Cornwall’s Isles of Scilly – five inhabited but tiny, sub-tropical islands found, if searched for, in the Atlantic Ocean, 28 miles off England’s Land’s End…
Prologue
A Week from Now
She’ll wake up and see to her dad first so that she’ll get to spend breakfast time with him at the kitchen island. She didn’t know how much longer they had left until it wouldn’t matter, until she could no longer just leave him to his own devices for a couple of hours. But it will be a day when he’ll wash unaided and clean his own teeth. She’ll only need to prompt him, and afterwards, help him on with his polka dot socks.
‘Will you be writing about the returning helicopter service?’ he’ll ask.
‘Actually, dad, just finished a piece,’ she’ll say, discretely coloured eyes widening.
She’ll see a smile pass across his face and assume it’s of relief – she’ll know that thinking she’s busy makes her dad feel less guilty that he’s the reason she’s still at home.
‘There’s always a story,’ he’ll say, as if to himself.
‘Mean, sure, I suppose,’ she’ll say. ‘They tend to be small ones on a small island though.’
Because he’ll continue to chat normally and show no sign of his illness, she’ll say, ‘Gonna head to the office.’ She’ll kiss his cheek, which will be warm and smell of shaving cream. She’ll switch on the TV for him and dress in her army surplus Parka coat.
‘All right, love,’ he’ll say. ‘Drive carefully.’
‘Will, dad,’ she’ll tell him habitually, despite always driving too quickly.
She’ll climb into the Land Rover she knows as Jeane. From a large box brimming with case-less cassette tapes that sits on the passenger seat she’ll dig out The Little Ones. She’ll play their “Morning Tide” because the song never fails to make her happy.
On her commute, a winter sun will make fields of scented narcissi – daffodils – shine like moist palettes of yellow oils. They’ll appear and disappear quickly on either side of her as modest hills unfold and retreat. She’ll pass Porth Mellon and notice that the outgoing tide has left behind a pattern of arcs on the beach, drier by degrees, as if a rainbow has pressed itself to the sand.
After little more than five minutes she’ll be in her tiny office. As The Cornishman weekly newspaper’s sole employee on the Isles of Scilly, she’ll be there alone.
The first thing she’ll do is ring Nick, but he won’t answer. She won’t get to ask him if he got enough sleep then, his excuse for going home alone after last night’s party on St. Agnes.
Righteous indignation will make her ring her ex-boyfriend.
‘How’re you doing, Lucas?’ she’ll say. In her mind’s eye she’ll picture him – dark red hair, experimental goatee, suit jacket and smart jeans.
‘Busy as. I’m physically carrying old records over to the new building from the hospital.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘We’re on schedule for the new year opening though. Look, I’ll have to catch you later,’ he’ll say, hanging up.
Work will always be busy for the islands’ doctor.
The quiet in Arcadia’s office, on the other hand, will make her feel lonely and bored. She’ll know that the best way to overcome those feelings will be to work. With next week’s story already filed – that is, emailed to the Penzance office – she’ll collate advertising for Scilly Now and Then instead, a magazine she compiles herself and sends to the Printing Service next door every two months.
The graphic layout of perfunctory adverts for local services being her focus, the rhythm of work will take over. She’ll no longer notice the disintegrating décor of her office. She’ll not hear the background hum of the industrial estate come through the front door when it opens or notice the man who staggers in with it. Only when he aggressively brings both hands down onto her desk, as much to keep himself upright as to demand her attention, will she be wrenched from her reverie.
In surprise, she’ll leap to her feet from behind her monitor. She’ll find the man looming, looking unhinged. He’ll be skinny and shabbily dressed, with a left forearm in a dirty plaster cast.
‘Vinny,’ she’ll yell. But then the atmosphere will turn ghostly.
‘I saw him,’ he’ll say, in an awful, laboured voice.
A chill will fill Arcadia and linger. ‘What?’ she’ll say. ‘Saw who?’
‘Sergeant Leonard.’
‘Nick?’
‘He was alive.’
‘What?’
‘How can he be alive, Arcadia? I killed him four days ago…’
‘What?’
Part 1 – Arcadia Kendrick
Sunday, 1st December 2026
1
The front door closed behind her. Beneath the soles of her Doc Martens, the forecourt gravel crunched and complained. As she walked, Arcadia Kendrick tied her tumultuous dark blonde hair back in a ponytail, and some of it fell like spider’s legs across her face.
She climbed into Jeane and ejected the tape from the deck and tossed it into the box. Her phone rang. It was her friend Mike Brown, a flower farmer.
‘Hey, Mike,’ she said, smiling, before he fell across her words in static and stumbling.
‘– lost two dogs here this morni –’
‘What did you say?’
‘– claim to have watched Pip disapp… thin air at the hedge … We were picking from Mike’s New... front of mum’s house, now my pickers refuse to go back to that –’
‘It’s just run off somewhere, hasn’t it?’
‘Pip’s fifteen years – doesn’t run anywhere. My… other hand –’
‘Your Lucy? She’s a tearaway.’
Both dogs were King Charles Spaniels, but Mike’s was a one-year-old live wire.
‘…gone – hour, Arc.’
‘Huh? Oh, Mike, that does seem odd.’
‘Disappeared at the hedgerow just where Pip did.’
Arcadia frowned. ‘Do you mean they pushed their way through the bush?’
‘No... not what... mean – searched, all of us.’
Although she could barely understand what he was saying, she felt suitably rebuked for daring to suggest the obvious.
‘They’re not here anymore.’ Static fizzled. ‘I don’t really blame… for refusing to leave the glasshouse…something in the air. I don’t know what to do –’
‘Mike, I’ll be there in a couple of minutes. Don’t upset yourself. The dogs must be somewhere, mustn’t they?’
*
Arcadia pulled up outside the first barn on the unpaved Rocky Hill side of Four Lane’s End, because all the usual parking spots were occupied by cars belonging to flower pickers and tiers. She was surprised to see the police car there too.
“Barstool Blues” came to an end and she turned off the Land Rover’s ignition. She got out and walked round the front of Jeane. A sign board over the barn doors bore the legend, “Farmer Brown’s Bulb Shop.” The doors were wide open but the darkness inside the barn was impenetrable.
Something burst from it. A figure. Arcadia had no time to react, but the runaway, wired for escape, was able to rear up and soften the impact. Even so, they knocked her back against the side of her Land Rover before changing direction and resuming their flight.
Winded, confused, Arcadia blew a raspberry of shock as she watched the figure disappear round the corner. She stood up and jerked her Parka straight.
At full pelt and equally without warning, a second person rushed into the daylight. This one did not react so swiftly, nor so dexterously, to her unexpected presence just outside the door. They ran into her and fell with her up against the side of Jeane.
It was a man.
His face was right in hers; sunned, clean-shaven, neat-featured. The lengths of their noses pressed together. His breath was heavy on her flesh. For an infinitesimal moment she gazed into his soul, as he did hers. She didn’t know what she saw, but it was something.
The policeman snapped to.
‘Stay here,’ he yelled too loudly. And then he sprinted after the runaway.
Arcadia's eyes bulged incredulously. ‘Did you get Miranda Priestly to hold your pint?’ she said into the space he left behind. And then she tore after him.
It was Vinny Kimble they were after. Vinny was an emaciated, life-long low-level criminal with a limp and a left arm currently in a plaster cast. In all seriousness, it wouldn’t likely have been anyone else. Arcadia recognised him as he moved beyond the far end of the glasshouse on their left. By the time the policeman reached the same spot, Vinny had temporarily disappeared through bushes bordering an ornamental front garden. Then the man erupted back into view, crossing the garden and entering a line of trees.
Vinny’s handicaps meant it was worth persisting with the chase. Arcadia followed the policeman through the bushes and by the time he’d reached the trees she was on his shoulder.
He glared round at her, briefly and angrily.
On the other side of the trees, they found themselves on a patch of land called Mike’s New Fields, four fields which grew smaller as they descended the hillside to the road. ‘There,’ said Arcadia, pointing. Vinny had run to the track beside the western hedgerow. The undulating rows of earth bearing half-picked flowers would have been far too tricky underfoot to risk crossing at pace.
But they were baffled to spot an old lady too, walking down the track by the roadside hedgerow. Her inexplicable presence on the other side of the field momentarily distracted the policeman.
‘Who’s that?’ he yelled.
‘Don’t recognise her,’ said Arcadia as they ran.
They were mere yards from Vinny when the man abruptly stopped running, bent over and pushed his way into the hedge. Arcadia and the policeman flailed as they slowed dramatically, grabbing each other for balance on the precarious wet mud underfoot. They both stared into the hedgerow… and both found themselves unable to distinguish a patch thin enough to be where Vinny had gained entry.
Arcadia said, ‘I think this is the field Mike was on about. Did he say anything to you about disappearing dogs?’
The policeman ignored her. Clutching her sleeve for balance he leaned to one side and pointed to where he thought the hedge thinned. She thought she heard him say, ‘What about here…?’
… but the comprehensive environment in which Arcadia existed – her reality – snapped instantaneously into another.
Shocked by what her eyes were telling her, Arcadia fell over. But it was neither prickles, twigs or leaves, nor hard mud or unpicked narcissi that she felt on the palms of her hands; it was the intractable cold certainty of floorboards.
She was hallucinating this absurdity, she assumed.
Strange then, that the policeman fell into her line of vision, dropping to his knees in similar disorientation and ejecting a guttural complaint that indisputably echoed within a built room rather than dissipated across a rural hillside.
2
Where’s the hedgerow?
Arcadia leaned up on one elbow. She was at the shadowy end of a long, rectangular room, an end cloaked in darkness – especially behind her, at the wall that was there instead of a hedgerow. This gloom crept towards illumination the further down the room she looked, where at the other end two windows, side by side in the wall on her right, let in weak winter daylight. Halfway to the windows, a solitary rickety-looking chair made the room look large.
Perplexed, Arcadia glanced at the policeman, who pushed himself upright but took no notice of her.
With no help from him apparent, Arcadia looked inward for a solution. To end the hallucination, she told her brain to recognise the rural spot from which they’d fallen. She turned round again, and this time really looked for biological life.
But it absolutely was not there and nor were any rows of flowers beyond. Arcadia was close enough to the wall to make it out in the gloom, but no matter how much she willed it to, it did not morph back into organic matter. She took a short, sharp breath and shook her head. She didn’t feel drugged, but how could this be real?
Where’s the bloody hedgerow?
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Hello?’
The policeman uttered a noise like, ‘Urgh,’ as if she’d punched him in the stomach.
Arcadia frowned and climbed nervously to her feet. It surprised her when she was able to take a step. She touched the wall on her left. As far as she’d been trained by life to understand such matters, the room was real.
‘This is something, isn’t it?’ said Arcadia, glancing sidelong at him. ‘Mean, there’s got to come a point when we just stop disputing and start accepting, no?’
The policeman persisted in both not answering her and not looking at her. Even in the madness of her situation, Arcadia found room to feel piqued.
‘Mean, I’m certain I’m not dreaming,’ she said. ‘Though it’d help some if you’d only speak –’
‘Shut up!’
The words erupted from him venomously.
Arcadia glared at him. She felt the flesh of her face straining.
Perhaps the extent of his anger and discourtesy took him by surprise too, because after turning away from her he turned back, only this time lingered some. He seemed about to go on speaking but stopped himself. He sucked in his lips and swallowed the words. A look not far removed from a smile became a contrite grimace.
‘Just… stop speaking for a minute,’ he said, his voice quickly decreasing in volume. ‘Please.’
‘Great,’ Arcadia said deliberately, and then walked pointedly into his line of vision to goad him. ‘Just what I’ve always wanted. To be stuck in an alternate reality with a basic bastard. Don’t you have to pass some kind of common courtesy test to be a policeman?’
At last, the man looked at her.
But his eyes flickered uneasily, refusing to settle on hers.
‘Something…’ he said, as if an explanation were beneath him, ‘… is happening to me. I would like a moment to myself.’
Arcadia felt outraged. ‘Fine. Coz that something is not happening to me too… And it certainly wouldn’t be a good idea to discuss our situation. You just stay all up in your chivalry there and have your bloody moment, you rude cock.’
He shook his head and threw up a dismissive hand for her to talk to.
Arcadia sneered and moved away from him. Her anger made her want to go off on one. It took all her effort to suck up the slight, and not respond how she wanted to, for the simple reason that she didn’t know what the hell was going on with the reality around them. Until she did, she might well be better off with him than without.
So she turned her attention to sizing up the room.
Arcadia’s eyes were accustomed now to the poor visibility, but she hadn’t yet pinpointed what was odd about the place. She realised there was a door at the other end of the windows. When she saw that it was ajar, she pointed at it and looked back at the man.
‘Do you think Vinny came here? If he did,’ she said, ‘he went that way.’
With a disagreeable look apparently etched permanently in his face, the man gave a single nod.
Still emboldened by residual anger, Arcadia said, ‘What’s Vinny done anyway?’
The policeman sighed. ‘What’s it to do with you?’
‘I’m here because of him, thanks,’ she said, ‘so how about you just tell me.’
Now he looked irritated. But he said, ‘Theft of petrol cannisters from Porthloo Farm during yesterday’s storm,’
Arcadia nodded. ‘Do you think Vinny meant to come to this place – that he already knew it was here?’
He looked at her disapprovingly. ‘I told you to stay behind. It was for your own good. Now you’re my bloody…’
Oh my God, I can’t stand this bloke.
‘Don’t you dare presume to take responsibility for me…’
‘As long as we’re here I have to,’ the policeman shouted, and with that he planted himself onto the chair. It proved to be as rickety as it looked, forcing him to spread his feet apart for balance as he said, more quietly, ‘Little miss Cornishman.’
Arcadia bristled.
‘My name is Arcadia Kendrick.’
‘Don’t I know it. She with the irritating habit of being where I need to be for work, sometimes before I even get there.’
Arcadia’s eyebrows arched. ‘Some of us are natural investigators,’ she said in a provocative tone.
‘Really. Well do me a favour then and investigate what’s happened to us.’
‘Fell into some kind of portal to somewhere else,’ Arcadia said immediately, and she felt surprised and approving of her own conclusion.
The policeman’s mouth turned upside down as if to indicate that he too felt unexpectedly satisfied with her suggestion, even giving a cursory nod. He took off his hat and flattened his brown hair, which was a centimetre at its longest at a prominent widow’s peak.
‘Nick,’ he said reluctantly.
‘Nick what?’
‘Sergeant Nick bloody Leonard, Devon and Cornwall police,’ he said, as if annoyed that she didn’t already know, or that she pretended not to. ‘And it’s not one of us dreaming because we’ve both got free will. Maybe we were somehow drugged.’
‘Drugged or knocked out. Maybe Vinny brought us here in either case. Only thing is,’ said Arcadia, ‘don’t think that’s what happened. Know for a fact that I’ve been conscious the whole time.’
‘Me too,’ said Nick.
‘Was on the phone to Mike just before you pinned and mounted me. Told me two dogs had disappeared. Guess that case is closed,’ said Arcadia.
The thought of the dogs appeared to sharpen Nick’s focus. ‘A… portal… in the hedgerow…’
‘Wormholes are proven now to exist in science and nature, never mind science fiction.’
‘But we’re not in space,’ said Nick.
‘That’s got nothing to –’
‘Can you smell citrus?’
‘A minute ago.’ Arcadia moved to the middle of the room. ‘Wood shavings now.’
