A Clock Stopped Dead by J.M. Hall

Author:J.M. Hall [Hall, J.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-10T17:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

At the dark heart of Yorkshire there is dissatisfaction and a surprise revelation.

By Wednesday afternoon, after a couple of relatively clear days, the fog had come creeping back, welling up across the drab countryside like an recurring rash. On the A1, despite the amber speed restrictions, there had been a collision just south of Leeming Bar and crawling northwards Liz began to worry they’d be late for the six p.m. start of ‘Beyond Darkness with Gareth Ap-Glyndwr’. Any hopes of conversation with Jacob – one of their lengthy ‘sort out the world’ chats that they hadn’t had in such a long time – had not been realized. On being collected from school, he’d promptly plugged himself into one of the ‘Burning Planet’ podcasts he was so obsessed with and aside from some gloomy observations on car exhaust had remained silent.

Without that distraction and to keep her mind off the ever-growing number of mental rabbit holes concerning Rochelle Bamford, Liz had tried to focus on Jacob’s forthcoming treat. Would he like it? In her mind she pictured the excited words on the Flaxby Hall Experience website: Tate Bishop presents Beyond Darkness – with Gareth Ap-Glyndwr, one of the world’s leading parapsychologists! Thrilling experience for all – plus pie’n’pea supper! She kept on glancing at the solemn figure on the back seat gazing out at the smoky darkness and fuzzing lights of traffic. Was what she’d booked entirely appropriate? Would travelling through ‘the dark secrets of Yorkshire’s most haunted building’ give him a welcome jolt of cheerful distraction? Or would the ‘chilling glimpse of the dark world beyond this one’ be too much for her grandson?

When she’d booked the tickets, she’d been reassured by the lad on the phone that loads of families were coming, plus a party of Scouts from Yarm. Surely anything that included a pie’n’pea supper couldn’t be that bad? And no two ways about it, in her opinion it’d do Jacob the world of good to be chilled by something that wasn’t connected with carbon emissions. Or the problems of his parents.

Negotiating the way through a grey, dripping wood, however, down the potholed, weedy drive that was the approach to the Flaxby Hall Hotel, she felt those faint misgivings recur. It really was a gloomy place. In the thickening darkness the ranks of tree trunks brought to mind stories she used to read to her class about magic forests where wolves roamed to trap the unwary traveller.

Get a grip, Liz!

She glanced at the dashboard. Ten to six. Just in nice time.

Flaxby Hall Hotel wasn’t a hall, it was a wide, flat-roofed building in the style of architecture that screamed out 1960s and indeed was rather reminiscent of something out of Thunderbirds. It was a place that Liz knew of – one of those places that had hosted weddings and conferences but for whatever reason had been nobody’s first choice of venue. She herself had been there some years back on a primary English conference and her abiding memory had been of weak coffee and unpleasantly pungent toilet disinfectant.

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