53

A more insistent inspection of the body reveals no further treasure, although you do find peculiar marks. Just under the neck and barely above the collar bone are two big puncture wounds, each roughly two centimetre wide. There’s no blood, and the flesh inside looks shrivelled, grey and dry. You can’t help think that, however fatal the fall over from above would have been, this poor fellow wasn’t killed by the impact. In fact, he might have already been dead by that point.

There’s a little more light now, the sun slowly emerging fully from the horizon. You decide to go and see if you can find anything inside the cabin. It’s still dark enough in there that your eyes need a few moments to adjust, but when they do you immediately spot a small metal object glinting weakly on the floor – well, what should be the ceiling – of the carriage. You pick it up and hold it to the sunlight. It is a small pendant in the shape of a moth, a hawk moth. From its surprising weight in relation to its size, you guess it to be gold.

You step back outside, resolute on getting on your way now you have all this bounty. But the moment your foot hits the ground outside the debris field, there is a change in the air around you. It gets hotter, hotter than it should be in the morning, and certainly hotter than it would get at all throughout the day; it’s only late spring. At the same time, it gets darker, and you feel a weight on your entire frame. A low continuous whoosh fills your ears, and somewhere behind that, you hear some sort of raucous scream echoing from far away, but ever closer each second. The pendant in your hand is vibrating with increasing intensity. You don’t know what to do, but you think of the dead man and his puncture wounds. You don’t want his fate.

To abandon the pendant and run through the undergrowth as far away as possible, turn to 358. To hold on to it and still run away, turn to 9.