The Long Dark Road

by P. R. Black

  But Georgia knew, if no answers came, that one day she’d be knocking those doors, all right. She’d want to speak to everyone. She might take years to do it, but she’d do it. She’d look into every face, every pair of eyes. She’d watch and listen very carefully.

  But Stephanie had not stopped at these houses. Like a wraith she had drifted past them in the pouring rain. One or two people at their kitchen windows or upstairs in their rooms had seen her shade passing by, walking into the storm. The weather had made her passage memorable for them. Who’d be out here, on a night like this?

  Here and now, Georgia was beeped by a leering teenager as the footway disappeared – a nasty shock, a brief encounter with the kind of unpleasantness that Stephanie might have run into. She had to cross the road several times to avoid blind corners. Her shoulders were tense, alert, as she anticipated traffic, straining to hear the sound of an engine. Sometimes the road kinked and warped, so that Georgia felt herself stranded in a knot of road, quite unable to do anything should she be rushed on either side by traffic.

  As she’d been told by DI Hurlford, there were a number of places where the trees were garlanded with dead flowers and limp streamers. At one of these spots a wind chime played its melancholy fanfare. Perhaps it had been there when Stephanie had walked this same path, spinning and swaying in the maelstrom. This road wasn’t busy, even at this time of day – a bypass had been completed about ten years ago, diverting much of the traffic. It would have been a draw for every lunkheaded teenager in their daddy’s Beamer for miles around. The ancient tributes were testament to that – the places where the cars had left the road. Georgia had prescribed antibiotics for one boy back home who had lost his lower left leg in one such accident. She knew that the two teenage girls who were in the back of the car at the time had not even had that wretched luck. Stone dead; blunt-force trauma. The boy had seemed utterly indifferent, even contemptuous of Georgia as she examined the wound, and the nurse had said the same, later, after she changed his dressings.

  Stephanie had never driven, or shown even the remotest interest in owning a car. Georgia had paid for a few lessons as soon as her daughter was old enough, but the girl had begun to feign illnesses when the sessions came up, and soon enough she understood the signs. Pony riding and trekking had been more her thing, but again, the girl had retreated from that as soon as the teenage years had kicked in. She went into herself – a phrase Georgia had remembered from her Scottish granny. Private worlds had taken precedence over the real one. She was a wanderer at heart, a gypsy spirit, someone who liked hills, mountains, lakes, freedom, and not too many people. She was—

  A bum, Georgia had told her, after she came back home from a camping trip, as she dumped a load of stinking gear in the washing basket then left it to fester. A stinking bum. My beautiful daughter, a bum.

  She bit down on the memory. When she was alone – which was more and more often these days, now she was out of the blast zone of shock and trauma in the immediate wake of the disappearance – these sour recollections could flood in. A sharp word or a raised hand when Stephanie was a child; the exasperation of an exhausted parent when she wouldn’t behave in public; a catty remark, or even the full-blown rows. One exchange particularly haunted Georgia, a physical altercation when she’d grabbed her daughter by the scruff of the neck. Those dark eyes had widened in shock, the mouth dropping open. You are failing, she’d roared at her. Why did I have to have a failure as a daughter?

  Whatever, she thought. Whatever happened, she’s my daughter and I love her. Wherever she is, whatever circumstances put her there, alive or dead, I will have her back.

  The bridge came sooner than expected. It rose on the horizon, the slow undulating back of a whale, pretty in the fresh afternoon light. It was something you would use in the background if you were the type of person to take selfies, which Georgia was not – a Checkpoint Charlie for people trying to get to Ferngate by this route, rather than the motorway slip road on the far side of town. Unless you took the turn-off about two hundred yards past the alarmingly narrow throughway on the bridge, that was you until a roundabout seven or eight miles further on. Unless you parked in an overgrown lay-by forsaken even by the truckers.

  Georgia took a deep breath and cleared her mind, listening to the patter of the river underneath as she crossed the bridge.

  There was a theory Stephanie had entered the water here, whether by accident or design. Again, with the amount of rain that had doused the whole region over twenty-four hours, the waters would have been swollen and greedy, and there was a chance that her body had been carried downstream for some considerable distance before it was strained through Paveley Weir.

  Georgia accepted that the theory was sound. There was a chance that Stephanie’s body was under the water somewhere over the course of miles, snagged on a tree root perhaps, buried under mud maybe, but there. Somewhere. Still tossed this way and that by the flow of the water. Suspended animation.

  Short of dredging the whole river by herself, there was no way to be one hundred per cent sure. Maybe it’ll come to that, she thought. Maybe there will come a point where I’m wading through it, inch by inch, hoping to find something that isn’t there. Groping around in the riverbed. Hands full of stones and silt and things that wriggle. Similar to the knocking of every door. She’d present a flyer, maybe, a picture of a girl three years out of date, five years out of date, ten, fifteen, twenty years out of date. Please, she’d say. Please help. These derangements were not impossible, even likely.

  Reaching the crossroads after the bridge, Georgia checked her OS map before taking a left, up and over a set of steps in a limestone wall. The land rose surprisingly sharply here; there was farmland all around, and Ferngate itself was flat as a Monopoly board, but the land inclined sharply heading east towards the crumbling coast. After bypassing some sheep and their nervous newborns, the trees closed in. She followed an old train track, long ripped up by Dr Beeching, that led through a defile in the earth. Rock began to appear here, mainly slate and limestone, poking through new ferns and bracken. It was a fine dry day, but the rock was slick to the touch.

  Georgia was following a hunch, but a good one. If Stephanie had been following one of her old quests, then she would surely have passed through the cut in the earth. Even on a horrible night, or perhaps even because of it, this is where she might have gone. If she’d taken a notion. And ‘taken a notion’ was as good an explanation as any for why her daughter had walked up that lonely road, with no text messages or social media trail to follow, no other indication why she had gone where she’d gone.

  The other reason Georgia had come here was because, even if Stephanie had a destination in mind along that road past the bridge, then if she’d been abducted, this was a place where she might have been taken. Where would you go to hide a body? The notion still triggered a primeval reaction in her, deeper than instinct, a stiffening of the muscles at the shoulders, a mild sense of nausea. You’d dump it around here. Even with the sniffer dogs, the scores of volunteers, the foliage and the ground literally scoured, this seemed like a good place for wickedness to be concealed.

  The path was reasonably well kept, but stony. Georgia’s calves gave her more trouble than she might have supposed, and the new boots began to pinch in the traditionally awkward spots. After half a mile, she reached the first point on the map that had fascinated her – the cave.

  Cave was a misnomer; it was more of a gap in between two immense boulders, overgrown with moss and lichen, with a lip of rain-worn stone protruding overhead. It provided cover for anything the size of a man on down, and indeed there were signs that a fire had been lit outside it recently. Names and obscenities had been carved there, blurred over time into a Sanskrit highway across the rock. Georgia paused and crouched low, after making sure she was quite alone. You would sit comfortably inside, though the overhanging rock would be something on your mind. It would be wet to shelter in here, although the ground in there was soaked up by a nat
ural carpet of pine needles, but you could do it – you’d perhaps need to do it, with the rain coming down in the dark.

  Perhaps it was here that something had happened; something unspeakable. Though the police were sure no one had passed along this way.

  Georgia moved on. The next step along the journey would be her last along this route – the ghyll.

  She heard it before she saw it – roaring water carried through, some run-off for the source of the river. The ghyll was a waterfall contained within a rocky gap in the earth – a peephole at the top of a hill that gave a view into what was either a vision of hell, or a natural wonder, depending on your viewpoint. Signs had been erected there, warning passers-by of the danger. Georgia had read there was some opposition to these signs among ramblers and local people, some disdain over the incursion of the modern world even as it served to warn people of the danger of death.

  People had died in the ghyll. It was a popular spot with cavers; once you squeezed yourself through the aperture at the top of the hill, a flat slab of rock pitted with holes formed over the last ice age, there was a very tricky climb down to a cavern, and a downward-sloping tunnel into fast-flowing water that eventually emptied out into the river below. Two cavers had been killed in a collapse in there, in 1985. They had been trying to squeeze through the narrowing, water-logged passageway down, down and down into some unspeakable darkness, when some rock had fixed them fast under the water.

  Georgia was not claustrophobic – not so you would notice, anyway. She was not arachnophobic either, but she was certain what her reaction would be if a bird-eating spider was to land on her face. So, too, for this gap she stared into now, at the head of the ghyll.

  ‘That is one great big pile of nope,’ Georgia said, aloud.

  She heard the water through the black hole; caught a faint impression of silvery light as the water bounced off the hollow rock. Georgia could not imagine being in that gap even if she had wanted to go down it. The idea of being trapped down there, with no space to move, no way of getting in or out, was almost too nasty to properly consider.

  There were other statistics, apart from the luckless cavers from 1985, pointillistic black and white newsprint photographs she’d seen only the past few weeks, when she’d looked into the background of the ghyll. There were the suicides.

  Once you had squeezed through a narrow passageway with a bit of a kink in it, you were through a drop of perhaps twenty yards down to a hard, jagged stone floor. That’s where many people were found.

  It was a theory that this is where Stephanie had been heading, on the night she vanished. It was the second most popular theory surrounding her disappearance, according to every single message board, website, Facebook group and forum Georgia had haunted. There was the idea that her daughter, in the depths of a despair few could imagine, had come to this place in the dark in the middle of a storm, had lowered herself into the gap – perhaps helped by the sudden flow of water – and had fallen around seventy feet. From there, the turbid waters had carried her spindly body through the channel where the cavers had dived, stuffing her in like a child cramming a toy into a dollhouse too small for it, and then dumped her into the river, there to continue her journey to her unknown destination.

  Like all of the most popular theories, Georgia had to admit it was plausible.

  No body had been found there; and the police had looked. Specialists had been called in, cavers who had gone through the now-widened passageway where that luckless pair had died in 1985 – and that was after robots had been sent down, insectoid sentinels with camera lenses for eyes, and they had established there was no Stephanie there, and no traces of her there either, neither primary nor secondary – no tell-tale fibre threads snarled up on the rocks, no footprints on the softer earth above. If there had been any sign, it had long been washed away by the remorseless torrent.

  Georgia moved closer, pleased at the solidity under her feet on the thick, flat rock. Some daring souls had tattooed their names into the stone, here, close to the gap. It was bigger than Georgia had supposed, looking at it online. Even a bigger man could easily go down that gap, she thought. Swallowed up in the earth. She looked forward into darkness, chilled by the echoes of running water, the connotations of depth, of a sudden end to a fall.

  She edged forward, and then she read the warning sign planted in the ground once more, and then realised that someone could shove her into that gap without much trouble.

  Just as she hesitated and turned her head to check that no one was preparing to do this, someone did, and she plunged down the hole, screaming.

  8

  The hound of hell’s call carried all across the moors, and Princess Stephanie was afraid. But she knew that she had a chance with the Sword of Destiny in her possession.

  From ‘Princess Stephanie’s Journey’, by Stephanie Healey, aged nine

  Someone asked me if I was into hiking. It felt cruel to laugh, so I did.

  From the diary of Stephanie Healey

  It was a joke, a pratfall. Except she was about to die.

  Georgia was wedged into the hole in the earth, in the place where the suicides jumped; where Stephanie might have fallen.

  Her legs were dangling free in space, her thick-soled boots a sudden and terrible drag against crude gravity. The lip of the cut in the earth that reached into the ghyll was at her waist, her backpack wedged tight against her.

  Then the ground seemed to swallow her, and it was at her chest. Her fingers grasped at the rock, hard, and slowed her progress. She arched her back, wedging herself into the hole. The backpack was quite full at the base, but if it should slip by as little as two or three inches, then Georgia would lose her leverage. And then, only her fingertips and whatever strength she could retain in her shoulder joints would be all that stopped her from disappearing.

  Her chin hurt; she supposed she had bashed it against the rock. She caught her breath, threw back her head, and cried out: ‘Help!’

  Only birdsong answered her, and the rustle of the trees.

  Someone shoved me, she thought. Someone hit me on the back of the knees and I slipped forward. Someone ran up behind me, quiet as you like.

  ‘Help!’ she shrieked again. ‘Someone help me!’

  And an answer came. One quick, terse bark from a dog.

  ‘I’m at the ghyll! I’m falling! Help me!’

  Even as she said it, her fingers lost their grip, and she slipped an alarming distance. As she regained a hold on an aeons-old rill in the slab of rock, she knew that the backpack was a hair’s breadth away from dislodging. She scrambled with her feet and knees to find some purchase on the rock, and from there to boost herself back to safety, but the gap fattened in front of her; she could only find the merest touch on the ends of her boots, but it simply wasn’t enough to take her weight.

  Turn. I’ll have to turn around; there’s rock at my back. But doing so would remove the wedging effect of her backpack.

  I might have no choice.

  ‘Help!’ she screamed again. And again, a dog barked. Closer this time. ‘Somebody help me! I’m stuck in the ghyll! Help me!’

  With a great spasm around about her midriff, she tried to edge upwards – and this was what finally dislodged the backpack.

  ‘Oh no,’ she gasped, as a terrible strain gripped both her shoulders and her wrists. ‘Oh no, please, please.’

  The dog barked again, closer this time, but Georgia couldn’t cry out. She tried to turn around to her right, to find the stone that touched her backside, and to somehow brace her feet against that. But in the turning, her hand slipped.

  She screamed as she fell. The dank walls around her stole the sound, bouncing it off the face of the stones.

  She did not fall far, but wedged again in another gap, the side of the wall scraping her ear painfully and taking some skin off her hand. She was caught again, in a secondary gap. Again, the backpack had stopped her from tumbling into the gap.

  And below that, the seventy-foot dr
op. To the place where they found the bodies in 1985.

  ‘Someone help me! I’m stuck! Help!’

  There was some purchase in the unseen gap ahead of her, but her boots slithered off it – and this drove Georgia deeper. There was little to hold on to, and no way to brace herself. The black rock rose up five or six feet above her head. Daylight presented a mocking face in the cut above her; birds even flew overhead, an added mockery.

  ‘Help! I need help! Oh God!’ She slipped again. One hand found a cut in the rock, something to hold on to. The backpack was no longer tight against the rock. Her feet were swinging free.

  This is it. This is how I go.

  She held on, muscles straining, but there was no way she could last even two minutes, let along as long as it might take for someone to reach her.

  Something blocked out the light above.

  It was a dog’s head. An Alsatian – with comically cocked ears. It barked once, loudly, the roar of a dragon bouncing off the wet stone.

  ‘Is someone up there? Help me!’

  ‘Hey there,’ someone said. ‘What’s going on? Is there someone down there?’

  ‘Yes! For God’s sake, get help. I can’t hold on!’

  Another head took the place of the Alsatian’s; that of a man, though she could not make out the features. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Oh Jesus. Hang on, if you can – just hang on.’

  ‘I can’t! I’m going to fall!’ Panic turned her voice into someone else’s, the oscillating shriek of a banshee, or a lost soul.

  Georgia felt her fingers slip; the rock scraped painfully up her back, breaking skin. She was slipping. She was going. The rock touched her throat, almost delicately. Then her chin, rougher still. Something strained and snapped somewhere in her bicep, though she felt no pain.