I tried to feel relieved that she was offering, since I couldn’t see the car. I hadn’t realised the wood was so dense. We must be taking a different route back, because even after dodging around several trees I was no closer to locating the car, and Bella kept slipping out of sight. At least whenever I looked behind me I saw my son, but I was acutely aware that the watery syllables had yet to grow fainter. Perhaps the stream that led through the trees was transmitting the sounds from the spring, but I couldn’t help associating them with the mist that loomed high overhead. I glanced up, only to wish I hadn’t, because the shifting pallid mass beneath the treetops appeared to have ambitions to assume a shape, and I could have thought it was emitting the persistent syllables. Another glance might show me the approximation of a face, hunching grub-like across the underside of the foliage while it mouthed the words with dangling lips. Surely I could fend off the impression so long as I refrained from looking up, but as the leaf mould sucked at my shoes I heard a plop of moisture on the woodland floor. Was it a fragment of the dripping face? What might happen if a drop of it fell on me or, worse still, on my son? The idea brought me so close to panic that I didn’t immediately grasp what I was seeing ahead – a glimpse of my car. There was Bella too, heading as nearly straight for it as the trees permitted, and I did my best to catch up with her while making sure I wasn’t leaving Roy behind. “Go on, dad,” he said with impatience shading into resentment, and as I was rewarded by a clear sight of the road he tapped me on the shoulder to alert me to its closeness. No, that wasn’t Roy, and it wasn’t a finger, unless the finger consisted of a substance that was seeping through my shirt. I lurched forward, almost colliding with a tree that glistened with trickles of water that followed every crack in the bark. All the trunks around me were frantically active with water, so that I could have fancied a presence overhead was using the wood to reach with a multitude of tendrils for us, the intruders. I floundered between them, as desperate to avoid touching them as I was not to be caught by another drop of water. When I stumbled onto the road at last, Bella was standing guard beside the car, and slipped in as soon as I unlocked it with the fob. Drops of water plopped around me on the tarmac, and I thought the road felt far too much like sodden earth. I waited by the car, having almost lost my footing on the saturated leaves, to make sure Roy was safe, even when he protested “You can get in, dad.” I clambered in as soon as he joined Bella, and locked the doors at once.