She had just stepped onto the rock when the thin line of light under the window blind vanished. Stopping where she was, Heather waited, expecting to see another light come on elsewhere in the house, but several long minutes passed and the darkness remained complete. She listened, too, desperate to get some sense of where this person was, or where Nikki was, but no voices were carried to her on the wind, no slamming doors or footsteps. Everything was eerily quiet. With the knife now held at her hip, Heather circled the place until she found a back door, a short flight of steps leading up to it. In the dark, everything was colorless.

Wait. Wait, wait, wait. She screwed her eyes up tight, trying to concentrate on the small voice of reason. Try your phone again. You have to. You could be about to get both yourself and Nikki killed, idiot.

Half a bar of signal. It might be enough, but then again, she might get a few words out before she lost the connection, and then what? She quickly texted Ben: Fiddler’s Folly. Red Wolf found. He has Nikki. Help.

She didn’t wait to see if it had gone through or try to call him. The monster inside this place would get a good early warning that she was here, and that could doom Nikki. Better to go in quiet now, Heather told herself. Better to take the chance.

The door was unlocked. Heather stepped into a small, filthy kitchen, thick with shadows. A square window let in enough moonlight for her to see a sink filled with dirty plates, an old wooden table riddled with burn marks and scratches, a packet of breakfast cereal open on the counter. There was an old-fashioned radio sitting on a cupboard shelf, and the wallpaper was peeling away in long, moldy strips. The place was old and badly maintained, but also clearly still inhabited.

She moved out into the hallway beyond, which led at the far end to a staircase that turned back on itself. There was a door to either side—one, which was standing open, revealed a room used as both a living space and bedroom. She could see a vast lumpy sofa covered with sheets, a coffee table littered with cups, and as she moved into the room itself, piles of dirty clothes just thrown all over the floor. Her heart in her mouth, she checked in every corner, but the place was empty.

Perhaps he’s gone, she thought suddenly. Saw me coming and left. He could have left through the door I couldn’t see when I was walking across the beach.

Or, suggested a darker part of her mind, perhaps this is a perfectly innocent house. Perhaps you have broken into the home of some poor, lonely soul, and you’re about to frighten the living shit out of them because you’ve lost touch with reality.

Heather backed out of the room and went to the closed door. Her hand on the door knob, she paused as a painting on the wall next to it caught her eye. It was difficult to see in the gloom, but something about it made her fish out the phone from her pocket again, letting the screen light up the canvas briefly. It depicted a strange, red landscape, a flat and arid place with soft hills clouding the horizon. In the foreground, there was a single stunted tree, so twisted and black it almost looked like a crack in the arid ground, its sharp branches reaching like fingers. Heather swallowed and looked away. The painting frightened her.