TWELVE

Sticks. Spiking cheeks. Looking for eyes. Poking the throat. Sticks. Bristling phalanxes needling from branches and erupting from the ground. Sticks everywhere.

Into the dark. Throwing your weight forward. Head down to protect your face. Arms flung out, fingers grasping for purchase, to seize handfuls of the sharp sticks and tug them aside. But down sleeves, inside your collar, and into your socks to catch like barbs, go the sticks and they bring you to a thrashing suspension, your feet never finding the ground. Because you cannot feel the earth, the dark clay from which all of it springs. Down through cracking bracken, sharp brown thorns and crunching dead wood, your feet plunge. Buried to the knee in small crevasses from which you cannot haul slow spent legs.

And there you hang. Gulping at the air like a man drowning. Dizzy with exhaustion, weary like the dying, you hang between the bindings of vine and the scaffolding of sticks. And wait. Wait for it.

Loping through complete darkness that begins a foot from your eyes, its stride covers thickets you could not even crawl through. Sweat cools from your neck down to your waist and turns to shivers.

Will it be quick? The end?

You haven’t even seen it, but the darkness transmits images at you, composites from a thing you have seen elsewhere, at another time. So maybe the horns will go through you. A puncturing thrust to the dense meat of torso before a furious shaking. Before the teeth get busy. Sharp yellow teeth. Old ivory snapping shut with a woody sound. Some teeth long for ripping, gleaming wet from black dog gums.

So keep your eyes closed at the end. You don’t want to see such a mouth up close. Before the bite, before its oblivion in the goring of your soft parts, the speckled lips will curl back in a whinny of excitement. You just know it.

It comes. You can hear it. The bellow of a bullock slowing to a nasal whine. A puff of air, shot through wet nostrils. A doggish grumble, and you can almost see the jaws part before the growl soars through the octaves to become the devilish yip yip yip that has circled you for hours. In the solitary hunt, driven wild by the salty minerals of your fear hanging in the cold air, and the expectation of gouting blood – the hot rush to bathe a black snout – you sense it tensing into a final stalk.

Now you scream. Into the darkness. Above, behind, forward and below. Scream until your throat rubs to rust. Scream at the futility because there is no one to hear.

The air about you stills, or even disappears into a vacuum of anticipation. In your imagination, behind closed eyes, its flanks and haunches are hardening to muscle, tough as ship’s rope. Forward comes the long neck, through the dark, through your mind. Out go two mottled spears of bone. Black horn. Stained and flaking from the last kill.

A final rasp of foetid air, bestial and hot with spoilt meat, engulfs you from behind. Air that comes from a shape so long and powerful, the terrible unseen presence sets fire to every one of your nerves in limb and spine, one more time. To fuel your last thrashing plunge into the sticks. The skewers. Arrows of wood. Hard as bone. Sticks everywhere.

Awake. Into the darkness with a whimper. Shuddering as if you’ve just climbed from cold water. Your lungs pumping, sucking down the kind of air that gathers for decades beneath old houses, tainted by mildew-softened wood and the dunes of dust in lightless spaces.

Where are you? The air moves above your face, or does it?

Bruised. Your back and shoulders hurt against the wooden floor on which you lie looking up into the dark. Moving your arms, you make a rustling sound. The sleeping bag. It’s the sleeping bag that has rolled from the foam mat to the dirty wooden floorboards and ruffled around your knees. Gasping, you sit up. The palms of your hands touch the gritty wood beneath your body.

Luke. My name is Luke and I am on the floor. Of the house. The one we found in the black wood.

His breathing slows down. He stops panting. The sticks are gone. And he’s not being chased. It was just a dream, nothing more. But his skin feels sore all over, like it has been scratched from so many brambles, thorns and trees with bark like the barnacled hulls of old boats. Must be from yesterday. From the long, delirious and exhausting trek through the wet forest that never ends.

He looks about the room and sees a ruddy glow from inside the stove and remembers Hutch lighting it the evening before. Hard to tell what time it is with the windows shuttered tight, the door closed and no light filtering down the staircase from that windowless attic. Where is his watch?

And where are the others?

About him in the thin ruby light he can see three empty sleeping bags, all strewn about and open beside backpacks and the debris that has spilled from them.

Staying still, too afraid to move, he listens. Strains his ears and sends his hearing out and into the darkness.

And there it is. A sound, so faint but still distinguishable from the patter of rain upon the walls and the occasional creak coming out of this broken home in a wet world. Sobbing. Someone is crying. Upstairs. He looks to the indistinct ceiling and swallows the fear that is tightening his throat.

THIRTEEN

On your knees you weep. Sobs wrack your chest and your eyes are cried dry. Parched heaving comes out of your raw throat and sounds strange to your own ears. You cry because this is the end. Your life closes this way, in this dark and stinking place that makes no sense. There is no justice in this and no way to escape. But your anguish does not penetrate it at all. Sitting there on its haunches, on that wretched wooden throne, the long horns rising majestically to the ceiling like some crown, as it watches you, without mercy, empowered by your disgrace on these dirty planks. Its arms are flung to the ceiling in hideous triumph.

Your underwear is wet through, your thighs sticky.

Someone calls to you. From behind.

‘Hutch. Hutch. Mate. What? What is it? Where are the others?’

The voice sounds familiar, but Hutch cannot respond because it is too late and he must wait here for his end. Not long now.

A hand on his shoulder, shaking. ‘Wake up. Hutch, wake up. It’s a dream. Mate, a dream. You don’t know where you are. Wake up now. It’s over. Come on, mate.’

Hutch raises his head, keeping his eyes down and away from that awful black shape before him. He looks up and towards the voice, feels the dry salt crack on his dusty cheeks. Luke.

The recognition of a familiar face makes his own face screw up and tears would have fallen if there were any left. His mouth tastes hot and briny from sobbing. But why? Why is he here, in his boxer shorts, shivering in the darkness with a wet lap, weeping? He was going to die. After being scared for a very long time. Hutch squeezes his eyes shut, and forces his recollection of the dream from his thoughts.

Foolishness creeps through him, warming his cheeks and skin. ‘What the hell?’ He turns to look at what terrified him. In the gloom, faintly lit from some chinks in the ceiling, he sees its outline. Long limbs and horns, the body taut with expectation.

But it’s not alive. No, it is an animal. Stuffed and mouse-eaten. Some remnant of lunacy abandoned in a decrepit attic of a forgotten house. He looks up at Luke and shakes his head.

Luke looks down at him; his eyes full of confusion and fear. ‘We need to get out of here. Now.’

Hutch nods and reaches out to steady himself against his friend, who holds him beneath an arm and pulls him to his feet.

‘The others,’ Luke says. ‘We’ve got to find the others.’

FOURTEEN

They found Dom outside, kneeling in the long wet grass, wearing just his underwear and a T-shirt. Watching the trees with glassy eyes. His whole body shivered in the dawn chill.

Neither of them could touch him. Hutch and Luke had never seen him look this way. Lips dark in a dirt-streaked face, bleached of colour beneath the filth by the cold and by what he had seen, or dreamed of, like them. Dom’s face was oddly pink too, at the sides of his eyes, where his tears had cleansed a hot and salty path down his unshaven cheeks. He was unaware of them. Was just motionless and mumbling to himself with the other two shivering beside him, coming down from their own shock and trying to keep it together.

Tousle-headed and wild of eye, Hutch and Luke could not help but follow Dom’s stare to see what it was he had found out there in the dark trees. But they saw nothing but black wood, dripping greenery and the whitish glimmer of birch bark, all struggling from the choked forest floor.

Hutch spoke first. ‘Domja. Domja.’

He must have heard Hutch, because without turning his head, he said, ‘It’s going to put us up there, in the trees.’

It could have just been gibberish that Dom had brought with him from sleep, but for a while no one spoke. Until Luke turned to face the house. ‘We’ve got to find Phil.’

FIFTEEN

Phil was found in the larder, standing up but cowering naked in a corner of the filthy cramped space. Almost luminous in the shadows, his heavy body had withdrawn itself away from their presence in the doorway. His eyes were locked on to something that was not there, as if it was behind them and slightly above them at the same time. But as his expression was rigid with such an intensity, they were all still tempted to look up, and behind themselves, to see what it was that their friend saw. Both of Phil’s arms were raised. But there was something indecisive about the position of his hands. Perhaps he had lifted them to ward something away, but the supporting limbs had become weak as the hopeless idea of defence struck him.

‘Phil. Mate. Come on. Let’s get you sorted.’ Hutch had recovered enough from his own trauma upstairs to approach Phil; wary, slow, but confident.

Phil’s lips trembled like a child’s in the middle of a fright. His voice was too low for words to be heard. When Hutch touched the fingers of one hand, Phil whimpered and dropped his head between tensed shoulders.

‘It’s all right, mate.’ Hutch held Phil’s hand and gently led him from the annex. The smell of stale urine on damp wood came out with him.

He was covered in his blue waterproof by Dom, huddled out the door of the hovel by Hutch, and taken into the dull aluminium light of early morning.

The forest around the wild paddock looked exhausted after the lightning storm, even relieved. Long wet grass and the cold fresh air revived Phil. He came back to them, to the world, with three powerful heaving sobs that sounded incongruous, strange, unlike any sound they had heard Phil make in their presence before. And then he was standing before them, blinking, with only the top half of his indignity covered. His forlorn eyes questioned each of them, but he received no answer, no understanding. The other three just returned a sense of awkwardness and mystification to him. And they could not hold his intense stare for long.

Hutch turned back to the hovel. ‘Come on. Let’s get packed up.’

Luke moved ahead of him. ‘Amen to that.’

‘Wait,’ Dom said. ‘What the fuck?’

Luke nodded at the hovel. ‘I told you it was a bad idea. Who knows what we stirred up.’ He was about to elaborate, but thought better of it. Phil and Dom stared at Luke, their faces stricken with a desperation to comprehend what he had just suggested.

Hutch paused on the threshold, looked over his shoulder, his face grimed with smoke and dirt. His eyes appeared too big for his dirty face. ‘There’ll be time to talk about it when we’re tear-arsing out of here.’