Prologue

She’s dead! She’s not coming back, okay?

It was dark and foggy. Dustin was sitting on a bench, unable to see more than three feet in front of him, as he used the last of his energy to yell at the slender figure in front of him.

How can she be dead? What’s happened to her, Dustin? Where’s she gone? Seventeen-year-old girls don’t just disappear without a trace. Her Instagram hasn’t been updated since the start of the summer, she’s stopped posting Snapchat stories, and the last person I know she spent any time with is you.

Listen, dude. I loved her. She was my best friend. And now all I’ve got left is a sodding hair band and a bunch of useless photos!

As he spoke, he threw the bag containing the photographs and hairband toward the figure. Dustin looked up but could barely see his assailant through all of the fog. If you’d just happened upon this scene, you’d never guess that it was the middle of the summer holidays—it looked more like the setting for a Christmas card.

Don’t throw your shit at me! You talk like you knew she was going somewhere. How can you expect me to believe a word you say when you won’t tell me where she is or what’s happened to her?

The voice of Dustin’s antagonist seemed oddly disembodied as a result of the thick white haze, making the anger and frustration in it seem somehow more threatening. Dustin began to sob, overwhelmed with the emotion of the situation.

I can’t tell you any of it. I made a promise, one that I have to keep. You have to trust me. This is so damn hard for me.

"Hard for you? Someone’s dead, Dustin, or at the very least missing. Trust you?! I’m not convinced that you weren’t the one to make it happen!"

Piss off. Dustin said, standing up and storming towards the fog-covered figure. Get the hell out of my life.

He stormed forward and pushed the mysterious person to the ground. Shaking with rage and anger, with tears running down his face, he began to run through the fog until he found a familiar footpath. He stopped to catch his breath and, leaning against a tree, began to sob to himself once again. Pulling his phone out of his pocket, he realised with a start how late it was.

Damn, I was meant to be home hours ago.

He unlocked his phone and opened the photos app. There, in his favourites, were several photos of him and Emma that he took a few weeks previously. Dropping his phone to the ground, he put his head in his hands and began weeping heavier, until eventually his whole body was shaking.

I love you, Emma. What am I meant to do now?

One

Broken Night

Aaron awoke with a start. It was still dark, and a cool breeze washed over him from the open window next to his bed. He ran his hands through his hair— his forehead was clammy, and he noticed with annoyance that he had sweated through his bedsheets again.

He hated summer. Always had. Far too hot, far too humid, and never enough unbroken sleep. Bad dreams always seemed to find him in this weather, although come rain or shine they’d been increasing in frequency since the start of the year. They were often along a recurring theme, not that he could really remember much more than that once he’d woken up.

Looking over at the window, he found himself musing on the nature of dreams and reality, you know, the kind of heavy thoughts that one has at 3am. He remembered something his dad had told him at his twelfth birthday party, just three weeks before he was killed in an accident involving a drunk driver and an articulated lorry:

Nothing makes you think as deeply as teenage hormones do. You’re about to think that you understand the universe all of a sudden, that you know the world inside out in a way that you just don’t think adults do. Trust me, you’ll realise it’s all a load of crap soon enough.

It was one of the few things his dad had ever told him that he looked back on without much fondness. Surely not all of his current thoughts and theories were the result of meaningless hormone-induced teenage bollocks? Without lifting it from the still-wet pillow, he turned his head toward the open window and looked out into the night.

The moon was full and illuminated the land around the house. No front garden, no back garden, just land and trees. He could see ground fog in the distance, the result of the hot late-summer weather interacting with one of the nearby lakes, but once his gaze broke the tops of the trees it was a beautifully clear night. On a night like this you could see the stars in all their glory, and even a bit of the Milky Way. He used to spend hours at this window as a younger child, looking up at the night sky and dreaming of traveling to distant worlds. This window inspired his love of physics, his love of science, and fuelled a lifelong obsession with science fiction that so few of his friends shared.

Funny, he thought. The window was as much a metaphor as it was a reality. It had allowed him to see into his dreams and figure out what he wanted to do, what he wanted to be. Was this the kind of deep and meaningful rubbish that his dad was talking about?

Aaron sighed. This was no good, all he was doing was laying here stewing over whether he could trust his own thoughts or not. Annoyed and weary, he closed his eyes and pressed his head further back into the sodden pillow. Shifting his head around to find a spot that was a little less drenched, he quickly and quietly drifted back off to sleep.

* * *

All around was fog. Eerie, glowing fog—like there was something just out of Aaron’s sight that was glowing, burning bright. He sat on some kind of bench, alone, and yet voices—people chattering—filled the air around him.

Every now and then he could make out the odd word or sentence— Help me!, or Where am I? seemed to resound most often. Aaron stood up and turned his whole body around, desperate to see who the voices belonged to or where they came from, but he couldn’t work out which direction the sounds coming from or see anyone - or anything - in this dense cloud of mist.

He sat back down on the cold, hard bench and gazed up into the all-encompassing fog. Where was he? Was he dying? Or dead? He tried to steady his breathing and focus. He’d been here before. He recognised the place, in spite of there being no familiar features. He felt oddly at home here, in this dense formation of cloud.

Suddenly something flapped in front of his vision. Was that a bird? No, it couldn’t have been. It didn't feel like a bird, there were no cries or feathers, no wings or claws. Aaron waited. Counted. Five, four, three, two, one… there! There it was again! Something dark, like a slight shadow in the fog, swooping around in front of him.

Aaron sunk further down on the bench, letting the fog envelop him. Another shadow. Two, three, four of them. Was it his imagination, or was their swooping getting more frequent, too? The voices seem to get louder as the shadows approached. Help me, one cried. Murderer! yelled another. Where was he?

The bench on which he was sat felt solid. Hard, cold, but definitely intact—the only tangible thing in this place, it seemed. He ran his hands over it, feeling out from his shivering body. Smooth. Empty. Cold.

Another swoop. And another. The voices seemed to be getting louder and louder, and before Aaron knew it, they had turned from muted statements into screaming cries for help. The shadows were swooping ever closer and more frequent and in spite of their lack of wings or physical form, they were whipping the air around Aaron into a frenzy. The fog seemed somehow denser, the lights more intense, and the chill in the air altogether more biting.

Pressure started to build up in his skull. At first it felt like a run-of-the-mill headache, but with each passing second it seemed to grow ever more intense.

More swooping. More screaming. More pain.

The pressure in Aaron’s head grew more intense, and it felt like his skull was trapped in a vice. Seconds passed slowly as the pain burned hotter, and the voices in his ear perforated his ear drums. Suddenly the intensity of it all reached a threshold and the floodgates opened. Aaron found himself involuntarily screaming out in agony, trying to release the pressure that was slowly destroying his cerebellum.

He clutched his head and rolled around on the bench trying to find some kind of relief. The pain was intense, like nothing he had experienced before in his life. It was all-consuming, overpowering, so much so that he even started pleading with the shadows: This pain… please… help me! I can’t… I can’t think…

In the distance a new sound, like a truck reversing, started to cut through the screams. It grew louder, and Aaron finally couldn’t take the pain anymore. He curled up his fingers, grasping firmly at the edge of the bench on which he was sat, breathed in as hard as he could, and let out the most guttural, blood-curdling scream he knew how.

* * *

Sitting up suddenly in bed, still screaming with all of his might, Aaron opened his eyes. Gone were the shadows and fog, replaced instead by the familiar surroundings of his bedroom. The voices of despair and pain were suddenly replaced with birdsong floating playfully through the open window, and the buzzing noise that seemed to split his skull seconds earlier was in fact coming gently out of the alarm clock nestled between two books to his left.

These dreams are going to kill me he said aloud to no-one, as he swung his legs out of bed and surveyed the world around him. His brain was buzzing, but the softness of the carpet beneath his feet felt oddly reassuring. It’s okay, I’m safe he said to himself reassuringly. And I’m guessing Mum’s already gone out or she’d have stormed in here wondering what the screaming was all about.

Standing up unsteadily, Aaron lumbered over to the chair he kept in the corner of his room. It had become a bad habit of his to throw his clothes on there at night and, if they passed the smell test, putting them straight back on the next morning. He picked up a plain black t-shirt from the chair and sniffed it gently. Nodding to himself, he threw it on over his still-wet forehead and stood facing the full-length mirror to his left.

Okay, he said, looking at his tired reflection and smoothing his hair out slightly.

Let’s see what today brings.

Two

Concrete Jungle

The ride into town was always a pain. No matter how many times Aaron cycled these tracks, it always seemed needlessly complicated and far too long a distance. He cursed under his breath at the fact that he lived so far away from civilisation as he pushed down once again on the pedal of his worn-out bicycle.

Looking around him, he could appreciate the appeal of the natural beauty of the place—woodland and trees, shrubs, birds. It was rare to find a place like this in such a scummy town. But here he was, cycling through a veritable paradise in the hazy evening light, on his way to the small grimy shopping district that Meriville had to offer.

He thought back to the note that he hastily shoved into his pocket before leaving the house, keen to actually get to the shop after a lazy few hours spent watching stuff on Netflix. Kleine, it read, Out at a committee meeting. Any chance you could pick up a few bits for us? Mama x

There was a list attached with a few items on it, from the mundane stuff like milk and bread to the frankly disturbing, like butternut squash. What even is it? Aaron asked himself as he cycled. It’s just bad tasting orange mush. Weirdest. Vegetable. Ever.

He hated when his mother called him Kleine, either out loud or on paper, and yet she insisted on doing so at every available opportunity. Who wants a German pet name that translates into English as little one? It was cute-but-embarrassing when he was five, and over the years it had become far less of the former and far more of the latter. At least ninety per cent of the world around him had no idea what it actually meant thanks to their relevant ignorance of German language. One of the many cool things about having a foreign parent, he thought.

At seventeen years of age, Aaron Grayling stood tall at 178 centimetres. While acne had not been kind to him as a younger teenager, his face these days was round and slim, with a vague hint of fluff about it. Forever grateful that he couldn’t grow a beard, Aaron found himself too lazy to clear away the soft fuzz that inhabited the sides of his face particularly often, giving his features a soft, almost peach-like appearance.

In spite of the fact that he cycled everywhere he could, he seemed to completely lack muscle definition. His clothes just kind of hung off his gaunt, skinny frame to the point where, in spite of his relative tallness, he usually had to buy t-shirts about four sizes smaller than his peers. For Aaron, looking like a skeleton was very much for life, not just for Halloween.

He slowed his bike to a halt and stopped in the middle of the dirt track that led through the woodlands from his house to the town. He had pains in his knees which his doctor assured him were just ‘growing pains’ that would stop eventually, but he’d at least hoped that as he neared adulthood they’d ease off even tiny bit.

Aaron desperately needed to stretch a little before he carried on with the journey. Massaging his Lycra-clad knee, he surveyed the scene in front of him. The woods had always felt lonely and derelict. There were a few old huts and buildings here and there, mostly now reclaimed by nature. It had been several decades since the railway line and station to which they used to belong had closed, leaving behind a trail of decaying industry. Aside from the huts, ruins, and the track that was heavily trodden into the ground, all Aaron could see around him were trees.

He continued to rub his knee, which still felt like it wanted to break itself in half. He wished he’d stop growing already—one of the main reasons he had started wearing his cycling gear for every trip into town was because half his clothes were too tight to be comfortable whilst riding, and while it was fine on a warm day like today, the nights were already getting shorter and things would start getting cold again soon. Nobody wants to be cycling whilst freezing in a thin layer of Lycra.

Right he said out loud, as if to clear the bad memory from his head, back to it.

The path beneath Aaron’s wheels slowly turned from compacted earth to concrete, the trees started to thin, and more signs of life were visible as he sped along on his bicycle. He instinctively tightened his shoulders as he navigated through the terrain - the change from the vibrant green of summer foliage to the dull, raging grey of a town suffering from severe neglect was jarring to say the least.

Meriville wasn’t a huge town, but it was far too big to be a village and far too small to be a city. Nestled in woodland just off the M6 motorway, its population of around fifty thousand people tended to be either commuters looking for somewhere quiet outside of the city, or people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere interesting. Aaron’s family fell into the former category once, but that was a long time ago. Now he and his mum were very firmly in the latter, stuck in a fix-it-up house that they couldn’t afford to fix, and that nobody would buy if they tried to sell it.

The trees thinned out