CHAPTER 8

The world stopped spinning a few seconds later. Denzel, however, did not.

He screamed as he tumbled through darkness, yelped when he bounced on something wet and slightly squishy, then babbled incoherently when he went rolling down a grassy hillside.

At last, after what felt like forever, he slammed into a tree and came to a sudden, jarring stop.

Denzel didn’t think he had ever been grateful for smashing face-first into a tree before, but he’d been starting to worry that he was never going to stop, so this particular tree was a welcome one. Heaving himself up on its bottom branches, he had a quick check for broken bones, then tried to figure out where he was.

Wherever it was, it was dark, grassy, mountainous, and rainy.

Still Scotland then.

Night had drawn in, and the blanket of cloud cover turned the light from the moon into a faint patch of white on the grey ceiling above. He’d lost his torch in the cave somewhere. He couldn’t remember where, and reckoned it didn’t really matter. He didn’t have it now, and that was the main thing.

Cupping his hands above his eyes to shield them from the rain, he looked back up the hillside he’d come rolling down. He couldn’t see the cave entrance anywhere. He couldn’t see any landmarks he recognised, in fact, unless you counted puddles.

Down the hill wasn’t any better. There were a few trees scattered around, the edges of their leaves reflecting the thin moonlight. For a moment, he thought he saw a light somewhere down near the bottom of the slope, but then the rain lashed at his face again, forcing him to turn away.

It was then that he heard it – a sudden movement in the foliage behind him. He spun on the spot, punching wildly at the air, but finding nothing. For the briefest of seconds, he thought the sound must’ve been his imagination, but then an ominous white shape appeared from behind a clump of bushes, and bleak, doleful eyes gazed deep into his own.

Baaaaa.

Denzel leaned against the tree and exhaled. “You almost gave me a heart attack,” he whispered.

The sheep stared back at him, its mouth moving as it thoughtfully chewed on some grass.

Baaaaa, another sheep chimed in from a little distance away. This one was munching on a clump of weeds that sprouted from a puddle of mud.

“Easy for you to say,” Denzel told it. “You’re not the one being chased by—”

Both sheep suddenly shot off down the hill, their feet thundering across the grass and mud. One of them glanced back briefly, its eyes bulging in terror as it stared past Denzel at the hillside above.

Denzel saw them then, three red-clad shapes coming bounding down the hillside, their swords drawn. They’d found him. The Samurai-ghosts had found him. For a few seconds, Denzel flapped in panic and considered his options. He thought about climbing the tree, but it was only about ten feet tall, and it didn’t have many leaves to hide in.

He thought about standing his ground and fighting.

That thought didn’t last long.

With a high-pitched “Wait for me!” Denzel threw himself down the hillside after the sheep. He ran in big, bounding steps, gravity dragging him along just as much as his legs were propelling him. He tripped and stumbled, skidded and slipped, spiralling his arms around in terror as his momentum grew and his legs were forced to run faster and faster to stop himself falling.

The grass and mud became slippery stone shale that was not unlike loose gravel. Denzel’s out-of-control run became an even more out-of-control slide, and he hurtled down, down, down the darkened hillside, picking up speed with every second that passed.

On the one hand, this was good. He was confident that he had to be going faster than the ghosts, which meant he would be pulling ahead.

On the other hand, he would presumably reach the bottom eventually, and he wasn’t sure what would happen then. At this speed, and with no means of slowing down, he was pretty confident it wouldn’t be anything good.

He didn’t have long to wait to find out. The hillside levelled off suddenly, and Denzel’s downward slide became a frantic forward stagger. In the darkness, he saw the ground fall away just ahead of him, and realised with a sinking feeling that he was going to run right off a cliff in five more steps.

Unfortunately, he realised this four steps in, and the final step found nothing but thin air. Denzel fell straight down, his arms flapping, his legs kicking furiously at nothing but empty space. His mouth opened as if to scream, but before he could utter a sound he slammed into a big rock that stuck out from the cliff face, knocking all the air out of him in one painfully brief wheeze.

After the rock came a tree, then another tree, then a second rock, and then a series of increasingly large branches. And then, after all that, came the ground. It was quite soft, as ground went, thanks mostly to the rain. The various branches and rocks had all slowed his fall too, so that when he finally hit the ground he sort of schlopped into it without doing himself any more damage than he already had.

Groaning, he tried to stand, but his body made it clear that it wasn’t ready for that yet, thank you very much, and he had no choice but to lie there in the soggy darkness, waiting for his breath to return.

As he waited, Denzel saw three shapes moving above him. He held his breath and watched as the pursuing Samurai-ghosts went sailing above the treetops and vanished into the darkness ahead.

He kept holding his breath for as long as he could, before finally letting it out in one long, soft gasp.

They hadn’t seen him. The ghosts hadn’t seen him! He’d lost them. He was safe. For now, at least. He started to sit up, then stopped himself.

What if they came back? Or what if this was a trick and they were waiting on the other side of the tree, ready to slice him into several different pieces the moment he got to his feet?

He lay back down and decided to wait where he was for a little longer, just to be absolutely sure that the coast was clear. Three or four hours should do it.

Half a day, tops.

Two and a half minutes later, Denzel was so cold and wet that he reckoned being sliced into variously sized bits would be preferable. He pulled himself out of the mud and spent a few moments listening for any sign that he’d been spotted.

When he was confident that no one was about to swing a sword at him, he set himself to figuring out what he should do next. The cliff face behind him was too steep to climb, even with the rocky outcrops he’d thumped into on the way down. He might be able to climb one of the trees, but even if he reached the top he’d have to jump a large gap in pitch darkness, with the wind howling around him.

He didn’t much fancy that.

If he walked away from the cliff, he’d be following the Samurai-ghosts, which didn’t strike him as a very sensible idea.

That left two directions, both of which ran parallel to the cliff. Neither one seemed any more promising than the other, so he picked one and started walking.

Then he changed his mind, turned round and walked the other way instead.

As he walked, he worried. He worried about Smithy, Samara, Tabatha and Boyle, more or less in that order. He worried about the Cult of Shantankar, and about the Ghostfather. He worried for a good few minutes about the whole “Chosen One” thing, and the idea that he would somehow be responsible for unleashing an ancient evil upon the Earth.

That would be a bummer.

The more he walked, the more worried Denzel became about something else. Something more pressing than Chosen Ones or Ghostfathers.

“Yep,” he sighed, stopping beneath a tree and taking shelter beneath its branches. “I’m completely lost.”

And he was. On his left, the cliff face had become a sloping hillside that was still far too steep to climb. On his right, a few metres of grass and bracken gave way to absolute darkness that he couldn’t possibly see anything through.

The rain had changed from a sideways torrent to a steady downpour of large, fat drops that plinked on the leaves overhead. Even if he called for help, no one would hear him, with the possible exception of the Samurai-ghosts.

He could have navigated using the stars, were it not for the fact that they were hidden by the clouds. And, more importantly, for the fact that he had no idea how.

The rain had found its way inside his jacket and was soaking him to the skin now. As he stood there all alone in the darkness, Denzel began to shiver. Or maybe he’d been shivering for a while. The cold and the rain made it hard to think straight.

The wind whistled around him, making him colder still. He couldn’t stay out here. If he didn’t find cover soon, he wouldn’t have to worry about the Samurai-ghosts killing him – the gathering storm would do it for them.

There had to be somewhere he could go. There had to be somewhere he could hide until the weather and the ghosts had moved on. But where?

As if in answer to that question, a fork of lightning tore across the dark night sky, briefly painting the landscape in its electric glow.

For a moment, Denzel thought he saw a ramshackle old house just a couple of hundred metres down the hillside, and then the darkness returned to swallow it up.

He fixed his gaze on the spot where he thought he’d seen it, and began an unsteady limp in that direction.

Several times he tripped and stumbled, but he daren’t look down, daren’t take his eyes off the patch of darkness ahead of him. If he lost track of where the house was now, he might never find it again.

Another bolt of lightning cracked the night wide open, revealing a run-down old cottage that seemed to slouch on its foundations as if too tired to stand upright. Moss grew across the whitewashed stone walls. The garden was a tangle of weeds and grass, somehow even more unkempt than the wilderness around him.

But it had walls and a roof, which meant he could shelter there. Probably not until the rain went off – he didn’t think the rain was ever going to go off – but at least until morning.

He was halfway along the path when the door opened. He’d assumed the house was abandoned, and so he let out a little gasp of fright when the door creaked slowly inward on its hinges and a figure in a long white nightdress appeared, the light from a candle she held showing off a road map of wrinkles on her face.

“Now, what in the name o’ the wee man are you doing out in this weather?” the old woman asked him. She stepped aside and beckoned him into the darkened hallway. “Come away in, before you catch your death…”