Read Advent for Free Online Page B

not charged.’
      ‘I think there’s one in the café.’
      ‘Ah, thanks. I’ll catch you up?’
      The station café was empty of everyone but a couple of well-wrapped pensioners, morbidly stirring their tea. Gav stared at the phone. He paused for only a few seconds. That other train would be leaving soon. There was no time to worry about what he was doing.
      The past few years of trying to bury his secret life had turned Gavin into a practised liar. By the time his father’s voice had finished reciting its message, he knew what to say.
      ‘Hi, Mum. I’m calling from the station . . . Got here fine. Auntie Gwen was a bit late, but she just came so, um, we’re leaving now for her place. Ah, oh, by the way, it may be a couple of days before I can leave another message, my phone’s run out and . . . I must have left the charger at home. Apparently Auntie Gwen knows a place I can charge it, but she won’t be going there for a bit. Anyway, whatever, she said not to worry, OK, Mum? So I’m fine, hope you’re having a good time. OK. Bye Mum.’
      He ran out of the café, only just remembering his bag. Two minutes later he was squeezed in among the school kids as the train clattered and growled away from the town into the night.
      Once or twice in the next half-hour Gavin wondered whether he was about to become the victim in the kind of story you read about in the newspapers. All the pieces were in place. He’d left a message for Mum telling her not to expect to hear from him. He’d gone off with a total stranger. She was, obviously, a nutter. He imagined some old snapshot of himself smiling out from the paper, beside an article detailing the mutilations he’d suffered before his body had been found abandoned in the woods. Nevertheless he kept following. He followed Hester off the train at a tiny station on a hillside above a town. He followed her into a boxy old car, barely listening to her apologies for the clutter and the smell – ‘Oh dear, the mice must have made their way in while I was away’ – and the encouraging monologue she kept up – ‘It really isn’t all that far as the crow flies, hardly any distance at all, but we have to wend our way round the river. Probably half an hour or so. You can’t get much speed up in the lanes and even less when it’s foggy. Who knows, we might run into your aunt coming the other way . . .’ The only time he properly panicked was when the passenger door had clicked shut beside him in the station car park. His hands had balled into fists in his pockets and for a few moments he was convinced that this time he’d made a seriously stupid mistake. As she banged the gearstick into reverse, he was about to throw the door open and jump out, when a phrase she’d used popped into his head: fellow travellers.
      By the end of the few seconds it took him to dismiss it as just another of her meaningless oddities, it was too late; they were out on the road and moving.
      It was like being driven along a narrow trough at the bottom of the sea. High rough hedges closed in on both sides of the car and the headlights picked out nothing beyond the next winding of the road. Sometimes trees bent over them and the trough became a tunnel, a circle of white mist enclosed in a frame of skeletal branches. Occasionally they would pass a house stranded in the dark, the sight of its solitary windows only making Gav feel more like he was entering a labyrinthine wilderness. Hester, though, seemed sure that this tangle of sunken alleys was taking them somewhere: Pendurra. The way she was talking about it made it sound as if she was pleased to have an excuse to drive that way.
      ‘. . . same family living there since who knows when. That’s very unusual these days. The old estates, the grand houses with land around them, they’re ruinously expensive, needless to say, and the land doesn’t make money any more. No one knows how they’ve managed to keep it going. Though I