It’s not easy running through snow that in places comes up to your knees, especially with one bare foot, but nothing matters when you’re running scared, nothing can stop you.

Nothing at all . . .

Nothing.

I’m running alongside the hedge to my left (the one that runs parallel to the road), and as I’m leaping and bounding like a startled deer through the snow, I’m vaguely aware of shouting voices calling out to me from the gate —“HEY! HOLD ON! IT’S ALL RIGHT! COME BACK!” I think one of the voices is the monkem-dog-lady, and the other one sounds like the old-monkem-lady-with-the-rifle. Part of me wants to turn around and shout at them —“GO AWAY! PLEASE! JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!”— but another part of me, the deep-down primitive part, just wants to disappear into a hole in the ground and lie there curled up into a ball with my eyes closed tightly and my hands clamped over my ears . . . and that desire is so overpowering that when I come to a chest-high snowdrift that’s half hidden behind a massive old oak tree, there’s nothing I can do to stop myself diving into it.

Nothing at all . . .

Nothing.

White nothing, cold dark white . . . I dig down into it, burying myself deep in the snow . . . down into the icy silence . . . down, down, down into my hole in the ground . . . and then I just lie there, curled up into a ball, with my eyes closed tightly and my hands clamped over my ears . . .

And the outside world disappears.

It’s all right now, Elliot, Ellamay says quietly after a while. They’ve gone.

“Are you sure?”

The voices stopped ten minutes ago, and about five minutes later the car started up and drove off down the road.

“What about the dog?”

It’s gone. They’ve all gone. You’re safe. You can uncover your ears and open your eyes.

I cautiously take my hands from my ears and slowly open my eyes. Silence. Just the soundless fall of the snow and the faint sigh of a low wind skimming across the field. The snow cave is dark, but not scary-dark — its pure-white walls lightening it enough to keep the black-fears at bay.

Are you okay now? Ella says.

“My foot’s cold. It hurts.”

Give it a good rub. You need to keep the circulation going.

I do as she says, rubbing my bare foot with both hands.

Have you got anything you can use to wrap it up?

As I search through my coat pockets, hoping to find a scarf or a woolly hat or something, I realize with a sinking heart that all the stuff that should be in my pockets is no longer there — phone, house keys, flashlight . . . all gone. They must have fallen out when I was throwing myself over the gate.

Check your pants pockets, Ellamay says.

I shake my head. “I never put anything in my pants pockets.”

Why not?

“I don’t know . . . I just don’t.”

Check them anyway.

I know they’re empty, but there’s no point in arguing about it, so I quickly search through them, front and back.

“Nothing,” I say.

Ellamay sighs.

I wouldn’t blame her if she was annoyed or exasperated with me. If I’d put all my stuff in my pants pockets, I probably wouldn’t have lost it. But I know Ella isn’t annoyed with me. She never is. She understands . . . she always understands. She knows I don’t have much practical pocket experience — if you barely ever leave the house, you don’t need to know much about pockets — and as we both lapse into a snowbound silence, we’re as together as we always are.

Together.

As one.

And here in the sanctuary of our snow cave we feel as safely cocooned as we’ve ever been — curled up together, keeping each other warm, our hearts beating as one . . .

It becomes us.

It is us.

It was us.

Before it all went wrong.

“Maybe we could just stay here this time,” I whisper.

Ella doesn’t answer for a while, and I can hear the depth of sorrow in her silence.

“Sorry, Ella . . . I didn’t mean to —”

It’s okay, she mutters. I just . . . I don’t know . . . it just got to me for a moment, that’s all.

“Can you remember it?” I ask hesitantly.

Dying?

“Yeah.”

I’m not sure. I remember something. I remember being alive, with you, inside Mum, but after that . . . there’s nothing . . . less than nothing . . . no darkness, no light . . . no time, no where or when . . . no nothing, forever and ever and ever and ever . . .

“It was terrifying,” we say together, our eyes filling with tears.

It still is.

We sink back into our silence again, and for a while we just sit there together, gazing around the snow cave, remembering, imagining, wondering what might have been . . .

Eventually Ella sighs again and says, We can’t stay here, Elliot. We have to get going.

I nod reluctantly and glance at my watch.

What time is it, Cinders?

“What?”

Ella smiles, glancing at my bare right foot. Cinderella lost her glass slipper, you’ve lost your Wellington boot. If you don’t get home by midnight, you’ll turn into a pumpkin.

“No,” I say, shaking my head, “you’ve got it all wrong. It’s Cinderella’s golden carriage that turns into a pumpkin, not her. And she gets home before midnight anyway.”

No, she doesn’t.

“She does.”

She doesn’t.

“She does.”

All right. But even if she does —

“What was that?”

What?

“That noise.”

What noise?

“Listen.”

We listen together to the silence, and after a while I begin to wonder if I was mistaken. Maybe I didn’t hear anything after all. Maybe it was just in my mind, or just something blowing in the wind, or maybe it was —

KAH!

It’s much louder now.

What the hell is it? Ella says.

KAH!

“I don’t know,” I mumble, cowering back against the cave wall. “But whatever it is, it’s getting closer.”