He tossed her duffle bag down beside her and was off again, leaving her coughing in dust fine as powder. He admitted it later, when pressed. No reason to deny it. They hadn’t talked much. She wasn’t his type. He had not seen a woman answering Linda Aberdeen’s description again.

“It’s only a visit,” said Linda to herself, choking on dry air. “Anyone can visit their grandmother.” Still she wished she had brought her daughter with her, if only as something warm to hold.

Here, the air was dry as paper and chilly. There were no houses to redirect the wind that flew along the road and through her green coat, tangled her hair and stung her nose. No buildings visible at all. No cars. Nothing Linda knew.

Sylvie Spicer had sent Linda a firmly drawn map with Keep on the path written in bold black letters. The only other landmarks on it were the road, “Blue Mailbox Corner”, “The Dead Tree” and “Creek.” It took Linda several minutes to find the mailbox, although it was no longer blue: a tin-roofed wooden box, large enough to hold a child, cobwebbed and filled with purple shadow. The path began there: a crease in the brittle grass barely wider than Linda’s shoe. No gate.

She clambered through the slack wires of the boundary fence—the fluted wood of the posts shifting slightly with the disturbance—slung her bag over her shoulder and set off down the slope toward the trees that seemed to indicate a watercourse.

Throughout the long bus ride and the days leading to it, Linda had fought to lower her expectations. Her beautiful, tormented, uneasy mother, both kleptomaniacal when it came to superstitions and deeply suspicious of all fiction, had never spoken of Sylvie Spicer. It was too easy for Linda to hope Sylvie might be everything her own mother had not been, everything she wanted to learn to be for Patricia.

But the interminable drive, the cracked cold land, the wire-sharp grass abraded those hopes.

“Still,” Linda said to herself and a flitting wagtail, “blood and water, and all that.” At least, Winston had said, it would let her stop wondering about her mother’s family.

The grass she strode through clung to her jeans and hemmed her coat in pale seeds. She strained to see an opening, a gate, another fence in the trees, anything that hinted at a destination, but the air stung her eyes to tears. When she lowered her hand, she saw the animal.

Linda had never seen a dog that colour, the peculiar grey-blonde of the grass, like ash and honey. Its limbs were thin, its skull narrow and its eyes glass-green: brilliant and alive. Metres away from the track, it watched her, every part motionless: its small ears, the hollow-flanked body tapering to a skeletal tail. The only thing she knew for certain, bone-deep, blood-deep, was It can run faster than me.