A grim warning

Alex wakes up to an empty bed and the smell of bacon. He pulls on some clothes and goes to investigate.

The girls are all up and sat eating breakfast in the front room. Nathalie is wearing tight black leggings and a green top, and her curly hair tied back away from her face. Emma is wearing a thin blue dress that shows plenty of slender leg. Isolde is still in her white nightshirt.

"Morning!" Isolde says with a smile as he enters, and throws another rasher of bacon onto the grill.

Nathalie smiles at him knowingly. He thinks of their shared secret and smiles back. Emma, however, is as cold as she had been on the journey over the previous day and largely ignores him. To be fair, he thinks, she looks pretty hungover. Clearly last night's wine had gone straight to her head.

After breakfast, Isolde gets dressed in a short blue smock (rumpled, of course) and they decide on the route for a pleasant hike through the woods. Whilst Nathalie is bent over the table and pointing out landmarks on the map Alex finds himself looking at her shapely ass, which looks great in the tight black leggings. Emma catches him and raises an eyebrow, and he forces himself to look away. There's no point in raising questions, and Nathalie had been clear that the evening needed to stay a secret between the three guilty parties.

Finally, plans made and sandwiches packed, Nathalie throws open the door and daylight floods into the cabin.

She immediately screams and covers her face with her hands.

Alex jumps forward instinctively, pushing Nathalie behind him.

Laid out on the grass in front of the cabin is a dead deer, lying in a dried pool of blood. Its stomach has been torn open and its intestines arranged in a complicated pattern of loops and angles. A small cloud of flies buzz and flit around the carcass.

Alex covers his face with his arm. The stench of **** is overpowering.

"What happened?" Isolde asks, her face white.

Nathalie looks as if she might not answer. Then she shrugs. "They call themselves witches," she says. She seems to have fully recovered from her shock and is now standing with her hands on her hips, observing the scene coldly. "Its meant to be a warning, I think. Pretty pathetic, really."

"Wait, what... witches?" Emma looks incredulous.

"Not the old woman with a black cat and broomstick type, if that's what you're thinking. They're just people in stupid masks. Men and women both. There's been a few of them meeting up in Darkmoor Woods for years now. You find evidence from time to time... Little icons. Dead animals. That kind of thing."

"Who are they?"

Nathalie shrugs. "No one really knows. They're losers though. Probably just a couple of kids dressing up and playacting. Or maybe a couple of mid-life crises, fat and bald forty something men with more money than sense and a taste for kinky sex. Look! That will have been them." She points down the lake to where a plume of black smoke drifts into the sky, a remnant of last night's bonfire. "Some stupid rite or another."

"Do you think its the same people with the car we saw yesterday?" Emma asks, hugging her chest and looking at the dead deer unhappily.

Nathalie laughs. "Witches driving a battered hatchback? Its possible I guess." She reflects. "No, that's probably just other walkers like us."

She absently wipes her hands on her leggings and looks at Alex.

"Come on, hero. Grab a pair of shovels from the shed at the back of the cabin. You and me are burying this thing."

"What then?" Emma is still white. " We're not still going on the walk, are we?"

"Of course we are. They're just a bunch of pathetic fakes, Emma, who like dancing around in the nude and playing make-believe games. Don't let them scare you. We're here to have a nice time, and that's just what we're going to do!"

She jerks a thumb at Alex. "Shovels!"

It doesn't take long to bury the deer. The ground is soft and the shovels very effective. Only an hour later, the four of them are trekking out down the lake... in the opposite direction to the sinister plume of black smoke.