A dark tale

MAGAZINE Bump in the night

Summer isn’t all sweetness and light as Stephen Gregory reveals with this dark tale…

It was a balmy evening in midsummer, but when the man in the corner of the bar started talking, he cast a shivery chill across the room.

It had been a long warm day in the mountains of Snowdonia. The bar was full of walkers and climbers. Their voices were loud and boisterous, and their faces were flushed with too

much sun and the beer they were hilariously quaffing. They

were brimming with youth and their stories of conquest – the crags they’d clambered, the summits they’d bagged.

One of them, an especially ruddy and raucous youth, was teasing a gathering of girls about his sighting of a huge, hairy hominid – a yeti or a sasquatch or the legendary bigfoot, yes, here in Snowdonia! And he was rewarded for his blarney with a chorus of giggles and guffaws.

Until the elderly man in the corner started to talk. He was lanky and lean, with a cap of silvery hair, a beaky face and big leathery hands. Quietly unassuming – for he was a veteran climber who’d made his reputation in the Alps and the Andes and the Himalayas – he said that he’d encountered the yeti, in one of the highest, remotest valleys in Tibet. It had stalked him, he’d seen its looming man-like shape and its footsteps in the snow… until, after an hour or more, it had disappeared into a bank of dark grey cloud.

The man was serious and calm. He wasn’t trying to top anyone’s stories. He finished his drink and stood up and left.

There was a shivery silence, until the youngsters filled it with

their beery banter. I went home. It was twilight, a soft and gentle evening in midsummer. My home was an old caravan on a hillside, near the village of Betws Garmon, a few miles down the valley from Rhydddu and Llyn Cwellyn. I was renting the caravan for the summer, for only a few pounds a week – no water, no electricity, just a bed and a table and a gas stove. The farmer had tried to make it more comfortable for me, and he’d come along one day with a little black and white television and rigged it to a car battery.

I trudged up the track to the caravan, high above the road. Before I went inside, I scrambled a few more yards to the cave… a quarry-hole, a cleft in the rocks which had become almost completely overgrown with ash and rowan and lush green bracken. I liked to go there as the evening light was fading, to watch the bats which flittered out of the cave, to see the

nightjar swooping silently across the fields, to enjoy the last of

Sometimes I would peer into the darkness of the cave… dark and forbidding, a rubble of slate-spoil, a tumble of rock which had collapsed from the roof of the hole. When I had first

explored with a torch, I’d glimpsed a jumble of bones, a mat of fur or wool, a grimace of teeth… undoubtedly a sheep which had blundered in and broken a leg.

Now I pushed aside the undergrowth and squinted into the shadows. I sniffed a sweet warm pungency from inside the cave. And as I turned away and let myself into the caravan, I thought I heard a slither of movement behind me, as though the rocks had shifted.

I’d had a few beers myself. Not as much as the sunburned youngsters had had, but enough to settle me comfortably onto my narrow bed. Darkness fell. I lit a few candles, safe inside jam-jars, and I twiddled the dials of the television. As the night gathered around the caravan, I found the perfect bedtime movie. The Shining … in chilly silver and grey and black and white, Jack Nicholson was haunting the deserted bedrooms of the snowbound hotel, and his little son was pedalling his scooter along empty corridors… and that scratchy music, the epitome of a horror-movie soundtrack. I lay back and let Stephen King’s terrible tale take hold of me.

Maybe I fell asleep. I awoke with such a jolt that I heard myself yell. The caravan was shaking, as though a giant hand was trying to lift it off the ground and turn it upside down. I struggled to my feet. The television slid off the table, crashed onto the floor and went blank.

I shoved the door open and jumped outside. The caravan stopped shaking, as a huge black shape emerged from the darkness and went lumbering across the field. A cow. It had

been scratching its great bony haunches on the corner of the caravan. I heard it go snorting away into the distance.

The next day I told the farmer what had happened. I was going to ask if he might come up to caravan and re-connect the television, so I was making the story as light and funny as possible. I mentioned the movie I’d been watching, how spooked I’d been, and for a bit of melodrama I’d hinted at the slither of sound I’d heard from inside the quarry-hole.

I expected him to scoff at me. He was a burly, booming fellow, always ready to mock me as an idle, so-called writer loafing

away the summer in his caravan. But this time he didn’t scoff. There was a flicker of a shadow on his face, as he glanced over

my shoulder and up towards the cave. He fixed the television

for me, without saying much, without his usual joshing and teasing. I stood in my doorway after he’d left, and I watched him moving the cattle into a different field, away from the caravan.

The long hot days didn’t last long. I settled to my writing, while a curtain of drizzle blew against the windows like cobwebs and pooled into muddy puddles around the caravan.

Good days for writing, but inducing a kind of cabin fever after a while. In the evening I walked down to the road and got a lift up to the pub in Rhyd-ddu. It was quieter now that the weather had changed and the holidays were nearly over. The rain was steady and cold, covering the flanks of Snowdon, and inside the

pub there were only a few locals. Sitting in the corner, lost in his memories of long ago adventures in faraway places, the elderly climber was sipping a glass of whisky.

Our eyes met for a moment. He raised a quizzical eyebrow, as though he remembered me from another time, as though we’d shared an idea or a memory which had now slipped away. And for a moment I recalled his account of the yeti, which had stalked him in the high mountains of Tibet, and I’d seen the seriousness in his eyes.

I went home. It was quite dark. The long days of summer were fading. I glanced up at the quarry hole, but I didn’t go there… the twilight was chill and grey, not good for my communion with the bats or a glimpse of the nightjar, and not a glimmer of sunset.

I lay on my bed, too lazy to light the candles. The television fizzed and crackled. I must have fallen asleep.

Until I awoke with a jolt. The caravan was shaking and rocking as though something was trying to roll it over. The television crashed to the floor. I stumbled to the door and fell outside,

ready to shoo away a pesky cow which must have returned to my field…

The shaking stopped. No cow. But, as I rubbed at my eyes and peered around me, a looming black figure appeared

from behind the caravan. It strode into the shadows and disappeared into a bank of dark grey cloud. And footsteps… there were footsteps, for a few seconds only, before they melted into the mud… n

Stephen Gregory’s first novel, The Cormorant, which he wrote in Snowdonia 35 years ago, has been published several times in both the UK and the USA, and translated into German, Polish and Italian. The new edition, which is available from Parthian Books, is its tenth publication.