Ramsey Campbell by The Faces at Pine Dunes

Author:The Faces at Pine Dunes [Dunes, The Faces at Pine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-01-02T13:15:50+00:00

As he emerged into the open, the clouds parted and the moon rolled free. The enormous shape in the open space glistened with moonlight. The unstable head turned its crawling face towards him.

The dream trailed him to Liverpool, to the central library, although the space and the head had faded before he could make them out - if indeed he had wanted to. But a rush of rain, and the bright lights of the library, washed the dream away. He hurried up the wide green stairs to the Religion and Philosophy Section.

He pulled books from the shelves. Lancashire Witches. North-West Hauntings. Ghostly Lancashire. The banality of their covers was reassuring; it seemed absurd that his parents could be mixed up in such things. Yet he couldn’t quite laugh. Even if they were, what could he do? He slammed the books angrily on a table, startling echoes.

As he read he began to feel safer. Pine Dunes wasn’t indexed in North-West Hauntings. His attention strayed fascinated into irrelevances. The hanged man’s ghost in Everton Library. The poltergeist of the Palace

Hotel, Birkdale. Jokey ghost stories in Lancashire dialect, ee lad. Rain and wind shook the windows, fluorescent light lay flat on the tables. Beyond a glass partition people sat studying, library staff clattered up and down open staircases, carrying scraps of paper. Reassured, he turned to Lancashire Witches. Pine Dunes. It was there, on three pages.

When he made himself search the pages they didn’t say much. Over the centuries, witches had been rumoured to gather in the Pine Dunes forest. Was that surprising? Wouldn’t they naturally have done so, for concealment? Besides, these were only rumours; few people would have bothered struggling through the undergrowth. He opened Ghostly Lancashire, expecting irrelevances. But the index showed that Pine Dunes covered several pages.

The author had interviewed. a group the other books ignored: the travellers. Their stories were unreliable, he warned, but fascinating. Few travellers would walk the Pine Dunes road after dark; they kept their children out of the woods even by day. A superstitious people, the author pointed out. The book had been written thirty years ago, Michael reminded himself. And the travellers gave no reason for their nervousness except vague tales of something unpleasantly large glimpsed moving beyond the most distant trees. But surely distance must have formed the trees into a solid wall; how could anyone have seen beyond?

One traveller, senile and often incoherent, told a story. A long time ago he, or someone else - the author couldn’t tell - had wandered back to the travellers’ camp, very drunk. The author didn’t believe the story, but included it because it was vivid and unusual. Straying from the road, the man had become lost in the forest. Blinded by angry panic, he’d fought his way

towards an open space. But it wasn’t the camp, as he’d thought. He had lost his footing on the slippery earth and had gone skidding into a pit.

Had it been a pit, or the mouth of a tunnel?

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