Follow You Home by Mark Edwards Read Free Book Online

. As old as the forest itself. And like the blackened trees that stood hunched in the clearing, the ground around the house seemed dead, the grass tinged grey in the weak moonlight.
    Lights flickered in the windows. Candles, I realised. Like the light that glowed in the hollows of a jack-o’-lantern.
    I knew, with every instinct, every scrap of learned and inherited knowledge, that this was a bad place. That we needed to turn around, right now, and get away. That we shouldn’t take another step towards this building, should not pass through that door, must not go inside.
    But then we heard another cry, a strangled sob from inside those stone walls, and as the silence descended again, Laura and I walked towards the house, towards the door, as if our legs had a will of their own.

Chapter Eight
    O ut we came, bursting from between the trees, back onto the path, stumbling in the half-light, almost falling, one of us catching the other, stopping only to scoop up our backpacks from the edge of the forest.
    We ran all the way into town.
    We didn’t talk.
    We didn’t look back.

Part Two

London
November 2013

Chapter Nine
    I sat on the chair in the corner of the bedroom and stared at the empty bed. The room was musty, stale, smelled of alcoholic sweat and dirty clothes which exploded from the overstuffed laundry basket. Used mugs and painkiller packets and unread books threatened to push each other off the bedside table.
    Sometimes in the night I could hear something scratching and skittering in the walls. Rats, drawn to the spreading squalor? I needed to let some fresh air in, but the effort of doing this, of crossing the room and trying to find the key that unlocked the sash window, of forcing the frame open, was too much. Everything felt like too much effort.
    All I wanted to do was sleep. I was exhausted, permanently j et-lagge d, with scratchy eyes and the clumsiness that comes with over-tiredness. I was forever bumping into things, dropping my phone, smashing crockery. I hadn’t been able to sleep, not properly, for three months.
    The quilt was folded over so it appeared there was someone asleep in the bed. Not just someone . Laura. I could almost see and hear her soft breathing, the little snuffling sounds she made in her sleep. If I hauled myself out of this uncomfortable wooden chair and slipped my hand beneath the duvet I would be able to feel her warm skin, stroke her hair.
    But the shape in the bed was not Laura. It was an empty space. A phantom.
    Because Laura wasn’t here anymore.

    She left in mid-October, six weeks ago. The day she went, I had been at a meeting that I had been unable to avoid. I would never forget the way that Camilla and Damien from Skittle had looked at me, as if wondering if the real Daniel had been bodysnatched, whether the person sitting in front of them with the chewed nails and the inability to form a coherent sentence was an impostor. I told them I’d picked up a nasty virus on my travels, was still trying to shake it off, which was a warped version of the truth. I wanted to tell them that the old Daniel, the person they knew, hadn’t returned from Romania. This was the new, diminished model.
    Luckily, I wasn’t expected to do much apart from co-operate with their PR efforts. I’d been interviewed by a couple of journalists from Wired and some other tech magazine, who asked me lots of questions about the app I’d created and the deal I’d done. My app, Heatseeker, was due to launch in the spring. Until then, I had little to do, though I kept telling myself I needed to start work on something else. I was waiting for inspiration to strike.
    When I got home, Laura was standing beside a black cab, the driver heaving her suitcase off the pavement.
    ‘What . . . what are you doing?’ I asked.
    Laura blinked at me and got into the cab.
    ‘You all right, love?’ the cabbie asked. She nodded and he climbed into the driver’s seat.
    ‘Where are you going?’