Chapter 1
“Fuck the digital signature, Gary. I’m not clicking through twelve pages of terms and conditions in a sodding monsoon.”
Gary stopped his thumb mid-hover over the screen of his handheld terminal. He was from Salford, he was soaked to the skin, and he looked entirely unequipped to deal with a middle-aged woman refusing to engage with his logistics app. Between us, sitting square in a muddy, sheep-tainted pothole, was a plastic crate clearly labeled Current Tax Year: Urgent.
“Company policy, love,” Gary muttered, his breath blooming like exhaust fumes in the damp air. “If the asset is compromised by moisture on delivery, I’ve got to log a Tier-2 dispute protocol or the depot will have me by the bollocks.”
“I’m not your love, and your app is a bureaucrat’s minion,” I said, planting my hand flat over the glass screen to block his camera lens. “If you log a dispute, your head office will freeze my delivery status, trigger an automated customer-satisfaction loop, and send me three separate emails asking how I feel about my experience. I feel wet, Gary. Wet! Get the boxes inside and we’ll call it a draw.”
Gary stared at my hand, then up at the sheer, blackening sky of the Hatherclough valley. The hills closed in on us like the jaws of a giant, looming vice. It was barely four in the afternoon, but the sky had already turned the color of slate, and the wind was driving a relentless, horizontal spray straight down from the High Peaks.
He didn’t argue. The weight of the Pennine weather, combined with my complete refusal to touch his stylus, broke his corporate compliance. With a heavy grunt, he pocketed the terminal, hoisted the wet crate from the mud, and shuffled it through a front door built for eighteenth-century miners.
“Where’s the filing cabinets going then?” he grumbled, his boots squelching on my new flagstones. “The clutch on the Luton van is smelling proper toasted on this incline, and I’d rather be back over the tops before the motorway turns into a car park.”
“The front room,” I said, my voice flat, stripped of the corporate diplomacy I’d spent twenty-five years cultivating in Manchester. “And please don’t stack them by the radiator. Assuming the radiator actually works, which, given the current structural integrity of the skirting boards, is a mathematical longshot.”
Gary gave a nod that suggested my life choices were no concern of his, dumped the remaining cardboard archives into the hallway with a series of wet thuds, and fled. Within two minutes, the diesel engine was roaring a desperate, high-pitched protest as he backed down the loose shale track, leaving me entirely alone with the silence of the clough.
It was a heavy, suffocating sort of quiet. No sirens, no distant rumble of the tram, no reassuring hum of suburban traffic. Just the relentless, wet slap-slap-slap of rain hitting the slate roof and the angry hiss of my cat, Dr Snuggles, as he glared at local wildlife from the window ledge.
I looked down at the threshold. I’d traded the predictable, comforting exhaust fumes of the Mancunian Way for a village in the back of beyond, and I already had a queasy feeling about the decision.
I turned back toward the dark hallway, ready to hunt for the box containing the gin, when a sudden wet crunch on the shale path stopped me.
A neon-orange blob materialized out of the mist. A high-altitude emergency flare that possessed the terrifying, uninvited buoyancy of someone who spent her life forcing people into mandatory fun. She was wearing a pair of rugged tracking boots that must have cost more than my annual council tax, a matching waterproof poncho, and a massive, flowing linen scarf that was a severe health and safety hazard in this high wind.
She wasn’t carrying a traditional housewarming gift like a bottle of wine, a tin of biscuits or a loaf of home-baked bread. Instead, she was thrusting a glass jar of homemade wild-garlic kimchi toward my chest. The liquid inside was a violent, radioactive shade of orange, and the metal lid was visibly bulging under the sheer pressure of its own internal gasses. It looked less like a neighborly welcome and more like an improvised explosive device.
“You must be Sarah! The new accountant from town!” she cheered, her voice bouncing off the wet stone with the kind of aggressive energy that makes you want to lock the door and hide under the stairs. “Oh, look at you, you’re absolutely absorbing the valley’s moisture. Brilliant for the lymphatic drainage, darling. I’m Janine, I run The Gritstone Arms Wellness Centre just down the clough.”
I took the volatile jar gingerly, keeping it at arm’s length in case it detonated. “Right. Thanks. I’m actually just trying to find the box with my router before the remaining data on my phone completely dies.”
“Oh, forget the internet, sweetheart!” Janine laughed, dismissing three decades of global telecommunications infrastructure with a wave of her rings. “Hatherclough is a digital detox zone. The universe wants you to unplug. In fact, I’ve already put your name down for the Parish Council Welcome Subcommittee on Thursday. We’re drafting the agenda for the winter allotment allocation and tackling the oat milk transition strategy for the local livestock. We desperately need a proper numbers person to audit the finances.”
I stared at her, the horizontal rain stinging my face. My tolerance for working groups, action points, and strategic overviews had expired sometime in 2018, and I hadn’t moved to the middle of nowhere to resurrect it.
“I don’t know, Janine,” I said, my voice deadpan. “I’m pretty busy at the moment, maybe some time in the future I might have a little more free time.”
The far distant future, sometime after the heat death of the universe.
Janine didn’t even blink. Some women are immune to the subtle signals of polite refusal. She just let out a loud, ringing laugh that made a nearby crow flap away in terror, then leaned in closer, dropping her voice to a theatrical whisper.
“Oh, I’ll pencil you in for next quarter then! A sharp eye is exactly what this place needs. The Council hasn’t even had this cottage on the local housing registry since 1996. A total administrative black hole. The Vernon estate just kept it completely frozen on the books for thirty years, God knows why. Anyway, Thursday at eight at the pub! Open that kimchi carefully, it’s got a bit of a kick!”
She spun on her expensive heel and vanished back into the grey soup of the clough before I could formulate a second, more specific refusal.
I stood on the threshold, looking down at the bulging orange jar, then turned back into the freezing, shadow-drenched hallway of my new home.
An administrative black hole since 1996. My brain, despite my best efforts to shut it down for the evening, automatically noted this previously unknown piece of information. Maybe part of the reason this large house was so much cheaper than my flat in Chorlton.
I shut the heavy oak door against the rain, locked it with a key that looked like it belonged to a dungeon, and set the bulging jar of garlic kimchi on the floor. If it exploded, at least the stone flags were washable.
The kitchen was roughly the temperature of a meat locker. I located the boiler in a recess beside the back door. It was a hulking monstrosity with instructions consisting of a single, faded yellow sticker from 1982. The reset sequence involved holding down a copper valve, toggling a plastic switch, and apparently praying to a forgotten deity of central heating. I tried it twice. The boiler responded with a pathetic, hollow clunk and went completely dead.
“Fuck’s sake,” I muttered, my fingers already going numb.
I needed a drink. The problem was, the box containing my actual glassware was currently buried somewhere beneath four hundred pounds of archive files in the hall. I rummaged through the nearest plastic crate, found a neon-pink baking measuring jug, and poured three fingers of lukewarm Gordon’s gin straight into it. It wasn’t elegant, but it was efficient.
I took a long swallow and pulled out my phone. Zero bars. The three-foot-thick gritstone walls weren’t just walls; they were a Faraday cage built by Victorian masons, and it seemed they ensured total isolation from the twenty-first century.
This was a disaster. I had a strict five-o’clock deadline to load a Q1 re-forecast. If those figures weren’t in the system, some middle-management compliance tick-boxer in the London office would trigger an automated escalation protocol, which meant automated warnings, phone calls, and an endless log of administrative shite I had zero intention of dealing with.
I grabbed my laptop bag, balanced the measuring jug of gin in my left hand, and eyed the narrow, twisting staircase at the end of the hall. If the valley wasn’t going to give me a signal down here, maybe I’d just have to go higher.
The stairs were narrow enough to bruise a hip and angled at a crooked slope. By the time I reached the top landing, my thighs were burning and the pink measuring jug of gin was sloshing dangerously close to the rim.
The spare bedroom was small, drafty, and dominated by a monstrous Victorian wardrobe that the previous owners had left behind. The home buyer’s report had explicitly advised against attempting to move the heavy furniture without professional assistance. Naturally, I dropped my laptop bag, set down my gin, and shoved it.
The wardrobe screeched across the floorboards like a dying pig, exposing a massive patch of peeling wallpaper. The surveyor had logged this as ‘minor condensation typical of regional stone properties.’ It wasn’t condensation. It was a rotting, black circle of damp that had eaten right through the plaster to reveal a square indentation in the gritstone.
A hidden iron wall-safe.
The small brass latch was furred with green oxidation. I didn’t have a key, but decades of dealing with stuck filing cabinets had taught me that British manufacturing from the last century usually yielded to brute force. I went downstairs, grabbed a poker from the wood-burning stove and returned. I hooked the poker into the metal loop and yanked.
With a dry, rusted crack, the door swung open.
Inside sat a single object: a thick, heavy, leather-bound accounting ledger. Its spine was cracked, and a layer of grey dust sat on top.
I reached in to pull it out.
The second my fingers clamped around the leather a blinding flash of vibrant, spectral teal-blue light violently erupted from the pages. It sliced through the gloomy bedroom, throwing sharp, electric shadows against the ceiling and illuminating the dust motes like neon static. The air instantly turned freezing—a sudden, deep chill that sent a shiver through my whole body. My ears popped, filled with the phantom sound of a cassette tape clicking to an abrupt stop in a stereo that wasn’t there.
Then, just as quickly, the light snapped back into the paper like a rubber band.
The bedroom returned to its grey, miserable reality. The rain continued hitting the window.
I stood there, blinking away the blue spots dancing across my retinas, my heart finally doing something resembling a brisk trot. Great, I thought flatly. A stroke. Or toxic mold spores. I lowered the ledger and looked toward the corner of the room.
Sitting cross-legged on top of my pristine, color-coded Tax Year 2024/25 archive box was a lad.
He looked about seventeen, with a messy, wet-looking mid-nineties curtain haircut flopping into his eyes. He was wearing an oversized, faded black Nirvana T-shirt, a red-and-black check flannel shirt tied securely around his waist, and a pair of ripped denim jeans that had seen better decades. He didn’t drift, and he didn’t float, but he was semi-transparent. He sat on my cardboard files, looking thoroughly unimpressed, slowly blowing a pink bubble with a piece of phantom Hubba Bubba before letting it collapse with a soft, spectral snap.
He shoved his hair out of his eyes, looked at the bare walls, and then turned his gaze slowly toward me.
“You spilled your drink, mate,” he said.
