Frowning slightly, she unwrapped the parcel only to find a large, smooth pebble. It was cold to the touch and made her think of the seaside. Someone, not very artfully, had scratched the shape of a heart into one side of it.

‘Huh.’ Fiona’s frown deepened, trying to think of who might do something like that. You did get the occasional artistic kid, the child who savoured the role of being the one to do something shocking or different. But then, in all honesty, very few of them ended up in an A-Level PE class. They were all doing Art or Drama.

In the end, she lined up the cards along the front of her desk, and set the pebble down next to them, scratched side facing the class. And then she went home.

7

Before

The man took the boy to his house, although it was not a house in the sense he knew. It was a vast, sprawling place with shining floors and old, dark furniture, warm with polish. It was clean and cold and silent, with no marks on the walls or dirty cutlery lying around. The big black dog trotted across the wooden floor briskly, its claws clattering the quiet up into pieces, and the man came in behind them, taking off his hat and hanging it on a hat stand.

‘You can stay here now, Michael. It is Michael, isn’t it?’

The boy didn’t reply. He was watching the dog, which had passed in front of a tall mirror on the wall, and briefly there were two black dogs, eyes like amber fires. The boy followed the animal and saw another creature in the mirror – a filthy stick figure with a shock of black hair, a dark thing smeared with dark matter. Abruptly, he could smell himself, and the thought of being in this clean place and making it dirty forced a noise of distress from his throat. His skin felt hot and prickly.

‘Nuh. Unh …’

‘Come on. I’ll run you a bath.’ The man came up beside him and looked down, and for the first time the boy saw that one of his eyes was wrong – the white was a little too white, the brown of his iris too smooth. ‘You’ll feel better, lad.’