At least they’d been lucky with the weather.

For the last three months, Pat hadn’t shut up about the forecast. Half a dozen different websites and apps, historic rainfall levels, the effect of global bloody warming. When she’d finally declared that late September was their best bet for a dry night, Carly hadn’t believed her.

There was no science to it. They were in Cumbria, and the only thing you could be sure of was that if it wasn’t raining now, it would be raining later. Late September was nothing more than a guess.

But the thing about guesses was that sometimes they were right. They’d been hiking by moonlight for three hours, from Thackthwaite, right over Fellbarrow. Apart from fifteen minutes of light drizzle at the start, it had been a dry night after all.

Ambling more than hiking, really, and ambling in the wrong direction mostly. But Pat wasn’t the only one who took her abilities more seriously than they deserved. Joanne was on maps, and Joanne would have struggled to find her way out of a paper bag.

Which was why Carly had suggested a shortcut, even if it wasn’t a marked route. Cut west over some private farmland, and soon enough they’d be on the road and just a short trot from where she’d left her car.

Except there was light in the sky ahead of them. Dawn wouldn’t come for hours, and they were heading west, so it wasn’t that. But whatever it was, it was stronger than streetlights, which shouldn’t have been ahead of them any more than the rising sun. Stronger than anything you’d expect to see around here.

Heading west shouldn’t have been much of a challenge, even for Joanne. But Joanne had fucked up again.

“This can’t be right,” said Pat, stopping a dozen yards ahead of them. Pat was faster than Joanne or Carly, her long legs making easy work of the uneven ground. The full moon was better than nothing, but it hadn’t stopped a few stumbles from Carly and a lot of complaining from Joanne, who’d hardly looked up from the map for the last half hour. It was no wonder she kept falling.

“It is,” insisted Joanne, catching up. Carly reached them a moment later. “I promise you, this is west. Just over that hill there’s a barn, and half a mile past the barn we’ll find the road.”

The road was one of those tiny routes without a name, winding between farms until it ended in either a lake or a bigger road. If Joanne was right, this one would lead them to Mosser, where Carly’s car was waiting for them.

If Joanne was right.

Carly looked up past her friends. The moon was to her left now, huge and cold, but the light ahead was warmer.

And it was flickering.

“Guys,” she said.

Pat was already talking. “Give me that map.”

“No.” Joanne took a step back and folded her arms defensively over the poorly-folded paper.

“Guys,” Carly repeated, a little louder.

“Seriously,” said Pat. “Show me where you think we are. Because there shouldn’t be anything that bright round here.”

“Machinery,” replied Joanne. “It’s just a bunch of tractors, isn’t it?”

“Can you hear any tractors?” countered Pat.

They fell silent, joining the silence of the countryside around them, a silence of no tractors, but a silence broken by a noise of a different sort, the sound of wind punctuated by bangs and cracks.

“Guys,” said Carly, a third time. “I think it’s a fire.”

She strode ahead, the others following, until she reached the top of the hill.

And then she started running.

She could hear them behind her, their footsteps pounding the ground. Pat had almost caught up already, while Joanne was breathing heavily and lumbering behind but still pushing on.

Joanne and Pat were a pair of bloody idiots, but they were her friends, and they were the sort of people who’d see her running towards a burning building – a barn, Carly corrected herself, glancing over to see that confirmed by a sign on a wooden fence – and run after her.

“Slow down,” panted Joanne.

Carly ignored her.

Because she wasn’t running towards a burning building.

She was running towards the figure she’d seen just a few yards from the burning building.

Without breaking stride, she turned her head back in Joanne’s direction and shouted.

“Call an ambulance!”

When she looked back, the figure was raising itself onto its elbows. Looking in her direction, possibly startled by her call.

It’s the shadows. The shadows from the fire, and the moonlight.

A face couldn’t look like that.

She reached the figure a moment later, just ahead of Pat, and bent down, to see that she was wrong.

A face could look like that after all.

It was so many different colours. White and black and brown and pink. That must have been from the burns. The man’s clothes – it was a man, she thought, but couldn’t be sure – were smouldering rags. She could see skin the same colours as his face in the places where it had burned away entirely.

And there was something else, too.

She edged closer. The man was shaking his head. But it didn’t look like a voluntary movement. It looked like…

No.

She could hear Joanne behind her, talking on the phone, relaying their location. Fell Barn, the sign had said.

The shaking grew more intense. Carly could see the blood, could feel drops of it land on her own skin as he shook. She sensed Pat, crouching beside her, looking on in silence.

But her attention was entirely on the man.

There was so much blood. From a few feet away, she’d been too appalled by the burns to see anything else.

But this man hadn’t just been burned.

He’d been cut.

She was watching a man in the act of dying.

The shaking subsided, suddenly. Carly reached forward and placed her hands around the man’s hand. She watched his face, hoping against hope that she wasn’t too late, that he was alive, that in the moment before he died, he’d feel something, know that he wasn’t alone at the end.

His face went slack. She looked back as Joanne finally caught up with them, talking on her phone, then falling silent.

“Jo,” she said, without looking around.

“Yes?”

“Tell them they’ll want to bring the police with them. Whatever this was, it wasn’t just a fire.”