Ma blasted on her horn three times. She shifted down and gunned the engine. The dirty and battered green Land Rover revved, and the wheels screeched as she swerved around the man shambling towards them. Michael saw her pull hard on the wheel. The four-by-four leaned into a slide and came to a stop with its suspension rocking a few feet from Michael and his friends.

  Toby yanked open the passenger door and jumped in, calling, ‘Get in the back, you prats!’

  Nat moved first and Michael was right behind. The shambling man with his milky eyes picked up his pace, reaching for them with the beseeching hands of a drunk street preacher. The end is nigh. The end is nigh, and can I get Amen to go with this bottle of off-label vodka? Michael paused half in the rear door. The little girl who’d crawled out of the sand dune bared her teeth and sprinted at the four-by-four, her uncoordinated limbs staggering down the sand drift.

  ‘Fuck me, Mikey! Shut the door. Shut the door!’ Nat shouted.

  Michael did and fell hard into the side of the cabin as Ma crunched the gears and they revved away to the smell of diesel and burnt rubber. There was a bang when the little girl ran into the back of the truck. She was a blur through the mud-smattered rear windows. Her little arms were flailing snakes, whose heads smacked against the glass, before they picked up speed and pulled away up King Street.

  Michael glimpsed the other figures from the ramshackle houses on Sandyford Row all staggering towards them through the agitated dust. Between that and the grime of the windows it was difficult to trust his eyes.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’ he said.

  ‘Wrymals,’ Toby said without turning.

  ‘Wrymals?’ Like so many of his memories, or maybe they were better thought of as misremembrances, the word was familiar, but he knew he was missing something. In the last few minutes everything he’d held as so certain—his life developing and selling high end properties in London, the anger he felt towards his father and what he felt was a profound betrayal, his relationship with his mother, his old friends and his childhood—all now seemed to be wrong.

  Nat sat opposite Michael on the benches in the back of the Land Rover. ‘Aye, wrymals, Mikey. You remember now?’

  No, Michael wasn’t remembering. The day had slid down the scree slopes of the uncanny valley.

  Toby pressed himself to the window. ‘Look out for the kids. We’ve got to be sure they didn’t go into the dunes.’

  Michael held the worn leather thong hanging from the roof and twisted around to the window. The streets were almost deserted. A few stragglers rushed down narrow pavements, heads bowed against the wind and sand, hastening into front doors, with the demeanour of retreating prison guards under siege, slamming doors and throwing blots to lock themselves in. But there was no sign of either Sam or Tink.

  Ma traversed the main roads with the same caution she had negotiated through Hernshore woods, only this time it was a patchwork of chocolate box houses that whipped by instead of trees. The tyres wavered over the sand dashed across the streets, which seemed to have quickly blown further into the town. They slid around corners into connecting side streets, zigzagging up through the town, until they were back at Nat’s garage. Ma brought them to a skidding, neck-snapping halt.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Toby jumped out, shouting. ‘Tink... Tink.’

  Michael rushed onto the street too and jogged down the alley to the yard.

  ‘Tink!’ Toby’s call was muffled inside the workshop. He emerged just as Michael broke into the yard. ‘They’re not here.’ He shouldered past Michael back down the alley.

  Michael looked around the yard. His half-wrecked Beemer lay where they’d left it. An eddy of sand around his feet caught his eye. It skimmed through his legs and over rough concrete to a crackle of distant thunder. A sudden vertiginous sensation swept over him, as if he were floating high above an endless expanse of dunes, and far below two dots the size of ants struggled into the wind gusting against them. As quickly as it came, the image was gone. Worse was the sense of terrible familiarity that image gave him. In its wake, an even more terrible feeling clamped his stomach in a vise. Sam: he needed to find him. It was a powerful, panic-inducing sensation he had to actively fight down, because if left unchecked it would burn out of control. He sprinted back to the idling Land Rover. Toby was slamming the door after himself. Once Michael was on board, Ma stomped the accelerator.

  Hernshore woods claimed them under the cowl of its canopy. They drove past a blur of trees for less than a minute before Ma veered into a passing point and brought them to a bone-jarring halt. Michael couldn’t keep up with his mind. Thoughts and emotions of the here and now zipped like dragonflies over the surface of deeper waters containing the half-remembered things submerged in the past.

  Nat put a hand on Michael’s shoulder as they alighted. ‘We’ll find them, m’lord.’

  Michael was about to call him a dick or something similar—the time for humour seemed to have vanished with the summer sun—but Nat was deadly serious, already scanning the forest, a man-at-arms anticipating their next move. Still, the use of Michael’s inherited title needled him. It was another detail that didn’t sit right. Although, the more this went on, one thing after another not falling within the parameters of his neat view of life and who he was, the more Michael was starting to feel that he was the one out of line...

  ‘Tink!’ Toby bellowed, rushing into the treeline, snapping branches underfoot.

  ‘Toby, wait!’ Michael called after him, but the big man wasn’t listening.

  ‘Let him go ahead,’ Ma said, rounding on them. ‘But you two go with him. Check your old haunts. They were probably the same as mine when I was young, and they are no doubt Tink’s now.’

  ‘What about you?’ Michael said.

  Ma fixed him with those pale grey eyes of hers. The same ones that, as a kid, could have been stone cold during a scolding and tea cosy warm when love was needed. There was a mix of both in the eyes looking at the grown-up Mikey Lorimer. Michael felt the profound loss of his own mother like a fist-sized hole in his chest. How big must that hole be inside Sam’s chest? By Herne, he needed to find Sam, but Ma was talking.

  ‘We all talk about the luck of the Lorimers. Some talk about it soured with jealousy. And I don’t know if you know this, maybe your dad told you when you were a nipper, but seems you’ve forgotten what kind of man he was. Maybe your mother told you, too. But I think she was as riven with grief as you were when you left us. Let me tell it you then, little Mikey.’

  She put a gnarled hand to his cheek. It was rough from farmwork and warm with tenderness. ‘Lorimers always pay for what they get. Debts have their price as well as their prize, and those things are never equal. What most people forget is that all our fates, for better or worse, but usually for the better, for longer than anyone can remember, are bound to your family. So, I will check the South side of the woods, while you cover the North.’

  She held out the car keys to Michael. ‘Here take them. I’m going to head back to the farm once I’m finished here to make sure they aren’t there.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be quicker in the truck?’ Michael was still transfixed by her grey eyes.

  She titled her head a touch and smiled at him so lovingly Michael felt his heart ache. ‘No, love. If they aren’t here, then get to the ruins. If I find them first, I’ll drag those two children by the scruff of their necks and meet you at the castle.’

  ‘And if we don’t find them by the time the storm hits?’ Up until this point in his life, Michael had always known what to do and whatever he did always paid off. Every gamble, every leap into the unknown, had landed for him. Fifty pence pieces into a telephone box change slot, cool and smooth. But for the death of his father, that had been Michael’s life. Was that what Ma meant? Was that the price he’d paid? But she interrupted his galloping thoughts.

  ‘If we can’t find them, then they are already in the dunes, and you will have to do what you were always meant to.’

  The words appeared on his lips like an incantation, ‘Cross the shifting sands; and become a man. But if a Lorimer you be, beware; For the dunes are the great wyrm’s lair.’

  ‘You do remember,’ she said.

  Michael’s face was blank. ‘No, I don’t.’ The saying or poem, or whatever it was, was another card trick. But like his current property deal with the Chinese venture capitalists, he was pretty sure the cost of the bet for this hand was more than he had.

  Thunder sounded from the direction of the sea. Ma twitched her head in that direction, as if looking beyond the mass of the forest at what was coming and gave a shrug. ‘You will remember and when you do, don’t feel bad. You’re a good boy. Always were. You’ll do the best you can, just like your father did, and his father and all the Lorimers that ever were.’ With that, she turned away and romped across the road into her side of the woods, calling the children's names.