Damn you, I thought.

The events of the past few days had frightened me, and that fear remained. The sense of threat was still there.

But there was anger burning beside it now.

A short time later—I wasn’t sure how long—I became aware of quiet voices outside the room, and then there was a tentative knock at the door. I stood up and made my way over. The nurse was out in the corridor, and Sally had arrived too.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Adams.”

Sally rested her hand gently against my arm, then passed me a tissue. I realized at some point I must have been crying.

“Yeah, the window’s open,” I said. “My hay fever’s hell at this time of year.”

Sally smiled gently.

“Listen,” I said. “Thank you. For everything you’ve done. I suppose I don’t have much of a right to say that, after everything, but my mom would have wanted me to thank you. And I’m sorry about earlier.”

“You don’t need to apologize. And you’re welcome.”

She began to talk me through the practicalities of what would happen next, and the arrangements I would need to make. The words washed over me. I knew I should be remembering all of this, but I couldn’t concentrate. All that filtered through was that it was going to take a few days to organize.

“Are you able to stay?” Sally said.

I thought about everything that had happened. How scared I had been. How all I really wanted was to get away from here and forget the past. And how—whatever was happening here—that wasn’t what I was going to do.

Because, alongside the fear, that anger was still burning.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

TWENTY-NINE

Night had fallen by the time Amanda arrived back from Brenfield, the town they had traced the CC666 account to, and she drove slowly and carefully along the main road that led to Gritten Wood. The streetlights above bathed the car in intermittent waves of amber: a hypnotic effect that seemed to be pushing her into a kind of dream state. The world outside the car didn’t quite feel real. She was trying to concentrate, but her mind had become slippery and her thoughts were refusing to take hold.

She took the turn off to the left when it arrived. The town ahead was dark and dead, the streets little more than dirt paths and the houses like hand-built wooden shacks half buried in the gloom on their separate patches of land. As she drove, she spotted a few lit windows here and there—small stamps of brightness in the night—but saw no real signs of life.

And, looming over it all in the distance, the black wall of the woods.

A couple of minutes later, she parked outside a house that seemed even more deserted than the rest and got out of the car. The clap of the door closing echoed around the empty streets, and she glanced around a little nervously, as though she might have disturbed someone or something. There was nobody around. But despite the lack of visible activity, she still had the sensation of eyes turning to look at her.

Of her presence being noticed.

And after the events of the last two days, that scared her.

She turned to the house. The front gate was broken and dangling from a single rusted hinge. She pushed past it and headed up the overgrown path to the front door. The cracked windows to either side were gray and misty, the inside of the glass plastered with yellowing newspaper. With a flashlight she might have been able to make out the headlines there—tales from a different age—but the sensation of being watched was so strong that she was reluctant to draw attention to herself.

She tried the door handle.

Locked, of course.

She took a step back and looked up at the blistered wood of the house’s face. The windows above were as smoke-dark as busted light bulbs, and a portion of the guttering was hanging loose. Moss was growing between the beams above the door.

Fuck it.

She took out her phone and turned on the flashlight, then stepped carefully into the thicket of grass to one side of the path, shining the light through a window where a patch of newspaper had curled away from the pane. The beam played silently over the empty room inside, pools of light and shadow rolling over bare floorboards and damp-speckled walls.

Amanda turned off the light.

There was nobody here; the house was derelict and long since abandoned. But this was where Eileen and Carl Dawson had lived, and where James Dawson had grown up twenty-five years ago. This was where Charlie Crabtree had always insisted on setting out from when he led the boys on their treks into the woods that lay behind.

Eileen and Carl Dawson had continued living here until around ten years ago, at which point Carl had inherited a small amount of money and the couple had decided to finally move away from Gritten Wood. They hadn’t been able to sell the house, though, because who would want to buy a property in a place like this? But even so. They had packed up their things and gotten away from here, leaving the house and all the bad memories it held sealed up behind them.

And they had moved a hundred miles away to Brenfield.

* * *

Back in the car, Amanda drove a few streets on and parked outside the address registered to Daphne Adams. This was supposed to be where Paul was staying. And yet, while the property had been marginally better maintained than the one she’d just seen, there was the same sense of emptiness to it as she walked up the front path. The house itself was dark and quiet, and her heart sank as she approached. She glanced back at the street. Paul’s car wasn’t here. He wasn’t going to be either.

She knocked and waited.

Not expecting a response, and not getting one.

The frustration rose; she needed to speak to him. Where the fuck was he? She knew he had gone to the Gritten Police Department earlier and reported a doll being pushed through his mail slot, but the officer he’d spoken to—Holder—hadn’t taken the matter seriously. It was one of a litany of errors that had been made, and she supposed some of them were hers. She didn’t even have a contact number for Paul. She’d discovered he was here in Gritten by talking to the college he worked at, but there was nobody there to answer her calls at this time of night. She had a sneaking suspicion that Theo would have been able to help her out there, but she’d already tried the number she had for him, and he’d left work for the day.

She stepped back.

The yard wasn’t as overgrown here as at the Dawsons’ old house, and after a moment’s hesitation Amanda flicked on her phone’s flashlight again, then made her way across to the side of the house, and down the tangled path that led toward the back. She listened carefully the whole time, hearing nothing but the slight rush of the night’s breeze. When she reached the backyard, she shone the beam across it. The light didn’t penetrate far, but she could make out the dim line of the wire fence at the bottom, and sense the vast, impenetrable blackness of the woods beyond it.

The woods where Charlie Crabtree had vanished.

She shivered.

Charlie’s dead.

Amanda was no longer sure that was true. And as she stared at the dark expanse of those endless trees, she wondered who or what might be moving around out there right now.

Despite heading out to Brenfield earlier, she had never gotten as far as Carl and Eileen Dawson’s house there. She had called ahead to the Brenfield department as a courtesy while en route, and had been told that the police were already at the property. Because that morning a man and a woman had been found butchered there.