Read Online Whispers in the Dark by Jonathan Aycliffe - Free Book Online Page A

the next morning, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Clouds lay motionless all across the sky. In every direction, the countryside had turned dark, there were shadows behind every hedge and in every thicket. A cold wind moved in from the north, hampering my progress. The wings of blackbirds tangled through the sky. I saw men and women in the fields—old men, old women—tout very far away, beyond the reach of my voice, stooped over strange instruments, intent on some dark labor that I could not comprehend.
    The farther I walked, the more desolate the landscape grew. Nowadays people make that journey with their children, in large cars, cocooned against the cold and the dark. They drive on smooth, black roads, each one as long as all the roads of my childhood strung together. They carry National Trust cards in their wallets and copies of road maps in the glove compartments of their Volvos. Their worst fear is that they will run out of petrol on the long stretch from Otterburn to Belsay. And what is it they fear? That they may be forced to wait for an hour or two until one of the road clubs sends a man in uniform to their ignominious rescue.
    I neither despise nor envy them. They work hard, they are entitled to their weekend outings, their souvenir mugs, their potato crisps. And if the price they have to pay for that is some sort of inner desolation of which they may not even be aware, some loss of self, some unawareness of place and the passion for place, perhaps it is not too high a price for the comfort they feel.
    The price I paid for walking in those fields was higher, and I never felt comfort or peace or oneness with nature. That is all a game. Do not believe everything my generation says. I knew only fear there, a sense of disquiet. Every coppice I passed seemed alive with mingling shadows. But it was not just shadows. It was presences. It was the knowledge that here, where green fields gave way to moor, I was more vulnerable than ever. Something was waiting for me, something I could neither name nor envision. But I knew, as I turned each corner of that road, that it was hiding, biding its time.
    I reached the village of Kirkwhelpington early on the third day. “Barras Lodge, near Kirkwhelpington” was the address I still remembered my mother writing on the envelope when she asked my father’s cousins for help. It was a small bleak hamlet on the edge of nowhere, with an ancient parish church, a school, and very little else. The world seemed to end here, in scrub and moor and forest.
    I found a little public house where they sold me bread and cheese and small ale to wash it down. It was a rough place, with no more than a couple of unpolished tables and a few wooden stools. When I had finished, the publican’s daughter came to clear my table. She was a girl not much above my own age, red-faced and well built, but not at all pretty.
    “Can you tell me where to find Barras Hall?” I asked.
    “Barras Hall? Whatever do you want to go there for?”
    “My brother’s there,” I said. “I have to Find him.”
    “What business has your brother with the likes of them?”
    “You mean the Ayrtons?”
    “Who else would I mean? They’ll give him no work, if that’s what he’s looking for. Nobody goes to Barras Hall in search of work.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “They just don’t.”
    “Nevertheless I believe he’s there. Can you tell me how to find it?”
    She hesitated, then nodded.
    “Keep on the main road as you leave here, that’s the Cambo Road. Stay on it through Cambo to Scots’ Gap. There’s a turning past there on your left, before you come to Hartburn. That’ll take you up to Barras Hall. You can’t miss it. There are walls all around and but the one way in.”
    I thanked her and left. Outside, there was a threat of snow in the air. On the grass verges, the morning’s frost had not lifted. I passed dark woods in which the frosted branches of leafless trees stood out against the conifers like