‘We’re here,’ said the Riddler.
Fitz had closed his eyes. This time, there was no cascade, no carousel, no pageant of bright images. He saw only darkness.
‘I said we’re here,’ said the Riddler. ‘You have to look, or you won’t survive what’s coming.’
Fitz heard a train whistle. He could feel the steel of the track running beneath him as he sped down it, bearing down on himself, bearing down on the place where he would open his eyes and see. The track went through him like a spear, over and over continuously.
‘Look,’ urged the Riddler.
‘I can’t,’ Fitz answered him. He was gasping, leaves caught between his tongue and his teeth, dirt caked in his eyes, the plugs of it wormed far into his nose. He tried to cough but there was dirt running in his veins, and it crumbled by clods into his lungs every time he moved. Everywhere was wet, and cold. He heard the silence of it lapping at the shore of him, little vacancies between his bouts of struggle. They were getting longer.
‘You can,’ said the Riddler. ‘Open your eyes to it.’
Fitz opened his mouth. The further he stretched it, trying to yawn and swallow in the air, the more dirt seemed to clog it. He made incoherent noises, straining to draw tiny breaths of air through the fissures between the muddy clumps wedged in his teeth, jammed hard against his tongue.
‘What are you most afraid of?’ asked the Riddler.
‘Smothering,’ said Fitz. ‘Obviously.’
‘No,’ said the Riddler. ‘More than that.’
‘Dying,’ tried Fitz.
‘More than that. More than that. More than that.’
He opened his eyes.
The light had not faded completely. He was still in the wood. He knew the place well, a little thicket bordering a glade, a place where robins and wrens spatted at midday not far from the porch stone. Unlike the wood, in which the trees rustled with life, and moaned or creaked in the heavy southerly winds, this place was silent, a kind of dead centre at the eye of the wood’s wild whirl, an island of gold in its green, green sea. Owls stood sentry in the branches nearby, and kites coasted the skies above; no little bird, no mouse dared venture on the short grass of the glade. But he had eaten there, once, with Clare, a picnic of chicken and toast.
Now the sun didn’t fall on the wide gold grass. Instead, a mist clung to the ground, little wisps of it threading from the trees, and gathering around the short, slender spring blades. The leaves in the trees had only just begun to uncurl from their winter buds, and in this weak light they seemed sickly and abortive, what was at morning vital now at evening shadowed and deformed.
He heard a noise. It was a noise he remembered – the sound of a knife scraping on toast. He looked at the trees. Clare was speaking.
‘Don’t run away,’ said the Riddler. ‘You are always running away from this place.’
Fitz looked at the trees. Clare was speaking. There was the sound of a knife scraping on toast.
‘Don’t look away,’ said the Riddler.
Clare was telling him she loved him very much. He was looking at the trees and their thousands of shades of green – so much life, so many different sorts of lights –
‘You’re looking away,’ said the Riddler. ‘They will find you there if you don’t find yourself first. This is what they will use against you.’
There was the sound of a knife scraping on toast, dragging across the surface of the bread. Then there was a new sound, which he knew was the sound of the knife digging into the chicken liver. The jar of it. It went on and on. Through the trees.
‘Stop looking away,’ said the Riddler.
The trees he thought full of eyes, the eyes of owls and finches and tits and robins, wrens and martins, wood pigeons and woodpeckers. How many eyes did he see, unseen, at that very moment? They were watching him; he didn’t dare to go out on the grass.
Digging, the sound of digging reached him, and Clare was talking, telling him how she came to be his Bibi.
‘Why were you not always my Bibi?’ he asked her.
And the knife scraped on the toast once more, and was silent.
‘Look,’ said the Riddler. And he took Fitz’s head, and turned it to the grass, so quickly that he didn’t have time to shut his eyes.
It was a memory he could not recall. The mist had covered it almost completely. But there were two figures there in the glade, at evening, moving darkly in the dark. One held a shovel. He was tall, and wore a top hat. He drove the shovel into the broken earth. Leaning down, he took hold of something and dragged it, scraping, along the earth. It was the corner of a sheet, or a blanket. Fitz peered at it through the gloom, and saw in its corner, where the man gripped it in a tight twist, chequered squares of red and green. And then the scraping of the shovel on the earth had ended, and Fitz saw a body tumble out of the blanket into the hole that the man had dug.
Fitz saw a body tumble into the hole that Mr Ahmadi had dug in the glade in the Bellman’s Wood. And the girl turned and looked at him and it was Dina.
Fitz said, ‘I don’t really like chicken.’
Clare said, ‘I will always love you anyway.’
Dina said, ‘The eyes don’t always have to follow the body.’
The Master said, ‘The wind never breaks faith.’
And the body was the body of Mr Ahmadi Senior.
Fitz looked down at his hands and arms where they were tangled in the thicket, but they were not in the thicket at all. Instead they were twisted and wrapped in the light blanket Clare had embroidered for him, covered with wagtails. He was lying in his bed, at home.
Home.
‘What are you most afraid of,’ asked the Riddler. He was sitting by Fitz’s bed.
‘Death.’
‘No,’
