The horse drew to a standstill. Will shook the reins and made more chivvying noises but to no avail.
“Are you hungry, nag? Is that it?” He felt in his pockets for food but found nothing edible. Under the cushions on his seat was a carrot but when he offered it to the horse, it wasn’t interested.
“What’s wrong? Do you smell something?”
The road stretched ahead of them, seemingly no different from the road they had traversed so far. The same razed fields and stunted trees. The stench of dead things. The bones sticking out of the earth.
He tried tugging on the reins to lead the horse forwards but it strained against him. Will gave up and left the horse where it stood. The road led on for another half-mile or so before it petered out.
“Super,” Will sighed. The terrain grew rockier and the trees disappeared altogether, replaced by spiny bushes. It continued to snow, the large black flakes like wafers of ash from a burning house. Their burn was bearable, once you got used to it. Will clambered over the rocks and saw the house immediately. It was still a way off, but smoke was whipping from its chimney and a single window was a square of pale orange. The sea was here once more, fizzing against the shore, its skin vibrating with reflected crescents of black. Spume made quivering sculptures that the wind tossed into the air. Will reckoned it would take him twenty minutes or so to reach the house, but before he had crossed half the distance, he came across the woman.
She was lying on a ledge on one of the bigger rocks. She looked to be asleep; her limbs were not twisted to indicate a bad fall. Will got down beside her and patted her gently on the shoulder.
“Hello? Are you okay?” His voice, after a long silence, sounded alien to him. It buzzed in his ears, atonal and waspish. But it did the trick. The woman woke, frowning, her mouth moving as she tried to make words come.
“It’s okay. Here, let me help you stand.” Will gently pulled her upright. The woman was flapping her hands around as though batting away flies. Her eyes twitched and then flew open. She regarded Will with shock, as though she had never seen a fellow human being before. And then she screamed. The sound distorted as it came from her lips, glissading into a metallic, digitised howl, something that might be happened upon on a short-wave radio. Flakes of snow found their way into her mouth and she choked and spat them out. Her breath was coming in tight, short blasts.
“It’s okay,” Will soothed, trying to squeeze her hands together so she could do neither him nor herself any harm. “Try to relax. You’re okay now.”
Okay, he thought. Nobody here is okay.
Slowly the woman found some poise. She looked around her, taking in the surroundings with the wonderment of a child at the zoo. Will was ready for her first question, the inevitable, when it came.
“I don’t really know where we are,” he said. “But I just came from a small village a couple of miles back that way. There don’t seem to be very many people around.”
“Who are you?”
“Will.” He stuck out his hand and she shook it. The frown had yet to leave her brow. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties, with a long, sleek pony tail and grey eyes. She didn’t have any of the characteristics of Alice or George. He was glad about that.
“Joanna,” she said. “My voice sounds funny. It’s like talking through a kazoo.”
“Yeah, I don’t know why. But there’s tonnes of strange stuff here. You won’t believe some of it.”
“I don’t know how I got here.”
“Me neither.”
“I remember…” Joanna faded out, looking away in the direction of the road Will had just travelled along. Her eyes seemed to be searching for visual clues as to what had gone before. “I remember two brilliant lights, and a roar. And falling, like you know, in a dream.”
Will had pricked up his ears at the lights. He mentioned his own hazy recollections. “I was just on my way down to that house. To see if they could help me find a train that went to somewhere with a bit more life.”
“Can I come?”
Will felt like hugging her. “Of course. I’d have been disappointed if you didn’t.”
They made their way over the rocks to a narrower path, hampered by offcuts from boulders and muddy puddles. The black sun had sunk behind the edifice they had left behind. The snow too had lifted; only a few flakes fell now. Will checked his hands. They were chapped and sore, but the skin had not broken.
“This place seems to me,” Joanna was saying, “the most familiar place in the world. But at the same time, I feel as though I have never been here before.”
“I know what you mean,” Will said. “I’ve been wandering around as though I’ve been lost, but not once have I panicked about it. It’s like I’ll turn a corner at some point and there will be a lane that I recognise, or a house belonging to somebody I know.”
“Not this one, though?” Joanna said, pointing to the building that loomed above them, on a small incline that formed a welcome mat to a dense, purple mass of strangled trees behind it.
“Afraid not,” Will said.
“Thank you for helping me,” she said, as Will reached up to ring the doorbell. He turned to thank her. And in that second, the light in the window went out.
Joanna said, “Ah.”
“That’s encouraging,” Will observed, and rang the bell anyway. They waited but nobody came to greet them. A chorus of rasps fell from the trees.
“Hahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa. You focken eejit! Knock-knock? Who’s there? Some git. Some git who? Some git who’d be better off throwing himself in the sea!”
Will picked up a rock and hurled it at the branches of the nearest tree. Three or four of the parrots took off, circled, shat at him, and resettled in the trees to blow raspberries or send him the odd extravagant curse.
“I have an elevated class of friends here,” he said. Joanna wasn’t comforted by his humour, preferring to watch the door intently as a shadow fell upon the pearlescent glass at its heart. It opened a crack and a child’s face peeked out. It couldn’t have been any older than ten or eleven. Will’s first impression was that this was the offspring of Alice and George. It unsettled him to the marrow. But then he saw that the likeness those two had shared was not in evidence here. The boy was on the floor, looking up at them.
“Did you fall over?”
The boy shook his head.
“Is your mother in?” Will asked, appalled at his feeble voice. The boy shook his head, and then shook it again when Joanna asked to talk to his father.
“Can we come in then?” Will asked, trying to sound calmer, for the boy’s sake as much as his own. “Wait for them?”
“I’m not supposed to allow anybody through this door,” the boy stated, in a cultured voice that belied his years. But the statement sounded rote-learned. His eyes were playful and welcoming, as if he was grateful to see somebody who had come to visit. Picking up on this, Joanna asked: “How long have your mummy and daddy been away?”
The boy let the inch-wide crack of the door grow to a foot. He raised his eyes to the sky, adding and subtracting, the triangular tip of his tongue peeking from between his lips. “A year or so,” he said, carefully.
Joanna and Will swapped a glance. A parrot in the tree shouted: “Don’t let him in, kid. The peg-selling freak. He’ll have your Action Man! He’ll have your Tonka truck!”
Joanna squatted on her haunches and smiled at the boy. Even though Will could see she was scared, she still had a beautiful smile. “Can we come in, please? We just need somewhere to rest. And we need a big, brave boy to look after us. We’re both scared.”