He didn’t answer back. Maybe Ben had imagined it, but he thought the man’s pace had quickened.

There was something unnaturally cold about that cottage. A memory, maybe; a tragedy that pined for peace but instead lingered eternally in the one spot it yearned to escape. Ben never understood why hell was sold as a fiery place. Death and sadness were always cold.

They soon reached those familiar laneways. Pink wildflowers speckled the drab shrubs that fenced them in. And these became more prominent as the man led them through a series of softly winding turns.

‘You ready for this?’ Chloe asked.

‘Does it matter at this stage?’ Ben replied, smiling back at her.

The lane widened at the next bend and there they saw the first two cottages not left to ruin; set on either side, facing each other. These were the coloured blocks on Sparling’s map, dropped around the village like yellow Lego bricks. The reality was somewhat less vibrant.

Both were built of bare stone, packed tight, with their cracks filled in with dirt. By the windows, a piece of wood had been worked into the stone like a miniature door. The roofs were thatched thick with straw; their once golden blonde now dulled to a dirty brown. Edges were unevenly chopped, with cobwebs and other filth clotted under their awnings.

Ben had envisioned doors painted in bright primaries, and window boxes spilling over with garlands of fresh herbs. Instead, the cottages’ every aspect was faded and dispiriting. Someone may have, in the past, taken pride in washing their walls or trimming back the thatch, or maybe they had nurtured seeds and watched them blossom, inviting colour and life where now neither were welcome, estranged for so long that even their memories were as black and white.

‘What do you think?’ he whispered back to Chloe.

‘I can’t believe they still live like this,’ she replied, moving up closer to him.

‘Two hundred years,’ Ben said in his best Sparling impression, to which she giggled and pushed him away.

His nostrils caught a scent in the air, pungent and moist; cabbage or some similarly foul vegetable boiled into a watery soup. Luckily they’d brought their own food for the trip. He tried to peek inside one of the cottages as they passed but there was no light within; not a single ember to break the black. There could have been someone standing right there, lurking a step back from the threshold – like a trapdoor spider, always waiting, always hungry – and Ben would have been none the wiser.

‘Just up here now,’ the man said, pointing ahead towards another corner, where the sun spilled across the pathway.

They were approaching the cluster of homes set around a clearing, like a marketplace or square. It was the only one of its kind in the village.