Raven's Gate

cat leapt off the chair. With no effort, it sprang up on to a windowsill and then out of the window. Outside, Noah walked past, pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with manure. The cat ran past him and continued up the lane. A moment later it had disappeared from sight.
    Matt stood at the edge of the wood, looking down a tunnel of trees. The bicycle lay on its side on a grassy verge beside the road. Five minutes had passed since he had slipped past Noah and made his way out of Hive Hall. But he still couldn’t make up his mind.
    Once again he was tempted to find his way to London. He must have been confused the night before. He had been unable to see where he was going and had somehow missed his way. But an inner voice warned not to try navigating the lanes again. He didn’t want to waste any more time going round in circles, and anyway, there was another way out of this. The LEAF Project was supposed to be voluntary. A single phone call to Detective Superintendent Mallory was all it would take to get him out of this nightmare.
    But before he did that, he wanted to know more. What were the sounds he had heard the night before? What was going on in the wood? There was only one way to find out.
    Matt had pinpointed the spot from which he thought he saw the light coming. It had to be somewhere in front of him now. And yet he was unwilling to step off the road. It wasn’t because of the story Mrs Deverill had told him – he doubted there was any chance of his wandering into a bog. It was the wood itself that scared him: its unnaturalness, the uncompromising lines. Nature wasn’t meant to grow like this. How could he possibly find his way when every pine tree looked the same, when there were no hillocks, plants or streams to act as landmarks? And there was something else. The corridors between the trees seemed to go on for ever, stretching into a shadowy universe of their own. The darkness was waiting for him. He was like a fly on the edge of a huge web.
    He made up his mind, stepped off the road and took twenty paces forward, following a single path. The pine needles crunched underneath his feet. Provided he didn’t turn left or right, he would be fine. He would let the trees guide him. And if he thought he was getting lost, he would simply follow the same path back to the road.
    And yet… He stopped to catch his breath. It really was extraordinary. He felt as if he had stepped through a mirror between two dimensions. On the road it had been a cool, bright spring morning. The atmosphere in the wood was strangely warm and sluggish. Shafts of sunlight, a deep, intense green, slanted in different directions. On the road, he had heard the twitter of birds and the lowing of a cow. In the wood, everything was silent … as if sound were forbidden to enter.
    Already he saw that he should have brought a compass with him. At the very least he could have brought something: a knife or a tin of paint to help him find his way back. He remembered a story he’d been told at school. Some Greek guy – Theseus or someone – had gone into a maze to fight a creature that was half-man and half-bull. The Minotaur. He’d been given a ball of wool, which he’d unravelled, and that was how he’d found his way out. Matt should have done the same.
    He turned round and, counting out loud, retraced the twenty paces he had taken.
    The road wasn’t there.
    It was impossible. He looked back at the wood. The trees stretched on endlessly. He checked left and right. The same. He took another five steps. More trees, all of them identical, running as far as the eye could see … and further. The road had disappeared as if it had never been there. Either that, or somehow the trees had grown. That was what it felt like. The artificial wood encircled him. It had captured him and would never let him go.
    Matt took a deep breath, counted twenty paces forward, then turned left and walked another ten. Still no road. No matter where he looked, he saw the same thing: tall, narrow trunks and a million needles. Gloomy corridors between them. A hundred different directions but no real choice. Matt stood still, hoping that he would hear a car on its way to Lesser Malling. That would help him find the road. But no car passed. A single crow cawed, somewhere high above. Otherwise, the silence was as thick as fog.
    “Great!”
    He shouted out the single word because he wanted to hear the sound of his own voice. But it didn’t even sound like him: it was small