first became aware of a disturbance in the air. A kind of restlessness. I looked sharply up through the smeared windscreen, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. The road was deserted. No one had passed by on either side for some time. Yet there was a suggestion of movement nonetheless, a shifting of light on the ridges high above. The mountains loomed more menacingly over me and the hillside appeared even closer, those ancient forests of evergreen and the naked, unforgiving branches of trees in winter. What secrets did they contain within their shadows?
My heart skipped a beat. I wound down the window. The silence surged around me. Again, nothing. No telltale footsteps or voices or rumbling wheels in the distance. Only later, when it was over, did it occur to me that the silence was peculiar. I should have been able to hear something. The roar of the furnaces back in Tarascon or the belching chimneys of the factories at my back. The sound of metal on metal or the song of the railway lines snaking up through the Haute Vallée. The rapids on the river. But I was aware only of the silence. Silence, as if I were the only man left alive in the world.
Then I heard it. No, not heard. I sensed it. A whispering, almost like singing.
‘The others have slipped away into darkness.’
I caught my breath.
‘Who’s there?’
I often heard the ghost of George’s voice inside my head, though it was growing fainter with the passing years. But this was different. It was a lighter sound, gentle and exquisite, carried on the cold air. A reverberation, an echo of words once spoken in this place? Or the girl I’d heard singing outside the hotel in Tarascon, her plaintive melody somehow reaching high into the mountains? Or was that too fanciful? Of course there was nobody there, no one at all. How could there be?
I realised my hands were clamped rigidly to the steering wheel. The temperature had fallen and what looked to be snow clouds were approaching from the south. It was bitterly cold inside the car, too. I wound up the window, flexed my fingers until they were in working order and tucked my scarf tightly into the neck of my jumper.
I took refuge from my troubling thoughts in practical things. Leaning over, I studied the map book and tried to work out where, precisely, I was. I’d been heading towards Vicdessos, which was about fifteen miles from Tarascon. My intention had been to turn there and head across country on the back road to Ax-les-Thermes. Two chaps from home were at the resort for a week’s skiing and had invited me to join them for Christmas. I’d neither accepted nor declined the invitation, but now saw some merit in being among friends. I’d been driving around on my own for a few weeks now and the companionship might do me good.
I peered outside. If the map was accurate, it appeared I had missed the turning to Ax-les-Thermes. And if the weather were changing for the worse, it would be lunacy to head higher into the mountains. The sun was covered completely now and the sky was the colour of dirty linen. Far better to rejoin the main road.
I traced the route with my finger. If my calculations were correct, I could continue this way for another mile or two, past the villages of Aliat, Lapège and Capoulet-et-Junac, then I’d find myself back on the road to Vicdessos on the far side of this low range of hills.
Leaving the map book open on the passenger seat, I put my gloves back on and fired the electric starter. The little saloon spluttered back into life and I drove on.
The Storm Hits
I had gone no more than a mile or so when a flurry of sleet splattered against the windscreen. I turned on the wiper, which only smeared muck and ice over the glass. Winding down my side window, I reached round and tried to clear the worst of it with my handkerchief.
A violent gust of wind hit the Austin head on. I dropped from third to second gear, acutely aware that the tyres would not hold if the sleet turned to ice. A single snowflake, as large as a sixpence, settled upon the bonnet, then another and another. Within seconds, or so it seemed, I was in the centre of a blizzard. The snow was swirling and twisting in the spiralling draught, settling on the