The Farm by Tom Rob Smith Read Free Book Online

their crooked noses and bellies like boulders. Their sinewy arms can rip a person in two, snapping human bones and using splinters to scrape the gristle out of their shrapnel teeth. Only in forests as vast as this could such monsters be hiding, yellow eyes stalking you.
     
    Along the final stretch of deserted road before the farm, there were bleak brown fields, the winter snow had melted away but the topsoil was hard and jagged with ice. There was no sign of life, no crops, no tractors, no farmers – stillness, but overhead the clouds were moving incredibly fast, as though the sun were a plug that had been pulled out of the horizon and the clouds, along with the dregs of daylight, were being sucked down a sinkhole. I couldn’t take my eyes off this fast-moving sky. After a short while I began to feel dizzy, my head began to spin. I asked Chris to stop the van because I felt nauseous. He carried on driving, arguing that we were almost there and it made no sense to stop. I asked again, less politely this time, to stop the van, only for him to repeat how close we were, and finally I banged my fists against the dashboard and demanded that he stop the van right this very second!
     
    He looked at me like you’re now looking at me. But he obeyed. I jumped out and was sick in the grassy verge, angry with myself, worried that I had ruined what should have been a joyful occasion. Too queasy to climb back into the vehicle, I instructed Chris to drive on, intending to walk the last distance. He refused, wanting us to arrive together. He declared the moment important symbolically. Therefore we decided that he’d drive at a snail’s pace and I’d walk in front. As if I were leading a funeral procession I began the short walk to our new home, our farm, the van following behind – a ridiculous spectacle, I accept, but how else could we reconcile my need to walk, his need to drive the van, and the shared desire to arrive simultaneously?
     
    Listening to Chris boohooing crocodile tears to the doctors at the Swedish asylum, he presented this episode as evidence of an irrational mind. If he were telling the story now he’d almost certainly have started his version of events here, omitting any mention of the strange fast-moving sky. Instead, he would’ve described me as baffling and fragile, unstable from the outset. That’s what he claims, his voice strained with make-believe sadness. Who would have thought he was such an actor? Regardless of what he claims now, at the time he understood the emotions triggered by my return, an extraordinary feeling after fifty years, as extraordinary as the sky that welcomed me home.
     
    Once we reached the farm he stepped out of the van, leaving it parked in the middle of the road. He took my hand. When we crossed over the threshold to our farm we did it together, as partners, as a loving couple starting an exciting new chapter in their life.
    • • •

I REMEMBERED THESE PHRASES – ‘shrapnel teeth’ and ‘bellies like boulders’ – they were lifted from a Swedish collection of troll stories that we’d both loved. The book’s cover had been missing and there was only one illustration of a troll near the front, a pair of dangerous dirty yellow eyes lurking in the depths of a forest. There were glossier books about trolls, sanitised child-friendly stories, but this tatty old anthology, long out of print, found in a secondhand bookstore, was filled with gruesome stories. By far it was my mum’s favourite book to read at bedtime, and I’d heard each of the stories many times. My mum had kept the book among her collection, perhaps because it was in such a fragile condition that she feared it would fall apart in my hands. It was a contradiction that she’d always shielded me from trauma, yet when it came to fairy tales she’d wilfully sought out more disturbing stories, as if trying to compensate, giving me in fiction that which she’d tried so hard to take away from real life.
     
    My