He shivered in the damp fog. And for the first time, Philip started to feel concerned. Apart from his map, he had a waterproof, a bottle of water, a spare pair of socks in case he got his feet wet. But nothing to eat, except a roll of his favourite sweets, the perfumed Parma Violets that he’d remembered from his school days. There might be some sugar in them, but they wouldn’t provide him with extra energy for long.

Philip kept walking, but without recognizing any signs or gateways. Twenty minutes later, when his foot slipped into a hole and his ankle doubled up underneath him, he knew he wasn’t on the path at all. For the last few hundred yards, the slope of the land had been tending upwards, not down. The ache in his calf muscles was enough to tell him that fact, but he’d been trying not to notice it.

As he nursed his painful ankle and wiped a bloodied scratch on his hand, he knew that he was now in difficulties. He had no idea what direction he’d been walking in, or whether he’d even set off from the place he thought he had twenty minutes ago. His ankle wasn’t actually sprained, and he could still walk on it, if he was careful. But the fog was as thick as ever, and there were no lights visible, no sound of traffic from any direction. His senses detected nothing around him except muffled rustlings and coughs in the heather, sounds that he took for the presence of sheep.

Then he reached a point where the terrain sloped towards him on all sides, rough ground calloused with rocks and grimy with dead bracken. It seemed to him that the landscape had caught him up, and now held him in its grubby palm, like an insect it meant to crush.

On the ridge of the slope above him, a single hawthorn seemed to writhe in the fog drifting past its branches. For a few moments, Philip could do nothing but listen to the silence, his senses baffled by the absence of noise. It was as if he’d gone suddenly deaf, or someone had turned off the sound in the world around him.

Trying to make some contact with his senses, he held his hands up to his face. The smell of Parma Violets, and a single drop of blood.

He came to a low fence and decided to step over it, rather than casting backwards and forwards to find a gate or stile. A moment later, he was falling.

Chapter Sixteen

Journal of 1968

LIVING UNDERGROUND COULD have its advantages, I suppose. You’re away from the wind and rain, which is something to be thankful for up here in the hills. But the drawbacks can be fairly serious.