by Morag Joss
I shiver and settle myself down, hugging my knees. Suddenly I’m too weary to move any further. My eyes close for a moment, though it’s so cold I won’t fall asleep. I wish I could. I need a place to lie, somewhere to stay. Is it to be here, another hillside under the moon? I look back in the direction of the town.
Something feels near at hand. I force myself awake and try to make sense of the contours of the hill, but I’m drowsy and shapes loom and shift and nudge against me, benignly perhaps; the wind now has me wrapped in its cool rocking arms and I don’t wish to be let go. I can’t trust my eyes, but I strive to make out a gate half-open, half-closed, in the moonlight. I’m searching through the dark for signs of a throng of lost ones idling along the path, the wind ruffling dry leaves into a familiar tangle of hair, bearing the echoes of myriad remembered stories and the scents of old vines and honey. Will they wait for me?
Something is ending, or beginning. How long will they linger, my lost ones, my wanderers? They wonder, I think, why I stay away. Do they hear me when I murmur that I think it may be coming soon, the night when I venture close enough to see if the moving shadows on the hillside really are theirs, do they know how I yearn to catch a glimpse of patient, moon-white hands outstretched to take me with them? But again I make myself turn away and look down towards the town. Then it’s as if I also see, motionless under the roofs of all the houses, the slumbering keepers of stories, the tender, infinite stories, so clamorous and so many and all of them unfinished, surrendered, waiting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Morag Joss grew up on the west coast of Scotland. She began writing in 1996 when her first short story won an award in a national competition. She then wrote three Sara Selkirk novels, set in Bath, the first of which, Funeral Music, was nominated for a Dilys Award by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.
With her fourth novel, Half Broken Things, she won the 2003 Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger award. Half Broken Things has been adapted as a TV film and broadcast on national television, and Puccini’s Ghosts, published in 2005, has been optioned for film. The Night Following is Morag Joss’s sixth novel. She lives in Hampshire.
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