Water, Rob thought. I need to find water. A leat, a river. A ford.
He sped south on the Dousland Road at over seventy miles an hour, through Yelverton, swerving as violently as he could. Several other drivers blew their horns at him and as he weaved his way through the middle of the town he came close to colliding with a bus. Still Esus held on, and started hammering even harder on the roof. As Rob turned down Meavy Lane, with the Honda’s tyres shrieking operatically, Esus smashed his windscreen into a milky jigsaw, and suddenly he was blinded.
He hit the high banking on the side of the road and there was a loud crunch as his nearside mudguard struck a tree stump. He managed to steer back into the middle of the lane and then he punched at the windscreen with his fist. His first punch only made the shattered glass bulge outwards, but then he punched it again, even harder, and he succeeded in knocking a jagged hole in it that allowed him to see enough of the lane up ahead.
‘Stop! I give thee but one more chance!’ roared Esus. But Rob was surging with adrenaline now and his confidence was beginning to grow. He needs me, he thought: he really needs me, or else he would have killed me already. He’s found himself in a world that he doesn’t understand at all, speeding along unfamiliar roads, desperately clinging on to a vehicle that can travel faster than anything he has ever seen, a vehicle without any horses.
After he had driven through Hoo Meavy, he saw that he was approaching the Dewerstone car park. Water, he thought. The River Plym. He slewed into the car park in a shower of grit, and as he did so an attendant in a high-vis jerkin strode forward, waving at him frantically to slow down and stop.
‘Hi! Stop, there! You’ve someone on your roof!’
Rob ignored him and circled around the parked cars until he reached the wooden footbridge at the far side of the car park. The bridge rattled loudly as he drove over it, and onto the rough granite track that had once been a tramway for iron miners. He knew where he was going: the tramway wound a steep and tortuous path up through the woods, all the way to the summit known as the Devil’s Rock, two hundred metres above sea level. The Honda lurched and bumped and its suspension clonked but Rob kept his foot down. One of Esus’s talon-like hands appeared in the hole that he had punched in the windscreen and started to tear away the broken glass, piece by piece, furiously pulling it free from its polyvinyl interlayer.
Rob drove higher and higher through the woods. The sun had come out and the light flickered through the trees like a stroboscope. He scattered a group of hikers, who shouted obscenities at him and shook their fists, and as he spun the wheel to avoid another elderly walker with a backpack he struck a glancing blow against a fir tree, denting his offside wing and cracking his headlight.
‘Stop!’ screamed Esus. He had now torn away so much of the windscreen that he was able to lean over from the roof and stare in at Rob, his face upside down, his white hair flailing wildly and his silver eyes even more wolf-like with anger. ‘Stop, or I will pull thy raymes out now!’
He reached into the car with one hand and seized the top of the steering wheel, twisting it violently from side to side. The Honda collided with one tree after another, with a series of loud, hollow bangs, but Rob slammed his foot down even harder on the accelerator, half-lifting himself off the seat so that he was pressing down on the pedal with his full weight.
With its tyres squittering on the granite, the car shot forward, straight towards the brink of the Dewerstone. Beyond that was nothing but a two-hundred-foot drop to the River Plym below. At the last moment, Rob kicked down on the brake pedal and yanked up the handbrake. The car tilted, nose down, and for a split second he was sure that he was too late, and that the car was going to go flying off the precipice and into the air.
In that same split second, a picture flashed into his mind of Vicky bringing up Timmy without him, but he thought, At least I’ve saved Timmy from Allhallows Hall.
The Honda’s front wheels went over the edge, but then it lurched to an abrupt stop, its back wheels jammed into a deep crevice in the rocks. At the same time, Esus lost his grip on the roof and slid forward, head first, and fell. As he plummeted down, he let out a scream like no scream that Rob had ever heard before. It sounded like a choir of demons, twenty demons rather than one, each voice shrieking louder than the other. It grew fainter and fainter and then, except for the softly fluffing wind, there was silence.
Rob gingerly eased open his door and stepped out onto the rocks. Several people were running towards him, but he went to the very edge and looked over.
He was in time to see that, far below him, Esus had plunged into the river, which was fast-flowing with foaming rapids. At first it looked as if he had miraculously survived the fall from the top of the Dewerstone, because he was thrashing his arms and legs. But then Rob saw that a dark streak was bleeding away from him and flowing away downstream. The streak grew darker and blacker and wider, and after a minute Rob realised what he was looking at.
‘Here, bloody hell – did I just see what I
