Through the winter of 1915, a cheerless Christmas and the hollow promise of the New Year he got used to being awoken in the night by the sound of running footsteps and screams, often his own, and so the first time that Bill came to visit him was peculiar in its absolute silence.
He could not recall the process of waking up; one moment he was asleep and the next awake with the stark clarity of a gunshot. At first he couldn’t work out why. There was no noise from anywhere else in the building, just the ticking of his wristwatch on the bedside table, and then he became aware of the human silhouette watching him from the corner of the room. Something about the figure gleamed. He could make out no features and yet he knew instinctively that it was Bill, an understanding confirmed by the lighter shine of a boar-tusk bracelet around his wrist. The deserter waited for his visitor to say something. Then either he moved, or the thin light through the curtains changed fractionally because the deserter could now see the condition in which Bill had chosen to visit him: he was naked and slicked with blood from huge wounds where his flesh appeared to have been gouged – no, not cut, the deserter realised, but eaten. Then he was gone as suddenly as he’d appeared.
Bill returned for the next two nights, but not again afterwards. It never occurred to the deserter that it might have been a hallucination. The bloody footprints that his old friend had left were real enough, though the deserter made sure that he cleaned them away so that the doctors didn’t see them and think that he was up to anything unusual. Bill had simply, for whatever reasons of his own, chosen to visit him from the No Man’s Land between life and death.
Time and again he dreamed of that conversation in the cellar, Bill drawing a neat scar across his forearm, and the boar-tusk bracelet on his wrist, while his cough grew steadily worse. He searched county maps of Shropshire for a village called Swinley, and found it hidden in a narrow valley amongst the tumbled folds of hills right on the border with Wales.
The locks and bars of Scholes Farm Asylum were no more effective as barriers against him than the barbed wire and craters of the Western Front had been. He stole clothes, money, and identity papers from the other inmates, who didn’t need them and probably wouldn’t notice their absence anyway. It was January, the worst possible month for a man with a lung condition to be travelling, but instead of convalescing by a warm fire he travelled by train out through Wolverhampton and the Black Country, enduring a series of draughty third-class railway carriages and long waits in damp station waiting rooms until he reached the market town of Church Stretton, which huddled below the sombre bulk of a hill called the Long Mynd. Despite being the low season, it was impossible to find a guest house vacancy for the night, since at the first sign of his cough the proprietors would close their doors to him, terrified of the disease he carried. It also meant that there were no brakes to be hired and he was forced to walk up the hill road and onto the unsheltered moorland plateau of the Mynd. It was not especially steep but with his lungs the going was strenuous. For a place that billed itself to summer day-trippers as ‘Little Switzerland’, he saw no majestic snow-capped peaks, just a succession of grey slopes looming out of the drizzle like waves of a cheerless sea, and the closest he got to a buxom blonde milkmaid was a fat dairy farmer called Jones who let him sit in the back of his cart amongst the rattling milk churns.
The countryside on the other side of the Mynd was a tangle of narrow lanes and high hedgerows running between farms and small villages, mostly without signposts since presumably the locals knew where everything was, but if he’d been alone and on foot he’d have soon become hopelessly lost. As it was, Jones the farmer deposited him at a junction with an even smaller road – little more than a track between close-crowded trees – assured him that it was the road to Swinley, and continued on his way.
* * *
It was cold under the trees. They pressed close on either side and tangled heavy limbs overhead like the fingers of hands steepled in dark rumination, while the undergrowth filled the space between their trunks, holly and hawthorn as thick with barbs as any coil of barbed wire. There was no wind, and yet he fancied that he heard faint rustlings, either of the trees themselves or something moving stealthily amongst them, keeping pace with him.
At a turn in the track he saw, blocking his way, an animal that he at first took to be a pig, covered in a dark, bristling hide with stiff hackles, and tusks curved both up and down either side of its snout. A boar, then. But surely extinct in Britain? It was statue-still in the middle of the path, staring at him, daring him to dispute its existence. There seemed no point in trying to hide his purpose, so he said, ‘I’m looking for the followers of Moccus.’
The boar regarded him, almost as
