The Low Road Read online

  It wasn’t raining this time, but it was dark. Alex didn’t stay as late at his mother’s as he had the week before, because the tide was earlier. Without the previous week’s downpour he could have driven faster, but he slipped down to the speed he had been going before, the radio tuned to the oldies station again.

  And there by the side of the road, holding out his thumb, was Joe.

  Alex braked before his sensible self could force him to drive on.

  As before, Joe opened the car door and leaned in.

  “Hello again!” Alex grinned.

  This is ridiculous. What the hell am I doing?

  But Joe’s bright smile chased his doubts away. He was real. Alex couldn’t have imagined a smile like that.

  “Alex! Great to see you. Can you take me into town again? I didn’t quite get there before.”

  “Of course—hop in.”

  Joe put his bag in the footwell. Rain dripped off his coat and his hair.

  “Is it raining?” Alex asked.

  It wasn’t—Alex was certain of it. There was no incessant banging on the roof, no deluge for his windscreen wipers to struggle through.

  “Chucking it down!” Joe grinned.

  The seat had been dry.

  Alex patted Joe’s arm. The anorak was slick with water and as Alex took the steering wheel again, he felt the dampness under his hand. But when he looked through his windscreen, there was no rain at all.

  “I’m going to a party,” Joe replied. “Want to come? You can take me for that drink you promised.”

  Alex nodded. “Yes, that drink—as long as you don’t run off on me this time.”

  “Did I?” Joe looked rather dazed, and Alex decided not to press the issue. He pulled back out onto the road and they went on their way.

  “Have you been busy since I last saw you?” Joe asked. “We’ve been busy on the farm. This bloody drought—I’m so glad we’ve at last got rain! I reckon you work in an office, don’t you?”

  Drought? It’d been a miserable, grey summer with only the occasional sunny day.

  “Got it in one,” Alex replied. “Yes, I do work in an office—I’m an accountant. Not exactly thrilling, I know, but it’s a good job.”

  Joe beamed at him. Alex tried to keep his attention on the road.

  “Bet you look great in a suit.” There was definitely something coquettish in Joe’s voice and Alex smiled to himself. Wonderful, no one flirts with me unless I invent them.

  “Not too bad.” He changed gear as they started to head downhill. “Bet you look great in your wellies.”

  “Sitting astride my tractor?” Joe said in a deliberately over-the-top rural accent filled with innuendo.

  “Well, yes!” Alex laughed. “And no ford to drive through this time…”

  The road was dry, but as they reached the valley bottom, Joe shook his head, putting his hand on Alex’s arm. “It’s a torrent! You better slow down.”

  Alex did so, and heard the swish of water under his car. Water that wasn’t there.

  I’ve lost my mind. I’ve gone completely insane.

  He changed down into a lower gear as the car headed uphill. To Gallows Hill. The signposts at the crossroads grew nearer, the headlights catching them in the diminishing light.

  His throat dry, Alex begged Joe, “Don’t go. Please don’t, Joe. Please. I…”

  This time, as he reached the top of the hill, Alex watched as Joe, who was there clear as day one minute, vanished the next. Alex jolted and accidentally set off his hazard lights.

  He banged his fists on the steering wheel. “No! No, you’re not meant to go. I imagined you, so why do you go? Why, when I want to see you?”

  He closed his eyes tight, bringing back the vision of Joe to his mind. The red anorak, the dark blond hair, the large blue eyes. When he opened his eyes, Joe was not there.

  Alex leaned forwards against the steering wheel, burying his face in his arms.

  * * * *

  Alex waited patiently at the local history desk in the library. A librarian appeared, who was wearing an ID card on a lanyard and a quantity of silver piercings in her face. No cardigans or glasses on beaded chains in this library, it seemed.

  “Can I help?” she asked.

  “Yes…perhaps. I’m trying to find out about Gallows Hill.”

  The librarian grinned. Given the Mexican sugar skull on the librarian’s T-shirt, Alex was not surprised at her reaction. He had found himself a librarian who was not afraid of the macabre.

  “Oh wow, Gallows Hill is so awesome, isn’t it? I go that way to see my auntie, and it’s so weird when the bus drives through there and you think of all the bodies buried under the road.” She sounded extremely pleased at the thought of it, and started to rummage on the shelf behind her. “Got a book here on famous local executions, if that would help?”

  Alex sagged a little against the desk. “It’s not…not exactly what I’m looking for. I’m just wondering, are there stories of anything odd happening at Gallows Hill?”

  She chuckled. “Besides buses driving over dead people?”

  Alex tried his best at a grin in return.

  “Okay, well, there’s a book on local ghosts?” she suggested.

  “Not exactly ghosts, but…” Alex made a decision. He had to be open to whatever he was experiencing, hallucinations or otherwise. “Well, yes, maybe that would be helpful.”

  “Ghosts come under odd things happening,” the librarian assured him. “Let me just go and grab the book. I’ll be a couple of ticks.”

  She bounded off, leaving Alex alone at the desk. He turned the book on executions towards him, grimacing at the stark image of a noose on the cover. He flicked through, skimming his way over the lives and deaths of local ne’er-do-wells. Does anyone grieve for the executed?

  The librarian returned and passed a slim book to him with a cover that showed a grey, wraith-like being drifting across a lonely country road. “Here we are! There’s a whole section on Gallows Hill in here.”

  “A whole section? Are there lots of ghosts on Gallows Hill?”

  She nodded. “Loads. A stagecoach and a smuggler, a grey lady, a black dog—you know, like the Black Shuck at Blythburgh. All that sort of thing.” She watched Alex’s face, and he wondered what he had given away as she asked him, in a low voice, “Why? Have you seen one?”

  Alex’s hand trembled and he turned the book face down on the counter. “I’ve seen…something odd. But it might be nothing. I’m probably just seeing things.”

  “Or you might really have seen something. I have.” She tapped her chest. “In this very building. An old man on the stairs. I offered him my arm to help him, but when he went to take it…he disappeared.”

  Alex took a step back from the desk. Joe can’t be a ghost. Ghosts don’t engage in conversation. His subconscious had invented him, and coming in here looking for ghost stories was hardly going to help matters.

  But before he could stop himself, Alex had passed the librarian his library card and a moment later, he was headed home with the book under his arm.

  * * * *

  Alex didn’t read the book right away. It lurked on his coffee table, telegraphing a sense of unease around his flat. He put a magazine over it because the cover spooked him, and he left it there as he went out that evening with Tora and some of her friends. But he didn’t really concentrate much on socialising.

  That book, that book…

  “You still look peaky,” Tora advised him. “Look at you. You’re so pale.”

  “I didn’t go away on holiday this year, and I didn’t manage to get much of a tan here!” Alex laughed, but he knew it sounded hollow.

  Two years ago, he had gone on holiday with his boyfriend at the time. Alex had managed to ruin a gorgeous week in Majorca on the last evening when, over a cava-fuelled dinner, he had proposed and been rebuffed.

  He could still hear his desperate voice. ‘We don’t have to get married right away. One day maybe. Years from now. I ju
st want to make a promise to you. That’s all.’

  ‘We’ve been going out for eight months, Alex, and suddenly you want a fucking wedding!’

  ‘I just…’

  Alex had never finished his sentence. He and Mark had split up as soon as they had retrieved their suitcases from the carousel at Stansted.

  Perhaps dead relationships had their ghosts. A haunting of a love from the past. But maybe Mark had never loved him. Alex had never been sure.

  “You okay, Alex?” Tora stroked his arm, and Alex blinked his way back to the present.

  “Sorry. Just thinking about things. Feeling a bit…not nostalgic, exactly, but I was just thinking about that holiday I went on with Mark.”

  “Oh, don’t talk to me about him!” Tora held up her hand. “No, not Mark, that horrible bastard. You deserve better than him, Alex, much better.”

  But Mark had been Alex’s last boyfriend.

  He leaned back against the bar and idly gazed around the room. Was there a man here who he’d go out with, given the chance? There were some good-looking guys around, but Alex wondered if any of them would like him. He was average height, his hair was dark, his eyes were brown and he didn’t have too bad a figure, but he knew he wasn’t stunning. No one would look at him across a crowded room and drop everything to run to him.

  In fact, if that did happen, it would make him feel uncomfortable anyway. So maybe it was just as well that no one would. And he hadn’t followed up his mother’s matchmaking attempts. It was best to leave it. It was best to—

  Joe?

  Alex spotted the tawny-haired man as soon as he came through the door of the bar. Alex stood straighter, no longer slouching, and smiled across the room.

  But he’s not real, you idiot.

  And Alex looked again, realising that it wasn’t Joe after all. Someone who looked a bit like him, who had apparently seen Alex smile and had turned away.

  Alex ordered a round of drinks and listened to Tora and her friends as they laughed. If he was with a group of people having an amazing night out, maybe he could claim that he’d had a good time too.

  Alex declined the suggestion of a post-pub kebab and went home by himself. He’d just go straight to bed and—

  The library book.

  He could see its spine poking out from under the magazine, part of the title obscured by the shelfmark label.

  Not the best book to read before bed, but seeing the book again had made all thoughts of sleep flee.

  Alex made himself a fruit tea and settled in his favourite chair, with only a standard lamp to illuminate the room. The librarian had helpfully placed a free bookmark advertising a local taxi firm at the start of the Gallows Hill section. Forgetting the tea that steamed on the side table next to him, Alex began to read.

  Since earliest times, high strangeness has been afoot at Gallows Hill. Probably where druids made their sacrifices before the Romans arrived and displaced them, the crossroads at this site is ancient and for hundreds of years was the place where criminals were sent to their doom. In the seventeenth century, witches who had dabbled in the cunning arts were hanged here then buried under the road. In the eighteenth century, it was the turn of highwaymen and pirates. By the early nineteenth century, the practice of executing condemned criminals at crossroad gallows was phased out, but Gallows Hill, a remote location on the lip of a valley with a Roman burial mound only a couple of miles distant, is an unsettling place. The Black Shuck has been seen here by drivers, who swerve to avoid it as fiendish red eyes drift across the road, glowing like lumps of burning coal in the night.

  Alex was shaken out of the book at this. Is that where those tyre tracks came from? But he couldn’t think that anyone would admit to having swerved out of the path of a hellhound. And he’d certainly not seen one.

  He went back to the book.

  A stagecoach has been seen on this lonely stretch of road, which is believed to contain the victims of a family slaughtered by a highwayman who was hanged at Gallows Hill. Their cries can still be heard on the anniversary of their cruel murder.

  Alex trembled and drew the throw from the sofa around his shoulders.

  A grey lady, too, has been seen around Gallows Hill. She is thought to have thrown herself off the causeway after her intended was lost at sea. Her ghostly spirit has been seen wandering up and down the lane as she calls for her dead love.

  Sometimes at night, the glow from spectral lanterns can be seen in the fields beside the road, as the spirits of long-dead smugglers make their way down to the causeway to collect their contraband. The sound of heavy wood and metal is heard scraping along the road as those same spectres roll barrels of rum and wine back to their dens in the marshes.

  Alex turned the page. There was only a paragraph left, and if it was anything like what he’d just been reading, it would only be more unreferenced hearsay that no one could ever corroborate. He wasn’t surprised that the librarian had had to look for the book outside the local history desk—it must’ve been shelved with fiction.

  Alex steeled himself with a mouthful of tea and went on.

  In more modern times, another spirit has joined the others, that of a young man who appears in the passenger seat of the vehicles of unsuspecting motorists.

  Alex hadn’t forgotten to close the windows and the heating was still on, but it was so cold in the room as he went on reading.

  Believed to be the ghost of an unlucky hitch-hiker, this phantom has been seen since the mid-1970s. No one knows who he was in life. The ghost appears for a minute or so, then vanishes as soon as the vehicle reaches Gallows Hill, his silent presence unexplained.

  Every limb rigid, Alex stared at the page, reading and re-reading until the words spun in his head, repeating like a chant.

  But I know who he is.

  * * * *

  On Sunday Alex decided to visit his mother, partly because he didn’t want to be on his own, but mainly as an excuse to head out over Gallows Hill again. She was surprised by his unexpected visit, especially as she was enjoying a quiet Sunday lunch with a man who Alex soon realised was none other than her boyfriend. Which had been rather awkward. He hadn’t known until that moment that his mother had a boyfriend.

  “You look well,” his mother said as Alex left half an hour later. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “It’s okay, Mum. Really. I’m a big boy these days and can look after myself.”

  She hugged him. “No matter how old you are, you’ll always be my little boy. Give me three rings when you get in.”

  Alex’s mother and her quiet-spoken, rather gentlemanly silver-haired boyfriend, stood on the doorstep and waved Alex off as he headed back into town.

  The tide was out and Alex crossed the causeway. His hands trembled on the steering wheel as he reached the mainland and was swallowed once more by the gloomy lane.

  Unlucky hitch-hiker.

  What the hell had happened? Had someone run Joe down? Did someone— God, no, if someone had murdered a hitch-hiker on the main road into town, it’d be common knowledge, something that even the poorly referenced ghost story book would’ve mentioned. Had there been a crash?

  Maybe. Alex knew how dangerous the road was, especially on a dark, rainy night. He’d gone that way often enough, once his parents had moved to the island village after he’d left for university. For over a decade he’d driven the route. So why had Joe chosen now to materialise in his car?

  Alex shook his head. He was heading to the spot where he realised Joe waited, and he pulled over and got out.

  “Joe?” he called. There was no one to reply, apart from some cows in a field on the other side of the trees. They mooed at him, as if telling him that he was on a fool’s errand and should give up and go home.

  Of course there was no one there. Joe was a ghost. If he was even that. He only appeared at night, and was always soaked from the rain. Even when it hadn’t been raining.

  Wasn’t there some theory that ghosts were stuck in time, forever
replaying a significant moment in their life? What if Joe had got into a car on a rainy night, intent on going to a party in town despite the terrible weather and his lack of funds for a taxi, and what if the car had crashed?

  What if Joe had been killed?

  Alex shivered. A car drove by, heading towards Gallows Hill. He had an impression that someone in the car looked at him, presumably wondering what the heck he was doing standing on the side of the road.

  Blackberrying. That’s what I’ll say.

  But on the other side of that thought was a horrible pang, a sense of loss that left Alex breathless. He clung to a tree branch, his eyes closing as he tried to control the wave of grief that forced its way over him. Joe was young, handsome, friendly. He was just the sort of man that Alex would ask out, if he could.

  And Joe was dead. Very dead. Dead even before Alex had been born.

  No wonder Joe’s hand had been so icy-cold to the touch.

  Yet Joe had spoken to him. No one else who’d had Joe as a passenger had heard him speak—at least, if that book of ghost stories was to be believed.

  “Alex?”

  He opened his eyes, and there before him, in his dripping anorak, was Joe. He was smiling.

  “Are you going into town again, Alex? Only, I wouldn’t mind a lift.”

  Alex tightened his grip on the branch, then with an effort released it.

  “Yes, of course I’ll give you a lift. But we could…we could have a chat first, if you like?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Joe replied. “You all right in this rain? You haven’t got an umbrella.”

  Alex shoved his hands into his pockets. “No…no, I’m okay for umbrellas, but thanks anyway.”

  “The party’s going to be fun,” Joe said. “I was going to bring some of my records, but I forgot them! What an idiot. Can’t be bothered to go back home through the rain and get them, though.”