“Only if you’re sure, baby.” Lana stroked her daughter’s hair. Her eyes remained locked on Tom’s in the mirror. Her lips formed a tight line across the bottom of her face, as if underlining the event.
“He was just a drugged-up loser, Mum. Who cares?”
Lana’s hand stopped moving on Hailey’s scalp. “Okay, honey.” She stared at Tom.
Tom nodded. “So we continue, then: to Hadrian’s Wall. It might do us all a bit of good, actually, just to get away from all that madness back there.”
“Can we have music on? Please?” Hailey was sitting up straight. She’d folded her arms across her chest and moved away from her mother, pressing her body against the inside of the door. She seemed to have forgotten about the horror they had witnessed.
“Yeah. Sure we can.” Tom reached out and turned on the radio. He noted that his hands were shaking, even as he turned the dial. The radio was tuned to a local station; they were playing a pop tune he vaguely recognised from a television commercial. He wasn’t sure what kind of product the ad was selling, but he knew most of the words to the song’s hideously catchy chorus.
“That’s good. Thanks.” Hailey smiled as she looked out of the side window. Her eyes looked empty, bereft of anything but the reflection of daylight.
He drove west, towards Hexham, taking the A69 — a road which followed the route of Hadrian’s Wall. Green fields were pocked with strange pools of light and shadow. Small tumbledown stone walls barricaded dirty sheep and kept them from the roadside. The occasional fell walker waved as they drove by, raising red-cagouled arms to indicate some kind of bond they did not share. Tom drove in silence until they reached the signs for a place called Greenhead, where he turned off the main road and followed the signs for the Hadrian’s Wall Path.
Tom parked the car on a patch of gravel. The sky was turning dark, clouds were bloated and shuffling. A few other people — pensioners, on a day out — were milling around, putting on or taking off their walking boots, sorting out rucksacks and packed lunches.
“I brought a picnic,” said Lana. She was buttoning her coat against the chill.
Tom nodded. “That’s nice. I’m sorry, the weather’s turning bad, and that thing back at the estate… It seems like something doesn’t want us to have a good time today.”
Hailey was walking away, towards a low fence. She sat down on the top bar and stared back along the road.
Lana moved towards Tom, placing her hand on his arm. “
Tom placed his hand over hers. She was warm, and her long, thin fingers moved against his, rubbing his thumb. “I want us to enjoy this, too,” he said. “All of it.” The sky churned above them. A large bird — black, and with a huge wing span — flew over their heads, cawing loudly. It was like an omen, but Tom refused to let its message inside his head.
“Come on, let’s go for that walk.” She squeezed his hand, and he felt brittle, like calcified bone. If he stopped for even a moment to think about all of this, he might snap into a million pieces, his skeleton shattering and the broken bones spilling across the hills and dales.
They walked together to the spot where Hailey was sitting, her legs tucked up under her bottom and her hands pressed flat against the wooden fence. “Come on, we’re going to work up an appetite.” Lana brushed her fingers across Hailey’s cheek, and the girl flinched away before getting to her feet and following them across the flat, wet grass.
They crossed the fence using a wooden stile, and headed up a long, gradual rise. The gravel path soon became a hard-packed dirt trail, and the bushes and trees thinned out the higher they climbed. Scrawny lone trees stood like sentinels, surrounded only by flat stretches of grass. Old rock falls had created shallow caves, and the roots of old trees clasped the stone walls of these strange natural constructions.
Soon they reached the tip of the hill, and went through a gate to follow part of a bridle path. As they turned to follow the tip of the rise, the partial remnants of the great Roman wall came into view.
The uneven stone spine of the wall stretched away from them, dipping into small valleys and then rising to rocky peaks. The route was no longer steep, but it did undulate dramatically, so that the wall itself resembled the sculpture of some great stone serpent. Tom recalled with passing fondness the legend of the Lambton Worm, and the old folk song they used to sing at school when he was a small boy:
This particular worm, the one whose back they were following across the ancient landscape, hoping that it might lead them to a glimpse of something better than they already had, was made of stone. But no, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the wall that would lead them to better things, it was their own ambition, and the strength of any plans they made.
“We learned about this at school, in Mr. Benson’s class.” Hailey had drawn level with them. Her eyes were still blank, dreamy, but she seemed a little more focused than before.
“What did you learn?” Tom thought that a mellow discussion about the history of the place might divert her mind from darker thoughts, and even help him to stop thinking about his increasingly uncertain future.
“Well, Emperor Hadrian built the wall. I think it was in AD 122, at least that’s when he started. It took — I think it was six years to build.”
“Well remembered,” said Tom. Lana gripped his hand. “Anything else?”
“It was built as a fortification to keep out trouble from Scotland.” She chewed on her lower lip between sentences, as if lost in thought. “But it was also meant as a symbol of Roman power, according to Mr. Benson. He reckons it was like the Romans flexing their muscles. Telling everyone else not under Roman rule to keep back, or they’d get a good kicking.”
Tom laughed. “Well, yes, that’s a fair point. The Romans certainly knew how to give folk a good kicking.”
“Something else, as well: we read this article from a science magazine, and apparently back in the Sixties someone dug up a portion of the wall and found human bones.
“Jesus, Hailey… do we really need to talk about that?” Lana shook her head. “What the hell gets into your head, girl? Sometimes, I just don’t think I know you at all.”
Hailey’s voice turned petulant, the tone low and uneven. “It was in the magazine. I didn’t make it up.”
“Okay, that’s actually very interesting.” Tom turned to face them, walking backwards across the stony ground and trying to avert the threatened row. “The Romans were a pretty nasty bunch, and they had very demanding gods.” Something caught his eye. A small, almost dainty movement far behind them, somewhere back along the route they had taken. It looked like a scrap of white sheet, or perhaps a piece of paper, flapping in the wind. Tom stared back along the trail, but nothing else moved. Even the hikers they’d seen in the car park were absent.
“What is it?” Lana looked in the same direction, and then at Tom. “Are you okay?”
Tom nodded. “Yes, fine. I just thought… I dunno. Something just spooked me.”
“Yeah,” said Lana. “Probably all this talk of dead babies. So I think that’s enough of
They followed the relatively straight line of the wall, clambering over small rocky outcroppings and plodding up and down the sudden dips and rises. In places the grass was so worn that it looked bald, as if transparent ice were forming and hardening the ground. The air was chilly — but not cold enough to support the idea of snow — and the slight breeze was stirring, becoming stronger.
Tom kept glancing over his shoulder, trying to catch sight of whatever he had spotted moments before. Each time he turned his head, something twitched at the edge of his vision. But by the time he had focused on the location, there was no longer anything to be seen. It was as if something were teasing him, drawing his attention before ducking back out of sight. The thought unnerved him, and he remembered the weird visions he’d been having lately: the dog with a boy’s face, a figure that may or may not be a visual echo of his dead father’s abuse.
“How about we stop for a bite to eat?” Lana pressed her body against him. It was warm, firm, and reminded
