switched it off.
I was lost. The map showed that I’d missed a turn, but I could follow this lane down via a watermill and pick up the trunk road. The hamlet around the mill was on my list of sites to check, so I decided to go there first. I turned left onto a one-car lane that you’d normally drive slowly for fear of meeting another vehicle, but I sped along between high hedges. A mile or so farther on, I passed a couple of ramshackle cottages, both with vans parked outside. Buzz-infested, for sure. I didn’t even brake.
Down a hill and over a stone bridge, the road turned sharply left in front of a gate and into a field. I struggled to make the turn and, as I flashed by the gate, I saw a small figure streak behind the hedge. I hit the brakes. Backed up.
There. Way across the field, a boy was scrambling over a fence toward an old barn. I grabbed the map: the barn lay at the end of a track that joined the road a few hundred yards ahead. I slammed the car into gear and raced down the lane, spinning the steering wheel into the turn, so that the wheels scrambled for grip before we picked up speed again and came to a skidding halt moments later outside a hay shed. I jumped out.
Water gushed from a tap against the wall of the barn, and I stepped forward to turn it off. The ground was littered with empty cans of pop. The air was still.
My heart gave a loud thud, as though I’d come back to life, and then I was running into the barn, clambering over the bales, shouting Billy’s name and throwing aside a pile of sleeping bags that lay on top of the hay, screaming for whoever was there to come out, show themselves, tell me where my son was. No one was there, just a half-dozen sleeping bags and a few grubby clothes.
“Billy? Billy!”
I stopped to listen for a reply. Outside the barn, farther down the dirt track, I heard the crackle of bicycle tires over gravel.
I jumped down from the hay, landing heavily in the dirt, and just caught the movement of the bikes as they turned out onto the lane. I ran to the car and spun round after them.
Way ahead of me, the hunched figures weaved across the road with blurred legs. I wrenched the gear stick into manual and forced the car into second, the engine furious as it engaged. I gained on the boys in seconds: there were five of them, the smallest one at the rear careering across the lane as he looked back over his shoulder to check on me. He went up onto the verge and righted himself, pushing ahead again down the center of the road. I revved up right behind them, snapping at their tails, and slid my window down.
“Stop!” I screamed at them. “Tell me where Billy is.”
The boy in front waved one arm round in a circle, and the little peloton broke into two halves, a couple of boys veering off into a field and the others turning down a side lane hidden by the high hedge. I shot past, braked, fishtailed to a stop. In reverse, the car weaved and whined until I had enough room to make the turn. I forced the gear stick back into first and the car jumped forward, its great haunches bunching up to thrust us round the corner into the narrow lane, where I only saw the small boy who had come off his bike and was lying in the middle of the road as I ploughed right over him.