The Mistletoe Bride(49)

As I unlocked the car, a customer came out of the Ship Inn, on the corner. I gave him good evening and raised my hat. He looked at me through ale-drenched eyes, bleary with surprise or suspicion, before stumbling away into the night.

‘Please yourself,’ I muttered, a little put out.

I took off my scarf, then checked Bill’s handwritten map again to be sure I had the directions clear in my mind: through South Harting on the Uppark Road, turn sharp left to follow the road up through the woods for a couple of miles. At the top of Harting Down, when the trees started to thin out, look out for a sign to Bill’s village.

I drove past a sleeping row of workmen’s cottages, aware of the dense woodland beyond the outskirts of Harting. Left and left again, my foot lifted from the accelerator on the bends. Fallen leaves, a patchwork of colours of burgundy and copper and gold, lit suddenly by the car’s headlamps. Right and left again, then I was plunged into the utter blackness of the countryside. Abrupt, silent. I fixed my eyes ahead, trying not to notice how the long tall trunks of the high trees loomed over the road or the way the ground fell violently away to the left. The engine was straining as I changed down a gear, then down again.

I’m an ordinary man – no imagination, my ex-wife used to say, proudly at first, then later with disappointment – but as I drove on and up into the woods, it seemed to me the darkness took on a life of its own. It seemed to bend and twist and curl around the car. The gnarled exposed roots of trees were the knuckles of an old man’s hand and the trunks transformed themselves into a marching army. The glint of sharp eyes in the undergrowth, a fox or a badger, vibrated with menace and spoke of something beyond any normal night-time creature. Every branch had a face, a shape, a living purpose.

It was getting colder too. Pockets of low cloud hung in the hollow spaces between the army of pines or floated across the road, as if pushed by some unseen hand. A light drizzle, cloud turning to mist, mist to fog. Faces, contours, eyes, fingers finding shape in the wall of white. Telling myself not to let my wits run away with me, I switched on my fog lamps. It made little difference. I still could see no more than six inches in front of me and the mist still seemed to be full of creatures. The hypnotic swish of the windscreen wipers, along with the rattle of the heater and the straining of the engine, was making me feel dizzy. I swallowed, aware my mouth was dry. Right, then right again, following the turn of the road. Second gear, down to first in places as the track went winding and twisting this way and that. Left, then left again. Another tight bend, the endlessness of the surrounding woodland, another halfformed face staring hollow out of the mist, except this time it was real.

I slammed on the brakes.

‘No!’

Did I shout out a warning or only in my head? I don’t know, only that this time there really was a girl, not an apparition in the mist. Flesh and blood standing in the middle of the road and I was going to hit her. I stamped on the brake again, hands clenched, shoulders braced. The back wheels spun. Slipping, skidding, sliding towards the girl.

‘Get out of the way!’

A thud of something beneath the car and I was thrown forward, hard against the steering wheel. After noise, silence. After movement, stillness. It took me a moment to realise the Morris Minor had come to a halt and I was still on the road, safe. Apart from a sharp pain in my ribs, I was all right.

What about the girl? Had I hit her?

I fumbled with the catch, my shaking fingers failing to get purchase, but in the end managed to fling open the door and stumble out into the night. I could barely see my hand in front of my face. But I called out, praying for an answer from another human voice.

‘Where are you? Are you all right?’

The fog muffled everything, footsteps, twigs underfoot. I traced my way round the car, hand sliding across the metal so as not to lose my footing and go tumbling down, round to where I thought the girl had been standing. I crouched down to look under the car, dreading what I might see beneath the chassis, but there was nothing except a heavy branch caught in the front number plate.

My relief was short-lived. The ground fell steeply away, I could see that now. Had she tried to get out of the way and fallen down the wooded hillside? I called out again.

‘Are you hurt?’

Then, suddenly, I saw her. Standing, silent, in a gap between the trees. Hardly visible in the mist, hardly there at all.

‘What in God’s name are you playing at?’ Fear turned swiftly to anger now I could see she was safe. ‘Out here alone, at this time of night, you could have been killed.’

I saw how young she was, no more than seventeen or eighteen, and somehow that shocked me. Thin arms and legs, long drab hair framing a thin, pale face. A cheap dress with a narrow belt and rather old-fashioned shoes. Indoor shoes, not right for walking.