The water was cold and astringent it bit into my toes and ankles and widened my eyes. I squatted down and began to scoop armfuls of water up and scrub them into me. I scrubbed my hair my face the back of my neck my chest. I scrubbed every inch of myself all of the parts of me that had not been touched for so long that smelt acidic and old I scrubbed them I poured water over them until the water in the bucket was brown and greasy and I was washed clean. Then I stepped out of the bucket and poured the dirty water on the stones of the yard and watched it pool and puddle and snake away. I left the bucket there upside down and went back in to the house and sat naked and wet at the table and drank one more glass of water and watched the fine drizzle drifting slowly down onto the stone floor and the stove.
I looked down at my body. It was pale and knobbly and cream-coloured. The five long scratches that ran down across my torso were still clearly visible though they had scabbed over long ago and were now more like brown pencil lines. The left side of my chest was no longer red and swollen but it did seem to be a different shape to the right side. My left knee and lower leg seemed permanently bent at a different angle from my right. But here I was. This was me. I wanted to run up onto the moor like this naked and wet and greet the thing. I could run forever this way with nothing to encumber me. The thing would understand me like this it would know me this way. I was an animal wet from the watering hole clean now and ready.
I sat there dripping onto the floor and sipping slowly at my water until I was nearly dry and then I put my clothes back on. I only had one set of clothes and it had not occurred to me until today how much they stank. The thing would smell me a mile away when I went looking for it. I would have to wash them. But not now. This morning I was going out again.
I was going to abandon my plan. I had known the moment I saw it again outside the wood that things must change now that I must be flexible that I had been gifted another offering and that I had to respond. So today I was going to go back to the wood. It must be living in the wood or maybe hunting in it. I was getting close now I was zeroing in and I wasn’t going to let it escape just for the sake of following some preconceived pattern. I was going to be thorough in my search and I was going to find it I was going to see it I was going to know. I had a feeling about this wood. A creature like that this was the kind of place it would live it was the kind of place it would hide.
It wasn’t far from the house to the wood. I made my way steadily and quietly up the shoulder of the moor with the familiar tor to my right over on the horizon. The wood was shut in by a wire fence with barbed wire along the top. There was a padlocked iron gate. There were ash trees and poplars and birches all around the edges and further in it was mostly yew and larch and spruce with a few oaks and ashes that looked older than the rest.
The first thing I did was to walk the boundary line of the wood outside the fence starting at the point where I thought I had seen it. Nothing. No prints this time even along the part of the fence where I was sure I had seen it walking. I kept examining the twists of barbed wire in case any hairs had been caught but there were none. Of course I heard no sound and I saw no creature. It wasn’t there not now. Why would it be? Why would it stay? Why would it wait for me?
I climbed the fence carefully and stood inside the wood and listened. Silence the same silence that had held me for so many weeks. No birdsong no rustling in the undergrowth no distant cars no voices animal or human. Just my breathing and my footfall and the settling of tiny raindrops on leaves and on the woodland floor. I decided to walk the wood as if it were one of my grids on the map. I would walk in a series of straight lines from north to south and then from east to west and that way I would cover all the ground. Nothing would get past me. I was good at this now.
I began. I walked slowly from one side of the wood to the other and then I walked perhaps fifty yards to the side and began down again in the opposite direction. At one point I saw what I thought might have been a footprint of the kind I’d seen in the lane but the leaf litter on the floor was so thick and damp that I couldn’t be sure really what I was seeing. Apart from that there was nothing. I walked this way north and south north and south for perhaps an hour and then I came to the edge of a deep pool of water. The pool felt old. It was long and narrow and it looked deep. Its surface was still and black. Long thin reeds and yellow irises grew around the edges. It reminded me of somewhere but I didn’t know where.
I made my way down to the edge of the water until the ground got too wet for me to continue. I love staring into water. I looked down into the black depths but I saw nothing not even any insects moving on the surface. The whole thing was like a great old scrying mirror. I looked into the water and I was in a flat wooden boat making my way across it and there was nothing around me but the sound of the water. But I was not in control of the boat something else was in control of the boat and in control of me and all of the people. I was making my way across water but I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t need to because what I wanted was not important now. I was a tool I was an object a means to a creation. I lay down in the boat the back of my head rested on the hard flat wooden planking and I looked up at the sky and the sky moved slowly above me and where I was being taken was no longer my concern.
There was nothing in the pool and there was nothing by the pool or around it. I walked the whole perimeter of the water I thought perhaps it might come here to drink but I saw nothing. So I continued with my plan. I walked the whole wood along my north south lines and then I turned and I did the same thing from east to west. Nothing. It was not here. Not only was it not here but there was no evidence that anything had ever been here even in the place I had clearly seen it the night before.
I made my way back to the gate out of the wood and I clambered over the top of it. I stood looking up at the long shoulder of the moor against the white sky. It was becoming clear to me that when I looked for this thing I never found it. I only ever saw it in passing when my guard was down when I was tired and hungry and walking away. My system didn’t work. I dropped my rucksack to the ground took out my water bottle and drank half of it on the spot. Then I shouldered my pack again and I made my way up the moorland slope the way I had walked yesterday.
Something dropped into me the minute I walked clear of the wood. Something changed. Now I knew that the search would always be fruitless now I realised that for days I had had this tightness in my belly this great knot like a fist clenched inside me and I felt it begin to loosen. My bowels uncoiled themselves my stomach turned to jelly and a strange calm spread from it through the rest of my body. I dropped my pack onto the heather and sat on the ground. I leaned back against a rocky protrusion and let my gaze wander across the woodland past the wire fence up to the tor across to the gully. I felt the fine drizzle on my face and hands. I saw how damp my boots were. I was not going to look for it anymore. Looking for it didn’t work. I was just going to sit and let my mind wander. There was nothing else.