Sam touched the bark of the giant tree. It was stone the colour of ashes, hard and unyielding. Lying on its side, the tree was more like a fallen skyscraper from an ancient and unknowable civilisation. The end of Planet of the Apes was the obvious cinematic comparison. Where there had once been branches, jagged nubs jutted out. It stretched for hundreds of metres in either direction. Sam wondered if it was possible that there had ever been such a tree? Maybe in the time of the dinosaurs, he thought. Or Kevin Connor’s The Land That Time Forgot. When Sam looked up, no stop-motion pterosaurs circled overhead. Instead, the dirty clouds pulsed with electricity, and thunder broke a second later. Ominous sound and light effects.

  How many castles had he stood at the foot of with his mum? Jabba the Hut’s palace. Lucas’s muse, Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress. Coppola’s castle in his campy Dracula. Mostly dead Westley with Fezzik and I?igo Montoya about to sneak into Prince Humperdink’s keep.

  But Tara wasn’t here. She never would be. They weren’t on their lumpy sofa wrapped in a throw, hunkered down in fantasies while the rain thrummed against their flat’s windows. Somehow, Sam had fallen through the screen and into a real fairy tale.

  There came a sharp report that echoed. Sam and Tink froze, exchanged a look, and turned in the direction of the sound. It came again. They both took a hesitant step in retreat. Some fifty yards away a small ball of fur was spat out of the side of the tree. A white and tan terrier skidded immediately to a halt in a puff of sand. Its head spun around to them. The terrier considered them, assessed whether they were friend of foe, before—eyes bright, tail wagging—it sprinted for them.

  They crouched and met the dog as it leapt up at them, yapping with excitement.

  ‘Shh, boy,’ Sam said, trying to calm him, but unable not to grin. The dog licked his face and hands, a wriggling bundle of muscle.

  Tink inspected the tag on his collar. ‘Eddie. He looks like Agatha Whishaw’s dog.’

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ Sam petted him. Eddie was beginning to calm down, though his tail wouldn’t stop sweeping the sand back and forth under his backside.

  Tink let the name tag go. ‘Same as us, I guess. He was always running off. Regular escape artist. He must have been hiding, poor fella.’ She rubbed Eddie behind the ear, who accepted the gesture with a princely lift of his chin, eyes narrowing in contentment. ‘So, that means there’s a way in.’

  Sam didn’t need any persuading. The great wyrm Sugnar hadn’t followed them into the tall grass, but that sure as hell didn’t mean Sam wanted to hang around to see if it would come back. Eddie came with them, the dog running ahead, then darting back, circling around their heels, and repeating.

  The opening was a horizontal crack in the trunk’s bark, swamped with sand. The entrance tapered at its ends, but the middle was high enough for them to crouch and hobble inside. Eddie shot ahead, barking as if hailing them to follow. Tink was ahead, bent over, her slender legs covered in grime and denim shorts in Sam’s face.

  She turned to check he was following. ‘You looking at my bum?’

  ‘N-no. I was—’

  She laughed. ‘I’m taking the piss, stupid. It’s not as if you can look at much else. Bit cramped, int’ it?’

  Sam was glad the gloom hid his blushes. ‘Should we stop here, rest a bit?’ They were sheltered from the wind.

  A bark echoed back to them and Tink turned back around. ‘No, see? There’s light up ahead. Not much but I can see it, and it’s opening out. Eddie seems to know the way.’

  She was right on all counts. They were deep into the cave — a cave that existed inside a tree, like something out of Pan’s Labyrinth — the crack behind them shrinking as the headroom grew. As Sam put a hand above his head to make sure he could stand up without cracking his skull open, he registered the dull glow in front of them. The tunnel ended by joining another. This one much larger and, by the looks of it, hollowing out the tree’s core and running its length. A meek shaft of light penetrated the roof at an angle. By itself it wasn’t much. However, even covered in eons’ worth of sand, salt rime, and dust, the silvery cobwebs that matted the walls and floor reflected that light and added to it a pale glamour. Their new travelling companion sat, tail wagging, waiting for them.

  Tink took Sam’s hand. He looked down at it dumbly. He kept being surprised at their closeness, despite how short a time it had been since they’d met. It felt like they crammed in several years of experiences into a few hours. Eddie carried on as if it was the most normal thing in the world and trotted off ahead of them, checking occasionally to see if they were following.

  ‘What do you think made the cobwebs?’ she whispered.

  ‘A shitload of spiders?’ he whispered back. His flesh had pulled to tight over his back.

  ‘That’s what I thought too.’ Tink searched the rock above them, and then something seemed to occur to her. ‘Unless...’ She dropped Sam’s hand and crouched down, taking some of the web in her fingers. It was thicker than a typical spider’s silk, closer to a fine cotton thread, which wasn’t comforting. When Tink lifted it, Sam could have sworn he heard the faint jingling of a bell. Eddie barked up ahead and came running back.

  ‘Moonthread.’ Tink said the word with amazement.

  Sam squatted next to her to get a better look. ‘What’s moonthread?’

  ‘Remember, from the legend?’

  Sam frowned. He could recall the broad brushstrokes of what Tink had told him in the bathroom as they unsuccessfully hid from the tide of sand. The woodcutter’s son – Ambernic, Arronic? – or something, had to cross the dunes to trap Sugnar. Well, they’d met her Royal Wormness and the dunes. But the other details he’d already forgotten. ‘I kind of had other things on my mind when you told me.’

  To an imperceptible jingle of bells, Tink pulled the slivery threads taut to show him. Eddie barked, growled, and then sneezed at the dust kicked up. ‘I think this is moonthread. The same as Alaric the woodcutter’s son used to snare the Great Wyrm.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Tink let the threads fall and got up. ‘I don’t know.’ She took in their surroundings. ‘It’s cooler in here, right?’

  ‘I guess so.’ Sam could taste the dampness, its faint earthy minerals on the air.

  Tink held up a hand. ‘Shh, listen.’

  ‘What, the wind?’

  ‘No, in here. Really, listen.’ Tink closed her eyes.

  Eddie tilted his head, as if they were daft. Sam peered into the dim light, concentrating. ‘There, I heard it.’

  Tink opened her eyes. ‘Dripping?’

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  ‘Yeah.’

  They set off along the cavernous tunnel. The petrified wood was uneven underfoot. It was like walking through the earliest hints of dawn. Shadows coagulated in crevasses, looming ahead only to recede in their wake, until they came upon a pair of fangs forking down. Two stalactites, one longer than the other, glistered with moisture. It beaded at their points and slowly dripped into a pool beneath.

  ‘Water!’ Sam said, falling to his knees and cupping his hands in the pool. Eddie was already there next to him joining in.

  ‘Do you think you should drink it?’

  Sam lifted his hands to his lips and sipped. ‘It’s good. A bit warm, but good.’

  They drank, realising how thirsty they were. Water dripped down their chins, and trickled from their wrists to elbows, mirroring the action of condensation that fed the pool.

  Water sloshing in his belly, Sam sat back on his heels. Eddie came and lay down between them. As soon as Tink petted him, he rolled to his back, leg in the air, so they could rub his tiny potbelly stomach.

  ‘I reckon you should tell me everything you know about all this,’ Sam said. This was their first real respite. With everything spinning away from him, he needed a familiar frame of reference. Something to anchor too. ‘I feel like everyone else has been watching this movie, and I’ve come as the fourth act started and no one’s even offered me popcorn.’

  ‘You’re weird. You know that, right?’

  ‘Says the girl who lives in a fairy tale.’

  ‘I don’t live in a fairy tale.’

  ‘Explain it to me then, like I don’t know nothing.’ In the back of his mind, he could hear his mum correcting his grammar. The words aren’t wrong, but the right way of speaking keeps doors open. The wrong way closes them before your mouth’s even shut.

  ‘Shouldn’t be hard.’ Tink had a little of that mischievous smile back. That was good, even if they were pretending they were braver than they really were. ‘But let’s keep moving.’ She got up and they began to walk along the hollow trunk of the stone tree, continuing in the direction they’d started when finding the pool of water. Eddie craned his neck to see why more hands weren’t petting his belly. He flipped onto his feet, seeing they were on the move again.

  ‘Where do you want me to start?’ Tink said. Their pinkie fingers brushed, finding each other in the near dark, and then their fingers laced together.

  ‘From what you’ve told me and what’s happened so far, I get that we are in some kind of cursed fairy tale.’

  ‘It’s not a fairy tale.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Totally,’ she said.

  ‘Okay then, let’s say this is your basic portal fantasy, right?’

  ‘Portal fantasy?’

  ‘You know, Wizard of Oz, Labyrinth, The Matrix, all the Jumanjies, Tron, definitely Inception. I love that movie. And you could make an argument for body-swaps too: Big, Freaky Friday, 17 Again. You know, age being the fantasy through the looking glass, instead of a magical place. But that’s not what we’re dealing with here.’

  ‘You are definitely weird, and I’ve not seen those movies. Except Big. Oh, and Labyrinth. They have those at Choices, the video rental shop on King Street.’

  ‘A video rental?’ Sam couldn’t believe it. His mum had owned VHS tapes and a player. But they were movie nerds, just like his grandfather, apparently. ‘There haven’t been video rental shops since... forever. Does this whole place exist in a time warp? Is that part of it?’

  Tink thought about this. ‘Time warp? No. It’s more like...’ Her eyes narrowed as she looked for a way to explain. ‘Hernshore is in a bubble. Lorimers can come and go, though you’re always called back. But the rest of us can’t leave.’

  ‘What, not ever?’

  Tink shook her head. ‘We can go to the woods and through the fields. But no one can get much farther than the edge of our farm to the South, and the Hempstock’s pigs to the North. Things come in, though people have a hard time finding us. We know a little about the outside because we get a bit of TV and radio. The Lorimers made sure the masts got put up. But the signal’s crap and usually everything is out of date by the time it reaches us. Like that phone you showed me your videos on in the playground. We’ll get ones like those in about twenty years, I reckon. A few people have got ones with all the buttons, but you can never get a call on them so what’s the point? Apart from that game Snake. That’s pretty cool.’

  The webs of moonthread, if that’s what they were, dampened the sound of their footfalls.

  ‘And that’s part of whatever this thing is to do with me?’ Sam said.

  Tink nodded. ‘It’s part of the deal, I think. Hernshore gets to be safe and prosperous. Nothing bad ever really happens. We have the farms and the town and the woods. Nothing ever really changes either, but Ma says we have more than most can hope for,’ Tink said wanly.

  Sam thought about being shut in his flat with his mum, before things got bad. How they could block out the rest of the world. In their own little castle, they were safe and happy. He would give anything to keep that. But that wasn’t real life and only seemed so perfect because of how precious and fleeting it was with hindsight. His new life, however, was one he could never escape, and that was its own special kind of prison. In that, he understood why Tink was sad.

  ‘You can never leave.’

  Eyes downcast, Tink gave a ‘no-big-deal’ shrug.

  ‘That sucks, big time,’ Sam said. ‘What else? What about the dunes and my family? How’s that supposed to work?’

  The sandstorm whistled and keened outside, bringing a tepid breeze. Eddie trotted ahead, as if he knew this bit already.

  ‘The legend says a long time ago Sugnar was called to Hernshore by Lord Guldar Hardrada and his sorcerer mistress Nywn. They lived in the keep on top of Lorimer Hill. I guess that’s where you get your name from, or your dad and his lot at least. Anyway, Sugnar blighted the land. Nothing would grow and the forest was dying. This was all because some kind of battle between our god Herne the Hunter and...’

  ‘Wait, what?’ Sam interrupted. ‘Herne the who?’

  ‘If you listen, you’ll find out.’

  ‘Sorry, go on.’

  ‘This was the battle between Herne the Hunter, God of the Wild Wood, King in the Greenworld—that’s a part of the good folks’ realm—and Sugnar, God of the Sea and Lightning.’

  Sam wanted to ask about what ‘good folks’ meant. He was pretty sure it was a term for the fey, or fairy folk. But he decided Tink might punch him in the arm if he suggested the fairy tale thing again. Instead, he listened, and tried to put out of his mind what could have made all this moonthread.

  Tink continued: ‘They were brother and sister. There are other stories about how they and others created the world and everything in it, but we haven’t got that long. Anyway, like some siblings they didn’t get on, and Sugnar was destroying the Wild Wood, making the dunes expand and salting the land so nothing could grow. The people were starving, and Lord Hardrada put them under his boot.

  ‘This is where Alaric comes in. He’s the son of Stannacks the Woodcutter, who tended the forest, but Stannacks grew ill and was dying. Alaric ventured into the forest to do his father’s work and met Herne at Entna, the world tree.’ Tink came to a halt and looked around at the tree they were in, her eyebrows arching at the thought, before carrying on without voicing it. ‘They made a deal. Back then, we could go to the dunes and the sea, though they were Sugnar’s domain, so you’d be a fool to linger there long. The deal was: if Alaric would help capture the Great Wyrm, Herne would take away Stannacks’ illness. Yeah, Sam, you’re right to be suspicious.

  ‘He was true to his word, but the words used in a deal are always important. Always read the fine print, right? Alaric was to take his axe and tie it to the moonthread woven by the wyrdsmith Rundleskink. Then Alaric had to run across the dunes to lure Sugnar and hide the axe just below the surface of the sand. When Sugnar came, she’d be snared. To escape, Alaric had to run for the sea. But this was the bit Herne never told Alaric, because he’d made another deal with Stannacks.

  ‘Stannacks, knowing he was dying, followed his son to the woods and saw him make his deal with Herne. He couldn’t argue with a god, but neither could he let his son risk his life for a dying man. So Stannacks made another deal for the life of his son. Gods like sacrifices and Herne had been counting on this to make the trap work. Big magic needs big sacrifices. Stannacks agreed to follow Alaric into the dunes. Once his son set the trap and ran for the sea, Stannacks used himself as bait to let Alaric get away. And that’s what happened. The father’s sacrifice saved his son and made the magic strong enough to trap the Great Wyrm in the dunes, like a prison. A place neither land nor sea, neither here nor there.’

  Tink’s blue eyes came up to Sam’s emphasising the last line.

  Sam thought for a second. ‘If that’s all true, then why are we still doing it?’

  Tink sighed dolefully. ‘Because magic isn’t forever. It needs renewing. Alaric, with the help of Herne, rid the land of Hardrada and Nywn, and lived in the keep on Lorimer Hill. Hernshore prospered. Life was perfect. But when Alaric’s eldest son came of age, another deal was done in the woods. But this time Herne came to Alaric when he was out hunting. To be sure the magic stayed strong, a sacrifice would need to be made. Each time the Lorimer’s eldest son came of age in the summer of his sixteenth year, he would have to renew the magic by crossing the sand with his farther. But each time, only the son would come back. For this the Lorimers would always be lucky and prosperous and Hernshore would remain under Herne’s protection.’

  Sam rubbed the back of his neck thinking. ‘But Michael, he isn’t here.’

  ‘He’ll be coming. He has too. The sand came for you. It’ll come for him too. But he’s your dad. He’d come anyway.’

  ‘He doesn’t even know me. He’s been in my life for like two days.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. He’s still your dad.’

  ‘But he’ll die if he does. Doesn’t he know that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Part of the way this works is you lot forget some of this afterward and go away. You always come back. Never this late before. I think...’ Tink trailed off, her face hardened, unsure if she should say more.

  ‘Think what? You might as well say. We might die today.’

  ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

  Sam flushed and his tongue seemed to swell. ‘I don’t.’

  Tink laughed. They were still playing at being brave, and Tink was better at it than him right now. She’d found her feet, and Sam knew he needed to catch her up.

  ‘Alright, Romeo. I kissed you, remember? Thought we were going to die then too.’

  ‘Oh right.’

  ‘Oh right,’ she aped him, teasingly. ‘I didn’t just kiss you because of that.’

  ‘No?’ Feelings burned in his chest.

  ‘No, I can’t help myself. It’s the part I play in the magic.’ She giggled at how Sam’s face sank. ‘Herne’s balls, you’re too easy to wind up.’

  Sam wanted to move this on before his cheeks burnt so hot his hair caught fire. ‘You said we forget, the Lorimers. Then you avoided saying the next thing.’

  ‘Not just a pretty face, are you? I think something is different this time. It must be. Ma has been weird, Dad too. But he’s been weird ever since my mum disappeared. It’s been worse for the last year though. I think they expected you back after Lady Lorimer, that would be your grandmother, died. The signs were there. Sand in the fields, white wyrms in the soil and infecting the cattle. Other stuff too. The way people are, some people change when the time comes. Neighbours bicker. Folks withdraw. But you and your dad didn’t appear.’

  ‘A year ago?’ A frozen blade of a thought cut from the bottom of Sam’s spine, and slowly peeled him open until it reached his brain, sliding home with all its terrible meaning.

  ‘That’s right. Why?’

  There was another light coming into view up ahead, brighter than the glow from the moonthread but burnt yellow by the desert beyond.

  Sam had a rock in his throat. ‘My mum. That’s when she got sick. Do you think...?’

  ‘What, Sam?’

  ‘You said the magic need sacrifices, and that something was wrong. We hadn’t come back. But in the end the sand comes for you no matter what.’

  ‘Yeah, so?’

  ‘Could what have happened to my mum, and Michael’s too, all be to do with this curse?’ Saying the words gave the idea reality. Its ugly logic seemed perfect and true, and it made Sam angry. ‘Did my mum fucking well die for some stupid deal made by people I’ve never met and gods I’ve never heard of from hundreds, maybe a thousand, years ago?’

  Tink didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Her face said it all.