Them That Chase

This was the unpublished short story that Episode 4 of The Silt Verses ended up being adapted from - we dug it out of storage  and thought it'd be a fun thing to share as we work through Season 2! Hope you enjoy.

She asks - and perhaps it’s just to kill the silence -

“Why does every house up here have a cattle grid? I don’t see any cattle.”

He's already stalking away up the footpath at this point, but the sound of her voice makes him half-turn his head, and he replies, curtly,

“There’s wild horses out in the woods. They tend to roam into town, eat out of the bins, disrupt the traffic. It’s to keep them out.”

It’s as if she’s trying to challenge him, with these inane and endless questions. She simply doesn’t understand, or she's pretending not to understand, how things work out here.

He has no intention of losing his temper today.

Because he has spent days advertising the fond memories of his childhood to her: the joyful camaraderie of long weekend walks in the woods, the calming impact of natural surroundings, the games that could be played in dens and hollows amongst the bracken. How this brought the entire family closer together.

Because he could hear the doubt in her voice when she agreed with him that a weekend out here in the countryside would be good for them both.

The doubt that a weekend could do any good. The doubt that anything, at this point, was capable of salvaging things between them.

He will prove her wrong.

He will be kind and patient with her, under any circumstances.

And he has no wish whatsoever to relive his vivid memories of how those long weekend walks actually played out, how his father would march the entire family (a procession of five trailing unhappy children and one shepherding unhappy wife) onwards through the old woods, setting a blistering pace and refusing to check a map, inevitably sending them down some supposed shortcut that would end with their boots sinking into a sludgy morass or the skies suddenly opening up with chilling rain, and then beginning to bark instructions at them as if it was their slow pace that had brought them all to harm.

“Keep up,” his father would yell back. “There’s them that lead, and them that follow, and no good comes to them that follow.”

He is not like that. He has grown into a different kind of man.

She can tell already that his mood has not improved since yesterday, so she just goes with, “Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t realise the horses would come so close.”

She keeps her tone soft. She wants him to know on some level that she is holding back from answering his contempt with her own contempt, that she is the one making an effort here for both of their sakes.

He says,

“It’s really something, isn’t it? Maybe we’ll see them once we get up into the trees.”

She hopes that she’ll have the opportunity to take a photo of the wild horses roaming in the gorse. It would be a tactically important image, one that she could send to her closest friends’ chat group (Having a great weekend, meeting new people!) to provide tangible reassurance that things aren’t as bad as they seem to believe.

Because they’ve been giving her pitying smiles and arm-pinches at lunches of late, and their jokes about his temper stopped being playful some time ago.

He has planned this route meticulously, with the help of the Ordnance Survey map left in their bedroom, plotting out the entire thing while she was spending too long in the shower.

There are recommended walks, odd skitterish little routes that zigzag back and forth through the woods and seem determined to be as complicated as possible (turn left at the stile, then immediately left again, then continue to the bridge, but do not take the cycling trail; instead, take a sharp right uphill until you find the well).

His route is better and neater; moving clockwise from trail to trail, just five or six miles to the pub where they will stop for lunch, before returning the other way, taking in as much of the wood as possible with zero repetition, forming a perfect circle.

She almost provoked an argument already this morning by asking him to show her the route they’re going to take, which he did only reluctantly, clutching the map in one hand and pointing with the other, refusing to cede control.

She fully intends to surreptitiously check Google Maps on her phone throughout the day, marking their location and direction with a reassuring blue dot, because she’s been through enough shit in her life as it is and she is not going missing on a bloody nature trail of all things.

He stops abruptly on the path, because across the flats he can now make out the treeline, a massed army or an ocean tide of ghostly birch and ash, and the welcoming darkness of the woods lurking behind that first rank of spindly trunks, leafless branches reaching up and devolving into smaller sub-structures and tinier veins, like blood networks or coral, breaking up the glorious February blue of the sky.

It would be wonderful, he thinks, to let all of it go. To dash forwards into those inhuman shadows and become one with the forest, your body’s outline broken up by light through the canopy. No longer anyone or anything.

Beside him, she says,

“Wow. I mean...wow.”

That’s it? he asks himself, silently, and with disgust. That’s all the response you can come up with?

Her presence is becoming increasingly unwelcome.

He snaps at her, “Come on,” although she is already fumbling for her phone to take a picture of the amassed tide of woods.

She lets this one go, returns the phone to her jacket pocket.

She tells herself that she may not let the next one go.

She lets him walk ahead of her, giving him his space, and as he passes beneath the treeline he seems to duck his head instinctively, passing hunched into the shade ahead as if he’s stepping into a church.

This is the first endearing thing he’s done all day.

He leads them away from the main trail, westwards down to a stile and a fence, rambling grey wire strung out through the trees, and hops nimbly over it.

It isn’t long before they’re away from the other hikers, and he can breathe again.

He finds himself hoping that she will not attempt to make conversation; that she will not spoil the dappling light and silence of the woods by airing her thoughts about what they’ll be having for dinner, or what might be causing the gentle crashing noises far in the distance (it’s the sound of loose tree branches dropping into the dry bracken, perhaps disturbed by the wind or by capering beasts).

She checks her phone, is assured that the blue dot is in place.

She puts it away again, quickly, before he notices.

She watches his hunched spine and shaking rucksack as he stalks away along the trail ahead of her, keeping to his own pace without turning once to check that she is still with him, and is reminded of an agony aunt column she read once, and hopelessly re-read:

Our species, overwhelmingly, is made up of people who inhabit a particular place upon the sliding scale between the anxious and the avoidant. And as a result, after the initial chase of the dating process, we may be surprised to find ourselves in another, second chase, one that is both joyless and endless, as the anxious partner pursues the avoidant partner and the avoidant flees the anxious…

She’d always hated that kind of reductive Jungian bullshit, the false wisdom that glosses over individuality in favour of simple archetypes, and when she first saw that column she read it out loud to him, scoffing,

“People aren’t like this. People are so much more than this. Don’t you think?”

And without looking up from his own phone, he repeated her own words back to her, carefully and apathetically rephrased for her benefit,

“Hm. No, no, I agree. People aren’t like that.”

Ever since that day, she hasn’t quite been able to shake off a specific, gnawing succession of fears that up until that point had remained undefined:

1. Am I more than merely an anxious partner?
2. Will he always be running from me, no matter how long we’re together?
3. Do I truly, really think he’s worth the effort required to catch him?
4. Would anybody else be any different?

She has been unable to find good answers to any of these questions.

He is surprised, and his pace slows.

By this point in the walk, they should be following the trail around to the north-west for a good twenty minutes before they come to another fence, another enclosed circle within the forest that is kept distinct from the surrounding territories for the sake of protecting the deer, or the birds, or the trees.

So it’s irritating, more than anything else, that there’s already a kissing gate a little way ahead of them, and a crossed trail cutting through the path just before another tangled and half-collapsed wire fence, at a place where he is certain there should be nothing at all.

There is no way in hell that he is going to get lost. Not on a four-hour walking trail through flat wooded countryside, in a national park that sees thousands of visitors every day. Can you even imagine the absurdity of it, the embarrassment?

He has a sudden vision of the pair of them being rescued by some gloating ranger in shorts and a Land Rover, swaddled in tin-foil blankets, photographed for the local newspaper. TOURISTS GET LOST IN 30-MILE WOOD.

I’m not a tourist, he protests internally. I grew up somewhere just like this. I’ve always had a knack for it. Dinah, though, she doesn’t even know how to use a compass. Probably this was her fault.

No, I will not get lost here. I refute the possibility of it.

But the kissing gate is closer now, and the crossed trail through the trees refuses to make any more sense, so he’s forced to stop and unloop the rucksack from his back and take out the Ordnance Survey map.

She catches up to him, and asks, politely,

“Everything all right?"

She does not suggest they check their location on her phone.

She shouldn’t have to pander to him like this. But it’s easier this way.

Having consulted the Ordnance Survey map, he realises his mistake.

Of course, they must somehow have drifted further to the east than he’d imagined. The crossroads they’re standing upon is there on the map, just in a slightly different place.

Generously, he shares this information with her.

“I was confused there, for a moment. But look, I’ve got it now - we’re here, by the dashed line. That’s the fence, and this is the gate. So we just go straight on.”

“If you’re sure…” she replies, with an uncertainty that makes him snap back at her,

“Of course I’m sure. Look, it’s on the map. There we are. This is where we stand. It couldn’t be simpler.”

She lets this one go as well, like a coward.

She follows him through the kissing gate, her hand straying against the rusted iron - and quite suddenly she flinches back, because she could swear that she feels a sting of unexpected pain, a shock of cold, lancing up from the metal into her fingers.

This is ludicrous, of course. The fence is clearly too dilapidated and crude to be electrified. And there’s no reason at all, with so many hikers on this trail, for the gate itself to carry a charge.

But the pain is real, and it lingers for a moment beneath the skin of her fingertips, as she stares at them in disbelief.

It’s as if the gate has bitten her.

He is already ahead on the curve of the trail, stalking away without concern.

She steps carefully through the other side without touching it again, says nothing, and keeps walking.

He can feel another headache coming on, a savage throbbing pain between his temples.

They should have brought bottled water. Why didn’t they think of it at the time? Why do things never go right for them?

Humiliations and petty disaster follow them wherever they go, like the hotel room that was overlooking the road and far too noisy, or the man in the newsagents who sneered at him when he stopped by to purchase chewing gum, or the rock that he clocks with the very edge of his toe, causing him to stumble.

Nothing ever comes easy for him. Nothing ever has.

Somehow, the trail has grown boggy, and their progress has slowed. They pick their way through the pock-holes of mud and amongst the fallen branches, looping back and forth along the path on the driest fragments of the earth, cursing whenever a boot slides down into unexpected gloop.

At a certain point, when the terrain of the trail has become as rough and muddy and broken as the terrain beyond the trail, he begins to doubt whether they’re still on a path at all.

Could that possibly be right? Could a path dissolve away into nothing? Or have they simply missed the turning somewhere back amongst the trees?

He turns to look.

She is relieved, at last, to see him turning to acknowledge her.

For the past hour or more, she’s felt increasingly invisible, trudging in silence behind him, following his shadow through an increasingly repetitive quagmire of branches and soil and stray, trampled bluebells.

It feels good to have her presence recognised, if nothing else.

He does give a shit, she reminds herself. He just doesn’t always know how to communicate that.

As she catches up to him, she can see that there’s something wrong with his expression; that he’s not looking at her, but staring over her shoulder into the distance.

“What’s up?” she asks.

He breaks away - and for the first time today, he smiles at her.

A nervous smile, but it’s still a smile.

“Ah,” he says. “I was a bit worried that we’d got lost. But there’s someone walking his dog behind us. So we’re definitely headed in the right direction.”

She glances back, following his gaze, but the woods behind them are empty and still.

“He’s gone behind the bend now,” he says. He looks a little confused. “He was a way off. Just, you know, a couple of figures really. I just took it as a sign that we haven’t wandered too far off the path.”

“I can check my phone, if you like,” she offers, but he just waves his hand enthusiastically, gesturing for her to follow him, and tells her,

“No, no. This is the way. I’m sure of it. And we’re still heading north, which is the main thing. Really, as long as we keep heading north, we can’t get lost.”

He thinks to himself,

What kind of dog was that, exactly?

It’s not that it was big, necessarily, so much as that the shape of it didn’t quite seem recognisably dog-like.

Which is of course a strange thing to think, because dogs can come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, from small and squat to enormous and rangy, and there’s no reason why he should have seen that shape in the far distance, on all four legs, running just ahead of a figure on two legs, and instantly identify it as something-that-was-not-a-dog, and yet…

This is ridiculous.

He glances back over his shoulder, but the woods are empty except for her, straggling behind him a little way down the path.

It’s just a few moments afterwards that he spots the thick bike trail, broad and flat, slicing through the trees just ahead, and he almost whoops in triumph as he sees a pair of cyclists rolling from the left side of his vision and along the trail before vanishing again to the right.

“We weren’t lost,” he calls back to her. “We just strayed from the path a little. It’s right here, it was always right here.”

She shakes off her uncertainty, and allows herself to enjoy his sudden good mood as they stroll hand-in-hand along the bike trail, which leads to a wooden stile onto the modern hedged lane, and they duck past a steady stream roaring convertibles and motorbikes until they arrive at the sign of the pub.

In a garden lined with creeping roses, they settle in on a bench and examine the menus,

Other couples are chatting over pints of bad lager and worse wine, stealing each other’s chips.

What a normal place, she thinks. What normal and happy people.

And we are just like them, too.

She wants fish and chips, and perhaps a large glass of white wine.

He selects a beef roast, and a local ale (something more exotic and unique than the standard imported lagers on tap) which he will surely come to regret.

He rises to place the order-

-and she gets up as well, pushing him down by the shoulder.

She says, “You got the train tickets. Let me take care of this.”

He shakes her off, firmly. Other people sense something unhappy in the gesture and glance around.

“No, no, don’t be stupid,” he says, lightly. “I’m treating us.”

She says, coldly,

“Don’t be…? All right, then.”

She hovers for a moment longer, and then returns to her seat and takes out her phone and stares at it intently for some time while he’s gone.

Eventually it’s clear that nobody has messaged her and nothing in the world has changed since this morning, so she puts her phone away and gazes around the garden again, searching for something to hold her interest.

The pub’s painted sign, swinging gently in the soft breeze, reads,

THE HOUND & HART

The artwork depicts a man - just a silhouette, walking along a long country path, with trees on either side, and a black dog-like shape trotting at his heels. Both figures are moving away from the viewer, as if they’re receding into the wood of the sign itself, and indeed they look discomfitingly small between the harsh black strokes that indicate the forests surrounding them.

“Where’s the hart?” she asks herself.

He places their order at the bar, brusquely and with confidence, relieved to note that the bar has a card machine (just imagine being laughed out of there as a city-slicker who does not carry the necessary cash to survive).

As he stalks back to their table with their drinks in either hand, he already has a sense of what’s going to happen next, so he tells her,

“Sorry if I was a bit, you know, back there-”

She is no longer in the mood for letting him get away with it.

“A bit what?” she asks.

He does not answer directly, but tries to exculpate himself instead with,

“I think I’ve just been a bit anxious this morning. I almost got us lost back there, and I really wanted to show you the countryside-”

She says,

“Does it, um, bother you, sometimes, that I earn more than you?”

He stammers a bit. Follows up with,

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course not.”

She observes,

“You always get wound up when I try to handle things myself. You wouldn’t let me pay for the hotel room, or the train tickets, or last night’s dinner. You do understand that I can contribute to our life together, don’t you? It isn’t any reflection on you, or anything like that. Because we're a team."

He takes a swig of his ale (awful, as anticipated).

Mutters, “You do enough for us already.”

He digs in deeper, adding,

“Look, you know I value you. And I, I like it when you lead on things. But sometimes I need to feel as if I’m the one taking care of us. It can’t just all be you. I need to be the one who’s providing.”

He has never told her about his visit last year to the nursing home, where Dad sat coddled in catheters and blankets and the reek of fresh urine, and yet somehow a master in his own brown armchair, with nurses rushing back and forth to tend to his every need, and as he, Robert, sat down the old man stirred from his vile wrappings and asked,

“How’s Dinah, then?”

“Good,” he’d replied. “Yeah, she’s good, Dad.”

“Taking care of you, is she?” his father asked, then laughed and spluttered at his own hilarious sense of humour. “That’s a good thing. Glad you’ve found someone like that. Some are born to lead, and others are born to follow. Isn’t that right, son?”

He will never tell her about the humiliation he felt, at that moment.

She does not say out loud,

“It’s about more than just providing, though, isn’t it? This whole damned weekend you’ve been barking orders at me like I’m your dog, just charging on through the woods and expecting me to follow. It’s like you’re so determined to be in charge, in control of things, that you’re running away from me, and to be honest, I’m starting to feel less and less certain about whether I want to keep chasing after you.”

He does not reply,

She eats her lunch in silence.

He does the same, and curses her for the lack of conversation.

She checks her watch, once they’ve finished, and says,

“It’s nearly three. Are we going to have time to complete your loop before it gets dark?”

He snaps back,

“God, yes, of course. We’ve got...what, almost three hours until dusk. What are we going to do, call a taxi? It’d be ridiculous. We’ve got plenty of time.”

He begins packing up his rucksack again.

A moment later, he concedes,

“We can take a taxi. If you’re really worried. I don’t want us to stop enjoying the walk because we’re trying to rush back.”

She says,

“No, no. You know what you’re doing. It’s fine. Let’s keep enjoying the walk.”

He glances up at the sky, at the sun that is now half-eclipsed by the sign of the Hound & Hart,  shards of cool golden light streaking over and underneath and around the wood.

“The sun’s still high,” he concludes. “We’ll definitely be fine. Let’s make a move now, though, just to be on the safe side.”

He hefts his rucksack, drains his horrid ale, and leads her back out onto the road and over the wooden stile and back into the deepening shadows of the great woods.

He can tell that she keeps updating the map on her phone, a few paces behind him.

Because she doesn’t trust that he knows where he’s going, even though this is a simple trail through honest woodland in the safest country in the world, and it would be a thing of impossibility to get lost in here.

It’s insufferable, and if she brings it up with him, he’d be justified in screaming at her.

It’d feel good, right now, to scream.

And it’s ridiculous, of course, because the depth and repetition of the forest is a simple illusion, a trick of perspective. If he struck out away from the trail for four or five minutes, he’d instantly stumble onto the edge of the woods, farmland or another road, something distinct and human, and they’d be reminded of how small and insignificant this stretch of countryside really is.

No place is endless. Not out here.

He’s feeling the cold more and more, now that the sun has dipped beneath the canopy and the forest is full of shadows.

She’s flicking through news articles. More agony aunt columns. The thrilling problems of other people in relationships.

She needs a break from here. A break from him.

He must have grown spooked by the stillness and silence of it all, because when he catches the movement up ahead in the distance, something slipping through the trees, he starts and shivers.

It’s just someone out with their dog.

With two dogs.

And the closer they get, the more recognisable the silhouettes will become, and he’ll be able to identify them as a man or a woman, as a sheepdog or a labrador, and the safer he’ll feel, once they’re good and close and he knows exactly what they are.

Perhaps he’ll even catch their eye, and nod, and say something hearty like,

“Lovely day, isn’t it?” like people do, out here in the countryside.

But they must be moving away from him, and more quickly than him, too, because in a heartbeat the shapes have receded out of sight amongst the trees, almost as if he’d imagined them somehow.

We’re walking too slowly, he thinks.

This is her fault. She’s dragging her feet, she doesn’t want to be here. She keeps holding me back.

Without her, I could run.

She’s already noticed that they’re no longer on the path, that once again they’re slopping their way through mud and over fallen branches, and presumably he knows that as well, because he’s striding ahead more forcefully than ever, as if he knows exactly which way they’re going.

She checks her phone.

No signal out here, for the very first time since the walk began. The Maps dot has not moved since she last checked it, ten minutes ago.

It’s funny, she thinks, how reliant we become on these things to tell us exactly where we are.

He stops.

There’s a tangled fence ahead of them in the trees, barbed wire wound about thick wooden stakes, following the line of some sunken ditch.

There shouldn’t be a fence here.

They’ve been following the loop easternwards perfectly well up until now, and they should be able to keep going straight, due south, until the trail curves back around and they step out of the woods onto the gorse plains and rejoin the herds of meandering tourists.

It shouldn’t take more than an hour, or even two.

But now they’re up against a fence, and either they’ll have to take a ninety-degree turn (and end up marching away to the east or west, in entirely the wrong direction).

It’s funny, how this forest keeps wanting to fuck with him. Like it’s determined to humiliate him, to prove his incapability.

“Can you check your phone?” he asks, weakly, after a moment.

“I, um,” she says, from behind him. “I don’t think I have any bars. Are we lost?”

He ignores her, taking out the Ordnance Survey map once more from his rucksack, and glares at it.

It is very evident where they should be. Their location is right there in ink, on a single black line that at no point encounters any kind of dashed line that would indicate a fence.

So either the map is wrong, or the fence is so broken-down and ancient that it can no longer be considered a fence at all, in which case they are exactly where they should be, and should keep going straight.

He looks back towards her, and opens his mouth -

-and catches the movement in the trees, back the way they came.

She sees him glance back over her shoulder, but when she follows his gaze, the woods are quite empty, and so she does not understand why his jaw clenches and he swallows hard, nor does she catch the significance of his muttered phrase,

“Three of them now.”

The sun’s getting lower.

“Are we lost?” she repeats, but he only shakes his head and says,

“We’re fine. We just need to keep going. Over the fence. We need to pick up the pace.”

He turns and stalks away from her, picking his way over the mass of barbed wire and brambles, then down into the ditch and up onto the other side.

He doesn’t wait to see her do the same.

He doesn’t want to talk to her about it. Doesn’t want to be laughed at.

She has never truly understood him, that’s the problem.

Three dogs now, or three dog-like shapes, moving on all fours, more human-like than dog-like in their silhouettes, perhaps, as if three walkers had suddenly decided to get down on their hands and knees and creep along through the woods like devolved creatures, like wild beasts.

And the one who followed in their wake, who walked on two legs, just as indistinct and as strange, possibly a hiker whose form was obscured and altered by a heavy rucksack or a long coat. Something like that.

Never quite getting close enough for him to make them out clearly.

But closer every time.

He walks harder, and faster, aiming for the obscure glow of the sun amongst the blackened tree trunks, expecting her to keep up.

She calls out,

“Robert! Robert! Will you slow down?”

He will not slow down.

Not for her, not for anyone.

He’ll run on, until the trees pare back and the skies are empty of twisted branches and he’s standing safely on tarmac once again.

He’ll run on, until he’s led them both to safety, and that’s when they’ll both be able to stop, and laugh, and appreciate how silly it was that they managed to both get so scared, on a simple country walk through easy woodland.

His foot breaks against something.

She is relieved that he seems to finally be waiting for her, right up until the moment when she catches up to him and sees, very clearly, why he’s stopped.

What’s lying in the bracken ahead of them.

He says, quickly,

“Just a deer.”

He nudges the yellowing skull with his foot, and adds,

“Sometimes they’re born funny. Poor thing couldn’t have survived for long.”

She thinks that the skeleton does not look like a very young deer, or even a juvenile deer, splayed out and scattered though the bones are amongst the leaves.

She buries this thought and says, instead,

“Look at how the antlers have grown.”

He says,

“Nature can be twisted sometimes.”

He doesn’t draw her attention to the legbone by his foot, the half-gnawed tapering joint that climaxes in a gnarled set of thin fingers.

Or not fingers, perhaps, but some kind of vestigial bone structure.

Do deer have bones like that, beneath their hooves? Because the hooves themselves aren’t bone, he knows that much. They’re cartilage, or ivory, or something similar, so it stands to reason that perhaps there’s something underneath.

When they get home, he’ll Google it, and then they can understand.

It’s just unfortunate now, when they’re in the middle of the woods, that they should be faced with this dead deer with its slender fingers, and the skull with twisted antlers that are protruding from the wrong directions, one from the centre of the forehead and one from the back, curving and looping around, as if the bone has got lost on its way out of the poor creature’s head, and the face itself is weirdly flat, lacking any kind of snout, more ape-like than deer-like, the eye-holes sat in the centre of its face, the teeth dangling from final strands of gum beneath a missing lower jaw.

It doesn’t look accurate to life, this deer.

The empty eyes are pooling with darkness, as the sun sets.

She speaks for them both when she says,

“Let’s just get out of this wood, all right?”

He feels as if the trees are teeming with movement, around them and behind them.

His head is beginning to ache again.

He says,

“Yes. Yes, all right. Come on, let’s go.”

She follows the shape of him, now increasingly dull and uncertain in the gathering dusk, down through the trees.

She reaches for her phone again, but their location has not changed, and the bright blue light of the screen only serves as a reminder that they’re losing more light with every step.

He’s walking faster and faster, almost jogging.

You need to wait for me, she thinks.

You can’t keep running away from me.

She feels as if she’s losing him, no matter how she hurries to keep up.

His silhouette keeps vanishing behind the black-fingered birches, then emerging again on the other side, both fainter and further away, as if she’s watching a film with missing frames.

She calls out his name. Tells him to stop.

He runs on.

I’m leading us, he thinks. I’m leading us all to safety.

He almost careens into a rough tree trunk, his fingers closing around the bark, and realises that it has now grown entirely dark, a soft blue-violet darkness that renders foreground and background indistinguishable, and his feet have begun to trip over and over again in the brambles and fallen branches.

The pain behind his eyes has not diminished. It must be the strain of squinting, of trying to resolve shapes from out of this twilight.

But the sooner he leads them out of these woods, the better off they’ll all be.

He runs on.

He curses as something hard rakes against his hair, some low-lying branch, and he puts out his fingers to feel at the rough twigs, a kind of ceiling, as if the forest has shrunk itself down and the canopy is just inches over his head, so he ducks down, bowing his head in supplication as he continues his flight, almost crouching down, as the foliage seems to draw closer and lower, until he feels hemmed in on all sides.

He keeps going on, because there’s nothing but darkness around him now and there can be no turning back.

He feels another branch cut at his face, slitting skin open, and he drops down further, falling onto his hands, the bracken pricking at his soft palms, but he keeps scrambling along on all fours.

It’s as if the forest has become a tunnel, narrowing with every step, enclosing him in from above and the left and right, but he cannot stop running, not until he’s safe.

He chokes.

Something is tightening around his throat, some snare of looped wire from a fallen fence, the barbs digging into the soft flesh of his jugular, and the more he struggles, writhing back and forth, the more it constricts upon him.

His legs kick out. His head rears up towards the darkened sky.

She stumbles out onto the path, into the wavering torchbeams of two hikers who laugh and cry out,

“Oh! You startled us!”

And then she can make out the distant lights of the village beyond, and the empty plains of heather and gorse that lie before her in the risen moonlight, and she realises that somehow, she’s left the woods far behind, and she’s by herself.

She turns back, her hands flailing against the empty air, and screams his name out into the darkness.

“Robert! Robert!”

He can feel the agony behind his eyes, the wrenching and squirming pain of something new being born, as the bone-spike of the antler breaks through the flesh and skin, driving upwards, twisting and looping, just as its second brother emerges from the back of his head, and he kicks and squeals, his spine cracking and steaming as it bends upwards into new shapes, his fingers stretching out, desperate to escape-

And then all at once the snare seems to slacken, and he gasps, wheezing out hot air from his nostrils, turning his horned head back and forth to try and get a sense of the heavy shapes that are even now padding through the leaves around him, their inhuman snouts sniffing and prodding at him from every angle.

He can hear his father’s voice from somewhere in the recesses of his disintegrating mind, mocking and hollow.

“There’s them that flee, and there’s them that follow. Them that lead, and them that chase.”

He feels the shape come up behind him, standing over him, and he finds that his body is no longer responsive; he is slack, paralysed with the terror of all prey animals, his eyes rolling helplessly back and forth in their sockets.

A pair of rough, leathery hands reach down, tugging at the wire of the snare.

The texture is rough, but soft; like leather, like skin.

He tenses, as the wire loosens, and the barbs unprick from his skin. The things on all fours are snarling, their jaws clacking with unnatural, misshapen teeth, as if they’re already sensing that their master will soon send them running out through the woods again.

He can only think of flight, now. Flight and the glorious devouring that awaits him, when flight ends.

He will run on all fours into the endless forests, and never look back.

He will lead, and others will follow. He’ll run, and others will catch his scent.

The snare is lifted over his antlered head.

He streaks up and out,

A flash of pale skin and silvered bone in the darkness,

And the second chase-

- The one that never truly ends -

-begins.