The light was so much better now. It had to be past three. Spring coming, eventually.
“Hey,” Aidan said, standing two feet away, hands clasped in front of him like they were the only thing in the world to hold; eyes big and brown and human and terrified and whole.
“Hey,” she said. “You stayed.”
THE MORAINE
Simon Bestwick
The mist hit us suddenly. One moment we had the peak in sight; the next, the white had swallowed up the crags and was rolling down towards us.
“Shit,” I said. “Head back down.”
For once, Diane didn’t argue.
Trouble was, it was a very steep climb. Maybe that was why we’d read nothing about this mountain in the guidebooks. Some locals in the hotel bar the night before had told us about it. They’d warned us about the steepness, but Diane liked the idea of a challenge. All well and good, but now it meant we had to descend very slowly; one slip and you’d go down the mountainside, arse over apex.
That was when I saw the faint desire-line that led off, almost at right angles to the main path, running sideways and gently downwards.
“There, look,” I said, pointing. “What do you reckon?”
Diane hesitated, glancing down the main path then up at the fast-falling mist. “Let’s try it.”
So we did.
“Look out,” I said. Diane was lagging a good four or five yards behind me. “Faster.”
“I’m going as fast as I bloody can, Steve.”
I didn’t rise to the bait, just turned and jogged on. The gentler slope meant we could run, but even so, we weren’t fast enough. Everything went suddenly white.
“Shit,” Diane said. I reached out for her hand — she was just a shadow in the wall of white vapour — and she took it and came closer. The mist was cold, wet and clinging, like damp cobwebs.
“What now?” Diane said. She kept her voice level, but I could tell it wasn’t easy for her. And I couldn’t blame her.
Don’t be fooled by Lakeland’s picture-postcard scenery; its high mountains and blue tarns, the boats on Lake Windermere, the gift shops and stone-built villages. You come here from the city to find the air’s fresher and cleaner, and when you look up at night you see hundreds, thousands more stars in the sky because there’s no light pollution. But by the same token, fall on a slope like this and there’ll be no-one around, and your mobile won’t get a signal. And if a mist like this one comes down and swallows you up and you don’t know which way to go — it doesn’t take that long, on a cold October day, for hypothermia to set in. These fells and dales claimed lives like ours each year.
I took a deep breath. “I think…”
“You OK?” she asked.
“I’m fine.” I was a little nettled she’d thought otherwise; she was the one who’d sounded in need of reassurance, but I wasn’t going to start bickering now. It occurred to me — at the back of my head, and I’d have denied it outright if anyone had suggested it to me — that this might be a blessing in disguise; if I could stay calm and lead us to safety, I could be a hero in her eyes. “We need to get to some lower ground.”
“Yes, I know,” she said, as if I’d pointed out the stupidly obvious. Well, perhaps I had. I was just trying to clarify the situation. Alright, I wanted to impress her, to look good. But I wanted to do the right thing as well. Honestly.
So I pointed down the trail — the few feet of it we could see where it disappeared into the mist. “Best off keeping on. Keep our heads and go slowly.”
“Yes, I worked that bit out as well.” I recognised her tone of voice; it was the one she used to take cocky students down a peg. There’d been a time when I used to slip into her lectures, even though I knew nothing, then or now, about Geology; I just liked hearing her talk about her favoured subject. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her in any of my lectures — not that she was interested in Music. Maybe it had never been what I’d thought it was. Maybe it had never been for either of us.
Not an idea I liked, but one I’d kept coming back to far too often lately. As had Diane. Hence this trip, which was looking less and less like a good idea all the time. We’d spent our honeymoon here; I suppose we’d hoped to recapture something or other, but there’s no magic in places. Only people, and precious little of that; less and less the older you get.
And none of that was likely to get us safely out of here. “OK then,” I said. “Come on.”
Diane caught the back of my coat and pulled. I wheeled to face her and swayed, off-balance. Loose scree clattered down into the mist; the path had grown rockier underfoot. She caught my arm and steadied me. I yanked it free, thoroughly pissed off. “What?”
“Steve, we’re still walking.”
“I noticed. Well, actually, we’re not just now, since you just grabbed me.”
She folded her arms. “We’ve been walking nearly twenty minutes.” I could see she was trying to stop her teeth chattering. “And I don’t think we’re much closer to ground level. I think we might be a bit off course.”
I realised my teeth had started chattering too. It was hard to be sure, but I thought she might have a point; the path didn’t look like it was sloping down any longer. If it’d levelled off, we were still halfway up the damned mountain. “Shit.”
I felt panic threatening, like a small hungry animal gnawing away inside my stomach, threatening to tear its way up through my body if it let it. I wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Mustn’t. If we panicked we were stuffed.
At least we hadn’t come completely unprepared. We had Kendal Mint Cake and a thermos of hot tea in our backpacks, which helped, but they could only buy a little more time. We either got off this mountain soon, or we never would.
We tried our mobiles, but it was an exercise; there was no reception out here. They might as well have been bits of wood. I resisted the temptation to throw mine away.
“Should’ve stayed on the main path,” Diane said. “If we’d taken it slow we’d have been OK.”
I didn’t answer. She glanced at me and rolled her eyes.
“What?”
“Steve, I wasn’t having a go at you.”
“Fine.”
“Not everything has to be about that.”
“I said, fine.”
But she wouldn’t leave it. “All I said was that we should’ve stuck to the main path. I wasn’t saying this was all your fault.”
“Okay.”
“I wasn’t. If I’d seen that path I would’ve probably done the same thing. It looked like it’d get us down faster.”
“Right.”
“I’m just saying, looking back, we should’ve gone the other way.”
“Okay. Alright. You’ve made your point.” I stood up. A sheep bleated faintly. “Can we just leave it now?”
“Okay.” I saw her do the eye roll again, but pretended not to. “So now what? If we backtrack…”
“Think we can make it?”
“If we can get back to the main path, we should be able to find our way back from there.”
If we were very lucky, perhaps; our hotel was a good two miles from the foot of this particular peak, and chances were the mist would be at ground level too. Even off the mountain we’d be a long way from home and dry, but it seemed the best choice on offer. If only we’d taken it sooner; we might not have heard the dog bark.