by Stuart Atkinson
by Stuart Atkinson
Saturday, their first full day in Gallowdale, seemed destined to be frustrating from the very first moment Fee looked out her window.
Disappointingly, the bright sunshine of the previous day had gone, and gazing out the window she saw torn, ragged clouds scudding across the sky, driven westwards by a gusting wind which was bending and swaying the branches of the trees too. People walking past were well wrapped-up in jackets and coats, suggesting the wind was cold as well as strong, so before heading down to join her father at breakfast Fee pulled on a heavy sweatshirt and thick combat trousers, telling herself they had a lot of exploring and rummaging around to do.
She hoped her father had dressed just as suitably; staying warm and comfortable were going to be essential if they were going to start unravelling the mystery.
To her relief - and the obvious disapproval of the restaurant staff - he had, and was dressed in his chunkiest black and grey camouflage jacket of which every available inch was taken up with pockets and pouches. It was clear from the scowls and tutts of the waiting staff that they weren’t used to serving people who looked like poachers or mercenaries, and Fee had to stop herself from scolding them for their dark expressions; she had no sympathy for people who judged others simply by their appearance.
“Thought you were going to stay there all day,” her dad smiled, glugging down a glass of chilled fresh orange. She just smiled back tolerantly, letting him enjoy his little joke. The half-empty jug beside him suggested he had woken up with his usual, legendary holiday thirst, and Fee knew that before they were done eating he’d be calling for a refill. Wouldn’t the waiters just love that..!
After planting a ‘good morning’ kiss on the top of his head she slid into the chair opposite her father and looked at the menu. She wasn’t really that hungry, but knew she had to eat something to keep her strength up for the long day stretching ahead of them.
“I’ve been working out a plan,” her father announced, enthusiastically buttering several thick slices of toast. Fee knew they were only starters, being eaten in anticipation of the Full English he had almost certainly ordered. He was nothing if not predictable. But a plan? They had only just arrived in the village, didn’t know one building - or person - from the other. How could he have developed a plan so soon?
“First,” he explained, folding down one finger, “we get out of this goldfish tank and go find that little gingerbread house we stumbled upon last night. Agreed?”
Fee’s eyes lit up; the cottage across the river had looked perfect, just perfect. She approved of his “plan” - so far, anyway.
“Then,” he continued, “I think we should spend an hour just getting our bearings, walk this place from one end to the other... Maybe draw a map or something, hmm?”
That was also a good idea. She was impressed. Surprised, but impressed.
“I’m with you so far,” she said, nodding approvingly. “But I’m starving, let’s order...”
Her father didn’t have to cough or click his fingers to get the waiters’ attention; they were already all staring at him, disdain etched on their faces. So it gave him great pleasure to turn into a charicature of himself and send them scurrying away back to the kitchens convinced that even if they worked at the hotel until the next millennium they would never encounter another customer as difficult or obnoxious as him...
By the time finished their breakfast both Fee and her father needed to laugh so badly they were frightened they would burst if they didn’t let it out, and as they walked out the door they could hold it in no longer and laughed until they cried.
Running to the car, overnight bags slung over their shoulders, they didn’t care about how cold the day was, or how many leaves the whipping wind was picking up off the ground around them; all that mattered was that they were together, and ready to face whatever the day wanted to throw at them.
With the bags safely stored in the boot once more they headed out the car park and back towards the bridge, re-tracing their steps from the previous night’s walk. As they passed the church again, Fee was glad she’d decided to wrap up warm; the Sun was hidden by the ever-shifting jumble of cloud above them, and even when it succeeded in briefly breaking through the grey and black canopy, sending a shaft of light spearing down towards the village, no warmth reached the ground.
They crossed a side road, walked a little further on, and then found the gate. “Here we are,” her father announced unnecessarily, swinging it open to allow her to pass through first. In the light of day the pathway was narrower and dirtier than she’d remembered, littered with soggy leaves, and the river seemed closer than she recalled too, but it was only a couple of minutes’ walk to the wooden bridge, and Fee bounced over it cheerfully, impatient for them to secure a room in the cottage which lay on the other side.
All night she’d been thinking about it, wondering if she’d actually imagined it, it seemed so perfect. But there it was, still, and the “vacant rooms” sign was still in its window, so she rapped on the door and stood back, fingers crossed there was someone in. The Hotel had been okay... but those waiters..!
The door opened with a loud creak, like the door to a haunted castle, and Fee found herself actually holding her breath as she waited for someone to appear. It really was like being in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Who would it be? A dourly-dressed butler? A slavering hunchback?
“Hello there!” a short, grey-haired woman greeted them cheerfully. She was dressed in an apron, carrying a duster in one hand and a can of polish in the other, as if they had interrupted her cleaning.
“Hello...” Fee’s father replied uncertainly, resting a hand on her shoulder to steady himself. “Sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for a room..? A Double? Your sign says - “
The woman’s plump, rosy-cheeked face lit up like a lantern. “You’ve come to the right place!” she told them, opening the door wider to allow them in. Fee noticed she was so well-built she almost filled it herself. But she seemed genuinely pleased they’d called. “Welcome to Ivy Cottage! Please, come in, come in, I’ll show you upstairs... if you like the room it’s yours.”
Fee followed her father into the cottage, WIPing her feet on the brown-bristle mat. Inside it was everything she had imagined. Oak beams crossed every ceiling, and the smell of baking bread was heavy in the air. Standing in the hallway, to her left was a large dining room, with two tables set out next to a window and, beneath an impressive collection of swords and pistols, a huge fire. A large, very comfortable-looking sofa lay across the room’s centre. To her right was a smaller room, a sitting room with more comfortable-looking furniture and a TV in the corner; it looked so snug and warm she wanted to curl up on the sofa and just go to sleep...
Upstairs the bedroom they were ushered into proved to be just as wonderful. With a big double bed and a small single across from it, plush carpets, tasteful decorations and a small TV and coffee maker, it was everything they - or at least she - was looking for.
“Actually, I’m amazed you have a room free at all,” her father said to the woman as he looked around the bedroom, “I’d have thought that you’d be booked solid at Easter..?” Beside him the guest house owner was panting, left a little out of breath from climbing the stairs. How old was she, Fee wondered. 65? 70?
“You’re right, and I was,” she admitted, “I had a group of five German tourists booked for this whole weekend, walkers I think, but they cancelled just this morning, ‘bout an hour before you called.”
Fee smiled. It was too good to be true! If the woman had said she was fully booked when she opened the door, she’d have cried-
“In fact,” the landlady added, looking Fee up and down, “you can have both rooms if you like... can’t have your young lady crammed into a corner now, can we?”
Before Fee’s father could comment the guest house owner was already walking the short distance across the landing to the other room. She pushed open door to let Fee peer inside.
“Oh, it’s lovely!” Fee exclaimed. Inside, the room was half the size of the one opposite, but it could have been designed from blueprints in her own perfectionist imagination: matching curtains and quilt, flowers in a vase on the window-sill, birds singing through the open window...
Standing in the doorway Fee’s heart was melting - but her father didn’t seem so sure.
“Um, it’s great, really,” he told the woman, “but we’re on a bit of a limited budget - “
“Oh no!” the woman laughed, dusting her hands off on her apron, “don’t worry about that, you can have both for the price of one.”
“That’s very generous of you,” Fee heard her father reply, “but I wouldn’t want you losing money because of us - “
“To tell you the truth, you’d be doing me a favour,” the woman said, sitting herself down on the bed. It creaked slightly under her weight. “I’ve not been too well recently, and wasn’t really looking forward to having a housefull this weekend... so I’d much rather have you nice quiet folks here than a big group... or be alone altogether..?”
“Well, if you’re sure,” her father said, still sounding a little uncertain. Fee had to stop herself shouting out “She’s sure! She’s sure!” The room was perfect, both rooms were perfect, and the old woman was practically begging her father to take them. What more did he want? Rose petals scattered on the floor?
“Well, okay,” her father relented, and Fee hugged him. In one stroke he’d made the weekend even more special. “Should I pay you up front, or..? For that matter, how much are the rooms?”
“Oh, no rush for that,” the woman said, waving the enquiry away as she walked out of the room, “you get unpacked and settled in, we can talk about that later.”
Fee didn’t need telling twice; her bag was already open and half-empty, her sandalwood soap and candle in their places, her panda resting between the bed’s pair of plump pillows. Home from home, already.
“Well, at least let me know what to call you,” her father asked, following the landlady out of the room.
“The name’s Mrs Hale,” the old woman called over her shoulder as she descended the stairs, laughing “yes, Hale as in ‘Hale & Hearty’, as you’d have guessed from my size..!”
Upstairs Fee laughed at the woman’s joke, feeling instantly at home in the little room - her little room. Sitting down on the bed she felt it giving beneath her just the right amount, then gave in and stretched out altogether.
As far as she was concerned, the weekend had just taken a very definite turn for the better.
After parking the car outside the B&B and bringing the rest of their things inside, they set about exploring the village properly. It took them under an hour to walk around the whole of Gallowdale and return to the comfort of Ivy Cottage’s snug, where a tray, sporting plates of scones and cakes, and two china cups of hot tea, was waiting for them.
Fee had intended to sketch out a rough map of the village as they’d walked around it, but when they entered the local store and found printed copies of a proper village map on sale for a pound she’d crunched hers up and bought one. Now, sipping at her tea, she laid it out on the table and examined it with her father.
The map showed the village was roughly square in shape, conveniently split into equal-sized quarters by the river and the main road which crossed in its centre. Looking at the map, the top left quarter was almost empty, with just the village school, village hall and open grazing land. Opposite it, on the right, the north-east quarter was the busiest, with three large houses, each one set in its own grounds, and a pair of bed and breakfasts, one of them Ivy Cottage itself.
Across the footbridge and over the river, the south eastern quarter was dominated by a large open field and a golf course. The open field was marked with a strange dotted circle, but, very helpfully, the map didn’t include a key so Fee had no idea what the markings represented. Next to the road, filled-in squares and rectangles marked the locations of the “haunted” church and the Castle Hotel.
Finally, across the road and opposite the hotel and church, Gallowdale’s south western quarter was mostly residential; behind the village store and its neighbouring small pub, a small, roughly-circular housing estate encircled a village pond and the war memorial, while slightly further south, past the village soccer pitch, five larger, private houses were clustered together in a tree-shielded cul-de-sac.
In short, Gallowdale was totally unremarkable.
“Doesn’t exactly scream out ‘Incredible Secret Hidden here!’ does it?” Fee’s father laughed, looking over her shoulder.
“No,” Fee agreed, but didn’t laugh. She couldn’t see anything humourous in the situation. The village was small, but had lots of cover, lots of nooks and crannies. Searching it thoroughly was going to be a nightmare. “But at least now we know the lie of the land,” she said seriously, “should save us some time. Going to be tough, though.”
Her father smiled wryly, wondering when his daughter had become a hardened military commander. “If we’re talking about time-saving, we can do that by going right to the scene of the crime. Where is the castle in relation to... all this...?” he asked, waving a hand vaguely over the map.
“On this scale, over here,” she told him, jabbing a finger onto the tabletop approximately a foot beyond the right edge of the paper, “to the east of the village, about two miles from our very own front door.”
“Two miles...” he repeated thoughtfully, “okay, we should check it out as soon as possible. I can’t imagine there’s much to be found here in Sleepydale - “
“Well, I think it’s nice,” Fee said defensively. And it was true, she did; the village was quiet, relaxing. She loved Edinburgh, to her very core, but once again, away from the traffic noise and crowds, she was realizing she could live without it. If she had to.
“Anyway, I want to take a look at this,” she repeated, tapping her fingernail on the odd, circular-shaped feature sheltered behind the church.
But her father was clearly itching to start sweeping around the Castle with his beloved metal detector. “Is the Castle hard to get to?” he asked, ignoring her comment and glancing out the window; above Gallowdale the sky was darkening. Just a little, but enough to make him feel restless to get back outside and doing something before they lost what little light remained, and the heavens opened.
Fee reached into her pocket and retrieved the creased Ordnance Survey map she’d originally used to locate the village.
Spreading it out on the table, covering over the village map, she traced a line eastward with her finger. “Easy enough, I guess,” she ventured, “half an hour’s walk Maybe... We just have to follow the footpath along the river and out of town, keep following it uphill as far as it goes, past this pool here...” She touched her finger down between two closely-spaced clusters of contour lines. “...and then cut between these two hills.”
Her father nodded approvingly. It didn’t look far at all. At least, not on the map.
Fee continued to trace out their route with her finger. “Then we go back down the other side, here... onto a flat area, here... and the Castle should be dead ahead.”
“Dead ahead sounds good to me!” he said enthusiastically. Then a thought occurred to him, something he’d been meaning to ask ever since his head-spinning “briefing” in Fee’s room a week earlier.
“Just wondering... how come the Castle isn’t marked on the OS map?”
Fee sighed; that had been puzzling her too. “I’m not sure... it should be marked as a monument, or historic site at least,” she replied. “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation...”
Her father’s eyebrow shot up at that comment. “Hey, when did we swap roles? I thought I was meant to be Scully...!”
She couldn’t help smiling at his reference; for years he’d teased her about them being a mirror-image of the X-Files FBI agents: he was the cynical one, she was the opposite, always ready to accept the unlikely or downright weird as an explanation for something.
“I guess we’ll find out when we get there Muldur,” she purred, shooting him a cool look.
He obviously took that to mean they were moving out. “Great, I’ll go get my gear - “
“Whoaa...what about this?” she protested, pulling back the OS sheet to point again at the dotted circle on the store’shand-drawn map. She was annoyed at his disregard for her opinion. “I think it could be important - “
Pausing at the door, he gave a frustrated huff. “The Picture shows your dragon flying over the Castle, right? Not over some... strange circle, hidden behind a church. We came here to search round the Castle... didn’t we?”
“Look, Fee,” he said, a little more impatiently, “I know this is your show, you’ve worked really hard on this and I’m as keen to get to the bottom of it as you are... but we’ve got today and tomorrow, Maybe some of Monday morning too, then we have to go home.” He paused, letting that sink in. “I know you want to explore, but I just think it makes sense to go to Ground Zero first, make the most of our time, then try other places... Okay?”
“I suppose so,” she said grudgingly. Even though what he was saying made perfect sense it still annoyed her that she wasn’t even allowed to voice an opinion. Staring at the store’s little fold-out map she felt her gaze drawn once again to the dotted circle to the rear of the church. There was something there, something waiting for her, she was sure of it.
But she had no idea what...
...and the Castle was just a short walk away...
“Fine...” she relented, “but I want to check out this when we get back...” she insisted, keeping her hand on the little map.
“Okay, okay!” her father replied, throwing up his hands in surrender, “it’s a deal. Now come on, we should get to that Castle while there’s still enough light to avoid all the cow pats...”
A quarter of an hour’s steady walking along the footpath took them past the golf course and out of the village. Before going any further they paused by a wooden stile set into a drystone wall crossing their path, to survey the area and plan their next move.
The twin hills rising up ahead of them to the east were tall, but not high enough to be considered mountains. Their lower slopes were green, dotted with bushes and shrubs, and the occasional large boulder, but the higher up Fee looked the more bare and loose rock she saw. Boulders and rocks of all size were scattered over their upper slopes, and she counted no less than three screes of grey and tan rocks on each hill. She knew that walking on the loose rock was awkward, sometimes downright dangerous, the way it shifted and skittered away beneath one’s feet, so she was pleased that their route would take them between the two hills, avoiding the screes. And beyond that..?
“I don’t like the look of that,” her father growled, nodding towards the sky. Fee agreed; the cloud had thickened noticeably since their departure, and the air felt heavier too. She’d been in enough storms to know when one was on its way.
“Let’s get going then,” she urged, and clambered over the stile, steadying herself on the wooden posts beside it. Her father followed, jumping down the other side, showing off as usual. Fee just smiled and shifted under the weight of her rucksack, saving her strength for the hike up the hills, where she knew she’d need it.
“Very pretty,” her father commented as they walked along the side of the small lake - or “tarn”, according to the map. It was only sixty or so feet long, Maybe half as wide, but it seemed to be a Mecca for local wildlife; many dozens of birds were either bobbing on the water or padding around it, resting or hunting for food. And the water itself rippled continuously as fish flipped and flapped beneath its flinty surface.
“Looks a bit cold though, if you were considering a quick skinny dip...” Fee laughed. Her father flashed her a “ha ha, very funny” smile and they walked on, heading uphill towards the gap between the two fells, trying to ignore the ever-darkening sky brooding above them.
Eventually they reached the mouth of the u-shaped valley between the hills, and were able to relax a little. The gradient had been steeper than their map had suggested, and after a longer-than-expected uphill trek both felt tired, but with relatively flat ground beneath their feet again they were able to pick up the pace. To either side a hill rose up into the leaden sky, and with no gaps in the cloud cover at all not even a single ray of sunlight was able to break through, leaving the hills’ green tones muted and dampened. At one point they passed an old, abandoned hut of some kind, which looked like it had been used recently by campers or hikers, but they ignored it and moved on.
And with every step the brooding grey clouds seemed to grow a little thicker, a little darker...
Finally they reached the end of the valley and, resting on a fallen boulder, as big as their car, they were able to look down on what lay beyond.
The map had been right: a flat plain stretched away beneath them, separating the hills they had just navigated their way through from another, much taller, much more rugged-looking range, of a different scale altogether. Those mountains were capped by snow, still, weeks after the last fall, and in the gloom of the approaching storm they looked more purple than green, like flint shards scratching angrily at the sky.
But as impressive as they were, the snow-dusted mountains were of no consequence, or interest, to Fee. There, in the middle of the plain, on the summit of a low hill, was a tantalising stone formation. Fee cursed herself for not remembering her binoculars, but didn’t need them; in her heart she knew what it was.
“You think that’s it?” her father asked, as if reading her mind.
“Yup, I think it is,” she replied, trying to sound calm whilst hoping he couldn’t hear her heart pounding. “You want to go take a look..?”
“Well, while we’re here, I suppose we should...” he said casually, then scrambled down off the boulder excitedly, offering her his helping hand when he reached the ground. She took it, skidded down after him, and together they headed down the crumbling slope towards the plain stretching away below.
They reached the top of the hill with great expectations, heads full of vivid images of turrets, walls, battlements and more...
...only to see little more than the barest of bare bones of the Castle, a four or five metre high circle of shattered stone which looked more like a cairn or a burial mound than the remains of a once-proud, medieval fortress. The vague - very vague - outlines of several walls and outer buildings could be seen around it, marked out by badly-weathered lines of stone or just rises and bumps in the texture of the ground itself.
“Well,” her father sighed, surveying the hill-top remains, “I guess now we know why this isn’t marked on the OS Map...”
Stalking around the other side of the castle remnants, Fee wasn’t so sure. The Castle had stood on the hill for centuries, over a hundred centuries, which made it one of the oldest in Britain and as such a site of huge historical importance. It made no sense for it not to be on the map. Besides, the sites of historic battles were marked on the maps, and they were in many cases just empty, wide-open fields without even a single gravestone or feature to betray their hidden past. Why had the Castle not been recorded in the same way? Something didn’t add up.
But she had no time to think about that. The sky was looking angrier by the minute, and they had work to do. A lot of work.
“Okay, I’ll look through the ruins,” Fee suggested, “if you want to start sweeping over and around the foot of the hill..?”
“Sir, yes sir!” he replied, giving her a snappy salute before setting his rucksack down on the mossy ground to retrieve his beloved metal detector. He’d modified the handle years before to make it fold in two, taking up less room, so after snapping the handle back into place he left his rucksack leaning up against the castle remains and, headphones on, started to walk around the edge of what was left of the building, detector sweep-sweeping the ground as he slowly spiralled-out in his standard search pattern.
Within moments he was totally focused, totally absorbed by the task, in a world of his own; Fee knew he wouldn’t come back to hers until he’d completed his search and found something. Or nothing.
Right now her money was on the latter.
Carefully, so as not to disturb or dislodge any of the remaining stones, Fee padded her way into the tower and made her way to its centre. It upset - and annoyed - her that there was hardly anything left of the old castle, apart from just this crumbling, neglected sheep pen of moss- and lichen-covered stones; how could it have been allowed to fall into such disrepair? She’d been expecting - and looking forward to seeing - the Castle from The Picture. What she’d found was the crumbling tower from Highlander. She felt cheated.
But that was stupid. You’re here, she told herself angrily, where you wanted to be... just think how far you’ve come, all the way from seeing that stupid Picture to here, the actual Castle in it. It was so unlikely, so ridiculous, it should have been impossible.
But here she was, in the Castle’s heart. She had been right. And, if she was right about everything else, something amazing had happened in the very same place, over a millennium and a half before; if she was right then she was in the lair of the dragon.
After a few moments standing there, staring up at the sky through the shattered remains of the tower, she felt the strangest feeling. Not dizzy, not quite, but... floating, almost. She rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath, figuring she was just tired after the walk, but when she looked up again the castle walls were pulsing, light and dark, light and dark. Something was going on.
When she looked outside she felt reality tip beneath her. Impossibly, the Sun’s motion across the sky seemed to have been speeded up, but even more strangely it was reversing upon itself, heading east, not west, as if Time had begun to run backwards. As it set the sky darkened, quickly, then brightened again as the Sun rose again, but in the west... Yet again itset behind the eastern horizon after flashing across the sky... then rose again... and set again... and again and again and again, until days passing in moments, and years falling away, racing away. Time was literally flying, centuries blowing away on the wind -
Suddenly everything stopped, and as she gazed up at the Sun, shining steadily in the sky once more, she knew where she was. Or, rather, When: 540 AD, on The Day.
She was standing outside the Castle, looking back at it from within its long shadow. The Castle was complete, a living, breathing, noble structure, tall and proud, looking out over the empty land like a stone sentinel. Now she saw it was almost a small hilltop village in its own right; tall, strong walls enclosed and protected a collection of small huts and modesthalls, making it home to a community of farmers. Around her, beyond the Castle’s thick stone walls, the plain was being ploughed and tilled by groups of peasants, weary-looking folk, men and women alike weighed down with tools and grain sacks -
Suddenly one of the men let out a startled cry. Looking up, Fee saw him pointing towards a bright light rising up from behind the far eastern hills, like a second, fainter Sun. As she watched it started to grow larger, and brighter too, and soon she could feel the skin on her face beginning to tingle and prickle with heat. Around her other peasants started to murmur in wonder and fear, and as the strange light cleared the mountains, casting dancing shadows on the ground rushing beneath it, some of the people around Fee began to throw down their tools and run.
But Fee was rooted to the spot, she couldn’t move, not in her dream state, and as she stared at it the advancing light resolved itself into a brilliant fireball, spitting and hissing as it powered towards her, trailing roils and curls of smoke and flame...
Peasants screamed out and bayed with fear now, and as the fireball ripped through the sky towards the Castle the air around them was filled with an awful, deafening, screeching howl, as if the Devil himself was coming to claim their souls.
Convinced the End was near, the people around Fee begged for mercy. Some lay on the floor, faces pressed into the mud, sobbing; others knelt together in groups, hands pressed together in desperate prayer, begging God to save them from the terrible “dragon” -
As it passed overhead the fireball suddenly flared brilliantly, and the peasants’ cries were drowned out by a whip-sharp sonic boom. Shock wave after shock wave slapped into the valley, and Fee was shoved to her knees. She struggled to get up again as stones began to tumble from the castle walls, bouncing across the fields around her, and as it arched over her head, too bright to look at, the fireball howled like a demonic wolf -
And then the stones began to fall.
They spattered into the ground around Fee like machine gun rounds, dozens of them, black bullets trailing grey smoke. There was no point moving or trying to dodge them, all she could do was stand her ground and hope. She was spared, the meteorites whistled past her, but others weren’t so lucky; she watched peasants on all sides jerk and dance macabrely as they were struck by the plummeting starstones, crumpling to the ground like puppets with severed strings...
And as they fell the fireball continued on its way, trailing thick black smoke as it speared westwards. Finally it vanished behind the western hills, oblivious to the chaos and misery left in its wake -
Around her the surviving peasants began to struggle to their feet. Some reached out for others, sobbing loudly, others stared mutely at the smoke-filled sky, struck dumb and turned insane by what they had seen.
It’s not over, Fee told herself, not yet -
She threw up her arm to cover her eyes just in time.
The flash, when it came, was blinding: it lit up the western sky like an enormous flashbulb, casting shadows as far as the eye could see, and when Fee lowered her arm she saw the sky was on fire. Clouds were rushing away from the west, as if being blown by the howling breath of some enraged god, and the sky between them was tinged with an unnatural, cold violet-hue. Above the western horizon itself, a mushroom cloud was starting to boil up into the cloud-cleared sky, its underside rolling and folding over upon itself as it rose into the air, glowing a dull orange as fires flickered within and below.
My god, it hit, she thought, watching the clouds rushing away, it passed over here then landed further west -
Then the ground beneath her started to shake violently, trembling and shuddering as if being pummelled from below, and she knew the shock waves from the impact were spreading away from Ground Zero like ripples on the surface of a pond. More stones fell from the already-weakend castle, crashing onto and crushing the pitiful survivors howling beneath it.
And above her the sky was filling with clouds, dark clouds of choking dust and ash, and staring up at them as they crept towards and then blotted out the Sun Fee knew that the Dark Ages had begun -
“Fee... Fee...” she heard a familiar voice calling her name, from somewhere in the far distance, and she looked away from the sky -
· to see her father standing beside her, metal detector hanging limply from his hand.
“Ohhh!” Snapping out of her daydream and back to reality so quickly disoriented her and she almost fell, suddenly feeling nauseous and dizzy. He caught her just in time.
“Hey! Are you okay?” he asked urgently, taking her by the arms. “You looked like you were going to faint...”
“I’m okay, really,” she coughed, squeezing her eyes tight shut as she waited for the world to stop spinning around her. Opening them again she was relieved to find that the sky wasn’t choked with black, a mushroom cloud wasn’t rising in the west, and the ground wasn’t shaking, or littered with meteorite-skewered bodies either. But it had all felt so vivid, so real... her daydreams weren’t usually that overpowering.
“Did you find anything?” she asked him, recovering slowly.
“Nothing,” he replied mournfully, looking out over the plain. “If any pieces fell here they are either too small to detect, or were cleared away afterwards.”
“Nothing in there either,” she breathed out slowly, glancing back towards the castle, “Maybe we should take another look - “
“... or Maybe we should just get you back to the cottage; you look like... “ He considered his next words carefully. “Well, you’ve looked better,” he said eventually, taking her arm gently. “Come on, we’re going back - “
“We can come back tomorrow,” he said, the tone of his voice making it clear he was the one in charge now. “You need to lie down.”
Any other time she would have argued, but this time she just let him have his way. Whatever had happened to her she felt like she’d just woken up after sleeping for a thousand years.
Slowly, carefully, they made their way down from the castle and back up into the overlooking hills, heading for the valley and their temporary home in Gallowdale. Although she felt lousy Fee stubbornly insisted on carrying her rucksack for herself, so by the time they reached the large boulder where they’d previously rested she was so tired she was ready to drop.
As she leaned against the cold rock, pale and panting, she thought she caught a glimpse of a figure on the hilltop far above, looking down on her, but it vanished just as quickly as it had appeared, and she dismissed it as a symptom of her exhaustion and scrambled brain; the only other things they’d seen on the hilltops were sheep.
Thankfully the storm held off until they reached the village outskirts again, so they were only half-soaked as they crossed the wooden footbridge and tramped towards Ivy Cottage. The cheery old landlady was already waiting at the door, clutching towels, concern etched on her face, and before Fee could argue she was bundled upstairs by the two adults, undressed and lowered into a deliciously hot bath, where she lay for what seemed like a lifetime, oblivious to everything but the sound of the rain pelting the window. Soon after drying-off she was fast asleep, wrapped up in crisp, clean cotton sheets, far too tired to dream.
She’d done more than enough of that for one day...
© Stuart Atkinson 2003