Trigger Warning

‘You’re Mr American,’ said a woman’s voice from behind him. He turned. She had short dark hair and was wearing the same olive-green sweater she had been wearing in the pub.

‘I guess I am,’ he said.

‘Local gossip says that you are helping out while Ollie’s under the weather.’

‘That was fast.’

‘Local gossip travels faster than light. I’m Cassie Burglass.’

‘Shadow Moon.’

‘Good name,’ she said. ‘Gives me chills.’ She smiled. ‘If you’re still rambling while you’re here, I suggest you check out the hill just past the village. Follow the track up until it forks, and then go left. It takes you up Wod’s Hill. Spectacular views. Public right of way. Just keep going left and up, you can’t miss it.’

She smiled at him. Perhaps she was just being friendly to a stranger.

‘I’m not surprised you’re still here though,’ Cassie continued. ‘It’s hard to leave this place once it gets its claws into you.’ She smiled again, a warm smile, and she looked directly into his eyes, as if trying to make up her mind. ‘I think Mrs Patel has your prescriptions ready. Nice talking to you, Mr American.’

IV The Kiss

Shadow helped Moira. He walked down to the village shop and bought the items on her shopping list while she stayed in the house, writing at the kitchen table or hovering in the hallway outside the bedroom door. Moira barely talked. He ran errands in the white Range Rover, and saw Oliver mostly in the hall, shuffling to the bathroom and back. The man did not speak to him.

Everything was quiet in the house: Shadow imagined the black dog squatting on the roof, cutting out all sunlight, all emotion, all feeling and truth. Something had turned down the volume in that house, pushed all the colours into black and white. He wished he was somewhere else, but could not run out on them. He sat on his bed, and stared out of the window at the rain puddling its way down the windowpane, and felt the seconds of his life counting off, never to come back.

It had been wet and cold, but on the third day the sun came out. The world did not warm up, but Shadow tried to pull himself out of the grey haze, and decided to see some of the local sights. He walked to the next village, through fields, up paths and along the side of a long drystone wall. There was a bridge over a narrow stream that was little more than a plank, and Shadow jumped the water in one easy bound. Up the hill: there were trees, oak and hawthorn, sycamore and beech at the bottom of the hill, and then the trees became sparser. He followed the winding trail, sometimes obvious, sometimes not, until he reached a natural resting place, like a tiny meadow, high on the hill, and there he turned away from the hill and saw the valleys and the peaks arranged all about him in greens and greys like illustrations from a children’s book.

He was not alone up there. A woman with short dark hair was sitting and sketching on the hill’s side, perched comfortably on a grey boulder. There was a tree behind her, which acted as a windbreak. She wore a green sweater and blue jeans, and he recognised Cassie Burglass before he saw her face.

As he got close, she turned. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, holding her sketchbook up for his inspection. It was an assured pencil drawing of the hillside.

‘You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?’

‘I dabble,’ she said.

Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National Gallery or Tate Modern.

‘You must be cold,’ he said. ‘You’re only wearing a sweater.’

‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘But, up here, I’m used to it. It doesn’t really bother me. How’s Ollie doing?’

‘He’s still under the weather,’ Shadow told her.

‘Poor old sod,’ she said, looking from her paper to the hillside and back. ‘It’s hard for me to feel properly sorry for him, though.’

‘Why’s that? Did he bore you to death with interesting facts?’

She laughed, a small huff of air at the back of her throat. ‘You really ought to listen to more village gossip. When Ollie and Moira met, they were both with other people.’

‘I know that. They told me that.’ Shadow thought a moment. ‘So he was with you first?’

‘No. She was. We’d been together since college.’ There was a pause. She shaded something, her pencil scraping the paper. ‘Are you going to try and kiss me?’ she asked.

‘I, uh. I, um,’ he said. Then, honestly, ‘It hadn’t occurred to me.’

‘Well,’ she said, turning to smile at him, ‘it bloody well should. I mean, I asked you up here, and you came, up to Wod’s Hill, just to see me.’ She went back to the paper and the drawing of the hill. ‘They say there’s dark doings been done on this hill. Dirty dark doings. And I was thinking of doing something dirty myself. To Moira’s lodger.’

‘Is this some kind of revenge plot?’

‘It’s not an anything plot. I just like you. And there’s no one around here who wants me any longer. Not as a woman.’