Part I

‘The Earth can heal you . . .’

Statement taken from Mason Brand’s journal, dated 27th April, 2001

1

Tamsin Doherty took a taxi back from the clinic knowing Kevin wouldn’t be around when she arrived home. She’d memorised the advice leaflet so there was no need to hide anything when she got through their front door.

Expect slight bleeding to lessen over the next few days. Cramping was normal - painkillers had been provided and she’d already chewed two of them down. Anything out of the ordinary (what the fuck was ordinary about this?) and she should contact her GP. Emotional fluctuations could occur. That she could handle. If there was one thing she was glad about, it was her almost sociopathic self-control. No one - no one - would have any idea what she’d done. Especially not Kevin. Even though all this was his fault, she would never say a word about it. Not even on her deathbed. And if it happened again she’d do exactly the same thing. Oh, she’d find ways to hurt him, of course. Kevin Doherty was not a man, he was a representation of a man. She cared about her two Staffies more than she cared about him. And, whether he was aware of it or not, she would humiliate him, belittle him behind his back at every turn.

Marriage was like everything else in the World. It revolved around money and power. Kevin had the money, she had the power and ever more it would remain. There was an adjunct to that. Whoever was the best keeper of secrets had the most power.

Christ, I’m a bitch. A hard-faced taker.

No, not a taker, Tam. A winner. Life is short, beauty doesn’t last. Take what you can get while you can get it. Make the most of every moment. Smell the fucking roses.

Who was that talking? Her mother? Probably, God rest her. She was a woman who’d had everything a man could provide. She’d lived like a queen to the end of her days. Tamsin planned to do the same.

Smell the roses? Oh, she smelled them alright. Nothing was sweeter.

The taxi’s motion made her nauseous. The drugs still in her system, she assumed.

‘Slow down, would you? It’s not a fucking track day.’

The driver glanced in his rear-view. She saw his eyes assess for talent first, danger second. If only he knew. The ride got smoother and she relaxed a little. Once she was through the door of her house all this would be behind her. Life, her blissful suburban wet-dream, would continue. She smiled. Satisfaction. Anticipation.

The smile fell away, though. She had questions. She could fend them off and distract herself eternally but she knew the questions would never leave her alone.

What would they do with it? Experiments? It was such a tiny thing - more like a rat or a mouse than a human. Would they burn it? Perhaps it would be buried. She imagined there was a job in the hospital for some minimum-waged minion who did nothing but burials. Judging by the number of women in the recovery room, both too young-looking and too old-looking, her fantasy interment worker would be kept very busy.

Yes, burial.

That was what happened. It was the proper thing, after all. Bury it. Let it rot. Let it be forgotten forever in the earth.

Her smile returned and she slumbered slightly, still drugged and comfortable. Her dreams were snippets of manipulated chaos and well-planned destruction. So much to look forward to.

***

Richard Smithfield sat in front of his computer and wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers. Moments later the slick had returned. The computer’s drive whirred and ticked. His wireless router whined at the edge of his hearing. An LED flickered, suggestive of the high-speed transfer of information. The fan kicked in to cool the circuitry.

Pam and the children were asleep and the house was quiet. It was three am. His study door was locked from the inside. But still. He was always like this. Heart rate elevated. An untrustworthy sensation in his guts. Breath caught at the top of his lungs.

He swallowed loudly. The download continued. This was the last one. He swore it to himself.

When the download was complete his media program opened the new file automatically. He turned the volume down to the lowest possible level, expanded the footage to full screen. He watched, an audience of one, the rush of blood inside his head louder than the grunts of satisfaction and the cries of denial and pleas for cessation. He didn’t understand the language but he didn’t need to. The tears were real. The contact was real. No make-up, no CGI. No actors.

He could not take his gaze from the salacious thievery in front of him. Didn’t want to blink when the surface of his eyeballs dried and demanded it. He was there with them; hurting, taking. And soon enough he used his own hand to give himself the release he so terribly wanted to experience, not in fantasy, not on the screen, but in real life.

Richard Smithfield couldn’t drive past a playground or school without giving them a sidelong glance. Sports days and matches had always been the most exciting and most testing times for him. Pam thought he was a proud father, watching Agatha swim and Donald play soccer but he was only ever on the lookout for that one opportunity; the one he most wanted but would never, ever take. Like a lion assessing a herd, he was waiting for an unusual animal to separate from the others and make itself known to him. It was a game, of course, and games needed more than one player. He watched for the ones who recognised themselves in him without even knowing that was what they saw.

And that was where the game ended. It was enough for him to know he was able to find prospects out there. He could not allow such investigations to become actions. Even though he thought about it every single day of his life. He loved his family too much. If he hadn’t met Pam and had the kids, he supposed he might be locked up by now. Making a family hadn’t come naturally to him. He’d had to imagine other things in order to succeed with Pam. But he had them now and he cared very deeply for them.

He imagined a time of freedom when he was older, somehow believing there would be less at stake when the kids had grown up and moved away. Such a time would probably never come. For now, and forever probably, pornography would have to suffice. It was dangerous enough like this. Stories about rings being smashed by the police and men like him being dragged into court were in the news all the time. He knew because he watched for those stories more than any other. He hadn’t allied himself with other people, though, and he hoped that would be enough to keep him safe.

As soon as he’d ejaculated, guilt flooded every cell of his body. He sweated it, smelled it on himself. It was always the same. He cleaned up carefully, even down to picking up moulted pubic hairs from the carpet. Everything would be flushed away down the toilet. He checked his file system and saw how much footage and images he’d accumulated. It made him nauseous to think of what might happen if his computer was seized.

Suddenly he was finding it a struggle to breathe. His heart was labouring but this time in a different way. It was beating like a baby bird’s heart but it didn’t feel like it was pumping enough blood. The rushing sound came back to his ears and rose in volume. The study seemed to go grey and all he could see was what was right in front of him. The computer. The files full of digitally-recorded exploitation.

It had to go. All of it.

This was the last one. He’d promised himself and he was going to make good on that promise this time. There was no untraceable way to erase files from a computer. He knew that. There were programs that would write over the disks hundreds of times but traces could be found no matter how many times the data was erased and overwritten. And the obvious question to be asked by the authorities in such a case would be: what on earth was so private it had to be concealed with such obsession?

Tomorrow he would see to the problem and make his home and his family safe. Then it would be time to buy himself a brand new, totally ‘clean’ computer. A computer he would not befoul with his fixation.

***

My name is Ray Wade. My username is The Survivor. It is a world of nightmares now, worse than anything I could have imagined.

I spend the day collecting useful items and clearing out houses one at a time, one street at a time throughout the city. Houses are easy; they yield bounties for a minimum of effort at minimal risk.

I’ve been scratched a few times but bitten only once. Not the sort of damage I need to worry about. However, while I’ve managed to collect ammunition of many kinds and plenty of medical items in various packs, the entire day has been fruitless because I have discovered no firearms. No rifle. No shotgun. Not even a pistol.

Daytime is never too bad, never too dangerous. It’s my chance to recuperate and stock up on necessities. Take rest, drink a supplement, raid the silent town for anything that might be useful. Minor scuffles are usually the worst I encounter while the sun is up. At first I only had a flick knife - for use at very close quarters. It’s all about technique; dodging bites and grabs and lunges, darting in between these, scoring a single wound and getting back out of reach again. With patience, striking with precision, this is the way to overcome them.

Dozens of them lie motionless around the town in my wake. Dead again. Dead for good and ever.

That first day, with nothing but my flick knife, had been difficult. The first night which followed it was worse. Many was the time I began to believe I wouldn’t make it, that I’d lost too much blood or carried too much infection in my system. Somehow, eking out my meagre packful of possessions, I stayed alive. Every new house I came to, every storeroom I found, was a bonus. I lived from one moment to the next, thinking only of what I could salvage and how best to destroy those who assailed me.

This night, though, I know in my heart it will be worse. Somehow, the sunsets hold a clue to how the night will be and here I am, not ready. Not ready by a long chalk, with the sun slipping behind gangrenous clouds, casting ochre and meat-toned shadows everywhere. The clouds lump up into intestinal creases, promising rain and possibly lightning.

And what do I have to get me through a night I know will be the leanest yet for bounties, the roughest yet for attacks and ambushes? My pack contains two bottles of protein supplement shakes - one strawberry, the other pineapple, for what little that’s worth. For the dark I’ve been lucky enough to discover a miner’s headlamp and spare batteries. I have syringes, antibiotics, needle, thread, bandage and scissors and one large bottle of topical disinfectant. In case of a real emergency, I have a single shot of adrenaline that might buy me enough time to find a hiding place where I can rest up for a while.

Problem is, while I am the hunter in the daytime, at night they come looking for me. Finding somewhere with a strong enough door to keep them out, even a lone determined one, will require a major stroke of good fortune. I don’t hold out much hope. One wound tonight, one serious bite or cut, and I will be sharing the dirt with the rest of them.

I have one thing going for me.

In the three days I’ve been here, I’ve found good handheld weapons. After using the flick knife I arrived with, I discovered a length of hefty pipe. A couple of well-aimed blows to the head with that was enough to take any of them down. At least so far. Then in a really tight spot, badly wounded and needing to tend to myself, I found a fire axe - lightweight haft and sharp as the day it was made. Get the swing right and it removed heads in a single swipe. Using it had almost been a pleasure after that.

Accordingly, my hand-to-hand skill increased. In one house I bested an unusually fast and deft assailant. Killing it had been a major undertaking until I found its weak spot. When I subsequently searched the house, I found manuals on martial techniques and then, completely by accident, I discovered a false section in the bedroom wall. Behind it had been built a small alcove and altar. On this altar, next to the statue of some eastern deity I didn’t recognise, was a sheathed katana. I wasted no time strapping it to myself and making a few test strokes in the air of the bedroom. As if I’d been born to hold that very weapon, the strokes from the manuals came to me like inspiration.

It was the confidence that weapon and those skills gave me that made me so careless of the time. Feeling unassailable and swaggering into every house on every street in search of booty, I’ve passed a whole day without making any real progress.

And now the darkness is coming; bruised, aching nightfall over a dead town full of sickness. I have my pack, lightly stocked by any standards, and I have my head-lamp, which I now put on. And I have my katana; the one thing that might surely cut through this night and lead the way to morning.

***

The RefuSec Waste Management truck pulled up to the gates of Shreve District Council landfill at 6.05 mother gates were locked and the staff car park was empty save for a dust covered and dented Ford Mondeo. It was dark and an uneasy breeze agitated the gates causing them to clang softly on their hinges.

On the other side of the entrance, a light was on in one of the prefab buildings. Another, taller block of light appeared as the door of the building opened. Briefly it was filled by the silhouette of a man pulling on a coat. The door shut behind him. As he approached the gates, the truck’s headlights picked out the day-glo stripes on his workwear.

A light mounted on top of the fence began to pulse orange and the gates slid open with a minimum of noise from their well-maintained runners and bearings. The man in the coat waved the truck in. There was a hiss of brakes being released and a cough of diesel. The truck pulled inside the perimeter and stopped again. Behind it, the gates were already closing.

The figure from the building approached the cab. The window was open. A tattooed face looked out, grinning and chewing.

‘Alright, Stig.’ said the driver through crackles of gum.

The gate-man nodded, not missing the open-mouthed smacking.

‘Still trying to pack in the cigarettes?’

‘Nah. Given up giving up, mate. Addicted to the bloody gum as well now. Fackyin’ . . . look at this.’ Chewing all the while the driver with a bad painting for a face rolled up his sleeve. His eyes were open very wide. ‘Nicotine patch, that is,’ he said pointing as though the gate-man might miss it. ‘A fag’s just not the full bifter without the patch and the gum. I have to take a couple of beta-blockers with a few swigs of scotch before I can think about gettin’ any kip at night.’ The driver stared out into the night. ‘Fackyin’ . . .’

The gate-man considered a light-hearted jibe about rehab and let it pass. The driver was lean and had a reputation for getting out of his cab to settle slights. Instead the gate-man said:

‘Know where you’re going?’

The driver nodded. Too fast. Too many times. Like a viper-strike his hand came out of the cab window. The gate-man flinched but he needn’t have. The hand was thin and grimy, fading turquoise webs and dots extending down from the wrist, a swallow near the thumb. Between the long fingers a wad of dirty twenties. The gate-man smiled and took them, flicked through, and pocketed the lot.

‘Who’s overrun their quota this time?’ he asked as the hand withdrew upwards.

‘It’s not that,’ said the driver. ‘The incinerator at the hospital’s bust, innit. Fackyin’ . . . can’t burn up the cut off arms and legs and lumps of cancer an’ that. Amazing how much “waste” they create. I ain’t going in a hospital, Stig. Not ever. I’d come out half the man I am now.’ The driver looked down and grinned, eyes chalky, already thinking about something else. Briefly, he came back to the moment. ‘Tell you what else, Stig. It stinks. The worst stink of anything I’ve ever had to shift. Shit and disease and rotting meat, all from people like you and me. Went into hospital in one piece, left with bits missing and a super-bug. Never going in there, mate. Fackyin’ . . . never.’

The gate-man nodded and stepped back.

The driver slammed the truck into gear and ground away along the temporary road leading to the landfill cells. Very soon, when the canyons of trash were all filled, the whole landfill would be sealed and covered with soil. They’d turn it onto a public park or sports centre or playing field and, in time, no one would remember the network of feeder roads that led the trucks to the huge mouths in the earth that swallowed the town’s muck silently and willingly. All this would be gone but the gate-man would be doing something similar somewhere else - at least for a while. There would always be waste and there would always be a need for waste managers and refuse engineers. He smiled because he knew he’d never be out of work.

Until he wanted to be.

The sound of the truck’s engine receded into the darkness along with the glare from its headlights. The gate-man half wished the driver would make an over-stimulated miscalculation and bury himself and his truck as well.

Fackyin’ . . . forever.

But where was the charity in that kind of thinking? Besides, without the hyperactive driver, whose name he still didn’t know after years of after-hours interactions like this one, there would be no backhanders for burying the town’s unauthorised waste. Not to mention the loads brought in by other drivers from other towns in other counties all around the country. Landfill space was running out fast. At two-hundred quid per unauthorised load - and there were several of those every week - the gateman was amassing a serious retirement fund. He looked through the chain link fence at his battered car and smiled. No one would ever guess he was a wealthy man. Only when this job was long behind him and he was living in a country where the weather and the people didn’t bring you down every single day, only then would he allow himself to live the way he wanted to.

It was going to be a lot of fun.

2

To anyone else it would have been the filthiest place on Earth. To Mason Brand it was a place of power, even more sacred and essential than his precious vegetable garden. He broke in there most nights to make contact with the land.

He stood barefoot on a layer of freshly-dumped soil. It was about a foot thick, just enough to keep the smell down and the animals from digging through overnight. Below the thin, yielding earth millions of tons of compacted waste rotted. Through his soles he could feel the warmth of it rising up like living radiation. The warmth came in the form of gas - noxiously sweet-smelling methane mostly - and in a simple emanation of heat; a subterranean fever.

The expanse below, filled with every kind of rubbish so compressed it was solid enough to build upon, was alive with decomposition. Tiny bugs were multiplying and eating the waste, breaking it down a particle at a time. Even the metals were being oxidised and consumed. All manner of human leavings and discarded materials were locked below him in cells the size of canyons excavated deep into the earth. Tramped down, by huge machines with toothed wheels, covered with soil to be forgotten and ignored. An entire county’s dumping ground. A place no one ever thought about unless the wind was blowing the wrong way.

But Mason Brand thought about it a lot.

There was something very dangerous about Shreve’s landfill. Here, after all, was the most poisonous site in the Midlands - in the country perhaps. More polluted than the run-off from any of Shreve’s factories. More pregnant with disease than the sewers. Cut yourself on a piece of rusted metal here and the wound would corrupt your entire body with sickness, end your life in a few days. These were the things the people of Shreve might have thought about the landfill, if they’d had a spare moment. And, of course, if they thought about it a little more carefully, they might have realised they were incredibly fortunate such a place existed; a place of severance and forgetting, a place of great convenience where all their waste could be covered over and ignored.

Mason would have been the most optimistic of all of them. For him there was something very beneficial about this place of gathered mess and heaped destruction and filth. Something almost holy. He had a gut feeling about the land and about its influence. This instinct was something which came from generations who’d existed long before him, woodsmen and wanderers, the generations who’d lived close to the land. Mason had lived exactly like them for a time, like a neolith. It was a part of his past he tried hard not to think about.

He had a sense of the Earth’s ability to heal and transform. This power came in the form of a pull or draw - not gravity exactly but a force of similar quality. The body of the planet, its soil and dust, was something like a living poultice. He had used this quality to cure himself of various ills over the years. A pack of wet soil wrapped in muslin and applied directly to his skin had cleared him of an attack of boils five years previously. Two years later, the same treatment, combined with crushed herbs from his garden, had relieved him of scabies.

For deeper maladies, wounds to the soul, Mason Brand was in the habit of digging a shallow trench, lying down naked so his skin would touch the loam and covering himself with earth up to his chin. There in his own back garden, hidden among his fruits and vegetables, he would lie awake all night with the worms and the slugs progressing around him. The Earth would draw the spiritual sickness from him and by the dawning he would be clean. Clean as the day his mother had expelled him, innocent and unprotected, into the filthy world of men.

It wasn’t something he talked about with his neighbours. Mason Brand rarely talked to anyone if he could avoid it. The landfill was a place where, by necessity, the Earth’s drawing was very strong indeed. And that was why, at night, when the compactors stood still as drugged giants and the rest of Shreve slumbered within their clean brick walls, Mason would climb through the hole he’d made in the perimeter fence and stand barefoot in this place of entropy and rot.

A quarter of a mile away, near the workers’ huts and the contractor’s offices, a small tower stood like a black candle against the light-polluted sky and at the top of this candle a flame, only visible at night, burned soft blue: the ignited exhalations of the earth, the collected methane being burned to save the atmosphere from its deleterious effects. But it wasn’t possible to collect all the gas and sometimes Mason would see violet will-o-the-wisps flash and shimmer and disappear as a small pocket of vapour ignited spontaneously. He saw these flashes as signs of the Earth’s life, blips on a monitor, pulses and heartbeats, messages of goodwill rising from deep within the body of the world. And from these portents he took faith in the way of things and experienced a simple gladness about the rightfulness and righteousness of decay.

He curled his toes into the soil, gripped the Earth, held on to her. She took away his leavings too; bad energies, bad thoughts, sickness before it had the chance to take root in him. Wrongfulness was pulled down through him, leaving him pure.

A sickle of moon rose up from the opposite horizon, as if to balance the disappearance of the sun. It was nothing but a cool glow at first, indistinct and pale behind the low, filthy clouds. As it rose it shrank and its edges became honed until it slit the fleshy vapours near the ground and floated free. A crooked smile, a slash in the night sky where the light from a pure universe seeped through.

Mason was hypnotised. He had no way to measure the slippage of overlapping moments. He might have been doing no more than focussing on an object through a lens or he might have been standing there a whole season, growing roots through the veneer of loose soil and deep into the landfill. Finally, he blinked and looked around him, feeling it was time to go home. He needed to rest. Even the Earth slept, half of it slumbering through darkness as it rotated its spherical face to the blessing of the sun.

Every part of his body was cold but the soles of his feet, still receiving warmth from the ground, still bleeding out his darker energies. He would never be completely pure - nothing and no one could be. For then an absolute state would be reached and the motion and flow of things into each other would, therefore, have ceased. Such a state, he believed, was synonymous with the end of the world and, no matter how well he felt he understood these things, he was not ready for that.

But the moon held him, its bright blade incising his eyes, the hook of it snagged into his mind. He could feel its draw on him too, coaxing his water, pulling him up. He closed his eyes a moment and hauled himself back taking a deep breath. Yes, time to go home.

His feet were welded to the ground and came away reluctantly. He stumbled and almost fell over trying the take his first couple of steps. Then the grip of the moon and the grip of the Earth were eased and he was liberated.

He didn’t get far before stopping again. There was wetness underfoot. Strange. The weather had been changeable but there’d been no rain for a few days. No puddles or muddy troughs belonged here, especially not on newly scattered soil. He looked down and scanned the darkness where only his feet were recognisable, fungus white against the black humus. Around them, oily liquid blackness was spreading out. The viscous fluid reflected the scalpel-sharp moon and even the yellow glow of the streetlights coming from Meadowlands, the estate where he lived.

All manner of possibilities sprang into his mind. A water main had burst nearby and was flooding the landfill. A blockage had caused the canal to burst its banks. Something in the landfill had burst and its filth was seeping upwards. None of the explanations fitted what was happening. They came and went in a sliver of a moment leaving only fear behind. Something was wrong here; profoundly, unnaturally wrong. The longer he looked at the welling of black fluid around his feet, covering them now, the stronger became this conviction.

Without taking another step, he crouched a little and put his hand to the surface of this rising flood. It was warm and slightly greasy between his fingertips. He held the substance below his nose and inhaled. It smelled rusty. This made sense to him. The landfill was full of oxidising iron and steel. Perhaps the leachate from the landfill had been blocked somehow and was backing up. Just as soon as he had this notion, it too was dismissed. The fluid should have smelled of things other than metal decay. It should have smelled of shit and rot. It didn’t.

He walked now, suddenly and with purpose, away from the newly covered area of landfill and back towards the fence-line. The substance under his feet was tarry and when he reached a place where the fluid no longer welled, the loose soil stuck to his tacky soles. He collected his shoes and socks by the gap in the chain-link, bent low and stepped through. He turned and used his pocketful of wire ties to sew the fence breach together again.

The way to his back garden twisted through low shrubs where small, well-used tracks had been made by badgers and rabbits. It led out onto an expanse of brownland where the grass that grew was sparse and clumped. Underfoot was coke and slag from the open cast coal mine that had been there before the days of the landfill. If this wasn’t hazardous enough to bare feet, much of the waste ground was littered with shattered glass from discarded bottles and other litter. Mason didn’t care; whatever was on his feet, he didn’t want to get it on his socks and in his shoes. He kept waiting for the substance to itch or burn the skin of his feet but it didn’t.

And so, as he did so many nights of the year, he crossed the brownland like a shadow returning to its sleeping owner. He was lucky, he believed, to reach his back gate without cutting himself. Instead of letting himself in through the back door of his house, he unlocked the garden shed, stepped in and switched on its single bare bulb. After the darkness of the landfill, forty watts was like staring at the midday sun. He blinked until his pupils adjusted and sat on a woodwormed pine chair.

Then he looked at his feet.

***

‘Agatha, come and get your tea.’ Agatha Smithfield hated her name.

‘Witch,’ she whispered to the walls of her room. ‘Witch-bitch-cunt.’

There were footsteps on the stairs; her mother padding in her stupid, ugly pink slippers, a pair of flesh-tone pop-socks barely hiding the broken veins in her ankles. Her mother scuffing along the upstairs carpet; the footsteps of a very minor martyr. She could see it all without looking.

‘Aggie? Your tea’s ready. Are you coming down?’

The voice was breezy, masking concern. Agatha swallowed her rage, stuffed it back down into her stomach to smoulder and pressurise.

The only other Agatha she knew of was Agatha Christie, a boring woman - long dead - who had written boring murder stories populated by boring toffs from a boring age she had no interest in.

Boring, boring, boring.

‘Yes, mother. Of course I’m coming. Don’t rush me all the time.’

‘Sorry, dear.’

And don’t fucking apologise for everything.

The soft footsteps retreated, a wound in their rhythm. Agatha felt guilt and disgust uncoil in her throat.

The name Agatha was synonymous with boring. It was also synonymous with ancient, grey-haired people. It was no name for a seventeen-year-old woman of the third millennium. Plenty of other girls her age had used their middle names to escape the stigma of their first names. But Betty Smithfield sounded so similarly awful there was no point. Shit, what had her parents been thinking about when they named her? They’d refused her entreaties to let her change her names. She vowed to do it anyway as soon as she left home. It would be goodbye Agatha Betty. Maybe she’d even change her surname, begin a second life. In the meantime the contraction ‘Aggie’ was the best she could do.

Downstairs, they’d all be sitting there already. Waiting. Don would have started eating even though their mother and father would have told him not to. Whenever she saw her brother, he was eating but there was no sign of it on his frame. The way he looked he might have been wandering the streets for a month. Nothing on him but sinew and gaunt, tight muscle. If she ate half as much as him she’d turn into a walrus.

She swore softly and swung her legs off the bed. She smoothed down her clothes, feeling the gentleness of her own curves and enjoying it. She looked in the mirror. She was beautiful and she knew it. She had no idea why she was stuck here in the suburbs of a town where the future held no promise. There was no existence here which she could aspire to, other than single-motherhood and government handouts and daytime TV. Gossip and jealousy, binge drinking and bitter tears as life stole her looks. She wasn’t so stupid as to believe her beauty would last forever. If she wanted to use it, she had to get started. The sooner she left, the sooner her second life, her real life, could begin.

It was the way out she hadn’t quite found yet. She knew it wasn’t as simple as hitching a ride to London and hoping for the best. She’d heard of other girls who had done as much. Some came back, beaten by the city and its takers, happy to sink back into the mould society had prepared for them, glad to be safe and obscure. Others had not returned but by the silence they left behind them, it was clear they had not succeeded. Not succeeded at anything except deviating from their grand schemes, succeeded instead at being exploited, succeeded at failure. It was no wonder they never came back, dragging the miasma of their filthy misadventures behind them like the smell of sickness. What family could live down such prodigality around here, where everyone talked and anyone could be destroyed by rumour without even knowing they were falling from grace?

No. She was not going to follow that path. She was going to plan it and she was going to achieve her goals through careful preparation. There was a right way of leaving town and she would find it. She would leave Agatha Betty Smithfield far behind and she would transform. When she did finally come back, it would be with her head held high and against the odds. Those who weren’t proud of her would be nauseous with envy.

Knowing this made it possible to walk down the stairs of her family’s uninspiring house, a house like too many others on the estate with an uninspiring family to match. Knowing this, she could take her place at the table and smile and eat the bland shit her mother cooked each day. She could do it because it was all part of her plan. Her time was coming. In months or weeks or days, the opportunity she was waiting for would present itself. There was a shiver of excitement in her stomach.

Richard Smithfield looked at her over his glasses, a toad of a man - not sweaty; oily.

‘Finally, the queen arrives.’

She sat down at the table. Donald looked at her out of the corner of his eye and put his fork down but he was already chewing something. Her mother, Pamela Smithfield, smiled but it looked like a wince.

‘For what we are about to receive,’ she said ‘may the Lord make us truly thankful.’

They muttered Amen.

Donald resumed eating, everyone else began.

Aggie put lumpy mashed potato and dried out chicken in her mouth. The gravy was brown but had no flavour. It didn’t even smell of anything. The only smell seemed to be wafting in from the waste disposal unit in the kitchen sink. It was always getting blocked. Either that or the wind was blowing the wrong way from the landfill again. She ignored it and chewed. Under the table, Sasquatch the golden retriever waited beside Aggie for his share of the meal - most of which would arrive from her surreptitious fingers long before it could be considered leftovers.

‘Gosh, mother, this is lovely,’ she said.

Pamela Smithfield’s smile returned, uncertain, faltering. She said nothing.

Nor did anyone else.

***

Not only did it smell like rust, it looked like rust. He picked off a dried flake of it. It came away reluctantly like a new scab. Crumbling this between his fingers, it even felt like rust as it disintegrated.

Suddenly, more than anything in the world, he wanted it to be rust.

But it wasn’t.

He left the shed, locked it, let himself into the silent house through the back door and went upstairs to scrub his feet in the bath. Only when they were scoured red and no trace remained, only when he’d washed the tub out thoroughly three times, only then did he allow himself to run a proper bath.

He lay there, knees poking up like strange tall islands, their dark hair matted flat to his white skin. Steam rose; the mist surrounding his anatomical seascape. He tried not to think about what had happened. All the evidence was gone now. It would be easy enough to let time pass and convince himself he’d made a mistake or that he’d stared at the moon for so long he’d hallucinated the rest of it. He became uncertain of his own judgement and was immediately glad for his fallibility, his untrustworthy perceptions.

There was comfort then and his eyes closed against the knee-atolls and the glare of the bathroom bulb. It lasted only moments. His eyes snapped open. This matter would not lie. He could not ignore it.

Mother Earth was bleeding.

***

I consider my options.

I can stay holed up in a room all night, recuperating and staying safe but I am wasting precious time by doing so - outside the situation worsens. I also run the risk of my scent being picked up by hungry assailants out on the hunt. One or two I can manage and, if the door is strong enough, I might keep them out until morning. But if one or two become three or four, there won’t be any door strong enough to keep them at bay.

I can continue raiding houses but the strength and agility of the assailants is far greater once the sun is down. I risk losing more than I might gain from the plundering.

The only real option is the bold approach: to take my katana onto the streets and hope I make it out of suburbia and up to the facility. There are routes, I know there are. Some of them will be almost uninhabited, even by assailants. But knowing which route to take is mostly luck. Stumble down the wrong alley or break through a fence in the wrong back garden and I’m likely to encounter odds I can’t match - not even with the weaponry of the Japanese warrior class. Not even with the skills I’ve developed, so hard-won over the last three days. The assailants have ways of moving, habits of attack and I’ve studied them well. Against one or even two at a time it gives me a big advantage. But against greater numbers I don’t think I’ll survive for long.

This leaves a final possibility but it’s the coward’s way forward. I can use stealth. Creep from doorway to doorway, sidle along walls and stay in the shadows of alleyways. I can crouch and crawl on my belly in the dirt. It will be slow. It will drain me. But it’s safer than walking into God knows how many skirmishes and risking my life.

While I consider all this, I stand with my back to a brick wall which forms the side of a three-bedroomed house. Opposite me is the wooden fence dividing this property from the one next door. I notice I’m panting, my adrenaline levels rising at the prospect of what lies ahead. Whatever I do, I will not sleep this night. I will not rest unless injury forces me into hiding.

I drop to a crouch and creep along the wall towards the back garden. It’s unlikely there will be anyone back there. I can’t see too far ahead but to turn my head-lamp on will attract attention. I have to do this almost blind. I come to the end of the wall and I’m about to sprint over the back lawn to the rear fence of the house when I think I notice movement to my left, by the back door of the house.

I turn to look.

Assailants. Three of them.

Heads cocked to listen, clothes torn or missing, decay visible everywhere. Ribs showing through ripped tee shirts. Lipless mouths grinning. Lidless orbs swivelling maniacal, unfocussed. They make a papery sound as they keep vigil. It is not breathing but the movement of their desiccated dead skin. They are agitated, hungry.

Three.

More than I can deal with even using surprise.

I’m going to have to get on my face and slide over the grass. I’ll have to stop regularly to turn and check they haven’t discovered me. What are they doing here? So many in one place. In the wrong place. Gardens like this should be empty. They should be safe.

Sick with fear, hands shaking, I put my face to the ground and start forward one stolen hand-span at a time.

***

Tamsin Doherty twitches in their bed. Beside her is an expanse of linen across which she and Kevin rarely meet throughout the night. On the other side of this gulf is the cliff face formed by his back. Her eyes are closed. There is a waxy patina of sweat darkening her hairline, transparent pinheads above her lips. Her closed eyelids are two pregnant bellies in which twin eye-foetuses kick. She takes a sudden in-breath, fingers gripping the sheets.

There is a tall building, a building made by the hands of men but one which reaches up very high. Some days the upper parts of this building are hidden by clouds. She knows there were people here once but now they are gone. There is only the building. It stands tall and alone in a silent landscape as if it is the last building on Earth, as if it is the first.

She sees the building from above and notices something there. Something moving on its bare, flat concrete roof. She knows what this thing is long before she is close enough to really see it. All the people have gone and they have left behind a poor denuded baby. She feels she may have lived many lives but never has she seen such a solitary being. Perhaps, like the paradox of the building, this is not the last baby on Earth. Perhaps, somehow, it is the first.

The baby crawls on the sky-scraper’s flat roof. There is a small wall and railing around the top of the building but the baby will fit through the rails easily if it finds them. It crawls well too. It might easily haul itself over the edge. She wants to go closer and help the baby, bring it safely to the ground but she cannot. She is here merely as an observer. The more the baby crawls, the more determined it becomes. It is naked and its hands and knees and feet, where they scrape over the cold concrete have developed thick pads, thick as the paws of wolves and lions.

The baby finds the door to steps that lead down. But the baby does not know about door handles and even if it did it would not be able to reach. It bashes its head against the steel door and when the door does not open, it crawls on, dogged.

The baby does not cry.

Sometimes this is as far as Tamsin’s dream goes. Nevertheless, she wakes dripping, swallowing, one hand clamped over her heart, the other clasped over her abdomen.

Both places are empty.

Beside her, Kevin Doherty sleeps on.

3

They lined the surface of every wall in Mason’s house, so much like wallpaper he barely noticed them. They were like memories of someone else’s life, someone else’s history, not his. Indeed, that was exactly what they were, for his bearded face appeared in none of them. Sometimes he caught himself staring at one of them, trying to recall if the moment had really been the way the camera had trapped it. He knew profoundly that cameras were like people; they never told the truth. There was so much happening in each of these kidnapped snaps - all he’d had to do was press a button and the theft was complete - but most of it the camera missed. The camera missed the hearts of these people he photographed but told you instead - insisted - that it had captured them faithfully. The picture convinced but the picture recorded only a fraction the event, a shard of the person, a shadow of the scene. It was like trying to catch and preserve snowflakes and this impossibility was what he had come to detest.

In those moments when he lost himself in remembering, or at least finding his memory as fallible as the camera’s, he also found passion. He had taken pictures with a kind of anger and frustration and it was that, perhaps more than anything else, the camera had recorded. Mason was one of life’s observers, the kind of man who spent parties watching and judging the guests instead of talking to them. Or, if he did talk to them, their words only reinforced his condemnation. London life, photographic life and all the parties that accompanied it, had therefore not suited him. And yet, it was at many of these gatherings that he’d shot his finest work - what others classed as his finest, at least. It was in the times he felt most alienated by his own inability to participate that he caught that fraction of a face or gesture which made a subject so interesting to look at later.

Rock stars, film stars, West end stars, critics, debutantes, lords and ladies, journos, paps, escorts and rent boys, dealers, pimps and spies. He’d caught them all at one time or another and in doing so he’d achieved three things. Fame, money and a nervous breakdown. It was inconceivable to Mason that his work could be seen as so influential. They called him a genius and this brought him more than a reasonable share of hate and adoration. For the years he spent on the London scene, he was ‘known’ everywhere. To him it was the ultimate irony; he had no personality and yet London turned him into a personality. In those days, he’d even appeared on late night chat shows where most of the guests and even the hosts were too stoned or pissed to be working. Back then, such things had seemed like good, highbrow arts programming. In reality it was egotism and bullshit of the worst kind. No one should have been paid to do it but they all were.

Mason had watched and snapped his way into photography’s hall of fame in just three years. Within another two he had disappeared from London and the photographic scene forever. And no one knew where he’d gone. The rumour was he’d entered rehab on a long-term basis but the truth was Mason never had the stamina to be an abuser of substances. Too much of anything introduced to his system made him ill. Also, it clouded his photographic eye, and so he’d steered clear of every narcotic.

What he’d really done was move out of his flat, sell everything he owned including the bulk of his photographic equipment, and bought a tiny mobile home. The vehicle had space for a single occupant to sleep in the back. He drove his new home away from London and didn’t stop until he reached the north coast of Scotland. He had money in the bank enough to live comfortably until he died. Instead he lived like a hermit, eating little, walking miles each day before returning to his four-wheeled home, still hating himself and everything he’d become and still not having any way to define who or what he was.

The barren Scottish wilds hurt him with their emptiness almost as much as London’s overpopulation and amorality had affronted him. There were no trees to speak of, only vast, layered ranges of hills and mountains, blasted by wind and carpeted with heather. His eyes needed more than this and so he left, driving down the west coast to the Lake District and onwards until he crossed into Wales. On the far side of Snowdonia, near the coast, he found oak-lined hillsides from where he could both see and smell the ocean. The hillsides were silent and the oaks there were ancient and twisted. He spent several days exploring the smallest tracks until he found a remote farm at the centre of a huge, unpopulated stretch of land. The farm was lost at the centre of the property, so rundown it was becoming part of the hillside. The land comprised high, steep hills inland, sloping down to densely wooded valleys so overgrown it seemed no man could have walked there for centuries. Below the woods the land levelled out towards the sea.

He parked beside the rusted skeleton of a tractor. A crooked woman opened the door to him when he knocked and the farmhouse exhaled the smell of living human decay. Mason had stepped back. The woman left it to him to speak.

‘I’d like to park on your land.’

‘We don’t allow camping.’

‘I’m not camping.’

‘What would you call it then?’

‘I just need some . . . quiet . . . for a while.’

‘How long’s a while?’ she’d asked.

‘I don’t know. I’ll pay you. I’ve got cash.’

She’d looked at him more closely then. Noticed his lengthening beard, his yellowing teeth - not age but neglect. Seen the sick caverns of his eyes and the closeness of his skin to his bones. She saw his posture. She was a judge of animals not men but she must have seen he was carrying some burden. He found her assessment uncomfortable.

‘You committed a crime somewhere, have you, boy? You on the run? We don’t want you bringing your problems here.’

‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ he said and he was able to look into her eyes as he spoke.

The crooked woman had squashed her already juiceless lips together as if deciding.

‘My husband’s sick. I don’t need more troubles.’

‘I’m not in trouble. I just need quiet. I just want some time.’

‘I’ll have to ask him.’

She’d shut the door then and he heard her scuffle away along what he imagined to be a dark, claustrophobic passageway. Then there was silence.

Mason turned to look at the hills and the rugged dry stone walls hewn from those hills. All around were dilapidated fences with rotting posts and broken barbed wire. The farmhouse was falling apart. Slates were missing from the roof. In the steep fields sheep cropped the grass. Shit matted their rear ends and many of them limped with foot-rot. Far on a hillside he saw grey-beaked rooks pecking at the torn open carcass of a ram. It began to rain, lightly at first which he found refreshing. The rain became heavy and determined. The water dripped from his unwashed hair into his collar and down his neck. He stepped under the broken porch which kept him dry, but the wind took lively and sprayed the water sideways onto him. He walked back to the minute campervan and got into the driver’s seat. From there he watched the rain distort and obscure the landscape through his windscreen and he thought about how the way he saw things didn’t really change what they actually were.

He fell asleep.

It was still raining when a rap that sounded hard enough to break the driver’s side window woke him up. His heart was out of control at the shock of it and he couldn’t catch his breath. The woman’s face was smeared and deformed by the rain. Her presence so close by frightened him. She held beside her a shepherd’s crook. To him it looked like a black iron hook. Rain fell hard and loud on the roof and the windscreen. She rapped the glass again even though she must have been able to see he was awake. He returned to himself then and opened the car door.

‘You’ll be coming in,’ she said as if the rain meant nothing to her. ‘He wants to see you. See your face.’

***

‘Shouldn’t you be revising?’

‘Fuck off, dork.’

Donald Smithfield stood in the doorway of his sister’s bedroom. Aggie was trying so hard to be a woman but she was still a girl. Even though he was only fifteen, he knew this. And she knew he knew it. This, he supposed, was why she acted like she hated him all the time. But then, even with only a few moments of hindsight, he knew he probably could have come up with a better opener.

‘What I mean is, I could help. You know, test you on stuff.’

She knew him too well. These things, these family understandings, they worked both ways.

‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing. What do you mean? I just thought we could. . .’

He watched her measuring him up. He couldn’t hold her gaze under such conditions and he looked away. Then he looked down. That was a mistake.

‘It’s about a girl isn’t it?’

‘Course not.’

But now her mood was different. She was curious. She was - miraculously, and there was no telling how many seconds it might last - not pissed off any more. This change made him think twice about the wisdom of coming to her for advice.

‘A boy then?’ She asked, knowing the power of her words.

Perhaps they’d shared too many secrets already. Though, now he thought about it more carefully, it had probably been him who had spilled his guts four-to-one over the years. Why was he so stupid? Why did he keep trusting her when she used her power to crush him?

‘I’m not into boys.’

‘Not this time.’

‘Just forget it, Agatha.’

Using her full name was one tiny weapon he could employ. All it would do, though, was let her know for sure that she’d needled him deep; giving her more satisfaction, if that was what she wanted. He turned away from the door and pulled it closed, hating to break the connection but knowing he had to save some part of himself, keep something intact if he was going to work things out on his own.

Before he’d taken two steps she was standing in the open doorway.

‘Wait, Don. I’m sorry.’ He stopped, his back to her. ‘I shouldn’t have said that, I know. I’m . . . look, it’s just me, okay? I’m in a rat. I’m pissed off with everything. I just want to get out of here and I can’t. Can you understand that?’

He supposed he must have nodded.

‘Come in. Shut the door and we’ll talk. I’ll help you, I promise.’

She sounded genuine enough but she could still have been reeling him in. He turned to look at her. The malice was gone. The need to dominate was gone. She wanted him in her life again. God, how stunned he was by the necessity of his sister’s love. He didn’t know what he’d do when she followed her dreams away from home and he never saw her. Who would he talk to then? Who would understand him?

She stepped out of the doorway to allow him past but he hesitated. He didn’t move because he knew that to walk into her room now was to walk into that future, the one in which he had to grow up and survive without the protection of Agatha. She loved him. She cared for him. There was no one else he could talk to about things. Stepping into her bedroom was stepping closer to that time when she would be out of his life. Where all this emotion was coming from, this passion, he didn’t know. All he knew was that everything he thought about hurt. Life was a rainbow of pain and he wasn’t sure he could live with any of its colours.

‘Don’t stand there crying, Donny. Come in.’

He hadn’t even realised but now he reached up and found the dampness on his cheeks.

‘Shit,’ he said, walking through the door.

The first thing she did was take hold of him and hug him tight. And he was weeping and weeping and he didn’t even know why.

***

Pictorial fragments of Mason’s memories coated the walls. He peered now at one of the only colour photographs he’d ever kept.

The light source came from the small window in the picture and it barely lit the scene. A flash would have killed the daylight, though, what little there was, and destroyed what he’d seen in that moment. This was the nearest he - or his equipment - had ever come to apprehending a moment fully and honestly. It had nothing to do with the fact the shot was in colour - there was barely enough pigment in the room to make that clear. The walls were almost grey, the furniture so faded it too might have been charcoals and ashes. The wood was dark enough to appear black at first glance and even the face the picture showed was drained of the bloom of life.

The man sat in an armchair that must have been as old or older than its occupant. It had certainly moulded itself to the sick lines of his body. His hands gripped the armrests and the veins on them stood out like wiring. He wasn’t looking at Mason. He was staring out of the window at a landscape he must have known better than the contours of his own gnarled body. The man’s grey hair was thin but long and pushed back as though by an invisible wind. It looked like his chair was a flying machine and he the pilot. Only the profile of the man’s face was visible but even so, anyone looking at the photo would have known that this man had sight beyond the power of normal human eyes. He was looking at the landscape, only part of which was visible in the photo, but he was seeing more than anyone else could see. He was seeing beyond.

That was it. An old man; a dying man as it turned out, his knees wrapped in a torn and threadbare tartan rug, his fingers spread like claws into the worn upholstery, in a room in a crumbling farmhouse cupped in the palm of the land. It wasn’t much of a subject. It wasn’t like the photos he’d taken in London. Critics would not have understood it and if they had they might not have wanted to give Mason much credit for it. It was too simple. Too unusual. Too real.

It was probably the only photo he’d ever taken that had any true value and it was not a value measurable in money. When he took it he’d been living in the woods a mile from the farmhouse for almost a year.

***

Richard Smithfield was having trouble breathing. The problem had started when he realised his computer contained enough evidence to destroy his life.

He stood in the cold of his workspace at the back of the garage, wheezing slightly and unable to completely fill his lungs. In the kitchen Pamela was doing her best to make a tasty evening meal for the family. No doubt she would be unable to achieve such a thing. Aggie would be inspecting herself in the mirror or texting her vile girlfriends about, well, God knew what. Donald, if he was anything approaching a normal fifteen-year old boy, would be wanking himself braindead in his bedroom.

He sighed in the gloom and switched on the fluorescent strip-light above the work bench. It illuminated what he was holding. The flattish, grey metal case was heavy in his hand. It contained the weight of his secrets. Not only that, it was designed to take punishment, to withstand knocks and accidents.

This wasn’t going to be any kind of accident.

Patiently, Richard Smithfield peeled off the metallic stickers identifying his product and set them aside. Using several sizes of screwdrivers, he separated the two halves of the dense casing. Another metal plate was riveted over the disks of the hard drive - there was no way to remove it without force. He levered the plate off, snapping and shearing small pieces of steel.

There inside, pristine and unmarked by a single particle of dust lay the stack of five cobalt alloy disks. They were the colour of blue slate but mirror bright. At certain angles they gave off a rainbow shimmer. He removed the steel spindle holding them in place and lifted them off. Hard to believe so much information could be stored on these beautifully simple looking components. Hard to believe such engineered matter held enough information to condemn him to prison and the life of an outcast.

But they could and they had to go.

He placed the disks on a large old rag and folded it around them several times. He turned this bundle over so that it would keep itself closed. He pounded the bundle with a claw hammer until there was nothing inside but shards and powder. He placed all the dismantled and shattered components of the drive in a black bin liner and put it in the boot of the Volvo. Early in the morning he would drive out, ostensibly to fill up with diesel, and drop the bin liner into the huge compressor at the tip. In a few days it would be untraceable at the bottom of Shreve’s vast landfill.

Then, and only then, he’d be able to breathe again.

***

The sensation of floating is wonderful at first. She feels giddy, light in her core.

Then she sees the building, far in the distance, piercing the sky to some degree but failing to attain heaven. She begins to fly towards it, not wanting to. She has no control. She is not flying, she is being carried, forced to fly. Perhaps then, she could also be made to fall. The earth is very far below, she would fall for a long time. She has a sense of being on a precipice, held there by something untrustworthy. A clip which might be faulty. A belt which might be old and frayed. Or perhaps something worse, the whim of a tormentor. Some entity she must trust to hold her even though it has the power to destroy her.

Like this, always on the verge of losing her balance or being pushed, she is propelled towards the building.

Reaching it and seeing how it thins to a thread as it extends downwards, she realises how tall it is. Miles, perhaps ten miles, from roof to foundation. Steel and glass and concrete. The entity holding her drops her and she begins to understand the true nature of falling. Wind pushing up at her but not enough to slow her down. The feeling that she’s left part of her insides behind. No net, no parachute, no safety line, no jutting branch or handhold.

The entity is not ready to let her die yet. It wants her to see something. She stops falling. No deceleration, nothing below to catch her, she just stops. It hurts at such velocity. And now she is hauled high again, flying against her will, back up towards the roof of the building.

She sees the baby and feels as though she must have seen it a thousand times; the crawl-leather on its hands and knees and feet, the bruises on its head. The entity has brought her here because no matter how many centuries it has been searching this roof, the baby’s journey is only just beginning.

Something new now. It looks so familiar but she can’t remember if it was there before or not. Now that she sees it, she supposes it’s always been there. The baby has found a sky light. It is made of angled panels of glass which meet in a shallow apex. The baby does not know what a sky light is. The baby knows nothing but the will to crawl and search.

It thump-thumps up onto a glass panel, eager now that it has discovered something new. Its hands and knees slap against the glass as it climbs the gentle gradient of a sheet of glass many times its size. This is a new feeling beneath its fingers. Cold, yes, but smooth and comfortable.

A crack appears. It makes a scratching, creaking noise and the baby stops crawling for a moment. Sound. A sound other than the slip and slap of it patting its leathery limbs on concrete day after day, year after year. She can see the crack is right under the baby. If it keeps crawling, it might leave the crack behind, make it to the safety of the apex or even that of a stronger sheet of glass.

The baby laughs, just once, a sort of gurgled ‘Ha!’ of triumph. It knows it has definitely discovered something new.

The glass breaks.

She flies through it with the baby. Follows it down.

4

There was a photo of the farmer’s wife too, also alone, and taken on another day.

Somehow the opportunity to photograph her and her husband together never came up. This time he was using black and white again. He’d found her in the kitchen peeling potatoes at the table. He had his camera with him but not because he’d planned to take her picture. He stood in the doorless entry to the kitchen seeing that everything about the scene was right and his hands went automatically to the camera slung around his neck. Only when he had his hands on it did she look up at him.

He’d asked her husband’s permission to take his photograph in his armchair by the window. This was something different, an opportunistic moment. He was about to ask her if it was all right when she looked back down at what she was doing as though he wasn’t there. He’d been around the pair of them long enough to understand how much they spoke without using their mouths. He relaxed a little, checked the light reading and brought the camera’s eye to his eye and when they were both seeing the same thing in the same way, he took the shot. But in the moment he’d found his composition, in the moment he’d committed himself to the shot, she looked up at him and her face opened.

Here, take it all, she seemed to be saying, like a rape victim going limp with compliance, that passivity taking all the power from the rapist. This wasn’t a rape, of course, not in any sense. She wanted him to see what was in her face and she opened it for him. Just then and never again.

Mason looked at that photo now. There was nothing in it to give it a date in recognisable time, except perhaps the quality of the picture itself. It could have been a hundred and fifty years old. There she sat at her table, a half peeled potato in one hand, a short knife, half worn away with sharpening in the other. Her fingers were crooked and had painful-looking arthritic nodules on them. The joints were swollen but still bony. A pile of peelings lay to one side. In an aluminium pan of cold water with a loose handle lay the clean, skinless potatoes. She looked up from her work and in her eyes there was history: the transition from carefree girl to practical farmer’s wife to widow-expectant in a single glance.

Every time he looked at the photo, Mason thought he could see bitterness but there was no bitterness there. Only experience and tolerance; not resentment but forbearance. There was a solitude there too, the seed of which must have been growing for a long time. She did not have her husband’s sight and so could not share his view of the world. Not even his view from the window where he sat. Being with him, loving him so quietly as she did, had made her a lonely soul living firmly in this world while her husband looked into the next.

Oh God.

There was no help in staring at these fragments from the past - good work though they may have been. He wasn’t looking at the photos to remember who he was or feel better about the past. He was looking for guidance, for answers.

The farmer would have known something about the bleeding Earth but he had long since followed where only his gaze had penetrated before.

Mason severed the connection with the photos, disorientated by the clarity of the memories that accompanied his staring. Such was the power of photography.

Little use it was to him now.

The farmer and his wife had helped him back then. He would have said they’d helped him to regain a missing part of himself but the truth was, the missing part was one he’d never been connected to until he arrived in on their land. He had to lose the rest of himself on that stretch of ancient hillside before he discovered the part that had always been missing.

***

I make it to the gates of the facility but it’s been slow going. Assailants stand everywhere in twos and threes. Watchful, sensing the air at all times, the merest whisper of my passing makes them turn their heads my way. I want to leap up and draw my sword, at least take out one or two groups, but I know the noise will attract more and still more of them until I am swiftly overcome. Again and again I’ve had to lie perfectly still and pray I haven’t roused them enough to come and investigate. I’ve pushed it, pushed it because my advancement has been so slow, but I’ve made it all the way to the facility car park without a single encounter. I am healthy. I am strong. I have weapons and skill. Dawn is only an hour or two away. All I have to do now is find a way inside the facility.

It’s the perfect moment. Better than I could have hoped for.

Ray Wade saved the game to his memory card and looked at his watch.

Christ.

4.45 am.

There was a rotten smell in the house that the dope smoke barely disguised and his eyes were red and sore. As usual, the bin needed emptying and the late night screen-watching was burning his eyes. Or it could have been the worsening stench from the landfill - a toxic gas, so the papers said.

Tomorrow - well, later today - was another day of lectures and classes. If he was lucky he’d get three hours of sleep. Jenny had been in bed for a couple of hours already - bored by his lack of attention. Either that or too stoned to stay awake any longer. Ray rubbed his face, dropped the controller and switched off the console and TV.

His skin was still puckered with goose flesh. The zombies in Revenant Apocalypse gave him the serious creeps. Perhaps because of this, and the tension the game created, he was completely hooked on it. They were so . . . watchful. So awake. Sniffing the air like dogs, vigilant eyes backlit by disease. And the way they attacked was merciless. Shit, it was fast too. You couldn’t turn your back and stroll away. If you engaged them, you had to put them down. God, he’d wanted so badly to use that katana on the fuckers.

That would be a treat for the following night.

Well, really it was this night, wasn’t it? He smiled in the skunk-spicy darkness of his tiny living room. Not too many hours to go until he let slip the samurai blade.

***

The baby chuckles, the first emotion it has ever shown other than determination - if that could ever count as an emotion. It has found its little hill of glass and scales it with confidence, with more strength than an infant ought to possess. She hovers above it unable to scream a warning even though she tries. The entity won’t allow her to interfere, only to observe. No, that’s not true; the entity allows her to feel everything, to empathise utterly with the chubby bundle, so hardened and bull-headed in its quest. She already knows something of the pain that is to come.

But only something.

There is no time here, she has decided. When she is here she recognises everything. When she wakes, all she knows is that she has dreamed this before. How many times, she has no idea. But when she is here, with the building, with the baby, she knows she has visited a thousand times. A hundred thousand. Revealing and discovering each part of the nightmare incrementally.

It will never be over.

There’s a squeaky cracking sound as the fracture creeps across the pane of glass. The glass gives way to the baby’s weight and it falls through. She’s right behind it in slow motion. So she sees how easily the edges that touch the baby open its unprotected flanks. The cuts are slow to respond, perhaps because they are the first wounds the baby has ever known. Or perhaps it’s simply because the entity wants her to see the details. Edges a mere molecule thick stroking innocent, flawless skin and revealing the flesh below. Then, finally, the wounds are obscured by a welling up of the baby’s life fluid.

It falls in silence. So sharp are the blades which have cut it that it doesn’t even know it has been opened up. It is also still a relative stranger to pain. She knows this state cannot last. She knows worse, much worse, is to befall the innocent.

Silence.

They fall together in silence. The baby first, she following closely.

Concrete welcomes them with cold inevitability and unyielding hardness.

The baby hits the floor in a rain of transparent razors. She does not. She is the witness.

The baby is not dead. But it should be. It is still but for its breathing.

Its left arm is broken. Not a simple greenstick fracture but a break. Radius and ulna snapped like tiny sticks of rock. Despite the hard pads on its hands and knees, glass shards have penetrated every part of the baby’s body which have made contact with the floor. Its mouth is a wet, red mess. If it had any teeth they would be gone. Instead the mandible is cracked and flattened. The upper palate is crushed somewhat, making the baby’s bloody face flatter, wider. It bounced when it hit, from its face onto its side and she can see the many places where the glass has pierced it ventrally and exited dorsally. It has developed ‘spines’ of glass.

They have landed - no, the baby has landed - in some sort of corridor or hallway with many doors leading off to either side. She is dismayed in a way that she is not able to express. She is not allowed to express it. The entity makes her hold her feelings in.

The baby opens its eyes. It is looking up. For a moment she thinks it sees her and her guilt deepens, colouring her very soul a warm red. But the baby does not see her. It looks through, beyond. And besides, she sees now that the baby only has one eye that still functions. From the other, the broad end of a glass lancet protrudes. This does not prevent the baby from trying to blink. One blink works, the other meets resistance.

And now, finally, the baby is waking up to pain for the first time. It feels its wounds; all of them, and its solitude and it howls for all of this. She would love to be allowed to hear its scream; she deserves to, she believes. But the entity permits her only to imagine what this scream must sound like. The baby howls and weeps, the hot sting of its tears no sensation at all beside its abandonment and wounding. It cries like this for a very long time and she is not allowed to give the baby comfort. Cannot approach to lay a mothering hand upon its torn, dying body.

But the baby is not dying.

When it realises this, when pain and crying are unanswered, it stops its grizzling. The broken baby turns from its side onto its hands and knees again. Leaving etches of blood in grooves made by the glass that is now part of it, it crawls along the corridor. At each door it discovers, it raises its broken arm and flails for entry. For response. When there is nothing, it crawls on, scratching along the concrete in cherubic agony, in saintly silence, still searching.

***

The photos were always evocative.

Mason remembered how he’d driven his camper down a rocky track toward the trees. It was steep enough to make him wonder if the camper would ever get back up. His very next thought was:

Who the fuck cares?

The ancient track stopped being rock and became rutted dirt and shale nearer the trees. But the way was still clear and the gradient had eased. He supposed the farmer must have kept the track open with a tractor or quad bike - if not the farmer, then someone he hired to help. Under the trees it was darker, the unending grey of the Welsh sky not making much impression beneath the low leaf canopy. The track ended at a gulley where no vehicle could go any further.

He walked out from his camper that day and into the rain, much gentler then than when he arrived at the farmhouse, and explored the area.

The gulley was small, nothing dramatic but it had to be negotiated on foot. On the side he descended were small boulders and rocks, all wearing a thick fur of bright moss. He lost his footing several times as he clambered down. At the bottom of the gulley was a tiny stream, black water flowing over coal-dark peat. It was probably no more than a footstep across the widest part. He crossed it. Beyond, was the opposite slope of the miniature valley. There, the grass was fuller and greener than the place where Mason switched off his engine. There were no rocks to slip on or trip over.

There, on the far side of the gulley, protected by moss-covered oaks dripping fronds of lichen and tears of rain, in the clean damp air he felt himself go silent inside. His mind stopped replaying his fears and insecurities. It stopped questioning the validity or lack thereof of who and what Mason Brand was. It was as near to true peace as he’d ever come. Given to him in a single moment. In that same moment he decided he would stay in those woods until he was ready to go back to civilisation.

And if that time never came, he knew he could remain there. Just be there until the end. Like the farmer.

***

In his bed, Don Smithfield held the memory of the woman he lived for in his mind’s eye and wanked until his prick was sore. Three ejaculations later and he still couldn’t rid himself of her, couldn’t sleep. Instead of memories he tried a fantasy, took their fragile new love to an unexplored level. He couldn’t come. His prick was chafed so raw there was no more pleasure in the pursuit. And anyway, this lonely stroking only left him empty, sorry and bereft.

He lay on his back in the darkness and wondered what to do. No answer came to him. Telling Aggie had probably been a mistake. She was incredulous at first and then, he thought, pretty impressed, though she hid it well. He made her promise, swear on their parents’ death, that she would tell no one. He thought she’d taken it seriously but there was no way of knowing for certain. She might blurt it to a girlfriend ‘in confidence’ or she might announce it in her class just to embarrass him. Maybe, just maybe, she would do as she’d promised and keep it a secret.

In a way, it would be cool if his mates found out but if it went any further there could be serious trouble. Police kind of trouble.

He’d had sex with a woman twice his age. That made her thirty years old.

And it made her a criminal.

None of this made it any easier to sleep. He slipped out of bed and sat at his desk, wincing as his pyjamas brushed the skin of his prick. The touch, though it stung, was enough to arouse him once more. He nudged the mouse on his desktop and a soft light filled the room. As his erection flared and reheated the skin was so dry it almost crackled. Then there was a sudden warmth and dampness in the crotch seam of his pyjamas. He looked down at his lap. A blot of blood was spreading across the cotton. Terrified, he fumbled his prick out for an inspection. The wound wasn’t serious, just a split in his raw foreskin, but it bled enthusiastically. His erection went down fast. All he could think about was what he would tell his mum when the PJs went for a wash. He decided he’d throw them out.

I have to get my mind off all this.

Instead of surfing for porn, he looked at the online news. Shreve had been on national TV today but he’d been too preoccupied to listen properly. He looked up the story on the BBC.

- Doctors blame poor waste management for rise in health problems - read the headline. Apparently, Shreve’s residents were suffering a far higher than average incidence of migraine, asthma and eye problems. Some hospital consultants in the area were blaming waste-leakage and fumes from the landfill site. During the day, Donald could see the huge dump they were talking about from his bedroom window. A local obstetrician had gone on the record to say he believed a recent and sharp rise in birth defects and childhood leukaemia to be directly related to the landfill.

Don blinked and rubbed his eyes. He looked away from the screen for a few moments until his vision cleared. Perhaps it was all the worry. Maybe he was highly suggestible. Out of nowhere a mean pounding was building up behind his right eye.

He could have sworn there was a smell of rot in his bedroom.

***

Ray took off his clothes and slipped in beside Jenny. It was after 5am now. He was exhausted and involuntarily replaying the scarier scenes from Revenant Apocalypse over and over again. His eyes hurt and the smell of rubbish from the kitchen bin had found its way into the bedroom too. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would empty it and bleach it. Somewhere between getting back from college and switching on his console there would be an opportunity.

He was high and wired, his skin super sensitive. Feeling Jenny’s warmth beside him created current through his whole body. The current flowed towards his groin and in moments he was fully aroused. He lay down beside her and caressed her sleeping body, sparks from the dope igniting his fingertips. He could hear his heart and the whoosh of his blood in his ears. She pushed his hand off and rolled away before he could really get started.

His electricity coagulated into bile and frustration. Did she have something better to do? She could sleep any time. Where was the passion? Why didn’t she want the comfort to be found by fucking in their private darkness at five in the morning? There were the lectures of course but he had a knack for absorbing information no matter how tired or stoned he was. Jenny, on the other hand, worried about every missed fact.

Fuck you, Jenny. You can sleep at your own place tomorrow night.

But he didn’t say it out loud.

The thought that they might not be particularly compatible had been sky-written across the blue of his mind many times but, like most forms of advertising, he ignored it. Most of the time he was too high to be bothered with the responsibility of facing the facts.

He sat up in bed and lit a cigarette. Though it ought to have had the opposite effect, it unwound him. His erection collapsed, his frustration seeping away with it. The electricity in his skin turned off. He watched the glow of his fag brighten with each drag and the pulse of it soothed him. Tomorrow was another day. Another chance with Jenny. Another batch of classes he didn’t need to worry about. Another opportunity to get wrecked.

And, in all likelihood, it would be the day of the katana. He crushed the butt out and fell asleep with a smile of anticipation not quite relinquishing his face.

***

Mason lived in the woods like a hermit for several months.

Occasionally, he walked to the nearest village for basic supplies. The farmer’s wife gave him eggs from time to time. He drank the water which flowed from the hills and nothing had ever tasted sweeter or cleaner. He imagined it was purifying him.

He awoke when the light came and slept when the sun was lost behind the hills. There was nothing to do with his days and so he did nothing. The only activity was to watch the animals and birds around him and wander the forest of stunted, warped oaks.

Often, he wrote his thoughts and observations in a scrappy journal. This was the only thing he could consider to be an ‘activity’. The rest of his existence was the twig of his mind and body bobbing slowly along time’s river. But the writing was something which had an intensity to it. He allowed anything in his mind to come onto the page without ever thinking to censor it. There was no one else to see it, nor had he thought far enough ahead to think there might ever be such a person in the future. These moments of writing were like fugues. He would lose himself to the wearing down of a pencil and its re-sharpening as he wove words onto a cheap jumbo pad he’d found in the village co-op.

Pages later he would look up and find the light of the day had changed. Whether hidden by cloud and rain or not, the sun might have shifted far across the sky and he would flip back through the indented sheets barely remembering what he’d put there. Nor did he ever read carefully over his scrawl. It didn’t seem the words were his. They came through him like a voice. He came to think of it as a kind of calling. Though he wrote the words of the calling every day, he worked hard to ignore what they told him. All he did was marvel at the amount and strength of it and the way the activity excised him from time and reality for however long he did it.

The pages and the doing of nothing mounted up in comfortable drifts. He watched the animals. He watched the seasons. The tyres on his camper went flat.

He didn’t care.

5

Mason looked out of his kitchen window into the back garden. Soon he would begin this season’s planting.

All the produce from last year, even the over-wintering vegetables, were used up or preserved. The garden, with its many beds was a featureless patchwork of exposed earth where his fertiliser was melding with the soil and strips of variously faded and dirty carpeting he’d employed to smother down any and all weeds. He felt excitement as a rising jitter in his stomach and a vague urge to move his bowels.

Every year it was the same, a childlike eagerness to help the earth bring forth food for him to live on. He sniggered to himself at his overreaction but he felt no embarrassment. This was who he was now. Not a photographer, not a bold visual ‘genius’ who owned all of London at the winking of his camera’s shutter. He was simply a gardener. In fact, he believed himself to possess the soul of an agrarian. Even though he was no such thing now, he planned to be so in the future. Alone and remote on the land like the farmer he’d come to see as his teacher.

This period in suburbia was temporary but necessary. Before he retreated for good, he wanted to give people one last chance. He had changed and so he hoped he might see another side to everyone else, not be so deeply critical of every other human being on the planet. So far, though, his solitude here on the Meadowlands estate was almost more complete than it had been on the farmer’s land. His time of living so close beside the earth was already years behind him. He was getting stuck again, as he had in London. He had to accept that soon the moment to move on would come.

Just one more season. Just one more season of being among people, even though he chased them away from his front door and did not speak to them in the street. Just one more year of being human before he became once more a creature of the land and of the forest.

He realised, as he surveyed his garden, that he was holding his breath.

He let it go.

He knew what the problem was. He could even admit it to himself. But he couldn’t overcome it. He thought he’d been alone in London but he’d been wrong. His true solitude came during his time among the trees. It was so difficult. Life in the woods had been so tranquil and so restorative to him that it was painful to admit how much the loneliness of it hurt him.

As much as he wanted the peace, he was terrified of making the final decision to live alone again, even though it was probably the happiest he’d ever be.

It wasn’t just the loneliness, of course. The depth of solitude was the obvious thing, the thing he would have talked about if anyone ever discussed it with him as a friend. There was another issue, however. The one he’d come to suburbia to avoid. Most of the time it was noisy enough that he didn’t notice it. He missed it and feared equally. The land and the trees and all the animals he’d shared the woods with had a voice, one voice, a calling. And they talked to him as though he were their closest confidant. They talked and the land talked and they never shut up. His papers were full of their ramblings and even now, years later, he dared not look back over them to see what they’d said to him.

As though he’d created a moment of the perfect silence into which speech might come, as though he’d petitioned it, the calling came through the babble of suburbia’s white noise right in that instant:

you’re being a coward

‘I’m not finished,’ he said, placing his forehead to the chill of the window pane and staring at the expectant garden. ‘I’m not finished with people. Not yet.’

have courage, Mason Brand

only the act which requires courage is the true act

He closed his eyes tight shut for a moment.

When he opened them, the face startled him so much he jerked away from the glass with a pounding heart. Like a man caught thieving. There was no time to recover himself. He stood there, red-faced, chest thudding, not knowing where to look. Could he have looked any fucking stranger than with his head pressed on the glass like a mental patient? Anger was the only response but his ire was hesitant like his words. He wasn’t used to speaking.

‘This is private . . . ground. Land, I mean to say. It’s my land and you shouldn’t be here.’

‘Maybe I’ve got the wrong house. You’re Mr. Brand, aren’t you?’

He blinked at the girl, looked around, recovering himself, coming back to the room. This was his problem; too stuck in his head and his memories. Not present enough.

‘You shouldn’t be back here. Can’t you ring the front bell? Knock? Like . . . normal people?’

It was ridiculous. They were talking through the glass with raised voices, almost shouting. The girl - she wasn’t a girl really, more of a . . . she smiled at him.

‘Look, I’m not here to steal your veggies, Mr. Brand. I just wanted a quick chat. Could you open the door?’

The part of Mason which remembered how to behave was screaming at him to act sensibly and open the door, offer tea and biscuits or a glass of wine - was she old enough for that? Of course she was - to do something, anything, and stop acting like a bloody psycho before she walked away.

But the back door, even with its six dirty panes of glass in peeling frames, was a barrier between him and the world. The world had come into his back garden, without any sort of invitation and she stood there now, still not leaving but with her expression fading from mild amusement at what could just be shyness and eccentricity into concern about her safety with such a man. He noticed her glance from side to side, probably checking if anyone was within earshot or working out how quickly she could run -

‘I remember when you moved in here,’ she said. ‘It was my eleventh birthday. I saw your knackered old camper pull in and watched you go around the back. Thought you were a tramp or a gypsy or something. I fell off my pissing bike watching you. Only time I ever cried on my birthday.’

‘You’ll have other birthdays,’ he said, trying very hard to. . . he wasn’t sure what he was trying to do but he knew he was failing.

‘Uh, right,’ said the girl. ‘Listen, I can tell this isn’t a good moment. I’ll come back.’

She turned to leave and all kinds of panic leapt inside him, yanked him into action. He opened the door and put his head out. Already she’d reached the corner of the house.

‘Wait.’

She turned back.

‘I mean . . . I’m sorry.’ Something kicked in from the past, from a thousand failed social interactions. ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. What’s your name?’

‘Aggie Smithfield. I live just down -’

‘I know where,’ he said and immediately decided he sounded creepy rather than informed about the community. He followed up quickly, holding out his hand which, for once, was not soil-blackened. ‘I’m Mason.’

He watched her hesitate. Something in her eyes, some need he couldn’t decipher, made her overcome any nerves she might have had. She walked back to him, boldly enough to make him retreat a fraction. Keeping his hand out was an effort. She took it before he gave in, squeezed it with adult formality.

‘It’s good to meet you,’ she said and he believed she meant it. Not like the people in the old days. This one was too young to hate him or envy him or try to drain him.

He realised he was still holding her hand and he let go quickly. He’d come too close to blowing this simple - there was nothing simple about it - interaction too many times already.

‘I just wanted to talk to you,’ she said. ‘Only for five minutes. Could I come in?’

He didn’t move.

She gestured with her head over his garden fence, towards the landfill site.

‘I wouldn’t mind chatting out here but,’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘You know . . . wind’s blowing the wrong way.’

She was right but he wouldn’t have noticed without a reminder. To him the smell of the dump was normal. More than that; it was a comfort.

‘Of course. Sorry.’

He retreated and opened the back door of his house to a stranger - to any person - for the first time since arriving six years previously.

For a time he stood there wondering what to do next. Where should they stand or should they sit down? What should he offer her or was that too forward, too much like . . . something? He saw the kitchen with new eyes now, her eyes, and realised she was looking at the state, not only of his house, but of his mind. This was what happened when you let people in.

After a few moments he laughed - pure nerves - at a total loss for how to continue.

‘What?’

‘Oh, God,’ he said, finally relaxing just a little. ‘I’m very. . .’

‘Used to your own company?’

He laughed again, exposed and suddenly not minding. Not from her. She seemed so natural about it.

‘Yes, that’s it. That’s it exactly. Would you like a mug of tea? I make it quite strong.’

‘Do you have coffee?’

‘No. Sorry.’

‘Tea’s fine. I’m not stopping long, honestly. I only wanted to ask you about . . .’

She was looking out to the hallway and stairs. She’d seen the photographs. How could she not notice them? They were everywhere except in the kitchen. He couldn’t stop himself this time. He pushed the door closed, severing her view. He didn’t know what to say. He went to the sink, feeling scrutinised, and put water in the kettle. As soon as he went to plug it in, he realised it was only enough for him; he went back to the tap to double the amount.

‘Actually,’ she said. ‘It was the photos I wanted to talk to you about.’

He spun.

‘What? What do you mean, the photos?’

‘Well, about all of it. You know, what you did. How you did it. I want to know about photography.’

He stood there shaking his head. He didn’t stop shaking his head. Even after he’d said:

‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

The kettle ticked, slow at first and then faster. A sigh began inside it, rising and rising. The sigh became a rumble. There was a click. Mason stopped shaking his head but didn’t turn to pour out the water.

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

She’ll go now, he thought. Back to her house and her family and I will not have to go through this.

‘Please. I really want to know. It’s the only thing that interests me.’

‘I can’t.’

She took a step closer to him and he wondered what that boldness signified.

‘Just tell me about one photograph and I promise you I’ll go. If you still don’t want to talk about it after that, I’ll never disturb you again.’

Before he could stop her - how could he have stopped her without touching her? - she’d pulled the kitchen door back open and walked into the downstairs hallway. Every wall was covered in framed monochrome photographs. There was no space between them. None of them were straight. He saw them with her eyes, the way he’d just seen his kitchen, terrified by her scrutiny - still quite casual at the moment but deepening, lengthening with every moment that slipped by. He had to get her out.

‘Will you do that? Just tell me about one. I’ll go then. I really will.’

What choice was there now short of pushing her out by force?

He clasped a hand over his beard, squeezed the rough hairs until they pulled the skin of his face.

‘Okay. One only. Then you go. And I don’t want you coming back here. Do you follow me? Not ever.’

‘Fine.’ She was all business now. So close to what she’d come for. A vampire, just like all the rest of them.

Now she looked closer, roved and stopped, moved on again. Drinking his moments - they were his moments even though he never talked about them that way. His moments. His partial realities. His misrepresentations, therefore, of the real world. They were dangerous, photographs, they told lies about the world.

She was on the stairs. She’d stopped.

No.

‘Okay. Tell me about this one.’

She was pointing at the farmer.

***

It was difficult to make it short but Mason did his best. He left out as much detail as possible, used terms that would elicit scant curiosity. He also lied: It was a farm he’d visited once. They’d asked him in for tea. When they saw his camera they asked if he would take a few pictures. This was the only one he’d kept. The shot was a fluke.

The girl was quiet for a while and he could see what was happening. The lack of information itself was causing her to have questions.

‘That’s all there is to it,’ he said. ‘Time for you to go. Please.’

She turned back to him. Whatever she’d come here for it was clear she hadn’t got it. She didn’t look angry. She looked sad. Defeated. She walked past him and back out to the kitchen without making eye contact. Two tea mugs stood empty on one of the surfaces, curls of steam still rising from the kettle. She reached out for the back door handle and hesitated, turning back to where he still stood in the hallway.

‘I want to be a model.’

His mind flooded with responses:

Silly bloody girl. No idea what you’d be getting yourself into. It doesn’t stop at photography no matter what your principles are. She could do it, though, she’s got the build and the grace. She’s got the blank, clean face. Whether you make it or not, that life will suck you dry like it did to me.

None of it came out. Instead he gave a kind of snort. It might have sounded like a laugh to her but that wasn’t what it was.

‘Why does everyone assume you’re going to fail before you even start? I’m not stupid, if that’s what you’re thinking. I won’t be taken advantage of.’

‘Really?’ This time he did laugh. ‘How will you avoid it?’

‘I’m a good judge of character.’

‘If that was true you wouldn’t be in this house.’

‘I can trust you, Mr. Brand. You’re a recluse but I know you’re all right.’

‘Do you? How do you know that?’ She shrugged.

‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘You’re too young and too inexperienced to know who you can trust and who you can’t. Do your parents know what you’re up to?’

‘It’s nothing to do with them.’

‘Give me one reason why I shouldn’t tell them what you’re thinking of doing. Do you think they’ll approve?’

‘Don’t do that.’

‘Then don’t be stupid.’

‘This is such bollocks.’

She was crying. The little girl had been unmasked. She governed herself quickly, wiped the few tears away.

‘Mr. Brand,’ she said. ‘I came here for your help. I know I can trust you so don’t mess me about. I need a portfolio. A really good one.’

Mason shrugged, not understanding.

‘I want you to photograph me. I know who you are. With your name all over my photos, I’ll bypass all the sharks when I get to London.’

Mason held his hand out towards the door, gesturing for her to open it.

‘You have to leave. Now.’

***

The farmer wasn’t as sick as he looked.

He came to visit Mason often. Sometimes walking down the steep, treacherous track with help of a long, warped stick. Mason would hear him coming long before he arrived. The diseased wheezing and the knock of his staff finding purchase on stones, the uneven footsteps of a limping man, the footsteps of a determined man. Stealing over the greasy stones, over the mossy stones, through air hanging wet even when it wasn’t raining, he came. He came through woods either angered by wind or resisting the unmoving light above them. He passed through the mug and cling of summer and through the nerveless hands of winter with pain in its bones. To him the world was a gateway. He need pay no fee for entry, showed no fear of departure. Bearded, ragged, staring, he walked like he was already a soul slipped from its shitty human moorings, a living man with the knowledge of the dead. And then he would be there, beside Mason and silent, watching the world with him, leading Mason’s eye to what he saw, how he saw.

Other times he came in Mason’s dreams. No less cumbersome or telegraphed an approach. No less fanfaring of his power. No less a shell of a man and still no less a mage.

Whether conscious or not, the farmer tutored Mason. He was a demanding master, a cruel one, and yet occasionally more caring than Mason’s own parents. His lessons were stories sometimes, tales of people who lived in times lost to memory and history. His lessons were visions of those ages and visions of the future. He taught about the Earth and the land.

‘You came here to forget who you thought you were,’ he’d said one day. ‘That was the right decision. You thought you’d find yourself here but you won’t. That would be an insignificant pursuit, a waste of very precious time. You must learn about how things are, not what you believe them to be. You must become a blank, a forgetting.’

This hadn’t been what Mason wanted. He’d wanted only to be left to himself.

‘It doesn’t matter what you want, fool,’ said the farmer.

‘But I’m paying you to let me stay here. I came to be alone.’

‘I don’t need your money. Leave if you want. Leave now. But if you want to stay here, if you want this sweetness -’

He’d made the woods silent then, like a conductor, and creature by creature, sound by sound, mood by mood, he’d brought it back to life and Mason’s soul was enchanted.

‘- you’ll heed me. You’ll work hard to discard what you thought you knew and who you used to be. You’ll understand - the way the old ones did.’

Mason didn’t even see the farmer’s hand seize the back of his head. The old man knelt and Mason was forced down with him. The hand, like the claws of a huge falcon, pushed his head onto the ground. Fallen gorse needles punctured his face. Moss and weeds mingled with his beard. Plugs of damp peat entered his nose. He panicked, tried to push back. The claws were too powerful. Trying to avoid suffocation, he opened his mouth. The farmer pushed harder. His mouth was stopped with the oozing of soft soil. His eyes went black against the engulfing mire.

‘You’ll learn to love your mother, boy. Smell her, taste her, listen to her. Respect her. This is what you are, boy, your mother’s reek and muck. Everything you are, she’s given you.’

The claw pulled him gasping from the ground. He was lifted by his head until his feet lost contact with the earth. He felt the most nauseating whirling and disorientation, a disconnection from everything, a free-floating terror.

‘Open your eyes, boy.’

The soil was gone from his mouth and nose and face. Gone was the fecund stench of endless cycles of becoming and destruction. He could see. And so he looked. What he saw was the sun. It burned everything else from his vision. It scoured his mind of all distraction until there was only eye-whitening heat and purity.

‘Simple enough for you? Mother Earth. Father Sun. Learn it. Embody it. That’s why you’re here.’

The claw had disappeared and Mason found he was sitting beside the farmer on the rocks as they had been before. The farmer was looking out of the woods towards the other side of the estuary or maybe he was looking into other worlds than this. Mason’s heart was arrhythmic and loud, his breath laboured. He touched his face but there was no trace of soil there in his beard, no burnt skin.

The farmer had stood up, his joints creaking like wet timber, and begun his walk back to the farmhouse.

‘Stay or leave. It’s your choice.’

That was the first lesson.

Mason stayed.

***

That was exactly the kind of detail he left out of his brief explanation of the photo on the stairway. As he sat, drinking the tea he’d been about to make for both of them. He sifted through the events of the morning trying hard to ignore all the parts in which he’d acted like a little boy. It didn’t leave much.

Maybe he should have been less concerned about someone judging him to be crazy, worrying about what a seventeen-year-ld girl might think of her heroic, meal-ticket photographer. Maybe if he’d gone ahead and told her the whole story she’d have left without him having to ask her and without any intention of ever coming back. But his woodland history was too delicate for him to spill to anyone, least of all the too-young-to-care and destined-for-the-streets Aggie Smithfield. If he was ever going to tell it, it would have to be to the right person. Someone who would embody it the way he had. Someone who would pass it on.

Knowledge, he’d discovered, came with certain built-in responsibilities. First off, once you knew something to be true, acting in ignorance or against that knowledge would always be a kind of sin. There was no way to un-know what he had learned. He carried it in his blood now, he supposed. That was the other problem. Knowledge existed to enrich the world. To help people make sense of their existences and help the world make sense of its people. How the people behaved affected the behaviour of the world. Mason knew he was one of the very few individuals left who understood this and used it as their guidance system. His morality was based upon such understanding now. To allow himself to reach the end of his life without propagating his knowledge would be the most ignorant and irresponsible thing he could do.

He thought about that every day; woke each morning, pure from the Earth’s drawing, and wondered how he could disseminate what he knew. When he’d reached full consciousness, in other words, by the time he’d finished his first cup of tea, he was convincing himself that this world he now inhabited, this cushioned, blinkered suburbia, could not take the truth. There was not one person left out here in the places where tarmac and concrete separated people’s feet from the ground who would listen long enough for his words to make any difference at all.

He’d be sectioned in a heartbeat.

Aside from that, Mason felt no sense of authority conveyed upon him by his knowledge. He had stumbled across a heavy burden in the woods, picked it up and shouldered at the behest of the farmer. Now he couldn’t put his load down without condemning himself. His only option would be to share the weight. It was an option which didn’t exist.

Other than the issue he’d brought back with him from the forested valley in Wales - that of his responsibility - Mason was unused to having to solve any kind of problem. This was one advantage of living alone and steering clear of people. He only ever had to think about or deal with himself. Most of the time, because he stayed in tune with the Earth and the seasons, there was little to concern him. Occasionally, his memories troubled him. Those from the woods and occasionally those from his time on the London scene. All of that was manageable stuff.

Now, in the space of a few minutes, he had a real problem. One that wouldn’t just go away without him doing something about it. This was what happened when you talked to other people. Every word uttered, every gesture employed in expression and the concealment of expression led to complexity. He didn’t need this girl hanging around. He didn’t need to talk to her about the farmer. He especially didn’t need to take photos of her - that was the kind of activity which would lead to him being run off the estate whether he’d decided to leave or not.

He drained his tea mug and stood up. Moments later he was standing on the stairs again looking at the picture. It was mesmerising. All you wanted to know when you looked at it was ‘who is this man?’ and ‘what is it that he sees?’. No matter how often he looked at the photo the effect was the same. He could only imagine the effect it would have had on the girl. Intrigue was not the thing to arouse in someone like her. She was tenacious and determined. He knew she’d be back. What he didn’t know was how he would handle her return.

He looked away from the picture with an effort. The truth was he didn’t need the photo. It didn’t need to be framed there on his wall. Everything about the farmer was inside him now and firmly in his memory. It would all stay there forever. The physical photo itself was unimportant. It was time for change - something the farmer had always told him was important to accept, even to welcome. He had also taught Mason ways to encourage such change.

He snatched the frame off the wall. The space it left was like a hole in his armour but he ignored how that made him feel. He unclipped the frame as he walked back down to the kitchen. He removed the rear panel and exposed the photo for the first time in several years. The frame had kept it clean and bright. The back of the picture was still white. He took the picture out carefully and turned it over. It seemed a fragile thing now, its power diminished. It was vulnerable in his callused hands.

Photos were lies, he reminded himself. He knew it so well and yet he still found it hard to make his body do what his sprit knew was right.

‘I don’t need it any more,’ he whispered.

He opened the back door and stepped out into the cold air. When he reached the shed, he hesitated, fumbling for the padlock keys in his pocket. He stopped and withdrew his fingers without retrieving the key. He wouldn’t need a shovel for this job. Sometimes it was better to dig with your bare hands, let the earth taste your skin and smell your wishes.

6

‘I can’t believe we live in such a shit-hole.’

‘It’s not that bad.’

‘It’s a fucking pit and you know it.’

Aggie Smithfield and her friend Moira sat on the swings shivering and smoking. The last hour and a half of school was a double revision period, self-supervised, so they’d left early. The recreation ground was a natural gathering point for the children of the estate and there was no better time to be there than when school was still in and they had it to themselves. Aggie turned her legs from side to side, assessing the shape and the length. It was too cold for the short skirt she was wearing but her legs were too pretty to keep covered. She could feel Moira looking too.

‘I don’t know why you hate it so much,’ said Moira. ‘My family’s lived around here for generations.’

‘That doesn’t make it a nice place.’

‘They must have stayed here for a reason.’

Yeah, because they’re all too stupid to leave. Aggie liked Moira enough to know better than to say it.

‘Maybe they didn’t have any choice,’ she said instead. Moira blew out smoke. The wind bent the stream and snatched it away.

‘No. They like it here. They know everyone. Everyone knows them. It’s home.’

‘What about you?’

Moira pulled her jacket tighter against the cold blow.

‘I’m happy enough.’

‘Don’t you ever think about leaving?’

‘I’d miss them all too much.’

The conversation was going nowhere. At least, not to the place Aggie wanted it to go. Why was there no one she could talk to?

‘You’ll keep in touch, won’t you?’ asked Moira.

‘What?’

‘I know you want to get out of here. Just promise me you’ll text me sometimes, eh?’

Aggie looked at Moira but she’d turned her head away. She was putting her hand out to take hold of Moira’s when she sensed movement behind her. Too late to evade them, she felt fingers close around her ribs and a shout by her ear.

‘RRAAA!’

She leapt off the swing with Don still clutching her. Her heart hammered, she’d nearly wet herself. Don was laughing.

‘You twat,’ she shouted. ‘You juvenile fucking twat.’ Moira was laughing too. The idiots. It wouldn’t be like this in London. People would respect her.

‘Alright, Moira.’

‘Alright, Don.’

‘What are you doing here, Donald?’ asked his sister. ‘Why aren’t you at school?’

‘Why aren’t you?’

‘You haven’t skipped the whole day have you?’

‘Got a sick note.’

‘Real or imaginary?’

‘Real, I think. Doctor says I might have migraines or something. I had this pain inside my eye. Really bad it was, like someone was pumping it up with air. Felt like it was going to explode.’ He eyed his sister’s cigarette. ‘Give us a fag, will you?’

‘No way.’

‘A drag then.’

‘No, Donald.’

Moira leaned over with an open packet of ten Benson & Hedges.

‘Here you go, Donald,’ she said.

As he took it, she caught his eye and smiled. He looked away quickly. She passed him her cigarette and let him light up off its tip. Aggie looked disgusted.

‘If they smell it on you, I’ll get the blame,’ she said.

‘Spray him with a bit of perfume,’ said Moira. ‘Works for me.’

Aggie ignored the suggestion, concentrating on what

Donald had said about his sick note.

‘I suppose your eye just got better, did it?’

‘Mum got a prescription for some painkillers. They work too. Make you feel . . . I don’t know, far away or something.’

The pissed-off wrinkles of Aggie’s face dropped out as she caught sight of something over Don’s shoulder. His instinct was to look but she stopped him with her hand.

‘Drop your fag and crush it out,’ she said. ‘Don’t turn around.’

Don grinned.

‘Dad home early, is he? Out walking Sasquatch?’

‘Seriously, Don, I’m not kidding. Do it now.’

He took only his third drag and dropped the butt, squashing it under one of his Vans.

‘Happy?’

Then he heard the sound of steps approaching on the tarmac footpath leading to the play area. Now he turned around.

They all recognised the approaching figure. A woman of forty-five dressed as though she was sixty. Flat brown shoes, grey tights and an ankle length woollen skirt. She wore a drab cardigan and a padded green jacket over the top. Her hair was black but she styled it like it was already grey in unflattering, homogenous curls. Around her neck was knotted, as always, a plain silk scarf. The scarf made her look like a sailor.

‘Shit,’ said Don. ‘The vigilante.’

Moira giggled, catching his eye again. Don appreciated the attention.

The vigilante approached at a march. This was how she walked everywhere. She had a message to deliver, a mission to the darker limits of society. Don found himself giggling too but it was nerves in his case. The woman actually frightened him.

She was still twenty yards away when her tongue leapt forth.

‘Why aren’t you children at school?’

None of them said anything. The marching quickened and she arrived.

‘Have you got cloth ears? Answer me, why aren’t you at school?’

It fell to Aggie.

‘We’ve got a free class.’

‘Rubbish, girl. I’ll report you to your headmaster.’ Aggie sighed.

‘My name is Aggie Sm -’

‘I know who you are, child.’

‘I’m in the sixth form and we have a free class. Go ahead and report us if you like. The headmistress will put you straight.’

It was a risk. The vigilante wasn’t beyond making the call and then they’d be in proper trouble. But Aggie was banking on the woman’s most obvious frailty - she hated to be wrong. Especially in front of ‘children’.

‘You should learn to speak to your elders with some respect.’

‘What? The way you respect us, you mean?’ The vigilante looked at their faces individually.

‘What about you, young man? You’re not in the sixth form.’

‘I’m off sick.’

‘You don’t look sick to me.’

‘The doctor made me better.’

It was true but it came off like backchat and he regretted it.

She scanned their faces harder. She wasn’t going anywhere yet.

‘You’ve been smoking, haven’t you?’

She said it more to Don than the girls and Aggie answered quickly to shut it down.

‘We’ve been smoking,’ she said gesturing to Moira. ‘We’re seventeen so it’s perfectly legal behaviour. He can’t because he can’t afford it. Besides, he’s too young.’

‘Filthy girls. Filthy habit. How can you sully yourselves that way? Don’t you care about your . . . bodies?’

That tiny hesitation was enough to lose the battle for the vigilante. Now they all knew she wasn’t talking about their ‘bodies’. She was talking about their ability to bring forth children. She was talking about sex. It was a wrong turn.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Aggie.

‘I mean it’s unhealthy for you. You should stop.’

Aggie capitalised.

‘What have our bodies got to do with you, Mrs. Ahern? What do you want to know about our bodies for?’

The vigilante stood straighter, moved her intense head away from them. Staying clear.

‘I’m only concerned for your health, girls.’

‘Don’t you know it’s inappropriate to talk about bodies with children, Mrs. Ahern? There’s a special word for it nowadays. What is it that word, Moira?’

Moira’s smile was all sharp teeth.

‘Grooming,’ she said. ‘Yeah, grooming’s the word.’

‘Grooming,’ repeated Aggie. ‘You could get put away for that.’

The steel went out of the vigilante’s mission.

‘I feel sorry for you,’ she said. ‘I really do. You walk through this world with sin as your companion and the devil for comfort. It could be paradise. Heaven on Earth and you won’t give it a moment’s attention.’

‘I think you ought to leave now, Mrs. Ahern. You’re making my little brother upset. He’s not even sixteen, as you know. All this abusive language could have a damaging effect on him. He might need to go for counselling. He’d have to tell them all about you.’ She looked at her brother. ‘Wouldn’t you, Donald?’

She had more power over him than the vigilante. She’d make his life hell if he didn’t side with her. So he nodded and the counter-attack was complete.

Mrs. Ahern couldn’t resist one last try. As softly as she could manage and using all her energy to restrain her utter affront she said:

‘Why don’t you come to church this Sunday, the three of you? Try and see things another way?’

‘Why don’t you get lost?’ said Aggie.

Mrs. Ahern’s lips tightened over whatever more it was she’d wanted to say. She nodded to herself almost imperceptibly and turned away. The retreat was more of a hurry than a march. When she was out of earshot, they all released sighs. Aggie took out her cigarettes and offered them to Moira and Don. Such inclusion was not wasted on him. He swelled up to their stature.

‘Fucking curtain-twitching bible-bashing Nazi bitch-bag,’ said Aggie.

The three of them went slack with laughter.

***

Mason replaced the photo of the farmer with one of tens of thousands of others he’d taken. It was very similar; this time a wistful model staring through a window on a rainy day, her fingers holding the nets so she could see out. It was for a catalogue selling floaty, hippy outfits. The model had no soul. The picture had no soul. It was black and white. It was perfect. Now the walls were sealed with lies again, not a true moment among the jigsaw of framed images. He stood back and smiled.

That night he travelled back across the barren brownland to the landfill. He hurried to keep out the chill. Once through the disguised hole in the fence he found the freshest area of soil. This was where they’d been dumping and compacting that same day. Now the ‘cell’ was filled and covered with earth. He removed his shoes and socks and stepped onto the soft warm humus. He flexed his feet and gripped the earth, let it get stuck between his toes and under his toenails. It was like coming home. He gave himself to the sensation of being ‘drained’. All the worry over the girl, the memories of his time in the woods, they seeped away like pus into a clay poultice.

His mind slipped its mooring.

At first the vibration was in his head. He felt giddy with it and his teeth buzzed where they met. It was like having the cone of a super-woofer placed against his occiput. A subsonic noise shook his cranium at some wavelength that threatened to unpick the sutures of his skull. Even this was not unpleasant in the state of consciousness he’d reached.

Then the buzz extended to the rest of his body and he came back to himself. He opened his eyes. His entire body was oscillating. It wasn’t in his head at all, it was rising up from his feet. He looked down. It wasn’t so dark, he couldn’t see that his feet had already sunk in to the ankles. He didn’t move.

The vibration became a rumble - he could hear it all around him now. He could feel it in his chest. His heart stumbled over its own rhythm. The Earth was shaking now. His knees responded like shock absorbers. And then the shaking became too strong for his legs and he fell to the soft earth. There was thunder under the ground. His hands sunk through layers of soil. His body followed them. There was soil in his mouth, grit forcing its way under his eyelids, trickling into his ears. He would have screamed if it hadn’t been a waste of the only breath he had left. The world itself tremored and he feared he would either be buried or flung off into space. Anoxia made sparkles behind his crushed-shut eyes. He had to breathe but if he did he’d breathe the earth into his lungs and suffocate. The sparkling became brighter and he began to relax, knowing it was wrong but not being able to resist.

All movement ceased.

Mason pushed his way back out of the soil, trying to spit out dirt and breathe at the same time. Particles stuck in his throat. For several minutes he believed he would still die, only above ground. But each in-breath revived him and each exhalation cleared the earth from his airways. He cried mud; shook soil from his ears.

When he was able, he stood up, wiping his face and blowing his nose onto the landfill’s covering of clean soil. The touch of his bare soles against the earth held no comfort for him now. Before he was able to walk clear of the newly covered cell, he felt the welling of treacly warmth rising through the topsoil. There was no need to stop and examine it this time; he knew exactly what it was.

Feeling only guilt and not knowing why, he made the darkest shadows his companions all the way home.

***

Ray woke, eyes wide, fully conscious. The whole flat was shaking. He could hear the glasses rattling in the kitchen cupboard, the cutlery shivering in its drawer. His mobile phone chattered towards the edge of the bedside table and fell off.

Seconds later the vibrations receded, to a tremble, to a buzz, to nothing. Heart racing, he reached out to Jenny and squeezed her hand

‘Did you feel that?’ He whispered. She took a few seconds to reply.

‘Feel what?’ she said eventually with a sleep-weighted tongue.

It took only a few minutes for him to get back to sleep, such was the level of dope in his system. In the morning, all he retained was a vague sense of anxiety.

***

Tamsin’s dreams lengthen and intensify. Sleep becomes exhausting, and yet, come the morning, she remembers nothing. Sometimes, she notices Kevin looking at her over his paper at breakfast but he never asks if she’s all right.

Since the true agony of the fall - the baby’s awakening as she thinks of it whilst dreaming - the scenario is different. When she arrives at the sky-penetrating building the baby is gone. The roof-light is already broken.

She flies in, feeling something close to panic. She must find the baby. She is responsible for it. Here in the dream, feeling responsibility is perfectly natural. Down through the broken-toothed mouth of glass. The corridor is dim now that the only illumination comes from the skylight. There is no electricity in the building. No need for it because there are no people. She knows the building is empty from top to bottom and that the baby should not hurt itself with fruitless searching. But, just as she knows the building is uninhabited, she knows the baby will never stop looking.

There’s a zigzag blood trail in the corridor, still wet, and she remembers the baby’s injuries. There’s a spike of glass the size of a knife blade piercing its eye and embedded in its brain. It really shouldn’t be alive. It has crawled over the broken glass, apparently injuring itself further, in order to test every door. She follows the blood trail, still floating, still controlled by the entity. The meandering red smear on the never-carpeted concrete widens, wettens. There are scratches in the stain where the glass it’s dragging with it cuts into the concrete, occasionally snapping off and leaving a bloody fragment. There can’t be this much blood in the tiny child’s body, can there?

She follows the trail around a corner.

Somehow the baby has found an open door. The blood leads through it. She follows. She comes to a bathroom. The baby has found nothing but a small pack of razorblades. It plays with them as though they are cards, lacerating its fingers to the bone until every blade is sticky and slippery. Some of them are stuck in its palms. The baby stops for a moment and looks around. Does it hear her? Does it know she’s there? She prays it will see her with its one good eye; acknowledge her at the very least. Then she knows the baby won’t be lonely any more. But the baby doesn’t see her. It isn’t looking for her. It’s looking for other toys to play with. The baby smiles through its broken mouth, dribbling cherry saliva. It turns to crawl out of the bathroom pushing the razorblades deeper with every shuffle. One lodges in its knee, opening up the leathery pad there to bring a fresh welling. The blood lubricates its progress towards the kitchen.

There’s something in there it wants. She sees it first, precariously positioned at the edge of a work surface. The baby crawls right to it. It looks up and sees the knife-block but it cannot reach.

Don’t do this, she pleads. Why are you doing this to yourself? No words are allowed to come forth.

The baby begins to bang on the cupboard doors below the surface. Its broken arm has knitted but at an unnatural angle. The tiny sharp-edged bones still protrude from a wound which will never completely heal. With the second ‘elbow’ of its broken arm and the other hand variously pierced by razorblades, it beats the cupboards hard. The vibration affects the knife block, bringing it nearer to the edge.

No, baby, don’t do that. Her scream is cave-silent.

The inevitable happens. The knife-block tumbles spilling its seven blades out as it falls. The block hits the baby’s head and bounces away heavily. The knives enter the baby’s body easily, as though it were made of fresh cake. They slide in deep. Deep enough to stay. The baby pauses, turns. Some of the longer knives have passed right through it. She sees the points poking downward from its chest as it screams. She can’t hear the screaming. She only feels it, deep inside, her spirit being murdered by the baby’s pain. She wants to weep and cannot.

The baby is crawling again. Back out through the open door. Back into the corridor where it resumes its wounded seeking.

She is with the baby at the top of the stairs. The stairs descend a square shaft in flights, with landings on each floor. They lead down into darkness. They look eternal but this is only because she loses sight of them somewhere very far below. There is a railing but the baby could easily slip through. It has stopped bleeding now but that barely seems a mercy considering the many impalings which are now part of its existence.

It hesitates at the top step. It is clear the baby does not understand stairs. She notices the baby isn’t as chubby as it was before. She can see its ribs when it breathes and there’s a squeezebox wheezing coming from the places where it was penetrated by knives. It tries to crawl down anyway and topples forward, smashing its nose on the corner of the second step before it gathers momentum and begins to roll with real force. Each bounce hammers steel or glass deeper into the baby’s body. It hits the wall at the bottom of the first flight which slows it but does not stop it from rolling down the next flight.

And the next, and the next.

The entity compels her to follow.

Down into the darkness where, for a long time she is aware only of her own descent and the vibration of flesh and bone and glass and metal being resisted by man-made stone. She is blind for a time and then the entity forces her to see in night vision - grainy black and white and only directly ahead of her eyes. All the rest is a tunnel of darkness or shadow.

The baby has been falling for hours. It is thinner and every part of it has been smashed ragged. It retains its piercings almost possessively but its once-angelic roundness is now all broken corners and snapped edges.

They reach the ground floor. She is right behind, unable to weep with relief for the infant. She would cry a dead sea if the entity allowed her but it won’t. There’s not much flesh left on the baby now. Mostly it is a crawling pile of broken bones, already fusing into crippled angles and deformed shapes. One hand is now only a stump of broken razors. Its toes are tiny sharp bonelets. Bones which should have been ribs grow like spines from the baby’s back. Its other eye is gone now.

Blind, shattered, emaciated, the baby still searches.

***

Many, many times she follows the baby on its journey down from light to shadow to darkness.

On the ground level, everything is dirty, messed up, abandoned looking. As though people were here once. Everything is broken as if a bomb exploded. She is back again, watching the bone-baby, the razor-baby, crawling. The only sound is the scrape of its knife-points and bones over the concrete. The baby has still not found what it seeks.

There has been a pause in the dream for what feels like decades when she’s here. The baby has reached the ground floor but has found nothing. If anything, it is searching with even more determination now.

This time, it finds something.

Right in the centre of the ground floor there is a square opening. The hatch is open. It looks like some kind of maintenance shaft and she is able to peer down while the baby skirts its edge. It’s deep, too deep for her to see the bottom.

Don’t do it. Don’t go in there.

The baby hooks its crippled razor hands over the lip of the hatchway and pulls. She falls right behind it. It is in these descents through the air that the bone-baby knows its greatest and most short-lived pleasure; weightlessness means no pressure on its fractures and punctures. When it falls, it is free.

She sees a ledge below them. The baby hits it, crushing both its legs before bouncing slightly and falling again. This happens many times. She would weep if her eyes weren’t as dry as dust.

Finally the baby hits a dirty, debris-strewn floor. It hits with the sound of splintering. With her monochrome night-vision, she sees the bone-baby lying still and she feels a welling of terrible sadness and terrible relief. She wants to touch the dead bone-baby but the entity won’t allow it. Then there is movement. The rising and falling of crush-damaged lungs, the beating of a torn but resolute heart. The bone-baby lifts its broken skull, lolling dislocated but still attached to its neck. It scents the darkness and begins to drag itself along through the rubble. Its metal and bone protrusions catch on corners and tear its body open further. It crawls on.

Then she can see something ahead. It’s a faint glow, rusty looking beyond the shadows. The bone-baby is eager. It crawls faster, scraping along like forks on china, like fingernails on a blackboard. She is suddenly afraid. More afraid than she has ever been before. The bone-baby makes progress towards the light. The passage grows tighter around them. Soon the baby’s spikes and breaks are catching the walls above and below and on both sides. She finds it hard to breathe as the space grows narrower. The baby gets stuck at the end of the passage. It is only inches from the light. She sees it straining its broken body, more glass and razor and steel and bone than flesh now, straining towards the red-orange glow.

She knows the baby is crying in frustration but the entity won’t let her hear it.

Then the bone-baby is gone. It has passed through. She tries to follow but she too gets stuck. There’s a huge warmth coming from the tiny hole at the end of the passage, huge and powerful. Eventually, she squeezes through.

This time the fall is short. She lands on a stone floor on her feet. The entity has finally put her down. She feels solid, feels her own weight at last and knows she can fall no further. The heat and brightness are coming from a giant blast furnace which occupies one entire wall of this cavern she’s standing in. Inside the furnace, molten rock and metal bubbles and spits. She takes a few steps back and turns all about, looking for the bone-baby. The bone-baby has gone.

For a while she thinks it has crawled into the furnace to extinguish itself forever. Either that or to live in the most intense agony it could find. Surely the furnace was the worst torment of all in this damned and forgotten building.

Then she looks down and realises she can’t see her feet. At first this makes no sense to her. She looks and looks, not understanding what she sees. There’s a misshapen lump of flesh in the way. She steps to one side and the lump comes with her. It’s attached somehow. She still can’t see how or why.

Something moves within her. Deep inside her abdomen. Buried there.

No wonder the shape makes no sense. It is the flesh of her belly as she has never seen it before. She is pregnant. The bone-baby is inside her. Her shape is unrecognisable because it is her once-smooth, naked belly-flesh stretched over the now foetally-coiled baby with all its wounds. Razors and knives and shattered glass and fractured bones made one with her. Already, its points and breaks, its shattered edges and grimy barbs are tearing through the walls of her womb. She can feel the bone-baby feeding off her insides, draining her strength. She is suddenly exhausted.

The first contraction is a mind-ripping shock. Enough to send her insane in a moment. She understands now what this will do to her. Her uterus shrinks, gripping the bone-baby, trying to force it out. Instead of beginning the baby’s journey through the birth canal, this clenching forces the baby’s weapons of self-harm into her body. Her liver, spleen and kidneys are skewered in the first few seconds of labour. The amniotic sac is punctured in many places and the fluid washes her legs in a shower of watery gore and mucus. The damage of its downward passage will be her destruction.

The bone-baby has completed its search. It is ready to be born.

And she will be the one to bear it.

***

Tamsin wakes, sweat-soaked, two fists pressed deep into her belly, biting back the scream. There is warmth and wetness between her legs. She puts her fingers there and brings them to her eyes expecting to see the dark signature of blood. Instead she smells urine.

7

The binoculars were handy but she didn’t always need them.

Many of the things Mavis Ahern saw happened right outside her house or across the street. Sometimes it was necessary to pretend she was on her way to the paper shop in order to find out where people were going. That kind of surveillance was tricky. She knew she already had a reputation as a meddler. When she followed someone, she had to be absolutely certain they either didn’t know who she was or didn’t know she was there. She was God’s eye in the Meadowlands Estate; she couldn’t afford for His eye to be put out through her own carelessness.

The Smithfield girl was up to something. It was obvious to Mavis if not to anyone else. Three times now - each occasion was clearly marked on the Agatha Smithfield record sheet, pinned to the fridge with a suffering Christ magnet - the girl had walked alone along Bluebell Way, passing Mavis’s house on the opposite side of the street. There was nothing in that direction worth walking to as far as Mavis could tell. The recreation ground was the other way. The post office, co-op and chip shop were on the far side of the rec. Even The Compass pub, where the youths bought and sold their drugs in the car park, was back past The Smithfield’s own house.

Following the girl was impossible; Aggie would notice her immediately, especially after their last encounter. The best view she would get if the girl came past again would be from around the side wall dividing her property from the next door house. She glanced at the times of the sightings; all three were Sundays, one mid-morning when Mavis had not long been back from church, the other two shortly after lunch. It was simple then; the following Sunday, she would be ready. She would devote the day to this one matter. There had to be a way to bring the girl back into the flock but first she had to know the nature of the girl’s sin. It would be the power this knowledge gave her that would provide the impetus for the girl to comply with her wishes. Yes, it was blackmail but the ends utterly justified the means.

Mavis would teach the girl about the love of God first. Then she would teach her about prayer. Right here in the living room. On their knees. Mavis would show her the way. It was time to bring the sheep back into God’s pasture. One at a time at first and then, as the flock grew, she would lead them home in droves.

***

It seemed as though winter had no plan to end. Until the weather began to change, any kind of change, Mason knew there was little he could do in his garden.

Other things kept him occupied.

Upstairs there were two spare ‘bedrooms’ neither of which he used for sleeping. The larger one contained a wardrobe left by the previous owners. When he had spare items or clothes, he put them in this room in boxes. The air in there smelled of damp cardboard and perspiration. There was a set of free weights in the corner. He used them occasionally to ‘hurt’ himself back into his body when the calling he’d first heard in the woods wanted to speak to him again. Lifting weights helped to dampen the effect. If he worked hard enough he could stumble to his bed and fall asleep, still dripping sweat, and wake up clear and silent-minded. Recently, he’d been spending more and more time up there. The way he lifted weights didn’t enlarge his muscles, it had the effect of bringing grooves and curves into relief as his fat burned. A vain man would have spent time admiring the effect in the mirror. Mason Brand never bothered.

In the smaller of the two spare rooms he fitted a blackout roller-blind. Testing it in the middle of the day with the door shut threw the room into complete darkness. He changed the bulb in the light fitting for a 25 watt red bulb. From the boxes in the next room he brought four tray-baths, an indoor clothes line, some tongs and developer, stop and acid fixer. He hadn’t worn a watch for many years but now he would need one. All he could find was a wind-up alarm clock in one of the boxes. He gave its key a couple of twists and it ticked immediately. There was no work surface so he brought the kitchen table upstairs. It wouldn’t be for long, after all. For the moment he could eat standing at the kitchen counter.

As he worked he found he was excited. His hands trembled ever so slightly and it made him laugh to himself. Like a kid again. He mastered the emotion quickly. This was not something he was going to allow himself to get used to. Nor would he do it again once this task was finished. When the room was ready, he pulled down the blackout blind and tested the light levels. It was perfect. He left the room in darkness.

As he shut the door his telephone rang downstairs. He did not recognise the sound. Its tone was strange in the silence of the house. A message coming in from somewhere. A message for him. There was no answering machine. The phone rang and rang.

As if breaking out of a trance he hurried down the stairs and picked up the receiver. He didn’t know what to say. Finally the voice at the other end took the initiative.

‘Hello? Mr. Brand?’

‘I . . . yes.’

‘Shall I come round?’

‘No.’

‘We need to find somewhere.’

‘I know.’

‘If I pick you up, we could walk there together.’

‘No.’

There was a short, tense sigh. Words snatched back before they were out.

‘You can’t come here again,’ he said. ‘People will notice.’

‘I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck.’

‘I do. I’d like to live here a little longer.’

‘Have you got a mobile?’

‘No.’

‘We’ll meet then? Somewhere . . .’

‘Outdoors. Trees and sky for depth and background. Texture and skin. It has to be . . .’

‘What?’

‘Natural.’

‘I wanted some modern stuff too, you know.’

‘Nature is modern. Nature is ancient. It’s all the same. You’ll get what I give you or you’ll get nothing.’

‘Fine. Where then?’

‘Shreve Country Park. Off the beaten track.’

‘I know a place. It’s where people go to -’

‘That’s no good. On the other side. By the landfill. There’s a quieter spot.’

‘It stinks like shit over there.’

‘It’s a quieter spot. Take it or leave it.’

‘Fine. What time?’

‘Before dusk.’

‘What should I wear?’

‘It’s not important.’

‘Where is this place?’

‘There’s a concrete pumping station by the rock dam.’

‘I know where you mean.’

‘Behind that, there’s a track leading off the footpath. The gate is broken and overgrown. You’ll find it to the left of a hollow tree.’

There was silence on the line for a while. He listened to quiet white noise. He thought he could hear her breathing. Suddenly, he didn’t want her to change her mind.

‘I’ll have a can of mace with me, you know.’

‘Bring whatever makes you feel safe. I don’t care. Before dusk tonight. That’s not long from now. Don’t be late.’

He placed the receiver down and stood unmoving in his hallway for a long time.

***

The old camper van hadn’t moved from its parking place on the block-paved frontage of his house since he’d arrived six years previously. The tyres were long since flat, there was green and yellow mildew growing on the rubber sealant around the windows and windscreen. Rust expanded from several sites like a skin disease. People had made their complaints from time to time but it was his property and his car. There was nothing they could make him do about it unless someone proved the vehicle was a danger. Most people had learned to simply leave Mason alone and that was how he liked it.

The only part of the camper that still worked was the rear door through which the tiny living space was accessed. Some nights when he couldn’t sleep he would take an A4 pad and sit on the dampening foam cushions by candlelight and imagine he was back in the woods. It was a dangerous pastime because it was the kind of activity that opened him to the calling. Some nights he missed the woods so much he was happy to take the risk. And, if he heard the calling, he wrote what it said.

If he needed to shop for anything or go anywhere, Mason rode a bicycle. The bike came from the recycling centre at the Shreve tip and that was the place he was most likely to go when he needed something. Winter was giving way, releasing its grip, weakening as the Earth progressed around the sun. Although it had held Shreve tight in its clamped fist this year, time was prising its fingers free. Perhaps no one else would know the change was coming for another few days - when the weather began to soften - but Mason felt the changes in his blood the way he felt the phases of the moon affect his mood. He needed new tools and new pieces for his old tools. The tip was the place to find them.

He cycled off early to miss the traffic, cold morning light gleaming on the speckled chrome of his handlebars.

The tip was a great place. It opened at 7am and closed at 6pm in winter, 8pm in the summer. People took their bags of garden waste and old furniture and broken TVs and all manner of leavings. Most of it went into the crusher ready to be taken to the landfill. There were bays for separating items out of the rubbish; places for wood, glass, cardboard, electronics, broken domestic appliances, hardcore, soil, green waste and metals. But many people still dropped items for separation into the main waste bay.

As Mason cycled past the entrance to Shreve Country Park he was unable to stop himself from glancing in and smiling at the memory of what had taken place there. He had done a good job, a professional job. In spite of the guilt he felt over letting himself be manipulated into working again, he had the girl’s word that she would receive his knowledge. He pushed the smile away quickly when he saw someone leaving the car park on foot. It was a man walking two panting, salivating bulldogs. It looked more like the dogs were walking him. Mason didn’t make eye contact, he never did, but he recognised the man from Bluebell Way. There was a faintest waft of cigarettes as he cycled by; that and the odour of the overheated mutts.

His journey took him around the town’s small ring road and off on a dead-end road leading to the tip. As he cycled along this road, three trucks full of collected waste turned out of the tip’s entrance and grumbled past him. He was buffeted by dust, diesel and the smell of waste - something he almost relished. So sensitive was his nose that he could put a fair guess on what each truck contained.

The staff knew him and knew also that he wasn’t one for conversation. Instead they nodded to him and smiled. Mason liked to think he had the respect of the people that worked at the tip. He doubted they were very well paid, but they, like him, could see the value of all the things the rest of the town threw away. He was quite sure they capitalised on it whenever they could.

Mason parked his bike outside the office where it would be safe and walked around to the portakabin where they displayed dumped items ready for resale. He spotted a box of books and went immediately to it. Here was something more for his shelf in the shed. He looked for classics mainly but sometimes a modern thriller would catch his eye. As he rummaged, a car pulled up at the main bay. Mason glanced up and saw Richard Smithfield’s Volvo pull in. He edged quickly to one side. This was a man he had no desire to talk to or meet. Ever.

The man got out of his car, wearing driving gloves. He went to the boot of the car and opened it. Mason shrank back as Richard Smithfield looked around before removing a single black bin bag and walking quickly towards the dumping hatch. The bag looked heavy but barely filled. He threw it in. The sound it made was a kind of crash and clink. A metallic percussion. Mason expected Mr. Smithfield to take more bags out of the Volvo but he didn’t. He slammed the boot shut, jumped back into the car and drove away. There was a five mile an hour speed limit around the tip. Mr. Smithfield must have been doing fifteen or twenty. Dust rose in the vehicle’s wake as it sped away along the access road and back to the main ring road which looped the town.

***

Aggie Smithfield walked along Bluebell Way trying not to hurry. It was hard not to break into a run. Her mouth was dry with anticipation and, for the moment, she wasn’t thinking about Mason Brand at all, only what his name on her photographs could do for her. He’d given them to her in a simple, plastic-coated cardboard folder with elastic drawn over a steel bobble to keep it shut. He wouldn’t let her look at the photos while she was there.

‘Open it when you get home. Not before,’ he’d said only moments before.

‘Fine.’

She’d tried to keep the hurt out of her voice. Had he noticed? It was hard to see his face through his beard. Hard to see his mind through his eyes. She had no idea what he was thinking. One thing she’d realised: he wasn’t as old as the beard made him look. And he was all muscle. His downcast demeanour and his rumpled clothes hid a lean, strong man rippling with quiet energy. It was hard to admit to herself that something about him aroused her interest - her sexual interest. He was hairy. He seemed dirty. He wore no sprays or aftershave, made no effort at all to look . . . nice. But the orbs of his eyes were the purest white she’d ever seen. The whites of a fundamentalist. Somehow she knew this meant his body, his insides, were clean and unpolluted. No cigarettes. No booze. No skunk. And all he seemed to eat were the vegetables from his own garden. His irises were a gleaming brown-amber, somehow lit from the inside. Whenever he looked at her she had to look away.

Right now, none of that mattered. What mattered was getting home to her bedroom and locking the door. Then she could -

‘Where do you think you’re going in such a hurry, young lady?’

Fuck. Not now.

She took a few more steps.

‘I asked you a question, girly.’

She stopped, turned and faced Mavis Ahern across the street. The hag was standing on the pavement outside her house. God knew how long she’d been watching for - Aggie hadn’t been concentrating. She didn’t want a confrontation this time.

‘I’m going home,’ she said, trying to keep her voice from betraying her excitement, and now this unexpected frustration.

‘And where have you been?’ That was enough, right there.

‘None of your business.’

‘It is if you’ve been up to no good. If I think you’re getting yourself into trouble, I’ll have no choice but to tell your parents.’

Aggie stood with her mouth moving and no words coming out. Was this woman for real? Why did the old bitch think she had anything to do with her life? Why was she even on this planet? Her mind made up to settle things for the last time, Aggie approached the Ahern woman directly, staring her out. There was some fanaticism in this woman’s eyes too but nothing like the power in the gaze of Mason Brand. He saw things as they really were. This old bitch saw them through a fractured, opaque lens. As Aggie neared her, the older woman appeared to back up. Only a fraction but it was enough.

‘Someone should have told you this long ago, Mavis. You’re a sad, lonely, old woman with nothing better to do than poke your nose into other people’s lives. I’m sick of it. If you’ve got something to say to my mum and dad, you come with me and say it. Right now.’

Mrs. Ahern had lost her voice for the moment.

‘Come on, you curtain-twitching bitch. Come and tell my parents all about it.’

‘What did you call me?’

‘You heard.’

Aggie grabbed a hold of the woman’s wrist and started to pull her along the pavement. The woman was stronger than she looked but she didn’t let that stop her.

‘Come on, we’ll go and talk to them right now. I want to get this over with.’

‘Let go of me. This is assault.’

‘You don’t know the fucking meaning of the word.’ Mavis Ahern snapped her arm out of Aggie’s grip making

Aggie stumbled away. The folder flew out of her grasp. When it hit the pavement the steel bobble caught the kerbside and bent. The elastic snapped off. Silky sheets of monochromatic images slipped into the gutter. For a slice of a second, Aggie stood in hesitation, her secrets disgorged in the street. Then she dived to retrieve the spilled guts of her brand new portfolio. Mavis Ahern beat her to it. She had grabbed two sheets from the folder before Aggie could collect the rest up and shuffle them back into their protective shell.

For some reason, Aggie didn’t try to take them back straight away. Here, for the first time ever, someone was seeing her as she had always wanted to be seen. It was her vanity that caused the hesitation, not the fact that she wanted Mrs. Ahern in particular to see her that way. She regretted it immediately. These things were still . . . private somehow. Aggie hadn’t even seen them herself and now this psycho harridan had her sticky fingers all over them.

Still Aggie didn’t move. She watched the vigilante’s face. What she saw there gave her satisfaction. The woman was awed by the art and struck by Aggie’s beauty. She was envious and disgusted. Aggie saw the flame of self-hatred rise into the woman’s face before she denounced the images she held in her hand.

‘Filth. Degradation. What is wrong with you people?’ That was it, wasn’t it? The vigilante believed herself separate from the rest of the community - at least from those who didn’t attend church or live by her painful, joyless morals. To her, Aggie was some kind of heathen invader in her perfect, religious world. Aggie took her chance and snatched the photos. Mavis Ahern was far quicker again than she’d expected. Aggie’s fingers met empty air.

‘Give them back.’

‘I shall be keeping these for your parents to see. Possibly for the police.’

‘They’re mine,’ said Aggie. ‘My property. If you don’t give them back to me I’ll call the law myself.’ She pulled her mobile from her pocket and stated dialling. ‘All I’ve got to do is hit dial and I’ll be talking to the police. Do you want them to come down here and interview you in the street over an accusation of theft? How’s that going to look in your precious church, eh?’

‘These are illegal.’

‘Believe it or not, Mavis, I know the law about this because I plan to make it my profession. There’s nothing illegal about these images. The police will agree with me. All I have to do is get them to come here and look for themselves. Now, give me back my property.’

The vigilante didn’t seem able to hand the photos back without her glance being drawn again and again to what she saw on those two sheets of black and white photography. Aggie’s removal of the photos from her hand brought her back to something like full concentration.

‘You’re damned,’ was all she said. Aggie snorted.

‘I’m not damned. I’m liberated.’ She placed the photos carefully back inside the folder with the others. She’d have to hold it all closed with her fingers now that the bobble was so bent. ‘I’ll think of you,’ she said to the crazy, lonely woman who stood before her. ‘I’ll think of you often when I’m living far from here and you’re still rotting alone with nothing better to do than pray and spy.’

She turned her back to the vigilante and hurried on. The anticipation of examining all the photos in the privacy of her room was only partially diminished by the confrontation. Some of the shots were dirty from landing in the gutter - those she would get him to reproduce for her. The sooner she got out of Meadowlands and Shreve, the better. She was one step closer now, a huge step closer to breaking free of this shithole forever.