But I didn’t. I turned away from them and walked back towards the farm. The sand under my feet turned to muck and grass and then the concrete of the yard.

And the children followed me.

It was terrible dark when I woke, and terrible cold. I was wild afeart. I wondered if I’d died and if this was hell, and if hell wasn’t a lake of fire but a cold and black place where you could see nothing but what was inside your own head. I must have cried out loud because straightaway I felt a hand on my arm, and I knew whose hand it was. I heard her reaching around in the dark for something, and then a match striking, and the lamp came on, and there was Mummy Joy leaning over me.

Ah, wee pet, says she, I thought you would die.

And she gathered me up in her arms and helt me awful tight, too tight, near crushing me, but I had no strength to get free of her. So I let her crush me and I was glad of it as she rocked me.

I fell back into my sleep near straightaway, but before I did, I saw them in the shadows, the children, watching.

For days, I came and went between one world and the other, and many’s a time I couldn’t tell which was which, nor where I belonged. Esther lived in the dream place. I saw her there, but I could never speak to her, and she couldn’t speak to me. But I could tell she was afeart, and she was lost. She wanted to go home but couldn’t find her way.

The children came with me, from one world to the other and back again. At first they kept a distance from me, like they weren’t sure of me, but after a while they came closer. Still none of them spake, but they watched.

That wee boy came closest of all, and I felt like I knew him, and he knew me. I thought of that memory I had of a boy that lived with me and the Mummies, and tried to mind that boy’s face, to mind if he looked like this one. I tried but I couldn’t. Memory is a liar; it tells you things that never were and forgets the things that were real.

What I do know is, he’d always been there. And the others. Always.

When I think about it now, I wonder, was that place always bad. Was the wickedness in the soil? Maybe it had always been there, even before the house. Maybe the wickedness seeped up through the soil, like the water did through the floorboards, and maybe it spread its wickedness to them men.

Maybe it’s always been there. Maybe it’s still there now.