They followed the dirt track with Chloe at the head of the queue, camouflaged in a collage of browns and blacks. Ben wanted to tell her how much he appreciated all she had done for him. But how do you thank a person for saving you when you can’t return the favour? Hers was the hand that had reached out for his when he’d felt almost too ashamed to take it. Who else would have given him another chance after so many fuck-ups?

‘There it is,’ she called back to him. ‘Watch your step. It gets deeper off the path.’

Most of the water had drained into the field on the far side, but still the cottage looked as though it had been built on its own private island. This explained why the whole place had been so wretchedly damp on their last outing. A stagnant stream must run beneath the village, trickling through its black depths like a sewer. All it took was a hard day’s rain to invite it up onto the surface.

‘Fucking typical,’ Chloe muttered under her breath.

‘There’s nothing typical about this,’ Ben said, looking at the island as though an ocean divided them.

‘Our luck, I mean.’

‘Oh, okay,’ he replied. ‘Yeah, this pretty much falls into line with being cursed, I suppose.’

‘Let’s get it over with.’

Ben dithered as always. Chloe, as he’d come to expect, did not.

She sloshed towards the cottage, wading through the brownest water he’d ever seen. Dead leaves were as boats sailing away from the maelstrom of her movements. Her arms were held high as their reach. And whatever profanities she was whispering, Ben couldn’t make any sense of them. Suddenly she sank up to her neck. One unlucky step had found a hole in the earth and those heavy boots were enough to drag her right to its bottom; fazed but not fallen, she clambered up and kept on going.

‘How is it?’ Ben asked, once Chloe’s shrieking had quietened.

‘How the fuck do you think it is?’ she shouted back.

He dipped a foot under the surface, letting the boot fill, imagining that sensation crawling up his body, numbing him like a liquid anaesthetic. The pain would come after, assuming he was still alive to feel it. He forced his legs reluctantly through the flood, its waters rising in increments to his thighs, and then high as his waist. The soil below was ever-changing, shifting with each uncertain step. His height would count for nothing if he fell.

The earth around the cottage was slick and fell apart in Chloe’s fingers as she clawed her way up. Only when she dug in her knees like two climbing picks did she find some purchase. Ben had watched her flounder, memorising her method, dreading his own turn.