Читать книгу The Cord: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff - Alison Case - Страница 7

HE REACHED THE CRAG just as the clouds finished blotting out the moon, plunging him into perfect darkness. No rain, as yet, but a distant flash and crack of thunder told him it would come soon. Blinded, he dropped to his hands and knees, feeling for the edge of the stone and then the path that ran down along the far side of it. He crawled slowly down, backwards so that he faced up the hill, checking always that the stone was on his left, until he came to the bottom edge of the crag. Then he turned right. There was barely a path here; it was a matter of keeping level, moving neither up nor down the hillside, feeling for the slight gaps in the weeds, and checking what he felt against the map of his memory. It had been years since they were last here together, but before the old master died they had come often. Feeling in the darkness, he plunged his hand straight into a patch of nettles, and drew it back with a curse. But it reassured him – he remembered those nettles, or thought he did. It was hard to judge distance, crawling slowly where he was used to scrambling with confidence, but if he was right, he was halfway to his goal. The sting of the nettles was good, too. It kept him in the present, kept him sharp, and he needed that, because the thunder was getting closer and the first drops were falling. He could not let the storm find him on this open hillside. He moved a little faster, then stopped, suddenly confused. Had he gone too far? Did the path, if it was a path he was on, lead straight to the cave, or pass underneath it? He could not remember.

Another flash of lightning came to his rescue. It showed him the cave, directly uphill, further up than he had thought. Quickly, while the image remained burned on his eyes, he scrambled up towards it, until he felt the bare earth that floored it, and then knocked his head on the low overhang of rock above it. The heavens opened then. By the time he had worked himself into the back of the cave, away from the rain, he was wet, but not soaked through. Good enough, he thought. It would be a grim night, but that was nothing new. He curled himself into a tight ball and shivered. There was nothing to do but wait: for the rain to pass, for his body’s warmth to dry his clothes, if it could, for daytime. One thing he could be sure of – there would be no sleep for him, not at this distance from Cathy, and certainly not with his blood still racing at her words.