Already running fast cuts of every slasher movie he’d ever seen through his head, Sam stepped into the secret passageway, following the discordant scream. He and his mum would pull their feet up and move closer together on the sofa whenever the hapless victim decided they needed to go into the basement, attic, dark menacing woods, or wherever the ridiculous bad decision led them, all by themselves. They relished admonishing those plucky teens, those hapless sparks of youth, for their obvious stupidity, while they watched on, disembowelling a bowl of microwavable popcorn. But now it was him, Sam felt the magnetic pull of curiosity numbing his reason, the adrenaline of heavy limbs, a desert in his mouth.

  The narrow passage was a couple of degrees cooler and darker than the cinema room. The steps of polished ash were steep, and the first step gave a little under his step but did not creak. It felt like it should have, but instead it held its tongue.

  Again, that scream, high and ululating and inhuman. Above, daylight cut across a landing, a way out, to the truth, like at the end of Neil Marshall’s classic horror The Descent, and the stairs were the mountain of bones. Sam’s mum would pull him close at that point, “God, I love this ending.” Her smell of Jasmin soap and herbal shampoo mixed with sweet popcorn. Sam climbed; the steps had a bone-dull echo. Daylight drew closer.

  Closer.

  Almost there.

  The scream wailed once more, and Sam understood the misdirection, just like in Neil Marshall’s movie. Or Shutter Island, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club—take your pick, they all used variations on the same narrative ploy. And the hinge of perception was flipped.

  Sam reached the top and stood on the landing and through the door could glimpse the dunes and the sea beyond. It was no scream at all but the cry of gulls. He pulled at the door, expecting it to be locked, but it wasn’t. He’d found the way up to the mezzanine landing. To his left the wide central hall of the beach house stretched out to the front door. The dark, abstract picture loomed above the fireplace, somehow managing to twist and churn but stay still all at once. To his right were bedrooms. He entered the nearest one. The rooms downstairs seemed to be waiting for visitors to return. But this room was different. It belonged to a boy, a teenager, frozen in time, abandoned as it was left, a Marie Celeste of a room. Posters on the walls: Greenday’s American Idiot; Rage Against the Machine’s immolated monk burning in black and white; Oasis’s What’s the Story Morning Glory. Sam knew them all. They were like his mother’s playlist’s on the cassettes they’d feed into the tape deck in Molly Micra, cranking the volume all the way to maximum because the speakers were crap and the engine was loud, but the music was so good—their singing not so much—shouting about wonderous walls or the importance of knowing your enemy.

  Since Sam had been deposited in Michael’s care there had been no evidence of any likeness between them, other than the blood tests and meagre trail left by his mother in her will. They were pieces of paper, as easily lost as found. But in the space of minutes, Sam had seen links, felt them. The movie theatre, the cult movie, the music: invisible threads attaching him to this stranger. Threads which seemed connected to his heart with barbed hooks, tearing holes and tugging out hunks of pulsing flesh without ever letting go. He’d wished he’d picked the other room and pressed on, kept moving to get away from those thoughts.

  Michael’s bedroom had windows half the height of the wall, running the length of the room, flooding it with light. Another door opened onto a balcony. Sam turned the small brass key in the lock. Outside, a cooling breeze from the sea washed him in sweet saltiness. The gulls, three of them floating on thermals, repeated their sirens’ call. Its blue paint blistered with subcutaneous rust. He leant on the thin metal railing and took in the view. It was cinematic.

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  If he was filming it...

  Sam fumbled for the phone in his pocket. He might not have any service, but the camera still worked. He hadn’t filmed anything for how long? Weeks? Months? The urge had returned, maybe because of the boredom or the movie room. Maybe because he needed something to feel normal again. He tried not to think about it too much and switched the camera to video.

  The shot started with his hand on the rail, and he walked as he tracked. Ideally, the shot would sweep from his hands, moving over the grass, cut but not freshly. He walked down to the lawn via the stairs to the right of the balcony. Slowly, the shot tracked, green over green, as the ground began to rise. A dolly carrying the camera, or more likely a drone nowadays, would give a smoother track, but handheld was good enough to mark the shots. The lawn gave way to parallel railway sleepers, sunk into the pebbles to form a path. The ground rose. Sam quickened his stride to increase the speed, hurrying, urgent, pressing, needing to show. To show what? What? What? The reveal. Sam stopped. The camera panned up from the railway sleeper wall at the end of the garden, until it found the sand. An ocean of it, stretching out and out. He wished he had a wide-angle lens, panoramic. Sand dunes topped with grass rolling into one another, on and on, peppered with flotsam, and framed by an eternal blue sky and a sea of sparkling waves.

  He let it roll for a handful of beats. As beautiful and dramatic a sweep as it was, after the shot was established, what could he do but hold it for a while? That was a cut. Sam pressed stop on the recording. There was nowhere else for the shot to go. What else could happen? Gulls wailed. Grass bowed in the breeze. The sea trembled in the distance. So, what? Only the biggest piece of arthouse wank would try to make more out of that than was really there. Sam looked up from his screen and another of his mother’s aphorisms blew through him like the salt breeze watering his eyes: Everyone has a camera now, but no one sees. Come out from behind the screen and really look, then make your lens capture what no one else can perceive.

  So, Sam looked, really looked at the expanse of sand, sky, and sea. What could he perceive? Wisps of sand eddied from the tops of dunes, which rolled, one from the next, leading to the water. It seemed so solid and immovable. And yet not. It was motion, like the painting above the hearth, and Sam then realised this was also the painting’s subject, though on a stormy night, rather than a calm day. The same but different. The dunes were forever shifting, but it was too slow to see with the naked eye. How could he possibly capture such an idea? The paradox hung there before him, unresolvable, his eyes fixing unfocused on that thought in the space that lingers in the middle distance of the mind.

  He felt an urge, as suggestive as a whisper, as quiet as a dream, in the way the sea shimmered with all the glamour of untold riches: sunken treasure, wonders of the deep. Behind a bristled ridge of sand sedge, a dune seemed to undulate. The soft shushing of sand slipping. The dune beside it moved next, sand sliding down its flanks. Time had no meaning here: fast, slow, forward, back, they could all be the same or none of them at all had purchase. The dunes were the moments between the ticking hands of a clock. Neither night nor day, neither land nor sea, neither here nor there. The urge tugged in Sam’s chest to cross the dunes and find the water’s edge, to know that between-place, that neither here nor there. It could only be three, maybe four-hundred metres at most to the water’s edge.

  The next dune moved, a slow ripple across the landscape. Something shifted beneath them, rolling sand from its back. It was out there, the thing he must perceive and yet could not, caught in the nether of unrealised imagination. A gull called to him. A warning? An affirmation? A Siren’s summons?

  The sea beckoned. He raised his foot, lifted it to step over the stout wall of weathered railway sleepers. A fourth dune shrugged, this one closer, as if the sand had noticed and was turning to face him. His foot stepped out, crossing the boundary. The urge was now a yearning, as powerful as a tide. His foot stepped down onto the sand. The soft ground yielding to his touch.

  Coming closer, a fifth dune shifted in quicker succession. The rush of sand louder. He must go to it. A gull hailed him with a peel of madness. Sam began to lift his trailing leg after him over the wall.

  And then, whipping through the hypnotic pull of the dunes, he was seized by a claw-like grip.