short, breathing hard, feeling lightheaded. The grate lay just feet away, a barrier between himself and what lay further, out there in the darkness.
And memories began to float back, manifest themselves out of the fog.
Oh, heavens, not more ghosts.
Fear gnawed at him like a dog ’s teeth on a bone, breaking his resolve, taking the first involuntary steps back and away from that place on his behalf. How many years had it been since he had thought of them ?
Out there, maybe a mile distant, where the moorland curved down into a natural hollow, a scraggy tree-lined ravine with a shallow, meandering stream at its bottom, stood a cottage. Two floors; an old farmhouse, perhaps, and the scourge of every schoolboy in his year and countless years either side.
Meredith.
Elaina and Liana Meredith. Sisters.
Exotically elusive, they ha d lived in quiet solitude in that cottage out across the moor for as long as Matt or anyone he knew could remember. Over the years their lives had gradually become part of local folklore, the two weird sisters , regarded by many to be witches, believed apparently ageless. Stories grew fat quickly in the pubs and living rooms of small communities like Tamerton, but no one Matt had ever spoken to knew them well enough to either confirm or refute any of the spectacular theories he had heard. The skeptical side of him imagined their lives were insipidly inane; two forty–something spinster sisters working as HR managers in a cold office block somewhere in Plymouth. But his whimsical side, the side that had once spawned the ideas for more books than he could ever hope to write, still remembered the tales that abounded in the playground at lunchtimes, of sacrifices and black magic, of two beautiful sirens whose lilting song drew unknowing men up on to the lonely moors to their deaths.
There had been a hundred stories passed back and forth while he grew up from primary and middle school into secondary, but by his early teens there was only one thing that preoccupied the minds of himself and the other boys his age about the two mysterious Meredith sisters.
What they did at night.
At school, on Friday afternoons in the winter, they used to draw lots. The shortest straw had to take the challenge. Go up there that night, camera in hand, and get a photo of some action.
Few made it past the cattle grate. Even fewer got as far as the cottage, got to photograph anything. Some did, though, their blurred, poorly lit treasures displaying a corner of wall, a door, an amorphous shape as likely a sheep as a woman. Boys returned with fanciful tales of their bravery and what they had seen, but the lack of any hard evidence only added to the mystery, making the challenge more appealing. During his school years everyone with any guts eventually got landed with the dare, and although most returned with little to tell, they all returned somehow fulfilled , as though by taking the challenge of the Meredith sisters each schoolboy had somehow crossed a threshold into manhood.
Matt remembered the night it had been his turn only too well.
I don’t want to be here anymore.
A burning sense of shame and humiliation swamped his senses. He started back down the road, at first walking backwards, then turning to bolt, arms pumping as he fled back in the direction of the village. It was too late at night, too dark, to go chasing ghosts. Some things really were best left alone.
#
He hadn’t seen the woman standing at the foot of a scrawny, wind-battered tree, just to the left of the cattle grate, shrouded by the mists. He hadn’t seen her standing there, clutching a bundle in her arms, a bundle that occasionally squirmed irritably. He hadn’t seen the smile on her ageless face.
He hadn’t seen her.
But Liana Meredith had seen him.
11
Rachel lay awake, one hand cupping her face, listening to the tick of the clock as the mi nutes and then hours slipped past. Her eyes and cheeks were red, sore from
And memories began to float back, manifest themselves out of the fog.
Oh, heavens, not more ghosts.
Fear gnawed at him like a dog ’s teeth on a bone, breaking his resolve, taking the first involuntary steps back and away from that place on his behalf. How many years had it been since he had thought of them ?
Out there, maybe a mile distant, where the moorland curved down into a natural hollow, a scraggy tree-lined ravine with a shallow, meandering stream at its bottom, stood a cottage. Two floors; an old farmhouse, perhaps, and the scourge of every schoolboy in his year and countless years either side.
Meredith.
Elaina and Liana Meredith. Sisters.
Exotically elusive, they ha d lived in quiet solitude in that cottage out across the moor for as long as Matt or anyone he knew could remember. Over the years their lives had gradually become part of local folklore, the two weird sisters , regarded by many to be witches, believed apparently ageless. Stories grew fat quickly in the pubs and living rooms of small communities like Tamerton, but no one Matt had ever spoken to knew them well enough to either confirm or refute any of the spectacular theories he had heard. The skeptical side of him imagined their lives were insipidly inane; two forty–something spinster sisters working as HR managers in a cold office block somewhere in Plymouth. But his whimsical side, the side that had once spawned the ideas for more books than he could ever hope to write, still remembered the tales that abounded in the playground at lunchtimes, of sacrifices and black magic, of two beautiful sirens whose lilting song drew unknowing men up on to the lonely moors to their deaths.
There had been a hundred stories passed back and forth while he grew up from primary and middle school into secondary, but by his early teens there was only one thing that preoccupied the minds of himself and the other boys his age about the two mysterious Meredith sisters.
What they did at night.
At school, on Friday afternoons in the winter, they used to draw lots. The shortest straw had to take the challenge. Go up there that night, camera in hand, and get a photo of some action.
Few made it past the cattle grate. Even fewer got as far as the cottage, got to photograph anything. Some did, though, their blurred, poorly lit treasures displaying a corner of wall, a door, an amorphous shape as likely a sheep as a woman. Boys returned with fanciful tales of their bravery and what they had seen, but the lack of any hard evidence only added to the mystery, making the challenge more appealing. During his school years everyone with any guts eventually got landed with the dare, and although most returned with little to tell, they all returned somehow fulfilled , as though by taking the challenge of the Meredith sisters each schoolboy had somehow crossed a threshold into manhood.
Matt remembered the night it had been his turn only too well.
I don’t want to be here anymore.
A burning sense of shame and humiliation swamped his senses. He started back down the road, at first walking backwards, then turning to bolt, arms pumping as he fled back in the direction of the village. It was too late at night, too dark, to go chasing ghosts. Some things really were best left alone.
#
He hadn’t seen the woman standing at the foot of a scrawny, wind-battered tree, just to the left of the cattle grate, shrouded by the mists. He hadn’t seen her standing there, clutching a bundle in her arms, a bundle that occasionally squirmed irritably. He hadn’t seen the smile on her ageless face.
He hadn’t seen her.
But Liana Meredith had seen him.
11
Rachel lay awake, one hand cupping her face, listening to the tick of the clock as the mi nutes and then hours slipped past. Her eyes and cheeks were red, sore from
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