It was one of those spur of the moment decisions that you make when drunk, and you don’t realise until you’re seeing things in more sober retrospect that… Yeah. Better choices could have been made.
I’d been out at The White Lion for my cousin’s birthday party, and the original plan had been to all drive back to hers with her roommate driving. Her roommate had backed out, and luckily for my cousin, her boyfriend had offered to come out and be designated driver. Unluckily for me, they have some of the loudest sex known to man, and there was no way if I went home to hers I’d be able to actually sleep on their sofa – I’d be up for hours listening to them at it.
Anyway, I told them I’d ordered a taxi, which I had done, but after they’d left, I got the confirmation text that it would be a forty-five minute wait. The Lion was still open for another hour or so, but I wasn’t in the mood to sit in there on my phone while the music was pounding, and because I was drunk, I just thought, oh, it’s not that far of a walk home. I’ll just walk!
It’s an hour and a half, if not two, and I live in a village in the valleys, so the main road between the White Lion in this village and home in mine cuts right into the valley side, with a sheer slope on one side down to the river and hewn-back cliff on the other.
I’d say I don’t know what I was thinking, but at the end of the day, I wasn’t thinking, was I?
I was just drunk and a bit thick, and by the time I’d sobered up enough to think more seriously about things I’d been walking for twenty-five minutes and didn’t much feel like turning back.
The winding road is pretty well-lit, but then, it has to be – there’s thick forestry on the sloping side, the trees tall and old, and it was blocking out a lot of the light from the moon that night, what little could get through the cloud cover. Still though, with the sharp bends and turns in the road, sometimes, there are places where it’s dark at night – the light comes away from the streetlamps and you can actually see the gaps of shadow between the edges of each circle of light, trees making shadows between some of them, or the edge of the cliffs at times. Fog was threatening as I’d started walking in, and once I was beginning to sober up, there was a good deal more of it, enough to add to the shadows and take away from any visibility there was.
I wouldn’t wear headphones on that stretch of road even in the daytime – the trees muffle engine noises, and what with all the bends in the road you can’t accurately hear cars coming; cars aside, a lot of that hewn-back cliff is held up with wire netting to protect from landslides, but they do happen, and you need to be able to hear them. Walking along the side of the road at that time of night, though, it was… eerie.
My breathing sounded so loud in my ears I felt like it could be heard for miles, and even the sound of my own heartbeat – there was no wind, no sound of cars in the distance, not even the trees creaking. Now and then, I’d hear an animal call like a gamebird or something, or hear a stick break in the underbrush down the valley side, and every time it made me jump a mile.
They say it’s haunted, that stretch of road – but then, every road in Wales is probably haunted at some point, right? Every road anywhere. If we’ve been about for two hundred thousand years, there must be ghosts anywhere anybody’s ever lived – because they’ve died there, too.
Fog had come in, was clinging to the edges of the valley side like skirts against someone’s ankle, thick and white.
I don’t believe in ghosts, and I didn’t walking home that night, but it’s the sort of thing you think about when you’re trudging home in the middle of the night, when it’s all deserted, when it’s frighteningly quiet and you’re shrouded in the night fog. Every time I stepped into the blank space between two stretches of lamplight and was suddenly drenched in whiteness, I felt like I’d dropped into an ocean of the stuff, even though the next reach of the street light was only a few steps away and I could see it right ahead of me. I kept doing a stupid little run through the shadowed bits, feeling heat flush the back of my neck and a shiver run down my spine, and then I felt pissed off I’d even done that, because I was just making myself scared.
I knew when I’d reached the halfway point because there’s a path that comes off the main road and leads about thirty or forty paces down to a public footpath, and I glanced down the hill to see if there were any cars parked there. The street lamp overlooking it was broken, so I couldn’t see very well, but I couldn’t see reflection off a windshield or a car light.
I hadn’t heard any cars all night, or had any drive past me, which was all for the best. I had an old duffel coat on over the top of my dress, and it wasn’t exactly high-vis.
I don’t know why I thought there’d be cars parked down there at this time of night – even if there had been cars parked outside of the public woods, they’d only be doggers – but for some reason I was convinced there’d be somebody. I took a few steps off the main road, looking, certain I’d see something, that there had to be someone there.
It’s weird, when you’re looking for something in almost pitch-darkness and you’re trying to make your eyes focus with not quite enough light to see by. I could see something. It was below the level of the fog, and at first, it was almost like I just saw something flit between the trees, and then when I stopped to stare, I could only see the trees themselves, their silhouette, but then it moved again.
I thought it was just a man at first, because I was staring right down the embankment and the shadow of him seemed to come out from behind one of the bigger oak trees, the really old ones that’s been there longer than my granddad’s been alive.
I nearly said hello, or said something, started to raise my hand, but it was like I was frozen with my breath caught in my throat as it got closer. It wasn’t easy to judge the size of it because in the dark I couldn’t actually tell the distance very easily, but the proportions were wrong, off. I could see the glint of its eyes too high up, and its head was bigger than its shoulders, the eyes too far apart, and it wasn’t moving like it was walking, but just sort of… rising.
Getting closer.
It should have been making noise. There should have been twigs snapping, leaves rustling, dirt shifting, but there was nothing but ringing silence down there, beneath the fog.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even move, didn’t even dare blink with how it was coming closer, and I wanted to cry suddenly, wanted to scream, because I’d stepped off the path, hadn’t I? I’d stepped out of the light and into the shadows and just like I was scared of there was something, it was wrong.
I didn’t know what it was, could just see the shadow of it and hear my blood rushing in my ears, so rooted to the spot in terror I couldn’t so much as shift my weight—
And then there was a hand on my shoulder, and I actually screamed.
I clapped my hand over my mouth, looking from the man in front of me to back down the hill, but when I looked this time, there was nothing there – no shadow, no big black thing, nothing.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said anxiously – he had been wearing a flat cap, and now he had his hands in front of him and was passing it anxiously between them, turning it in circles. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, Miss, I’m sorry. Just— You shouldn’t be walking this road alone, Miss, just wanted to see you were alright.”
I was shaking all over, huddled in my coat, and I kept looking from him down the hill, scanning for the figure, but it wasn’t there.
“This land in’t right, Miss,” he said, and I looked at his face, trying to see if I recognised him, which I don’t think I did. He had a pointy chin and a slightly upturned nose, freckles scattered on his round cheeks, and he had quite long eyelashes for a boy – they made him look like a boy when he wasn’t, really, I think he must have actually been about my age, twenty-five, twenty-seven, because his voice was deep. “You don’t want to be lingering on it. Can I give you a lift? Where are you going to?”
“Rhyd-gwyn,” I said, and he nodded.
“I’m going through Rhyd, it’s no trouble to stop to let you off,” he said. “I can drop you home.”
It was late, and I still had gooseflesh all over me, cold underneath my coat, and even as I was double-thinking it, getting into a car with some stranger I’d never seen before in the middle of the night, I was so freaked out I just followed him up to the road again.
I needn’t have been worried: he wasn’t driving a car.
I stood there, staring, at the big Welsh Cob harnessed to the cart behind it, a green-painted thing with a wooden bench on the front of it and a bunch of crates and sacks in the cart itself. The horse was bright white, not just the mane but its main coat, and I reached out to touch it, felt the heat radiating from it when I brushed my fingers over the side of its neck.
“Come on, brysiwch,” he said as he hopped up onto the bench, settling back with the reins held in his hand. “This is wild country, this, off the road. This road isn’t meant to be here, cut into the mountain as it is, and it knows it.”
“What does that mean?” I asked as I stepped forward and pulled myself up onto the bench. He clicked his tongue and his mare started forward, her hooves making regular noise on the tarmac as she followed the lines of the road. “Wild country?”
He didn’t say anything, looking forward on the path, and I was so stunned by the situation I didn’t say anything either, just sat there on the bench beside him, my hands folded in my lap and held between my knees. There was a lantern hung on one side of the bench’s back, and I could feel the heat coming off of it.
He was dressed in a brown wool coat and had his cap back on his head, leather boots, grey trousers. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but despite everything, despite the whole situation, the outfit wasn’t that far off to what some of the older farmers wear, and the cart was in good nick.
I’d never seen someone drive a cart on this road – I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone drive a cart locally at all, except for farmer’s fairs and the like.
“You live in Rhyd-gwyn?” he asked casually. I’m glad it was casual – I’m glad he was focused on the horse and the reins in his hands, and not on me.
“Behind the King’s Swan,” I told him. “Just off the main road.”
“I know it, yeah.”
“Where are you going?” I asked him, and he looked at me sideways, gave me a small, warm smile. There was something shy about it, I think.
“Oh, you know,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. “Home.”
“Where’s home?” Just asking the question made me feel like I’d been plunged in cold water, and that was before he turned away and looked straight on again, the smile fading from his lips.
“A long ways yet,” he said.
I tried to pay attention as we kept on moving, focused on the clip-clop of the mare’s hooves on the tarmac, tried to focus on her and the way she almost seemed to fade into the thick, white mist around us, the fog the same colour as she was so that you couldn’t really see where the horse ended and it started. If I hadn’t touched her, if I hadn’t actually felt her body under my hand, I might have believed he’d bridled the fog itself.
A few times, I looked off over the side of the path, staring into the darkness and looking to see if there was anything else down there, if there were any more shapes flitting between the trees, and the first few times I didn’t see anything.
The third time – the fourth, maybe? – I saw a dark shape move on a path I knew led down to and crossed over a stream. It was smaller than the other one had been, but it moved fast, and once again, it made no noise at all, no snapping or rustling in the undergrowth beneath it.
My breath caught in my throat, and I gripped the arm of the cart bench to lean over and look, but the driver nudged me with his shoulder.
“Try not to,” he advised me in an undertone, not taking his eyes off the road ahead for a moment. “Bessie’s got blinders on, it’s easy for her. We have to just not look.”
“Not look,” I repeated. “What did you— Wild country, you said. What do you mean by that?”
He looked at me sideways, his eyes slightly wide so that I saw the whites of them. “Best not to talk about it, Miss.”
“I want to talk about it,” I said. “You’re the one who said it. Wild country, you called this. How’s this wild country? This road’s been cut through here for donkey’s years – it’s been here since the seventeen or eighteen hundreds when they started up the quarry. What do you mean by that, calling it wild country?”
“Well,” he whispered, his voice so quiet I had to lean in to hear him. “You can cut through country like this, Miss, you can even cut into the mountain a bit. You can put in the road and you can pave it and you can line it with lamps and you can hold back the slides with stakes and boards. You can’t live on it, can you? We can walk back and forth, ride through on a cart, but it’s not really ours, it’s not yours or mine, it’s not owned by anybody. You can’t tame country like this unless it wants to be tamed. It’s still wild – especially on a night like this, can’t see your hand in front of your face. A man could get lost on a night like this – many a man has.”
I didn’t say a word, couldn’t even breathe in, and he glanced at me again and came over almost a little shy, said, “Or, or a woman, of course.” He swallowed. “And if you did get lost, you wouldn’t be able to find your way back, would you? Maybe if you made it down to the river, and it was the right one.”
“I saw something,” I said.
“Eh?”
“I saw something,” I told him again. “In the dark, down the embankment, I don’t know what it was, but it was, it was a shadow, it was getting so much closer when you—”
“Listen,” he said, shifting in his seat. “Listen, like I said, Miss, best we don’t talk about that.” He flicked his wrist, moving the reins, and Bessie picked up her pace. “Best we don’t talk at all, as it happens.”
We didn’t have that much farther to go, but the whole time my heart was pounding in my chest, and it only started to slow down when we came over the crest of the hill and I could see the lights of the village proper. There was barely any fog in town, only the barest hints of mist on the river and clinging around the bridge.
“Here we are,” he said as we came down the main road, already past village hall and the church and the graveyard, and got Bessie to come to a stop.
I hopped down, looking to the sign for the Queen’s Swan, Est. 1802, at the old painting of the swan on it that was faded now – the sign was a lot newer than the pub, obviously, was more like forty years old rather than two hundred. I turned back to thank him, and he was already gone, Bessie and the cart, too – not fading into the distance or carrying on down the street, but just… gone.
I nearly ran the two minutes up the path to home, had my phone torch on even though it was pretty well-lit, and there was no fog.
I didn’t want to be alone in the dark for a second, and even when I got inside and upstairs and into bed, cosy under the covers so that I could finally go to sleep, it was with all the lights on.
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