She pedalled as fast as her strained legs would allow but could not place what felt to be a safe distance between herself and the punctured oak. The urge to start sobbing was strong, but she fought it nobly. After the road had placed enough twists and valleys behind her, Berthe began to feel reasonably secure. She was homeward bound now and was excited by the notion of returning to that womb of familiar walls.

A sharp popping noise startled and momentarily confused her. The realization that it was the sound of her front tire being punctured registered only after her bicycle began to wobble and pedaling became all but impossible. She dismounted. Her heart sank as she studied the ruined wheel. Although she was no more than two kilometres from the family farm, Berthe felt like a castaway. She allowed herself a brief cry before wiping her cheeks, righting herself, and commencing to walk, dragging the useless bicycle through the clay.

Somewhere on this journey she began to sense—palpably, undeniably—a legion of perdu companions moving at her sides, her back. The sensation outwardly scared her, summoned gooseflesh and shudders. Yet inwardly, at some remote nerve-end where she imagined the Master might be enthroned, there burned an ember of excitement, of unspeakable pleasure. Were these haints or Hearth-Eaters, Berthe wondered? Whatever they were, they infused the breeze and the fields and the empty lanes with fullness, as though the Earth itself was ballooning up, swelling to the point of bursting.

Berthe reached a hand into the pocket of her mud-flecked trousers and squeezed the concealed nail, pressing it like a winemaker would a grape: in quest of its juice, its essence.

“May this nail ward off the stalking fey and all sprits foul,” she muttered desperately.

But the ghost parade remained in-step with her until the main road met with a nameless lane that curved southward, in the opposite direction of her farm. The hopelessness Berthe had felt only a moment ago was suddenly replaced with a fresh, delicious sense of everything around her becoming larger and more textured. It enthused her, made her more daring. She now wanted to explore, to do something (no matter how small) that she had never done before.

She rolled her bicycle toward the nameless lane down which she’d never ventured. Titillated by the novelty of it all, she followed the compelling slope.

In all probability, what Berthe saw and felt while she crept along was purely romantic, but the sky did seem to darken with her every step, and the wind did pick up and cause the gnarly tree limbs to cluck like scolding tongues. In time Berthe would come to accept that many of these impressions could have all been in her mind, but she might never, even in throes of a crisis of faith, question herself once she reached the end of that lane and witnessed the gravehands labouring in the tiny cemetery.