While she waited, biting her lip, she found her eyes growing accustomed to the darkness in the doorway behind Sam. And now she could see, all too clearly, what was in the shed.
For a while, Ben Cooper was able to keep the two figures in sight from a safe vantage point among the rocks on Raven’s Side. Gradually, he worked his way down the steep hillside, using the cover of the rocky outcrops and the first of the trees on the lower
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slopes. The two old men weren’t moving quickly. They looked as though they were out for a Sunday stroll, ambling along the path close together, almost shoulder to shoulder, apparently deep in conversation.
Cooper was glad of their absorption in each other as he scrambled down a stretch of open ground, stumbling on invisible rabbit holes and stubbing his toe on half-buried stones. Before he had reached ground level, Harry and Wilford had vanished around a bend in the path. He remembered a second path which ran at a diagonal across the face of the cliff and emerged on to
o o
the main path heading towards the Baulk. He found it quickly and broke into a run, lifting his feet high off the ground and letting them fall as softly as he could, afraid of unseen hazards that might trip him, but desperate to gain distance on the two old men. The surrounding trees grew tall and dense, and a thick, muffled silence gradually descended around him, cutting him off from the world that had existed higher up on the tors.
As he ran, Cooper thought of Diane Fry’s interview with Charlotte Vernon. If she really did visit the Baulk every night to contemplate the place of her daughter’s death, then Harry Dickinson would surely know it. There seemed to be very little that went on in this area that Harry wasn’t aware of. No doubt he had seen Charlotte picking her way along the path with her bunches of flowers, just as he had spotted her husband out on the Baulk. Cooper wondered what Harry’s real intention had been when he set off to try to meet Graham Vernon the night that Laura had died. And he wondered whether Harry now meant to follow up that intention with Vernon’s wife instead. There was no doubt in Cooper’s mind that danger lurked in the woods tonight.
For once, Harry was without his dog, Jess. But he was accompanied by Wilford Cutts instead. Probably there was |i
little to choose between them for loyalty. i.|
Cooper reached the main path, breathing hard, and turned I
westwards towards the Baulk. Down below him now, on his |
right, was the stream and the Eden Valley Trail that ran along |’|
side it. Faintly, through the covering of trees, he could hear if
i’ t> & > j
the whispering of the water. A barn owl called — an eerie, |
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long-drawn-out hunting cry that echoed across the valley and was enough to make him sliivcr, even though he knew what it was.
He wondered what luck Diane Fry might have had with the bird-watcher, and wished that he had her alongside him now. A fox barked somewhere ahead. Perhaps even the same fox that had sunk its teeth into the cooling flesh of Laura Vernon’s thigh.
A couple of minutes passed as Cooper walked as fast as he dared, squinting ahead into the gloom, hoping he hadn’t lost the two men. But eventually, as he rounded a bend by the disintegrated remains of a stone building, he came to a sudden halt at a glimpse of movement up ahead. He stood into the side of the path under an overhanging elder bough, and watched the
1
old men. They were standing at a point where the path diverged. Again they were very close together, merging into one dark, indistinct figure, as if they were holding each other, embracing like lovers. Then they turned, striding down the right-hand path without looking back. The path dipped in a gentle slope into a patch of denser trees and then towards ground that grew rocky and steep and was broken into deep ravines.
Cooper had to go more slowly as he found himself walking over the rocks. By the time he reached the first ravine, the old men had vanished into the night as if they had been erased out of existence.
He stood back off the path in the trees and waited. There was nothing else he could do. He wondered what Diane Fry would have done when she found him gone. Surely she would have the sense this time to call in and get some support. She wouldn’t make the same mistake again. No way. She wouldn’t make the
O J
mistake of following him into trouble.
As soon as she entered the woods, Fry knew that it would happen again. Though she had brought a torch this time, the narrow pool of light it cast at her feet seemed only to emphasize the blackness outside its reach, to make her isolation total and threatening. From among the trees, the eager darkness had begun to sidle in towards her, oozing round her body in swift, oily movements, and pressing in close with its nauseous and suffocating familiarity.
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The night was full of tinv, whispering movements. They were
O j ‘ L O J
like the soft seething on the surface of a bowl of maggots. They made her want to scratch her skin, where the small hairs were tense and moving. Then the invisible ants began to swarm across her body, nipping and biting as they went, their thousands of tiny insect feet scuttling over her arms and legs, itching her skin and
o o ‘ c>
burrowing under her breasts and into the moist warmth between
o
her thighs, until she wanted to scream with revulsion.
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She needed desperately to reach out and touch something solid for reassurance, yet could not move her hand for fear of what her fingers might encounter. Somehow she managed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, automatically, like a robot programmed for a single action. Every step she took made her afraid. Every movement wras like a leap into a void, a step into the midst of unseen horrors.
