The stool tipped with a hollow wooden thud as Finch lunged.
He didn’t think; animal panic simply overrode the cold stiffness in his joints. His shoulder slammed against the scullery door, the latch giving way under his weight with a sharp splinter of pine. He shoved past Bethan before she could bring the crowbar around, his arm brushing the wet, cold grease of her yellow oilskin.
He hit the back garden path at a full sprint.
The cold air tore into his lungs like ground glass. The mist was an impenetrable wall of white soup, blurring the outlines of the gooseberry bushes into spidery silhouettes. His city shoes found no purchase on the gravel. He swung wildly around the corner of the cottage toward the wicket gate, his chest heaving, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Just five yards to the road. If he reached the tarmac—
His left foot struck a hidden ridge of wet limestone buried under dead nettles. The sole of his town shoe sheared sideways in the slick Shropshire clay, and his legs flew out from beneath him.
He hit the earth hard, the breath driven out of him in a ragged, muddy gasp. Cold slurry surged up over his wrists, into the cuffs of his shirt, plastering his cheek to the grit of the path. Dazed, spitting bitter grit and rotting leaves, he clawed his fingers into the mud and tried to push himself up.
A pair of boots stood directly in front of his face.
They hadn’t moved; they had been standing there all along, rooted in the weeds at the garden verge.
They were massive, ancient working boots of cracked, blackened leather, studded with square-headed iron hobnails that had oxidized into rusty crusts. Above them hung trousers of coarse, sodden wool, stiffened by decades of dried lime and bog-iron, tied tightly around the shins with frayed lengths of hairy orange baling twine.
Finch’s gaze traveled slowly upward through the mist.
In the gap between the tattered hem of the wool and the cracked leather collars of the boots, where a man’s wool socks and pale ankles ought to have been, there was no flesh.
The limbs were grey, ridged, and hairless, banded like the segments of a petrified blindworm, the texture identical to the slick, calcified roots Bethan had laid out on the greaseproof paper. They flexed with a wet, wooden creak, gripping the inside of the leather like living timber shifting in a cellar.
Above the twine, the figure loomed vast and motionless in the fog, devoid of a human silhouette.
A shadow fell over Finch’s face, cold and heavy as a churchyard slab.
Then all became dark.