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There was nothing more to do. The sun hung sullen in the sky, tugging down a wreath of dark clouds around it. It stared down at Jordan and didn’t say anything. Jordan braced her shoulders, feeling the heft of the pack on her back, and wondered if she was ready for this.
What did it matter if she was ready? She felt the press of eyes on her from the forest and was light-headed for a moment. It probably knew everything, that ill-formed thing in the trees. It likely knew her flimsy plan, had already come up with one of its own. She felt it gnash its teeth together and she took Bree’s hand in one of her own, Karel’s in the other, and wished Taffy was there to bound away in front. Jordan’s heart twisted behind her ribs and she bit down on a cry.
Neither of the children said anything. They walked to the bank, where Teddy dug into the silt, her hair in snaggles that stuck to her cheeks. She didn’t look up at them. Jordan scanned the river for her father, hoping he was doing something normal, fishing, perhaps.
But he wasn’t, and her heart sank back down behind her ribs, resigned.
‘Do we tell him we’re going?’ Bree whispered.
Jordan gave a tight shrug, then leaned over the bank. ‘We’re going for a walk,’ she called. ‘Just for a little while.’ The words drifted out over the shingle and fell into the water one by one, drifting away on the current, little useless things. ‘We’ll be back for dinner,’ she said, and that was that. Her father never turned from watching his reflection in the water. At least his lip had stopped bleeding.
Jordan dragged in one long slow breath, then let it out. She squeezed the twins’ hands in hers. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, and they all turned to walk along the bank, the river flowing past them, and Jordan imagined she could hear it say this way this way this way.
That way to the sea.
They passed the clearing where Karel had found the diary in the stone storehouse. None of them said anything, but Jordan felt the weight of the book in her pack. She wished she could understand what was in it. She’d recognised that one word by instinct, set on its own on the page. Perhaps there were some more English words in there too. She hadn’t looked through it all. Maybe later, when they stopped for a rest, she would have a look.
The silence wound its way around them and tightened like a scarf. Even their footfalls were flat and lifeless. The river hissed to itself as it slithered by. Jordan kept glancing at it, looking for a place where it would be safe to cross. But even this close to the clearing it tightened between its banks, deepened and flowed faster. She kept her hands in the children’s and walked faster.
‘Mummy’s going to be mad,’ Bree whispered. ‘About Taffy.’
Jordan squeezed her hand. ‘Yes, but she won’t be mad at us.’
Bree lifted a sallow face to her. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I promise.’ Jordan watched her sister’s head sink back against her chest and wanted to scream. How had all this happened? One day she was just a normal kid, daydreaming her way through school, and trying to make plans for what she wanted to do with her life, and here, here she was, trying to keep her brother and sister safe from something evil that stalked them through a forest.
The trees were too close here. They crowded against the river bank, jostling for space. Jordan found herself peering through their shadows, trying to find the thing that was watching them. Because it was watching them, she had no doubt about that. And she thought it was probably laughing. Biding its time before it swung down from the branches and...what? Lopped their heads off? Sucked out their souls like marrow from bones? Both of those, she thought. Her skin crawled and she tugged on the twins’ hands again, urging them to go faster. She could feel the thing in the trees and it was laughing at them.
Her father was well out of sight now. He hadn’t even looked up at her when she called to him. A splinter of hurt wormed in under her ribcage. Her father had changed, before they even came here. A midlife crisis, her mother called it, with a roll of the eyes, and maybe it was, Jordan didn’t really know. What she did know was that these days her father smelled of fear. Fear and desperation. That’s why he was marrying Teddy. She was young and beautiful, and Jordan thought she probably held the fear at bay when they were together.
She didn’t understand her thoughts. Her father was afraid, but Jordan didn’t know what of. Only that he was. And now something had latched onto that fear and was feeding on it, and Jordan was pretty sure that if she and the twins had stuck around, things would only have gotten worse. She didn’t want to watch her father being eaten from the inside out. Even now, she glanced at the river and half expected a limp package of bones rattling in her father’s skin to come floating by.
The picture was a terrible one, and she shook her head to dislodge it.
Karel tugged his hand from hers and pointed off to the side. He was quivering, holding himself tight like the string of a bow. Jordan looked where he pointed, even though she didn’t want to.
In amongst the trees was another of the structures they’d seen before, uprooted trees stacked together to form an asterisk.
‘We saw those before,’ she said.
Karel shook his head. ‘Not that, look, those.’
For a moment, Jordan couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. There was the white of bone, a jumble of sticks, a small tumble of something stacked and falling. Her mouth went dry and she grabbed for Karel’s hands again.
‘Don’t look,’ she said, and wished she hadn’t seen them. The bones were small, but there were so many of them. A tottering pile of bones the size of toothpicks, of small skulls that still stared from blank sockets, and she half expected the whitened beaks to snap open and blindly beg to be fed.
So that’s what it usually ate. Birds, small animals maybe, but she didn’t know what sort of small animals wandered here. Nothing survived the trespass into the demon’s ground; that much was obvious.
‘Are those bones, Jordan? Bones?’
‘Don’t look,’ she commanded again, tugging the kids away, focusing her eyes on the way ahead, the best places to step, the brisk flow of the river beside them. Surely there’d be a place to cross soon? She’d feel safer once they were on the other side. Maybe they’d get lucky and the demon couldn’t cross the river. Then they’d be all right. It could yell and scream at them from the trees as much as it liked then.
Far away, something barked, screamed, barked again.
She couldn’t believe her luck. It was back in the clearing. It wasn’t following them. Then she realised who was in the clearing with it, and her heart sank into her stomach, wallowing there in a bath of acid.
But it wasn’t following them. She felt a loosening inside her, and stopped gripping the children’s hands so tightly.
‘I don’t like that noise,’ Bree said, her soft lips pushed out in a trembling pout.
‘Nor do I,’ Jordan said. ‘But it’s way behind us. Listen.’
Sure enough, the howling and barking rang out again, and this time it was even further away. Jordan let her face break its stiff paralysis and grinned.
‘It’s not following us,’ she said. ‘We’re going to be all right!’
Relief mirrored itself in the twins’ faces and Jordan wanted to lean down and hug them both.
‘Let’s find somewhere to cross the river, okay? We need to get as far away as possible before we stop.’
The river though, sucked at its banks, turned from shingle to mud, as though determined to thwart them. Jordan looked at it, gazed across the green width of it and eyed the other bank enviously. Over there the trees were thinner, spread further apart. It might even be sunnier over there, though surely that was just an illusion. They needed to cross the river as soon as possible.
But it was deep now, and flowing fast past them. There would be no way they could swim across. Even if she went across with each of the children, she would lose them. They would be torn from her grip and swept away. She could imagine it far too well – their small bodies tumbling upside-down right side up upside-down under the water, until a moment later a rock reared up and then the water would spread red, not green.
There would be a better place than this to cross. She just had to be patient and keep going. They were going to be all right. The demon creature was back at the clearing. They were quite far past its rubbish heap – for that was what the pile of bones was, she knew that – and maybe it couldn’t even come this far.
Or maybe it would be satisfied for a while with her father and Teddy. The thought caused a flush of guilt across her face, but she kept on walking. She wouldn’t think about it. Instead she’d think about how much she wanted to be at home, flopped down on the bed, music playing, and if her little brother or sister pushed into her room uninvited, well, she’d never yell at them again.
‘How much further?’ Bree asked, her voice frightened rather than whining.
‘Lots further,’ Jordan replied. There was no point lying.
The day had turned sticky under the low ceiling of clouds and Jordan let go of the twins’ hands and rubbed her damp palms against her shorts. She wondered how far they had to go before they were out of the thing’s territory. She was looking forward to hearing birds again. Nice, normal birds, squabbling in the trees. This silent world was heavy upon her shoulders.
There couldn’t be much further to go. Once they hit normal forest again, she’d let them all stop for a rest. Her shoulders were aching from the pack, and she thought the others probably felt the same. A little further, she thought. Just a little further, and then we can breathe again.
Twisting around to slip a hand in the pocket of her pack, she took out the GPS unit and switched it on. The digital display stuttered and she held it up in the air, urging it to link with a passing satellite, beam safety and coordinates back to her. Not that it would be any use, the coordinates, but it would be one tiny link with the outside world. She thought about the satellite up there, spinning lazy in orbit, and willed it to see them.
The screen stuttered some more, then scrolled numbers at her, faster and faster until they were just a blur of digital dots. Her thumb found the off button and she pressed it.