Free Fraser's Voices by Jack Hastie

the end would come with a knife or an axe or a gun
.
    But nothing happened.
    His ankle was sore. He couldn’t run; probably he couldn’t even walk. Fearfully he turned his head and looked behind him. The moor was blank. The ogre was gone. The immediate danger was over, but Fraser still faced a painful hobble home with one ankle feeling as if it was packed with little sharp needles which stabbed a hundred ways whenever he put any weight on it.
    Slowly he went on, sometimes crawling on hands and knees, sometimes hopping on his one good foot, over the wall and away from the moor; till he saw Kwarutta’s pool, glinting like copper where the light chequered through the leaves and wondered if his tumblings of the mind would come back with the heat and the stench.
    Then agonising along the trail through the wood, often having to rest from the pain, yet each time he stopped fancying he could hear, above his thumping heart, the faintest rustle, the slightest breathing as Something stalked him through the shadows of the trees in the gathering dusk.
    When he held his breath to hear better, the Thing stopped breathing too. When he was forced to breathe again with deep gasps, he was sure that he heard its hot pant just behind that tree or the bush over there. And once he was so sure that he heard It gathering Itself for the final spring that would bring It on top of him that he leaped, one legged, in his terror into a bramble bush and fell, scarred and scraped, with the red scrawls of the thorns stinging on his skin.
    But the blow never came; and at last he could see the lights in the windows of his home and he knew that, if it came to the worst, he was within shouting distance.
    In fact Dyer, having made a demonstration of ferocity which had had the intended effect, had turned back with a chuckle, picked up the empty latrine of his chemical toilet, replaced it and sat back with a pipe and a dram to watch the sunset. Of course, by the conditions of his rental of the site, he should have buried the latrine’s contents higher up on the moor, but that would have meant carrying the thing a hundred yards along the goat trail. In any case, you couldn’t reasonably be expected to dig a hole in the baked clay of the dried out peat bogs. Dyer had only tried it once.

THE GREAT GALE
    The heat and drought lasted another three days. Then with August came the thunder; at first distant rumblings as towering clouds massed over the hills; then the steady ‘spit, spit’ of big drops of rain; then the wind rose and the rain turned to hail as the full blast of the storm hit the van. It rocked and rattled under the bombardment, and the thunder cracked and the lightning flickered all around. But it stayed in place, held by the extra anchors Dyer had put in.
    Then the mist closed in. It was as if the god of the storm realised that the fortress could not be taken by assault and that siege tactics would have to be employed. The thunder and lightning grew fainter and dimmer and faded away, the wind died down and the hail turned to rain, a steady drenching downpour.
    By early evening the pools on the top of the moor were brimming and soon the whole hillside was awash as the water ran straight off the rock hard ground. Dyer had started to prepare his evening meal when he noticed the first trickle of water coming over the rocks above. At first he continued with his cooking, but the trickle became a torrent and the torrent a cascade and soon the whole ledge on which the van rested was awash and he could feel his home shudder under the force of the flood.
    When he went outside to investigate he saw to his horror that part of the ledge and whole sections of the Range Rover Track were starting to collapse and crumble into a thick red paste, which was oozing onto the hillside below.
    Then the van shifted and lurched as the ground to which it was anchored began to dissolve. Dyer decided to leave. A four mile hike in this downpour along the track