‘Hello?’ shouted Daniel again as he picked his way quickly over the rocks in the tunnel, hopping to put on his shoes one at a time.
But when he emerged, panting, into the daylight, with the fence all around him, there was no one there. He blinked in the bright sunshine, looking all about him. In the distance, a tractor the size of a toy suddenly breached the horizon and then turned and dipped below it again, into a green field half ploughed.
Daniel studied the ground around the edge of the hole.
‘Well?’ asked Bennett when he emerged, stamping his left foot down to make sure his shoe was on properly.
‘I think there was someone here.’
‘You think or you know?’
Daniel watched Bennett raise his eyebrows, wondering what he meant, until Bennett waggled the half-empty hip flask. His friend plucked the topmost wire between two wooden posts, making it thrum.
‘Well, if there was someone here, they’ve gone now,’ said Bennett. ‘Maybe it was just someone leaving another letter, worshipping at the shrine of Daniel.’
Daniel scanned the notes and offerings lying on the ground, and the ones hooked on to the wire and tacked to the posts, but he couldn’t tell if there was anything new since the last time. He looked to his left and studied the dark fringe of the woods and then he heaved himself up over the fence and started walking towards the trees. He thought he heard Bennett muttering something, but he couldn’t be sure as the breeze blew over his ears and he didn’t turn to find out.
He lingered on the edge of the pines, looking into the cool, muffled dark, and then he walked on, beyond the first row of trunks.
The floor was a weave of soft brown needles, springy, like matting beneath his feet. He trod carefully as if it might give way any moment, listening for the sound of another person, his hearing seeming keener after spending so long near the waterfall.
The cracks of sky shone bluer between the tapering tops the deeper he went. But when he heard Bennett coughing behind him, the needles hissing as he kicked at them, Daniel stopped and picked at a nub of hard sap on the trunk beside him. ‘Let’s just say it was nobody then,’ he said.
‘Or a passing cloud,’ said Bennett. He sighed. ‘It hasn’t been a waste of time though, has it?’
Daniel thought about that. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all.’
And Bennett smiled.
The boys pedalled back across the meadow, leaving two bright, winding trails in the grass. When they arrived at the wheat field, they started back through the lumpy tractor channel.
Daniel looked back over the bobbing, bearded heads of wheat towards the woods, imagining that someone was watching him. But there was just a wall of trees. And then he thought he saw something moving on the edge of the woods. It could have been a figure flitting between the trunks. Or it could have just been the sunlight and shadows falling through the branches of the trees.
‘There’s no one there,’ said Bennett, ‘however much you want there to be.’
Daniel kept watching for a few seconds more and then just turned round. ‘Let’s go or we’ll miss the train,’ he said.