When she looks up she realizes that hidden among the trees is a tumbledown house, without a roof. Lauren stands her ground, feeling fear curl around her arms and legs. She begins to walk away, her steps turning into a run. After at least a mile, when she can’t run any longer, she finds a gorse bush and crawls beneath it.

Niall is walking through pitch black, the crunch of ice and rocks beneath his feet, the smell of the pine fresh and frosty, heavy with snow. He knows he is getting closer to the centre of the forest and he knows he shouldn’t be there. All at once, a small, dark-haired man steps out from behind a tree, dressed in a cloak of moss and dead bracken. ‘I’m looking after the lost girl,’ says the man. ‘Come with me.’

Niall can see bugs crawling in the man’s cloak, earwigs and brown lacewings, crane flies and iridescent leaf beetles.

They start walking along narrow, shadowy paths. ‘She’s just around the corner,’ says the man. ‘I found her.’

The dense ferns brush against Niall, their leaves as high as his chest. He has to wade through, pushing against the undergrowth, feeling bugs crawl under his sleeves. Moonbeams light the path as he follows the small, shaggy-cloaked man with a shining lantern and staff. ‘I live alone,’ the man says. Niall notices they are among birches now and he has a strange feeling he is at his grandfather’s cottage in Gairloch and he’s telling him the myth of the Ghillie Dhu. The cloaked man begins to turn around as a cold dread seeps into Niall’s bones and he springs awake in the dark, then passes out again.

18

Some hours pass. Lauren stops herself from falling asleep completely in the bushes. Her dad once told her of mountaineers who went to sleep in the snow and never woke up. She sings songs to herself in her head. ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ and ‘Stairway To Heaven’. She closes her eyes for minutes at a time, dazed with cold, and then opens them. At last, the forest begins to get a little lighter. She realizes she is far away from any path and the trees look identical around her. In the distance, she can see spots of light. They are not torches exactly, but more like fireflies, if those existed in Scotland. Something ephemeral, she has heard told in stories. She follows them, over the mossy forest floor, past boulders and banks of ferns for a couple of miles. The birds are starting to call. Her legs are about to give out when she realizes she is walking alongside the edge of the forest, glimpsing the fields between the trees. The early morning is still dark, but deep grey rather than black. It will not be light for hours.