She walked on, listening to the crisp noises of her footfalls, tasting the clean air on her tongue. She came to a large tree and stopped. The cottage should be close now – she should at least be able to see lights from its windows – but the woods ahead of her promised no such thing. And a darker interior voice was asking why she wanted to hurry back at all. What would she find back at the cottage? More letters, more feathers? Reave had sounded shaken on the phone, but should she trust him? Someone was certainly trying to frighten her, but why would Michael Reave care about that? Unless what the Polaroid suggested was true. She brushed her fingers against the bark of the tree, and saw that someone had carved a shape into it, probably with a knife. It took her a second to recognize what it was.

A heart.

It was cold and she was alone; she wasn’t safe, she was in danger, and terribly exposed.

‘Fuck. What am I even doing here?’

She fumbled her phone out of her pocket and pressed it into life. The light from the screen display dazzled her, lighting up the bare trees and undergrowth in a painful fizzle of artificial glow. She blinked rapidly, alarmed at how little she could see, and turned the phone out into the gloom. No figures lurched into sight, but she was suddenly very aware of how large the woods were, and how tiny her light.

There was a crump of noise off to her left, like something heavy moving rapidly through the undergrowth, and Heather put her back to it and began to run, as best she could in the dark, the light from her phone weaving back and forth to summon an endless crowd of chaotic shadows. The noise behind her increased as whatever it was came after her, and Heather heard herself make a small noise of terror. She was in a nightmare, the earliest nightmare, the one where you were running from something terrible but your legs were hopelessly slow, caught in treacle. Against her will she thought of the stories Michael Reave had told her, and Pamela Whittaker’s paintings. The woods are dangerous. The woods are where the wolf waits.

She stormed up a slope, crashing into and through small bushes. Twigs and thorns caught at her skin and clothes, pulling her back as though the very woods were against her. Reaching the top of the slope, where she hoped to be able to figure out where she was, she stumbled, falling to her knees in the mud. There was a smell, a combination of the wild, dark earth and another scent that seemed older, and stranger. She scrambled back to her feet, and there was a new sound very close – panting, quick and hot.

The barghest. Black Shuck. The hound that haunts the lonely places.