I shut the door once she was no longer to be seen and wondered why I’d loitered to watch, so little had the sight of her descent conveyed. My aunt’s portraits in the corridor weren’t too communicative either. I found no message in the spectacle of my sketched face growing older – certainly nothing remotely mysterious. The impression of the forest in the background did change, growing a little more detailed each year, though even in the last picture the tangles of branches looked hardly more substantial than cobweb. I could have fancied that they either hid or formed a figure that progressively took shape, though not much. Even in the final portrait the distant figure wasn’t much less thin than the branches, if it was there at all. Striving to distinguish it made me feel as though the web of a forest was fastening on my mind.

That night I dreamed of an enormous web that was also a maze. My son was caught somewhere in it, and I had to find him without becoming lost to the web myself. Whatever had constructed the elaborate apparently endless trap was not just its denizen but its essence. The creature was itself the web, hiding in plain sight all around me while it waited for my fatal move. The insight drew me deeper into the labyrinth, and the only way out was to waken, though I thought years passed before I struggled free. I lay in the dark, feeling appalled that I’d left Roy in the web, and took some time over convincing myself it was simply a dream.

In the morning I left the portraits alone, and went to my desk as soon as the bathroom and a token breakfast were out of the way. Having checked my emails – offers with nothing to offer – I glanced at Facebook. Roy had posted photographs of his excursion with Bella two days ago, showing a field surrounded by a spiky hedge. Although the sun was at the zenith, some quirk of the image extended what appeared to be shadows of the hedges into all four sides of the field. Hadn’t I once seen something of the kind? Yes, in one of Thelma’s paintings – and then I read the name of the location. It was Drummer’s Meadow, which was listed in her journal.

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

The Next Step

“It’s Roy. Don’t know who you are or what you want, so say. Your number would be good as well.”

He’d recorded this at least a year ago, and I felt I was hearing an immature version of my son, someone less than Bella had begun to make him. I wondered when he might change the message and what the change would say about him. “Just me,” I said. “Call me when you’ve a moment, could you? There’s something I’d like to check.”