And to feel watched.
But I wasn’t a teenager anymore.
A little ways in, I turned to the left, making my way between the trees at an angle toward the back of my mother’s house. If I was careful, I would be able to sneak up on whoever I’d seen at the fence.
A minute later, I judged I was nearly there. It was punishingly hot, and I stopped to wipe sweat from my face before crouching a little and beginning to move more slowly. The distant backs of the houses began to appear gradually between the branches of the trees.
A stick clicked beneath my foot.
I held still for a moment. Nothing by way of response.
I continued forward, reaching the fence a few seconds later, the trees thinning out and the untidy spread of my mother’s backyard suddenly visible ahead. There was nobody here. But when I looked down, the undergrowth at my feet was clearly flattened, and I could smell something in the air.
A sickly trace of dirt and sweat.
The skin on the back of my neck started itching. I turned slowly to face the woods behind me. There had always been something wrong with this place—a soft thrum of energy to the land, the same as when you got too close to an electricity generator—but the sensation right now was worse.
Somebody was out there.
Someone hidden between the trees.
“Hello?” I called out. “Anyone there?”
There was no reply. But the quiet had an edge to it, like breath being held.
“Charlie?”
I had no idea why it was his name I called, but it got a result. After a couple of seconds of silence, I heard foliage snap gently ahead of me on the left. I stood very still, my heart pounding. The woods were so dense in that direction that I couldn’t see more than a few feet, but the sound hadn’t come from far away. Whoever was out there was still close by.
I steeled myself, then moved tentatively, edging between the rough trunks of the trees, stepping over the coils of grass, and lifting thin spreads of branches out of the way.
And then, as I emerged into a clearing, I froze in place.
A man was at the far side.
He was about thirty feet away from me, standing with his back to me and his head bowed, his body entirely still.
“Hello?” I said.
The man did not reply. I looked closer, and saw he was wearing what appeared to be an old army jacket, worn away at the back of the shoulders so that the fabric stuck out in feathery tufts. And as I listened, I could hear him breathing.
No, I thought.
No, no, no.
Although a part of me wanted to move closer, my body wouldn’t respond. I felt as rooted in place as the trees to either side of me. I reached up and pinched my nose.
I wasn’t dreaming.
And then, just like that, the man moved away between the trees. I stared after him in horror, but he was out of sight almost immediately, foliage snapping as he disappeared deeper into the woods.
Then the world fell silent.
I stood there, my heart hammering.
And just as Charlie’s name seemed to have come from nowhere a moment ago, a thought came to me now that was similarly unbidden. That what I had just seen hadn’t been a man at all. That it was something that had dragged itself out of the depths of the Shadows to visit me, and was now returning to its home among the trees.
SIXTEEN
Jesus, Amanda thought as she arrived in Gritten.
The world around her seemed to have completely changed in the space of twenty minutes. Not long ago, she had been driving along tranquil country lanes, surrounded by sunny idyllic fields, thinking: This isn’t such a bad place. Whereas now there were just empty industrial estates and shabby houses and shops on all sides, and what she was thinking was: This is a fucking shithole.
Which was admittedly harsh. In her experience, places were just places. What mattered most were the people who lived in them, and an upmarket zip code was no guarantee of anything; you found good and bad everywhere. And yet there was something especially beaten-down about Gritten. Despite the sunlight, the air seemed drab and gray, like an old wet cloth half wrung out. As she looked at the dilapidated neighborhoods she drove through, it was difficult to shake the sensation that the place was cursed in some way—that there was something poisonous in the ground here, rooted in the history of the place, that kept the land barren and the people dead inside.
Her phone was in a dock on the dashboard, the navigation showing her the route. About half a mile to go.
She slowed the car slightly as a tight bend approached, then passed a series of newly built houses on the left. The folly of hope over experience right there, she thought. It was hard to imagine someone moving to Gritten who had the option of being anywhere else instead.
Of course, some people had no choice.
A few minutes later, she parked up a little way past the address registered to Billy Roberts. The house was small and stood off by itself between two stretches of bedraggled, overgrown grass. The brickwork was crumbling away below the old windowsills, and the paint on the front door was peeling so badly it looked like something had been clawing at it. The remains of an old garage were half attached to the left-hand side, with sheets of corrugated iron scattered on the ground and a few rusted struts still poking out of the house, like a body with an arm torn off and the ripped tendons hanging loose.
Amanda’s first thought was that the place had seen better days. But then she remembered the implied details she’d read about Roberts’s childhood—the neglect; the extreme poverty; the allegations of abuse—and she wondered if maybe it hadn’t.
She killed the engine and sent a curt message to Lyons, informing him she’d arrived. When she’d gone to his office yesterday, he’d turned out to be more than amenable to her suggestion of traveling to Gritten to talk to Billy Roberts. In itself, that had not been much of a surprise. With the possible involvement of a third party online, the murder of Michael Price had started to sprawl at the edges, and Lyons always had his eye on the prize. If Roberts turned out to be implicated or—even better—Charlie Crabtree really was still alive and they could find something that led to him, there would be gold stars all around.
But Lyons needed the rest of the day to clear her visit with the Gritten Police Department. What she hadn’t expected was that, in the course of tracing other individuals connected to the original crime, she would learn from the college he worked at that Paul Adams was also back in Gritten right now. Lyons had loved that, of course: two birds with one stone. And so what she’d initially imagined as a day trip had ended with her booking a shitty local hotel and hastily packing a suitcase that was presently stuffed in the trunk of her car.
Roberts first.
She took out her phone as she approached the house and called Roberts’s number again. The street was so deathly quiet that, after the call connected, she could hear the phone ringing inside the house. No answer, though. She killed the call and the house fell quiet until she knocked on the door.
She waited.
Was there movement inside?
There was a small fish-eye lens on the door, and a few seconds later Amanda had the crawling sensation that there was someone on the other side of it staring out at her. Impatiently, she looked behind her at the run-down surroundings. The house was opposite a row of closed shops, the metal shutters daubed with simple graffiti. A little way along the road was a fenced-off yard filled with piles of old car tires, an illegible wooden sign tied to the wire mesh.