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to his study. It was empty. He used the granite barometer to finish the job someone else had started, and when the drawer slipped open he breathed a sigh of relief to see the letter still there. He folded it in half—no longer mindful of its brittleness—and shoved it into his jeans pocket.
    Then he turned and faced the garden, arms crossed. “Want it now?” he asked. And against his better judgment, and in perfect tune with the bad horror film he had convinced himself he was not in, he said, “Come and get it.”

CHAPTER TWO
shapes in dust
    Throughout that afternoon he kept returning to his study to look at the desk. He touched the bent lock and the ragged wound in the wood, trying to find a scar where a crowbar or screwdriver had been inserted to jimmy the drawer open. There was nothing. Only the torn wood, the bent metal. And each time he returned he tried to come up with some other explanation. Could he have caught his belt on the handle and ripped it open? But it was a strong oak desk, the lock old but firm. Perhaps he’d slammed it too hard that morning after depositing the letter inside, and ruptured the wood around the lock? But he thought not.
    And there were those groans he’d heard when he was in the bath. Wood on wood, or the sounds of effort.
    He did not go out into the garden again. Something seemed wrong out there. He could not make out whatit was, but the more he looked, the more unsettled and hemmed in he began to feel. The light was fine, the trees and bushes moved in time with the subtle breeze, birds probed the lawn for worms and insects, shadows remained where they should have been, butterflies rode the air like ash from a distant fire. It was fine, yet everything felt wrong. He went from spending ten minutes staring out the window to an hour avoiding looking outside at all.
    He rang Helen again. Her voice mail picked up, and he remembered her saying she had a meeting that afternoon. So he rang twice more and listened to her voice.
    Around three o’clock Scott slouched down on the settee and popped a DVD into the machine. As the title sequence of
The Thing
played out, he pulled the letter from his pocket and read it one more time. The sound of the TV retreated; the feel of the settee grew increasingly personal. When he finished the letter and read the scrawled
Papa
at the end, he closed his eyes against the rosebud brushing against the living room window. Perhaps when he woke again it would have bloomed and died and it would be autumn, and the letter would be forgotten.
    He and Helen were going to Rome in October for a few days. They traveled well. Having never had kids they’d saved a tidy sum through their working careers, though Scott sometimes thought the more money they had, the sadder it made them.
    He shifted on the settee, listened to the men in the Antarctic slowly growing apart, and felt the brush ofsomething against his cheek, as though the rose had grown all the way through the glass.
    Papa taps his cheek again, and Scott wakes. He’s almost fourteen, and he’s taken to sleeping away hot afternoons as the summer holidays blaze their way toward the autumn term.
    It’s a familiar memory, and Scott relives it as a viewer. It’s like a waking dream that he has lived many times before. He knows what is coming next.
    â€œGet up and shake your ass,” Papa says. “We have to go to the woods!”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWe just do!” The old man is excited and animated, shifting here and there in Scott’s room as the boy pulls on shoes and socks, baseball cap, jacket.
    â€œYou don’t need that; it’s hotter than the Sahara’s arse out there, boy.”
    Scott smiles and drops his jacket onto the bed. His cigarettes are in there. Papa doesn’t yet know that he smokes, and Scott has already decided that he might never tell.
    â€œCome on! Before it’s too late!”
    â€œWhat is it, Papa?” Scott