The Disciple by Steven Dunne

cold.
    ‘Please, Damen. Just once for love.’ She pushed his arms down and kissed him with her frosty lips. Brook could feel her soft flesh trembling in her too thin slip and tried to pull away, but she pressed closer to him for warmth, her tongue beginning to search for his.
    A stench so foul Brook thought he might retch made him push the girl away and he swung the torch back to her face. The blackened skull and orbs of her eye sockets glared back at him and he shrank back to the wall of his tent, almost collapsing the frame. The broken beer bottle protruding from her neck glistened in the artificial light, grimy panties still dangling from its neck – testimony to her killer’s final incriminating act.
    ‘You’re not real,’ shouted Brook. He darted the torch this way and that, searching for her corpse. She had gone. Brook heaved a sigh. A second later he felt the movement at his feet and knew at once what it was. He scrambled to pull the sleeping bag off his legs but the seething, roiling mass of rats struggling for air at the bottom of his fetid bed gouged and scraped their way to freedom over his quivering torso.
    Brook sat bolt upright and took several huge gasps of air. When his heart returned to near normal, he poked a bleary head out into the sharp, cold air of the morning. Although only wearing underpants and T-shirt, he spilled out onto the sopping grass and raised his six-foot frame to its full height, welcoming the fingers of dawn massaging their faint warmth into his face.
    He closed his eyes and rubbed the fatigue from them. It had been years since he’d dreamed of Laura Maples, dreams he thought he’d left behind forever. Her killer, Floyd Wrigley, was in the ground – Brook had seen to that – and his nightmares had been buried with him. Or so he had thought. Two nights in a row. He heaved a final huge sigh. Something was wrong.
    He looked at his watch and scrabbled back inside the tent, emerging with a box of matches inside a plastic bag. The first two matches he removed failed to ignite, but the third obliged, and Brook slid it under the kettle of his one-ring camping stove and made some tea.
    Brook returned to the tent, dressed quickly, then packed his sleeping bag, camera and other meagre possessions into the side of his rucksack.
    He then set to work taking down his quick-erect tent. He worked rhythmically, occasionally looking around as he folded, but there was no landowner or farmer to complain this early in the morning.
    Brook packed his stove, kettle and mug and struck out down the path that would eventually spit him out into the small hamlet of Milldale, on the River Dove in Derbyshire’s Peak District. Forty minutes later he was standing on Milldale’s ancient footbridge, admiring a nearby heron and feeling the warmth of the low sun spread its balm.
    He clambered up the steps to the municipal toilets. After an icy wash, Brook gazed at his bleary face in the cracked mirror. He then set off up the path next to the river that would eventually take him to his home in the village of Hartington. He walked steadily, ignoring the hunger gnawing at his tight belly and feelingquiet pleasure at the newfound strength in his legs and shoulders. Two weeks of wild camping, walking fifteen miles a day and eschewing alcohol and cigarettes had left Brook feeling as fit as he had in years. But the dream of Laura Maples gnawed at him. What did it mean?
    Brook power-walked the last mile into Hartington and up the small hill to his front door, stopping only briefly to get a pint of milk and a loaf of bread at the corner shop. As he was extracting his keys from a side pocket, his eye wandered to the small, lavender-scented front garden of Rose Cottage next door. He noticed that the ‘To Let’ sign, which had been there for many a month, had now been taken down and laid flat along the side wall of the cottage. At the same time, he noticed that several upstairs windows had been opened to air the place