For several minutes after Frek’s departure, Mig sat, staring sightlessly at the river’s sparkling surface. He felt unhappy, he felt frustrated, above all he felt foolish.

He had observed the cycle of desire and rejection often enough during his school and university days, and sometimes when he wasn’t too busy struggling to subdue his own body, he had felt rather smugly that an intelligent observer probably knew more about the game than many players.

Wrong! And the result? Here he was, a twenty-seven-yearold adolescent, feeling sorry for himself!

To divert his mind from these painful speculations, he opened the Illthwaite Guide and read again the passage describing the fate of the waif boy.

It was an ill-judged attempt at diversion. Emotional and sexual frustration was a mere cat’s-paw compared to the tempest stirred up by the measured terms of the Reverend Peter K. He felt again what he had felt that first night as he approached the Stranger House – the mist swirling around his head; the fear coating his tongue; the desperate pumping of his lungs inflating the chambers of his heart to bursting point.

He leapt up to escape it, but he bore it with him. And when he reached the fork in the path which led to Foulgate Farm, his feet seemed to turn uphill of their own accord.

But the ghost of an experience four hundred years old could not serve to strengthen living limbs, and certainly not to lend grip to a pair of casual shoes which were fine for a gentle stroll but ill suited to this increasingly rough and rugged track.

Soon he was back wholly in the world of here and now. His bad leg was aching and he was breathing so hard it must have sounded like the approach of a traction engine to the inmates of Foulgate.

The Gowders certainly looked as if they’d anticipated his coming, he thought with a shiver. They were standing in their cobbled farmyard, one holding a plane in his hands, the other a bradawl. Between them on a trestle lay a half-assembled coffin.

This, he thought with a shock of recognition like a blow, this was the house in which that other Miguel had fought with Thomas Gowder. There was the barn in which he had first lain with Jenny Gowder. Across these cobbles and up that track ahead he must have fled, almost naked, from the fury of the younger brother.

And these two men standing looking at him with eyes that were neither surprised nor welcoming, these were the descendants of that Andrew who had driven the wooden spites into Miguel’s hands and feet, and left him hanging from the blasted oak tree.

One of them spoke.

Laal, he thought, recalling what Sam had said about identifying them.

“Can we help you, mister?”

“I’m going to Mecklin Moss,” he said.

“Then you’re going right,” said the other. Who must therefore also be Laal.

It was very confusing. It was hard enough separating the living from the dead without the separation of the living from the living being a problem too.

He made his way carefully around them and out of the other end of the yard. He was sure they would stand and watch him out of sight, but after only a couple of steps he heard the rasp of the plane.

Their indifference felt more of a trouble than their interest.

The track here was wider and rutted by wheels. It wove upward through tummocky drumlins, and soon the buildings of the farm were out of sight.

Beyond the drumlins this main track began to bear to the left, following the contour of the fell. Eventually it must curve downhill and become Stanebank and descend to the Hall. But at the highest point of the curve, his feet chose a narrower path, scarce more than a sheep-trod, which led straight on.

He knew with a certainty beyond need of proof that this was the way his young terrified ancestor had fled.

The main track had been worn to the visible bedrock but now, as the ground leveled off into a relatively flat expanse of moorland, he felt the path beneath his feet become increasingly soft and damp, as though here the earth’s bones lay too deep to reach. Yet strewn across this marshy moorland were huge boulders, deposited there by God knows what glacial drift or subterranean tremor.

He paused to examine two massive slabs, or perhaps the halves of one even vaster rock, leaning drunkenly against each other to form a lofty tent. The dark recess looked uninviting now, but in a storm with no other choice it must look almost welcoming. That someone had found it so was suggested by a circle of scorched earth at its mouth. Fire, the fourth element, which might help a man survive the perils of the other three, when earth became treacherous and air surged with invisible violence. As for water, no longer content simply to seep up around his shoes, it now gleamed darkly in sinister pools amidst the coarse grass, and soon he found even apparently solid patches of bright green turf dissolving beneath his feet to sink him deep in clinging mud.

He glanced at the sketch map in the Guide. While not detailed enough for precise navigation, it confirmed that he was on the edge of Mecklin Moss. Mecklin Shaw must be somewhere over to his left. Or rather, must have been. Even in the Reverend Peter K.’s day, it had almost disappeared. Now, a century on, what could remain? But to that other Miguel, as he glimpsed the darkness of the trees swaying against the lighter darkness of the sky, it must have looked to offer some slight hope of refuge.

Ahead, now as then, there seemed nothing but the certainty of getting irretrievably bogged down in the space of a couple of dozen meters.

His thoughts turned to Sam Flood’s namesake who had drowned himself up here in the Moss. Self-destruction, a fearful choice for any man, for a priest far worse. And what a place to choose! No simple plunge into deep drowning waters was on offer here, but a long struggle out through quag and bog till at last the mud held you fast and you must prostrate yourself as though in worship to bring the longed-for end.

He shuddered and said an intercessory prayer for the poor lost soul. A man who by all accounts was informed by an overwhelming desire to do good.

Much good it did him.

A bitter tribute to futility.

He arrived at the place where the wood must have been.

All traces of it had vanished, at least on the surface. Perhaps deep below there still lay ancient roots. But for too long now there had been no thirsty trees and, left undrained, inevitably the ground had been taken over by the relentless slough. He had no way of knowing for certain this was the right location. So far he had experienced nothing more up here than the natural reaction of any sensitive being to such a dreary place.

It could be that, having brought him so close to the end of his voyage of discovery, his otherworld guides were leaving him to his own devices. If so, he should feel glad. They had often been uncomfortable traveling companions, and dealing with this world on this world’s terms looked likely to present enough problems to occupy him fully.

But no man who has for so long felt different is ever completely grateful to lose the feeling.

He turned his back on the Moss. Another thin trod ran away downhill to rejoin the curve of Stanebank. It was in this direction that the other Miguel, bleeding and lame, must have staggered after Jenny Gowder had released him. Knowing what her own fate must be were she caught in his company, she had not dared to help him further, yet what she had already done was an act of great courage.

And so the injured youth had limped and crawled downhill till he was too weak to move further, then lain exposed to the savagery of the elements till by the grace of God the young Woollass had chanced upon him.

He had much to thank the Woollasses for, thought Mig. It had been that sense of obligation, as well as his sense of desire, that had made him unburden himself so comprehensively to Frek. Now it was up to them.