Sam tried to hold on to Tink as the wave of sand enveloped them, covering them in darkness. But she was ripped away and his familiar guilt transmuted into shame, into which he was lost every bit as in the tumult. Only his bursting need to breathe brought panic to the rescue, taking over every cell and neuron. He fought sand, clamping his mouth shut, struggling to move his limbs against the thick current. His chest hitched as the sand settled and, horrifyingly, solidified. One arm was stuck outstretched above his head, the other was twisted behind his back, but what was up and down was impossible to tell. A muffled groan rang up his throat, and in the battle between will and instinct his lungs hitched.

  When he snorted a nose full of sand, the moan became a strangled scream. He tried to thrash his head, but he was locked in place. All he was doing was accelerating the inevitable, that moment when he’d admit defeat and open his mouth and suck down a lungful of dried particles, and that would be the real start of the pain and panic. The thought made him fight harder and get the same result. Nothing. He was going to die in the back garden of a rundown squat in a small English town no one had ever heard of. Not a fate too dissimilar from his mother’s. Just swap squat for council flat and small town for London tower block and that would be about right.

  The breath was coming now. No point fighting anymore. It was going to hurt and maybe the anticipation was worse than the real thing. Sam knew that wasn’t true. Sometimes the anticipation was only a warm-up for the real agony.

  The short hall in their London flat opened up before Sam again, far longer than it should be. He drifted along it to the door, like that Arriflex 35 BL camera on a dolly following Danny pedal down the corridors of the Overlook Hotel, all rich and high definition before that was even a thing. There were no twins, no elevator of blood, no rotting hag in a bathtub waiting for Sam. His mother’s room had no number at all, let alone 237 on a red key fob. It was a cheap door of laminated wood from another century, and behind it lay the end of the world in a tangle of plastic tubes and morphine. He could never go in that room. He’d even got as far as reaching out for the handle, expecting it to be cold, but the heating was up high in the flat, making it feel of nothing but hard, remorseless metal. He always recoiled. Couldn’t do it. Maybe this time, right as he took his final futile breath, he could pass through the door. In his mind, he reached out and readied to give in.

  Fingers wrapped around his wrist. The door zoomed away, or maybe it was he who flew back to his grave of sand. Someone was pulling. A second hand found his forearm and the upward pressure tore at Sam’s shoulder. He wriggled and fought. His clawing fingers broke free. He kicked and twisted. The helping hands regripped further up his arm and somehow the pressure lessened around his hairline. Like a man wrestling in a straitjacket, he shook his head clear, and he gasped. Sand caught in his throat, and a cough wracked him, but he was able to breathe.

  Tink was on her knees, switching from pulling to digging. She sobbed as she worked, tears streaking her cheeks. When Sam’s other arm came free, he crawled his way out of the ground, with Tink hauling at his hoodie, until he collapsed on his back, still coughing looking up at the sky.

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  The darkest storm clouds he’d ever seen hung heavy overhead. A chaotic render of stygian greys, blacks, and browns, they brooded and twitched with flashes of lightning trapped within their towering citadels. Every muscle burning with exhaustion, cough abating, Sam sat up. He wiped the spit from his mouth and looked around them.

  In all directions, the dunes seemed to go on without end. A warm breeze twirled gossamer curtains of sand across their crests, ghosts in communion with dust dervishes. A hand shielding his eyes, Sam squinted into the distance, scanning the undulating desert, and he almost missed it, sweeping past before catching a glimpse of white and the faint glister of light reflecting off water. The sea. It was impossibly far. Over mile upon mile of sand, made farther by the up and down gradient of countless dunes, each one a steep hill. But when he stood at the cusp of the dunes at the end of the beach house garden, the sea had been only a few hundred metres away. He spun one-eighty from the direction of the shoreline to where Hernshore should have been.

  There was no town or fields or wood, only the dune-scape heaving to oblivion at the horizon. Here and there the unmoving ocean of sand was marked with tufts of grass or bare woody shrubs. Off to the right, and several dunes closer to the sea, a giant tree lay on its side, half buried. It was smooth along its flanks but for the nubs where branches had once been, its roots a stubby grey crown on an ossific body. And there were other things too. Things as impossible as an unending desert.

  ‘We need to move. Find somewhere safe,’ Tink said, hugging her arms around her chest.

  It sounded funny. Safe? Here? Sam laughed, like a hiccup that turned into to a cry of frustration. He pushed both hands into the dune and brought up fistfuls of sand that ran between his fingers and blew away on the wind. ‘This is really it? This is your legend. You weren’t joking then?’ His words were angry.

  Tink put a hand to his chest but dared not quite touch him. ‘Shh! Please, we have to keep quiet.’

  ‘What are we supposed to do?’ Sam carried on, ignoring her. ‘Walk to the sea?’ He turned that way. ‘That was it, wasn’t it?’ He laughed again at how far it was. Miles upon miles through a desert of soft sand and massive dunes. He laughed some more at the idea of a legend and of him being some chosen one and of magic and of how comically unfair life was, killing his mother and landing him with a dopey rich prick who’d given him nothing but half his genes and a cursed birth-rite. What a joke. What a punchline.

  ‘Shh! Stop, please, Sam.’ Tink held out her hands placatingly.

  Sam shook his head and walked in a circle, muttering and chuckling. ‘Maybe I’m dead? Nah, couldn’t be that lucky, blud.’

  A vibration came from beneath, faint but humming up through the soles of their feet. Tink squatted and placed her hand on the dune. Lightning flashed deep within the storm clouds, with the flickering of a phosphorous strip-light blinking on and off. They’d switched roles from their failed escape attempt at the house. While Sam continued to pace and talk to himself, Tink scrutinised their predicament. Particles danced and skittered on the surface of the dune around her hand. There was a deep distant hum of a coming train galloping down the rails. Where was it? So many dunes. Save for the flotsam and jetsam of this realm, it was a panorama of sameness.

  Tink stood bolt upright. ‘There!’ She pointed. ‘Shut up. Sam! There, for Herne’s sake, look.’

  Sam stopped and stared. He blinked, mouth frozen open mid-rant. His gaze went from her face to her arm and traced the invisible line into the distance. At first, he didn’t see it, maybe thinking she meant the galleon with its torn sails, listing halfway down a dune, or the turrets of stone buildings peeking above the surface of the sand. But then, far off, a dune seemed to shrug.

  ‘Do you see it?’ Tink asked, still jabbing her finger.

  Sam squinted. ‘I...’

  The next dune moved, sloughing in two as a deep cleft opened down the middle. ‘Yes,’ he said, breathlessly. ‘What is it?’

  Tink pulled at his arm, frantic. ‘Sam please, we’ve got to go. We’ve got to find somewhere to hide. She is coming.’

  ‘Who is coming?’

  ‘Sugnar. The great wyrm knows you are here.’