Where is she?

Maybe I’ll go back to my Hilux and lock the doors. Stay inside until help arrives. But what if he’s hurting her? What if help will be too late?

There’s a thing in the trees.

It’s a deer or an elk – something wild, with eyes reflecting back in my headlights.

Ten or fifteen-trees deep. It’s not a deer, a deer would have skipped away as soon as I arrived. It must be an elk. The eyes are level with mine so it’s standing in a hollow. Two shining eyes in a sea of absolute darkness.

Cold water drips down my back. Sleet mixing with sweat and freezing to my skin.

‘Julia,’ I whisper.

Nothing.

I creep around the front of her car. Shadows here, a black area my headlights can’t reach. The abandoned train-wagon looks rusted to the spot, its name and logo long covered with myriad graffiti tags and a layer of pollen.

A crow caws and flies overhead; broad, black wings flapping and gliding.

I step on a toadstool and it collapses under my boot.

‘Julia?’

Slugs all around me, the ground covered with them. Brown ones and black ones. Glistening.

I crouch down to look underneath the train carriage.

Beer cans and one broken watch. A thousand more slugs.

‘Julia? Are you here?’ my whisper is taken by the wind and sent crashing through the pines into deep forest.

I touch the carriage.

The rusted surface is rough on my skin. The dry pollen feels like moth-wing residue between my fingertips.

She’s not here. Could she be at another point on the tracks? Did I misunderstand her instructions. My breath clouds in front of my face. I’ll head back to my truck and wait there, doors locked, stungun ready, until the police arrive. I’ll call Luka Kodro to come help me.

There’s a noise.

A squeak.

I stop dead.

‘Julia?’ I whisper.

The noise is right at the limit of what I can make out. In the darkness, in the forest, I can’t pinpoint where it’s coming from. Behind me, up in a tree, further away.

‘Where are you?’ I whisper.

‘Help me,’ she says.

Holy shit, she’s inside the carriage.

I look around for Emil. For anyone else. Anything else.

Something runs across the tracks further up the line and stops still to stare back at me. It’s a small deer. Her ears turn in every direction but her head remains as still as if it were cast from bronze and mounted on a plinth in the town square.

The deer bolts and I move my head closer to the gap in the carriage door. The only door I can see.

‘Julia?’

‘Please,’ she says. ‘Don’t wake him.’