Joni was right: we needed help. Peter needed help.
We drove alongside a cricket ground, and I realized we were about to pass the high street in Wodebury, the village where I had first seen the bodies. It was ages—eons—since I was last here. It was all I could remember. Everything from before had simply dropped away, like rocks down a chasm. I had left Marlene Greene behind on this high street and driven away. Now I was just borrowing her body, wearing her boots.
I sped past the junction, trying to prevent the children from seeing the bodies. Trying not to look myself. The kids were too busy bickering and elbowing each other. But my eyes darted across, drawn like flies, and there were the three corpses. Only now two were on the pavement and one lay in the street. How is that possible? I thought, Animals? What kind of animal could haul a whole body along the pavement? Dogs? I didn’t stop to work it out, but pulled up instead on the stone bridge, just out of sight of the pub, and squeezed the top of my nose until I felt pain in my teeth. Make it stop.
I dropped the hand brake again, and we sped off, the high hedges blurring past my window.
“That helicopter could save Peter.” Charlie didn’t look up from studying his hands in his lap.
“That’s a good idea, but I don’t know where it came from.”
“Maybe it’ll come back?”
“I’m not sure we can wait that long.”
“What are we going to do, Mummy?”
“We’re going to ask for help.”
I pulled in to the camp to pass Joni the liquid paracetamol and suppositories.
“The morphine was locked in a safe. I’m sorry.”
She took the two white boxes and sat with one in each hand. Peter had passed out again, but Joni shook her head when I offered to help give him the drugs.
“I’ll make it right,” she said.
I took a few steps toward the car, but stopped and turned.
“Why do you have to make it right, Joni?”
She opened the boxes and lined up the bottle and packet beside Peter’s head, taking out the instruction sheets and ironing them flat across her thigh with her palm, humming all the time.
“This isn’t our fault,” I said. “We never could have known—”
She turned over the sheet to read the other side. Peter gave a moan and shifted his head. The onslaught was coming. Joni closed her eyes and hummed louder.
“Do you want me to stay with Peter for a while?”
I waited.
“Joni?”
When she didn’t answer, I turned and ran back to the car. I had to find help somehow. We raced up the farm track to the far side of the field where the hermit’s shed hid in the trees.
He was out. I hammered on the door hard enough for the rattling padlock to scare away the roosting pigeons. He must be “doing his rounds.”
“Mr. Tumnus is the world’s worst hermit,” I told the kids.
The creeping sense of unease that I got from the forlorn clearing twisted my gut between its bramble fingers. But as I watched Billy sitting on the sloping stone parapet of the Lonely Steps, bucking his hips to try to get himself to slide, I shook my head. Billy wasn’t scared here. And there was no rational reason why I was.
“Mummy? I said, ‘what’s a hermit?’” asked Charlie, tugging my sleeve.
“A loner. An oddball. Someone who hides from the rest of the world.” And maybe that’s all my disquiet amounted to: a curtain-twitching suspicion of the stranger in our midst.
“So are we hermits?” said Maggie, with her usual scalpel logic.
“No, love, we’re perfectly normal. Get the Lost Boy in the car.”
As I slammed the door behind them, a wraith cry floated across the field. Peter was awake again.
I got in and started the engine, just for the background noise. The kids all looked at me, on tenterhooks for a solution. I bounced my palms gently on the steering wheel.
“Mummy?” said Charlie.
“What?”
He shook his head and gave a tiny shrug. It was bad enough not knowing the answer, but these poor kids didn’t even know the question. I reached over and took his hand.
“We’ll find help,” I said. And I turned the car onto the road to Moton Hall.
Gravel swarmed up from beneath my wheels and stung the flanks of the car. The stately home looked much larger from the side where the mismatched domestic extensions and over-the-centuries additions huddled in the background, trying not to let down the symmetrical perfection of the facade. The layout was as tangled as undergrowth. It was as though every place in the countryside were as densely layered as the forest.
“He could be anywhere.” I was bouncing my palms on the steering wheel again, harder now, so that I accidentally pipped the car horn and made myself jump.
“Ha-llo,” called Billy, waving toward the front part of the house. Framed in one square pane of a sash window floated a white face. It faded back into the darkness.
I was out of the car and across the gravel in a moment. The kids scrambled after me. I held one hand above my eyes to peer through the glass, which was enameled orange by the lowering sun. I glimpsed a hallway filled with serious antiques, and a wide doorway that opened to the next room. I moved along one window. Inside a vast library and music room sat the hermit in a high-backed chair, pretending to read a book. One of his willow-pattern teacups stood on the glossy wood of an ornate side table.
I banged on the glass. He looked up and pulled his glasses down onto the tip of his nose, peering at me over the top.
“I need your help,” I shouted.
He cupped a hand around his ear.
I licked my finger and wrote backward onto the glass, one letter in each of the small panes: HELP.
He folded down the corner of his book and slipped it underneath the teacup. Then he came over and jiggled the lock until it released, letting the massive window roll up on its pulley.
“What happened?” he asked.
“One of the kids got burnt. Badly. He’s in pain, and I can’t find any morphine.”
“I don’t have any morphine.”
“Of course not. But you mentioned a radio. Can you contact anyone? Can you call out?”
He was already shaking his head.
“What about these broadcasts then? Do they say anything about helicopters? Because we saw one earlier over the hill fort. If I could get them to come back for Peter, he might have a chance.”
Now he was at the chair, slipping the book into one pocket and wiping the teacup on his handkerchief before dropping it into the other. I carried on talking to his back.
“Any idea where they might be based? If I could drive to them? Or anyone else I might find who could treat Peter?” I glanced behind me to see if the kids were in earshot. Charlie was there, his fingers twisting his trousers again. I leaned in through the window and lowered my voice. “The boy’s going to die if we don’t get help.”
He waved at me to move back so he could climb up and out of the window.
“If this helicopter has seen you, I rather think we’re all going to die.”