Bella

GRADUALLY THE PATH DWINDLES TO a thin ribbon, then little more than an animal track. The painted signs disappear. I'm in the right place. Headed for the heart of the woods.

I actually shiver: for the first time today, I feel like I could do with a sweater. I can't hear the sound of the sea here, or any noise from the hotel. Nothing but the muttering of leaves in the breeze, the occasional secret scurrying of some small, hidden animal. The rest of the world feels a very long way away. But then, I'd known it would be like this.

The diary in my bag bumps against my leg. I pass huge trunks spotted with lichen, standing on ancient, moss-covered feet. I pass twisted yews, dark and witchy with their moldering churchyard smell. Whispering beeches. A couple of monkey puzzles planted by some eccentric ancestor, with their freakish, swaying branches. All about me I can hear a shivering, chittering sound as though the woods are delighted—excited, even—to have a human trespassing so deep in their midst. The scents are of pine and months-old leaf mulch and the occasional rancid stench where some animal has expired in the undergrowth. Unmistakable, scorching the nostrils. We know the smell of death on instinct.

At last I see it: the Wishbone, she called it. The dead tree looms pale in front of me: two bone-white, forked branches, leafless and stark.

The knot of dread presses harder.

Shadows swim and shiver at the edge of my vision. The path has become more and more overgrown, I'm not sure I'm even following it anymore. The trees crowd even closer. The air is cooler still, denser. I think I catch the crack of a twig somewhere up ahead and am suddenly on high alert. I stop and listen, but all I can hear is my own breathing.

Just when I think I'm truly lost I see it: a twisted old tree, the rough bark studded all over with strange knots and whorls. I stop and shine the beam of my torch at it. The whirls are almond shapes, the knots within them round and plugged. They look uncannily like eyes; it's hard to believe from a distance they haven't been scored into the bark until you get closer and see it's definitely the hand of nature. Hundreds of them, staring out in different directions.

The tree with a hundred eyes.

It's just as haunted-looking as I remember. And there: the strange dark hollow in the trunk. I peer forward to look, then freeze. I definitely just heard something moving behind me. An animal? No: it sounded heavier, clumsier than that. I'm hardly breathing, my pulse in my throat.

Am I really about to come face to face with her for the first time in years? My whole body is electric with adrenaline. And with fear. Of course with fear. I know what she's capable of, after all.