Valley of Nightmares by Jane Godman

Author:Jane Godman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance;historical;gothic;suspense;mystery;supernatural;world war two;world war 2
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2016-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

The weather was perfect as we set out, with bright sunshine breaking through the clouds to cheer us on. We followed a small brook and a series of watery cascades upstream, through a wood where the trees wore their best springtime colours. It was heartening to know that the back of winter was finally broken, and to feel summer at last approaching. The day was warm, and I felt little beads of sweat trickle down my spine as we navigated a pony path beyond the increasingly straggly woodland and finally gained the open ground. Here heather and scrub clumped together in dull purple-brown shades, a feeble effort that could not compete with the glorious palette of the valley. The near landscape was dull and desolate, but above us the ridges and screes announced the romance and majesty of the mountain. The feeling that clawed at some primeval instinct deep inside me grew stronger as we climbed. Mount Taran was stamping its supernatural poetry into my consciousness.

An acrid smell of sulphur drifted on the morning breeze, and I wrinkled my nose. It was out of place in this sylvan setting. As Gethin marched ahead of me, a single warning flash of cold blue light shot across my vision and flew upward. It paused, quivering like a single lightning bolt, high above me atop the mountain. I stopped in my tracks, and Gethin looked in enquiry over his shoulder at me.

“The lights…I told you I could see them. Well, one of them just flew past me.” The words sounded lame even as I spoke them.

He followed my gaze up to the summit. “But it’s broad daylight,” he pointed out reasonably. “You said you only saw them at night.”

“I still saw it,” I insisted. It may have been only a fleeting glimpse, but I believed my own eyes.

“Do you want to go back?”

Well, what a silly question! Of course I did. But I said no. My natural contrariness kicked in. I marched past him with a new determination in my stride. After all, it was he who had insisted on this walk, to prove to me that it really was “just a mountain”.

As we continued our climb, the impressive north face of the arête, which I could see from my bedroom window, spiked upward ahead of us. After much red-faced huffing and puffing on my part, we finally came to a point where the steep rock face relented and became the gentler incline known as the chair. We rested there and sat with our backs against the dry stone wall of a tiny, two-roomed cottage. Gethin told me that it belonged to the Taran estate and had been built in a time when shepherds spent much of their life on the hillsides. It was used occasionally now by ramblers if the weather turned. We had no need of its shelter on that sweetly sunny day.

Continuing even farther skyward, we crossed the hump of a whale-backed hill that unfolded a series of spectacular views one after the other.

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