Free Tanners Dell: Darkly Disturbing Occult Horror by Sarah England Page B

because there are things you need to know – I’m piecing things together, you see; and you must never go there alone. There has to be someone you can trust who would go with you!”
    Becky sighed. The bus was already climbing up The Old Coach Road towards Bridesmoor. A peevish rain spattered across the windows, the moors stretching out for mile after sodden mile on either side. It might not be a bad idea to be armed with more information, but who on earth could go with her? Celeste wasn’t young or fit enough by the sound of it, although she’d never met her. Who then? Noel wouldn’t get the same days off. Ideally a level headed male – someone to square up to the Deans if they appeared...and then a name popped into her head. What about Toby Harbour? Question was though, would he go against his superiors and keep the visit to himself?
    “Well yours would be the next stop,” Becky found herself saying as she reached for her bag. “Bit of a hike from up here but—”
    “Good, I’ll put the kettle on. See you in ten.”
     
    ***
     
    Becky stepped off the bus at the highest point on Bridgestone Moor. Ahead the pithead wheel dominated the landscape like a blackened scarecrow, and to the left lay a barren expanse of moorland between the mine and Cloudside Village. If she’d taken the bus directly there she wouldn’t have to do this, but it was only a mile or so out of her way and Celeste had been pretty adamant. Resigned to a blustery walk, she put her head down against the prevailing wind and began to tramp down the muddy lane. There wasn’t another soul in sight.
    The pit had been dead now for about twenty years or so, being one of the last South Yorkshire mines to close. There were mixed feelings. Some were angry at the loss of a good income, others relieved because Bridesmoor had an unusually high mortality rate. The stories went along the lines that you could hear the souls of dead miners trapped underground, howling in the wind. And some people had seen, usually when falling out of The Highwayman or The Druids Inn, grey figures covered in soot, stumbling across the moorland with hands outstretched. Becky smiled. Everyone loved a good ghost story. Sadly though, the mortality figures were not borne out of imagination but were weighted in fact. There had been more men electrocuted or trapped following gas explosions here than anywhere else in the country, along with the highest rate of widowhood and fatherless children.
    On a whim she turned to look down over Bridesmoor village, and with the wind behind her stood for a moment imagining what it might be like to live there. It looked like the end of the earth. You could see the whole village from up here – a sprawling estate of bungalows, a few rows of terraces, and a small church at the end just as the houses petered out and the woods began. Was that it? She screwed up her eyes, trying to work out where the old mill might be, concluding that as a water mill it must be somewhere in the trees at the bottom of the village near the river. Hmm…there were woods to the east and the west of it too. Well concealed.
    A sudden sharp gust almost lifted her off her feet and she gasped, bending double in the face of it as she whirled around. A belt of sleety rain slashed into her face and with cold, wet fingers it was a struggle to get her umbrella up. Flaming hell!
    Then out of nowhere, with the wind blasting in her ears as she wrestled with an inside out umbrella, a black Nissan truck suddenly roared down the lane and almost knocked her down. In an effort to save herself she toppled into the dry stone wall, ripping her coat and skinning her elbow. What the…?
    She looked up just in time to see the vehicle vanish over the horizon.
    Charming - fancy not even stopping to see if she was okay!
    Slightly tearful at the pain now searing through her ankle, and hobbling a little, her mind flitted back to the second the truck had passed . Now that was odd. No, really odd . A