Free The Mermaid's Child by Jo Baker

anything but him, and he was just a grainy flicker of movement to my left and a lightness where his collar curled above his jacket, that I was in a place that I had never seen: from the village, the track disappeared beneath these trees. The thought made the hairs stand on the nape of my neck. The air sang in my chest.
    â€œI know a few places you could try,” he said.
    I stopped again. The stranger walked on without a break in his stride, without turning his head. I stared after him a moment, or rather at the darkness where he’d been. I could hear him walking on though the murk, water sluicing round his legs, stones clattering out from underneath his feet. My mouth was opening on some still unformulated question, and I was just breaking into a run to catch up with him again when my foot snagged on something and I went flying.
    He caught me. An arm across my chest, winding me.
    â€œAll right?” he asked, setting me back on my feet.
    I nodded, hadn’t got the breath to answer him.
    â€œNot far now,” he said, “Not far to the watershed.”
    And he set off again into the dark. I followed him unevenly, gasping, looking forward to the watershed. We’d rest in there awhile, I thought. Perhaps we’d stay the night.
    We had come out from underneath the trees: it was a little lighter, and the rain fell more gently. Underfoot, the angle of the climb grew shallow, the water’s tug less fierce. Soon, we were walking on flat ground.
    And I realized that the rain had stopped.
    I wiped my face. A fullish moon had risen out of nowhere. Its pale light picked out the road in front of us, twisting away into the distance, serpentine, declining, dry. To left and right,the darkness of moorland heaved up towards a cloudless, starry sky. Blonde grasses rustled gently in the breeze. My clothes were sticking to my skin, dripping: my skin bristled with goosepimples. A droplet rolled down my nose, hung, then fell into the open throat of my shirt.
    But the rain had stopped.
    He had stopped too. His face, shadowed by the hatbrim, was unreadable. I glanced round over my shoulder, back the way we’d come. I could still hear the rain thwacking down onto foliage, splashing into standing water, trickling away in rivulets downhill. I stretched a hand back into the dark behind me, and three drops landed there in quick succession, soft and heavy. I took a step back, and the rain was falling thick and fast and cold, drenching through the skin-warmed wetness of my shirt. I lifted my face up to the sky, spiralled slowly round, open-mouthed. I turned back to him, and stood there a moment, just looking at him.
    â€œHow did you do it?” I asked.
    He pushed up his hatbrim and stood looking at me for a long moment, but even so I still couldn’t quite read his expression. A slight shake of the head perhaps. Perhaps half a smile.
    â€œC’mon,” he said, and turned to go. “You’ll catch your death.”
    I stepped out of the rain, into the dry.
    I stayed at his heel, always half a pace behind. As we walked I was vividly conscious of the sigh of his breath, the creak of his bootleather, the crunch of his footfalls. The moors reared up above us. The air was cool with mist. From high up and to the left came a distant reedy birdcall, a kind I’d never heard before, and I caught the sweet wild smell of honey.
    â€œWhere are we?” I asked.
    â€œNowhere,” he said.
    â€œIt’s lovely.”
    It must have been hours, miles, that we walked that night. We crossed becks, running fast and shallow across the track, cutting down through the turf, and when we crouched to cup water to our mouths it tasted like the smell of currant bushes. I drank, squatting there on the gravel beside him, conscious of his crouching presence, his lips open to his cupped hand. Once, straightening, I found my legs had stiffened, become weak and heavy, and as we walked on my feet seemed just to swing out ahead