nothing in the trees— Susanna was on her knees beside me, doubled over and gasping, and I grabbed at her in a panic, looking for blood. “Su. Look at me. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine.” It was a second before I figured out she was laughing.
“What the fuck—”
“Oh my God—” Leon was crouched in the dirt, a hand pressed to his chest. “I can’t breathe—”
“Jesus Christ. What was that?”
“That,” Susanna gasped, “that was a long-eared owl. You pair of fools.”
“No,” I said. “No way. The size of it, the—”
“Have you never seen one before? They’re big bastards.”
“It went for us.”
“It must’ve thought you were starting. All that noise you made—”
“Leon. That wasn’t an owl. Right?”
The whites of Leon’s eyes, in the moonlight. “My chest. I think I’m having a heart attack—guys, please, it hurts—”
“You’re having a panic attack,” Susanna said, wiping her eyes with a knuckle and getting her giggles under control. “Take long slow breaths.”
“I can’t breathe.”
“That,” I said, “was not a fucking owl.”
Susanna stared at me for another moment. Her knuckle had left her face streaked with dirt like warpaint. Then she toppled slowly backwards to the ground, hair in the earth, gazing up at the blank sky. Leon sounded like he might be crying.
There was grainy dirt in my shoes and all over my hands; I was sweating and shaking and way, way too stoned. The ugly moonscape all around me looked nothing like the Ivy House that was woven through my life. It hit me, with a freeze of utter horror, that that was because it wasn’t the same place at all: this was a fake, a dark mist-formed parallel, some skewed but lethally plausible facsimile that Rafferty had created and tricked us all into, and now we were here there was absolutely no way to get back. It felt like something I’d known all along, deep down, if only I’d had the sense to recognize it. I almost screamed, but I knew Rafferty had to be listening and that tipping him off would lead to some unimaginable disaster.
High whistles of night birds, over the trees. Above us, in my bedroom window, the light had gone out.
“What the fuck,” I said. My voice sounded scraped and hollow. “Is wrong with you guys. What the fuck.”
Neither of them answered. Leon was sobbing, not bothering to hide it any more.
“You shits. You know that? Fuck you.”
“I want to go home,” Leon said, through tears, wiping his face with his palms. In the faint light he looked grotesque, hair swept into lunatic scribbles, face contorted and dirt smeared everywhere.
“Yeah,” Susanna said. She struggled up to sitting and then to standing, wobbly-legged. “That’s probably a good idea. Come on.”
She held out her hands to Leon. He caught hold, and after some fumbling and staggering they managed to get him vertical. They stumbled off together across the uneven earth, arms wrapped around each other, Susanna’s ankles bending at impossible angles. Neither of them looked back at me.
I stayed where I was. Inside the lit kitchen, Susanna slumped against a counter, poking at her phone with glassy, slow-motion concentration; Leon, at the sink, palmed water onto his face and neck, ran himself a mugful and gulped it down. Susanna said something, and he nodded without turning. The air around me was restless and moth-ridden, tiny things fluttering at the back of my neck and crawling on my arms, cold striking up from the earth through my clothes.
After a while Susanna glanced at her phone and said something else: taxi. They groped for coats and dropped them and slung them over their shoulders, and wove their way out towards the hall.
My high was starting to wear off, but the garden still had that terrible alien feel, itself and not itself. The thought of standing up and walking across it, exposed, made my back prickle—who knew what this place had waiting in its secret corners, mantraps, tangling vines, feral dogs and searchlights. But I was shivering, my arse was damp, and even if that thing had been just an owl I didn’t like being out here alone with it. In the end I hauled myself to my feet, fought down the head rush and scuttled up the garden like a mouse under a shadow.
It took me a very long time to grope my way up the stairs. Smell of dust, soft even snores from Hugo’s room, floorboard creaks making my heart ricochet. I couldn’t decide whether to wake Melissa; on the one hand she needed