The Low Road by Eleanor Harkstead

Author:Eleanor Harkstead [Harkstead, Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LGBT Romance Fiction
ISBN: 9781913186357
Publisher: Pride Publishing
Published: 2019-11-14T23:00:00+00:00

* * * *

At lunchtime the next day, Alex left the office and headed to the library. He waited at the local history desk again, and the librarian he’d spoken to before appeared. This time, Bela Lugosi in Dracula garb reared out of her T-shirt at him.

“How were the ghost stories?”

Alex sucked air through his teeth before replying, “Annoyingly short on references.”

She laughed. “You sound like my old tutor at uni!”

“I’m just wondering…there’s a phantom hitch-hiker mentioned in the book, who started to appear sometime in the 1970s. So I suppose that particular ghost came about as a result of something that happened in the 1970s, on Gallows Hill? An accident, something like that?”

The librarian tapped the edge of the counter in thought. “Yeah, could’ve been.”

Alex closed his eyes for a moment, picturing Joe, all the life in him gone on a wet, dangerous road. “How would I find out?”

She grinned. “Newspaper archive. We’ve got local newspapers on microfilm—you’d just have to spool through them and look.”

“Ahhh…”

“Could take a while, though. They’re not indexed, unfortunately.” She pulled a comical grimace, then came out from behind the desk and waved Alex over to some metal drawers. “Tell you what. You get started now, and if you fill out this enquiry request form, I can get on it for you. Ten pounds an hour.”

“Really? Oh, that’s a relief. Take as long as you like!”

“I’m glad you’ve said that. Normally when I say ten pounds an hour, all I hear is the sound of screaming and hurried footsteps as they run away.” She opened one of the metal drawers and started to take out box after box of microfilm. “I’m Sarah, by the way.”

“I’m Alex.” He smiled.

Sarah loaded up the first microfilm into a huge machine that looked as if it, too, was a relic from the 1970s. “I don’t suppose you’d mind telling me why you’re so fascinated by this hitch-hiker? You said the other day that you’d seen something odd, and I was just wondering—you’ve seen the hitch-hiker?”

“Erm…” He’s gorgeous and I’m dating him a few minutes at a time in my car. “Oh, it’s just that I drive that way quite a lot as my mum lives out on the island. And I hear about weird stuff happening on that road, and…and I was wondering if something I’d seen was connected with the hitch-hiker. That’s all, really.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard stuff about that road too. Then again, we had someone in here once who’d seen a load of Roman soldiers marching through a basement in town—from the knees up!” Sarah laughed at that, then twiddled a dial that brought the image on the screen into focus. “There we are! The Standard, January 1970. May as well start right at the beginning. I’ll bring you over a request form and you can get started.”

She let Alex sit down, then pointed at the machine. “This button goes forwards and this one goes backwards.”

In the time left to Alex in his lunch hour, he found no reference to Gallows Hill in the old newspapers.

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