The Ghosts of Dunmail Raise
A bit of fiction
This is part of the Choc Knox 30 day writing challenge, and today I have decided to put forward a little fiction. This is the first part of a short telling of the legend of King Dunmail, and the ghosts of Dunmail Raise in the historic English county of Cumberland.
Hopefully, as the last line of this post indicates, this retelling will be continued.
This is day 18 of the challenge.
It’s rare that you break down on a perfect evening, or at least, it should be. Something about rain and wind, or snow and ice, makes miserable evenings the most fitting time for a flat tire, or for the engine to die on you, or for the exhaust to fall off. But, other than a light wind, and the chill you’d expect in the fells on an autumn night, the night my car failed really was perfect.
I climbed out of the car, opened up the bonnet and stared at the machinery below, pretending to know what I was looking for. Beyond the basics, I had never been one for the innards of a car, preferring instead to fix the unhealthy mechanical sounds by putting my hands on my hips, tutting intently, and giving the wretched thing a long hard stare.
On this particular evening, it was clear that it was going nowhere, and with the nearest payphone some distance away, neither was I.
In those days, these high-fell roads were quiet at night. And though the town of Grasmere sat only a few miles behind me, and though the road towards Thirlmere ahead was straight and plain, it really was a perfect evening, and I decided to spend the night in my car, wrapped in the blankets I always kept in the boot and thankful for the flask of tea I invariably took with me on journeys like this.
It’s impossible to remain unimpressed with the grandeur of England’s North, even with the cursory glances that a swift drive allows to you. But, once left stranded and alone at night, you start to feel the weight of age as well as scale. The hills have witnessed things, things that only they and the stars can talk about. And though you may have the rough fell sheep for company on a night like that, they are either too dumb to notice it or listen too well to be on your side.
But that night, I witnessed something as well, and now perhaps, I and the hills have something to talk about.
It was about half past eleven, by the car’s clock, which always ran a little slow. I put my mug down on the dashboard and was getting ready to settle for the night, hoping to catch a few snatches of sleep between the inevitable neck cramps that come with the strange angles of sleeping in a car. Before I pulled the blankets up around my neck, I decided to make a brief trip outside, to stretch my legs.
I walked a short way off the road and, after a couple of moments of air, I turned back to the car.
As I turned, I came face to face with a man who was robed in the moon. Terror took hold of me.
In my youth, I had refused to make eye contact with the dark, in case something in it looked back. Years of streetlights and city life had cured me of that particular fear, but at that moment it returned, and has never again left me.
The man was dressed in armour, with a spear at his side, and he had a gash of gangrenous mist across his face.
It’s common for the eyes of the dead to be described as looking through you, or beyond you, as if the ghosts of the past see more clearly than the eyes of those who have life. But such descriptions are false. The man looked beneath me, as if my world was too high for him to meet eye-to-eye. He could see things that I couldn’t, I have no doubt of that. But he saw less as well. The dead always see less than the living.
“Is it the hour already?” said the man, in a voice that sounded like fog, and mire, and the pale wave of cotton grass. “It cannot be the hour, for the trumpet has not come…”
He glanced at me and met my eyes for the first time. “You will want to move, weighty one, lest my brothers take your taunt ill…”
At that, he raised a horn to his lips and blew.
To Be Continued…