Nush had long since put the soft-top back up on the Beamer. The woods had gobbled up most of the light. With the canopy so thick, it was like driving through perpetual dusk in a land that time forgot. The bloody trees seemed to go on forever. Okay, she wasn’t able to put her foot down, partly because the road was so windy and partly because it was as potholed as a Peruvian mountain pass. Still, would the trees ever end? The undergrowth had also grown thicker and briar-like, tangles of unruly shrubs between trees wearing thick coats of ivy, their boughs furry with moss and mottled with pale lichen. On the bright side, what she was seeing was more of a forest than a woodland, and that would add some potential zeros to the land value if it all belonged to the dishy Lord Lorimer. Even with that lovely thought, she couldn’t help but punctuate each crunch of her suspension with the salty exclamations of a sailor.
‘Bollocks!... Crap!... Son of a—!’
Then finally the road, which had become a dirt track, degenerated into something which would struggle to even be called a trail, and the hole Nush’s little two-seater speed machine tried to traverse was less of a rut in the road and more of a trench. The front bumper gave a loud crack as the car took a minor nosedive which it never managed to pull out of. Her head snapped forward, like one of those stupid nodding dogs on the dashboard of a workman’s van, and the engine stalled.
Instead of swearing, Nush screamed, grabbing fistfuls of her black hair and tousling it into a tangle Medusal snakes.
She slammed the car door, tottered from the over-zealous effort, and fell unceremoniously on her backside when one of her heels impaled the soft ground. Another scream of outrage boiled up and she pulled up fistfuls of the mossy thatch beneath her and threw them at her shoe, the car, the cavernous pothole and the trees. When she was done, her chest heaved up and down.
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She found her composure after a while and delicately moved raven locks of hair from her face, tucking them behind her ears. Picking herself up, Nush retrieved her shoe, ignored the mud around the heel with a determined effort, and approached her car to survey the damage.
It wasn’t pretty. There was no way she was going to be able to back out because the lip of the hole had severely dented the undercarriage, and one of the back wheels was no longer in touch with the ground. She hissed a few expletives, trying the think. The phone was still no bloody use, so she couldn’t call for help. A little more salting the air at that conclusion, and then she noticed how the foliage around her seemed to eat up the sound, suck the swear words right out the air, and for the first time she became truly aware of her surroundings. She was no longer passing through, protected by the metal and plastic amour of her car. She was exposed, in the wild, in the actual-fucking-wild. The temperature was cool, and her skin pimpled, the fine hairs on her arms bristling. Sounds, alien to her, came from all around. They weren’t the noises of the city: no rumbling engines, no sirens, nor the omnipresent electrical hum. No leery builders catcalling, drunks shouting, nor the chatter of coffee shops. These were the sounds of another world entirely. A breeze whispered through the trees, like a scheming ghost. Unseen birds chirped, with their beady little eyes watching from the canopy. From somewhere farther down the rambling trail came a crack. Nush gave a start and spun skittishly to face that direction. Nothing stirred. Were forests like old houses, with rafters and joists like creaking bones?
‘Brilliant, turn the fucking place into a haunted house, why don’t you?’ She rubbed the gooseflesh from her arms and retrieved her purse, stuffed in a half-drunk bottle of water, and slung it over her shoulder. ‘Well, the Yanks love a fucking ghost story, I could use that in the sale. First things first: let’s get the buggering-fuck out of here. How much farther could it be? This is England, not the Blair Witch Project.’
Nush put back her shoulders, lifted her chin, and set forth down the track on foot, picking her way carefully over the lumpy ground, threading between the trees.
‘Michael “tight-buns” Lorimer better be shagging-well grateful when I see him.’
