‘Phones!’ Smacked with the galling realisation, Kira fumbles in her jeans. ‘All this time, we had civilisation. How did we forget? We’re the internet youth.’
Fiddling with his scratched device, Callum offers it full disapproval. ‘Magic forests do that. Even to youths.’ He shoves the phone in his inside pocket. ‘It’s not working, anyway.’
Kira frowns. It was fully charged this morning. ‘We tried.’ She flicks her dark-starred case. ‘Have you really never seen this road? You seem like you’ve lived here forever.’
‘You do realise’—Callum squints at the thick white sky—‘that no matter how many times you ask, the answer will stay the same? Yes, I’ve lived here for years. Yes, I’ve explored these woods to death. Yes, I thought I knew every path, every clearing, and pretty much all of the trees. But clearly, I was wrong.’ The teasing in his voice wilts. ‘Asking “are we there yet?” won’t suddenly make it right.’
Kira’s cheekbones heat. ‘That’s not what I was doing.’
She turns away. ‘Hey.’ Callum grabs her arm. ‘I’m not—agh.’ He shakes his head. His expression is pained. ‘I know you weren’t saying that. I’m not trying to be patronising. It’s just…’
He mouths for a moment. Kira waits. Despite what he’s saying now, he’s made her feel stupid. It’s not party town for her, either.
‘Whatever that was’—he sighs eventually—‘it can’t have happened.’ He waves a bleak hand behind them. ‘There’s no way it can have happened, but it did. And I’m trying very hard not to think about it, or this’—another wave—‘because none of it should be happening. Honestly, I’m happy to assume I was wrong about knowing every inch of this forest. If it explains it, I’m game. Magic clearings, magic footprints. All of it.’
Kira watches his eyes flick around them. He truly does look thrown. Lost.
‘So what do we do?’ She starts walking again. She’d rather stay peeved, but the look in his eyes…it settles in her stomach like sickness. Maybe she had been hoping that eventually, they’d be “there.”
‘We walk.’ Callum sighs again. ‘In theory, it shouldn’t be long before we find somewhere with people. It looks like unpopulated heathen-land, but you can’t go far around here without hitting some random hamlet. And then’—he spreads his hands, preaching ruefully to the masses—‘we’ll work out exactly where I went wrong. Whoa.’ He stops. ‘What’s that?’
The trees taper into distance perception. Stuck in the road before that, a something has come into view. Callum’s insides hiccup.
‘A sign?’ Kira’s voice is ambivalent, as though the something is a joke, a blemish, and a threat. ‘Here? Pointing to what?’
She rekindles their approach, more watchful than before. Uncomfortably, Callum follows. ‘I don’t know.’ Although he’d rather not admit it, this development is not a comfort. It’s wrong. He’s never seen anything like it. Not in the forest.
Not anywhere.
Fifty metres, twenty, ten. They’re far too close; his skin prickles, and not from fear, but an oddness in the air. It’s electric, heady, like a storm.
He’s never been a fan of storms.
‘Oh.’ Kira stops, high-pitched, surprised. Callum brakes to avoid collision. He’d been considering defeat, admitting his unease, his spider-senses, whatever, in order to try the direction that doesn’t have a magic sign. ‘It’s a window.’
Callum’s unease eases. She’s right. A frame nailed to a splintered post, the small, wooden, air-filled window is comically vigilant and pointlessly alone.
Kira tilts her head to the side. ‘It’s adorable.’
She smiles, at it and him. It’s subtle, inquisitive, different from the grin that makes her eyes crinkle to nothing. It’s adorable in itself.
It doesn’t prevent his snort. ‘It’s useless.’ Jogging the last few metres, he pokes his head through the gap. Blinking once, twice, thrice at the empty air, he manoeuvres back out with a shrug. ‘Yep.’ He flicks a dismissive hand. Thank Christ for easy solutions. His spider-senses were bollocks. ‘Useless. Although it does have a nice motif.’
Hello.
Callum looks up from the etching. ‘What?’
‘I didn’t say anything.’ Bending until her head is level with the frame, Kira contemplates the view. The road is captured perfectly, so barren and picturesque it could be a winter postcard. The scene is all there is, though. No framing of something specific; no hidden message carved into the wood, unless you count the mocked motif. A tiny engraving of a sketchy tree trunk, it has four thin branches and a line for the ground. That’s it. That’s all there is.
Disappointment clunks inside her. As much as she’d love to prove Callum wrong, the wooden window is useless. She lifts her head. The real-life scene is still. Rotating her lips in twisty contortions, she peers back through the gap. Over the wood. Back through the gap. Everything is the same: the same sky, the same winter, the same impatient Scot signalling to get a move on…
Or not. Kira leans closer to the frame. Something is different; something she missed, or that hadn’t been there. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she parts her focused lips.
‘There’s a fork.’ The words are a breath of disbelief. ‘Callum.’ She glances up, grasps his attention, and quickly returns to the gap. ‘The road forks. Look.’
Callum swings around beside her. ‘No, there isn’t.’ He swings back. Kira narrows her eyes. Parting around an island of trees stretch two ramrod roads. ‘Is this some oddball trick of yours, or is one of us actually blind?’
‘You.’ Standing, she shifts from the postcard-path to the real-life road. The fork remains. ‘Definitely you. I’ll prove it.’
Either she’s gone mad, or he has. Callum scratches the back of his neck and watches Kira march away. After the length of a beginner ski slope, she throws out her arms. ‘See?’ she shouts, breathless but satisfied, clumsily swivelling to face him. ‘You must be able to see it now. It’s right behind me.’
He’s in that experiment where no one sees the monkey. Callum shades his eyes, but it makes no difference; right behind her or not, there’s only one road. He stoops to squint through the window. The same image greets him, and exhaling through his teeth, he shuts his eyes. If he’s being made fun of, she’ll be right back on that lift.
Callum straightens up. Blink, slow, deliberate: no fork. Again: still no fork. Again.
At the fifth, Kira jolts into focus. Callum wavers in surprise. He hadn’t noticed she was blurred. ‘I still don’t see anything,’ he calls. Irritation barbs his chest. ‘Is this payback for the chairlift?’
Giddiness swoops in a swoon. ‘Jesus.’ Swaying, he slaps his hands to his knees. Nausea curdles like rancid milk. Unsteadily, he looks up.
The giddiness crashes straight back down. Shuddering, splitting, distorting around a narrow belt of trees, the way ahead reshapes itself. Behind Kira, just as she said, curve two white roads.
Rocking a hand to his spinning head, Callum wobbles up to his feet. A glance at the window, up at the fork. Deceitful, dizzying monstrosity. He resists the urge to kick it. Some monkey. What a little shit. What a wazzock.
With a final, cursing glare, he slogs after Kira.
It takes an age too long. Collapsing beside her, he emits a queasy groan. His woozy limbs are exhausted by the minuscule hike, as unhappily unwieldy as the arches of his feet. ‘I need to sit down,’ he mumbles after the fact. ‘Don’t mind me. Stupid monkey. Stupid goddamn monkey.’
Settling into the snow, he drops his head into his hands. Stupid monkey?
Whatever. The restless words slip away. In the short time it took him to get here, Kira’s mind metamorphosed, from an energetic, curious whirl to a vacant, staring mass. Cocking her head, she stares through Callum. She’s blanker than the time she tried to write a book. Even her memories are fading.
What?
Whatever. The events of the day are drifting away, and like snowflakes, she lets them go. Romy, the clearing, the fork. The cuts
on her face that pulse in the cold, the man she met this morning. They sink into tar, and she’s nothing.
Nothing but a numbness in a swaying bag of bones. No concern. No wonder. No attempts to understand. It’s her seventeenth birthday, two-point-oh. She almost giggles. Over-drinking to nirvana. Now, it’s not as nauseating but just as rich, as harmonious; it leaves her with a dreamy floating, a faint flurry at the edges of her senses, and a vague sense that she’s not herself.
With her thoughts a sluggish, oceanic rumble, Kira glances over her shoulder. The prongs of the fork are identical, straight and white and lined with the booming, marching trees. ‘Which…’ she mumbles. Her tongue is treacle. ‘Which way?’ The question takes eternity. ‘Which way do you want to go?’
After an endless pause, Callum shrugs. It’s as listless as if he, too, feels and wonders nothing. ‘Right,’ he murmurs in a weary breath. Heavily, Kira helps him up. ‘You know. For consistency.’
Why are they carrying on? A voice beats at the base of his skull, but his senseless brain ignores it. Why are they pretending this is okay? None of it is. None of it can be. Why aren’t they running for the hills?
They should be. They have to. He’s a swimmer in a dream, or a somersaulting monkey, crashing cymbals and chattering, inane. Mindless, barely there. If he let himself, he could spread his arms, fall back, fall in, and—
A monkey?
With a tremendous, deadweight heave, Callum hauls himself back. He’d been thinking about monkeys, or one specific monkey, and he snatches it with papery hands. The monkey. A video of an experiment, one about attention that he studied at school. The teacher presented it with glee. How many of you, she’d started by asking, think you’ll spot it straight away?
He had.
Callum grasps Kira’s hand and tugs her into movement. Whatever’s happening, to them and their minds, he can’t let it win. She doesn’t protest; she doesn’t seem to hear. In fact, and the image washes him cold, she looks worryingly like Romy. Inanimate, grey-faced, and very far away. ‘Come on. We need to get out.’
Neither of them see, as they slowly turn right, a smiling wisp of a woman.
Neither of them see her restless tendrils pale into the air.
Hello.
The numbing fog was creeping back. Kira’s might never have begun to lift, but at a sly slip of wind down his neck, Callum is awake. They’re trudging through a growing, weighty daze, and he stops.
‘No.’ Disentangling their hands, he jabs his nails into his skull. ‘Stop. Jesus. Kira!’ He grips her shoulders. ‘Kira, wake up.’
He could shake her, but he doesn’t. She hasn’t spoken in far too long, hasn’t done anything except be led. Is it too late? Has it gone too deep?
‘Hmm?’ Like fingers clearing a misted window, her eyes suddenly spark. ‘What?’ Kira looks up at him. His swell of relief is startling as she blinks, a dreamer out of touch. What would happen if she’d been lost? ‘What’s wrong? Has something happened?’
‘No.’ Callum lets her go. It feels like a wrench. ‘We’re fine. Everything’s fine. It’s just…’ He gestures around them, at the flat sky, the trees, the road. None of it ever ends. ‘This place. This atmosphere. I don’t know; something. The forest is never like this. It’s screwing with our brains.’
He rubs his hands down his face, rough and repeated. ‘Making us sleep while we’re awake,’ he continues, muffled by his fingers. ‘You know if you’re watching a film, and you kind of know what’s going on, but most of your brain is thinking about waffles? When you wake up, you expect to be able to pick up where you left off, but you can’t because a bouncing snowman’s joined the cast, someone’s turned the city to ice, and you have no idea how it happened. That’s what’s going on here, and we have to make it stop.’
Kira stares through him. Her mind is sharpening fast now that he’s shaken her fog, but not enough to fully function. ‘Are you comparing this to watching Frozen?’ She blinks at him, half-amused. A further level of fuzziness lifts. Somehow, she smiles. It’s screwing with our brains. ‘Does this mean you’ve seen Frozen?’
‘Men do many things for women.’ Callum turns his attention to the road ahead. Kira sees something register. ‘Oh, come on.’ He tips back his head as if to say Lord help us. ‘Really?’
Where the road had been strong and unfailing, now it ends. Kira’s shoulders slump in a way she thought reserved for cartoons. There’s a break in the road, a break in the trees, a break where the land falls into the sky, a clean-cut precipice that troubles and exhausts her. She speaks in a sigh. ‘Do you want to go back?’
‘No.’ Callum shakes his head, although he looks like he’d far rather nod. ‘We’ve come this far. We might as well go to the edge.’
Kira tugs a hand through her tangled hair. If she was writing the book she didn’t finish, she’d say she was flabbergasted, or flummoxed, or any other words that are intricate but contrived. She’d probably use all of them. At this point, no single option is enough.
‘Kira?’ Callum prompts.
Kira brings herself back. ‘Sorry.’ She gestures emptily. ‘This is all just so…’
‘Impossible.’ Callum nods along. ‘I know. I’m starting to hate that word.’
Twisting her gloved hands into knots, Kira follows him toward the drop. The air is sharp, stripped of weight. The pines are more like incense, perfumed. Or is it madness?
Madness. Everything is madness. This holiday has only lasted a week, but that’s enough; enough for anyone to know that no part of the land just falls. There’s nowhere where the sky takes over the land, where the mountains, the valleys, the lakes disappear. It’s no longer a case of Callum losing his way, if she ever believed it was…and as they peer out on the edge of nothing, suddenly, she’s afraid.
In the nothing lies a blanket of unbroken cloud. White seeps into pale blue, darkening to indigo, purple, violet; where it creeps along the horizon, it fuses into snow-cloud black. It’s a melancholy sunset without the sun, and it pinches Kira’s breath.
But the cloudscape is not what has Callum’s attention. Following his cheerless gaze, she gasps; below them is a drop, a cascade of land and air. Carved into the mountain, their road falls fast, curving down steeply and tapering to nothing. Kira leans gingerly over the edge. No; not nothing. Treacherous and frozen, it’s there when the slope opens up again, winding through the cluttered trees.
And beyond the trees…Kira wavers. Madness. Madness is all there is. Half of her wants to step closer. Half shouts to get the hell away. Beyond the trees rolls a turquoise ocean.
‘Where are we?’ she whispers. It’s vast and transfixing. She can’t not stare. Sky and water, a strip of land. There are no buildings, no mountains, no roads. No other side. Just the churning waves, a faint roar slapping the shore, and the burst of the sunless sunset. ‘Callum?’ She drags her eyes away. The colour-bright water is painful, but hypnotic. ‘Surely this goes beyond—is that a hummingbird?’
A speck of blue flits through her afterglow. Hovering behind Callum’s head, the tiny bird bobs serenely. Golden wings tremble, beaded eyes curious, and it watches before darting off with a hum.
Into the sunset, a beautiful buzz. ‘Not like any I’ve ever seen.’ Callum shakes his head as it vanishes, swallowed by the boundless sky. ‘Not that I’ve ever seen a real one, but still.’ He scratches his head. ‘We really need to leave.’
He turns his back on the water. ‘Wherever we are, we need to leave. There’s no ocean here. For God’s sake, the country’s landlocked. I won’t use that goddamn word again, but it’s definitely time to go.’
‘Agreed.’ Kira spares the precipice one last look.
The fog sweeps in like wind. Her mind has cardboard walls, and they flutter off with the bird. Nirvana. Oblivion. She’s teetering on the alcoholic brink, and all she can do is stare.
Shimmering water, burgeoning clouds. Unchanging, stalking trees, burning and scarring her brain. Her world was never anything else. She smiles. The
colours of the clouds are mesmerising, merging with the sea. Waves upon waves and shore upon trees…she thought she’d hit nirvana before, and on her birthday before that? She’d had no idea what it meant. It’s this, here, watching the tides, watching the wispy moon forge a threadbare home. It’s the night creeping in and the day flying out.
‘Kira.’ Callum taps her arm. ‘Let’s go.’
Her eyes don’t falter as she brushes him away. The sunset; the sea. The smiling of the moon. It’s home. She frowns. ‘No.’
If he notices her irritation, he ignores it. ‘Come on, Kira.’ He pulls a face at the ocean. ‘There are more important things than staring at that. If you really want to eye up a large body of water, I’ll take you to Lake Geneva. Hell, I’ll take you to France, if you’re feeling committed. Right now, I don’t care. I just want to get away from here.’
Kira doesn’t move. Her irritation is flowering, to anger, to rage. Maybe if she settles to stone, Callum will leave her alone.
‘Kira.’ Seizing her shoulder, Callum turns her toward him. ‘This isn’t right. Come on, let’s—’
No.
‘Get off!’ Kira screams. Wheeling around in a surge of crimson, she slaps him so hard her arm socket cricks.
Time staggers. Kira boils inside, like she’s turned to acid. Stunned, Callum stares at her, his cheek flushing scarlet. The sound of the impact echoes round the mountain. A gunshot in ricochet, it bounces back, once, twice…and as it fades, so does Kira’s rage.
The curtain lifts. The crimson greys. The acid turns to water.
‘Oh, my God.’ Kira claps her hand to her chest. Her heart beats faster than a panic attack. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what—’
Her voice cracks. Blankly, Callum probes his skin. Biting halfway through her lip, horror seethes in her belly. Black scratches at her vision, and she blinks. Blinks. Blinks. The ocean begs her to turn again, be burned again, enraged again. It’s a furnace, an oven, a bonfire, licking at her back. She wraps her arms about her body. She won’t give in. She won’t be like Romy.
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