Prologue: URBAN RAIN DANCE

The woman scurries out of the main entrance and across the wide grey slab of the communal parking area, light spilling out of the doors behind her to stain the concrete steps with a cold, white wash. She pulls her quilt-lined padded jacket tight across her emaciated frame; a pitiful attempt to keep out the unseasonable chill. Grief follows her like a stray dog — vying for her attention and yapping at her heels — as she heads for the car.

Monolithic concrete towers loom over her, their gaze blank and impassive under a weak moon that barely even registers in a sky as grey as the structures which sulk around her. These tired buildings do not judge the woman; only her family can do that — and only when they discover her activities, much later, and long after the deed is done.

The car starts on the first try. This is unusual in itself, so she decides to take it as a sign that the night is on her side.

She’s aware of the wind’s force as it blows against the sides of the little car, for it is a constant fight to keep the vehicle on the road as she heads away from the estate. The town of Stonegrave is sleeping, all good little boys and girls having gone to bed hours ago. The only folk abroad at this dead hour are those in search of things which cannot be seen by the light of day, or who require the cover of night to hide their grim intentions. Dark deeds and darker desires accompany her towards her destination.

She guides the car through the centre of town, being careful to stop at every red light and obey each speed limit sign she sees along the way. It would not pay to be apprehended for such trivial crimes, and therefore her entire plot to be sabotaged by a contrivance of chance and circumstance.

But the omens are good; as always she reaches the place unmolested.

Ringstone Field lies guarded by a tall security enclosure, but she knows the way inside. Local children have dug a hollow under a section of fence, and she follows in their illicit footsteps.

The woman walks around to the back of the car and opens the boot. She takes the package out of the small space and carries it close to her chest as she strides towards the fence. She follows the line of the first low boundary, and then skips deftly over the wooden horizontals; the main security barrier is on the other side, topped with lethal spikes to keep out the curious.

She finds the gap under the wire and slides under the fence on her belly, pushing the package ahead of her. On the other side, she stands and brushes soil from her coat.

The eight large weathered megaliths, known locally as the Dog Stones, dominate the green half-acre like sentinels. They cast no shadows in the darkness, yet when stepping before them she feels suddenly cold and isolated, detached from the world. She walks to the centre of the circle and places the package on the ground, removing the black plastic wrapping to reveal what is inside.

The bound and muzzled dog spills out onto the soft ground, drooling and snarling and whining like a baby. Its claws are extended but it cannot reach to rake her flesh; the knots hastily tied in the thin nylon rope she used to restrict the beast’s movements have not slackened at all during the journey.

This is the first one to be brought here still living. The others were dead, all six of them — a mouse, a rat, a rabbit, a fox, and two alley cats. The dead vermin were merely road kill collected from a winding lane a mile outside of town. The felines she killed herself with a kitchen knife. This one she stole from a neighbour’s back yard, luring it with drugged meat.

The woman feels a sense of import as she kneels before the struggling dog. There is the faint stench of something on the wind, a moist aroma of spoiled meat or rotting vegetation. As soon as she notices it, the smell is gone.

She takes the thin-bladed craft knife from her pocket and crouches over the wriggling hound. By now even this dumb animal knows that it will soon die, and the volume of its cries increases, even behind the sturdy leather muzzle. The woman grits her teeth against the aural assault and prepares to cut.

“Come back to me, son” she whispers, as she raises the knife. The blade flashes in the moonlight and the dog’s cries are cut off, along with most of its head. Gagging, and with tears stinging her eyes, the woman quickly disembowels the animal, spreading the steaming innards across the short grass.

The wind stops. Silence creates a vacuum inside the stone circle and the woman’s ears pop as if she is travelling at high altitude.

“Come back to me.”

She stares up at the flat sky and suddenly it is torn in two like a vast silk sheet being divided by a blade; something huge and unseen struggles through the flapping rent, and the woman begins to smile. Clouds shudder like dust in a breeze and the air becomes thin and brittle. Something is coming.

Then — after a pause in which it seems that grieving parents weep, entire species die, the very earth groans, and distant worlds collide — it begins to rain.

The woman closes her eyes and opens her mouth in anticipation of the downpour. After a few moments of anticipation she opens her eyes to see why her face remains dry. Rain is sheeting from that great hole in the sky, even as it shuts like a mouth at the climax of a yawn; yet the fat raindrops halt above her as if a sheet of glass too sheer to be noticed by the human eye protects her.

Puzzled, she looks around. Beyond the imposing stones, rain spatters the ground, churning the soil into mud. Inside the circle no rain falls.

Slowly the woman begins to smile.

She walks out of the protective circle and into the heavy rain, twirling and giggling like a child. Then, with a dark and hungry hope blooming deep inside the chambers of her submerged heart, she begins to dance.

Chapter 1: OUT

It was raining. Guy Renford stepped out of the prison gates, too scared to look behind him in case he was suddenly summoned back inside. The sky glowered above him, a vast swirling porridge of grey and black. As Guy stared up at it, he embraced the air that ran its chill fingers across his face. It felt different, that air: lighter, filled with a promise that could never be offered in the stale fart and cannabis-smelling miasma that passed for oxygen behind prison walls. It felt like freedom.

He walked stiff-legged towards the car park, the rain soaking him through to the skin in less than a minute. There wasn’t much in his trouser pockets apart from his cab fare, an out-of-date one-way train ticket from Leeds to Newcastle, a battered leather wallet (empty but for a photograph of a heavily pregnant Bella) and a creased stick of chewing gum still in its foil wrapper.

The sound of the downpour was like white noise, blocking his ears and forcing its way inside his mind; thoughts of his wife and daughter were crowded out, flattened beneath the damp weight of the elements.

The taxi driver sat in the cab, reading the newspaper. His face was stern, and he didn’t look at all chatty, a fact which suited Guy down to the ground. He knocked on the side window, — disturbing the man in his examination of the daily gossip columns — then climbed into the back of the car.

“Wet out. Again.” Perhaps he was the chatty type after all. “Yeah, I’m soaked through. Going to need a change of clothes as soon as I get home. Has it really been like this for a month?”

“Longer,” said the man, releasing the handbrake and guiding the car out of the tight parking space. The windscreen wipers were set to full speed, but still they struggled to clear the glass. Rain poured down, obscuring Guy’s vision of the looming prison block. He laid back his head on the soft upholstery, and closed his eyes to blot out the grim surroundings as he was whisked back into the life he’d left behind.

They headed south and joined the a1 towards Leeds, the rain hammering at the body of the car like airgun pellets. Traffic was light — nobody in their right mind was out in weather like this, unless their livelihood depended upon it — and the roads were dangerous from the combined threat of flooding and badly restricted vision.

The driver hadn’t spoken since his opening gambit, and instead focused his attention on the treacherous road ahead. The radio was on low, and Guy could make out Johnny Cash singing about “The Man” coming around. The apocalyptic, biblical overtones in the song seemed somehow appropriate.

When a news update was announced, Guy asked the driver to turn up the volume, then leaned forward over the back of the empty passenger seat to concentrate on what was being said:

“The British Meteorological Society is at a loss to explain the endless rains that have devastated parts of Britain for the last forty days — an official spokesman saying that this scale of inclement weather is unprecedented, and could reach what he called ‘almost biblical proportions’.

“Flood warnings are in operation throughout the country, and the government are preparing to issue an official Red Alert. In short, it looks like it’s going to get a great deal wetter before the sun comes out.”

Guy tuned out the mundane radio chatter, and thought about the last time he’d felt the sun on his institution-pale face. Just over three years ago: in the summertime, he and Bella had taken newborn Kay to visit his cousin in Harrogate, and the sun had been shining almost as bright as his daughter’s smile. The memory of heat still warmed his face, and burned away any tears before they came.

For three long, hard years he had held on to the belief that he would feel the sun on his skin once more, and he wasn’t about to stop believing now that he was finally back on the outside. That memory was all he had: it was sacred.

The taxi bounced off the motorway at a slip road eight miles north of Leeds, and Guy was forced against the rear door and window as he slid across the back seat. The driver was taking no prisoners: fares were scarce in this weather, nobody wanted to be outdoors. Familiar sights blurred past Guy’s face, seeming unstable and dreamlike to his tired eyes, as the car approached the small town of Stonegrave. Boyhood memories diluted by rain and memory; his many preteen hunting grounds submerged beneath a cold, creeping despair.

“What was that address?” asked the driver, quick-glancing at Guy in the rearview mirror. Rain hammered the vehicle, making him feel attacked from all sides, hemmed in by strangeness. This sudden bout of paranoia disturbed him, reminding him of the constant fear he had felt during his prison sentence, and he felt his hand move towards the door handle, fumbling with the mechanism. Suddenly, Guy no longer wanted to be locked in.

“Just drop me here,” he said, feeling nervous and disorientated. “This’ll do fine.”

“You sure, mate? You don’t even have a proper coat.”

Guy glanced down at himself and smiled.

He paid the driver, giving him all the money he had so as to include a tip and watched from the kerbside as the car veered off into the middle of the street. The driver completed a rapid three-point turn, splashing standing water onto the pavement on both sides of the road, and moved off at a crawl in the direction from which they’d come. Just as Guy was about to turn away and walk the remaining short distance to his parents’ house, the car halted. Brakes screeched; the vehicle skidded on the wet road surface; there came the almighty thump of something colliding with metal.

Guy stared into the misty distance, squinting to penetrate the fringe of falling water. The driver opened his door, stuck his head outside, then promptly closed the door again.

Guy jogged the hundred yards or so back to the car and rapped his knuckles on the window; the glass lowered, disappearing into the door as the window wound down. The taxi driver stared at him, blinking. He looked confused.

“What happened, mate?”

“I… I dunno,” said the driver. “Felt like I hit something — a big cat, or a dog maybe? — but when I looked, there was nothing there.”

“Wait a minute.” Guy nodded his head and walked to the front of the car, already soaked through to the skin and unconcerned about getting any wetter. He knelt at the front of the vehicle, inspecting the bumper. The plastic was warped, and the top of the bonnet sported a slight concave dent, as if something heavy had landed on the front of the car.

Guy followed the gentle contours of the sunken bonnet with his fingertips, wondering what was so heavy that it could cause such damage, and how tough it must be to simply walk away unharmed. There was no blood anywhere in the vicinity; although the rain might have washed some of it away, there should at least be some telltale red spatters on the ground under the twisted bumper.

He walked back to the open window. “You certainly hit something, but it didn’t hang about to sue you,” he said to the driver, smiling in an attempt to lighten the mood.

The man shook his head, spots of water decorating his stubbled cheeks. “Thanks,” he mumbled. Then he drove slowly and carefully away.

Guy turned up the collar of his jacket and walked the other way, suddenly feeling the need to be sat by a radiator sipping a mug of hot chocolate, his mother’s hand stroking his hairline like she used to do when he was a frightened child. He tried to ignore the sensation of being followed, but after a short while he could no longer resist the heat of unseen eyes burning into the back of his head.

He turned around, pausing at a pedestrian crossing. The street was empty; no suspicious figures dogged his steps or back-stepped into the fizzing downpour.

He did, however, glimpse the fleeting suggestion of something bulky fleeing away from him through the rain: a large dog — perhaps someone’s roaming house pet scampering home to be warm and dry. It must be the hound that had been hit; perhaps it was injured after all.

Guy brushed water out of his eyes with a steady hand; the vague, unsettling image vanished. He carried on along the street, forgetting the sight as at last he neared home.