Bella

I'M LYING ON THE MOST comfortable mattress I've ever encountered but I've never felt less like sleeping.

"I have to make you aware that you'll be very close to the woods," the receptionist told me when I phoned to book, after transferring a chunk of my modest savings into my current account. "And there will be construction work during your stay, near those Hutches. But we're offering a substantial discount."

"How much?"

"Fifty percent. But I should also let you know that this particular Hutch will be closest to the noise."

I took a deep breath. "I want it."

It's not the impending construction work: I can deal with that. It's the feel of the woods hemming me in, the trees pressing against the windowpanes as though they're trying to have a good look at everything.

Giving up on sleep, I scroll through Instagram until I find the official account for The Manor. Every image or video has a kind of sunlit haze to it, like it's a dimension slightly more perfect and beautiful than our own. And every gorgeous image of the surroundings—the Georgian main building silhouetted by the setting sun, the light glinting off the pool, the herb garden in full bloom, the woods with the dawn mist rising off them—is interspersed with a photograph or Reel of Francesca Meadows looking equally picturesque: a wicker trug filled with rosemary looped over one arm, bending down in a trailing linen shift to tickle an improbably clean pig behind the ear, picking barefoot through the wildflower meadow like something from a perfume ad. These images, the ones of her, always seem to get the most likes, the most views. I scroll and scroll until my eyes ache. But I can't stop looking.

A sound, outside. I glance up, suddenly alert. The phone slithers onto the floorboards with a clatter. Out there in the dark, coming from the direction of the woods: a low, guttural groan.

And then... nothing. Over in a second. But the silence seems to reverberate. I slide off the bed and grab the robe from its hook, pull it around me. My nerve endings bristle. My eyes, when I glance at myself in the mirror, look wide and scared.

I unlatch the door. The warmth of the air is almost foreign. It's almost completely silent outside, just the faintest hush from the trees as the breeze moves through them. The sky is a deep, velvet, countryside black and the stars seem crazily bright and near, as I've not seen them for many years. The sound is gone. Already it's hard to remember it properly, grasp exactly what I did hear. Or perhaps it didn't come from the woods as I'd thought, but one of the other cabins. Perhaps the loud sex couple are back at it. I don't think so, though. I'd hate to think what sort of sex would produce a noise like that. It sounded like something in pain.

And then something catches at the edge of my vision. Like a trick of the eye at first, like those little silver specks that appear if you stand up too quickly. Little pinpricks of light moving between the trees. The welcome drinks will be long over by now; it can't be that. As my eyes adjust, I see the lights look more like flames, flickering, moving around at head height or perhaps higher.

And now I catch sight of something else. A figure at the very edge of the woods. Possibly wearing some kind of hood. Maybe fifty feet away, just caught by the perimeter lights. Standing so still that if I hadn't looked in exactly the right spot I might not have noticed it. I say "it" because I'm not totally sure that what I'm seeing isn't a trick of the eye. If it is a person it's difficult to tell where they start and the shadows begin—and if it is a person I can't make out a face. I squint into the darkness. I think I see some kind of movement there now. But again it could just be a trick of the wind, the shadows rearranging themselves. Or it could be another guest having a quiet smoke in the night air.

But something is clawing at the edges of memory. Something I don't want to let out of its cage—

I shut the door quickly, then lock it. My heart is thumping in my chest. A ditty playing on repeat in my head. Vaguely following the lines of that old children's song "The Teddy Bears' Picnic," with its warning of creatures meeting in the wood.

Except in the version I learned, there was something much worse than teddy bears lying in wait.