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skin——
    Elven? So this was just more stupid fantasy. Elves and fairies and aliens. I felt like hurling the manuscript out of the window, letting it blow across the motorway. I’d risked everything for this and it was pointless. But somehow I couldn’t quite stop reading; the story so exactly mirrored my own. Lissy’s own.
    And de Conway, Philippa de Conway. She must be related to Miles. Dad hated him so much he had to be involved in this one way or another. That wasn’t the only disturbing thing.
Iron
. Mentioned on almost every website about the paranormal, definitely in every book I’d ever read about witches, fairies, elves, all of that bull.
    Which was why last summer in a remote French village, I escaped Dad and Elena for the afternoon and I went to the blacksmith.
    I asked him to forge me an iron knife.
    The blacksmith’s southern accent was so strong I couldn’t understand what he said when I came to take my knife away. Probably for the best. I’ve carried it in my pocket ever since, a sharp blade held safe in a leather case, a smooth wooden hilt.
    Yes, it’s paranoid and bizarre to keep an iron knife in my pocket, but whenever I think of just throwing the stupid thing away, I remember the empty bed, that spider jerking across the still-warm sheet. I was so young, but I can still see it all so clearly.
    You can’t be too careful.
    It’s also paranoid and completely crazy to steal a manuscript from the British Library,
I reminded myself.
But that hasn’t stopped you
.
    I knew all this was becoming an obsession, unhealthy and peculiar. I knew that, this time, I had in all likelihood gone too far. Sometimes overstepping the mark is the only viable option.
    I looked down again, found my place in the cramped columns of text.
    Descending into the Gaol when the hour came for the Creature to appear before the child’s distraught father, who was the magistrate, de Conway’s men found nothing in her cell but a heap of dead winter leaves.
    I shut my eyes, pushing away the memory. Not just of looking down at the empty basket, the brown decaying leaves, that spider, but of the fear. Feeling more scared than I’d ever known. Because even then I
knew
they were so powerful—
    Philippa de Conway was never returned to her parents, alive or dead. If the Elven put period to her Existence, she was not given a Christian burial and her poor soul wanders yet. In truth, her father Sir de Conway disappeared only a matter of days after the Elven Creature, and indeed there are some who believe it was nothing but a case of Infanticide, the guilty Parent running from Justice. Of course, in Hopesay itself the people say their lord followed his Child into the Halls of the Hidden, searching for her.
    This was it. I shut my eyes, weak with relief. Relief that I hadn’t somehow imagined everything because that would mean I was crazy. Wouldn’t it?
    The memory rose up again like something dead and rotting floating on water.
    Walking step by step across Mum and Dad’s room. The silence, that thick, relentless silence after all the screaming. Reaching the baby basket. Looking inside, and…
    Just keep on reading
. I turned back to the journal, forcing myself to focus.
    Depend on it: should knowledge of the crimes committed by this Race reach the population of this island, no longer disguised as foolish fireside tales designed to haunt the sleep of children, yes, if all were to learn the Truth, there would be an Uprising. We might think ourselves safe now the Gateway is closed, thanks to the perspicacity of de Conway’s grandson, but it will only take a single mistake to open it, a lone moment of weakness, of human error, and the Creatures will once more have the power to hunt Christian men and women, to take their prey home—
    An uprising. I tried and failed to imagine the newspaper headlines if everyone knew. Because they
are
here: this Gateway or whatever it is has already been opened, God knows how or when. They’re Hidden, but