Читать книгу Devil's Peak - Brian Ball - Страница 3

CHAPTER 1

Jerry Howard knew he’d been the worst kind of fool when he saw the first black clouds screaming in from the northwest to blot out the High Peak.

In what was left of the pale spring sunlight, he could see the sheep alongside the Hagthorpe village road calling to their zany lambs as they made for cover.

“Oh, Christ,” he said, looking up. He was in deep trouble. There was the face of Devil’s Peak leering at him, as if it knew that he was stuck, with the top of Toller Edge above seven or eight handholds away. It might as well have been in Outer Mongolia or Bangkok or in the Snug at the Furnaceman’s Arms, which was where he wished himself now, instead of waiting with freezing hands for the courage to move up the vertical corner in the rock face.

M. Severe, the handbook had called the climb, which was named after someone called Scragg—Scragg’s Corner. Half an hour before Jerry had grinned to himself, made sure that his small rucksack was firmly in place on his back, and begun the ninety-foot ascent. Only fools climbed alone, of course, but this wasn’t a real test of skill.

Anyway, who else could find time on a Friday at the end of the Easter vacation to go with him? Only Debbie, and she’d gone in a rage the week before, back to South Shields and the trawler captain who’d been waiting three months for her to get over what he called the Bearded Wonder. So Jerry had come out on his own. Well, so he’d done a small climb. Why not? You had to balance the thrill of doing the corner crack alone against the dangers—and he had done this particular climb three or four times before, so where was the danger? It wasn’t until he was within twenty feet of the top that he’d found his fingers slipping on the gritstone and realised that there had been a sudden drop in the temperature.

It was seeing newly broken gritstone where there should have been a jug of rock that frightened him into looking round. Someone had done the unthinkable. Some vandal had come up Scragg’s Corner and taken a hammer to the one handhold vital to the climb.

“Mad bastard!” Jerry exclaimed, aghast when he looked up to see why his icy fingers hadn’t found the four-inch projection.

Who could have done it!

Some maniacal yob out with his mates after shooting up the daft sheep? A climber? But climbers wouldn’t! It was totally unthinkable!

Jerry tried again and his fingers slid over wet, cold, smooth rock. And then he looked all about him with a sickening sense of danger. He had no top rope. No rope at all, in fact. He couldn’t be hauled ignominiously to the top of Toller’s Edge to be laughed at by his fellow-climbers. There weren’t any. Nor could he go down a rope which he might have fixed to the rock himself. He’d been a fool. And it was getting so cold that his face stung abominably and his right hand jumped with frozen fatigue. He looked down, careful to keep both feet evenly balanced, left on a solid ledge, the other on a bit of rock that was no more than a slippery protuberance about the size and shape of a slice of orange. Below, the sunlight was dying. Last year’s bracken had been trampled by the sheep in places, though it still lay thickly in a brown carpet. A tanker’s air-brakes squealed on the narrow road at the turn for Hagthorpe.

Then Jerry sensed rather than saw the blackness that was looming over the High Peak. He did look then. Snow-clouds were roaring like banshees over the roof of England.

Snow!

The wind got up, adding an urgency to the sheep’s calls. Jerry looked all about the Edge in case someone should have come out for a walk, or some party of climbers he hadn’t noticed before were about. No one. Even the youngest of the kids who lived just below the broad bald masses of the Peak knew what the black clouds meant and would have turned for home double quick. A car ground its way along the Hagthorpe road, its driver intent on getting to his destination.

The first snowflake drifted to settle in Jerry’s dark beard as the sunlight was extinguished. He looked over his left shoulder towards Sheffield, where at the edge of the cloud belt there was still dazzling sunshine.

He shuddered as another snowflake landed on his nose and gently dissolved. He knew he could not stay still for much longer. Go down? He’d never make it. He was committed now. Below was a jumbled mass of rock eroded from the cliff-face. Not much more than sixty feet. Say seventy. Enough to break every bone in his body on the jagged edge of the harsh boulders. He called out above the wind:

“Help! On the Edge! Can’t move!”

The wind filled his mouth as he roared, and the chill of it bit into a top filling of white metal. He shut his mouth quickly and thought of the unfairness of it all.

It was lonely in the bed-sitter without Debbie’s sing-song tones, so he had packed a pound of cheese and a small Hovis, stolen a couple of cans of beer from Andy and Anne’s flat—knowing that they would have helped themselves just as freely from his—and set off to think out how he was to cajole another year’s grant from his local education authority. That, and to do a spot of scrambling. Not climbing, he had told himself. Only fools climbed alone. And they didn’t do it for long. Hagthorpe Cemetery held a couple at least.

Again the wind licked at his white metal filling. Snowflakes danced towards him, thrown there by some freak of wind from the High Peak. Above, the clouds were now solidly black.

The rock was getting more and more slippery as the snow began to settle in cracks and fissures, on tiny ledges and even on the vertical face itself until it was blown away over the top of Toller Edge twenty feet above. Twenty feet!

He reached out his right hand again and felt the raw new stone. A black rage filled him. Who could have been so cold-bloodedly murderous as to destroy the route up the corner? Jerry was so annoyed that he almost lost his balance. His left hand was an ice talon in the crack just above his head; it slipped, and a knee tremor shook his lower body, so that the right foot almost went. He exerted all his power of concentration to control the shaking. He held his balance. Just.

He examined the stone above his head. Right hand should have taken part of the body weight for long enough and given leverage for the long leg movement on to another of those tiny blips like the one his right foot rested on now. Then fairly easy holds and up to the top. A large whisky, a laugh at his luck and back to Sheffield. Jerry blinked as snow fell into his upturned face. There was no way up.

It couldn’t be done. He needed another foot of height—eighteen inches, more like—to get his right foot on to the next hold. He looked at his left foot and saw that it was covered in fine snow. Bigger flakes began to fall.

The Peak was experiencing almost the complete range of English weather in one day.

Jerry turned, looked up again, and the small weight of the rucksack tugged at his shoulders. It came to him at that moment that he might have a chance.

If only he could balance like some bloody circus performer—for even a few seconds! Simply getting the frozen rucksack off his back with one hand was enough for the moment. As for getting the bloody beer cans into position beneath his left foot—well, that was best not thought of. Even then, they might not give him the extra height he must have.

“They’ve got to!” Jerry muttered to the rock face.

He wriggled with his shoulders and arms until the rucksack was hanging over his right shoulder. The beer cans clanked. How tall were they? Seven inches? Eight? Enough height, but it would take the talents of the Sheffield Monkey Man to be sure of getting them just right! He worked the stiff leather straps free and reached for one of the cold tins. Long Life it said on the label.

He had to catch the can between the good ledge on which his left boot rested and his leg, hold it in position, and locate the other beer can. Then that had to go on top of the other. It wasn’t possible, he told himself.

The other can was lodged below the spare sweater and the Hovis loaf. It came free and he let the rucksack drop into the space below him, not watching it vanish into the swirling blizzard. He screwed his nerves to give maximum concentration. There would only be one chance. If he failed, Hagthorpe’s cemetery would know another moving little ceremony, with Andy and Anne sobbing at the graveside and going back to Sheffield to swill beer until they forgot him, and maybe Debbie there too if she wasn’t busy with her trawlerman. The Pakistani landlord whose name he could never remember would chuck out the stack of indecipherable notes that were all he had to show for three years’ work on his thesis. Long Life! Exit Jerry Howard in a late-April blizzard!

With infinite care he lowered the can, arcing his body outwards to give the greatest leverage to his feet. Snowflakes made a dancing stream of white light between his body and the slippery rock face. Then the can was quivering against its mate, two ice-cold cans of beer whose contents should have been safely inside his belly by now.

And they held upright. There was plenty of room on the ledge for both his left foot and the upright cans; there must be at least another quarter of an inch to spare, he thought.

He looked once back at the blackness that was the High Peak and saw the mask of Devil’s Peak smiling enigmatically through the blizzard; he moved before he completely lost his nerve. Up! And arms, legs, belly, bearded face against rock, all that could be brought into play did their part. And he was on the cans, left hand searching for the good wide crack above, right hand on a sliver of rock that the yob hadn’t smashed away, right foot up and over the glassy expanse above the orange slice and on to a real ledge!

Five minutes later, Jerry was on the top of Toller Edge in six inches of snow, completely exhausted.

“Never again!” he whispered. “Never again!”

He lay for nearly ten minutes, slowly freezing and enjoying it. He realised that he was slightly delirious. He looked at his watch, saw that there were two hours of daylight left.

He lurched to his feet, and began to trudge along the footpath that was outlined by an indentation in the snow blanket. It would take perhaps half an hour to get down off the Edge. He tried to urge himself into a loping run but abandoned the idea after twice falling perilously near the rock face. The wind bit through his anorak as if it hated him. There was nothing to be seen all about him but the gusting, billowing snow. He made a snowball and tossed it into the wind. It was thrown back, to take him on his face.

At the same moment, he tripped over an unseen chunk of rock deep below the snow and wrenched his ankle. Jerry bawled with pain above the roaring of the wind. As he went down, he caught a glimpse of the High Peak in a freak, clear moment; there was Mam Tor, bald and white. And, before it, the unpleasant black scar that the local people called Devil’s Peak.

Yelling helped, so he cursed his luck, the snow, the weather forecasters who’d promised blue skies with an occasional shower later in the day, and he also cursed Professor Bruce de Matthieu for a bald-headed ponce who didn’t know the difference between a good researcher and a lickspittle. It would take him an hour at this rate to get off the damned Edge. The snow was coming now in great feathery chunks that built up drifts in minutes.

“I’ll lose my way,” Jerry said suddenly, aware that he had moved off the path in his pain. He limped back but his footprints had gone. And he was only halfway down the sloping ramp that led from the Edge to the Hagthorpe track. Tracks that were as familiar as the bottles on the shelf at the Furnaceman’s Arms could lose their contours in six inches of snow. When the drifting started, the High Peak became a foreign country, its ridges, tracks, hills and valleys given an altogether outlandish appearance. Jerry knew he was lost.

After leaping like a gazelle up Toller Edge, to be overcome by fatigue in a blizzard—no! Only fools did that! Or innocents like the two Boy Scouts last year and the clot of an Army Lieutenant two years earlier. He put on a spurt and howled with pain as he did so. And he had no food, nothing! Chocolate, cheese, Hovis—all down in a two-foot deep drift of snow at the bottom of Toller Edge with the spare sweater and the compass and map.

He hobbled on in the blizzard, silent now. There was a grimness about the wind, a cold certainty about the whiteness. How had they felt, the poor young lads last year when they’d wandered on to the black crags of Devil’s Peak? Cockily assertive, until they realised that after all they hadn’t been prepared? Like me, Jerry thought; and their bodies were never found!

The grinding pain in his ankle kept him aware of his surroundings. He had to walk in a lop-sided manner down the path he had found. It wasn’t the right path, but it led down, and that was the important thing: to be off the heights, where the wind was an Arctic killer.

Where the sheep went, into the sheltered chimneys and corners—that’s where he would go. And rest.

An hour later, he lay down without realising that he had done so. Actually a delirium had claimed him, one in which he thought himself opposite Janice, she of the disastrous marriages, huge bosom and hauteur at the Furnaceman’s. She’d got a drink called a Snowball, and he had gin and Italian vermouth, iced. The ice was very cold. He opened his mouth to suck on it He didn’t realise that he was face down on a slab of stone, Darkness came, but he was not aware of it.

In another hour or two, he would have been quite cold, and some time in the night his corpse would have solidified. It was the thrumming of the Diesel engine that brought him to a last flickering of consciousness. The noise was the background murmur of the crowd in the pub; Janice told him to pay no attention, they were a set of creeps and why didn’t he have another drink, on her this time because his grant hadn’t come through yet.

He opened his eyes and saw the frozen rock he had rested against. “Oh, Jesus!” he whispered.

And so he heard the noise for what it was and realised that he might, just, save himself. He crawled towards the heavy throbbing noise, careless of falling now, too scared of freezing to worry overmuch about suddenly pitching into emptiness as his rucksack had done a couple of hundred years before. Terror urged him on. The heavy beat of the engine was near, very near. But it was so dark!

Not a glimmer of light! Just the glare of the snow on the ground, and the thick curtain of whirling snow all around, still driven by a howling gale! He moved on, slowly. And there was a light.

It was a dim corona, seen through snow, but it was like some vast dawning of religious inspiration to Jerry. He pitched into the snowdrift and clawed on unconcerned.

He burst through to the roadside at a point where it ran between a cutting in the rock. He was about ten feet above the level of the road. Up against the drift from which he emerged was the source of both noise and light. It was an enormous red tanker, though Jerry was not aware of this yet.

He saw a window with a light inside. He brushed snow from his face and peered inside. Jerry saw the two writhing figures of a man and a girl. He could see the bare narrow shoulder blades of the girl and her ridged back. Despite his low physical state, he registered the mark at the base of the girl’s spine: it was a red cicatrice, raised and wealed. To Jerry’s delirious mind it seemed that a small red animal crawled over her. At another time he would have turned away without acknowledging what he saw, but not this time: he tapped on the window with an apologetic despair.

The couple on the seats within did not hear him at first, so he tapped again. He tried not to smile or to shriek either. The woman looked up—an attractive girl about eighteen, registered Jerry. He wondered if he would lose any fingers. The man looked out too. Both shouted something. Jerry knew he was not welcome.

The man shrugged the girl off. She began making vulgar signs at him, shouting at the same time; Jerry couldn’t hear a word. Then she looked for her clothing. The driver rummaged for something, his red face suffused with anger. He wasn’t going? He couldn’t!

“Help!” screamed Jerry. “Please! I’m hurt!”

The girl began to shout back. Then she adjusted her skirt and looked out at him. Her friend was fumbling with his clothes also. She took the opportunity of abusing Jerry directly. Winding down the window she yelled:

“Get off, you dirty peeper!” in a South Yorkshire voice.

“Please!” Jerry begged, as the driver called out to let be and shut up. “I’m hurt! Hurt! A climber! I am! Look at my hands!”

He showed them to her in the attitude of prayer as the big Diesel engine roared back at the wind.

“Please!”