Chapter 38: Aiden

I can sense Sarah’s anticipation as the car turns off the freeway onto a wide two-lane road. The scenery quickly grows wild, rough and bleak and windswept. There’s something very primal about the land here. It feels both exposed and secretive. The low-growing grass and scrub is a thin skin stretched over bone. Ragged clouds chase across a hazy blue sky, and the sun is pale and watery. Sarah opens the window, letting the chill air flood in, and beyond the bitterness of dry earth and the faint spice of grassland flowers I catch the scents of salt and rotten eggs.

The snake of a single-track rail line edges towards the road then runs alongside it, sun glinting off the rails. Up ahead I see a small train station building sticking up out of a line of pale rock, like a single tooth left in a jawbone.

“This is the border of the estate,” Sarah says as we draw level with the station. “It belongs to Blackmarsh, but it isn’t Blackmarsh itself.&