Page 67 of The Memory Wood

The words slip out before she can call them back.You don’t speak until you’re told. Say you understand.Anxious not to provoke him further, she scrabbles up, supporting her manacle with her good hand.

He comes at her then, a monster in the dark. She can’t suppress a scream, and when it rings off the cell walls he grabs her by the neck and shoves her in front of him.

‘Please,’ she moans. ‘Oh, please, don’t.’

‘Enough,’ he hisses. ‘Do as you’re told and move.’

Elissa stumbles forwards. It’s only when she passes beyond the perimeter of her chain that she realizes he’s unlocked it. She’s free, and yet she’s not; the loose end doesn’t drag on the floor, which means the ghoul must be holding it.

When he scoops up his torch, light bevels around her. Shadows lengthen and swing. Three more steps and she’s through the open door.

In her terror, Elissa can hardly breathe. Nor can she make any sense of the half-glimpsed shapes that bow out of the gloom.He’s going to kill me, she thinks, convinced beyond doubt.This could be my last living minute.

Her breath is a whistle in her throat. Her family is so far away.

Stone steps in front, pressure behind. Elissa struggles up.

So much time she’d thought she had before her. So many years unlived.

The ghoul shoves her again, harder this time. In response she climbs faster, hurrying towards her fate.

Keep good thoughts in her head. Thoughts of family, of love and laughter. But her mind is racing so fast she can’t fill it. In her panic, she bites her tongue. The pain is glass inside her mouth.

The ghoul’s torch illuminates a switchback. Elissa leans around it.

‘Up,’ he hisses. ‘Up, up.’

In an instant she’s back in her mum’s Fiesta, parked outside Wide Boys. Lena Mirzoyan is saying something – just a throwaway line, but it’s soaked in love, steeped in it; and then the scene falls away and she’s back on the staircase, emerging into a squalid room that might have been a kitchen long ago. That she’ll spend her last moments separated from those she cares most about, with no one to hold her hand, is the worst of all fates.

It’s light outside, an afternoon grey. After so long imprisoned in darkness, Elissa’s senses are overcome. Her muscles burn with the effort of walking. Her feet trip over floorboards warped by damp.

Ahead, a corridor of sloping shadows. Here, the air’s even colder. It presses at her shoulders, her face. ‘Please,’ she whispers. ‘I did what you said. I did.’

The ghoul is behind her. She could glance back and look at him, but she’s too scared to do that, too scared to consider what it’ll mean if he lets her. Even now, she can’t abandon hope.

All at once she’s outside, her shoes sinking into soft mulch. Around her, dripping trees point towards an overcast sky.

The Memory Wood, she thinks.

It’s so beautiful. The whole world is beautiful. Tears prick her eyes.

Then she sees the white van, parked to her left, and its sticker: a trilby-wearing skull smoking a cigarette.

CHILLAX.

The van doors are open. When the ghoul shoves her she bangs her knees against the bumper.

Suicidal to climb in, but what choice does she have? Shecan’t fight. Her muscles are so slack she can’t even run. Somehow, she lifts her right knee, swinging it on to the cargo bed. The ghoul grabs her other leg and flips her.

Elissa tumbles over, unable to protect her wrist. The pain is a white-hot scream. Her stomach clenches and she vomits, a liquid gush. Behind her, the ghoul leaps into the van.

Elissa blinks, but her eyes aren’t working. She smells something odd, recalls a vague memory of flowers. There’s something wet against her lips, and suddenly she’s so scared that she just wants this to end, and quickly.

How many more seconds of life?

How many?

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ she whispers.

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