Lightning crackles again, but the trees are so dense here it doesn’t give her much to see by. Thunder comes quicker this time. It’s almost deafening.
One hand goes down onto the verge, onto a pile of nettles and its little darts spitefully puncture her palm and the soft undersides of her fingers. She has to lean into the pain harder before she can regain enough balance to snatch her hand away and try to rightherself. When she does, her knees buckle as she loses her balance again, and her socked foot is submersed in slick, cold mud. She cries out with frustration but gets up again, inserts her foot back into the boot and carries on, though more slowly and carefully.
Her hand throbs. Cold is creeping into her bones. She walks on feeling helpless and possessed suddenly by the fear that Paul might not answer even if she calls him. What will she do then? Does it mean that Edie has harmed him? Right now, anything seems possible.
The rain worsens as the trees become sparser around her and the canopy above splits. She doesn’t know if she’s safer with more tree cover, or less.
She stops. Questioning herself. Should she turn back? She has no idea how far she’s come or how far she has to go.
She points the torch back in the direction she’s come from to assess her options and sees at once that it will be harder to go back than to keep moving forward. The slope behind her looks steeper than it felt when she was coming down, and slicker, as if everything solid has melted and is descending with her. As if the only momentum is down, toward the farmhouse. She carries on down, slipping and sliding. Yelping.
A feral shriek cuts through the dark. She stops and points her torch into the forest, first in one direction, then another, standing as still as possible, breathing tightly through her nose, as if this could make her invisible. Her hand shakes.
She doesn’t see the movement but hears it. Behind her, something approaches, not quickly, but deliberately. She swings the torch wildly in its direction but sees only foliage, teased by the wind. A shudder ripples through her. Lightning strikes, but it only confuses her, white light glancing off every tree trunk, picking out every leaf and thorn and bramble.
She feels spot-lit by it, intensely vulnerable and takes off down the hill, running as quickly as she can, not caring what she stepson, or whether she risks falling. She feels possessed by fear, driven by it. The torch beam bounces, illuminating things at random. A tree, the ground, a face.
Emily doesn’t see the log across the lane. Her toes hit it, hard, and she falls heavily. Her phone flies from her hand. For a moment, the large puddle it lands in glows, lit from within, before reverting to oily black.
Emily lies still, wet, shocked, cold to her bones, and in the deepest darkness she’s ever been alone in. She begins to push herself up and her whole body starts to shake.
A few feet from her, a hand reaches toward the puddle where her phone has sunk, dips into the water, and removes it.
Jayne walks through the darkness and calls for Emily. The rainfall is more intense than ever. She should go back inside because the storm is almost overhead, but she feels obliged to check around the barn thoroughly, at least. If she doesn’t, she won’t have done her job properly.
The incline behind the barn is steep and the passageway cut out of the hillside between the two is narrow. She’ll be amazed if Emily is hiding back here but you never know.
As she steps into the passageway a blur of sharp teeth and black-and-white fur bolts past, almost knocking her legs out from under her. Too close, too big, too strong, too quick. A badger. She yelps and swings around, trying to track the animal with the torch beam but failing. She doesn’t know where it’s gone, and she can only hope it’s not coming back.
She inches along. The kitchen light glows through the small back window. It’s fogged with condensation, but the room looks empty. Ruth must still be upstairs.
It feels surreal, looking in, as if she’s an outsider at her ownweekend and that change of perspective gives her pause and makes her question everything she’s felt certain about, and persuaded the others of.
She feels a surge of fear. From out here, looking into the barn, as if it were a dollhouse, or an alternate reality, the thought that Mark might be in danger doesn’t feel so far-fetched as it did earlier.
And she regrets making Emily walk uphill toward the burial chamber earlier, when they were looking for a phone signal. If she’d agreed to go back to the farmhouse, they might have made it down easily and they wouldn’t be in this situation now. If Emily is hurt, will Paul ever forgive them?
Breathe, she tells herself. As she takes her next step something crunches beneath her foot and simultaneously from behind her an animal shriek of pain cuts through the night. The badger again? Has it caught prey? Got itself hurt somehow? Or did the noise come from further away? It’s hard to tell. The wind is whistling.
She hurries back out of the passageway and aims the torch in the direction of the sound, then in wider and wider arcs, but it’s futile. She sees nothing apart from shivering foliage, and branches bent taut but can’t help feeling that things are happening around her, larger movements, laced with menace, that her regular senses can’t detect.
She concentrates hard, willing herself to remain calm and not to give in to fear, but she fails. Her chest is rising and falling rapidly. The muscles in her neck and shoulders are knotted.
And now she’ll have to punish herself because she equates feeling fear with cowardice. It’s what she did when she was serving. If something made her feel weak, or vulnerable, she pushed herself harder and faster, doubled down, volunteered over and over for things that made her blood run cold until she’d taught herself a lesson.
It made her feel better about the death she witnessed and felt responsible for.
She moves forward, consciously putting one foot in front of the other, but not too quickly. Part of the challenge is that she must do this slowly enough to feel her fear as it knits itself into every bone, muscle, and tendon in her body and walk with it, uncowed by it.
She emerges around the front of the house and thinks she’ll make herself check the lane one more time. As she approaches the thicket of hedgerow at its entrance, she senses movement again, even though she doesn’t see or hear it clearly. The hair on the back of her neck prickles.
“Emily?” she calls, hopeful. Perhaps Emily is hiding, ashamed that she didn’t have the courage to go down the hill on her own in the end. It would be a relief but there’s no reply.
Lightning rips through the sky, thunder on its tail and Jayne sees something in front of the hedge. She shrieks involuntarily and tries to direct her torch toward it with an unsteady hand. The bulb flickers and fails. She shakes the torch, but it won’t come back to life.
She forces herself to approach the hedge, praying for her eyes to get used to the dark but feeling as if the darkness is fear itself, pressing in around her, claiming her. When she’s close, she can make out an outline that looks anomalous. A person?
“Edie?” she whispers. The idea that Edie might be out here comes to her unexpectedly, but it’s convincing. Why not? Has Edie come to witness the meltdown she triggered with the letter? Or to do worse?
