7

‘Wake up!’

Ben was suspended in a lightless ocean. He could hear a voice – faint and distant, but it was getting louder. His shoulders were being shaken. Exhaustion, like a weight, held him down. He tugged at its chain, tensing its links, but it was rooted in the seabed of his subconscious; so deep in dream that its scape was still his reality.

It was Aoife. It had to be. She had awoken during the night.

‘It’s okay,’ he whispered, reaching out to hold her, ‘it’s just a bad dream.’

‘Wake the fuck up,’ snapped the voice, definitely not his daughter’s.

Ben jolted up, eyes blinking, seeing nothing. The black void of the tent seemed to press against him as he reached for the hands gripping his shoulders. They weren’t Aoife’s. Small as they were, they weren’t small enough, and yet such was the darkness that he held them regardless.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘There’s someone outside!’

Chloe’s hands were still on him. He could hear and feel her every panicked breath. She lifted off and her fingers chafed frantically around them, searching for a torch. Before he could brace his eyes, the tent exploded in white light. Blind again.

‘What did you hear?’ Ben asked, shielding his face.

Chloe was knelt on the floor of the tent, holding the torch in both hands as if she were gearing up to swing it. Her legs were bare; she was wearing just a tank top and underwear. The girl was spooked. Ben was mindful enough to focus on her eyes when eventually he could see again.

‘Footsteps,’ she replied, barely a whisper, ‘outside.’

‘How close were they?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Too close. What does it matter how close they were? There’s someone out there. They must have followed us?’

‘Could it have been an animal, like a badger or something?’

Chloe shifted over on her knees towards the door of the tent. Her fingers pinched its zip like the pin of a hand grenade. She glared back at him, biting her lip.

‘What are you doing?’ Ben asked, slipping out of his sleeping bag.

‘I’m going to shine a light on this fucking badger of yours.’

‘Wait,’ he said as he patted around, searching for his own torch.

He shuffled up beside her and together they listened before committing. There wasn’t a sound other than their knees balancing on the tent’s nylon floor. Ben gripped his torch like a baton. Their eyes locked. They nodded their heads. Ready. One, two…

On three, Chloe hitched up the zip and cast her light outside. Ben had no clue as to the time, but their fire was long dead. A light enamel of frost glistened on its stones. They tracked Chloe’s torchlight. It flashed around the field, taking in its walls, its corners, and every blade of crisp grass in between. There was no sign that anyone had approached their tent. Amidst the stillness, their breathing fell into a slow and steady synch.

‘I don’t see anyone,’ Ben whispered.

The cold air was glazing over their mouths and clinging fast to any bare skin. Still the torch swept from side to side, revealing nothing and no one. Chloe pushed up onto her feet.

‘What are you doing now?’ Ben asked, talking directly to her naked legs.

‘I’m looking outside,’ she replied, her knees clattering together in the cold. ‘If someone’s out there we won’t see them if we’re peering out the door, will we?’

She stepped out and walked across the grass on the tips of her toes. Ben was equally underdressed but if he stayed behind to drag his jeans on, he would never hear the end of it. Man up, Benny Boy. Chloe was already standing by the stones that had cradled their campfire, spinning her light around in every direction.

Ben brought his torch’s beam upon the copse of trees. They rose out of the night like scrawny giants. That was where he had heard something crack. He regretted not telling Chloe now. Ben watched and listened, as before. There was no movement that he could sense, not even the nervous foraging of some nocturnal animal. If there was something in the bushes, his torchlight should have startled it into revealing itself.

This is insane, he mouthed, but no words escaped his lips.

Ben suffered through the cold. Keeping the torch steady was impossible.

‘No one’s going to be out on a night like this,’ he shouted over to Chloe.

Her cylindrical light was stabbing the darkness around the field’s perimeter.

‘I definitely heard someone,’ she replied.

Twigs and frigid grass crunched beneath Ben’s feet as he jogged over to her.

‘Come back inside the tent,’ he said. ‘It’s too cold.’

Chloe was panning her torch over the wall.

‘Just let me check one last time. I know what I heard, and it wasn’t some fucking badger.’

‘Jesus, what have you got against badgers?’

They followed the shaft of Chloe’s light as it scanned slowly across the distance. So vast were the surrounding fields that they couldn’t see their far walls. The beam just petered away into nothingness. They pressed their bodies into each other to steady their shaking. One last time, Ben kept chiming in his head. Even his internal voice chittered from the cold.

The light skimmed over the sparkling ground. That’s all there was to see, the same unbroken sight fading into the distant dark. No trees. No hedgerow. There was only frost-tipped grass, and then the torchlight passed over something; a shape too far away to make sense of in that second. Chloe grabbed on to Ben’s arm.

‘There,’ she shrieked, ‘did you see that?’

There was somebody out there.

The torchlight strained to reach him.

He stood inert and unaffected by the bitter cold that caused Ben’s limbs to dither in spasms. The distance between them and the faltering light obscured any detail beyond his shape. His body looked incredibly tall, but it was impossible to truly tell as there were no features in the vicinity to use as reference. His long arms arched out slightly and were set rigid by his sides with their fingers spread apart; visible only because they were so long and pale.

He was clad in black, under a tight-fitting cloak or coat that pronounced his skeletally thin limbs. In the dim, wavering light his whole frame looked somehow misshapen; wrong for reasons the eye couldn’t define at that distance. The man’s head was hairless like a fleshless skull. No features were discernible. But he was watching them. Ben knew that much without having to see his eyes.

‘What does he want?’ Chloe whispered, one hand still clutching on to Ben.

The cold was too painful to bear. Her fingers were practically frozen to the torch, its light fluttering uncontrollably. And still the man in the field remained as a statue set deep into the earth, unmoving, his intent towards them unknown.

Ben tried to focus his screwed-up eyes – to extract some detail so that he might identify him from earlier. But in that waning light, he hardly looked human at all; more like some hideous insect that had crawled up from the cold earth. And that silhouette alone was chilling to face down, no matter the distance.

‘What are you doing out there?’ Ben shouted. ‘What do you want?’

The man’s menacing shape remained unchanged, and the icy silence was a solid sheet between them. No cracks, no weaknesses, no sound.

If he had hidden or even come running at them, his reasons for being there would now be known. But to just stand there, watching them. It was more unnerving than any action.

‘We can’t stay out here,’ Ben said, putting his arm around Chloe’s shoulders. ‘We’ll freeze to death.’

She was shaking like an injured hummingbird. He led her to their tent. Her tired body tried to edge back towards the stranger, too weakened now to hold the torchlight towards him but desperate nonetheless to see him gone.

‘Come on,’ he whispered, helping her inside.

Ben zipped the tent closed behind them and brought Chloe over to her sleeping bag. The shock – of the freezing temperatures and the fright combined – had shut her down. Snap seizures of cold tortured their bodies, but Chloe’s were especially severe. She was too thin, too light, to be standing outside and so exposed. He forgot his own pain, wrapping all that he could find around her as she slid her pale, almost translucent legs into the bag. She still hadn’t spoken. He had known the girl for only two days and Ben already knew that wasn’t a good sign. Cold as it was, it wasn’t the elements that had knocked her back. It was the man. The one who had watched them from the darkness of the far field and that Ben knew in his soul was watching them still.

Chloe’s body folded into a foetal position. Why hadn’t they thrown their jackets on? It’s not as though the cold had hit them as some surprise.

If the villagers meant them harm, then their tent wasn’t going to survive a siege. But why? They had promised to leave in the morning. The rules had been set and they’d followed each and every one of them.

‘Chloe,’ he whispered, ‘it’s okay. I’ll go and see what he wants.’

She didn’t reply. He rubbed what might have been her arm, listening to the nylon whish back and forth, too rapt by anger to even realise his hand was moving; a steadying action, more for his sake than hers.

Ben was sick of it. The charade never stopped. Every close-minded village guarded its stories like scripture. Ghosts, devils, phantoms, and fairies – muddied words cleaned and whetted as weapons for the young and the credulous. And trembling by Ben’s side, Chloe – their latest victim. Never mind the fright they had given her, luring a woman out into the night to spy on her was crime enough.

Ben reached for her parka; the warmest thing on hand. He sank both arms into its short sleeves and drew the hood over his head. There was no feeling other than the pain that throbbed hardest in his toes.

He zipped the tent’s door open. The night was, at once, a presence – an oppressor and a killer. There was no peace in its dead air. No splendour to its stars. It was as though an army ringed their campsite in darkness, tiptoeing in terrifying silence, swallowing them from all sides.

The torchlight was blinding; Ben’s eyes too weary to adjust. Muscles burned as he lifted himself onto the grass. The farthest reaches of space couldn’t be as cold nor as dark as that tiny tract of land in that moment. He padded towards where they had seen the man. Ben’s light shivered like a white sheet in a hurricane. If the villagers had found them, then they now watched on with an impossible stillness.

Ben’s lungs were a bellows exploding fog with every wheeze. Even with Chloe’s parka, the cold was as relentless as a thousand lashes. He stepped closer to the far field. His light reached like a ghostly arm across its white grass, waving from side to side, swiping through the darkness, but there was no one there. The field was empty.