Dani clicked her torch on and shone the wide arc of white light left and right. Despite the beam’s power, it did next to nothing to help, as all Dani could see in front, all around, was the thick trunks of trees. She couldn’t even see the top of the hill, or the flagpole upon it any more, though she still had a good idea where it was.
‘Why are we doing this?’ Ana said, her voice quaking. She was already two or three steps behind Dani who slowed slightly to let her catch up.
‘When you came out into the woods, and first thought you were being watched, where exactly was the hill?’
‘It was on my right.’
Dani waited for her to add to that description. She didn’t. ‘But how far away? Can you remember where the moon was?’
Despite Dani’s apparent rashness at heading out in the dark, she really didn’t want to be rambling aimlessly for hours, and if they could at least narrow down the search area even slightly, it would be of great benefit.
‘Ana?’
‘I don’t know the distance. A hundred metres maybe. Two hundred even. And I’m sure the moon was right behind it, lighting it up from behind, because the figure… the flag, its shadow, was reaching right down towards me.’
Dani glanced to Ana and even in the thin moonlight could see the look of terror in her eyes as she recalled her escape.
‘The moon’s right in front of us now,’ Dani said, ‘but it must have moved a fair bit in the last couple of hours, so we probably need to bear left from here.’
Ana looked unsure, but she didn’t protest as Dani veered left. So far they’d not found any semblance of a track, and Dani had no clue how far away they were from one. The ground underfoot was soft and wet, but not particularly muddy, largely being made up of piles of discarded leaves and pine needles all soggy from the cold and damp autumn and winter.
‘Stop!’ Ana said, her voice quiet though intense.
‘What?’ Dani whispered.
‘I thought I heard a noise.’
Ana was hunched down, looking back in the direction they’d come from. Dani shone the torch that way, but it looked exactly the same as everywhere else. Trees. No life.
‘It was probably an animal or something,’ Dani said, trying her best to sound calm and confident, even though she’d been in much the same position as Ana now was, back at her house earlier, when she’d heard a noise, hoping it to be innocuous, moments before having the fright of her life.
But there was no one else there now. Dani was sure of it.
‘Come on, let’s keep moving,’ she said when the eeriness of the situation got the better of her.
She pulled on Ana’s arm and the two of them were moving again, albeit more slowly and more cautiously and more silently than before, as though both of them were now straining every sense that little bit more.
‘If you see anything at all that you recognise, just shout,’ Dani said.
‘This wasn’t it,’ Ana said, shaking her head. ‘It was more of a trail than this. This is…’
She didn’t finish the sentence, and Dani wondered what she’d been about to say. This is pointless? This is hopeless? This is stupid?
A part of Dani agreed with each of those options, though it was a part which she was managing to keep pushed somewhere to the back of her mind for now.
Soon they’d been walking for more than fifteen minutes with no identifying features in the landscape at all. Cloud had once again covered the moon, meaning they couldn’t even use that to help pinpoint their direction, and Dani was becoming more and more disorientated, unsure if they were moving in a straight line or not. If they had been, then they surely should have come to the edge of the hill by now, yet they were still on the flat.
She dipped the torch down and took out her phone, but there was no signal and without one the map app was useless. ‘Shit.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
She put the phone away.
Should they turn around and head back? Dani was becoming more tempted by the second to do just that. Yes, they both had decent coats on, but they were hardly equipped to be spending the next five hours out in the freezing cold, before morning came, roaming around relying on hope to see them through.
But they didn’t stop and turn back. Dani marched them on. Right up until they finally came to a track. Or a semblance of a trail at least. Dani shone the torch up and down, eking the path out from the darkness as best she could. The narrow strip of hard-trodden mud was all of three feet wide and formed a twisted route between the trees and undergrowth.
‘Could this be it?’ Dani said.
‘I… I don’t know.’
Dani sighed, which received a petulant glare from Ana.
‘Come on, this way,’ Dani said, heading off to the right.
The trail twisted for a couple of hundred yards, and Dani’s sense of direction was soon thrown. Yet she kept on, trying to remain undeterred. Then the torch light captured something up ahead, sending back a bright flash of light. A metallic reflection. Dani twisted the torch, trying to hit the same spot again as she moved. There it was again. She squinted in the darkness, trying to figure out what she was looking at. She glanced over to Ana, whose keen stare suggested she’d seen it too.
‘What is that?’ Ana said.
Dani didn’t answer, just kept on walking. They were all of ten yards away when she figured out the answer.
‘A fence?’ Ana said.
A metal fence, more precisely. Six feet tall with spiked prongs at the top. A security fence, although it had certainly seen better days. The structure was mangled and had fallen in on itself in places, and was covered in evergreen growth, largely ivy, in others.
Dani shone the torch along the ground and saw that the trail snaked alongside the fence as far as they could see.
‘You must have seen this before?’ Dani said, her tone almost accusatory.
‘No. I didn’t. I mean… perhaps I did pass here, but I don’t remember a fence. I didn’t have a torch though.’
Fair point.
They’d only moved ten yards alongside the fence when Dani stopped again. She stepped right up to the fence, a spot where the metal was almost entirely lost behind twisting green growth. She was sure she’d seen something poking out from underneath. She reached her hand out and dug into the intertwined stems, and her hand disappeared into the unknown. Her mind flashed with a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. The one where the heroine pushes her hand into a crevice filled with giant cockroaches and writhing centipedes, looking for the switch to release Indiana from a death trap. Dani shivered at the thought of those monstrous creepy-crawlies, but had soon cleared away the growth to reveal nothing but a rusted and dented and faded sign.
‘Danger. Keep Out. Unstable ground,’ Ana read.
‘A mine?’ Dani said. It had to be. Or a quarry perhaps, although there were no markings on the maps she’d seen to suggest either. Unless they were completely off-track.
‘Come on,’ Dani said, moving again.
‘I don’t like this,’ Ana said. ‘I really don’t.’
‘We must be getting close.’
‘But I didn’t even see any of this! This isn’t the right…’
She stopped mid-sentence. Had stopped walking too. Dani was sure she knew why. Up ahead, there was a section of the fence that had caved in, about five feet wide, though the metalwork was almost entirely lost under a tangle of ivy that was congruous with everything around it.
They both moved towards the spot, side by side, passed over the broken fence in unison, pushed through undergrowth for several yards. The form of the hill was now visible in front of them. The ground rose steeply into the distance.
Then Dani spotted it. Right at the base of the rise, disguised by yet more twisted branches and creepers, was what looked like a hollow in the rock. All of five feet tall, barely more than three wide.
‘We found it,’ Ana said, absolute terror in her voice.