Free Midwinter of the Spirit by Phil Rickman

to do well at school, determined I should go to university because he hadn’t. Taking the father’s role, you know? He owes Denny too, I suppose.’
    ‘How can he make it up to you?’ Lol said softly. ‘How can your father help?’
    She blinked at him, as if that was obvious. ‘With my book, of course – my book about the Dinedor People. He can help me with the book. He can make them talk to me. They sent him to me, so I must be able to reach them through him.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The ancestors.’
    The barn was quite small: just four rooms. It had been converted initially as extra holiday accommodation by the present owners of the farmhouse, some people called Purefoy, who apparently ran a bed-and-breakfast business. But this had not been a very good summer for weather or tourism, and they’d presumably realized they could make more money with a longterm let. Not much ground, of course. No room for a garage, quite difficult access, but a beautiful rural situation.
    Moon had come up here on the mountain-bike Denny had bought her in the aftermath of the shoplifting case. It was a hot day and she was pushing the bike up towards the camp when she suddenly, as she put it, felt her ancestors calling out to her.
    It was the most incredible experience. Like the one Alfred Watkins must have had, when he first saw those lines in the landscape. Except I was aware of just one line, leading from me to the hill and back through the centuries. The hill was vibrating under me. I was shaking. I realized this was what I’d been training for, during all those years of digging people up. But that was only bones. I want to unearth real people. I want to communicate with them. I knew I had to discover the story of the hill and the Dinedor People. It was just an amazing moment. I felt as light as a butterfly .
    Moon had been up here until the dusk came. She’d found herself almost frantically knocking on the doors of farmhouses and cottages all around the hill to find out who was living here and who had lived here for the most generations. Discovering, as she’d suspected she might, that the oldest Dinedor family was her own. Moon maintained that her family had come out of the original settlement on Dinedor Hill, all those years before the time of Christ.
    But none lived here any more. Her father had snapped the line.
    Close to sunset, Moon had arrived at Dyn Farm, at the old, mellowed farmhouse near to the camp, to find the Purefoys – Londoners, early-retired – in the garden.
    Usually, as you know, I’m so shy, unless I’ve taken something. But I was glowing. They didn’t seem very friendly at first, a bit reserved like a lot of new people, but when I told them who I was, they became quite excited and invited me in. Of course, they were asking me all sorts of questions about the house that I couldn’t really answer. I was just a toddler when we left .
    Then they showed me the barn. And I felt that my whole life had been leading up to that moment .
    Moon came over and stood in front of Lol, close enough for him to see her nipples through the nightdress. Oh God! He kept looking at her face.
    ‘I wanted to tell him – my father – that it was OK, it was me, I was back. I was here. I wanted to tell him it was all right, that I’d help him to find peace.’
    ‘You tried to talk to him?’
    ‘No, not last night. I couldn’t get close enough to him. This was the first night… last Saturday. Yeah, I had a sleep and then I went for a walk in the woods, where he shot himself. I went there when it was dark.’
    ‘You saw him then?’ This is eerie. This is not good .
    ‘I didn’t see him then. That was when I started to call out for him.’
    ‘Literally?’
    ‘Maybe. I remember standing in the woods and screaming, “Daddy!” It was funny… It was like I was a small child again.’
    Lol said tentatively, ‘You, um… you think that was safe, on your own?’
    ‘Oh, nothing will ever happen to me on the hill. I intend to walk