~

When I wake in the lilac light, the hand and the face are gone.

For hours I’d watched it. Occasionally, it would vanish as if swept away by the moths, but then the hand would be back again, pressed so hard against the glass that the wooden frame creaked and groaned. The sight of it yanked the muscles deep inside my chest, but I just sat there, hunched on the corner of the straw mattress, doing nothing. A wisp of recollection occasionally stirred in the back of my head. A memory, but one I couldn’t reach. A ghost.

But do ghosts beat at walls? Do ghosts try to clamber inside?

It’s a while before I brace myself enough to fling open the cupboard door to see if the worm still coils inside. I nudge it open with a long branch, but find the compartment bare of anything except a heap of something broken, reaching up to my knees. Like a huge eggshell, splintered and shattered, the shards burned into a blackened pile. Feathers and leaves and skins. I nudge a shard with the end of a shoe and it rolls onto a ridged and rounded edge. A brown bit loosens. It smells like rot.

There’s no sign of the worm, so perhaps it flattened itself enough to squeeze beneath the heap and bury itself in the earth. I sit back on the mattress and peer at the glass in the window behind me. Where else am I supposed to go now? I’ve tried the mountain face, I tried moving the blockage, but I couldn’t do it. Not alone. My stomach groans. I haven’t eaten in three days. What was the last thing I had? I strain to remember the last flavour that passed my lips, but I can’t. I’m changing. Perhaps when I fell down that ravine, I hit my head harder than I thought? Still, it doesn’t matter. I can’t look back. Only forwards now.

Perhaps it was a clementine? Yes. A clementine.

What if the person pawing at the glass was stuck here, just like me? Michael’s words had been, “No one who stays in Mothtown lives there long. Everyone passes over.”

But what proof did he have? What if she – something about the hand and face makes me sure it’s a woman – travelled here with the same goal, found the way was blocked, and couldn’t go back? Could it have been the same woman who I’d seen in the mouth of the cave, as strange and contorted as she was?

Then, the most awful thought, one that’s been gnawing at me for the last day, opens like a terrible flower: What if no one has ever found the door, and they’re stuck here? All of them. But surely, Michael wouldn’t keep sending people here if there was nothing to find? Nothing to do but die? Waste away, or fall down a crevasse, or into a bog. But then again, if that did happen – no one would return to ever tell the story. To warn the rest of us.

I shake it off. That’s a dark road. I can’t go there now.

The woman at the window: she, at least, was real. Perhaps she needed my help? Michael never said that the statute of secrecy ended when we reached Mothtown. It was the first rule of door-seeking: delegates could only make it through if they travelled alone. She shouldn’t be here. So even if she did need help, I can’t help her. But what if the shadows were pursuing her, too? What was I meant to do? What if I’d strayed too far, after being lost in the marsh, and this was somewhere else? No. This has to be the right place. I’m doing everything I was told to. I sink back into Michael’s office in an attempt to remember the moment I knew this was the way. As ever, he was sitting on his leather chair and looking up at something I couldn’t see. But this was early on, during our third lesson. Back then, my clothes were still clean and my hands didn’t shake. But as I often did, I was fighting a crippling headache that would black out the following day. Once it came on, there was little I could do.

“So,” he said, reaching a hand across the table as if he was about to take mine. “We need to find your way out.”

“I already know what it looks like,” I said, as casually as I could. “I’ve seen it. In a photograph.”

“Oh?” Michael’s jaw cocked oddly to the side. “Where? Near where you live? Yorkshire, isn’t it?” He pulled a little golden key from his pocket, swivelled around on his chair, and used it to unlock a long wooden box on the cabinet. “No one ever knows their way out before I tell them.”

As Michael filled his arms with scrolls, I sought perspective through the window. That day, there was no one at the bus stop, and traffic – nose to bumper to nose – crawled along the road. The bright blank of sky sparked a sharp pain through my temples, so instead I focussed on the soft violet plant on the windowsill. The soil twitched with bluebottles, disorientated, stuck on their backs.

The air in the office was thick. My head throbbed.

Michael dropped the scrolls on his desk. “These are the doorways we know about so far. There are nine. The dots are the in-use doors. The crosses are doors we can’t use anymore.” He started to pull the elastic band from one of the largest. “These maps are the shortcuts. This doorway’s the closest. I’d suggest this one for you.”

“No.” I shook my head. “There’s a mountain, and heather. It looked cold, and wild. In Scotland. Near Glencoe.”

“Where did you see that?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

Michael’s eyebrows raised “It does.” He tutted, the tip of his tongue coming to rest on the edge of his teeth. “You can’t just follow someone else you know. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another, everyone’s path is different. Your body is different. Your mind is different.” He gestured to the row of rolled up papers. “That’s why I’m here. To teach you what you need to do to survive, and to find the door with the right shape to let you through.”

Why wasn’t he listening?

“I know the place. It’s the only one that will work.”

Michael raised his eyebrows again and shook his head before selecting a roll from the pile. It was a map of the UK, with nine green circles distributed across the isles. I hardly needed to look at it at all before I pointed to where I needed to get to. A doorway that stood alone, with not another one for hundreds of miles. “This one. Is that a mountain?”

Michael squinted. “Yes. And a valley, here.” He traced the faint blue line without touching the page. “I’ve not sent anyone there for a long time, it’s the furthest journey, geographically, for most. And most don’t want to suffer more than they are already. They want it to be easy. They need it to be.” He combed his fingers through his hair, so pale that I could see his scalp. “But I hear this is the best one for seeing the stars.” His eyes glittered. “You think that’s the one?”

I nodded. “I know it is. It’s where I’m meant to be. It’s where I’ll find… home. What’s it called?”

“Doras Mountain. But the road to it, that’s Mothtown.”

The door in the mountain isn’t a mouth now; it’s an eye. I even see it when I’m not looking, when I’m trawling the crags around its root, looking for another way in. The chalk shimmers with a fresh layer of frost, and I leave footprints from my too-large shoes. I hobble as best I can with my arms wrapped tightly around my chest. Behind me is a copse of copper trees and cherry buds. How can it be both autumn and spring, when it’s winter? I left in winter. How long have I been here?

Since I first emerged empty-handed from the mountain, I count two nights in the cabin. If it wasn’t for the rivulet down the slope behind the shack, I would have nothing to drink or wash the salt from my eyes. Somehow, the colder the stream gets, the easier it is to swallow. Submerging my foot in the flow numbs my ankle enough to keep searching, walking, crawling. My face itches. The heap of skin and bones on the doorstep disintegrates every hour, as if it was never meant to last the light of day. I step over it when I come and go, wishing it would be carried away by the night wind, but not wanting to lose the only remnants I have of something living. It is mostly bones now, broken down by the sun. Insects crawl and leave trails in the ash.

Everything repeats. The trees, the chalk flats, the cracks in the earth. No matter how far I stumble, I always end up back at the cabin just as the sky begins to bleed. I don’t even engage my mind anymore; I’m simply a machine trying to get from A to B on too little fuel. But every so often, I snap back to the present and I feel a huge weight on my back, anchoring me in place. It’s like I’m trying to knit things together, and each dropped stitch jolts me awake. The soundlessness of the place is loud in my ears, and my steps echo across the valley. I look for shoe tracks in the dirt, poring over tread marks to decipher whether they’re feet to follow or signs that the hunters are close. Increasingly, I’m doubled over, my jumper stretched over my raw and swollen back. I’ve given up trying to speak, and the fire that’d burned my vocal chords until now settles down into a dim ember, aching in my lungs.

And now, as I approach the third night with a stomach that bites at its own walls, I fall to my knees and stuff a handful of the white berries from beside the trail into my mouth. In my desperation, I try to swallow even before I’ve chewed; but I can’t. It’s as if my oesophagus had healed over almost completely, like a layer of skin shaped like the bottom of a cup. The berries taste sweet but artificial, like cough syrup, and the sickly flavour lingers long on my tongue even after I lean forwards and let them fall from my lips. I kneel in the copse, too exhausted to rise, but too terrified to lie there. I imagine how it would feel to have a warm blanket weighing down my back. Or for a hand to feed me something warm and soft. Something kind.

I remember him.

I see the back of him, standing straight against the mountain. He doesn’t move any more than a portrait does; he just stares at the road ahead. It’s the landscape around him that shifts, breeds, and grows greener and greener until the figure is small and obscured by grass stems as tall as lampposts. And even so, I’m looking up at him, because I’m even smaller.

I hope he made it. I can’t imagine that he’d suffered like this.

It starts to rain, and I hold my face up to the clouds. Even though I’m shaking, I savour the jolt of each drop on my tongue. The painting falls away, and I’m here again. Alone. The backs of my hands look grey and dry enough to be stone. I want to cry, “This isn’t what I wanted.” But instead, all I can do is release a low moan like an animal. I clutch at my chest and then for the cold, blunt grasp of brass at my collar, anything to bring me back to earth, but my fingers are lost in the mass of holes.

No. No. No.

It’s gone. Grandma’s brass button. The sparrow. I grab a handful of wool and curl my head down to my knees. It’s all falling away. All of it.

There’s a noise, as light as a footstep behind me, but it hits me like a sonic boom. And this time I don’t feel the urge to run at all. I squint through the trees to see who or what it is, but my head is too fuzzy to make anything out. Even the trees look as if they’re walking towards me.

It might be the woman with the face like a moon.

Wings flutter inside my chest. I search through the trees for her, try to taste her on the air. If only I could shout. What if she’s stuck somewhere or starving? Wouldn’t it be better to suffer with a hand to hold? We can’t step into each other’s heads but maybe we don’t need to. If we’re both here, we’re both the same. We can help each other. I open my mouth and shout a name… and what comes out hawks the air. It doesn’t even sound human; it’s mechanical, but it’s all I can do, so I call again and again until, exhausted, I fall forwards onto my hands in the litter.

Can she hear me?

But when I look up, the trees have shifted to the side and there are two figures, dressed in grey, standing between the voice and I. It’s them. Something about their clothes; I recognise them now. All-in-ones, all loose and baggy. Each one has something clipped to their chest. I can’t work out how, but they’re part of the same story as the woman with the swollen middle. I can see them together, somewhere open, and they were coming for me then, too. Everything was loud and people were screaming. Neither of them move, and although their faces are as featureless as the sun, I know they’ve come for me. It’s time.

No.

I scramble to my knees and crawl, but it’s not fast enough. Over my shoulder, the two figures take a step towards me, their arms held slightly out from their sides. There’s something tentative about the way they move, and it disconcerts me more than if they rushed towards me.

It’s too late. I can’t go back now.

I don’t know where the energy comes from, but in one, final, desperate burst, I stagger to my feet and race through the trees. The cabin is just ahead, though the hunters are close behind, crushing the undergrowth with each stride.

I slam the cabin door and heave the desk in front of it, but it won’t be enough. I drag the straw mattress against it too, and tug at my hair as I work out what else can be used to bar the way in. In a moment of madness, I try prising the cupboard door off its hinges, but they hold fast. Heavy fists hammer on the door, and I feel like I’m being shaken in a box.

And then I see the heap of dead things.

I fall into it, pulling it apart and spreading it around me. Feathers and leaves and more shredded skins. Hide, hide, hide. I’m wearing it like a coat and I feel heavier all the time. But then I see what lay beneath the broken mound: a tunnel, which drops a few feet and twists sharply to the right.

Towards the mountain.

The tunnel smells sweet, like pears, and as I lean closer, I see the soil is twitching with shining particles like glass. I press my finger to one, but it doesn’t hurt – in fact, it’s warm. All the blood rushes to that hand and my eyes roll back in my head with relief.

Behind me, the cabin door buckles against the furious slamming and the desk legs squawk a few inches across the floor. I shed the skin, swing my legs over the edge of the hole and, with one final breath, lower myself down. There’s just about enough room to crouch while I close the cupboard door behind me and slink like a worm through the shimmering opening ahead.