The Markers in the Wood

I'd been looking forward to the trip since January. That isn't an exaggeration. I'd marked it on my mobile calendar from 12 January with a little tent emoji, which was embarrassing, but showed where I was mentally. Work had been grinding me down since the autumn.

It was the sort of slow grind where nothing went catastrophically wrong. It simply never stopped. Callum Price had floated the idea over text sometime around Christmas. Three days in an isolated holiday cottage outside Bamford.

No plans, just walking routes, beer and catching up. I said yes before he'd finished the sentence.

We left Sheffield around midday on Friday. Callum drove because the hire agreement was in his name, though he'd added me as an authorised driver. The car was a silver Skoda Octavia that smelt as though someone had tried to hide stale tobacco with a pine air freshener.

It hadn't quite worked. Hannah Mercer sat in the passenger seat with her feet up on the dashboard and her headphones around her neck. She wasn't wearing them, just sort of holding them there. I was in the back with two holdalls and a paper bag of snacks I'd picked up from the Co-op on Ecclesall Road before we left.

The drive took about forty-five minutes. We left the main road near Bamford and turned up a narrow moorland lane. The trees closed in on both sides fairly quickly. There was nothing dramatic about it. They were simply there.

Callum had the address open on his mobile. The cottage was listed on one of those holiday-let sites with professional photographs that make everything look slightly better than it really is. I'd looked at the listing perhaps six times. I'm not good at waiting for things.

We found it down a gravel track off the A57 Snake Pass, at the end of a short drive through a stand of hemlocks. The cottage itself was smaller than the photographs suggested, which I'd expected. It had timber cladding, a metal roof and a covered porch with two wooden garden chairs. Someone had pushed a wooden bench against the railing. A rusted thermometer was nailed beside the door.

It read 17 degrees Celsius. That felt about right.

"This is great," Callum said.

He said it the way he says most things, as though the matter has already been decided and he's merely confirming it aloud.

Hannah climbed out, stretched and looked towards the tree line for a moment before looking at the cottage. I noticed, but didn't say anything. I assumed she was taking in the surroundings.

Inside, it smelt of cedar and slightly of dust. There was a kitchen with a two-ring hob, a living area with a checked sofa and a low table marked by a ring stain, and two bedrooms off a short corridor. Callum and Hannah took the larger room. Mine had a window facing the back of the property and a bed with a green wool blanket folded across its foot. I dropped my bag and sat on the edge of the mattress for a moment.

It was fine. Everything was fine.

We spent the rest of the afternoon doing essentially nothing, which was the whole point. Callum found a Bluetooth speaker in a kitchen cupboard and connected his mobile to it.

Hannah unpacked carefully, putting everything in a particular place, which is simply how she is. I walked around the edge of the porch twice, looked across the garden and looked at the tree line. The woodland began about twenty metres behind the cottage. It was dense.

It was the sort of density that swallowed anything after roughly five metres.

By five, we were sitting on the porch with beers. Callum had a Thornbridge Jaipur. Hannah had brought a cider from home. I had whatever local pale ale I'd picked up without checking the label.

We sat there while the sun dropped behind the ridge and the light changed from gold to flat to gone. The temperature fell quickly afterwards. Callum put on his fleece. Hannah pulled her jacket tighter. Nobody went inside.

We talked about nothing important. Callum's job, about which he was ambivalent. A university friend who had just become engaged. The walking route we intended to do the following day. The sort of conversation that goes nowhere and doesn't need to.

That was it. That was the whole evening.

I ate half a packet of salted crisps and felt genuinely relaxed for the first time in probably two months. I went to bed at about half past ten.

I don't know exactly what time it was when I woke. My mobile lay face down on the bedside table, and I didn't reach for it. I simply lay in the dark and listened.

The sound came from the direction of the tree line. It was low and rhythmic, but not constant. It continued for a few seconds, stopped, then began again.

The best way I can describe it is as something heavy being dragged across dry leaves. Deliberate, not frantic. It had a pace.

I remained completely still. I sometimes do that when something wakes me. I freeze and wait, as though whatever is there won't know about me if I don't move.

It probably isn't a useful instinct, but there it is.

I told myself it was deer. Deer move through undergrowth at night. They're heavier than people imagine. They drag their legs through leaf litter. I know that's true because I've looked it up before after hearing things in the dark, which tells you something about me.

The sound mostly fitted. It stopped after a few minutes.

I lay there a little longer, staring at the ceiling. The window was open a crack, and the cold air coming through smelt of wet bark. Then I turned over and went back to sleep.

In the morning, I didn't mention it.

Callum made coffee on the two-ring hob while Hannah sat at the kitchen table with her mobile. I poured myself a mug, stood at the window and looked across the back garden. The tree line looked the same as it had the previous evening. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed.

I didn't go and check.

I considered it for a moment, then decided against it. Callum didn't mention anything. Neither did Hannah. I assumed that if they'd heard something, they would have said so.

Or perhaps they'd done exactly what I had. Talked themselves down and moved on.

Either way, nobody said anything, so neither did I. We drank our coffee and decided where to have breakfast.

The Old Mill Cafe in Bakewell town centre was Callum's idea. It was the sort of place with exposed brick and a chalkboard menu, playing a mixture of folk music and things I didn't recognise. I had eggs, toast and a second coffee.

Hannah ordered porridge with fruit and ate about half. Callum had a full English, finished all of it and talked about the route throughout the meal.

The Black Clough Circuit was a six-mile woodland and moorland route with a moderate climb and good views from its upper section. I'd looked it up the night before. We'd completed harder walks. It seemed like a solid way to spend Saturday.

From the cafe, the drive to the gravel car park at the start of the route took about twenty minutes. Several other cars were already there.

We set off at around half past ten.

The first half was easy. The path was good and clearly marked, the sort of walking where you can hold a conversation without watching your feet every second.

We talked. Callum set a pace slightly faster than necessary, which is also simply how he is. Hannah walked behind him and I followed her. At some point, I stopped talking and listened to the wood for a while. Birds. Wind in the upper canopy. Our boots on the path.

The views from the top were good. We stopped to eat the sandwiches we'd packed, and Callum took about fifteen photographs. I sat on a flat rock, looked towards the ridge line and thought about nothing in particular.

It was a good hour.

The descent was where it changed.

We were perhaps a mile from the car park when we rounded a bend and walked into it. For about ten metres, strips of cloth had been tied to branches on both sides of the path at eye level.

They were pale and off-white, with some almost grey. Each strip had been knotted tightly rather than loosely. The knots were deliberate, the sort you had to work at. There was no wind in that section of the wood, and every strip hung completely still.

One after another, they lined the route.

All three of us stopped at the same time.

"A memorial, perhaps," Callum said. "People do that. Tie things to trees."

Hannah studied the strips for a long moment.

"That isn't what this looks like."

Callum shrugged. "What does it look like?"

She didn't answer. She simply started walking through the middle of them without touching anything. I followed.

The strips were close enough for me to touch without fully extending my arm. I didn't.

We emerged from the other side and kept walking. Callum caught up and said something about the climb on the return section. I answered him, but the easy feeling from the morning didn't come back. Not completely.

I kept walking.

We returned to the cottage shortly after four. Callum was talking about his boots, something to do with an insole rubbing during the descent, and I was only half listening.

The porch steps were in front of us. I was already thinking about sitting down and not moving for a while when Hannah stopped.

She was two steps ahead of me and stood looking at the doormat. It was one of those black rubber grid mats, with WELCOME in raised letters already worn nearly smooth.

A folded piece of paper had been tucked beneath its front edge. It wasn't protruding obviously. It had been placed as though someone wanted it to remain secure without being noticed immediately.

Callum picked it up before either of us spoke. He unfolded it, examined it for a moment, then turned it towards us.

A grid had been drawn carefully in pencil, seven columns across and seven rows down. Every cell contained a symbol. They weren't letters, numbers or anything I recognised. Some were geometric, composed of small angular forms. Others almost resembled letters without quite being them.

One symbol appeared several times in different rows. The lines were precise. Whoever had drawn it had taken their time.

"Huh," Callum said.

That was his entire reaction. Huh.

He took out his mobile and photographed both sides. The reverse was blank. He folded it again, held it towards me, and I accepted it for no particular reason.

It was ordinary, cheap printer paper, slightly softened by having been outdoors.

"Probably children," Callum said. "Or something to do with geocaching. People leave things."

Hannah hadn't spoken. She watched the paper in my hand with an expression I couldn't quite read. She didn't look frightened. It was more as though she was following a thought to its conclusion and didn't like where it led.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"Yeah."

She went inside.

Callum watched her leave, then looked at me. "She's been quiet since the walk."

"I know."

He shrugged and followed her.

I remained on the porch for another minute with the paper in my hand. Then I placed it on the small table by the door, beside an unused storm lantern.

I didn't throw it away.

I don't know why I didn't throw it away.

Callum began making dinner, and Hannah came outside again. She didn't sit down. She stood near the railing with her arms crossed, not as though she were annoyed but as though she were holding something in place.

She looked at me, then out across the garden.

"I need to tell you something," she said.

"All right."

"On the route, there was someone among the trees."

I waited.

"About fifteen metres off the path, standing still. I noticed them when we were coming down through that long section before the bends. I thought it was another walker who'd stepped off the path for a break or something. I didn't think much of it. But I looked back about a quarter of a mile later."

She stopped.

"They hadn't moved at all. Same place, same position. They were just standing there, watching us."

I said nothing for a moment. The garden was growing dim in the early evening grey that falls quickly among hills.

"You didn't say anything on the route."

"I know. I kept thinking I was wrong about the position, that I'd misremembered where I'd seen them."

She shook her head slightly.

"I hadn't."

I believed her. That was the thing.

Hannah doesn't create drama. She's the sort of person who will sit with something uncomfortable for a long time before saying it aloud. When she finally does, it's because she's already questioned herself twice.

She had been a junior doctor for two years and was now working at foundation or core-training level. Her threshold for what counted as alarming was fairly high.

I went inside, found my mobile and returned to the porch. I searched for the number of the Peak District National Park ranger office and found it in the third result. The telephone rang four times before someone answered.

"Peak District National Park. Ranger Peter Hargreaves speaking."

I explained as plainly as I could. We were renting an isolated holiday cottage outside Bamford, near the A57 Snake Pass. We'd walked the Black Clough Circuit. Hannah had seen a figure standing motionless among the trees, watching us from off the path. We'd also found a sheet of paper beneath our doormat, covered in symbols we didn't recognise.

There was a pause. It wasn't a long one.

"I appreciate you reporting it," he said.

His voice was smooth and practised, the sort of calm that comes from spending years saying reassuring things to worried people.

"We haven't had any reported incidents in that area recently. The route has been quiet."

"All right," I said.

"I should mention that there's a small spiritual community occupying some converted farm buildings near the National Park boundary. They've been there about four years. Entirely legal. Their permissions are in order."

He paused.

"They do sometimes leave markers along walking routes. Cloth, sometimes other materials. It's part of their practice."

"Cloth markers?"

"That's right."

"And the figure?"

Another pause, shorter this time.

"It could have been a member of that community. They move through the area. They're not considered a danger to anyone."

He said it the way people speak when they aren't technically lying but aren't telling you everything either. I've heard lecturers talk like that. Lawyers on television talk like that. There is a particular flatness to it.

"All right," I said. "Thank you."

"You folks have a good evening. Ring back if anything else happens."

He ended the call first.

I stood with the mobile in my hand. A spiritual community. Walking-route markers.

I looked at the folded paper on the little table.

Those strips hadn't looked like route markers. The figure Hannah described hadn't sounded like someone out for a walk.

I went inside and didn't say much about the call. Callum had pasta cooking and water boiling, and he'd opened a bottle of red wine that was already half empty by the time I sat down.

Hannah had changed into a sweatshirt. The cottage was warm and smelt of garlic. For a while, it almost felt like an ordinary Saturday evening.

Callum put on a playlist. We ate.

We talked about a mutual university friend who had just become engaged to somebody none of us had met. Callum refilled my glass without asking.

It was fine. It was almost fine.

At about ten, the porch light began to flicker. It flashed twice in quick succession, held steady, then flickered again.

Callum looked up at the ceiling as though he could see through it to the fitting.

"The bulb's probably loose," he said, pushing back from the table.

He was outside for perhaps two minutes.

When he returned, he said nothing at first. He stood in the doorway with one hand still on the frame, and his face had taken on a colour I'd never seen on Callum before.

"Come and look at this," he said. "Quietly."

We went outside.

The porch light was steady now. On the boards directly beneath it, centred as though someone had measured the position, thirteen flint stones had been arranged in a circle roughly seventy centimetres across.

They weren't pieces of gravel or random rocks. They were smooth, similar in size and evenly spaced.

Somebody had placed them there one by one while the three of us sat only a few metres away, eating pasta and talking about a wedding.

Nobody spoke for a while.

Callum crouched and examined the stones without touching them. Hannah stood with her arms at her sides. I looked at the circle and then towards the tree line, which had become nothing but dark shapes.

I thought about National Park Ranger Peter Hargreaves's voice, about that particular flatness, and about the paper on the table inside.

I didn't say what I was thinking.

I already knew it wasn't random.

We returned indoors. Callum shut the door behind us, and I watched him check the latch twice without seeming to realise he was doing it.

That was new.

Hannah was already sitting at the table. The paper lay in front of her. She studied it in the way she examines things after reaching a conclusion but before finding the right moment to say it aloud. I've known her long enough to recognise that.

Callum sat opposite her. I remained standing near the worktop.

"I need to tell you something," she said.

Callum placed both hands flat on the table.

"All right."

She pointed to one of the symbols near the centre of the grid. It wasn't the heavier one at the top, but a smaller angular mark with a diagonal line cutting through its middle.

"I've seen this before," she said. "Not something similar. This exact symbol."

Callum studied it. "Where?"

"On a patient. Last spring. At the Northern General Hospital."

Hannah had worked there for about two years. I knew that. What I didn't know was whatever she was preparing to say next.

She paused in a way that felt deliberate, as though deciding how much to tell us.

"He came in unresponsive," she said. "An ambulance brought him in. He had no identification, no next-of-kin details and nobody with him. Physically, he was mostly all right. We couldn't find anything acute, but he wouldn't respond to anything. Not pain, light or voices."

"He just lay there with his eyes open?" Callum asked. "Like a coma?"

"No. He tracked movement. His eyes moved. He was conscious. He simply wouldn't speak."

She paused again.

"He never spoke. Not once during the entire admission."

That landed strangely. Not impossible, but strange.

"How long was he there?" I asked.

"Five days. We did everything. Neurology review, psychiatric assessment, toxicology screen. Nothing explained it. He ate when food was put in front of him. He walked when we helped him stand. He simply didn't speak, didn't respond to questions and didn't acknowledge that anybody else in the room existed."

She looked at the paper again.

"He had that symbol tattooed on the inside of his left wrist. The same proportions. The same line through the middle."

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"When he was discharged," she continued, "he stood up by himself, dressed and walked to the door. A nurse tried to stop him because we needed a signature on the discharge documents. He walked past her. He didn't push her or look at her. He just went around her as though she wasn't there."

Hannah folded her hands.

"They found a piece of paper on his pillow after he'd gone. It was folded in exactly the same way as this one."

She tapped the sheet on the table.

Callum leant back. I could see him searching for an interpretation that would make the facts mean something other than what they plainly seemed to mean. He's usually good at that. This time, he said nothing.

"Did you keep it?" I asked. "The paper from the hospital?"

"No. I probably should have, but I didn't."

She looked at me.

"Honestly, I tried to forget him. The whole thing. He unsettled me in a way I couldn't explain, and I don't like things I can't explain. So I just..."

She shrugged once.

"Put it away."

That was Hannah. She didn't frighten easily. When something did affect her, she filed it somewhere and carried on.

The fact that she had taken this particular memory out now, in front of us, with that paper between us and thirteen flint stones arranged in a circle on the porch, told me more than the story itself.

Callum said it could be a coincidence.

Hannah looked at him but said nothing.

"I'm only saying that symbols recur," he continued. "Religious iconography, folk traditions. There's overlap all the time. The ranger said there's a community out here. Some man in Sheffield had a tattoo. That doesn't necessarily..."

"Callum," Hannah said quietly.

That was all. He stopped.

We remained there for a while. I don't remember exactly what we discussed afterwards, if anything.

At some point, Callum switched off the lights except for the one above the sink, and we went to bed.

I lay on top of the covers in my clothes, staring at the ceiling and listening to the cottage settle and the trees outside. There was no particular sound. I listened to everything, to the whole property, waiting for a noise I couldn't name.

I didn't sleep.

Sunday arrived grey. I was already sitting on the edge of the bed when daylight began filtering through the curtain, which was thin and admitted more than it should have. My eyes felt dry. I'd been awake long enough that I wasn't tired any more. I felt hollow, running on whatever lies beneath tiredness.

Callum tried to start the car shortly after eight. I heard it from inside. The engine caught and cut out. He tried again.

The same thing happened. Then again.

I went outside and stood on the porch while he tried four more times. Each time, the engine ran for perhaps two seconds before stopping as cleanly as though somebody had pulled a plug.

"That isn't the battery," I said.

"I know."

He called a vehicle recovery service in Bakewell. The woman at dispatch said it would take at least two hours, possibly nearer three. She estimated that someone would arrive between eleven and half past.

Callum agreed, returned inside, and we made coffee without talking much about the car. Hannah sat at the table with her mobile. I drank mine standing up.

After a while, I went outside.

I told myself I merely needed some air. That was mostly true, but since waking I'd been thinking about the edges of the property and the places we hadn't examined.

The cottage stood in a clearing, with the garden stretching back about twenty metres before the woodland began. We'd spent time on the porch, on the walking route and in the car. We hadn't walked the perimeter.

I started around the left side of the cottage, passing the propane tank and the untouched woodpile. The grass there was longer and hadn't been cut recently. It was wet from the night, and my walking shoes soaked through within thirty seconds.

I carried on.

At the rear of the garden, the mown section ended and ground cover began, a mixture of ferns and low brush before the trees. I followed that boundary towards the right with my hands in my pockets, not searching for anything in particular.

I found it about two-thirds of the way across.

A shallow trench, about twenty-five centimetres deep and twelve metres long, ran parallel to the tree line. The earth was dark and freshly turned, heaped in a low ridge along one side. It wasn't erosion or animal activity.

Somebody had dug it recently. The soil was still loose. It hadn't settled or dried around the edges.

I stood looking at it.

Then I smelt it.

It wasn't strong or overwhelming, but it was there beneath the wet soil and leaf mould. Something else.

I know that smell. Most people do, even if they've encountered it only once or twice. You don't forget it, and you don't confuse it with anything else.

Something was in the ground.

I stood there for perhaps a full minute, possibly longer. I looked at the trench, then at the tree line behind it. I thought about Ranger Hargreaves's voice on the telephone, the circle of stones and the unidentified man in the hospital who had walked out without signing anything.

Then I turned and went back to the cottage.

Callum was refilling his coffee when I entered. Hannah remained at the table. Neither looked up.

I didn't tell them what I'd found.

I sat down, picked up my mug and stared through the window at the garden while we waited for the recovery lorry.

It arrived at around half past ten.

Dispatch had estimated between eleven and half past, so its early arrival was the first thing I noticed. It probably meant nothing, but I noticed.

The lorry came slowly up the gravel drive. It was white, with a tilting flatbed and NAYLOR'S VEHICLE RECOVERY stencilled in faded blue letters on the door.

I was still sitting at the table with my coffee when I heard its tyres on the gravel. I stood and looked through the window.

The lorry stopped about six metres from the front porch and remained there for a moment with its engine idling. Nobody climbed out.

Callum put down his mug.

"That's him."

We stepped onto the porch.

The driver's window descended, and a heavy-set man leant out with one thick forearm resting on the door. He had grey-brown hair, a broad red face and small dark eyes that moved slowly and deliberately across the property.

He looked at the cottage, the garden and the tree line. Then he looked at us.

"You called for recovery," he said.

It wasn't a question.

"Yes," Callum replied. "The car's here."

The man didn't move. He surveyed the property once more in the same slow sweep, then returned his attention to us.

"The car's going to the garage," he said. "You're riding with me."

Callum gave a short laugh. "We can follow you. It's fine. We've got..."

"You're riding with me," the man repeated.

The same flat tone. The same expression. No explanation or softening, only the same sentence twice.

I looked at Callum, and Callum looked at me.

The driver, Graham Naylor according to the lettering on the door, simply waited. He had the air of somebody who had already decided how the next ten minutes would unfold and had no interest in discussing it.

"All right," I said. "Give us a few minutes to collect our things."

Graham Naylor looked at me for a moment.

"Don't take long."

We went back inside.

Callum immediately started talking about his walking pack, camera bag and the cool box he'd brought from home. Hannah was already moving with quiet efficiency, collecting her jacket and mobile from the table. I picked up my keys and wallet. That was essentially everything I needed.

I travel light. It's a habit.

"I'm not leaving my camera equipment here," Callum said.

He stood in the middle of the living room, looking at his belongings as though performing a calculation.

"It'll be fine," I said. "We're coming back for it."

"Are we, though?"

I didn't have a good answer.

I began to say something anyway, something about contacting the holiday-let company and sorting it out, but Hannah seized Callum's arm hard enough to stop him halfway through a breath.

She pointed towards the tree line.

I looked.

The figure stood there, about fifteen metres beyond the end of the garden, where the trees began.

It had the same absolute stillness as before, but it wasn't in the same position. On Saturday, it had been farther to the left. Now it was centred behind the cottage, directly in line with the back door.

It had moved closer to the centre line. Not far, but enough.

Callum said nothing else about his camera equipment. He collected his jacket and the hire-car keys, and we went through the front door to Graham Naylor's lorry. Hannah sat in the middle, Callum by the passenger window and me on the outer edge of the bench seat.

The recovery cab smelt of diesel and old coffee. A Greggs bag lay on the floor and looked as though it had been there for some time.

Graham said nothing when we climbed in. He got out and began loading the Octavia onto the tilting flatbed.

We watched him work through the windscreen. He was efficient. He didn't glance at the cottage or the tree line. He simply did his job.

Once the car was secured, he returned to the cab, turned the lorry around on the gravel and drove down the track.

I watched the cottage in the side mirror until the trees closed around the road and hid it.

After several minutes of silence, I asked, "How did you know the address?"

Graham glanced at me. "What?"

"The address. Callum gave it to dispatch, but you arrived early. I was wondering how you knew where to go."

He was silent for a moment, watching the narrow road.

"I've been called to that cottage four times," he said. "In the last two years."

I waited.

"Different guests every time."

"The same fault every time?" Callum asked. "What fault?"

Graham didn't answer. He kept driving.

I looked at Callum. Callum looked at Hannah.

Hannah watched the road ahead. Her face was completely calm, which by then I had learnt meant the opposite of calm.

Nobody asked Graham anything else, and he offered nothing.

We travelled the rest of the way to Bakewell with the windows closed and the radio switched off. The Greggs bag rustled across the floor whenever we rounded a bend.

Shah's Garage stood on the outskirts of Bakewell, a grey concrete-block building with two bays and a gravel forecourt. SHAH'S GARAGE had been painted by hand on a board above the entrance.

There was one other car outside, an old Vauxhall raised on stands with a cracked rear light.

Graham reversed the flatbed into position and began unloading the Octavia. He didn't come inside with us.

The mechanic was a wiry man in grey overalls. His name patch read IMRAN. He had short, dark hair with grease in it and a narrow face. He looked at us in the way people do when they want to make it clear they aren't interested in conversation.

He took the keys from Callum without speaking and moved the car into the bay.

We waited for about twenty minutes. The small waiting area contained two plastic chairs and a coffee machine that wasn't switched on. I looked at my mobile. Callum sent somebody a text. Hannah stood beside the bay entrance and watched Imran Shah work.

He lifted the bonnet and leant over the engine. After perhaps two minutes, he straightened and beckoned to me.

Only me.

I went over.

He pointed beneath the bonnet to a lead running from the battery area towards the engine block. It had been severed cleanly, the two ends resting about two centimetres apart. It wasn't frayed, corroded or worn.

It had been cut with a knife or a pair of snips. The rubber sheathing ended in a neat edge on both sides.

"Earth lead," he said.

I looked at it. "Right."

"Car won't keep running without it."

"Right."

I looked at him.

"Who severs an earth lead?"

He didn't answer.

He fetched a replacement from the rear of the garage and fitted it in about fifteen minutes. Then he drove the Octavia out of the bay, left the engine running on the forecourt and went inside to prepare the invoice.

The recovery and repair came to three hundred and sixty pounds.

Imran handed me the invoice without looking at me. I paid by card. He processed the payment, returned the card receipt and placed the keys on the counter between us.

That was all. He didn't offer an explanation, ask whether we knew how it had happened or suggest that we speak to anybody. He simply set down the keys and stared at the wall behind me.

I picked them up.

Callum and Hannah were already outside. I remained there for another moment.

"Thank you," I said.

Imran nodded once and walked back into the bay.

Callum was waiting beside the car when I left the garage. He leant against the passenger door with his arms folded, staring at nothing in particular. Hannah stood a few feet away with her jacket zipped to the neck, although it wasn't especially cold.

"Are we all right?" Callum asked.

"Yes."

"Earth lead, was it?" He pushed himself away from the car. "Strange."

I didn't respond. I didn't tell him it had been cleanly severed.

I unlocked the Octavia, and we got in. Callum retained the hire agreement, but he was shaken, so I took over the driving.

The route back towards Sheffield followed the A619 and A621. It was mostly two-lane road through the Peak District, with bends and small villages appearing and passing in quick succession. I'd driven it before.

Normally, it was an attractive journey. I kept to a speed appropriate for the posted limits and the winding roads, and tried not to think too hard about where we had come from.

Callum sat in the passenger seat. About ten minutes into the drive, he put on some quiet, forgettable music and looked through the side window. I don't think he saw much.

Hannah was in the back. During the first five minutes, I noticed that she wasn't facing forwards. She had turned, not completely but far enough, to watch through the rear window.

I could see her in the mirror.

She wasn't making a show of it. She wasn't craning her neck or behaving dramatically. She simply sat at a slight angle, her eyes fixed steadily and silently on the road behind us.

I didn't say anything. I don't know what I would have said.

Do you see anything?

Probably not that.

She remained like that for most of the journey. I kept checking the mirror, not because I believed something was following us, but because she was there and I couldn't stop noticing her.

The road behind us was simply a road. A handful of other cars. A lorry pulling a trailer beneath a tarpaulin.

As we passed Baslow, Callum said, "I'll ring the holiday-let company tomorrow."

"All right."

"I'm sure they'll have some procedure for this. It probably happens more often than you'd think."

I didn't answer. I wasn't sure what sort of procedure he meant. I wasn't sure what this was, exactly, in any form that could be explained to a holiday-let company.

"We left most of our things there," he said.

"Yes. My sleeping bag's still inside. The good one."

Hannah said nothing. I watched the road.

Callum let the subject drop and returned his attention to the window. The music continued, something with a guitar that never seemed to go anywhere. I turned it down slightly, and he didn't object.

We reached Sheffield at about half past four. The late-afternoon light had that peculiar quality it gets near the hills, coming in low and sideways, flattening everything and washing out the colour. I followed Ecclesall Road towards Nether Edge. Callum and Hannah lived in a rented stone-fronted Victorian terrace there. They had been in it for two years.

It was a pleasant street, lined with mature trees. I pulled up outside, and Callum opened the door before I had come to a complete stop. He got out, stretched and looked at the house as if confirming it was still there. Hannah climbed out more slowly.

She stood on the pavement and looked back along the street for a moment. Only a moment. Then she looked at me through the open door.

"Thank you for driving," she said.

"No problem."

She held my gaze. She seemed to be deciding whether to say something else, but she didn't.

She closed the door and walked towards the house. Callum leant back in through the passenger side.

"I'll message you," he said. "We'll sort out the cottage stuff."

"Sounds good."

"And, hey..." He paused. "It was still a good trip. Mostly."

I nodded.

He closed the door and jogged after Hannah. She already had her keys out by the time he caught up with her at the front step. I watched them go inside. The door closed behind them.

I sat there for perhaps thirty seconds. I don't know why. Then I pulled away and drove home.

My flat was in Walkley, north-west Sheffield, about fifteen minutes from their place. I had the first-floor flat in a divided Victorian house: one bedroom, a kitchen that was too small and a window over the sink that looked on to the neighbour's fence. I had lived there for three years. It was fine.

I got home at about five.

I put my bag down beside the door and left it packed. I poured a glass of water, stood in the kitchen and drank it. The flat was quiet in the way it always was after I had been away for a few days. It felt slightly unfamiliar, as though it had been getting on with its own life while I was gone.

At about six, I made eggs and ate them standing at the worktop because I didn't feel like sitting at the table. I washed the pan and put it away.

Callum didn't message.

I checked my mobile at seven. Nothing. I checked it again at half past eight. Still nothing.

That was fine. He was probably tired. He was probably looking after Hannah, dealing with the hire company or simply trying to unwind. That was fine.

At about nine, I sat at the kitchen table with my mobile and a beer I didn't really want, and tried to think about something else. Work, mostly. There was a project I needed to return to on Monday morning. I managed to think about it for perhaps two minutes before my mind slipped away from it.

I kept returning to the walking route.

Not the figure. Not the stones outside the cottage. Not the trench. Not Graham Naylor sitting in his recovery lorry and refusing to get out. I kept returning to the strips of cloth: the pale, knotted pieces tied to branches at eye level along that section of the route during our descent.

That detail in particular.

I kept trying to establish the order. Had they been there when we walked up that morning, or had they appeared after we passed through, so that we saw them only on the way back down?

I replayed it. We had parked in the gravel car park at the start of the Black Clough Circuit at about ten. Then we had set off.

The circuit climbed before it turned back, so we had done the ascent first. I went over the sequence, trying to fix what I had seen and when, and I was fairly sure I hadn't noticed the cloth on the way up. Surely one of us would have mentioned it.

Callum would have said something. Hannah would have. Nobody had.

So the strips hadn't been there on the ascent.

Except that, when I played it back again, I wasn't certain. There was a section on the climb where the path crossed a south-facing slope and the trees thinned. I had been watching my footing most of the time.

Callum was ahead of me. Hannah was behind me. I hadn't been looking at the branches. I could have walked straight past the strips without noticing them.

So perhaps they had been there.

I replayed it a third time.

The same result.

A different result.

I couldn't settle on either version. That isn't unusual. I know memory doesn't work like a recording. You don't get a clean playback. Details disappear, especially when you're moving and not deliberately paying attention to something. That's normal.

But this didn't feel like a gap.

That was the part I couldn't get past. A gap feels like missing footage. Reality jumps, and you know it has jumped. This was different.

Every time I replayed the sequence, I received a complete version. It simply wasn't always the same one. Both versions felt equally real: the one in which the strips were there on the ascent, and the one in which they weren't.

Every time I checked, I found a whole memory, but never a consistent one.

I sat at the kitchen table with that for a long time. The beer grew warm. I didn't finish it.

A car passed outside, and its headlights moved across the ceiling and vanished. I kept running the memory back. I couldn't stop. Not because I believed it would matter, or because it would change anything else that had happened that weekend, but because I couldn't make it stay still.

The cloth strips. The branches. The light through the trees. Whether we had already seen them, or whether we were seeing them for the first time on the descent. I couldn't fix it in place. The longer I sat with it, the less it felt like forgetting.

Eventually, I got up and put the beer in the sink.

I didn't pour it away. I simply left it there. I don't know why that felt like a decision, but it did.

The kitchen was quiet. The first-floor flat was usually quiet after midnight. There was only the occasional car and, at two in the morning, the refrigerator making the noises refrigerators make.

I stood at the worktop for a moment and looked at the table as though I might sit down again. Then I didn't. I went to the window instead.

There was nothing outside. A streetlamp. A parked Vauxhall with a cracked rear light. The launderette across the road, its sign still illuminated. An ordinary Sunday night. I stood there longer than made sense.

The thing I kept returning to wasn't the figure among the trees. It wasn't the trench. I had spent most of the drive back from Bakewell thinking about the trench, the smell rising from it and the things a person had to tell himself in order to keep driving without saying anything to Callum or Hannah.

I had told myself plenty of things on the A619 and A621 back towards Sheffield.

A deer. Something that had died naturally. Perhaps a garden, although nobody dug a garden in a twelve-metre line behind a holiday cottage. I had worked through every possibility, and none of them held. Eventually, I had stopped trying and concentrated on the road.

But the trench wasn't what was keeping me awake.

I returned to the table, sat down and opened the photographs Callum had taken of the paper, with its seven-column by seven-row grid of symbols. He had sent them to the group chat on Saturday evening, when it had still seemed like an odd thing that had happened during a weekend away, rather than the sort of thing you would be sitting with alone at two in the morning.

I studied them for a while.

The symbols meant nothing to me. They still meant nothing to me.

I placed the mobile face down.

The cloth strips. That was it.

That was the thing.

I had tried approaching it from every angle I could think of. I tried anchoring it to the light. I remembered the light being lower during the descent, more orange, striking the trees at a different angle from the light during our climb.

I was certain of that much. If I could place the cloth strips in relation to the light, I would have the sequence.

But whenever I tried, both versions worked. Strips in the orange light on the way down. Strips in the flatter light on the way up.

Both memories sat there, equally convincing.

I tried to reconstruct the order in which we had been walking. Callum was usually in front because he set a pace and rarely noticed when the rest of us fell behind. Hannah was in the middle.

I was last.

That part remained consistent. So I tried to remember what I had been looking at when I first noticed the strips. Had I been looking beyond Hannah at something Callum had already passed, or had I been the first to see them?

That should have given me a fixed point. I was at the back. If the strips had been there during our climb, Callum would have walked between them first. I tried to remember whether I had seen him react.

I couldn't retrieve it.

I had one version in which he stopped and said something. Another in which nobody spoke until Hannah pointed. A third in which I was the first to mention them.

Three different versions, each complete. None obviously false.

I tried to remember what we had been discussing. We had talked for most of the walk, just ordinary things, the sort of conversation you have when you haven't seen your friends for a while and need to catch up. I remembered one stretch when Callum spoke about his job, something about a project being delayed. I remembered Hannah laughing at something.

I couldn't place either moment in relation to the strips. They might have come before. They might have come after.

I got up, poured another glass of water and drank half of it at the sink.

The thing about ordinary forgetting is that you know when it happens. There is a gap. You were somewhere, and then you weren't, and you know the part between has gone.

I have forgotten plenty of things. I am not someone who believes he has a particularly good memory. I mislay my keys about four times a week. I forget names. I lost the entire second half of a road trip with a university friend in our second year because I was ill and everything blurred together.

This wasn't like that.

It was the opposite. This was too much memory, not too little. Each time I reached for the sequence, a complete version came back. The problem wasn't a gap.

The problem was that two complete events occupied the same place, and I couldn't make either one leave.

I sat down again. The refrigerator came on and hummed for a while, then stopped.

I thought about Hannah watching the road through the rear window for the whole journey home.

I thought about Callum saying he would message and then not messaging.

I thought about Graham Naylor sitting high in the cab of his white recovery lorry, his hands on the wheel and the engine running. He hadn't got out. He hadn't even opened the door. He had simply looked towards the property with those small, dark eyes, as though he had already decided what sort of place it was and needed only the briefest glance to confirm it.

Four call-outs in the previous two years. Different guests. The same fault every time.

I thought about what that meant.

I thought about it for a while, then stopped because there was nowhere useful to go. Some things can be turned over until you eventually reach the bottom of them. Other things simply have to be held, and they remain the same shape however long you hold them.

My mobile was still face down on the table.

I turned it over.

No messages.

Callum's last message in the group chat was from Saturday afternoon: a photograph of his walking boots on the route, with some stupid caption beneath it.

Hannah had reacted with a thumbs-up. That was the last thing in the thread.

I put the mobile down again.

The cloth strips and the branches along that section of the route. About ten metres of them, pale and knotted at eye level, lining both sides of the path.

Whoever had put them there knew the route. They knew where people would walk and how high to hang the strips so that they would be impossible to miss.

That wasn't in question.

What I couldn't answer was whether they had been there the first time we passed through, or whether someone had tied them to the branches while we were farther along the circuit, leaving us to discover them on the descent.

I had spent three hours at my kitchen table trying to answer that question, and I still couldn't.

What troubled me most, what I returned to however many times I replayed the memory, was that it didn't feel random. Ordinary forgetting is random. You lose details in no particular order and for no particular reason.

This felt precise.

This one thing. This one sequence. This one detail that might have told me how long we had been watched and from how close.

That was what I couldn't hold still.

Not the figure. Not the stones. Not the symbol Hannah had recognised from an unidentified man who had walked out of the Northern General Hospital after five days without signing his discharge documents.

The cloth strips. Their place in the sequence. Only that.

I sat there until the sky began to turn grey at the edges. It wasn't light yet, only less dark. I watched it happen through the window without ever deciding to watch.

At some point, I lowered my head on to my folded arms and closed my eyes. I didn't sleep. I simply stopped trying to solve it.

That was the best I could do.

I remained there with my eyes closed while the kitchen slowly grew lighter around me. I let the weekend remain where it was behind me, unresolved. All of it. The sounds, the symbols, the smell from the trench and the man among the trees who never moved.

I let it keep the shape it had.

The strips of cloth were different. I couldn't put those down. Not entirely.

They are still there whenever I think about it, which I sometimes do late at night when the flat is quiet and I can't sleep.

Both versions. Both complete.

Both equally real.

I still can't tell you which one happened.