Waterfall Glen (19 page)

“I wouldn’t like to impose.”

“You wouldn’t be.”

“You’re sure? I’ve got a sleeping bag and fold-down bed in the camper.”

“You don’t need them. I’ll make up the guest bed for you.”

“If you’re sure … “

“Cameron, I’m sure.”

“I’ll just nip across and get an overnight bag, then. Do you know if there’s a quick way to get to the top of Jamie’s Crag from here?”

She nodded. “Turn right at the bottom of the steps
outside the wall. You’ll come to a bridge, just above the waterfall. It leads to a flight of steps up Jamie’s Crag. You’ll need a flashlight, though—a torch, I think you call it. I’ll see if Finlay has one.”

She didn’t have to go looking for Finlay because, having heard the clatter of frame on floor, he came rushing in to find out what had happened.

Five minutes later Cameron was heading along the path that led to the bridge.

C
AMERON WAS GONE FOR SO LONG THAT
K
ATE AND
F
INLAY
were pulling on their coats and getting ready to mount a search party by the time he returned. “Cameron! We were just about to go looking for you,” Kate told him. “We thought maybe Jamie’s ghost had gotten you.”

Cameron didn’t even manage a smile, let alone a laugh.

“Is everything okay?” Kate asked.

“The torch died on me,” he told her.

Kate and Finlay both looked at the torch in his hand, which was shining brightly, then looked back at him for an explanation.

Cameron didn’t know quite what to tell them.

When he set off from Greystane he’d been thanking his long-departed relative Jamie for helping secure him a night under the same roof as Kate Brodie.

However he wasn’t thanking Jamie quite so much by the time he reached the end of the path behind the summit of Castle Crag, because the only way down to Waterfall Bridge was by a staircase of wooden sleepers that descended
the forested hillside.

Cameron hadn’t been able to set foot in a forest since Kosovo, not even by day, let alone night.

He stood there shining the torch down the stairway. The beam of light seemed to heighten the blackness around it. A breeze blew through the branches and they gave a dry rattle that startled him far more than it should have. The trees took on a skeletal quality, their branches like outstretched arms, the twigs like clutching, bony fingers. Staring with horrified fascination into the darkness, Cameron saw things he knew weren’t really there, heard things he knew couldn’t really be heard. His hand shook as he shone the torch to left and right because he half-expected that, at any moment, the beam would fall on something nightmarish. Something that wouldn’t stay dead and buried in a far-off forest clearing.

Eventually he gathered himself enough to twist the front of the torch and tighten the beam so it would travel further, trying to put the forest on either side out of mind by putting it out of sight. He used the torch to probe for the bottom of the steps, but there was no end in sight. Even though he could barely see the trees on either side of the stairway now, he could sense their brooding presence. He felt like they were closing in.

Unable to face what lay ahead, Cameron turned and hurried back along the path and past the staircase that led up to Greystane.

He followed the track that wound its way to the bottom
of Castle Crag and the glen below. After using some stepping-stones to cross the burn, he followed the track up Jamie’s Crag until the torchbeam fell on his van.

Once in the camper he put a towel into his rucksack, some underwear on top of the towel, and his toilet bag on top of the underwear. Slinging the rucksack over one shoulder, he left the camper. He had the key in his hand ready to lock up, but something stopped him before he could turn it.

The unmistakable feeling that he was being watched.

His heart started pounding, his pulse racing. Telling himself it was just his imagination working overtime, he took a deep breath in a bid to calm himself, locked the door, and slipped the keys into the hip pocket of his jeans.

But the sensation of being watched grew stronger. So strong that he half-expected a clutching hand to come down on his shoulder at any moment, and was afraid to turn around for fear of what he might see staring back at him.

When at last he turned around it was hesitantly, and the white beam shining out from the torch in his hand was anything but steady.

The circle of light bounced along the bottom of the door of Jamie’s Cottage, no more than a dozen yards from where he stood. As it did, so the sensation of being watched vanished.

The lower half of the door was split in the middle, and twisted inwards at one side. Cameron shone the torch upwards, over the rusty iron handle, to the top of the door.
It was buckled outwards at the outer edge. He knew the warping was probably due to the top hinge having rusted away. Yet still he had the thought that it looked almost as if the damage had been caused by someone trying to batter the door down—and it never occurred to him that it might have been someone on the outside trying to kick the door in and break into the cottage, even though that would have been the more logical assumption.
The thought that filled his mind was that the damage had been done by someone inside trying to hammer the door down with their hands in a desperate bid to get out, to escape something dreadful and godforsaken that haunted the darkness within the old stone walls …

Something that moments earlier had been watching
him.

If there was such a thing as a door to hell it would look like this, Cameron thought. The longer he looked at the door, the more unsettled he became by the prospect of what lay beyond it. Soon he was imagining the sound the door would make if he forced it open, and what he might find if he stepped inside. He didn’t have to make a conscious effort to imagine; the thoughts came unbidden to his mind, complete in every detail…

The door opening with a jarring shudder, giving way to a drawn-out creaking that went on and on and on.

A darkness revealed that was more complete than the blackest night.

Stepping into it, being enveloped by it, swallowed by it.

Being startled by movement behind him, and turning
around just in time to see the door that had opened so noisily swinging silently, slowly, inexorably shut.

Grabbing frantically for it, but to no avail because it was tantalisingly out of reach.

Watching helplessly as the outside world—the world with his camper van and Greystane and Kate Brodie and Glen Cranoch, with the sun and moon, light and warmth—became a steadily diminishing vertical slash in the darkness before disappearing altogether as the door slammed shut, leaving him standing in the blackness that was deeper than night.

Reaching blindly for the door handle, but finding only splinters that lanced his palm, slit his fingers and wedged under his nails.

The mounting horror of realizing that there was no handle on the inside of the door—realizing there was no way out.

Desperately probing for the crack between door and frame, only to discover it was too narrow to offer his bleeding fingers purchase.

Sinking to hands and knees and searching for the warped section of wood, only to find that it had sprung back into place and was flush with the frame.

Struggling to his feet on shaking legs and reaching for the twisted top of the door only to discover that it, too, was no longer warped.

The feeling of being watched, not from a distance now, but from so close that a bony hand might grab him at any moment.

Looking over his shoulder, seeing only darkness but sensing something more.

Turning back to the door and hammering at it until his hands were black and blue but not managing to break it down, for it would only warp and twist, not splinter and break.

Shouting until he was too hoarse to do more than whisper, and hearing the echoes of voices other than his own getting ever louder …

Cameron’s dark imaginings were interrupted by the feeling that he was being watched again. The unseen eyes seemed to peer at him not from a crack in the door but from a little to the left. His hand was shaking rather than just trembling as he swung the torch in that direction, over rough old stonework cast in stark relief by the dramatic interplay of light and shadow.

As stone wall gave way to the small, deeply inset window, so the feeling of being watched faded once more. The beam from the torch fell on the bottom right-hand pane. It was cracked and stained and reflected the light, so that all he could see was dirty glass. A weak halo was cast on two of the other sections of the four-paned window, showing they had the same cracked and dirty glass in them. The other quarter of the window—the top left corner—was darker than the deepest shadow, and Cameron remembered from earlier in the day that its glass was missing altogether. Trying to forget his nightmarish imaginings of what might lie within the cottage, he walked towards the window, angling his wrist to shine the torch into the glassless section. Each step he took was smaller and slower than the last because, as the circle of light moved towards the empty quarter of
the window, so the beam grew ever dimmer. When he was halfway to the cottage and shone the torch directly at the glassless section, the light died altogether.

“Damn!” he said under his breath. He moved the batteries around, hoping to get some extra charge out of them. Just as he was snapping the cover of the compartment back in place he got the feeling of being watched again. The sensation was so strong that he stopped what he was doing and instinctively looked at the window. The clouds parted and a shaft of moonlight fell on the cottage, which was less than half a dozen yards away now. He looked on in horrified fascination as the pane of glass next to the empty quarter misted up, as if fogged by warm breath.

The misting slowly vanished in front of his eyes until it was gone so completely it was difficult to believe it had ever been there at all.

Just as he was wondering if the misting had been a product of his imagination rather than something within the cottage, the pane clouded over again …

Then gradually went from opaque back to clear.

Cameron stood there, transfixed, watching and waiting and somehow knowing that the misting would reappear in a breath’s time.

His own breath came out in a rush.

The silence was so intense it was far more disturbing than any noise. Any moment now, he thought…

And, sure enough, the window pane misted up again …

Then cleared just moments before the silvery light
died as another raft of clouds drifted in front of the moon. The sudden darkness made Cameron remember about the torch in his hand. It lit up when he flicked the switch. He focused its beam on the window pane, waiting for the glass to mist up again.

The moments stretched. The glass remained clear.

Cameron stood like that for a full minute, maybe two, struggling to keep the torch trained on the window pane because his hand was shaking so badly. He didn’t know if it was fear or shock or a mix of both, but for that minute or two he was incapable of reasoned thought.

Then adrenalin kicked in, and possible explanations for what he’d witnessed flooded his mind. It could have been the breath of an animal…

A squatter …

Somebody snooping around from the property firm—the man with the camera Finlay had seen several days earlier, perhaps …

Or it could have been a figment of his imagination.

That last thought frightened him more than all the others put together. The idea that madness might lie coiled in the darkness inside him was far more terrifying than anything that could be lurking in Jamie’s Cottage, so he pointed the torch at the heather-covered ground to light up the way, and started walking towards the ruin again. His steps were slow and uncertain, and the torchbeam shook with more than just the walk over uneven ground.

After a few paces the circle of light rose in front of
Cameron, no longer falling on bare rock or clumps of heather but instead climbing up the rough stonework of the cottage wall, just a couple of yards ahead of him now. He stopped and slowly raised the torch. Its beam dimmed as it moved over the thick slab of a lintel.

The light got dimmer still as it passed over the cracked and dusty bottom panes of glass, so much feebler now that he knew he hadn’t imagined the dimming.

And then, just as what was left of the light fell on the glassless quarter of the window, it died completely. Cameron raised the torch to juggle the batteries around once more. For a moment the torch was pointing up at the sky, and came on full strength. But when Cameron pointed it into the empty quarter of the window it died again, leaving him staring into utter blackness.

Without warning, there was a barely audible sighing from within the cottage. A shadow moved in the darkness, sensed as much as seen, and suddenly a pair of eyes were staring straight into his own. They were unlike any eyes he’d ever seen before: perfectly circular, the irises bright amber, the pupils large and a soul-less black. Cameron took a step back on legs that barely had the strength to support him. The torch fell out of his hand and he stumbled and ended up on the seat of his pants. The clouds cleared the moon, and just then something began to emerge from the empty quarter of the window: tufted, bushy eyebrows followed by those piercing amber eyes … A grey face with a cruelly curved beak … A white chin and then a dappled
chest, dark flecks on light… Followed by a pair of talons as vicious as the beak.