The cottage in winter

The mist hurried down the hills around her and soon she was engulfed in an unfamiliar cloud, the hills barely visible, like so many ghosts.

When she was here before, staying in the very same cottage, surrounded by the same necklace of hills, they had been soaked in summer sunlight, a brightly-coloured surround of beauty, distant yet divine. Now, in the mist and fog, the mountains closed in upon her, like a ghostly gang of troll giants.

She shivered, at the cold, at the silence and at the fog of uncertainty the mist provided: would her friends make it through or would she end up spending the night alone?

She turned and walked back to the cottage, she had never intended to go far, just a stroll to breathe in the mountains, to get a taste of the surrounding countryside in the crisp evening air. She would wait until her friends arrived, until the morning, before venturing further.

When she got back, there was no sign of Adam, Diane and Roger, though she’d given up hope before then. No human being would travel in that fog, not with the added hazard of the ice, deadly and dark, turning the friendly summer roads they had once known into death traps.

She was wrong to insist that they come up that day. “It’s easy for you,” Adam had said, “You’ve only to got to drive round the corner from Manchester, you can get there in daylight, crawl along whatever speed you like. Driving from London will take hours, not to mention the fog warnings, that‘s bound to cause massive delays. It‘ll be better if we set off early tomorrow morning, when the fog‘s cleared. ”

“But we’ve only got a long weekend,” she had pleaded, “if you don’t come up until tomorrow it’ll hardly seem worth it. It doesn’t matter what time you arrive, I’ll have food ready for you, or you can go straight to bed, the point is to wake up here Saturday morning and have two whole days together.” She’d eventually persuaded him, but they must have turned back when the weather worsened.

Inside the cottage she lit a fire, a real live fire, with logs she’d bought on the way up. The smell was delicious, a crisp array of flavours, malty, musky, smoky, even the slightest hint of chocolate. She wished she knew what tree they were from, but the sign had just said ‘Logs for sale’, and when she’d asked the man he’d had no idea: “They’re just logs love.”

She baked four potatoes in the section of the fireplace the landlord had shown her. They took an hour to cook, by which time it was nearly nine, there was no chance of them coming now. She ate her potato with cheese, ham and a bottle of wine, and listened to some classical music.

When they’d come here in the summer, that far off time, they’d spent the week walking the hills, getting to know them close-to, not the distant ghosts they were tonight. Those summer evenings were filled with laughter and drinking and stories and eventually Diane and Adam rushing off to bed for summer nights together. Roger had flirted with her, she had wondered if they might end up getting together, but they were both too conscious of living so far apart, not wanting to start something they couldn’t finish.

Tonight, alone, but with every comfort possible, the evening passed slowly into night. With the bottle nearly empty, she decided it was time for bed, putting the uneaten food in the fridge, just in case her friends arrived in the night.

She got first dibs on choice of bedroom, sole dibs, the double room above the front door, the one painted bright red. She read for a while, finishing her wine, clearing her mind. She was in a strange bed in a strange house in a strange world, with a surround of strange noises from the Lancastrian countryside. Sleep came awkwardly and she dreamt vividly.

In her dreams she saw Adam, Diane and Roger, their ghosts, echoes of the people she knew. She saw Roger’s car, a ghostly representation of his car, as it skidded on unseen ice and veer from the road, skidding down the wondrous hillside: spectacular views, spectacular deaths.

She woke with a jolt and sat bolt upright. There was no car, but Diane was still there, a faint apparition at the foot of her bed. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, she thought, but then the apparition spoke, telling the same tale of a dreadful car crash that she’d just seen in her dream.

At some point Diane’s ghost faded away and she was confronted by Adam and Roger, both bemoaning their fate, wailing that they shouldn’t have traveled in that weather. She lay there silently, chilled by their ghostly presence and their allegations; it was, after all, her who had talked Adam into driving.

The ghosts continued to haunt her all through the night. In the morning she awoke, so she must have slept again, at some point the ghosts in her room had been replaced by ghosts in her dreams.

In the sunlight of a winter’s morning there was no sign of ghosts or bad dreams, but she knew that she faced another two nights of the same horror. It was her fate.

It has been ten years now, precisely, since her friends had died, had died driving to this very same cottage. She endures the horror of it one weekend every year. She sees it as her duty to let her friends haunt her, as it’s the only existence they have left. After all, she tells herself, it was her fault they risked the journey on that dangerous winter’s day. It was her fault they died.