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“Well, thanks for all your help. It’s been nice chatting.” He turned and stomped away.
    When he looked back Raritan was still watching him. The unicorn would see him go around the front of the house. If Raritan told Kit that he’d gone by the road instead of the back path, his uncle would guess where he was heading. But there was no point asking the unicorn to keep quiet about it. Keeping quiet was, thankfully, the only thing the animal did naturally.
    Norman trod as lightly as he could on the gravel driveway. Malcolm could have done the whole getaway noiselessly, but Norman was a little more heavy-footed. When he reached the road without anyone calling him back, he took one brief look back towards the house, then broke into a run, pelting down the road in the direction, he hoped, of Summerside.
    At the start, he was pretty confident of his sense of direction. The fields on either side of the road looked familiar. The low rock walls looked familiar. Even the hay bales looked familiar. But as he slowed to a walk to catch his breath, he realized that all fields, all rock walls and all hay bales look pretty much the same. The road wound away from the house, never in a straight line and never flat. Hills, walls and high hedgerows seemed always to obscure his view, so it was difficult to get a bearing and he became less and less sure he was going in the right direction.
    He’d figured that if he followed the road, he would arrive in Summerside eventually, but after an hour he was less certain. When the road just stopped in the middle of a hayfield, he realized he’d missed a turn. It took him twenty minutes to track back to the fork he’d missed, and he followed that again for another forty-five. It was nearly noon and he’d eaten all his granola bars and had startedlooking for houses. At worst he could ask for directions; at best he could ask for a few pieces of paper. That wasn’t too weird, was it? People asked for a cup of sugar from their neighbours all the time.
    What was weird, now that he considered it, was that he hadn’t seen a single house or cottage, or even any sheep or cows. Norman didn’t think he’d ever driven for more than five minutes in England without seeing a sheep or a cow, and there were houses everywhere … usually. He was getting that queasy feeling that something was more deeply wrong than he’d first guessed when he arrived at the second dead end. But this wasn’t just an empty field at the end of the road. A few feet beyond, the asphalt fell away completely. There was nothing but sky. It was as if the world just ended there.
    Norman inched slowly forward until he could see over the edge. What he saw made him dizzy with vertigo. He was on the edge of a huge cliff. The drop was almost vertical. Many, many feet below, the sea crashed against the rocks, but from this height, Norman could barely distinguish the sound of the waves from the sound of the wind across the fields. Something felt wrong about this. Norman knew England was an island, but this cliff didn’t seem right. It just felt as if it didn’t belong there. He was certain that the Shrubberies was more than a few hours’ walk from the sea.
    It was dawning on him that Kit might have changed more than the occupancy of the Shrubberies. Doubling back again, he gave the stone walls and empty fields a closer look. They looked normal, unremarkably normal, but maybe that was the point. Maybe they were supposed to look real. Norman was beginning to wonder if this wasn’t the real England or the real Shrubberies. His sense of direction wasn’t that bad. He ought to have at least seen Summerside from one of the rises on the road, but the hedges and walls were always in the way. He ought to have passed at least one house or one person in half a day of walking, but the country seemed remarkably empty today.
    The further he walked, the more convinced he was that this wasn’t the real England and the real Shrubberies but a book set