Dead Men's s Boots

It was tough going through the shoulder-high weeds: somewhere there had to be another gate and an actual driveway, but Juliet was already striding ahead so I followed, letting her break the trail for me. That was a good idea in theory, but Juliet seemed to walk around the brambles and devil’s-claw rather than through them, squeezing herself through gaps that were unfeasibly narrow for a grown woman, so I still found myself struggling. By the time we got to the porch I was scratched and dishevelled and in a fairly uneven temper.

There was no bell or knocker. I banged a tattoo on the screen door while Juliet turned three hundred and sixty degrees, surveying the devastation. From here, no other man-made structure was visible. We might have dropped out of the sky along with the farmhouse, into the merry, merry land of Oz.

I hit the screen door again, harder this time. There was no answer, and the echoes of the banging had that hollow finality that suggests an empty house. I was about to turn away, but then I caught a movement off on my left-hand side and turned.

It turned out the porch went around to the side of the house. At the far end of it, having just turned the corner and come into our line of sight, stood a very old woman dressed in a white dress whose hem was stained with dirt. Her face was almost as pale as Juliet’s, but that was the only point of resemblance. Her hair was wispy silver, so thin that her scalp showed through. Her bare arms hung like lengths of string, her elbows awkward knots.

Her feet were bare, too, and I noticed that one of them was turned at an odd angle so that she walked on its outer edge. She was carrying an orange plastic bowl, and she had a frown deeply etched into her face.

‘Who are you people?’ she said. Her voice had the broadest Southern twang I’d heard since we touched down, but it was so quiet that a lot of the vivid effect was lost. It was barely louder than a sigh.

‘Miss Seaforth?’ I said, approaching her as slowly and unthreateningly as I could.

I held out my hand. ‘My name is Felix Castor, and this is Juliet Salazar. I’m sorry to just barge in here like this, but we were hoping you might be prepared to talk to us about your sister—’

I broke off. Ruth Seaforth’s eyes had grown big and round. She sat down suddenly on the porch swing, making it shudder and creak.

‘Oh Lord,’ she said, staring at me as though I was a telegram bearing a whole raft of politely coded bad news. ‘Oh . . .