So was Roy, I thought, and now I was. She seemed to begrudge having spoken, and as the car inched downwards the silence let me hear an echo in my head. It was the name she’d warned me against uttering, though it didn’t sound quite like my voice. I set the windscreen wipers working with a shrill scrape of plastic on glass, but switched them off when they didn’t shift the darkness. The black walls were amassing it around and inside the car, and I had an impression that the dogged repetitions of the name were helping it accumulate. When I turned on the headlights the beams looked truncated, as if they’d encountered some indefinable barrier. A sudden rush of moisture or a swarm of insects streamed across the section of the track the beams illuminated, and vanished over the edge. “Summon all you will,” I heard Bella murmur. “You cannot rise in time.”

I wasn’t anxious to learn what this meant, not least in case enquiring might help to rouse the subject, though could Bella’s observation have done so? Certainly the reiteration of the name in my head was growing more insistent. The headlamp beams fumbled at the track as the car lurched aside from a large hole gouged out of the edge, and the wing mirror scraped the opposite wall. As the beams steadied rather more than my heart did, they found a level stretch at the foot of the slope. I was able to hope that the worst of the journey was over until the car reached the bottom, where the headlights showed a sheer wall at the far end of the track. I drove forwards, searching for somewhere I could turn without ending up in the river, and saw that the gloom or my fears had deceived me. While it resembled a wall, I was faced with a steep upward slope. Surely it wasn’t too steep for the car to mount. “Stop now,” Bella said, presumably to me.

As I dragged at the handbrake I saw that the river was barely a stream, trickling ahead into the gloom. The summer drought had reduced it so much that its liquid whisper sounded close to parched. Here beside the low point of the track most of the riverbed was exposed, and only the absence of sunlight had saved the mud from drying up. If the site was the resting place of Lumen Scientiae, it might have seemed little better than pathetic, but its lack of vitality felt ominous, the preamble to the revelation of a secret. Eager to be gone as soon as possible, I released my seat belt and was climbing out of the car when Bella said “You may stay at the wheel.”