The onset of night brought about contradictory feelings within Paul Harvey. He welcomed it because it hid him and cloaked his furtive excursions from the farm. But he feared it too because it brought memories. Night had, in the past, always been a time of fear for him. The time when his father and mother would fight or when, in later years, he would be dragged from his bed and beaten, forced to bear that reeking stench of stale whisky and tobacco in his face as his father shouted at him.
Harvey hated to be shut in. It was another legacy of his childhood. His bedroom door was always locked from the outside, and this practice continued right up until his father died. There was no chamber pot in his room and, more often than not, he would be forced to urinate out of the window if he awoke during the night. Before he understood that trick he would simply wet the bed or do it into one of the drawers. Consequently, the clothes inside stank most of the time. However, whichever course of action Harvey had taken it had brought savage retribution from his father. During his troubled years at school, Harvey had been quizzed by teachers and taunted by his fellow pupils about the cuts and bruises which he bore almost all the time but, of course, he never dared to divulge the truth of how he sustained them.
His hatred of enclosed places had intensified during his stay in Cornford prison. The fact that he was kept in solitary, for the sake of the other prisoners, made things worse. But now, to a certain extent, he was free to wander the open fields and hillsides of Exham for the first time in his life and, with night now draped across the countryside like a shroud, he did just that.
As he stood at the top of a hill, the lights of the town glittered invitingly below him and Harvey gripped the sickle tightly as he made his way down the incline. An owl hooted close by but Harvey ignored its cry.
The town beckoned and Harvey did not refuse its call. He felt no fear, just a peculiar feeling that was something like exhilaration.
The woods on the outskirts of town swallowed him up.