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  After about twenty yards I stopped and looked back.

  ‘You chickening out?’

  ‘No, Henry,’ I said. His voice had been quiet and shaky. I took pains that mine sound firm. ‘Memorising. We want to be able to find that dead section again.’

  He’d nodded. ‘Good thinking, smart boy.’

  Pete looked back with us. Stand of three trees close together there. Unusually big tree over on the right. Kind of a semi-clearing, on a crest. Shouldn’t be hard to find again.

  We glanced at each other, judged it logged in our heads, then turned and headed away, into a place no-one had been for nearly ten years.

  The forest floor led away gently. There was enough moonlight to show the ground panning down towards a kind of high valley lined with thick trees.

  As we walked, bent over a little with unconscious caution, part of me was already relishing how we’d remember this in the future, leaping over the event into its retrospection. Not that we’d talk about it, outside the three of us. It was the kind of thing which might attract attention to the town, including maybe attention from this side of the fence.

  There was one person I thought I might mention it to, though. Her name was Lauren and she was very cute, the kind of beautiful that doesn’t have to open its mouth to call your name from across the street. I had talked to her a couple times, summoning bravery I hadn’t known I possessed. It was she who had talked about Seattle, said she’d like to go hang out there some day. That sounded good to me, good and exciting and strange. What I didn’t know, that long-ago night in the forest, was she would go on to do this, and I would not, and that she would leave without us ever having kissed.

  I just assumed... I assumed a lot back then.

  After a couple of hundred yards we stopped, huddled together, shared one of my cigarettes. Our hearts were beating heavily, even though we’d been coming downhill. The forest is hard work whatever direction it slopes. But it wasn’t just that. It felt a little colder here. There was also something about the light. It seemed to hold more shadows. You found your eyes flicking from side to side, checking things out, wanting to be reassured, but not being confident that you had been after all.

  I bent down to put the cigarette out in the snow. It was extinguished in a hiss that seemed very loud.

  We continued in the direction we’d been heading. We walked maybe another five, six hundred yards.

  It was Henry who stopped.

  Keyed up as we were, Pete and I halted immediately too. Henry was leaning forward a little, squinting ahead.

  ‘What?’

  He pointed. Down at the bottom of the rocky valley was a shape. A big shape.

  After a moment I could make out it was a building. Two wooden storeys high, and slanting.

  You saw that kind of thing, sometimes. The sagging remnant of some pioneer’s attempt to claim an area of this wilderness, and pretend it could be a home.

  Pete nudged me and pointed in a slightly different direction. There was the remnants of another house further down. A little fancier, with a fallen-down porch.

  And thirty yards further, another. Smaller, with a false front.

  ‘Cool,’ Henry said, and briefly I admired him.

  We sidled now, a lot more slowly and heading along the rise instead of down it. Ruined houses look very interesting during the day. At night they seem different, especially when lost high up in the forest. They sit at angles which do not seem quite right. Trees grow too close to them, pressing in. The lack of a road, long overgrown, can make the houses look like they were never built but instead made their own way to this forgotten place, in which you have now disturbed them.

  I was beginning to wonder if maybe we’d done enough, come far enough, and I doubt I was the only one.

  Then we saw the light.

  After Pete asked his question in the bar, there was silence for a moment. Of course we remembered that night. It wasn’t something you’d forget. It was a dumb question unless you were really asking something else, and we both knew Pete wasn’t dumb.

  Behind us, on the other side of the room, came the quiet, reproachful sound of pool balls hitting each other and then one of them going neatly down a pocket.

  We could hear what each other was thinking. Thinking it was a very cold evening, and that there was thick snow on the ground, as there had been on that other night, when we were fifteen. That the rest of the town had pretty much gone to bed. That we could get in Henry’s truck and be at the head of a hiking trail in twenty minutes, even driving drunkard slow.

  I didn’t hear anyone thinking a reason, though.

  I didn’t hear anyone think why we might do such a thing, or what might happen if we did.

  By the time Pete had finished his cigarette our glasses were empty. We put on our coats and left the bar and crunched across the lot to Henry’s truck.

  Back then, on that long-ago night, suddenly my young heart hadn’t seemed to be beating at all. When we saw the light in the second house, a faint and curdled glow in one of the downstairs windows, my whole body suddenly felt light and insubstantial.

  One of us tried to speak. It came out like a dry click. I realised there was a light in the other house too, faint and golden.

  Had I missed it before, or had it just come on?

  I took a step backwards. The forest was silent but for the sound of my friends breathing.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Pete said. He started moving backwards, stumbling. Then I saw it too.

  A figure, standing in front of the first house.

  It was tall and slim, like a rake’s shadow. It was a hundred yards away but still it seemed as though you could make out an oval shape on its shoulders, the colour of milk diluted with water.

  It was looking in our direction.

  Then another was standing near the other house.

  No, two.

  Henry moaned softly, and we three boys turned as one, and I have never run like that before or since.

  The first ten yards were fast but then the slope cut in and our feet started to slip, and after that we were down on hands half the time, scrabbling and pulling — every muscle working together in a headlong attempt to be somewhere else.

  I heard a crash behind and flicked my head around to see Pete had gone down hard, banging his knee, falling on his side.

  Henry kept on going but I made myself turn around to grab Pete’s hand, not really helping but just pulling, trying to yank him back to his feet or at least away.

  Over his shoulder I glimpsed the valley below and I saw that the figures were down at the bottom of the rise, heading our way in jerky blurred-black movements, like half-seen spiders darting across an icy window pane.

  Pete’s face jerked up and I saw in it what I felt in myself, and it was not a cold fear but a hot one, a red-hot melt-down as if you were going to rattle and break apart.

  Then he was on his feet again, moving past me, and I followed on after him towards the disappearing shape of Henry’s back. It seemed so much further than we’d walked. It was uphill and the trees no longer formed a path and even the wind seemed to be pushing us back.

  We caught up with Henry and passed him, streaking up the last hundred yards toward the fence. None of us turned around again. You didn’t have to. You could feel them coming, feel them getting closer like rocks thrown at your head, rocks only to be glimpsed at the last minute, when there is time to flinch but not to turn.

  I was sprinting straight at the fence when Henry called out. I was going too fast and didn’t want to know what his problem was. I leapt up at the wire.

  It was like a truck hit me from the side.

  I crashed to the ground fizzing, arms sparking and with no idea which way was up. Then two pairs of hands were on me, pulling at my coat.

  I thought the fingers would be long and pale and strong but then I realised it was my friends and they were pulling me away from the wrong section of the fence, dragging me to the side, to the right part, when they could have just lef
t me where I fell and made their own escape.

  The three of us jumped up at the wire at once, scrabbling like monkeys, stretching out for the top. I rolled over wildly, grunting as I scored deep scratches across my back that would earn me a long, hard look from my mother when she happened to glimpse them a week later.

  We landed heavily on the other side, still moving forward, having realised as one that we’d just given away the location of a portion of dead fence.

  But now we had to look back, and what I saw — though my head was still vibrating from the electric shock I’d received, so I cannot swear to this — was at least three, maybe five, figures on the other side of the fence. Not right up against it, but a few yards back.

  Black hair whipped up around their faces in the wind, and they looked like absences ill-lit.

  Then they were gone.

  We moved fast. We didn’t know why they’d stopped, but we didn’t hang around. We didn’t stick too close to the fence either, in case they changed their minds.

  We half-walked, half-ran, and at first we were quiet but as we got further away and nothing came after us, we began to laugh and then to shout, punching the air, boys who had come triumphantly out the other side.

  The forest felt like some huge football field, applauding its heroes with whispering leaves.

  We got back to town a little after two in the morning. We walked down the middle of the deserted main street, slowly, untouchable, knowing the world had changed: that we were no longer the boys who had started the evening together, but men, and that the stars were there to be touched.

  That was then.

  As older men, we stood together at the fence for a long time, recalling that night.

  Parts of it are fuzzy now, of course, and it’s reduced to snap-shots: Pete’s terrified face when he slipped, the first glimpse of light at the houses, Henry’s shout as he tried to warn me, narrow faces the colour of moonlight. The other guys most likely remembered other things, defined that night in different ways and were the centre of their own recollections. As I looked now through the fence at the other forest I was thinking how long a decade had seemed back then, and how you could learn that it was no time at all.

  Henry stepped away first. I wasn’t far behind. Pete stayed a moment longer, then took a couple of steps back. Nobody said anything. We just looked at the fence a little longer, and then we turned and walked away.

  Took us forty minutes to get back to the truck.

  The next Thursday Henry couldn’t make it, so it was just me and Pete at the pool table. Late in the evening, with many beers drunk, I mentioned the fence.

  Not looking at me, chalking his cue, Pete said that if Henry hadn’t stepped back when he did the week before, he’d have climbed it.

  ‘And gone over?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  This was bullshit, and I knew it. ‘Really?’

  There was a pause. ‘No,’ he said, eventually, and I wished I hadn’t asked the second time. I could have left him with something, left us with it. Calling an ass cute isn’t much, but it’s better than just coming right out and admitting you’ll never cup it in your hand.

  The next week it was the three of us again, and our walk in the woods wasn’t even mentioned. We’ve never brought it up since, and we can’t talk about the first time any more either. We killed it.

  I think about it sometimes, though. I know I could go out walking there myself some night, and there have been slow afternoons and dry, sleepless small hours when I think I might do it: when I tell myself such a thing isn’t impossible now, that I am still who I once was.

  But I have learned a little since I was fifteen, and in the end I just go smoke another cigarette on the porch, or out back of the diner, because in my heart of hearts I know that was then, and this is now.

  The Woodcutter

  It was a mistake. Not his first mistake, but a big one. Spike knew it was. He could think of no other way of generating cash, however, and London — as he’d discovered soon after he arrived — was not a cheap place to live. It wasn’t like he was even making so much. A couple of handfuls of pound coins in each pub, maybe thirty quid per venue. A hundred and fifty pounds a night, if he was lucky. Not chickenfeed, but hardly easy money either — especially as he tried not to work the same patch night after night and so had to keep finding new areas and different pubs. Not to mention that one evening in five he would leave a place and find a couple of guys waiting for him outside, men who’d either threaten to beat him up unless he handed over his earnings (and then beat him up once they had the cash) or else get straight to beating him up while taking the money, as if to save time. Regardless of the methodology, being beaten up — and financial loss — were regular features of his evenings. He’d be forced to take a couple nights off afterwards, to let facial swellings go down or allow time for his hands to start working fluently again, which also cut into his earning ability. In the two months he’d been in the city he’d been lucky to clear five hundred a week. Try living in London, finding somewhere decent to sleep, something to eat — even for someone like Spike, who consumed little of substance — never mind incidental costs like dry cleaning your jacket to get the blood off, for that much. It’s hard.

  It’s hard and cold and lonely.

  During the day he walked the streets and killed time in parks. He dawdled in bookstores. He nursed an Americano for an hour at a time, choosing a different coffee shop each day, sitting outside despite the low winter temperatures, watching the streets. If you keep yourself clean and tidy and walk with apparent purpose then cities are accommodating, especially a city like London, for two thousand years a scrappers’ den that has been willing to accept — or at least tolerate — just about anyone.

  Can’t find a job? Come to London and do our laboring and bar work. Home country having a meltdown and people starting to kill each other the whole time? Try a spell in London town. On the hunt for adventure, larks, and high times, and think you can ignore the rules?

  Ah, maybe not that last one.

  That had been the first mistake.

  He kept an eye for others like him. Someone who might be willing to pass back the message that he’d realized the error of his ways, and was very sorry, and could he please come home now? He saw them once in a while but they were all very superior and took him in at a glance. They refused to have anything to do with him, focusing on their missions, gone for good the next day. He didn’t know any of them from before and so he didn’t understand how they could have tagged him as bad news so quickly, but he came to fear he’d been away so long now that he stood out, that something was beginning to fade, that if he was stuck here much longer he’d lose what made him different. He didn’t know if that was even possible, but still the idea made him afraid.

  He hadn’t lost The Thing yet, however. He knew that because of the way he kept himself in food and lodging and — after he’d acquired the habit — cigarettes. He liked the look of smoking, he tried it, he kept doing it. Impulse control had never been his strong suit. At the end of each long afternoon he went back to his room. He’d found small, grimy lodgings off Goodge Street, more of a guest house than a hotel, cheap because it was not at all nice. It was close to the British Museum, though, another good place to kill time. It was also just around the corner from a large YMCA, and he stopped by its bar on the way out each evening. When he found himself in conversation with one of the young travellers boarding there — German, Italian, American, Eastern European, most nationalities were represented — he’d listen out for new venues to hit in the evening, though they’d almost always be heading for noisy trend-pits someone on Facebook had recommended, where Spike’s shtick wouldn’t work.

  After a single drink at the Y he’d get back out onto the streets and walk until he found an area he hadn’t worked before. On the way home at the end of each night he walked down the alleyway, to check the door. He did this secretly, covertly, carefully — in case anyone was watching, testing him. He
went in the period between 11:01 and 00:01, the correct time. He always approached humbly and with something he’d picked up that day — a dropped coin, a paper cup of collected rain water, a blade of grass plucked from between paving stones.

  None of it made a difference. The door was always there but it was never open. It might have been easier if it disappeared. If a door isn’t there then you can’t hope to go through it, but if it’s there but always locked, then you’re trapped. Someone is keeping the door shut. Someone won’t let you come back.

  So now that he’d made his mistake, what the hell else was he supposed to do?

  The days started to feel even longer.

  Then one morning, in his tenth week, he came across the newsagents. It was an unremarkable place, the sort of dingy little business you find on street corners in the center of London, selling celebrity magazines and cigarettes and quick sugar fixes to office workers. It was early and he was bleary from another night of bad sleep — he seemed to be dreaming more and more in recent weeks, cloudy visions of home that left him feeling empty and panicky — and found himself inside without noticing much about the place.

  ‘Bad for you, you know,’ a voice said.

  Spike looked up. He’d asked for what he wanted without even clocking the guy filling the space behind the counter. He saw a man who was tall and stooped and had a craggy face, with a harsh, hooked nose and sharp grey eyes. His hair was very thick and long and his hands were extremely large. In one of these he was holding out the pack of Marlboro that Spike had asked for.

  ‘Yeah,’ Spike said. ‘So I hear.’

  ‘I don’t mean the cigarettes.’ The man never took his eyes off Spike’s. ‘I mean this place.’

  Frowning, Spike handed over some hard-won coins and backed out of the shop. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

  Back on the pavement he hesitated and looked back into the newsagents. The man was still watching him. From here he looked far too large to be behind the counter. He lifted one arm and made an odd movement with it, bringing his hand down, then back up, and down and up again.