Julie woke in the middle of the road with the taste of blood in her mouth and, for several long seconds, no understanding of why that should concern her.

​

She lay still while consciousness returned in pieces.

​

Gravel pressed cold against her cheek, one particular stone digging an aching little crescent into the skin below her eye. The air smelled of wet earth, petrol and something metallic she recognised before she wanted to.

​

Somewhere nearby, a mechanical clicking repeated at patient intervals, too regular to belong to the forest surrounding her and too weak to sound as though it would continue much longer.

​

Julie opened her eyes properly.

​

The road was narrow and empty, hemmed in by trees whose branches met overhead in a dark green canopy. Rainwater trembled at the tips of the leaves, though the rain itself had stopped.

​

There were no streetlights, no houses and no passing cars, only a grey strip of tarmac disappearing around a bend in one direction and climbing gently out of sight in the other.

​

For a moment she remained where she was because getting up would require admitting that she did not know how she had come to be lying there.

​

Then the clicking sounded again.

​

Julie turned her head.

​

Twenty metres away, a silver car had wrapped itself around a tree.

​

The sight did not frighten her immediately. It was too complete for that, too much information arriving at once: the bonnet folded upward, the driver's side crushed inward, the windscreen fractured into a white spiderweb around a dark red smear. One headlight flickered weakly into the undergrowth, and the indicator continued its pointless rhythm.

​

Click.

​

Darkness.

​

Click.

​

Julie pushed herself upright.

​

Memory came with the movement.

​

Rain striking glass. Her hands around a steering wheel. Music playing louder than it should have been. Headlights where headlights were not supposed to be.

​

Then the violent sensation of the world moving sideways.

​

“Oh.”

​

The word left her quietly.

​

Julie looked down at herself. Jeans. Trainers. A white shirt dirtied along one sleeve. There was no blood on her chest, no torn fabric, nothing to explain the amount of red she could see through the broken windscreen.

​

She touched her face, then her ribs, then ran both hands over her arms. Nothing hurt beyond the faint tenderness beneath her eye. When she stood, cautiously at first, her knees held. Her ankles held.

​

Her body felt disconcertingly ordinary.

​

The car did not.

​

She approached it slowly. Up close, the damage was worse. Blood streaked the steering wheel and had soaked into the inflated airbag. The driver's window was gone entirely, glittering fragments scattered across the road and into the grass.

​

Julie stared through the opening.

​

The driver's seat was empty.

​

So was the passenger seat.

​

The back seats too.

​

“No.”

​

She stepped away and turned towards the trees, half expecting whoever had bled inside the car to be standing among them.

​

“Hello?”

​

Her voice travelled farther than she expected.

​

Nothing answered.

​

“Is somebody there?”

​

Only water dripping from the leaves.

​

Julie returned to the car. Her handbag lay upside down in the passenger footwell, its contents scattered beneath the dashboard. She could see her purse, her phone, a set of keys and the pink tube of lip balm she was forever losing.

​

The familiarity of those objects brought such sudden relief that she almost laughed.

​

“Okay. Phone.”

​

She reached through the broken window.

​

Her fingers passed through the handbag.

​

Julie recoiled so violently that her elbow struck the door frame.

​

She felt nothing.

​

She stared at her hand.

​

Then at the bag.

​​

Slowly, because there had to be an explanation and because explanations sometimes required doing things one did not particularly want to do twice, she reached inside again.

 

Her hand moved through the leather as though neither it nor the bag had any obligation to acknowledge the other.

 

Julie snatched it back.

 

“No.”

 

She tried the door handle.

 

Her fingers passed through the metal.

 

For several seconds she stood with one hand suspended in front of her while her mind rejected what her eyes had already accepted.

 

She pressed her palms together.

 

Solid.

 

Touched her own arm.

 

Solid.

 

She turned to the nearest tree and wrapped both hands around a low branch.

 

Solid.

 

The car alone refused her.

 

“No, no, no.”

 

Panic began as pressure behind her ribs, then crept into her throat and made every breath too shallow. Julie backed away from the wreckage until the backs of her legs met the verge.

 

Think.

 

Her name was Julie.

 

That came easily.

 

Julie...

 

She waited.

 

Nothing followed.

 

Her surname should have been there. Its absence felt physical, like reaching automatically for a light switch in a familiar room and finding only wall.

 

“Julie what?”

 

The forest offered no suggestions.

 

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried harder.

 

Where did she live?

 

A kitchen with yellow curtains.

 

Coffee.

 

A woman laughing somewhere behind her.

 

A hand pushing damp hair from Julie's forehead.

 

The impressions vanished the moment she tried to hold them.

 

Julie opened her eyes.

 

The car's indicator continued blinking.

 

Click.

 

Darkness.

 

Click.

 

“Okay,” she whispered, because speaking made the silence less enormous. “I was in an accident. I know that. That's something.”

 

She walked around the car looking for a body, although she was no longer certain what she hoped to find. There were no footprints leading into the woods, no torn clothing, no trail of blood beyond the wreckage. Only tyre marks curving sharply towards the tree.

 

At the edge of the verge stood a wooden sign.

 

Julie frowned. She was almost certain it had been there the entire time, yet she could not understand how she had failed to notice it.

 

Three words had been carved into the weathered wood.

 

COMA HILLS — 3 MILES

 

An arrow pointed into the trees.

 

Julie stared at it.

 

“You're joking.”

 

Nothing changed.

 

There were very few circumstances in which following an ominously named sign into an unfamiliar forest after waking beside a blood-covered wreck constituted a sensible decision.

 

Unfortunately, remaining beside the wreck wasn't exactly brimming with promise either.

 

She took one last look at the phone lying uselessly inside the car and followed the arrow.

 

The forest changed so gradually that Julie did not notice at first.

 

The tangled undergrowth thinned. The mud beneath her trainers became a proper footpath edged with small white flowers, and the heavy canopy opened enough for pale sunlight to reach the ground. Birds began singing somewhere above her.

 

After perhaps twenty minutes—though she had no reliable way to measure time—the smell of wet leaves was joined by something warm and yeasty.

 

Julie stopped.

 

Bread.

 

Fresh bread.

 

She had never before found the smell of bread threatening.

 

“Of course there's a bakery.”

 

Talking to herself was beginning to bother her less.

 

She continued until a low stone wall appeared between the trees, followed by the roof of a cottage. Then another. The path widened beneath her feet and, almost without transition, the forest released her onto the top of a hill.

 

A town lay in the valley below.

 

Julie stood very still.

 

It was beautiful in a way that made her immediately suspicious.

 

Stone cottages clustered along winding streets, their windows framed by flower boxes overflowing with red and yellow blooms. Thin curls of smoke rose from chimneys despite the mildness of the day. At the centre of town stood a clock tower with a gold face that caught the light whenever the clouds shifted. People moved through a market square carrying baskets and paper bags, and somewhere a church bell rang the quarter hour.

 

Beyond the rooftops rose seven hills.

 

Julie counted them twice.

 

The first was little more than a green slope at the far end of town. Each one after it rose higher, until the seventh disappeared into a bank of low cloud.

 

Something about them unsettled her more than the wrecked car had.

 

The car belonged to a world she understood. Cars crashed. People were injured. Memory failed after trauma.

 

Storybook towns did not appear three miles from deserted roads and call themselves Coma Hills.

 

Julie turned towards the forest.

 

She could retrace her steps. Find the road. Walk until another car came.

 

Except she couldn't touch her own phone.

 

Except there had been blood inside a vehicle she remembered driving and no body anywhere near it.

 

She looked down at the town again.

 

“Fine.”

 

Julie started downhill.

 

The first person she encountered was an older man sweeping the pavement outside a bakery. He wore an apron dusted with flour and looked so reassuringly ordinary that Julie nearly cried when she saw him.

 

“Excuse me.”

 

He looked up and smiled. “Morning.”

 

“I think I've been in an accident.”

 

The broom stopped.

 

Not dramatically. He simply paused, his expression shifting from polite interest to something Julie recognised a second too late.

 

Recognition.

 

“There usually has been,” he said.

 

Julie stared at him.

 

“What?”

 

The man resumed sweeping.

 

“Reception's in the square.”

 

“Reception?”

 

“Straight down. Big building on your left.”

 

Julie didn't move. “What do you mean, there usually has been?”

 

He glanced at her again.

 

“Best let Agnes explain.”

 

“Who's Agnes?”

 

“Reception.”

 

“That's a place, not a person.”

 

A faint smile touched his mouth. “Here, she's both.”

 

Julie watched him sweep a small gathering of leaves into an already immaculate pile.

 

“Do you know where I am?”

 

“Coma Hills.”

 

“I gathered that from the aggressively unhelpful sign.”

 

That earned her a slightly wider smile.

 

“Then you're doing better than some.”

 

Before Julie could ask what that meant, he nodded towards the square.

 

“Go on. Agnes'll be waiting.”

 

“Waiting for me?”

 

But he had already returned his attention to the pavement.

 

Julie walked away because she could think of nothing else to do.

 

The deeper she went into town, the more its normality began to feel deliberate. A woman pushed a pram past a butcher's shop. Two teenagers argued over a bicycle. An elderly couple sat outside a café sharing a newspaper.

 

Nobody stared at Julie.

 

Nobody appeared concerned that she had emerged from the forest dirty, confused and possibly concussed.

 

A little girl sitting on a doorstep did look at her.

 

Her gaze fixed on Julie's sleeve.

 

“That'll go away.”

 

Julie stopped.

 

“What will?”

 

The girl pointed.

 

Only then did Julie notice the blood.

 

A rusty stain covered the cuff of her white shirt.

 

She lifted her arm.

 

The colour was fading.

 

Not drying.

 

Fading.

 

As Julie watched, the deepest red softened to pink.

 

“How did you know that?”

 

The little girl's mother appeared in the doorway behind her.

 

“Lily.”

 

“But she's new.”

 

“Lily, inside.”

 

The girl stood reluctantly.

 

Julie stepped closer. “Wait. What does she mean, new?”

 

The woman gave her the apologetic smile of a parent whose child had asked a stranger something embarrassing.

 

“She's curious.”

 

“About what?”

 

The door closed.

 

Julie remained on the pavement, staring at her sleeve until the final trace of blood disappeared.

 

At the end of the street stood a painted sign.

 

WELCOME TO COMA HILLS

POPULATION: 347

 

Julie passed it.

 

A wooden click sounded behind her.

 

She turned.

 

POPULATION: 348

 

Her breath caught.

 

Then movement at the top of the road drew her attention.

 

A young man stood where the forest path met the first houses. Barefoot. Blood ran from his hairline down one side of his face. He looked around with the same stunned incomprehension Julie imagined she had worn half an hour earlier.

 

The number had changed for him.

 

Not her.

 

Julie looked at 348 again and wondered, with a coldness settling deep in her stomach, when it had changed for her.

 

Reception occupied the largest building in the square, a three-storey stone structure that looked less like an administrative office than a very expensive country hotel. Brass handles gleamed on the front doors. Fresh flowers stood in enormous ceramic pots on either side of the entrance, and inside, the floor had been polished until Julie could see a blurred version of herself moving across it.

 

A small bell sat on the reception desk.

 

She reached for it.

 

“Julie.”

 

Her hand stopped.

 

An older woman emerged from a doorway behind the desk. Silver hair was pinned neatly at the nape of her neck, and she wore a burgundy dress with sensible black shoes. There was nothing threatening about her appearance, which Julie had already learned not to find reassuring.

 

“You took your time,” the woman said.

 

Julie stared at her.

 

“How do you know my name?”

 

The woman's expression changed.

 

Subtly.

 

“Ah.”

 

“No.”

 

The woman blinked. “No what?”

 

“You don't get to say ‘ah’ after knowing my name when I don't even know where I am.”

 

“You know your name.”

 

“My first name.”

 

Understanding settled over the woman's face.

 

“You don't remember the rest.”

 

Julie swallowed. “No.”

 

“That happens.”

 

“What happens?”

 

“Surnames tend to go first.”

 

Julie gripped the edge of the desk.

 

“Why?”

 

The woman regarded her for a moment. When she answered, the briskness had left her voice.

 

“Because nobody calls you by them when they're begging you to wake up.”

 

The room seemed to become very quiet.

 

“What did you just say?”

 

“My name is Agnes.”

 

“I don't care what your name is.”

 

“You will eventually.”

 

“I want to know where I am.”

 

Agnes glanced towards the windows.

 

“You already know.”

 

“I know what the sign says.”

 

“Then you know where you are.”

 

“Coma Hills isn't a place.”

 

“It is from where you're standing.”

 

Julie gave a short, disbelieving laugh and hated how frightened it sounded.

 

“I was in a car accident.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“There was blood.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“My hand went through the car.”

 

Agnes nodded.

 

Julie waited.

 

Agnes offered nothing else.

 

“I'm dead.”

 

“No.”

 

The answer came so quickly that Julie looked at her.

 

Agnes stepped around the desk.

 

“You're not dead.”

 

“Then what am I?”

 

For the first time, Agnes seemed to choose her words.

 

“Your body is somewhere else.”

 

Julie shook her head.

 

“No.”

 

“Most likely in a hospital.”

 

“No.”

 

“Being kept alive while people wait to see whether you wake up.”

 

“Stop.”

 

Agnes stopped.

 

Julie had backed away from her without noticing.

 

The beautiful lobby remained unchanged. Sunlight warmed the polished floor. Somewhere outside, a child laughed. The clock tower began striking the hour.

 

“This isn't real.”

 

“It's real enough.”

 

“I want to wake up.”

 

“I know.”

 

“Then tell me how.”

 

Agnes looked past her through the tall front windows.

 

Julie followed her gaze.

 

The seven hills rose beyond the rooftops.

 

A sick understanding arrived before Agnes spoke.

 

“You leave.”

 

“Through the hills?”

 

“Over them.”

 

“All seven?”

 

“All seven.”

 

“And then I wake up?”

 

Agnes hesitated.

 

“And then I wake up?”

 

“If there's still something to wake up to.”

 

“What does that mean?”

 

“Time matters differently here.”

 

“How differently?”

 

“I don't know.”

 

“You seem to know everything else.”

 

“I know Coma Hills. I don't know what's happening beside your hospital bed.”

 

Hospital bed.

 

Julie looked at the hills again.

 

“Fine.”

 

She headed for the door.

 

Agnes made no attempt to stop her.

 

Julie reached the entrance before that became more alarming than being stopped would have been.

 

She turned.

 

“What?”

 

Agnes folded her hands on the desk.

 

“Nothing.”

 

“You're doing a face.”

 

“A face?”

 

“The one people do when they're watching somebody make a mistake.”

 

A faint sadness entered Agnes's expression.

 

“You've only just arrived.”

 

“So?”

 

“So perhaps you should remember a few things before you start trying to leave.”

 

“I remember enough.”

 

“Your surname?”

 

Julie opened her mouth.

 

Nothing.

 

“Where you live?”

 

She looked away.

 

“Who was waiting for you?”

 

That question hurt in a place she could not name.

 

Agnes returned behind the desk and opened a drawer. From it she took a small notebook with a dark green cover and placed it in front of Julie.

 

“Write down what you remember.”

 

Julie didn't touch it.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because tomorrow you may not.”

 

Julie stared at her.

 

“The longer you stay,” Agnes said, “the more difficult remembering becomes.”

 

Outside, somebody wheeled a bicycle across the square. A woman emerged from the bakery carrying a paper bag. The town continued around them with the calm assurance of a place where nothing terrible had ever happened.

 

Julie looked through the window at the people passing.

 

“Then why is everyone still here?”

 

Agnes was silent for a moment.

 

“Because leaving is difficult.”

 

“And staying?”

 

Something almost like pity moved across Agnes's face.

 

“At first, staying is very easy.”

 

Julie looked down at the notebook.

 

She picked up the pen.

 

The blank page seemed suddenly enormous.

 

“My name is Julie.”

 

“Write it.”

 

She did.

 

MY NAME IS JULIE.

 

She waited for the surname to appear.

 

It didn't.

 

Below it she wrote:

 

I WAS IN A CAR ACCIDENT.

 

Her hand stopped.

 

A woman's face came to her with such force that Julie inhaled sharply.

 

Dark hair threaded with grey. Tired eyes. A hand resting against Julie's forehead.

 

The memory vanished before she could understand where it belonged, but the feeling remained.

 

“Mum.”

 

Agnes looked up.

 

Julie bent over the notebook.

 

I HAVE A MUM.

 

Her handwriting blurred.

 

She blinked.

 

“Julie?”

 

The voice did not belong to Agnes.

 

Julie froze.

 

It was distant, muffled as though travelling through several closed doors.

 

“Julie, sweetheart?”

 

Her pen fell from her hand.

 

The hallway behind Agnes lengthened.

 

Not gradually.

 

One moment it ended at a closed wooden door; the next it stretched impossibly far away, its warm wallpaper bleaching into white as the lights above sharpened into fluorescent strips.

 

At the end of the corridor stood a hospital room.

 

Machines.

 

A bed.

 

A woman sitting beside it.

 

Her mother.

 

Julie knew her before memory supplied anything else.

 

The woman was bent forward, one hand wrapped around the fingers of the person lying beneath the sheets. Her shoulders shook.

 

“Please wake up.”

 

Julie moved.

 

“Mum.”

 

The hospital room seemed to recede.

 

Julie ran.

 

“Mum!”

 

Her mother lifted her head.

 

For one impossible second, Julie thought she had heard.

 

Then a man's voice spoke somewhere beyond the bed, low and clinical.

 

“We need to discuss what happens if there isn't an improvement.”

 

“No.”

 

Julie ran faster.

 

The corridor stretched beneath her feet.

 

“Mum!”

 

The white walls folded away.

 

Julie hit the polished floor of Reception hard enough that she expected pain.

 

There was none.

 

Agnes was beside her.

 

Julie grabbed her arm.

 

“I heard her.”

 

“I know.”

 

“I saw her.”

 

“I know.”

 

“She's there.”

 

“Yes.”

 

The first sob escaped before Julie understood she was crying.

 

Then another came, and whatever control she had maintained since waking in the road collapsed. She folded forward, one hand pressed over her mouth as though that might contain it.

 

“My mum's there.”

 

Agnes sat on the floor beside her.

 

“Yes.”

 

“She thinks I'm—”

 

Julie couldn't finish.

 

Agnes didn't finish for her.

 

That kindness somehow made her cry harder.

 

When the worst of it passed, Julie wiped her face with both hands and forced herself to look through the windows.

 

The seven hills remained where they had been.

 

They no longer looked picturesque.

 

They looked like distance.

 

Like time.

 

Like seven separate opportunities to fail.

 

“I have to get back.”

 

Agnes nodded.

 

Julie returned to the desk on unsteady legs and picked up the pen.

 

Beneath the three lines already written, she added:

 

I NEED TO GET HOME.

 

She underlined it.

 

“I'm leaving tomorrow.”

 

Agnes said nothing.

 

“I'm serious.”

 

“I know.”

 

“I'll make it through all seven.”

 

“I hope you do.”

 

The gentleness of the answer irritated her.

 

“You don't think I will.”

 

Agnes looked towards the square.

 

“I think everybody says that on their first day.”

 

A knock sounded at the front door.

 

Julie turned.

 

Nobody stood outside.

 

Only a bunch of white flowers had been placed on the step.

 

She looked at Agnes.

 

Agnes did not move.

 

Julie approached the door and picked them up. A card rested among the stems.

 

The handwriting was neat and unfamiliar.

 

WELCOME TO COMA HILLS.

 

Julie turned it over.

 

HOW LONG WILL YOU BE STAYING?

 

She read the question twice.

 

Then she looked beyond the square to the seven hills, their green slopes disappearing one behind another until the last vanished into cloud.

 

The town around her was warm, bright and impossibly beautiful, and for the first time Julie understood that none of those things meant it wanted her well.

 

She held the notebook tighter against her chest.

 

Somewhere far beyond Coma Hills, her mother was waiting beside a hospital bed.

 

Julie couldn't remember her surname.

 

She couldn't remember where home was.

 

But she remembered that someone wanted her there.

 

For now, that would have to be enough.