Free Last Train to Gloryhole by Keith Price Page A

and pulling her even closer. ‘How about you? Say, let’s do what we did the other day, shall we?’
    ‘And what’s that?’ enquired Rhiannon, starting to tremble with a mixture of fear and anticipation, as it gradually dawned on her what it was that he was proposing.
    ‘Let’s go down the line,’ replied Chris, tugging both of her hands down firmly inside his own.
    The confident, boyish smile that followed these words, and which set Rhiannon’s heart beating faster, she quickly sensed was too much for her to consider offering up even the faintest of objections. So, unlike on the previous occasion, she didn’t protest. And so, with tousled heads dipped, and slim, bare arms gripped tenderly round each other’s waists, the two young people continued strolling eastwards along the dusty, tarmacadam lane that ran across the top of the great, seven-arched viaduct, into the teeth of a gathering breeze, and away from the setting sun, which quickly threw their long, single shadow way ahead of them down the line of the ancient railway-track, and, with just a single zig-zag, caused by the structure’s perimeter walls, right on over the side of the head-high, stone parapet, and away faintly into the distant woods.
    The entrance to the tunnel was now little more than a huge, round, concrete wall with a steel door at its base, which was supposed to be locked shut, but was invariably left wide open for intruders and ordinary passers-by to peer in, sniff the dank, humid air inside, and think better of interrupting their pleasant country stroll for a dim, cavernous step back in time.
    In the Sixties this wide, curved passageway beneath the limesone hill provided a route by which steam-trains were able to reach the industrial town of Dowlais, and so carry away from it, in a long caravan of open trucks, both its steam-coal and its iron and steel products, for which the locality was rightly renowned right across the world. Indeed in early Victorian Times the Dowlais Ironworks had been the largest ironworks on the planet, and the very rails that the trains ran on from Dowlais towards Cardiff, to London, to Paris, and even further afield towards Berlin, Moscow, and Outer Mongolia for that matter, were all etched indelibly with the small Welsh town’s famous name, the term Dowlais Steel being, as Isambard Kingdom Brunel had claimed at the time, nothing less than a by-word for quality product.
    The steel-door creaked like a banshee as it was pushed open, and soon Chris’s head peered out into the darkness which by now had enveloped the entire river valley, and which would inevitably make their one-mile walk back rather more harrowing than before. After Chris, emerged Rhiannon, holding on to her lover’s shoulder with her left hand, while in her right she carried her scarf and blazer, from the pockets of which hung limply her blue-and-green striped tie and blue tights. Chris swung the door shut behind them, and the pounding clang of its closure echoed eerily around them, causing unseen sheep to gallop away raucously along the track, or to scramble noisily up the hill’s steep slope in the direction of the castle for their very salvation.
    ‘It’s O.K., babe,’ Chris assured her. ‘It’s just the pesky sheep. I think there’s only two of them. You know, they’ve probably been doing much the same as we have, if you ask me, only amongst the trees.’ He turned towards Rhiannon and giggled heartily at the thought, but quickly saw that she wasn’t quite as amused as he plainly was. ‘I’m sorry, babe. I forgot - you only know about cows, don’t you? And horses, of course, since your dad’s got two of them, you tell me.’
    Rhiannon’s ice-blue eyes met his own. ‘I don’t want to come here again, Chris,’ she told him firmly, bending now, and lifting one bare leg up onto the bank so as to pull on her tights. ‘And anyway, I bet this is where you brought Pippa Jenkins that time. And don’t go denying it, neither, Chris,