Wait.

Between two of the silvery doors, there was one much shorter tree on the horizon. Human-shaped. Like it might be wearing a hat. Christ. I sat up and looked again. It wasn’t moving, not even an inch, but the other trees were taller and thinner. This was lumpy, smaller and rounder at the top. It could have been a person, standing dead straight. Shoulders, a neck.

The pines creaked, a slow, scraping sound.

Move. I got up, my ankle slipping, grazing my hands on the trees. I half skipped away and hit a new footpath. Euro house beats were going in my chest. My clothes were sticking to my arse and back. I began to feel a bit stupid. A man with a trilby? A film noir detective wandering the woods seventy years too late? Yeah, right, Polly. I slowed down.

There was a sound. A rustle and a click, somewhere in the fog of the trees beside me, like I’d heard on the first night in the garden. Every blade of grass was still. Every leaf, every branch. A scrap of white plastic ribbon hung limply on a skinny bough. The wind was finding its way into something. I kept tramping down, trying to ignore it.

There it was again. I couldn’t quite tell if it was following me or I was following it. What sort of animal made that noise anyway? I waited for some killer chipmunky pine-squirrel to leap out at me, all teeth and claws and ear-splitting shrieks, a weird Scottish Z-movie, but it never came.

My boots now caked in mud, I chose the right hand path at a fork, aiming for the pale grey of the loch between the trees. I swear that rustle was still there, every time I stopped listening for it. Everything smelled heady and damp.

I looked down the path and stopped dead. Someone was coming towards me. A long coat and scarf, blood-coloured spatters on his cheek. The man from the bar. Red-top cryptic crossword man. He had one hand in his pocket and the other held a walking stick with two short, polished antlers on the top.

His face opened as he saw me. ‘Not much for you down there, I’m afraid, lassie.’

‘OK.’ I stopped and pulled my phone out, looking fixedly at it as he passed me, pretending that I knew where the hell I was going, pretending that I had five thousand friends to urgently communicate with, pretending that there was reception, before idling forward.

When I turned, ten paces later, he was in the same place, his body twisted to watch me as I went down the hill, his hand still in his pocket. When I next snuck a look back he was heading up the path in the direction I’d come, the lower end of the walking stick pointing ahead of him every time he lifted it, as if he were at the head of a parade.

The path continued on the opposite side of the road, becoming a steep grassy bank that led down to the loch, further along than I’d been before. Half a bay, seaweed like discarded wigs in the water. A black and white bird with a long, neon-orange beak flew low, making little rape alarm calls.