SEVEN

It was impossible to tell how long the place had been uninhabited. Or what kind of people once lived there.

Uncovered by yellow torchlight, that struggled to reach far into the cramped hovel, the first thing Luke noticed were the skulls. And then the crucifixes.

From small birds to what could have been squirrels and stoats, small mottled heads had been fixed with rusted nails to the timber walls of the large room on the ground floor. Larger skulls of lynx and deer and elk had mostly fallen from the walls and cracked against the floorboards. One or two still grinned from near the low ceiling, where their porous bones managed to hang on.

Between the skulls still mounted upon the walls were at least a dozen crosses. By the look of them, though no one looked for too long, they had been handcrafted from bundles of twigs tied with twine, and were mostly tilting now, or even hanging upside down. From the ceiling beams that brushed the tops of their uncovered heads, two empty and corroded oil lamps creaked irritably on their hooks if touched.

Under the floor, mice scampered. In this place they sounded angry at being disturbed, though something far too confident and unafraid was also suggested in their rustlings.

Hutch came back from an annex joined to the main room. ‘Tools and stuff. A nasty-looking scythe in there. I’d hazard a guess this place could be a hundred years old.’ He went to the little iron stove in the hearth. He patted his dirty hands around its round belly. ‘Bugger’s rusted shut, but it feels dry-ish.’

Phil was testing the sawbuck table, which creaked under the pressure of his two hands pressing down. Dom had claimed the one seat – a crudely fashioned wooden stool at the head of the table – and was wincing as he tried to remove his boots. ‘Hutch. Get your mittens on these. I can’t undo the laces. I’m actually scared to see what’s inside. And my knee feels like a water-skin full of nails. I want the magic spray you had this morning. Then you can get the fire going.’

From where he was crouching, Hutch grimaced at Dom over his shoulder. ‘I’m seriously thinking of leaving you here in the morning.’

Around them the house creaked and shifted like a wooden ship trapped in the ice. ‘Is this even safe?’ Phil asked.

Hutch swore at the stove. And then, without moving his head, he said to Phil, ‘I wouldn’t put it to the test.’

Luke flashed his torch over the walls and ceiling again. He was the tallest of the four and as he warned himself to watch the low beams, he cracked the side of his head against one of the iron lamps.

Phil, Dom and Hutch laughed. ‘You all right, mate?’ Hutch then asked as an afterthought. ‘That sounded nasty.’

‘Fine.’ Luke shone his torch at the narrow staircase that led to the second storey. ‘Anyone been up there yet?’

‘With this knee,’ Dom said, ‘I’m not moving again until Hutch fetches help and the Swedish air force lands a helicopter in the garden. Ain’t that right, you hopeless Yorkshire arse? And you can use that map to get the fire going for all the use it’s been.’

At this, they all laughed. Even Luke who couldn’t help himself, or stop himself from warming to Dom all over again. He was being too sensitive. It was the dreadful forest and the desperate walking. His thighs still seemed to be moving as if they continued to clamber up and down rocky slopes and stretch over deadwood. They were just tired. That was all. ‘I don’t want to sound like a fool—’

‘That could be a challenge,’ Dom muttered, as he removed his second boot. ‘Where’s the spray, Hutch?’

Luke looked at Dom. ‘Piss off.’ Then turned to Hutch. ‘But I definitely heard something out there. In the trees.’

Dom grimaced at him. ‘Don’t start with that crap. Things are bad enough in here without you giving me the shits.’

‘I’m not messing around. It was like …’ He couldn’t describe it. ‘A crash.’

No one was listening.

‘I want new feet.’ Phil stood up in his socks. ‘Think I might go and check out the bedrooms.’

‘I’ll take the one with the en suite,’ Hutch said. He was digging at the door of the stove with the penknife he had bought in Stockholm from the outdoor adventure store. Like everything else in the country, it hadn’t been cheap. Luke bought one too because he liked the idea of having a knife in the wilderness. Dom dismissed them as being too expensive and said he would use Hutch’s if he needed it. Phil lost his knife on the first day. He’d left it at the first campsite.

Outside, the thunder ground iron hulls against granite. A vivid flash of lightning followed and seemed far too close to the house. It lit up the dusty wooden floor by the open door.

Phil paused on the first of the stairs on his way up, and fingered a dark crucifix. As if to himself, he said, ‘You’d think they’d make you feel safe. But they don’t.’

EIGHT

Phil came down the stairs so quickly it sounded like a fall. If the bangs of his feet didn’t get their attention, his gasps for air did.

Downstairs, three pairs of eyes went round and white. Three torch beams flashed to the foot of the staircase.

Through which Phil burst, then fell to his knees. He turned on to his backside and shuffled away from the whole idea of the stairs.

Inside Hutch’s mind came the image of meat dripping from a tree.

Dom dropped his feet from the table to the floor. ‘What the hell?’

Luke stood up from where he had been sitting close to the door, still peering out at the rain as if unable to accept that they intended to spend a night here. He kept his shoulders bent forward as if expecting a blow; opened his mouth but couldn’t speak.

Stupidly, in his fright, Hutch felt a yawn rise through him.

Phil tried to shout but it came out a yelp. ‘Something’s’ – he swallowed – ‘up there!’

Hutch looked at the ceiling. He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘You are kidding me.’

‘Let’s go,’ Dom said.

Hutch held a hand up. ‘Ssh.’

Around the table, Dom and Phil scrabbled for their boots. Heads close, Dom asked Phil something in a whisper. Phil turned his head quickly towards Dom’s face. ‘I don’t know! I saw it. In the bed.’ It was a preposterous statement, but no one laughed or could even swallow. The very idea of a bed in this place should have cut the tension, but somehow it made everything worse.

Hutch held up two hands, palm outwards. They were filthy. ‘Quiet! Cool it. Just cool it. There can’t be anyone here. Look at the dust. There were no footprints when we came in. It’s not possible.’

Plump face bloodless and quivering, Phil struggled to speak. ‘It’s in there. Up there.’

‘What?’ Dom demanded.

‘An animal?’ Luke asked.

Hutch looked at Luke. ‘Get your shank out.’

Luke frowned.

‘Knife,’ Hutch said, then held up his own.

Dom had one boot on and was stabbing his naked toes at the other wet boot which scooted across the floor. ‘This is getting stupid. Bloody stupid.’

Hutch strained his neck forward. ‘Can’t be an animal. Listen.’

Dom pulled the second boot back on and winced. ‘Fuck this. I’m off.’

‘Dom, shut it! Listen.’ Hutch walked slowly to the foot of the stairs.

Luke moved away from the door to let Phil and Dom pass on their way out. ‘Easy H. Could be a bear.’

Hutch shook his head. ‘It would be down here with us by now.’ He looked at Phil and Dom who stood together on the porch, peering back inside. A gust of wet air and the smell of damp wood grew stronger indoors, as if eager to replace their presence inside. ‘Phil. Was there a hole or something up there?’

‘Eh?’

‘A hole? In the roof? A window busted? Was it an animal?’

Phil swallowed. ‘It was sitting up. Staring at me.’

‘What?’ Dom asked.

‘I don’t know. I saw some eyes in my torchlight. And something black. Something big. But it didn’t move. It just sat there and stared at me.’

Dom threw his head back. ‘Jesus Christ. I can’t believe this!’

Hutch glared at him. ‘Dom. Cool it. We’d have heard anything alive in here long before now. You can hear mice under here and they’re the size of your thumb.’

Hutch looked at Luke, hoping to prompt an idea. But Luke’s expression told him that it didn’t look like he was convincing anyone about an absence of life in the building. Around them, the sound of rain pelting the walls like hail threatened to engulf the shuffling of their feet.

Hutch looked at the ceiling. ‘We can’t go back out in this. The temperature will drop like a stone in an hour. We’re already soaked. We’ll freeze.’ For a few seconds no one spoke, but glances were exchanged back and forth.

Luke suddenly grinned at him. ‘You first then.’

NINE

It was not possible to creep up the stairs soundlessly, as they would have wished. The planks moved under their feet. They cracked and even boomed with every careful and reluctant footstep taken. Hutch went first holding his torch in one hand, his knife in the other. Luke stayed close behind him, but not too close that he couldn’t turn and bolt down the stairs if Hutch so much as flinched. The tiny knife handle hurt his fingers. He relaxed his grip.

‘Anything?’ Luke whispered, looking up through the narrow, black wooden tunnel they squeezed clumsily through; a thin passage that reeked of the old sheds in an allotment he’d explored as a kid, fragrant with cat urine and clotted with dross.

‘Nah,’ Hutch said, his voice tight like he was holding his breath.

Luke’s pulse threatened to jump out of his mouth and ears at the things his torchlight revealed around Hutch. The old dark wood was crowded with long bearded faces that were nothing more than the patterns in the discoloured grain of ancient timber. It was museum-old, museum-black. It should have been behind glass, not around them in the darkness. He suddenly respected Phil for going upstairs on his own.

The thought of people once living here with no electric light or power in the foul wood, filled Luke with such a sense of wretchedness he felt like his soul was being pulled down and through his feet. They had been simple and they were old and they wanted comfort from the cross. One would have died first, the other would have lived alone in such despair that just to know it for a moment would make your heart burst.

He tried to shake the terrible feeling from himself. It jostled with his fear. This was never a place for a man to be, ever. He felt that instinctively. You got mixed up with the kind of madness that nailed skulls to walls. Even the cold black air seemed to move about them and through them with a sense of its own purpose. It was stupid, irrational to think so, but his imagination suspected the house was inhabited with something he didn’t need eyes to see. They were small and fragile here. They were defenceless. They were not welcome.

Hutch peered around the bend in the staircase. Luke caught his face in profile with the light from his torch. He’d never seen Hutch with that face before. Pale and drawn like he’d received bad news. His eyes were big and doleful. And watering. ‘OK,’ Hutch whispered. ‘There’s a few more steps and it opens into a room. Like an attic. I can see the underside of the roof. It’s pretty wet up here.’

‘Real slow, H. Slow,’ Luke whispered back. As they groaned under Hutch’s boots, Luke briefly wondered if he would be able to take those last few stairs. Holding his breath, he forced himself to follow.

Hutch was three footsteps ahead of him when he stopped moving. Shoulders down, head cocked forward, Hutch stared at something ahead of him, in the upstairs room, out of Luke’s sight from where he was standing on the last two stairs. Hutch swallowed. He’d seen it too then; he was looking at what sent Phil crazy.

‘What?’ Luke whispered. ‘Hutch. What?’

Hutch shook his head. He winced. It looked like he might cry. He shook his head again, and sighed.

Now Luke didn’t want to see it either, but felt his feet shuffle him upwards. ‘Is it OK? Is it OK? Is it OK?’ he whispered, then realized he had said it three times. He could not take the sight of any more blood today.

‘This is wrong,’ Hutch said in a little-boy voice. Luke stared at the side of Hutch’s face. He climbed the last step and stood beside his friend, then turned his whole body to face the room. At what both of their torches were now directed at.