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By Root 553 0

and then, where it leveled again, braked. He hadn’t noticed the knot of trees and the tangled hedge on his way up the hill. He’d been concentrating on the climb, and besides, he hadn’t known at the time that something so ordinary was about to become an unusual feature of the landscape. Now he saw that the disorderly hedge had overgrown a line of bent and rusty railing and that the gap in it contained a wrought-iron gate hanging aslant from a single hinge. Something — curiosity, luck, instinct — made him wheel the bike over to it. A rectangular slat of wood lay in the grass under the drunken gate. He picked it up and turned it over. A word had been carved into it, long ago. Clem cleaned the dirt away with the edge of his palm. The first five letters jolted him: Frank. Then: lins. Franklins. He heard the sound of a car and dropped the sign and shoved the bike through the gateway. He crouched behind the hedge. The car passed. He stood up, wondering why he had needed not to be seen.

The trees nearest him were youngish sycamores. Trees that grew like weeds if you let them. They’d colonized what might once upon a time have been a lawn. He was standing on what might once upon a time have been a path or drive. He left the bike where it was and followed the path, here and there turning sideways to shoulder through branch and bracken.

He almost stumbled into the pit where the house had once stood: its cellar, he supposed. Three sides of it marked by the low remains of walls, a gable wall higher than the others, all now gripped and pierced by tree roots and sprouting fern. The overgrown path continued past the ruin, and Clem pushed along it, arriving at last at the rear of a mossy redbrick building that looked pretty much intact. He walked around its corner and stopped dead, confounded.

He found himself standing on a low peninsula of wilderness that protruded into the vast ocean of stubble. Its edge was defined by a stand of tall and ancient Scots pines, their trunks all reddish, peeling scales. He stood in the mottled shadow of the trees and gazed out. Everything ahead of him and around him looked scalped and baked, but now this did not dismay him. Because he was looking down on Bratton Manor. It was closer than he’d thought it would be. He could make out the stubs of its chimneys, part of its walled courtyard, the drive curving away between the chestnuts. He couldn’t resist the desire to cup his hands around his mouth and call her name. The word disappeared, echoless, into the enormous sky.

Clem turned away and looked at the brick barn behind him. It was quite large, about forty feet long and twelve high. It had no doors, just a wide opening with a weathered timber frame. Above that, a slumping oak lintel under a roof of skewed slates. The only window, a small shuttered aperture, high up, to the right of the door.

Inside, it took several moments for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. It was not entirely dark; sharply defined shafts of light tilted down from where slates were missing. He stood still until he could make out the obstacles on the leaf-strewn floor: a bundle of fence stakes wrapped in barbed wire, a heap of moldering sacks, an upended wooden thing like a child’s crudely carpentered bed. Close to the back wall, a rough narrow board rose up. A banister, of sorts, beside a flight of steps. He looked up. The building had a second floor. Or rather half of a second floor: a hayloft supported by heavy wooden beams that spanned the building. The steps were narrow, no wider than the rungs of a ladder. He tested each tread with his foot before trusting it with his weight. They all gave and groaned, but did not break.

At the top, the darkness was more intense. On the far side of the loft, there were four thin lines of light, forming a square. It took Clem several moments to work out that this was the shuttered window he’d seen from outside. He made his way toward it on his hands and knees, slowly, horribly afraid of the floor giving way, of falling into darkness among its wreckage. His hands encountered dry leaves, straw,