'It's the fog,' said Jackie. 'You must have driven up a slip road without realising it. Looped round in a circle. It's easily done.'
'Yeah, you're probably right,' said Joe, but he sounded unconvinced.
He drove on, mouth set in a grim line, hands gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles stood out in sharp white points. For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Both stared at the road ahead.
Then Jackie's eyes widened. 'Oh God,' she breathed.
The fog was back, same as before, a thick, solid wall of it, directly in front of them.
There was something intimidating about it. Something sinister and challenging. But when he spoke, Joe's voice was carefully upbeat, almost jaunty.
'Well, I suppose this supports your theory that we've come in a circle. We'll just have to be more careful this time.'
Jackie nodded, but said nothing. She felt the muscles in her arms and stomach tightening, instinctively pressed herself back into her seat as the fog enshrouded them again. She'd always hated roller-coasters, always hated that moment when the car clanked its way to the top of the incline and was inching forward in readiness for the downward plunge.
She felt like that now. That awful anticipation. That sense of being out of control and unable to do a thing about it.
Stupid, she told herself. What is there to be scared — Without warning, a figure loomed out of the fog.
She only caught a glimpse of it before Joe was yelling, and yanking on the wheel, and the car was slewing sideways. But in that split second she got the impression of someone tall and ragged and oddly lopsided; someone standing directly in the path of the car, head tilted to one side as if it was too heavy for the spindly neck that was supporting it. She saw no other details. The figure was nothing but a charcoal-grey silhouette on a pearly-grey background.
And then the car hit the figure side-on with a sickeningly loud bang, and the figure flew backwards, as though snatched away by some vast predator. Suddenly the car was spinning madly, and the tyres were screeching, and Jackie was being thrown about as if she weighed nothing.
Even as pain exploded in her shoulder and knee as she whacked them on the seat and door, a sharp, almost searing memory came to her of being seven years old and clinging to the safety bar of the waltzer in the fairground and wishing it would stop. And then, hot on the heels of that, she thought with an almost lucid calmness: This is going to be the biggest impact I've ever known. I wonder if I'll die.
Then suddenly there was silence, and she was lying at a strange angle across her seat, pressed back by the air bag. There was a smell in the air, fumes and hot metal, and she could taste blood in her mouth, and when she tried to move her leg a hot, jagged corkscrew of pain leaped from her shinbone to her hip, making her cry out.
Joe spoke. She couldn't see him, but she heard his voice, cracked and shaky. 'Jacks, are you OK?'
She opened her mouth to answer and it was full of blood. She spat it out.
'Hurt my leg,' she said.
She heard Joe shift beside her, then grunt softly in pain. 'I need to call for help,' he said, 'but I can't get a signal. I think it's this bloody fog.'
There was a screech of metal. Jackie couldn't think what it was at first, and then realised it must be the sound of the buckled driver's door being pushed open.
'What are you doing?' she said, fighting down panic.
'I need to get help,' he said again. 'I'm going to walk back along the road a bit, see if I can get a signal.'
'Don't leave me, Joe,' Jackie said.
'It'll only be for a few minutes. I need to call for an ambulance. And I need to find out what happened to that bloke we hit.'
'Don't leave me,' she said again.
'I'm not going to leave you,' he said. 'I'll be back in a few minutes, Jacks. Promise. Just. . just try and relax, all right?'
She heard a creak of metal as he shifted his weight. A hiss of pain. Then the sound of his footsteps as he hobbled away, into the fog. His footsteps grew fainter, and then suddenly she couldn't hear them any more. She felt a sudden surge of loneliness, which threatened to escalate into outright panic. She breathed deeply, in and out, fighting to bring it under control. She told herself that everything would be fine, that Joe would get help, and that soon they would be in the hospital or at home, a bit bruised and battered, maybe, but wrapped up snug and warm in front of the telly, sipping nice hot cups of tea.
Because of the air bag she couldn't see much. Just a portion of the shattered passenger window and the swirling grey fog beyond. Curls of vapour were drifting in through the window, acrid and cold.
She was just beginning to wonder how much longer Joe was going to be when a terrible, ratcheting scream came tearing out of the fog.
It was an awful sound, barely human, and yet Jackie knew that it had come from her husband's throat. Gripped by freezing terror, she started to shake and cry. She tried to move, and her spine erupted with white-hot pain, so intense that she almost blacked out.
Then another scream tore into the echoes of the last, a high bubbling wail of pure agony. Now Jackie felt alternately hot and cold as sheer sickening panic surged through her. Terrified and helpless, she told herself that this couldn't be happening, it couldn't, it couldn't. .
She tried to call her husband's name, to scream for help, but she couldn't make a sound.
Not even when she heard the slow, dragging footsteps coming towards the car.
Not even when a hand that was more bone than flesh reached in through the window.
ONE
'Right then, boys, who's up for a little jaunt round the Bay?'
It was Steffan who'd spoken. Toby looked at him, then glanced at the flushed faces around the glass-laden table. Not for the first time he found himself wondering whether a single one of his new friends — if that was really what they were — felt as dislocated and as. . well, homesick as he did.
Like every other first-year, Toby had been at Cardiff University for about four weeks now. Four weeks of partying and drinking and meeting new people. Yet, despite it all, he still found himself trying to shake off the notion that he was an outsider, that he didn't fit in. Everyone else seemed to have cemented themselves quickly and easily into student life, so why hadn't he? Though he would never have admitted it to anyone, he badly missed his mum and dad, and his mates, and all the familiar things and places back in Leicester. He missed his girlfriend Lauren, too, even though they'd decided to cool it a bit now that they were going off to different universities. God, he even missed his annoying little sister, Jess, and her obsession with MSN.
What's wrong with me? he thought. Why can't I just enjoy myself? Why can't I just let myself go?
Maybe it was the people. Maybe he'd fallen in with the wrong crowd. Sports Management attracted all sorts, but because of his room-mate, Curtis, he'd found himself stuck with the hard-drinking rugger-buggers. Toby had never thought of himself as a party pooper, but he just didn't see the point of getting blotto every night. It wasn't even as if drinking with this lot helped him loosen up; in fact, the more raucous and obnoxious his new friends became, the more he found himself retreating into his shell.
'What do you mean by a jaunt?' Curtis asked now. He was a Londoner, and wore his hair in short, beaded dreadlocks. He was tall and worked out a lot. He wore white skinny-fit T-shirts to emphasise his rippling muscles. The guys sometimes called him Audley because he looked like Audley Harrison, the boxer.
Steffan grinned, stood up and delved in his pockets. He was big and solid too, though not as toned as Curtis. He was from Newport, and because of his local knowledge he'd pretty much appointed himself leader of the group. Nobody else seemed to mind, but Toby wasn't keen on Steffan. He found him arrogant and sarcastic and, despite his own homesickness, he couldn't help finding it a bit pathetic that the guy had chosen a university only a mile or two up the road from where his parents lived.