“Set your course for the heights.”

I took this to refer to the Lake District, unless it had an occult connotation. In an hour the horizon ahead began to grow mountainous, by which time the sequence of fairyland broadcasts had moved on to Mendelssohn. Fells rose beside the motorway, framing sunlit lakes, but Bella had no word for me. We were approaching the northernmost lakeland town when she said “Now the depths, Patrick.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Leave the highway and I’ll guide you further.”

Once I took the next exit she directed me northeastwards into a landscape veined with streams and shadowy with forests, rearing its fells high. We’d turned aside from the town without reaching it, and entered a region where the inhabitants were denoted only by the names of unseen villages or sites: Killhope, Heads Nook, How, Long Meg and Her Daughters, Scale Houses, Unthank… I’d met no vehicles for miles of narrow winding road by the time Bella said “Right here.”

This sounded ominously immediate until I saw she was indicating the direction at a crossroads, which presumably she’d seen before I did. The pointers of the signpost that protruded from a hedge were so rotten that the words on them hardly resembled language. The lane I turned along was even narrower and more devious than the road I’d left. Spiky hedges shut it in, and the fields beyond them only underlined how constricted a route I was being forced to follow. I’d been constantly twisting the wheel and braking at bends for at least a mile when Bella said “Now left.”

Once again she’d anticipated a junction in advance of me. Her voice conveyed less expression than the navigator on my phone would have, but I wondered if she might be hiding some emotion. The pointer at the entrance to the side lane was so weathered and decayed that the illegible word it bore appeared to have been written in an occult script, unless the letters were reverting to ancient symbols. When the lane was made it would have offered just enough space for a car to pass another, but now the neglected hedges left no room. I didn’t know whether I was more nervous of encountering another vehicle or of being alone on the secretive road. As my eyes began to ache with the relentless sunlight that the bends in the road kept returning straight into my face, Bella said “Down.”