Gloaming

Please have a looksee at part one (it's dreadful but it's quite short): Whinberries

The sun climbed. Ned stalled near a pond skipping stones for nearly as long as he had by the apple tree. Joanie couldn't get them to skip at all, but she was good at finding flat ones. It felt good to be busy and helpful. For a while anyway. She got hungry, and started to cry. Ned soothed, coaxed, distracted, bullied, or ignored her by turns.

"I want to go home, Ned," she whimpered.

"Then go," he said.

The thought terrified her.

"But I don't know the way."

"Well, go or be quiet," he snapped.

This is how the hours of the afternoon oscillated by. Joanie's mood waxed and waned, and Ned's patience did the same.

"Are you sure you know where we are?" Joanie peered around. "It's been ages and I haven't seen any whinberry bushes."

"Course l know the way," he said, "It's not far now."

This conversation was repeated many times, with slight variations.

"It's just over there."

"Round that bend."

"Down that bank."

By the time they reached the right spot, the sun was slinging its honey low over the horizon.

"But we haven't even got anything to put them in," Joanie said.

"We'll put them in our pockets," Ned cast an expert eye over a cluster of berries, and popped a couple in his mouth. Joanie had a good idea of how he was going to carry the berries back.

"I thought you said they all had dog widdle on," she grumbled.

"Not these," he said with a juicy grin. "Only the low down ones."

Joanie was thoroughly fed up. The ground was uneven and rocky. The first time she fell, he'd been sympathetic. Every time after that, he'd been increasingly impatient. Her knees were scraped and her feet bruised. She itched to say, I want to go home again but she bit her tongue. He wasn't being mean right now, and she wanted it to stay that way. It was at least a bit better when he wasn't being mean.

Her belly growled and cramped. The cheese sandwiches their mother packed had been a long time ago. Ned had never been the sort of boy to save any food longer than half an hour. She hunted for berries to fill the aching gap, but it seemed Ned had managed to find the last good ones. The rest were low-down, shrivelled, dog-widdle ones. Joanie rubbed her fists over her eyes, and trudged after her brother on sore feet.

She might be small for her age, and not starting school for a few days yet, but she had some idea that it had taken all day to get here, and it would take that sort of time to get back. It was definitely cooler now, the day a bit less bright. Like the sun was running out of steam.

"Ned?" she squeaked, hurrying to stay close, "We should start going back now, shouldn't we? I mean, really."

A thoughtful frown creased Ned's forehead.

"We are," he said, glancing round. "I think." He caught at Joanie's hand, and held it tight.

*

When the last toenail clipping shaped remnant of the sun slid out of sight, it took the honey with it. Colours lost most of their warmth and lustre. The bushes looked the same. The rocks looked the same. Joanie looked around them for a clue, something that stood out.

"Are we los-"

"No!"

Ned was all bluster, but he hadn't let go of her hand. He held it a bit tighter. His hand was clammy, but Joanie didn't let go.

Thick fog was blooming on the hillside. It made it even more tricky to figure out what was what and where.

"It's fine," he said, sounding calmer. "Look, that's the Devil's Chair over there. Everyone knows that." He pointed at what looked like an enormous pile of rocks. To Joanie, it didn't look much different to any other big pile of rocks, but he was right, in a way. Everybody did know the Chair, or at least all the grownups did. He said it so confidently, too. "So we were going the wrong way," he admitted, "But...." he looked around, pursing his lips. "It's def'nitely this way. Def'nitely."

He strode off down the path. Joanie had to jog to keep up, stumbling on the stony track.

"Don't start crying again," Ned said, and she could hear the eye-roll in his voice.

Maybe it was just the worry of being lost, and the threat of dark falling but she felt bad, now. Really bad. Managing the uneven ground with the thickening fog was tricky enough, but it felt as though it were tilting. As if it were a bad-tempered pony trying to buck her off. And the fog... the fog was thickening like her fear. It bloomed at an unnatural pace, and roiled like a living and malignant soup that wanted to strangle her.

Her chest tightened, and she trembled, trying to go faster. Any moment now, fear was going to catch up to her and throttle her. It felt as though something or someone really was close behind her, no matter how quick she tried to go, and it would be right there and any moment it would reach out with a cold hand...

"Joanie?" Ned sounded concerned for the first time all day.

"There's something behind us!" she hissed, still squeezing his hand and trying to run at the same time. "Come on, Ned!"

"Don't be sil-"

They both heard it at the same time: hoofbeats. It made them both want to freeze in place, and sprint away down the hill at the same time, faster than either of them had ever gone before. The sound was wrong. A wrongness neither of them could quite put into words, but years later, they might have put it like this: No sane person would ride up here, especially not when it was (please no) starting to get dark. It was too up-and-down, too rock-strewn. There were no wild ponies up here, either. If there were, Joanie would have needed no coaxing to get her here. The trick would have been peeling her off the hillside and getting her home.

Still. They both heard it, shrouded in the fog and carried on the wind. It came and went, so that you could nearly think that was only my imagination. Then it came back. It was hard to tell how far away it was. The wind and fog made everything more confusing. Was that... clanging? Shouting?

The noises died away again, and all either child could hear was the thumping of their own hearts. The air tasted tangy, coppery, like if you fall down and bite your lip, and still the fog wreathed around them.

"Joanie? Are you crying again? I told you-" but even Joanie could tell that his heart wasn't in it. He scolded her out of habit, because it was something normal and familiar, and therefore comforting, but-

"It's not me," she said. "I hear it, too."

They strained their ears.

"Do you think someone else is lost up here, like us?"

Ned scowled. "We are not lost, I told you, I know the way now-"

Clearer this time, and you could tell it was a woman crying, not a little girl.

"Hello?" Ned called out with a boldness he didn't feel. "Miss? Are you there? Are you alright?"

The weeping faded, and an unnatural silence descended. The prickle you get on the back of your neck when someone is looking at you was magnified ten times over and it lived and writhed in the fog right next to them. It sizzled off their skin like wild electricity.

The children found their feet had stopped moving, and they very much wanted to move them, even faster than before. It was as if the ends of their legs had become just more lumps of rock on the ground. Perhaps the rest of them would follow suit, and they would collapse here in untidy heaps. Maybe that's where all the lost children went.

Unable to run, they both looked back, knowing in their liquid bellies that they would see the Thing they were so afraid of, but wanting to be wrong. Wanting this to be one of those moments where you turn on the light and realise it's not a monster, it's a jacket hanging on the door.

A gaunt figure, on horseback of course, and cloaked in green, stood near the Chair. That's where the dead silence was coming from. The mist, too. Wisps of it clung to him, as if it were part of him, or almost. Like a second cloak.

Joanie could tell, even at this distance, that he was looking right at them. His gaze was hard, like a cold slap. He didn't move, and his horse didn't move, but somehow his face loomed towards them out of the fog, as sharp and hard as an axe.

They snapped their feet away from where they'd become rooted to the ground, willed them life and wings, and ran.

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TBC

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Thank you for reading!