The hut was freezing. It smelled of damp and desperation. My fear seemed to flow into a pool fed by many streams, many fears: how many borders had we crossed, I and how many others who had been here before? I felt my thigh yet again for the faint bump of my gold ring. Sewing it into the hem of the smock was Besnik’s idea. “Nothing else, nothing bigger.” He had tossed me the smock in exchange for my city clothes and the contents of my handbag before vanishing into the night. Would the smock let me pass unnoticed, as he promised? And if so, how far would that ring take me on the other side? “After the shattered oak the path falls away. When you pass the marker stone you are across. Now I must go.” And he was gone.
I walked an hour up the stony track. Everything was silent but for my footsteps. Then the click of a safety catch. Two figures in dark uniforms stepped from behind the oak. One grabbed my shoulders, the other felt along the hem with sure hands. “Besnik, eh? Never lets you down.”
Moray McGowan, a Hiberno-Scottish silverback, wrapped chocolate, delivered mail, dug trenches, picked fruit and baked boiler insulation, taught for forty years at universities in Germany, the UK and Ireland, and now shuffles between the marshlands of Somerset (UK) and the jungles of Berlin.