Valley of Nightmares Read online

  Ceri eyed us suspiciously. “Have you been running?” she asked me, and I laughed. Or I tried to; I’m not sure it quite worked.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Your face is all red and you’re breathing very fast.” Over her head my eyes met Gethin’s. He smiled, and my fear that things would be awkward between us from now on took wings. A new fear—that he might change his mind and never wish to repeat, or complete, the experience—emerged.

  “Any time you want to finish those chores we started, Miss Divine.” The look of blatant longing in his eyes soothed my worries. “I will be ready for you.” A ripple of new lust thrummed through my already sensitised nerve endings, and I drew a deep, steadying breath. Impatiently, Ceri dragged me off to view a picture she had drawn.

  * * *

  The graveyard always occupies the best land in town. It was something my father told me, and it had stuck in my mind like a pea in a tin whistle. When I remembered the brief period of my life that I spent as part of a family, the light was always mellow and I was always warm. On this occasion, we had been eating Sunday dinner and my brother, his mouth full of Yorkshire pudding, had asked why.

  “Drainage,” my father replied and, before he could elaborate further, my mother, incensed, had scolded them both. One for talking with his mouth full and the other for introducing an “unsuitable” topic of conversation at the dinner table.

  There was no flat land in Taran village. The tiny churchyard clung desperately to the hillside as though trying to reach up to the forest of frowning, gloomy pine. The mountains loomed menacing and primeval, casting darkening shadows over the acquiescent graves. My father’s remembered words made my stomach churn. I remembered Ricky. I had not been able to visit his grave, but the hurt of his death was healing. I could see a time ahead when I thought of him only if a memory was triggered. I knew that was how it should be; time heals and life goes on. But guilt still lent its own cruel weight to my discomfort.

  The newer graves were at the highest point on the near-vertical hillside, and my breath was coming hard and fast by the time I reached them. Bryn’s and Christina Taran’s side-by-side tombstones lay pliant and still in a purple-shaded corner. There was nothing about these unassuming stone beds that spoke of unquiet rest. I tarried a while, removing a weed or two and arranging the flowers we had picked that morning. Ceri had not wanted to come with me—her eyes had been huge and troubled as she shook her head—and I had not pursued the matter.

  A slight breeze shifted the pines, and I looked up. The lingering, unburied shadows were as black as a demon’s thoughts. Without warning, menace pressed its loathsome, laughing face to my cheek. Like a rabbit anticipating the howl of a wolf, I froze. Inside the stillness of my body, my heart was a moth beating fluttering wings against a candle flame. I knew this feeling well. That part of my mind that was not of this earth took me back through my nightmares to Ricky’s graveside. To the watcher. The Hunter. I could not see him, but he was there.

  The church bells began their doleful refrain, startling me out of my fearful reverie. Blood flowed back to my limbs, and resisting the impulse to run, I walked quickly toward the safety of the village. The main street was deserted when I rounded a corner by the now-silent church. Seeking normality, my thoughts turned to Matthew’s calming presence. Often, when I was in the village, he would emerge from his lodgings as if by coincidence. I suspected he looked for me and engineered many of these “chance” encounters. Maybe I should just cut my losses with Gethin and turn to the safer, saner option. Matthew was, as Mrs. Comber would no doubt say, “a nice, young man”. What a pity my starved heart could only be satiated by Gethin.

  As if in answer to my thoughts, the door of Matthew’s lodging house opened, and I turned expectantly. But the man who emerged was not Matthew. I stared at him in amazement, but after a brief check in his stride when he saw me, he carried on walking. He kept his back to me as he looked—apparently engrossed—into the dusty window of the chandler’s shop. My heart gave a thud of mingled fear and recognition. This was nonsense! My imagination, disordered by my foolish thoughts in the graveyard, was continuing to play childish tricks on me now. Nevertheless, my feet had wings as I dashed back down the steep slope to the house.

  “Gethin?” I gasped to Vidor, who was tying back the honeysuckle and climbing roses so that they formed an arch around the front porch.

  “Study,” he replied with his usual lack of charm, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. It was a bonus that he had recently stopped pretending he didn’t understand anything I said.

  “How long has he been there?” I asked him, pointing at the hall clock. He regarded me as though I had gone mad. “How long?” I repeated, tapping an imaginary wristwatch.

  “One, two hour.” That was good enough. I hurried into the house and knocked urgently on the study door.

  “Lilly, what you are saying just doesn’t make sense,” Gethin pointed out reasonably, after I had breathlessly poured out my story.

  “It was the same man. It was the man I saw at Ricky’s funeral,” I insisted.

  He rubbed his nose thoughtfully. “Very well, let us accept, for now, that you have just seen a man in the village who you have also seen in London—on one brief occasion, when he wore his hat pulled low to cover his face—more than a month ago. What do you suggest we do about it?”

  The room had been his father’s study and his grandfather’s before that. It overlooked the rear aspect of the valley, and Anika and I had made liberal use of the beeswax in here so that the old-fashioned wooden furniture now gleamed gold in the candlelight. The rooftops of the caravans and the drift of gypsy bonfires could be seen in the distance. The normality of the scene made my outpourings sound foolish, even to my own ears.

  “I don’t know,” I said sulkily. When he put it like that, there wasn’t really anything else to say.

  He regarded me. “Taran can be a lonely place, Lilly, even for those of us who have grown accustomed to its remoteness and silence. You, on the other hand, have been used to the noise and bustle of London. And the legends that abound here can fire even the most resistant imagination.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up a hand to forestall me. “Some of the events you have talked about since your arrival—the lights on the mountain, the unearthly howling—these might, on first assessment, appear supernatural. Personally, I prefer to call them unexplained. But this man, even if by the most bizarre of coincidences it is the same man you saw in London, surely cannot be considered either?”

  “Before you continue in this vein and accuse me of allowing my overactive imagination to play tricks on me, shall I tell you why I am so sure it is the same man?” I burst out hotly, jumping up from my chair in agitation. It was safe to tell him, I decided. Vidor had already confirmed that Gethin had been here, in his study, all morning. There was no way he could have been in the village and then got back here before me. No car had passed me on my mad dash down the road. “I know it is him because in London, even with his face shadowed, I was struck by his remarkable—no, uncanny—resemblance to you! I’ve seen this man twice now, and both times, I actually thought it was you.”

  His expression did change abruptly at that. He looked thunderstruck. Before he could speak, I dashed from the room, allowing the door to close behind me with something that sounded perilously like a slam. Minutes later, I heard his car engine, followed by the crunch of tires on gravel.

  * * *

  When we left the house, the canopy of the heavens was a clear and startling azure. Showy blooms shamelessly flaunted their bejewelled petals in front of industrious bees. Summer was marking her territory on the luxuriant, verdant pastures at the base of the towering peaks. Shaking off their winter cares, the sheep migrated lower in search of a sweeter harvest.

  The ponderous trunks and high, woven boughs of the trees were heavier than last time I had passed this way with Gethin and l
aden with lush greenery that had only been coyly peeping then. Wild goats watched our intrusion into their world with disapproving yellow eyes as they trotted down to sip from the silvery stream and graze on its herb-fragrant banks. The determined warbling of the songbirds and swooping twittering of swallows played like a gramophone record with its needle stuck relentlessly in the same groove. I marvelled at how quickly I had allowed these babbling brooks and majestic mountaintops into my heart.

  Ceri had been pestering me for weeks to teach her to swim, but today was the first day I felt convinced that it was warm enough to venture into the high, crystal waters of Lake Taran. We had packed up our bathing costumes and a picnic, and set out along the mountain-bound path. It was the sort of perfect, early-summer day that made me want to congratulate nature on her achievements.

  By the time we reached the crest of the chair, however, the mountain, with the capriciousness to which I would never become accustomed, changed its mood. The bluish tinge of Taran’s breath sighed disconsolately against my cheek, and a vague hint of mist chilled the air. A glance up at the high peak where storms dwelt did nothing to lighten my uneasiness. Ceri shivered slightly, and I dug into the pack I carried on my back and retrieved the jumpers I had the foresight to bring.

  “I don’t think it’s going to be warm enough to swim today after all,” I said dejectedly, and Ceri nodded with what I suspected was relief. The lake’s waters suddenly appeared as dark and unwelcoming as a yawning grave. The fog was rolling in with alarming speed, and I suggested we should shelter in the old shepherd’s cottage until it cleared. I had never been inside the neat, one-storey building before, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. If the sheep and goats had claimed it as their own, it was likely to be an unpleasant and probably smelly place to sit out the fog. I was right. Paint had peeled off the walls to reveal patches of bare brickwork and an ancient stench—of dung and stale bodies—fouled the air. It contained a timeworn square table flanked by four mismatched chairs. There was no glass in the window, but, bizarrely, bright chintz curtains hung on either side of the aperture. The open shutters revealed only misty-white blindness that obscured the view. I tried closing the wooden covers, but they resisted my efforts. I lifted the latch on a thick-panelled door at one end of the room and found it opened into a second, smaller room. This was a roughly hewn square with a rickety wooden bench running the length of one wall. There were two neat piles of blankets folded on this, suggesting that climbers may have recently used the cottage for an overnight stay and were planning to return.

  I decided we were in for a boring few hours. Back in the main room, I clucked my tongue disapprovingly at a pile of beer bottles and bread wrappers left in a corner. We played “I spy”, ate our sandwiches, took turns to look out of the window to see if the sun might be starting to peep through and sighed over the vagaries of a weather system that had managed to turn us into prisoners.

  It was on one of my trips to check on the visibility that I saw the murky shapes of three men approaching the cottage. The mist did not help my eyesight, but I knew instinctively that the middle one, taller and more imposing in build than his companions, was the Gethin lookalike from the village. My instincts reminded me of Ricky’s funeral, the village churchyard and the sense of raw menace this man exuded.

  Closing the door, I grabbed Ceri’s hand and, finger on my lips, gestured to the other room. With speed born of panic, I lifted her up through the open window and heard her drop down into the hazy shroud of invisibility beyond. Hauling myself up in preparation to follow, I heard a shout from the other room as the men discovered my bag. I wriggled through the narrow space and hoped that it was my imagination that felt a hand swipe at my ankle just before I tumbled headlong onto the rocks. Winded as a sharp stone thudded into my side, I struggled up, and Ceri, with a gesture we had practised so often while we slept, caught my hand. Trees, petrified into winter shapes, rose up out of the dirty white glow. The wall of fog meant we couldn’t run, but we stumbled in what I hoped was the direction of the path that would lead us into the valley. I was wrong. Our feet left the dry border of the shoreline and splashed into the shallows of Lake Taran.

  Shouts and heavy footfalls behind us spurred me forward in the only direction available to us.

  “Be brave,” I whispered as we entered the expanse of water made midnight dark by the fog rolling across its glassy surface.

  Ceri’s hand tightened trustingly in mine. “I’ll try, but I’m not sure my heart is very pure, Lilly,” she whispered as the icy water lapped our ankles. “I never told you, but I put a slug in one of Mrs. Price’s best shoes once. And…” She took a deep breath, clearly determined on a full confession. “It was me that ripped the bow off her best hat, not Shucky.”

  “I don’t think any of that makes your heart bad, darling,” I murmured. The water swirled about my waist, and I hoisted Ceri onto my back where she clung like a little monkey.

  A sudden shout from the water’s edge effectively changed the direction of my thoughts. Ceri gave a whimper of fear, and I hugged her legs closer about my waist. I hoped we were far enough from the shore that the sweeping torch beam could not find us. The sound of one of our pursuers entering the water and striking out in our direction told me my hope was in vain. I moved determinedly on. The water was too deep now to stand. Ignoring the leaden weight on my back, I swam out even farther.

  The surface of the lake began to ripple, and the man who was following us called out nervously, “Was ist das?” As if in response, the water shivered and bubbled as though it was boiling.

  A hoarse, masculine scream broke the foggy air. I stopped and, turning toward the sound, trod water. I could see wavering torchlight held high at the water’s edge and hear horrid, gurgling splashing sounds coming from an area of the lake between our position and the shore.

  “Gunther? Was ist los?” The voice from the bank trembled on a high note of fear.

  “What did he say?” I whispered.

  “He asked him, ‘What is happening?’” Although Ceri pressed her lips close to my ear, the words were unspoken.

  The relentless sounds of terror and agony—a man fighting for his life—combined to burn themselves into my brain.

  Then silence.

  “Wo bist du? Gunther…”

  “Where are you?” My translator’s voice spoke only inside my mind.

  That was the question I wanted to ask. But I couldn’t wait around for the answer I dreaded. I struck out for the near shore.

  “His heart wasn’t pure, but ours are,” Ceri said, with a measure of grim satisfaction. “And the others won’t come after us now.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Right, this was it. No going back. I was tired of waiting for something to happen. I turned the door handle and walked into the gloom of Gethin’s bedroom. There was no hesitation in my step. He was awake. One candle was still lit, and I could just make out his shape in the huge bed where he was lying on his back, hands behind his head. I had a feeling he was expecting me. I slid my nightgown over my head and dropped it to the floor. We didn’t speak, and he held back the bedcovers so that I could slide in beside him. I pressed myself up against his warmth, and he drew me closer, holding me there for a long, heartaching time. His lips brushed my temple now and then. Our naked bodies touched along their entire length.

  Gethin twined his fingers in mine, and we looked deep into each other’s eyes. I tilted my head up and whispered in his ear, “You said you’d be ready for me.” As if in answer, his rock-hard erection throbbed insistently against my stomach, and I allowed myself a little, triumphant smile.

  Softly, hesitantly at first, his lips claimed mine, and his fingertips danced lightly over my skin, exploring and claiming. Every touch was like velvet petals, dripping fiery sensuality into my pores. I raised my leg and draped it over his hip, loving the warm taste of his mouth. His lips left my mouth and travelled down my neck to softly
brush my nipple. I whimpered, and he gave a soft laugh before taking the hardened nub fully into his mouth. A ripple of pure, glittering lust shot through me.

  The air around us shimmered with our combined heat and light. I rocked against him, showing him without words, exactly what I wanted. He turned me onto my back and moved so that he was between my thighs. His hardness pulsed against my swollen flesh, and I murmured encouragingly. He needed no further invitation to slide into me. I gasped and arched my back as his thickness filled and stretched me. With infinite gentleness, he moved very slowly and smoothly, gliding in and out and gradually stoking up the intensity. His lips just touched mine, teasing and tantalising, and he circled my nipple with his thumb. By the time he began to pump hard and rhythmically, I was almost sobbing with pleasure. I thrust upward to meet him, taking him deeper, gripping his shoulders and feeling my nails bite into his flesh.

  Our eyes remained locked on each other as, with one final wild lunge I came, throwing back my head to call out his name. I heard Gethin’s answering, hoarse cry as his own orgasm shuddered through him. It was some considerable time before the world stopped spinning at last. I opened my eyes cautiously. Gethin took his weight on his elbows and watched my face, brushing the hair back from my forehead.

  “Boring, eh?” he teased.

  I smiled shyly. “But I didn’t know it could be like that.”

  “Nor did I.” He rolled onto his side and drew me into the crook of his arm. I imagined we might both emit smouldering embers after the fire we had just generated. I lifted my head to tell Gethin my thoughts, but his eyes were already closed. With a contented sigh, I snuggled closer into him.

  “I love you, you know,” I remarked conversationally. There, I’d said it. He wasn’t asleep, and he shifted his position to lie on his side, watching me, his thoughts hidden by the darkness of his eyes.

  “What do you want, Lilly Divine?” he asked, and I didn’t pretend to misunderstand him.