Herald of the Hidden by Valentine Mark

Author:Valentine, Mark [Valentine, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tartarus Press
Published: 2013-09-18T20:00:00+00:00

Herald of the Hidden

A large, creased map lay upon the table at 14, Bellchamber Tower. It depicted the lonely south-eastern part of our shire. At first glance, this seemed to possess a singular geographical feature: a deep, curving brown canyon running through one corner. This, however, proved to be no more than the ringmark left by a coffee cup. The map was also, though, dotted with little ink marks made by my friend Ralph Tyler, and he was staring at these when I visited one cold November day.

It had been a long time since he had gained any new clients for his researches into supernatural incidents. Possibly, word of his somewhat unorthodox methods, which often left his patrons feeling dissatisfied, had spread. The proceeds from the cheques some of these had once reluctantly written had begun to diminish. As a consequence, Ralph had needed to cut back on the rank cigarettes he liked to smoke, and was now hand-rolling—not very deftly—a reeking compound of a cheap botanical mixture, with a few strands of his preferred brand of Greek tobacco. The miasma from a recent taper of this formula still lingered in the air of his bare, cubic flat.

When no-one came to him for help with troubling and inexplicable incidents, Ralph’s restless spirit could not remain still. So he would instead review what he liked to call his ‘files’. These were toppling piles of cardboard folders containing an array of press cuttings, extracts copied from books, notes of local folklore, and any other stray ephemera that caught his eye. Several of these were sprawled on Ralph’s second-best armchair —the one that, in addition to being very worn (like the best one), also had a sagging arm. He scooped up one of the dog-eared, dingy documents and passed it to me.

‘Read that,’ he said. It was better than the greeting I sometimes got when I visited. If he was immersed in his work, I was often lucky to get a grunt, or a sharp nod of the head.

‘ “Cow did not need rescue”,’ I recited. Our local paper, the County Mercury, was known for its thrilling stories. ‘ “Firemen were called when a passer-by noticed a cow seemed to be stranded in the river near Whittlingham, and unable to get out. But by the time rescuers arrived, the cow had found its own way out. Local farmer Mr George Furtho said . . .” ’

‘No, not that,’ interrupted Ralph, ‘the one underneath.’

I turned my attention to the presumably even less eventful report below. I was about to start declaiming this aloud too, when its very curiosity made me halt, and begin reading it carefully.

It said simply that lights had been seen in the forest of Solsey at night. They were hovering above the ground. There appeared to be several sets, in pairs, and the witness—a watchman cycling to his round—had stopped to look at them for quite some time. He had not heard very much, but they would be a distance from

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.