CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

Sally opened her back gate and stepped into the garden. She glanced at all the unplanted rows she and David had dug when they planned to make an allotment.

The beans she’d planted had begun to sprout. The warm weather was good for them. The little row of canes was half-finished, and the rest of the trench was empty. Sally was sorry now that they hadn’t completed it. Like so many things in their relationship, it was left unfinished.

A sudden wind sprang up from the west. It bent the trees in the fields next to the cottage, but it was neither hot nor cold. It ruffled the grass, rattled the hedges, and lifted Sally’s hair and skirt, but she couldn’t feel it on her skin, nor could she smell any of the scents that a wind such as this usually carried. It was almost entirely bodiless, you could see and experience its effects, but you couldn’t feel them.

The leaves in the hedgerow made a dry, scratchy noise as they scuttled about in its wake. The hedgerow itself rustled, as if filled with a thousand little occupants. The branches of the nearby trees creaked as they bent and strained.

The bodiless wind intensified and the sounds increased, like a discordant symphony. In the points where each noise overlapped and collided, new sounds could be heard, created by the dissonance. Sally tilted her head and listened carefully.

At first she made out the consonants in the discordance, plosive sounds like cracking twigs. Then she caught the vowels, low and keening like the wind moaning through the branches. A voice was coming through. A composite voice, like a thousand voices talking all at once and not one of them human.

“You have the—have the—have the meat—the meat—the meat . . . ?” said the voice.

“Yes,” said Sally, clutching her bag.

She sensed the presence behind the voice, pictured it peering out from the shadows of the thicket. Something so primordial she could barely understand, let alone see.

“That is good—is good—is good. We can trap—can trap—can trap the Beast tonight.”

Then, as sudden as a freak change in the weather, the wind disappeared, the trees and bushes stopped shaking, and Sally was alone.

She felt, as she always did when Hettie came and went, that a shadow had lifted from the sun. That the unreal had withdrawn and the real had rushed back in to fill the void it left. More worrying was the emptiness she felt, and the craving for Hettie’s return.

Hettie was the name the townsfolk gave to the voice, and the inhuman presence that lurked behind it. Hettie of the Hedgerow. Sally had learned this from the pamphlet Jane had given her.

Increasingly, Sally felt her certainty wane whenever Hettie left—the sense of purpose Hettie instilled in Sally always seemed to ebb. For a second Sally wavered and wondered if she was doing the right thing, and then she thought of David, and why the house was empty, and she realised she had to see this course of action through.

Sally hurried inside the cottage to prepare the meat.