Burnt Paper Sky Read Online Free Page B

the rope swing and then returned to the path, striking out along it in opposite directions with a plan to converge at the main car park.
    I wasn’t calm, not a bit. Fear made my insides feel as if they were melting.
    As we searched, the woods were transforming. The sky became darker and overcast and in places the overhanging branches were dense enough to form a solid arch, and the path became a dark burrow.
    Leaves gusted around me like decomposing confetti as the wind began to build, and great masses of foliage shuddered and bent as it whipped through the canopy above.
    I called for Ben over and over again and listened too, straining to decipher the layers of sound the woods produced. A branch cracked. A bird called, a high-pitched sound, like a yelp, and another answered. High overhead was the sound of an aeroplane.
    Loudest of all was me: my breathing, the sound of my boots slapping through the mud. My panic was audible.
    Nowhere was the sound of Ben’s voice, or of Skittle.
    Nowhere did I see a bright red anorak.
     
    By the time I reached the car park I felt hysterical. It was packed with cars and families, because there were teams of boys and their supporters leaving the adjacent soccer field. A fantasy role-play enactment group loitered in one corner, bizarrely costumed, packing weaponry and picnic coolers into their cars. They were a regular sight in the woods on Sunday afternoons.
    I focused on the boys. Many of them wore red kit. I moved amongst them looking for him, turning shoulders, staring into faces, wondering if he was there, camouflaged by his anorak. I recognised some faces amongst them. I called his name, asked them if they’d seen a boy, asked them if they’d seen Ben Finch. A hand on my arm stopped me in my tracks.
    ‘Rachel!’
    It was Peter Armstrong, single dad of Ben’s best friend, Finn. Finn stood behind him in football kit, mud-streaked, sucking on a piece of orange.
    ‘What’s happened?’
    Peter listened, as I told him.
    ‘We need to phone the police,’ he said. ‘Right now.’ He made the call himself, while I stood beside him, shaking, and couldn’t believe what I was hearing because it meant that this was real now, that it was actually happening to us.
    Then Peter organised people. He rallied the families in the car park and got some to stay behind with the children, others to form a search party.
    ‘Five minutes,’ he said to everyone. ‘Then we leave.’
    As we waited, raindrops began to speckle the front of Peter’s glasses. I trembled and he put his arm around me.
    ‘It’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘We’ll find him.’
    We were standing like that when the old lady emerged from the woods. She was out of breath and her dog strained at its lead. Her face fell when she saw me.
    ‘Oh my dear,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I was sure you would have found him by now.’ She laid a hand on my arm, for support as much as reassurance.
    ‘Have you called for help?’ she asked. ‘As it’s getting dark I think you must.’
     
    It didn’t take long, but even so, by the time everyone had mustered, the shadows and shapes of the trees around us had lost their definition and merged into indistinct shades of darkness, making the woods seem impenetrable and hostile. Anybody who had one brought a flashlight. We were a motley crew who gathered, a mixture of football parents, re-enactors still in costume and a Lycra-clad cyclist. Our pinched faces told not just of the deepening chill, but of the darker and growing fear that Ben wasn’t just lost, but that he’d come to harm.
    Peter addressed everybody: ‘Ben’s wearing a red anorak, blue trainers that flash, jeans and he’s got dark brown hair and blue eyes. The dog’s a black and white cocker spaniel called Skittle. Any questions?’
    There were none. We broke into two groups and set off, one in each direction along the path. Peter led one group; I led the other.
    The woods swallowed us up. Before ten minutes had passed the rain