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what she’d observed in the week since she arrived in Cornwall, they’d formed quite the contented family, the four of them, even if the cat spent most of his time hiding behind the sofa; her grandfather seemed happier than he had since before Ruth got sick. All the more reason Sadie wasn’t about to return home without his dogs.
    Ash’s pace picked up and Sadie had to hustle not to lose sight of him. The vegetation was changing, she noticed. The air was getting lighter. Beneath the thinning trees, the brambles had taken advantage of the brighter sun, multiplying and thickening gleefully. Branches grabbed and clutched at the hems of Sadie’s shorts as she pushed through their knots. If she’d been given to fancy she might have imagined they were trying to stop her.
    She scrambled up the steep sloping ground, avoiding large scattered rocks, until she reached the top and found herself at the edge of the woods. Sadie paused, surveying the landscape before her. She’d never come this far before. A field of long grass stretched ahead and in the distance she could just make out a fence and what appeared to be a lopsided gate. Beyond it was more of the same, another wide grassy space interrupted in places by huge trees with rich leafy foliage. Sadie drew breath. There was a child, a small girl, standing alone in the centre of the field, a silhouette, backlit, Sadie couldn’t see her face. She opened her mouth to call out but when she blinked the child disintegrated into little more than a patch of yellow-white glare.
    She shook her head. Her brain was tired. Her eyes were tired. She ought to get them checked for floaters.
    Ash, who’d bounded ahead, looked over his shoulder to check her progress, barking impatiently when he judged it insufficient. Sadie started across the field after him, pushing aside the vague unwelcome notion she was doing something she shouldn’t. The sensation was not a familiar one. As a rule, Sadie didn’t worry about that sort of thing, but the recent trouble at work had her spooked. She didn’t like being spooked. Spooked was a bit too close to vulnerable for Sadie’s liking and she’d decided years ago it was better to march straight up to trouble than have it sneak up behind her.
    The gate, she saw when she reached it, was made of timber: sun-bleached, splintered and hanging from its hinges with a deep sagging ennui that suggested it had been doing so for a very long time. A leafy climber with trumpeting purple flowers had tied itself in comprehensive knots around the posts, and Sadie had to climb through a gap between the pieces of bowing wood. Ash, reassured by this sign his mistress was following, let out a rousing bark and picked up speed, disappearing towards the horizon.
    Grass brushed Sadie’s bare knees, making them itch where her sweat had dried. Something niggled about this place. An odd feeling had come over her since she’d climbed through the gate, an inexplicable sense of things being not quite right. Sadie didn’t go in for presentiments—there was no need for a sixth sense when the other five were being properly employed—and sure enough, there was a rational explanation for the oddness. Sadie had been walking for ten minutes or so when she realised what it was. The field was empty. Not of trees and grass and birds, they were everywhere; it was all the rest that was missing. There were no tractors puttering over the fields, no farmers out mending fences, no animals grazing. In this part of the world that was unusual.
    Sadie glanced around, searching for something to prove her wrong. She could hear running water, not too far away, and a bird that might have been a raven was watching her from the branch of a nearby willow. She noted great stretches of long rustling grass and the occasional gnarled tree, but nothing human as far as the eye could see.
    A black gleam moved on the edge of her vision and Sadie flinched.