We had to do it.

“Do what?”

Hit the hillbilly with a rock. We had no choice.

“I know.”

It was him or us.

“I know.”

We don’t have to feel bad about it.

“I don’t.”

Really?

“Yeah.”

We’re on the wooden steps now, and although we’ve only just begun the steep climb up, I’m already so exhausted that I know I’m never going to make it to the top.

“I’m done,” I gasp, stopping to get my breath. “I can’t go any farther.”

Yes, you can.

“I can’t . . .” I gaze upward at the dizzying height of the steps, and from down here, it looks as if they go on forever — disappearing into the darkness and reaching all the way up to the glass sky and beyond . . .

“The glass sky . . . ?”

What?

“Nothing.” I bend over, hands on knees, and try to get some air into my lungs.

“I can’t do it,” I say. “It’s too far.”

You can take one more step, can’t you? Just one more . . . ?

“What’s the point?”

Just try it, okay? For me.

I sigh heavily, then — using the rifle to hoist myself up — I take another laboriously painful step.

See? That wasn’t so difficult, was it?

“It was just one step.”

They’re all just one step.

I’m too tired to argue. I put my head down and start climbing the never-ending steps again.

You know it wasn’t a gunshot, don’t you? Ella says.

“What?”

The old monkems in the car, you know . . . the old-monkem-lady with the walking stick that wasn’t a rifle? Ella grins. You heard a bang, and you thought it was a gunshot, remember?

“Yeah.”

It wasn’t a gunshot. It was the car backfiring.

“I know.”

Silence.

I keep going.

Keep climbing.

One impossible step at a time.

What does Whitby have to do with Little Red Riding Hood anyway?

“What?”

The snow globe . . .

“What about it?”

It doesn’t make sense.

“Of course it doesn’t. None of this makes sense.”

Well, yeah, but the thing about the snow globe, the thing I’ve never understood, is why it has Little Red Riding Hood in it.

“Why shouldn’t it?”

Because Shirley got it from a souvenir shop in Whitby, and as far as I know, Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t have anything to do with Whitby. I mean, there’s no connection at all, is there?

“How do you know there’s not?”

Whitby’s famous for Dracula, not Little Red Riding Hood.

“Maybe Shirley didn’t get it from Whitby. Maybe she got it from wherever Little Red Riding Hood comes from.”

Little Red Riding Hood’s a character in a fairy tale. She doesn’t come from anywhere.

“Right. And you think Dracula’s real, do you?”

You know what I mean.

We lapse into silence again for a while, and as I carry on heaving myself up the everlasting steps — one by one by one . . . each step getting higher all the time, while my body gets heavier and heavier — I think I’m thinking about the snow globe . . . trying to work out why I keep thinking about it, why it keeps coming back to me — but after a while, I realize that I’m not thinking about it at all . . . I’m not thinking about anything . . . my head’s just an empty skull, a sphere of bone skewered on top of a spine . . .

But then, I ask myself, if it is empty, if there really is nothing inside my head, where are these thoughts coming from?

And now my otherness rises up through my spine and out through my skewered skull into the cold black air above me, and as I look down — for a measureless moment — I see the red-hooded figure of a little girl struggling up the steps, using a rifle as a walking stick . . . and I can see that her right foot’s useless, just a throbbing mess of flesh and bone, and she’s hurting all over, and she’s so tired . . . just so incredibly tired . . . and as I watch her heaving herself up the wooden steps — one by relentless one . . . each step getting higher all the time, her body getting heavier and heavier . . . I hear her voice

Elliot?

and she becomes me again.

Do you want to know something else that doesn’t make sense?

“No.”

It’s got nothing to do with the snow globe.

“I don’t care what it is. I don’t want to hear it.”

It won’t take long.

“I know what you’re doing.”

What do you mean?

“All this talking . . . it’s just a diversion, a distraction. You’re trying to take my mind off everything else.”

What mind?

“Yeah, very funny.”

All right, I admit it. You’re right. I should have known it wouldn’t work. You were always too smart for me.

“Yeah, well, it was pretty obvious.”

There’s no distracting you, is there? You always know exactly what’s going on.

“I wouldn’t say that . . .”

Look around.

“What?”

Open your eyes and look around.

I didn’t even know my eyes were closed, and when I open them and look around, I realize that I’m not climbing the steps anymore. I’ve climbed them. I’m standing at the top of the steps, leaning on my rifle-walking-stick, breathing heavily . . . and as I gaze back down the steps, and I see them disappearing into the bottomless darkness below, I know I can’t have climbed them. It’s impossible. There are too many of them, they’re too steep. I couldn’t have made it all the way up there, not in a million years.

I see the lights then.

Down in the woods, away to my right . . . faint lights, flashing intermittently through the trees.

The four monkems from the field.

“Yeah.”

They’re still quite a long way away.

“Yeah.”

They’ll find the hillbilly.

“If he’s still there.”

I don’t think he’ll have gone anywhere.

“We had to do it.”

I know.

I turn to my left then and look along the snow-covered dirt track stretching out ahead of me. I can just make out a slight graying in the darkness not too far along the path, a patch of blackness that’s not quite as black as everything else.

It’s the field at the back of Shirley’s house. It’s not so dark there. It’s got the lights from the road, the lights from the houses . . . there’s probably a stile into the field at the end of the path. That’s what you can see. The lighter patch is where the stile leads into the field.

It’s hard to tell how far away it is — and I don’t trust my senses anymore anyway — but something in the pit of my belly tells me it’s fairly close.

“Ready?”

Yeah.

“All right, let’s go.”

We set off along the track, and this time, before every step, I prod the ground in front of me with the rifle-walking-stick, making sure it’s safe to walk on. If I fall down into the valley again, I know — without a shadow of doubt — that I’ll never get out.

Do you know what we’re doing now?

“Yeah.”

Tell me.

“We’re going to Shirley’s.”

What for?

“To find Mum.”