THIRTY-SEVEN

Luke tried not to look down.

Twice a foot had just slipped from the wet bark on the branch beneath his feet, and his fingers tightened into claws on an upper branch until the hot-cold feeling passed from his skin and his frantic mind stilled. Sweat cooled on his forehead. He breathed out noisily; forced his chest to work in and out at a normal rhythm.

He could go even higher, but was already well above the treetops sloping about the foot of the hill. Once the shaking eased in his legs, he dared to look up and then around his position, peering through the branches of the spruce heavy with wet knots of spiky leaves that reached out from the trunk.

For the first time since they’d entered the forest, he could see for miles. Miles in every direction. And he could see the edge of the forest too. He nearly wept. It looked so close. He was about to shriek the news down to the others, but then imagined himself falling and stayed silent.

He squinted again, straining his eyes into the distance. The perimeter of the forest was hazy through the far-off vapours and too indistinct to reveal individual trees; so it was further away than it looked. But still within reach. Maybe six kilometres away. More like seven. And over to the south west, in the direction Hutch guessed at correctly. But Luke had been leading them due south. That route led into a bulge of green, misted with a heavy white fog of low cloud that he could not see the end of. ‘Jesus Christ.’ Had they kept on in a straight southerly line they would have plunged back into the thicker belt of virgin forest spilling across the border of Norway. This tree had saved their lives.

To Luke came the recollection of faces and streets and buildings in London that he might see again. An impression of Charlotte’s soft skin. Dark fragrant ale. Music from a stereo. Egg and chips with brown sauce in the café at the end of his street. The patient faces of his parents. Even the patched and musty shop where he sold CDs. He’d treasure every precious second spent there when he returned, cling on to the counter and tell his prick of a boss that he was so pleased to see him, every day. His chest heaved with emotion. Out out out, a little voice started in his head. He found himself grinning. It seemed like the first time in days. It felt awkward on his face, stiff. ‘God. Thank you, God.’ They could live. He could be alive for much longer than a few days. A pinhead of light spread to a horizon of thrilling, then choking hope. He closed his eyes.

Maybe he should strike out for it tonight. After a rest, and his last three energy bars. He became giddy with the speed of his new and shining thoughts. He shivered and opened his eyes.

Slowly, he withdrew the compass from inside his coat and held it up in front of his face to asses a precise outward trajectory, out of the trees and on to what looked like a long formation of treeless black rocks breaking through a scrub-covered expanse. Mist hovered over the far clear ground. It was a boulder field or hard rock plain, and somewhere inside of it was the Stora Luleälven River, which would run east to Skaite. Nothing would follow him out there; it didn’t like to be seen, he told himself. It crept about the ruins and relics of a former time.

From up so high, at least twenty metres from the ground, he could see Hutch’s logic with the short cut. But irrespective of the fact they were now being hunted, actually completing the short cut would have put Dom on a stretcher. Even he and Hutch, on their own, would have struggled to complete this shorter route. If one of them had suffered an accident, it would have been doubtful they both would have survived. ‘Stupid, H. Just stupid, mate.’

Carefully, he turned his head, but not his legs, and stared down at the branch that supported his weight to make sure his feet did not move of their own volition again. He caught site of the tiny tent below. Raising his eyes from his feet, he saw the inlet in the vast treeline in which they entered this godforsaken place three days before. Behind it he could see the uneven silhouette of a mountain range. About one third of the distance so far covered still remained before they could leave the southern tip of the forest. But at his pace, not slowed down by Dom and Phil, and after a decent rest and plenty of water, plus the last energy bars, he reckoned he could clear the forest by midnight, which would mean three hours in the dark with a torch. Or maybe tomorrow was better and he’d be out by noon the following day, if he could risk another night in here.

Before he could decide on when to strike out for the closest edge of this wooded hell, the world below him erupted into a loud voice. No, two voices. One inarticulate, the other calling for, ‘Phil. Phil. Phil.’ Each word gradually ascended in volume, until the voice was shouting. Then it settled for cries of ‘Oh God. Oh God.’ This second voice came from closer to the tree. It came from the tent.

Up in the spruce, Luke could not move his legs. His fingers closed tighter around the branches he was gripping. The thick rounded wood beneath his feet burned into his soles as if to fuse him into the limb.

It’s taking them. Won’t see me up here. Don’t move, don’t move. It’s still light, you can run. Wait. Wait here. Wait.

But then his head dipped and rose, dipped and rose, and he looked through the leafy branches below for his companions. Turning to the side, at the waist, he peered through the web of verdure and black bough, down to his left where the sounds of terror and distress called up from the earth.

There was the tent. Where was Dom?

There was Dom, standing up, a few feet away from the green and grey tent, looking down the slope, bent over. But silent now.

Luke began his descent, both legs shaking as his eyes peered between the lines of branches and the crevasses of empty air, disguised by false ceilings of green leaf, until his soles found and gripped the branches he had already traversed on the way up. He tried to keep his focus short, on foot placements and no further; not the distant hard ground that he could fall down to and be broken upon.

‘Dom!’ he called. ‘Dom!’ he called again. There was no answer, but he kept on going down, limb by limb. His voice sounded feeble, silly, up in the air. Trembling feet hovered above branches too low to comfortably descend upon, his body clutched to the trunk. He went down like a terrified blind man trying to get down a ladder where the thin air told him he was up high enough to die if he slipped. Descending with his body shaking with fear and tense with adrenaline; going down, branch by branch, until he swung by his hands and dropped to the rocky ground of the hilltop.

Pins of pain shot through his feet and he stumbled sideways, then pitched right over, smacking his face against a gnarly tree root breaking from the stony ground. The sudden pain sobered him, angered him. He got to his knees. Stood up, shaky on legs weakened from exertion.

His eyes darted everywhere, looking for what he did not want to see. A long thing, he imagined. Black, loping. Bright wet colour about its mouth.

But he just saw the inert tent, Dom turning back towards it, but looking over his shoulder. And about the tent was the stony ground and grey-black boulders, the dark moss and pale-yellow lichen, and a few small trees on the summit struggling through for life and for the sky. There was no Phil on their hill. A little pile of firewood thus far collected was scattered near Dom’s feet, like he had recently dropped it.

Luke’s own breath suddenly deafened him. Sweat joined the drizzle and ran into his eyes; blurred his vision that would not stop jumping and trying to see the worst in every direction. He wanted to scream and run fast, anywhere. Panic swamped his mind. He shouted something to clear his head, and then forced himself to stand still, to slow his jumping eyes.

His vision cleared. His line of sight extended to where it had been before he lost his head. He came back into himself swiftly. Then Dom rushed at him.

And Luke saw that Dom was shaking with eyes too wide for any face but the face of the witless. His mouth was open and ruddy and gasping out incoherent whimpers mixed with shuddering inhalations.

Like a drowning man, Dom seized him. Snatched handfuls of Luke’s waterproof and then slipped sideways and onto his hip, pulling Luke over with him. Until they both kicked and scrabbled and pushed at each other on the hard ground, but could not break apart because Dom’s white-knuckled hands were clamped onto his waterproof; the fabric tugged out and into an expanse of stretched and ripping material that Luke felt come further away from the seams under his arms.

‘Dom,’ he muttered. ‘Dom, let go.’ But Dom hung on to him like he was a life raft in black drowning water. He didn’t want to go under alone and he clutched at the only safe and companionable thing within his reach.

‘Let go!’ Luke roared next to Dom’s face. But Dom only whimpered and said, ‘He’s gone. Took … Took …’

Until Luke grasped Dom’s dirt– and sweat-streaked head in both hands and squeezed, shouting, ‘Get off. Get off me,’ crushing that frantic, saucer-eyed face. Which crumpled. The hands on his chest, tangled among his clothes, went limp and dropped away. Dom lay on his side and covered his face with his filthy fingers.

Luke kicked away at the hard ground until he was standing upright and flattening his jacket down at the front. He scrabbled for the little oval shape of the closed penknife in his trouser pocket. He got it out, got it open. A pitiful little blade, dull in the dusk light on the desolate hillock.

He walked away from Dom. Didn’t blink once until his eyeballs felt like they had soap rubbed into them. Walked straight to the edge of the summit and looked down the rocky slope they had ascended, down to where Phil had been gathering firewood.

‘Phil!’ he called at the top of his voice. Called until his lungs squeezed out all of the air and hung spent and exhausted inside his chest. ‘Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil!’ Then he was coughing, his throat wrenched and painful.

There was no sign of Phil at all, and no response from the eternity of wet trees and dark hollows and eruptions of tangled undergrowth. No bird calls, not a breath of wind; even the rain seemed to have paused in shock at what must have come from those trees to snatch a full-grown man from his feet.