‘Look, why don’t I collect some wood and get a fire going while you get the mushrooms? It’ll save time.’
‘Are you sure you’ll be all right? There are people after us.’
She stared at him, an eyebrow raised. ‘I can look after myself.’
They checked inside the stone shelter. Just one room, and leaves had drifted into the corners, but it seemed secure enough. There was even a small wood-burning brazier, along with a couple of battered saucepans and some metal plates.
‘Are you goin’ to be long?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘As long as it takes. You want dinner, don’t you?’
She smiled. ‘I’ve never had a man actually go an’ gather dinner for me before, ’part from my dad. I kinda like it.’
He couldn’t help himself. ‘What about buy you dinner? Has anyone ever done that? Apart from Mr Crowe, I mean?’
She shook her head. ‘Nope.’
‘Or cook you dinner?’
‘Nope.’
He smiled. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
The trees closed in around him within moments: trunks as thick as his body that erupted from tangles of roots and reached up towards the sky, forming a lacy ceiling with their branches. The thin light of the moon filtered down from above as he walked. Twigs seemed to grope for his face. Trailing strands of moss – or perhaps fine spider webs – brushed his cheeks and forehead, and he kept having to push them away. An owl hooted, and he could dimly make out the occasional sound of something larger – badgers, ferrets, maybe the odd deer – pushing its way through the undergrowth.
Somewhere off in the distance, a twig snapped as if it had been stepped on. Leaves rustled. Was it the wind, or a person?
He tensed, fearing that Scobell’s men had tracked them down, but a moment’s thought convinced him otherwise. He could still hear the owls and the passing animals. If Scobell’s men were around, the wildlife would have been more cautious.
Remembering the Edinburgh tenement, and the faces of dead men that had been staring out at him from the darkened doorways, he began to feel a flutter of panic in his chest. Were there dead men stalking him through the forest? Were they even now clustering around the door of the shepherds’ shelter, ready to burst in and attack Virginia? His heart started to race. He began to turn around, ready to race back to save her, but he stopped and took a deep breath. This was stupid. He put a firm mental hand on the panic in his chest and pushed downward. Dead men did not walk. There were no such things as ghosts. They weren’t logical. They were just superstition. Amyus Crowe had taught Sherlock a lot over the past year, but whatever Sherlock had learned had been built on top of a basic scepticism that was part of his character. There had to be a reason for things happening. There had to be a cause. Things that were dead were dead – they didn’t keep moving. Death was the absence of life. Whatever he had seen back in the tenement, whatever he and Matty had seen in Edinburgh, it wasn’t dead men.
Feeling better, he kept on walking. If he was hearing anything in the woods apart from the breeze then it was scurrying animals. The rest was just his imagination drawing the wrong conclusions from small amounts of evidence. Speculation in the absence of correct information was, he decided, a fruitless occupation. If he was going to come to conclusions in future, he was going to make sure they were based on evidence.
He entered a small clearing. In the light of the moon that flooded down from above he could see a cluster of mushrooms pushing through the loam and the leaf mulch of the forest floor. He approached and knelt beside them. They were bright orange in colour, and their edges were wavy, like lettuce leaves. He recognized them as chanterelles. Pulling as many as he could from the ground, he stuffed his jacket pockets.
A few feet away he found some morels, their honeycomb-like interior structure and brown colour unmistakable. Across the other side of the clearing, a few feet into the trees, he found a fallen trunk on which was growing a mass of the distinctive white strands of Lion’s Mane mushroom.
Arms and pockets full, he set off back for the shelter. He had enough to keep the two of them going until the morning. If he could find some water then he could boil them in the saucepans. That started him thinking – were there any herbs growing nearby that he could use to flavour the water?
His mind occupied with thoughts of how he was going to impress Virginia with his culinary skills, he walked up to the hut.
‘I’m back!’ he called softly, in case she was sleeping. ‘And I’ve got dinner!’
He stepped into the shelter, where Virginia had got a fire going in the stove. By its light, he saw that she was asleep, curled up on the ground. She had found some rushes or reeds from outside, and had piled them up underneath her head as a pillow. She had also piled more of them up for Sherlock, just a few feet away from her own head.
He wasn’t sure what to do. He supposed he could prepare food and then wake her up, but it had been a long hike uphill, and they had more walking ahead of them in the morning. Best that she slept now.
He dumped the mushrooms on the ground and sat beside Virginia. Something about the fresh air and the long walk through the woods had quelled his own appetite as well. They weren’t going to die of malnutrition if they missed one meal. He could cook the mushrooms when the sun came up.
He stared at her face. She seemed so relaxed, asleep. Her lips were curved in a slight smile, and her expression was calmer that he had ever seen it. Usually there was a watchful look on her face, especially when she was looking at him, but now it was as if he was looking at her with everything wiped away apart from the real Virginia. The girl that he so desperately wanted to know better.
He reached out a hand and brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. She stirred slightly and made a noise, but she didn’t wake up.
He watched her for a while, mesmerized by her incredible beauty. It was difficult looking at her when they were together in daylight, because she would spot him staring at her and stare straight back, or ask him what he was looking at, but now he could admire her for as long as he liked.
Eventually he stretched out beside her, his head on the rushes that she had left for him. He felt himself drifting off to sleep. Despite the danger, despite the situation that they were in, he felt happy. He felt as if he had found the place where he belonged.
He fell asleep so gradually that he didn’t even realize when it happened, but he woke up suddenly. Sunlight was streaming through the doorway. He must have turned over during the night, because he was facing in the opposite direction, away from Virginia.
He turned back, and felt his heart freeze.
There was no sign of Virginia. Three white skeletal figures were standing in the centre of the room. They stared at him with wide, lidless eyes set deeply in shadowed sockets. In their hands they held curved blades, like the sickles that farmers use to slice through wheat when harvesting it.
He scrabbled desperately for the door, but thin arms grabbed him from behind. The fingers looked like twigs against the sleeves of his jacket, but they were as hard as bone, and they hurt as they dug into his flesh.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sherlock struggled wildly, trying to break free, but the fingers of his attackers were immovable. One of them held a knife to his throat. It had a tarnished blade, as if it had been buried in the ground for years. The message was clear, and he stopped struggling.
The figures turned Sherlock over unceremoniously. He noticed with a shiver of fear that their clothes were ragged and mouldy, as though they too had been underground for a while. Buried.