Lost and Found
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing,’ said Stephenson. ‘Just the wind whistling in some rocks.’
‘It sounded like someone screaming.’
‘Your imagination’s working overtime.’
The noise came again, a howling that set his teeth on edge, like the sound of a lost soul in agony. He remembered the stories his grandmother used to tell him when he was a child, about people who got lost on the moors and were forced to stay there for all eternity, unless a traveller took pity on them. Suddenly the stories didn’t seem quite so silly.
‘Perhaps it’s wolves,’ said Shirley.
Stephenson shrugged. Were there still wolves on Dartmoor? He didn’t know, but thought it unlikely. Whatever was causing the noise had to be several miles away at least and was unlikely to bother them.
Somehow they had lost the road. The mud and stones underfoot had made a ruin of his expensive Italian shoes. His clothes were soaked through and he could no longer feel his fingers.
Shirley had lost her own shoes. The stones and gorse had torn her silk stockings to shreds and cut her legs, leaving them speckled with blood. Tears filled her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She hadn’t stopped complaining until now, when the howling wind had given her mind something else to focus on beside her own discomfort, for which small relief Stephenson felt grateful beyond words.
The fog hadn’t dispersed. If anything it had grown thicker, a dense amorphous mass through which they waded like deep sea divers. It permeated everything, freezing cold and ripe with the scent of vegetable decay. Stephenson could feel its clammy tentacles crawling down his throat and into his lungs, seeping through his eardrums and wrapping itself round his brain like a wet towel.
‘We’re going to die,’ said Shirley.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Her face was pale. She brushed away a tear and attempted a smile, but it wouldn’t come. And then the fog swirled in thicker than ever before and she disappeared from sight, like a shipwreck survivor carried away by the ocean swell.