I notice he has unbuttoned his shirt a little and catch a glimpse of damp skin and wiry coils of chest hair. He removes his sunglasses and fixes me with a stare.
“Last chance,” he says.
“For what?”
“To back out. There’s a train heading back to Plymouth in an hour. I’ll make your excuses—I can tell them you got sick.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re having second thoughts. Maybe you’re scared but you’re too proud to tell me.”
“Oscar always says it’s not the dead we ought to be afraid of, it’s the living.”
He smiles thoughtfully, extending a hand for me to walk ahead of him.
“Okay, Mina. Okay.”
I’m wary of thecrowd—there is a strange, glimmering energy coming off them—not excitement exactly, but close to it, just beneath the surface. Feverish, maybe. A few heads turn as we approach and a voice floats out of the small mass, “It’s the reporter again, look.” Questions bubble, their voices low and suspicious. They part, but only a little, so we’re forced to squeeze through. An elderly woman in a sun hat and hard white shoes steps forward, one heavily knuckled finger floating up toward me and stabbing me in the chest hard enough to make me stumble backward.
“I see fires on the horizon,” she says, mouth twisting with the words. “They’re burning red!”
A tall man squeezes close to me, his bony hip pressing into my waist.
“Can she find Donald? Ask her to look for him. Please! Ask her.”
“Sam?” I say weakly, as the crowd tightens about me. The tall man presses something into my hand. “Please,” he persists. A boy on a BMX is performing bunny hops down the road, his mouth sliced into a grin. He calls something out, I don’t quite hear it but heads turn toward him and he laughs nastily. The weight of bodies against me is suffocating.
“Sam!” I say again more sharply, feeling a wave of dizziness lift from the base of my skull. I think I can hear Sam’s voice saying “Hey, cut it out,” but it’s overlapped by the press of a body in front of me, musty breath in my face.
“You need to salt the ground,” the man says, towering over me. He must be at least six foot seven, long limbs, stubbled jaw. His eyes protrude from their sockets in a way that show the whites all around. “You need to protect yourselves. Rosemary and hemlock!”
He has a handful of something that he scatters in front of me. I don’t look down, I don’t stop. I push past him and fumble the latch of the little wooden gate. The sun beats down on the tops of our heads like a fiery halo. I can feel my scalp contract with the heat of it. The gate opens and I stumble through it into a yard of scrubby concrete. A potted plant outside the front door is brown and wizened and long dead. Beside it, molten stumps of candles have been left next to a small wreath of bay leaves. There is a teddy bear slumped between them. It reminds me of accident sites, the tributes that appear there. I hear Sam behind me, voice raised as he follows me through the gate and latches it against the press of bodies.
“Behave yourselves! Jesus!”
“You didn’t warn me about this,” I snap, turning away from the rash of faces hovering, open-mouthed and bulbous eyed like a shoal of hungry fish. “Who are these people?”
“I don’t know, Mina. Honestly. They weren’t here last week.”
I look down at what has been placed in my hand. A dog collar of faded green leather. The little brass disc on it readsDonald.Sam is knocking on the front door, flushed with urgency. I risk another glance behind at the people milling by the gate, their glassy eyes fixed at the house. It’s only a small group—a dozen maybe, it barely constitutes a crowd—but that strange aura radiating from them is a voltage slowly increasing. The weight of their expectation makes my skin itch.
The door is opened by a young boy—Billy, it has to be—wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms. No top. His skinny ribs press against pale skin. There is a graze on one of his elbows, another on his chin. He looks from me to Sam and his expression of irritation and annoyance dissolves. He grins, rubbing a hand over his shorn head.
“Sam! My man!”
“That’s right, Billy-boy. Are your parents home?”
“Mum is. Dad’s at work.”
He looks up at me, face twisted in thought.
“This her?”
“This is her, Billy. Can we come in? You’ve got a mob out here.”
Billy runs off yelling and Sam steps aside so I can enter the house first. Indoors it’s gloomy, all the curtains drawn against the prying eyes outside. The hallway smells like the ghosts of cooking; of boiling and roasting and frying, spitting oil, burned fat. Charred skin. Underfoot, the carpet is a sickly yellow color, thin and scuffed.
“Hi. It’s Mina, isn’t it?”