Riven with blackened veins, the grey membrane in the wall of the giant serpent’s lung parted with the resistance of taut elastic.

  The Nar had its shoulders free and was wrestling to draw the rest of its torso out of the ground. Its hiss was a lascivious lick around the brain pan of Sam’s skull: Lorrriimerrr!

  ‘No time to say hello. Let’s go.’ Tara jerked her head at the hole.

  Sam pushed Tink to the hole and took aim. The machine gun spat fury, making the anaemic grotesquery perform the herky-jerky danse macabre. Deformed Terry came running along the narrow ledge towards them, groaning incomprehensibly, waving a gnarled length of driftwood. But his meaning became clear. More Nar were already coming, slithering at his heels. Terry skidded to a halt; a waxen arm shot from the wall in front of him, grasping at air.

  ‘Samwise, shift your backside!’ Tara shouted.

  A chorus of rasping sibilance swelled, like a once in a generation storm tide grating through shingle, a tide that would always come, would never stop, never give up. Terry swung at the emerging Nar as Sam dove through the gap between Tara’s straining arms.

  On the other side, Jonathan Lorimer was waiting, looking up at a monolith. Next to Jonathan was an elegant older lady, much less degraded than everyone save perhaps Tara and broken necked Agatha.

  A least four storeys high, the monolith was narrower at its base and broader at the top. The edges were rounded, so that it had the appearance of a stubby cone turned on its blunted tip. But this was all a general feeling because details were difficult to discern, given that it was covered in a thick matting of pale silver moonthread.

  Sam and Tink ran towards Jonathan. The monolith flexed. A millennium of cobwebs suddenly twitched, expanding out and contracting. Gagun! A muffled double bass drum thudded, bringing Sam and Tink skidding to a stop. Tink’s hand sought Sam’s in the gloom, but he pulled it away when Tara clambered through the wall behind them, closely followed by Terry. With a horde of monsters at their backs, the behemoth’s heart pulsed once more before them.

  Tara dragged Sam on by the scruff his hoodie. It only took a couple of stumbling steps to unstick his feet.

  ‘You need to listen. We don’t have much time,’ Tara instructed.

  From the place they’d entered, now sealed tight shut, Terry moaned something, and from the way he brandished the cudgel of driftwood, it was clear he meant to guard their backs.

  Jonathan turned to greet them. ‘Sam, this is your grandmother, Cynthia.’

  Cynthia immediately gathered Sam into a hug, before holding him at arm’s length. She had once been beautiful, a starlet in the making, before marrying Jonathan Lorimer. Cynthia Rockwell, with a string of early seventies B-movie credits to her name. With his mother’s obsession with all things Across the Dunes, and adjacent trivia, Sam realised—to his chagrin—he’d seen his grandmother’s breasts. On a creature feature binge two summers ago they’d watched Electric Eel II, in which a young Cynthia Rockwell had a three-line part and died early in the first act, electrocuted in shallow water wearing nothing but multi-coloured striped bikini bottoms. Sam didn’t want to linger on exactly why he remembered that detail about his grandmother’s bikini bottoms; of course, at the time he didn’t know who she really was to him. Not that that made things any better in the present. This elegant older lady seemed to register his embarrassment as something else, shyness perhaps.

  ‘You have the Lorimer chin but your mother’s eyes. Such a handsome boy. I wish I’d known you.’ It sounded as though she was commiserating his impending death. But of course, in the backward world of the dunes, it was her recent death and the whole sorry burden of the legend. She let him go with a wan smile.

  Gently, Tara took Sam’s hand and looked at him with a face that first shone with happiness before darkening to regret. ‘You can’t stay.’

  That stung worse than the whipping storm of sand that brought them to this nightmare. ‘But I want to stay,’ Sam said, not caring how much of a petulant teenager he sounded in front of Tink.

  ‘You can’t, Samwise. This is a place for the dead and you two are very much alive. But you won’t be if you stay.’

  ‘Because of the Nar?’ Tink guessed.

  ‘That’s correct,’ Jonathan said.

  The heart beat, and Terry shifted uneasily at the chamber’s membranous doorway.

  Tara squeezed Sam’s hand in both of hers. ‘They will come. That’s what they do, and we fight them off.’

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  ‘We?’ Sam said, pleading. ‘You’re one of them now?’ It had always been him and his mother against the world, fighting the crappy London state school system, the gang culture around their Freakstown tower blocks, and the relentless grind of never having enough money. He finally got her back after death, like some fifth act resurrection, Hero’s Journey type shit, and she wanted to send him away again.

  ‘Oh Samwise!’ Tara touched his cheek. Underlining her point, she was cold as the grave.

  Sam swerved his face away. ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘My baby boy, this place isn’t for you. Not yet, maybe it never will be. The Nar will come, and we will fend them off, but we always lose. There are too many of them and time is on their side.’

  ‘Your mother is right,’ Jonathan added. ‘Typically, they feed upon us slowly. We waste away over the decades, centuries even. But, as you have seen, they are more frenzied now. We dead are their food. They are somewhat like Sugnar’s digestion and immune system. The living are an infection they will seek out and destroy so that their feeding, which is also Sugnar’s, can begin.’

  Deformed Terry groaned and pointed his driftwood at the heart, which flexed and thudded. ‘Thrr moo thre.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Jonathan said, holding his chin in a way that reminded Sam of a gesture Michael and, he realised, himself made when thinking. ‘I know this is all a lot to take in. One thing we don’t understand is why either of you or—sorry I didn’t catch your name?’

  ‘Gretchen Tunstall, M’Lord, but everyone calls me Tink.’

  ‘None of that M’Lord nonsense; it’s Jonathan. Yes, I was saying we don’t understand why either you or Tink are here.’

  ‘We were swallowed by a giant snake God,’ Sam said sarcastically.

  ‘Sam!’ his mother warned. But he didn’t care. He was royally pissed. No, that didn’t capture it. He was beyond that. The kind of nebulous anger he was feeling was more like John Wick after Russian gangsters had just killed the dog his dead wife had given him. Except he was a gangly sixteen-year-old and not a trained killer with mad skills.

  Jonathan, however, merely took it on his shrivelled chin and chuckled. ‘That bit we know. What we don’t understand is why it isn’t Michael here, but another non-Lorimer during the crossing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sam said curtly.

  Tink jumped in. ‘Nothing is going as it was supposed to. Lord Lorimer, Michael I mean, arrived back today. Sam didn’t know anything about the crossing, and I took him to the dunes.’ She was speaking faster the more she blurted out. ‘Well, not into the dunes, obviously. Okay, maybe not obviously. But I didn’t. I’m not that stupid. I took Sam to the playpark on Sandyford Row and then things got weird. I didn’t know who he was, honestly, I didn’t, and the sand came for us. We ran and… well, we didn’t get away, and here we are.’

  Jonathan was horrified. To Sam he said, ‘You arrived the same day as the crossing?’

  Sam shrugged yes.

  ‘You’ve had no training? Michael told you nothing of the legend?’

  Sam shrugged no.

  ‘Why didn’t Michael bring you back earlier?’

  ‘It would be kind of difficult seeing as he got lumbered with me a couple of days ago. He said we were coming here to sell the beach house. We were supposed to be back in London by the evening.’

  Jonathan was aghast. ‘Sell the beach house?’

  Tara looked equally troubled. ‘Two-days! That can’t be right. I’ve been here for months, at least.’

  Eyes dancing around his thoughts, Jonathan seemed to be putting it all together. To Tara, Jonathan said, ‘Time doesn’t work the same way in the dunes. At least we think it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s faster; sometimes slower.’

  ‘He’s treating you well, though?’ Tara said to Sam.

  ‘I guess. But why didn’t you tell me about him? Why didn’t you tell him about me?’

  ‘It complicated.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  Jonathan added, ‘Don’t blame your mother. The magic of our pact has strange effects.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t that. I nearly told you both. Michael made it clear he never wanted children. He hated the idea. He had… issues with his father.’ Tara tried not look at Jonathan as she said it. ‘When I fell pregnant, I wanted to tell him. Every time I did, it never seemed like the right time. Then we had an argument.’

  ‘What about?’ Sam asked.

  Tara hesitated.

  ‘About me?’ Jonathan said, frowning.

  Tara nodded. ‘Kind of. I brought up kids, to feel out if he’d mellowed on the topic, but it kind of got twisted around to how he’d never be a father and mess up his kids.’ To Jonathan she said, ‘He thought you took your own life. That was the story in the press when you died. Spielberg and Lynch both said nice things.’

  Jonathan’s head wobbled in a that’s at least some consolation way.

  Tara carried on, ‘I said something in defence of Jonathan. Something like “we don’t know why people do the things they do.” He accused me of being a groupie; that I didn’t know what his dad was like. In the heat of it, he got it in his head we only ever got together because of who his father was. I was insulted and hurt, and you know what I’m like: I kicked him out. We probably each waited for the other the make the first move. Pride, like arguments, is a stupid thing. The more you grew in my belly the more I dug my heels in, told myself I was in the right, and he should be the one to call because I was having his baby. A baby he didn’t know about and said he never wanted. Then you were here, and you mended my broken heart.’ Being dead didn’t stop tears coming to Tara’s eyes.

  ‘I told myself, if Michael turned up or he bumped into me pushing you along in your pram, I’d tell him. But without each other, we moved in very different circles. When you’ve got a kid, time moves so fast and before I knew it, years had gone by: you were starting school and Michael still didn’t know. It seemed too late by then. Would have looked like I’d come begging for money.’ She shrugged. ‘Which we needed. But like I said, pride is a stupid thing. I’m sorry, Samwise.’

  ‘Thrr moo thre,’ Terry repeated urgently, venturing a few cautious strides from the entrance.

  ‘Indeed,’ Jonathan said. ‘The moonthread. I wish we had more time to talk this all out, but as Terry is trying to get me to say, there is something wrong with the moonthread. I suspect it is connected to what you told us, Tink.’ With a classic English flair for moving things on when they become emotionally difficult, like turning on the car radio after running over the neighbour’s cat, as if that would cover the indiscretion, he walked up to the behemoth heart and pulled away an armful of gossamer. He grabbed swathe after swathe, letting the sickly skeins fall to the ground. ‘The moonthread is breaking.’

  ‘So?’ Sam said petulantly. His anger hadn’t abated. If anything, it was growing, rolling over on itself, gathering force, churning, foaming. What did any of this matter? One crapping thing followed the next, and what power did he have? It wasn’t hard to believe in fate, if all your life had ever demonstrated is that there were forces in the world that decided what was going to happen to you. What else was fate if not the class or sex or race you were born into, or whether you were born into a family that loved you or not? At least he had the last thing, but even that was taken away from him by some rich prick and the pact his family made in the way-back-when. Just another type of fate, money, magic, privilege, there was no difference. All he was supposed to do was play his part. Be a good boy. Do the right thing. Work hard at school. Be polite even when the police got him to empty his pockets. Keep it all in while the heart monitor counts down on your mother’s life and leaves you alone. Fuck it, fuck it all! That’s what he and Tink had agreed.

  ‘Watch,’ Tara said.

  Jonathan got down on his knees and started to pull the thick matting of moonthread apart, like cobwebs in an ancient tomb. ‘Here it is.’

  Tara ushered Sam and Tink closer.

  Tink gasped. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  The heart flexed, jouncing a long wooden handle. Two-thirds of its flint head was encased in fibrous white and red scar tissue. The final third glinted dully in the illumination of the moonthread.

  Solemnly, Jonathan confirmed what Tink was thinking. ‘Indeed! It’s Alaric’s axe.’