Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“I’m going as fast as I bloody can, Steve.”

I didn’t rise to the bait, just turned and jogged on. The gentler slope meant we could run, but even so, we weren’t fast enough. Everything went suddenly white.

“Shit,” Diane said. I reached out for her hand — she was just a shadow in the wall of white vapour — and she took it and came closer. The mist was cold, wet and clinging, like damp cobwebs.

“What now?” Diane said. She kept her voice level, but I could tell it wasn’t easy for her. And I couldn’t blame her.

Don’t be fooled by Lakeland’s picture-postcard scenery; its high mountains and blue tarns, the boats on Lake Windermere, the gift shops and stone-built villages. You come here from the city to find the air’s fresher and cleaner, and when you look up at night you see hundreds, thousands more stars in the sky because there’s no light pollution. But by the same token, fall on a slope like this and there’ll be no-one around, and your mobile won’t get a signal. And if a mist like this one comes down and swallows you up and you don’t know which way to go — it doesn’t take that long, on a cold October day, for hypothermia to set in. These fells and dales claimed lives like ours each year.

I took a deep breath. “I think…”

“You OK?” she asked.

“I’m fine.” I was a little nettled she’d thought otherwise; she was the one who’d sounded in need of reassurance, but I wasn’t going to start bickering now. It occurred to me — at the back of my head, and I’d have denied it outright if anyone had suggested it to me — that this might be a blessing in disguise; if I could stay calm and lead us to safety, I could be a hero in her eyes. “We need to get to some lower ground.”

“Yes, I know ,” she said, as if I’d pointed out the stupidly obvious. Well, perhaps I had. I was just trying to clarify the situation. Alright, I wanted to impress her, to look good. But I wanted to do the right thing as well. Honestly.

So I pointed down the trail — the few feet of it we could see where it disappeared into the mist. “Best off keeping on. Keep our heads and go slowly.”

“Yes, I worked that bit out as well.” I recognised her tone of voice; it was the one she used to take cocky students down a peg. There’d been a time when I used to slip into her lectures, even though I knew nothing, then or now, about Geology; I just liked hearing her talk about her favoured subject. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her in any of my lectures — not that she was interested in Music. Maybe it had never been what I’d thought it was. Maybe it had never been for either of us.

Not an idea I liked, but one I’d kept coming back to far too often lately. As had Diane. Hence this trip, which was looking less and less like a good idea all the time. We’d spent our honeymoon here; I suppose we’d hoped to recapture something or other, but there’s no magic in places. Only people, and precious little of that; less and less the older you get.

And none of that was likely to get us safely out of here. “OK then,” I said. “Come on.”

Diane caught the back of my coat and pulled. I wheeled to face her and swayed, off-balance. Loose scree clattered down into the mist; the path had grown rockier underfoot. She caught my arm and steadied me. I yanked it free, thoroughly pissed off. “What?”

“Steve, we’re still walking.”

“I noticed. Well, actually, we’re not just now, since you just grabbed me.”

She folded her arms. “We’ve been walking nearly twenty minutes.” I could see she was trying to stop her teeth chattering. “And I don’t think we’re much closer to ground level. I think we might be a bit off course.”

I realised my teeth had started chattering too. It was hard to be sure, but I thought she might have a point; the path didn’t look like it was sloping down any longer. If it’d levelled off, we were still halfway up the damned mountain. “Shit.”

I felt panic threatening, like a small hungry animal gnawing away inside my stomach, threatening to tear its way up through my body if it let it. I wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Mustn’t. If we panicked we were stuffed.

At least we hadn’t come completely unprepared. We had Kendal Mint Cake and a thermos of hot tea in our backpacks, which helped, but they could only buy a little more time. We either got off this mountain soon, or we never would.

We tried our mobiles, but it was an exercise; there was no reception out here. They might as well have been bits of wood. I resisted the temptation to throw mine away.

“Should’ve stayed on the main path,” Diane said. “If we’d taken it slow we’d have been OK.”

I didn’t answer. She glanced at me and rolled her eyes.

“What?”

“Steve, I wasn’t having a go at you.”

“Fine.”

“Not everything has to be about that.”

“I said, fine.”

But she wouldn’t leave it. “All I said was that we should’ve stuck to the main path. I wasn’t saying this was all your fault.”

“O kay .”

“I wasn’t. If I’d seen that path I would’ve probably done the same thing. It looked like it’d get us down faster.”

“Right.”

“I’m just saying, looking back, we should’ve gone the other way.”

“Okay. Alright. You’ve made your point.” I stood up. A sheep bleated faintly. “Can we just leave it now?”

“O kay .” I saw her do the eye roll again, but pretended not to. “So now what? If we backtrack…”

“Think we can make it?”

“If we can get back to the main path, we should be able to find our way back from there.”

If we were very lucky, perhaps; our hotel was a good two miles from the foot of this particular peak, and chances were the mist would be at ground level too. Even off the mountain we’d be a long way from home and dry, but it seemed the best choice on offer. If only we’d taken it sooner; we might not have heard the dog bark.

But we did.

We both went still. Diane brushed her dark hair back from her eyes and looked past me into the mist. I looked too, but couldn’t see much. All I could see was the rocky path for a few feet ahead before it vanished into the whiteout.

The sheep bleated again. A few seconds later, the dog barked.

I looked at Diane. She looked back at me. A sheep on its own meant nothing — most likely lost and astray, like us. But a dog — a dog most likely had an owner.

“Hello?” I called into the mist. “Hello?”

“Anybody down there?” Diane called.

“Hello?” A voice called back.

“Thank god for that,” Diane whispered.

We started along the rattling path, into the mist. “Hello?” called the voice. “Hello?”

“Keep shouting,” I called back, and it occurred to me that we were the ones who sounded like rescuers. Maybe we’d found another fell-walker, caught out in the mists like us. I hoped not. What with the dog barking as well, I was pinning my hopes on a shepherd out here rounding up a lost sheep, preferably a generously-disposed one with a warm, nearby cottage complete with a fire and a kettle providing hot cups of tea.

Scree squeaked and rattled underfoot as we went. I realised the surface of the path had turned almost entirely into loose rock. Not only that, but it was angling sharply down after all. Diane caught my arm. “Careful.”

“Yeah, okay, I know.” I tugged my arm free and tried to ignore the long sigh she let out behind me.

The mist cleared somewhat as we reached the bottom. We could see between twenty-five and thirty yards ahead, which was a vast improvement, although the whiteout still completely hid everything beyond that point. The path led down into a sort of shallow ravine between our peak and its neighbour. The bases of the two steep hillsides sloped gently downwards to a floor about ten yards wide. It was hard to be certain as both the floor and those lower slopes were covered in a thick layer of loose stone fragments.