Chapters
Chapter Four At first the rhythm was in the dream. Not the dream itself. That had already gone to bits, the usual rubbish about being late for something that no longer made sense. What stayed was the rhythm. A tread on wood, slow and careful. Then another. Then another. Kai woke all at once. He lay rigid, eyes open in the dark, and counted them without meaning to. Seven. Eight. The wind hissed round the gable, setting something loose on the roof to a faint tapping, but beneath that the footfalls…- 13.1 K • Completed
- Chapter Three Morning arrived grudgingly. Kai woke with his jaw aching from sleep he had never quite trusted. For a few seconds he stayed where he was on the narrow bed in the desk room, staring at the strip of grey daylight leaking round the curtain and trying to decide what, exactly, he had heard in the night. Something moving in the house. That was as much shape as he could honestly give it now. In daylight it had already started shrinking. The sort of thing tiredness could build out of wind,…
- 13.1 K • Completed
Chapter Two The words sat there, dense and flat on the thin paper. Kai recognised them vaguely. Sunday school, maybe. Or a funeral. The sort of line people quoted in serious voices and expected to land. It landed now. The click the house had made behind him no longer felt incidental. In the top corner of the page, boxed in Caius’s neat hand, was the reference: Prov. 14:12. “You okay?” Ellie asked behind him. “Yeah.” He shut the book a little too quickly and slid it back into…- 13.1 K • Completed
- Chapter One By the time Mere Cross had dropped behind them, with its bus shelter, shuttered post office and the chip-shop smell still faint in the car, the road had thinned to a strip of cracked tarmac shouldering through a colourless sea of moor. Kai watched the land rise around them, swallowing hedges, houses and phone signal. Just land and sky now. Low stone walls ran in crooked lines until they disappeared into the heather. “Cheery,” Ellie said, blowing steam from her takeaway coffee. “You…
- 13.1 K • Completed
