Diane blows smoke into the deep-grey air, from atop the tree trunk. ‘Yep. Uh-huh. Everything’s fucked.’

Rooks croak back at her.

‘I need to go home. Which way is it?’ Lauren feels as though she has been on a roundabout too fast. She is faint with hunger.

‘I’m not letting you go by yourself. It probably isn’t safe.’ Diane unscrews a thermos and hands the cup down to Lauren. ‘Here. Tea. Put your hands round it.’

Lauren holds it under her face and feels as though the steam is thawing her out. ‘Thanks.’ She takes a gulp.

‘This was for Ann-Marie. But you need warmed up. Climb up. Come on,’ Diane says, pulling on Lauren’s arm.

Lauren wishes she could smoke like Diane. School says it kills people if you do it too much. It’s Monday. The dread of school seeps into her stomach.

‘I’m waiting just a little. I want to see if she comes out. We sometimes meet here, though not this early. She said she’d see me later, but then wasn’t answering her phone. I just have a bad feeling about all this. Though she could turn up back at her house. I don’t know. Angela was on the phone to me—’ She stops and looks around as the trees creak. ‘We have to be quiet.’ She sees Lauren’s puzzlement. ‘There are bad people. A man did something bad.’ Diane starts lighting a cigarette, looking around furtively. Between clenched teeth she says, as if talking to herself, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be the person everyone’s scared of?’

Lauren looks at her and guesses she probably won’t tell her what she is really talking about. She thinks back to Halloween and making herself scary. Imagining, as she put on her make-up, that she could drink someone’s blood. ‘I wish sometimes I was a vampire. I could just fly over this whole forest and find them.’

Diane laughs, blowing air through her nose. ‘I wish you were too. Do you want another cup? I’m trying not to think the worst. It’s like a dream. You and me, sitting here. Barely morning. We heard stories, me and her, or rather I heard a story about these woods. It’s better not to tell you. But that was the start of it.’

She takes out something wrapped in foil, and opens it up. A stack of cheese sandwiches. Lauren takes one gingerly and realizes she has never been so pleased to see flimsy white bread.

‘The start of it?’ she asks Diane. ‘It’s OK. I was told something like that. The story about the dog in the woods and the human leg?’