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was a long way to the town but a sense of direction was coming to me now a sense ofwhere I was what this place was. Yes. I would have to climb the crest of the moor and trudge through rough heather. Up and over and down. I didn’t know if my body could carry me but I would try this because the only other thing was to return to the stone room and I would not return there.
    As I walked I felt the strange and awkward rhythm of my crippled frame. I was lurching down onto my left leg and supporting it with the stick then loping ahead with my right. I felt like a beggar on a slow pilgrimage but the result was an intense awareness of what I was. I could feel my body working or trying to work I could feel the muscles straining and how the bones knitted together and moved with the tendons. When I got to the stream I turned right and followed it up towards the shoulder of the moor. The climb was hard work. I had to stop and drink regularly. The heat didn’t help. Halfway up the climb I stumbled over a rock by the stream and sat down heavily on it. I decided to rest. The sound of the stream was the only sound I heard. I had already got through half of my water and I was only a mile or so from the farm.
    I continued slowly up to the tops and then I followed a peaty track through the heather. I was on a huge expanse of open heather moor now wide andbrown and green under the close sky. On the horizon to my right I could see the moor climbing upwards and peaking in a high rocky tor. To the left of the tor the land sloped down and slid into a deep stone gully. I walked now in the rhythm and I didn’t stop. I didn’t want to break the spell. I could feel my head emptying but I didn’t will it. I just walked and breathed and felt my legs jerking over the black track as I headed slowly towards where the other people were.
    It must have taken a couple of hours for me to walk across the top of the moor following the black track and keeping to my rhythm. When I reached the point where the track began to descend I knew that I would make it to the town. I didn’t know how I felt about that now. All of my questions seemed to have been swallowed by the heather and the sky but I kept walking because there was nothing else. Soon I arrived at a wooden gate where the rough footpath became a lane that headed down into the valley where the town was. I remembered it all now. I went through the gate and began to walk down the lane. Hedges of elder and ash and thorn grew up on either side of me and beyond them the heather and broom of the moor began to give way to fields of grass dotted with patches of bracken and bent, gnarled trees.
    It was then that the silence really hit me. It had been quiet in the house and in the farmyard and up on the moor but this lane was stiller surely than a lane should be. There were no rustlings in the undergrowth there was no noise in the hedges or the trees. No cows no dogs no sheep no cars no voices close or distant. No animals at all and no birds either. I realised then that I had not seen or heard any birds since the accident. There was no life here at all. Nothing moved except me.
    I kept walking. I felt it was perhaps a couple of miles now to the edge of the town. I passed an old church which I knew I had seen before. It was a squat medieval church with a square tower and a giant yew tree in its graveyard. I felt it was early afternoon though I couldn’t see the sun to make any judgement. I wondered what would happen when I got to the town. I didn’t know what I wanted. Suddenly I felt the need to explain myself. Perhaps I wanted to go shopping. I probably needed food though I wasn’t hungry. Or perhaps I wanted to go to a doctor. There would be a doctor there. Perhaps I should show somebody my knee and my ribs and the scratches on my chest perhaps I should talk to somebody about everything that had happened. I kept walking. When I got there I would know what to do.
    And then I found myself outside the church