Middle of October, 2003

Any expectation Edmund Sinclair and Hunter White had of a jubilant reunion after months away from home was demolished seconds after Edmund opened the door to his home. A collusion between the Sinclairs, the authorities, and the preparatory school which the boys attended had kept them sheltered from finding out until the Autumn holiday started. Now the bliss of ignorance was gone, replaced by the quiet torment of doubt, and it was everywhere.

It was all over the way that Elsa threw her arms in a strangle-hug around her son as he came into the house until he dropped his bag, gone misty-eyed in a bright pang of happy relief to have hold of her flesh and blood and daunted at the same time by the prospect of explaining the situation to him. It was all over the way that Corvus pet the boy's head and clasped his arms around both his wife and son to comfort the pair of them.

It was all over, as if in place of holiday decorations the countless, sleepless hours and languishing agony of uncertainty were strung throughout the house. And so they were, manifest as crumpled-up tissues and scattered forms, in stacks of home-made HAVE YOU SEEN posters in black-and-white on copy paper. Restless throw blankets and mismatched pillows were on the sofa and chairs in the living room, where someone struggled to get comfortable but could not relent any further from the hopeful vigil of the door.

It was even in the way that Millicent looked helplessly at Hunter with her big green eyes, knowing something he didn't, that she could not or would not explain as she attached herself to Edmund's back and watched over her shoulder while Hunter shut the entrance behind himself.

The tension was so thick Hunter's stomach was roped, and he knew Eddie must have been at least a beat ahead of him there in noticing what, or rather whom, was missing from the Sinclair huddle. Hunter remained quiet, drawn with some reluctance into the group hug at last by invitation of Corvus's waving hand and reassuring stare.

The explanations and details, as few as there were, began to unravel with the separation and migration from the entry hall over into the sitting room with the blankets and pillows, tissues and papers and half-finished mugs of tea.

Almost fourteen, Amelia Sinclair was Hunter's best mate's little and only sister, and over the course of the six years and some odd months, she was very nearly a sister to Hunter too. The spring before last she'd developed into something more than just a younger sibling tagging along on the boys' adventures, although the addition of another girl to the Sinclair house meant she had spent more of the summer following with Millicent and a motley assortment of lads as old or older even than Edmund and himself.

The cadre of boys who skulked around with the younger girls had already been through the shock-treatment of official questioning. The usual suspects were all accounted for and all behaving per normal given the circumstance, so there were no reasons to suspect they'd had anything to do with how Amelia had disappeared. Millicent was timid but adamant she'd not heard of or seen Amelia in Camden or anywhere else.

There was mute agreement and a renewed sense of hope with the boys back — Amelia had known exactly when they were due home, would want to see them both, and might come bursting in just any moment now. However, neither hope nor the flurry of reassurances that the police were actively managing the case had any impact on Edmund and Hunter's determination to go out and look for her, confident or consoling themselves that they knew better who to ask and where to look.



Hunter and Edmund split up in town, to cover more ground and question friends that would have possibly escaped connection. That was Eddie's idea, and of course it was smart. Hunter's agenda was much more vindictive.

He stood in front of the ancient and massive Abbey, lifting his chin and narrowing his eyes to see the bank of windows on its face, stress cutting the angle of his jaw sharper than usual as he ground his teeth. If you let something happen to her....The sound of a guitar strumming some angst-riddled tune turned him around, leading him down the wide market street toward the lad he was out to find and accost.

"You had one job, Graham," Hunter told him, giving a cursory look at a trio of girls and a younger boy who made up the loitering fan club of the day.

Graham was a local chap, seventeen and intent to develop a musical career. He was dedicated enough to have dodged out of taking his A levels already and spent afternoons and early evenings busking for pocket money off the tourists milling up and down the mall which led to Bath Abbey.

It was no coincidence Graham and Hunter looked as much alike as they might have been fraternal twins. Graham's hair was longer and hung into his greener eyes, and his facial structure deviated from the severe, patrician symmetry with which Hunter was beginning to scowl at him. One of them in tattered jeans and a ratted t-shirt pulled over a thermal top, the other still in his black uniform slacks and gray cardigan.

"Hunter! Welc—" The acoustic chords of the song Graham had been strumming screeched and stopped when Hunter grabbed the instrument by the neck and yanked it out of its owners' hands.

"No, it's not 'welcome' anything, you daft twat. Where is she?"

"...Oi! That's a f - -kin' Sigma," Graham stood up to protest the repossession of the guitar.

"Is it' Is it a f - -kin' Sigma?" Hunter asked with more than a hint of rhetoric. He set down his duffel bag, tossing the guitar up with a jerk and a twist and a flip of his wrist, as if he intended to give it a more appreciative appraisal. Instead, he smashed the body of the guitar on the pavement in a pair of angry downward strokes.

"You rotten little prick!" Graham was shaken out of his stoned tranquility just before the guitar shattered into pieces and splinters on the ground, and tagged Hunter with a right hook crashing into a blue left eye.

Hunter used the jagged end of the broken fingerboard, strings and detached bridge dragging through the air behind the swing, whip-slapping the older boy on one side of his head with a forehand follow-through that cut his cheek open in multiple, shallow gashes. "Where is she, Graham!?"

The brisk canter of a pair of police running toward the altercation was more memorable than the scurry of whispers that had gone dashing down the lane to notify the watch. One of the cops intervened by leaping in to subdue Graham's next move, arms sprawled wide. The other was set on Hunter, forcing the remains of the guitar from his hand and pulling him back by the shoulder.

"I'll be 'round to break your f - -king hands if you let something happen to her," Hunter spit a venomous promise loud enough for Graham to hear while the cop was wrangling his arms behind his body, and then he spit at the lad's feet.

"That's quite enough, Mister White," the policeman reasonably suggested.

The scuffle was over as quickly as it had begun, one officer dragging Hunter off by steel-cuffed wrists along with his duffel bag, as the other radioed in for on-site medical attention to Graham's dramatically bleeding face.



Owen White watched out through a window, drinking the last swallow of whiskey from a tumbler, as an unmarked police car crept up the long drive toward the house from the entry gate to deliver his son back to him quietly. He also watched as the boy was chauffeured out of the backseat, holding a plastic sack of ice over one eye swollen half shut and dragging a waxed canvas duffel along with him. He let both the officer and the boy stand outside the door long enough to wonder if anyone was going to answer it at all.

Hunter's dread of his father had gone tepid in the back of the vehicle, and as he stood on the expansive stoop waiting for admission to his own home he sublimated the spark of irritation. His father recognized it glittering in his son's eye. Owen was himself sometimes taken aback, albeit without remark, at how much his offspring resembled the self he remembered from years gone by. He set a heavy hand on the younger man's shoulder, drawing him into the house and into position under his wing opposite the uniformed officer in the foyer.

"Thank you so much for handling this....situation, Hugh," Owen flexed a polite rictus, an impersonation of a smile.

Hugh tipped his cap. "Of course. It's just a simple assault; the lad's family will be keen to drop the charges, given a formal apology and coverage of the damages. Hunter and I had a chat about how we can't go letting our emotions get the best of us, especially when we've got just cause for concern." Looking between father and son, he settled his attention on the elder White and the two men shook hands.

"Quite right. Sound advice," Owen agreed with diffidence, digging his fingers into the lean muscle of Hunter's shoulder as a silent prompt.

"Thank you, Officer Davies," Hunter numbly acknowledged, maintaining eye contact with the policeman.

"You're welcome, lad. Just let the professionals handle it, right' She'll turn up," Hugh put on his best confident smile that a girl so young could reappear in good health after being gone for as long as she had been. It was neither particularly inspired, nor inspiring.

"Wait, there," Owen let go of Hunter — who let his duffel bag drop onto the floor as an unspoken retort to the command — and walked the policeman back to his car. There was undoubtedly another clause of appreciation in whatever small talk the older men had out the door, and Owen remained outside watching the car turn and roll far down the drive enough that Hugh could not hear how loudly the front door of the White home slammed.

"Did I not make myself clear the last time we discussed your involvement with the Sinclair girl?" Owen's rich baritone was foreboding and forbidding, detached.

"Yes."

The crest ring was what split Hunter's lip as the back of Owen's hand struck out righteously. It whipped the boy's face to the left so suddenly and with enough force that Hunter lost his grip on the plastic bag he'd been holding up to his eye. Ice and melt-water flew in a momentary, prismatic arch across the foyer before raining and splashing onto the marble floors.

"Yes, sir," Hunter corrected his response, after correcting the twist of his neck to look back at his father, aware suddenly of every breath he took waiting to be dismissed from conversation and from sight.

"Good. Take your bag to your room; wash yourself up for supper," Owen's own cold eyes had not even a speck of regret or apology looking the boy over before he turned and walked down the hall with one last snippet of bidding: "Have someone clean that off the floor, too."

"Yes, sir."

"Hunter..." His mother had been watching too, hidden upstairs around a corner, but she'd waited, and too long, to try and catch him around the shoulders as he apparently obeyed the instructions that he'd been given. It was too late now for her attempts to soothe or comfort him. "Your father and I just thought —" It had always been too late, and he was immune now to her compulsion to coddle him.

She let him slip out of her grasp with little more than a shrug, pulling her hands back from the obvious and oblivious rejection that was the only answer he gave her. "— I'll have the foyer seen to," she gave as a hollow offering, pressing her lips and her hands together. Lovely and lonely, golden-haired and witch-eyed and just the sound of her shoes stepping down the stairs on the way to manage her household with a temporarily rejuvenated interest as her only child was visiting.

"Where is she, Jasper?" Hunter shoved open the door of the converted carriage house, and found his uncle exactly where he supposed he would be: sitting at a table that was overburdened with books that held down various maps, photos and diagrams.

Jasper was the elder of the two White brothers, his once-dark hair now just a saltier-than-peppery stubble on his head. He'd served as one of Her Majesty's Royal Marines until something in his mind had snapped. The occlusion of his right eye into a milky orb hadn't happened until much later than his honorable medical separation from service, and was a tale taller even than his combat memoirs.

He twitched belatedly at the boy's intrusion, offering a "Wot!?" as he handled up a wicked seven inch Bowie knife, an archaic but not yet eradicated reflex. When he found it was only his nephew, he laid the blade back down, and squinted leaning forward in the chair to focus. And then....he laughed. He guffawed, and he pointed at Hunter's face before he slapped the table, and he hooted with a deeply sardonic amusement.

"We're having dinner now," Hunter informed the hysterical veteran, allowing a defeated glumness to bow the straight edge of his shoulders and creep tiredly into his tone in lieu of any reputable witnesses. Perhaps he'd try to ask again later in the evening, when his wounds had lost their entertaining novelty, or in the morning when they'd take the falcons out...



The seven-thirty sky on a brisk autumn morning was all an ashy precipitous snarl of cotton, sheeting the weak white disc of the sun too thickly for it to run off the misty drifts of fog that were hanging over the land, threatening at any moment to dribble a piss of rain. The tree lines were turned to rust as the season changed, as many leaves in the black-fingered branches as on the damp ground faded from emerald to olive.

"Mugain, you slag....Again?" Hunter was sure the white gyrfalcon could hear his slander from such a distance as she was soaring overhead, though he was not under any impression the clever bird understood his slang nor had any empathy for his exasperated disappointment. He also knew where the bird was heading after she'd left his glove, leading him on a long and solitary march to a landmark and sometimes clandestine meeting spot which had lately been eerily vacant.

At sixteen, Hunter White was a rangy hundred and eighty centimeters of a young man, all taut strapped muscle still struggling to cover a skeleton finally slowing down its growth. His hair was cut stylishly short and gelled into thorny ink-black spikes. His blue eyes were as frigid as the North sea. A week of worry chiseled his already serious features as he stalked through a dale on the back of the estate, wearing a thick, brown leather glove on his left hand and a bag hung at a forty-five degree angle across his gray sweatshirt, blue jeans and a pair of scarred and mud-spattered boots.

"She's not over there. She's run off with some chav," in solitude, his annoyance with the girl's missing status was unrestrained, and he whipped at tall tufts of grass and stray shrubs along the way following the gyrfalcon with a reedy branch.

The last two days, Mugain had roamed at speed to the southern hectares of the White lands, flying in curious circles around a well.

The well was definitely one of the oldest installations on the land titled to his family, but it hadn't been used for possibly hundreds of years now. Its location was almost entirely irrelevant and invisible to the house the Whites currently occupied, and any buildings it had been in convenient distance of were long ago reclaimed by the ground itself. The stone and mortar cylinder was just a gaping, cobbled maw sticking up out of the earth, a pair of empty sockets where posts could support a wooden covering nothing but a rotted memory of structure. It should have been sealed, or iron-grated at the least, but for some reason the triviality of such a safety concern had been continually neglected over the years.

Flung seemingly abjectly on a southerly corner of the property, and adjacent to a comparatively modern country club estate, the well was just far enough away, just close enough to, and given just enough seclusion by a few copses of trees, to be a private refuge for a select group of would-be delinquents. They left a predictable array of evidence trespassing: cellophane wrappers of all manner tangled in brittle, dry grass like rumpled trash flowers, empty glass and plastic bottles alike broken into glittering little splinters or roughly weather-warped and undying grubby sculpture, a confetti of discarded cigarette filters....

More than the trash, the little corpses and remains of small animals he sometimes found mixed in with the garbage was what troubled Hunter about the well. It was rarely anything larger than an ordinary bird, mostly little rodents who must have hung their last prayers for life on some crisp crumbs the loitering teenagers left behind....The shriveled creatures looked as if they'd dried up like raisins, scattered with no apparent pattern in a wide swath around the well. Although there were no relevant burnt-out candle nubs or scuffed-out chalk designs, it was a regular enough occurrence on his outings to that corner of the property to make him wonder whether the little clique frequenting the well had gone much darker than just the rebellious sub-culture styling of their clothes or if some other responsible group was visiting the site at stranger hours.

The day before, Hunter thought perhaps Mugain was distracted by something scavenging the dead rodents or some piece of refuse that looked like a lure. However, the bird didn't strike, remaining in the air even after he'd whistled twice, and only finally returned when he'd baited his glove with a strip of raw meat.

Now, on the third day of the bird's errant behavior, there was more than just rubbish, desiccated rodents and weeds by the well where the falcon wheeled idly overhead.

From meters away, Hunter could see the well was flowing over with roiling and twisting, gaseous tendrils and arms of....something. Something viscous and black and too dense to rise like proper smoke. He considered briefly returning home to report the oddity, but it was a long walk back and his subsequent thought predicting ridicule from either of the elder White men if it turned out as some simply but singularly discolored expulsion of natural water or gas emboldened Hunter to ascertain exactly what in all the bloody hells by himself.

As he approached, he could smell it. It wasn’t an unusual scent, the earthy rank of mildew and mold, only pungently intense. Underneath that entropic aroma was a hint of something mingy, sour-sweet and rottenly astringent. What spilled over onto the ground was grudgingly translucent at its edges and through its narrower branches — which Hunter was too distracted to notice were all creeping toward or had already reached the withered animal corpses.

When he pushed the toe of his boot into it, there was no resistance, no squish of dirt turned to mud underneath it, no stain or streak on the brown leather, and like a trace of fog after it gracefully avoided and allowed his intrusion, it collapsed effortlessly around his ankles one and then the other as he stepped up to the circle.

Hunter peered over the stone lip down into the well, down into the chaotic swirl of liquid shadow, swung and swept his gloved arm over and through the emptiness in an attempt to get a clearer view. The black began to whisper a sharp painful whine. It quickly amplified into a full-blown curdling scream, a maddening needle stinging the inside of his head.

Just as sudden as the sound pierced his ears, a ghastly pale face flashed out of the darkness: it was dirty and dingy, curtained by filthy damp hair hanging in lank curtains down hollow cheeks. It stopped the nervous pounding of his heart temporarily in an aching lurch of recognition. Amelia.

No mere haunted delusion, the cravenly starved skeletal figure of the girl shot out of the cobblestone cylinder like a missile from a silo and the blunt-force trauma from the crown of her skull smashing into Hunter's face was enough to knock him flat on his back after a reflexive staggering of his feet. Landing on the ground shoved all the air from his lungs, and the dead weight of Amelia's little body landing half over him was a sucker punch from a soggy sack of bones. The impact made his already black-bruised eye throb, and the warm crawl of blood starting to run from his nose down onto his lip was his last note of sensation as the periphery world around him and the sky overhead both went b l a c k.

——- And she emerged from the dark Like a ghost in my head She said, "I haven't forgot Any words that you said I just stare at the clocks And I cry in my sleep And I tear up your letters And I burn them in heaps And I gather the ashes In that hole in the ground Where we fell" — "a wishing well," airborne toxic event https://youtu.be/BPUge-dpWio