Folk Devil

By Dewi Griffiths

"Two Religions: Two Brothers. One Ancient Tradition".

Three Wells: a remote English village, steeped in traditions passed down for countless generations.
The return of a man, John Stone, taken from there as a child sets in motion a battle between Paganism and Christianity. He is the last of the true Druids, the priests of the old religion, on a mission to raise a long forgotten god, Lugh, from a hidden well beneath the village.
John's guilt ridden brother, Alan, has become the village Vicar.
Their childhood friend Bob Farmer has become an internationally renown academic, whilst his sister Jane has stayed in Three Wells to become the village school mistress.
The return of John and Bob sets in motion the chain of events foreseen in prophecies of the druid Merlin, culminating at the annual Well Dressing, a traditional ceremony dedicated to thanking God for deliverance from the plague. This final Well Dressing will see John pitting the villagers of Three Wells against the newcomers who have come there to live... and die.

Folk Devil is The Wicker Man meets A Nightmare on Elm Street. A contemporary Celtic British horror novel.

Folk Devil is set in the Peak District - the very centre of England and is based on Celtic British Myths and History and is a part of Dewi Griffiths' Borderland Creative Universe as are his other novels Black Valley and Witch Sight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781999926311

Book preview

Part I: The Stolen Child

Chapter 1: Bad Memories

"Sorcery and sanctity… these are the only realities.

Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life"

Arthur Machen – ‘The White People’

July 2022. The wind rattles the bedroom window. He stirs from his dream. Dream and reality mixing for a moment. A tapping in the darkness. Getting faster and harder. Like a child’s fingers tapping on the window. His little brother. Desperate to come inside from the summer rainstorm outside.

Alan looks at the bedside clock. It’s three a.m. His wife Julie rolls over and drops back into her deep sleep. The clock’s display gives the only light in the pitch blackness inside and out. The street lights are switched off at midnight to save money by the village council. The effects of the economic crash over a decade and a half ago still reaching deep into these remote hills of Derbyshire, one hundred and fifty miles from London. In Britain that is a very long way. A different world.

The Peak District always has been a different world. Between places, always on the peripheries. Between the mills of Manchester and the steel forges of Sheffield. A part of neither. A rural idyll set aside from those dark satanic mills.

The Peak is divided in two between the moors of the Dark Peak and the limestone landscape of the White Peak. Contrasts in beauty. Both sanctuaries from the world beyond.

It’s not the first time the outside world has reached into the White Peak, into this picture perfect postcard village of Three Wells. Three and a half centuries ago it was the Plague. The village of Eyam, only ten miles away, let no soul in nor out as the Plague ran its course. The village practically invented the concept of quarantine well before learned doctors discovered how the pestilence was passed on.

Three Wells as ever kept its head down, not appearing in any of those histories, but like most of the villages in The Peak thanked God for deliverance from the Plague with flowers. Turning to its Pagan past; the ritual of Well Dressing. Turning sacrifice into a celebration by the community to thank God for deliverance.

Alan stares into the darkness of his bedroom. You can’t cut yourself off in the modern world. No man is an island. He cannot quarantine himself against the anger and loss of someone kidnapping and murdering his little brother. An autistic kid. Special. His responsibility. He should have looked after him. That’s what he was told to do. He turned his back on his annoying little brother and John was gone.

Alan woke hoping that the tapping at the window was John coming back. The way John used to tap on their bedroom window in School House when the doors were locked after he had slipped out onto the Moor at night. But the tapping on the window right now won’t be John. John died thirty years ago.

The memory snaps Alan fully awake. Alan sits up quietly as to not wake Julie and swings out of bed. He leaves the room barefoot not making a sound.

Alan doesn’t need lights. He has been in this Vicarage for over a decade and walking around in the dark as to not to wake anyone is something that happens often. Most nights now. He closes his daughter Cathy’s bedroom door silently as he heads for the stairs.

He feels every creak in The Vicarage staircase as he descends to his study, nodding to The Cross on the wall even though it is unseen in the darkness. He closes the door behind him and switches on the reading lamp on his desk. The print out of his sermon with hand written notes is on the desk by his computer.

Alan takes a seat at his desk, leaning over to the old TV/VHS tape combo on the far side of the antique desk. Alan hits the round power button. Static on the old cathode ray tube lights the room softly. Alan knows that the tape is in there. There are no other tapes he plays now. He hits rewind. The machine spools back the tape noisily until the tape stops. Alan hits play. The tape is well worn. The picture rolls and wobbles for a moment. It’s a local TV News report from 1992. Grainy, too sharp, hyper-real. Too real. Nightmarish.

The news reporter speaking in RP English, back in the day when local accents were not shown on TV, even local TV. Alan turns off the sound as to not to disturb his wife or daughter sleeping upstairs. He knows every word anyway.

The report is very well edited, put together to tell a story, not like today’s reports which are basically some idiot standing in a place where something happened showing the viewers nothing but themselves. In fact, the report is so well done it’s a historical document.

The reporter stands in Three Wells village square outside the famous Market Hall. As he speaks his words are superimposed with images of the village and the search for Alan’s little brother. John Stone. Eight years old. Special needs child. Missing. Believed kidnapped. Everyone out searching the streets, sheds, woods, hillsides and caves. Hundreds of people mobilised. The streets and side roads filled with cars, bringing people from all over the area to help the Police search. Press and news crews. An event millions remember but no one speaks of anymore.

His father, Mr. Stone the headmaster. The village school teachers, Peter Wragg and his wife Betty Wragg. The village children, Alan himself as a teary eyed ten year old, his friends Jane and Bob around the same age, just slightly younger. The same age as the boy who is missing. John. A family snapshot of John with his parents, cutting out Alan. For thirty years Alan has balked at this. Why was he cut out of the shot? It’s his brother! His responsibility! Alan closes his eyes.

He opens them to the police mug-shot photograph of the Old Man who took John away. Long haired. A wild look in his eyes. The local people had called him a hippie. Alan had as a child associated the word with friendly long haired altruistic idealists. Later he found pictures of Charles Manson and saw a similarity with Myrddin Lloyd. That was his name. The New Age Traveller who kidnapped and killed his little brother.

The contact telephone number is the old Sheffield dialling code, which was changed a year or two later. Maybe that’s why no one ever phoned to report that they had found John. A dead number. Alan smiles to himself. Three a.m. logic. Three a.m. is the time when Satan and his forces are at their height, trying to convince him that he is not to blame for this, when obviously it’s all his fault.

Alan stops and rewinds the tape. He hits play again, turning up the volume. He watches this tape for hours sometimes. Not to ease his guilt. To expose it. Make it raw. Electronic flagellation for a modern holy man.

Tears well up in Alan’s eyes and he closes them, listening intently to the words of the BBC reporter as he explains how Alan allowed darkness into this perfect world.

‘Three Wells, in the heart of The Peak District. One of England’s most beautiful and remote places. This village known only for its ancient Well Dressing Ceremony has been brought crashing into the twentieth century, with the abduction of the village school headmaster’s son. John Stone, an eight year old with learning difficulties, has not been seen since Tuesday. What was initially the search for a missing child on The Peaks has been transformed into a kidnap manhunt after the sighting of the boy with this man: Myrddin Lloyd, a New Age Traveller with a trail of criminal convictions right across Europe. Lloyd was seen in the area over the past few weeks speaking to the missing boy and other village children. Police are asking for anyone who has any information as to the whereabouts of John Stone, Lloyd, or other New Age Travellers recently seen in the area, to contact White Peak Police immediately on this number.’

A hand on his shoulder. Alan jolts awake. Julie his wife leans forward and stops the tape and switches off the TV combo. If you keep doing this, I’m going to burn that tape! You have to forget all that and move on. It’s thirty years ago Alan. 1992. It’s 2022 now. History. You can’t let it control your life. Let it go or get help. Please!

He was my little brother, Julie. I was supposed to take care of him. Keep him safe. He was only eight.

Alan please. You were a ten year old child. A child. It was a different world. People let children run wild in those days. Bad things happen to good people, babe. It wasn’t your fault.

I just wish I knew what happened to him.

Julie frowns knowing that pushing this memory down is better than prising it out. It can’t be lanced like a boil, it makes Alan what he is. An altruistic person at the heart of the community. Loved by everyone but questioned wordlessly as to why he took a wife from the big city. Wasn’t a local girl what he needed? If you are not born in Three Wells you are an Outsider. Behind the smiles, the villagers don’t like having an Outsider in the Vicarage. They don’t want them in the village!

Julie hugs Alan from behind, putting her cheek against his. Be careful what you wish for babe. Some dreadful old man took him away. Be thankful you don’t know what happened to him. Come back to bed. Please babe.

Alan looks at a photograph on his desk. The children in the video; a more recent snapshot of three people taken in the village pub a dozen years ago. Alan with Jane and Bob.

Chapter 2: A Dark History

"It’s no use going back to yesterday,

because I was a different person then"

Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland

Manchester and Sheffield are on the opposite borders of the Peak District. London is a hundred and fifty miles south, down the motorway. Many who grew up in Three Wells ran to these places where they could build bigger lives. But Bob went further. Seattle.

The far side of another continent. Four and a half thousand miles as the crow flies. Eight hours’ time difference. A third of a planet away. At the far western edge of the English speaking world.

Bob ran away from home too, just like he always told himself John Stone had done. Not being able to contemplate anything else as a ten year old in a remote village where any wrong doing was domestic and so not talked of in front of the children. John had run away with a crazy old guy to be free of Three Wells.

But Bob will never be free of Three Wells. Like everyone, he is drawn back to the place he was raised, educated and formed. A place he took for granted and didn’t question as a child but is so deeply driven as a man to understand it. Driven to know it better, even from eight time zones away. Forgetting the fact that all that distance away, Three Wells is changing from the village he knew as a child.

Seattle was a city he had grown to love, but had never really put down roots, the way you can put down roots in a village where everyone knows your name.

Coming to Seattle was a culture shock for the village boy, even after a few years in London. He navigated by the tall buildings or the Pink Elephant Car Wash near where he first lived. In his first week in the city, he had seen a queue, and thinking it must be worthwhile as it was so long, he joined it. As he got to the head of the queue, he found out it was for free methadone. He is far more streetwise today.

He liked being by the sea. Seattle is surrounded by the Puget Sound and waterways. His home in Kirkland overlooks the waterways with Seattle towering beyond. Derbyshire is the furthest place from the sea in the British Isles. He never went to the seaside as a child. It was too far.

And this part of Washington state has its forests, hills, and mountains. Bob felt at home here. Down south aways is the only rainforest in the northern hemisphere, on the Olympic Islands. It rained in Derbyshire too. The only time it stopped was for the idyllic summers before John ran away. What he called The White Summers as a child because they were so bright.

John going away. John being taken away. By a deranged hippy. Strange to consider that Bob moved to a very hippie city, the home of Jimmy Hendrix. Seattle did things its own way. The home of Grunge, the same outsider mentality expressed in a different way. The Seattle way. Always at the cutting edge of technology. The home of Boeing where the plane that brought him here was made in the biggest building in the world.

Seattle. The Silicon Valley of the North West, mixing cutting edge thought with cutting edge technology. The home of Microsoft and other really big businesses like Amazon and Starbucks. A mix that thrills Bob. So much more dynamic, but more relaxed than Manchester or London where he lived and studied, before he got the hell out of Britain. He’s glad he did with Brexit and the war in Ukraine. Although living in Trump’s America was not in the game plan. The America he dreamt of in his bed in Three Wells is dying around him.

It is Three Wells that is filling Bob’s mind this evening, as it’s been filling his mind every day for weeks. A longing. What his Welsh girlfriend back in the day when he was a student in Manchester had called hiraeth.

Bob carries his laptop bag into the Coast Salish Building, like all of the buildings on the University of the Pacific Northwest’s campus, named after the Native American tribes of the state.

This was one of the things that had drawn Bob here, a chance to study cultures still practicing shamanism. Comparing it to the old religion of Britain. The stone circles and standing stones around Three Wells hadn’t fascinated him as a child. They were like wallpaper. Now he studies all this in Seattle, one of the most non-religious cities in the world, where only a third of people followed any religion at all. Seattle suits Bob, being a religion obsessed atheist.

Bob passes a poster with his photograph on it. Actually, a really good one. It takes years off him. Making him look the part, the wunderkind of the faculty, even at nearly forty. He’d outgrow the place and move on eventually to pastures new. Maybe even back to the old country. Yes. That would be ideal.

The poster reads, ‘The University of the Pacific Northwest Summer Courses: Inter-Cultural Studies: Lecturer Dr. Bob Farmer’. Bob enters the empty lecture theatre.

An hour later the lecture is in full swing. Quite a crowd for a Tuesday evening after the end of the semester. Mostly his students from the final year, whose graduation he attended last week, but also a smattering of sophomores, some of the faculty, and a few new faces. Those must be members of the public. That’s a surprise. A nice surprise. And they are being entertained.

Bob is in his element. Old enough in his late thirties to have his doctorate and a number of papers under his belt, but young enough to be dynamic, use new technology in an engaging way, here where class numbers are not on an industrial scale.

Behind him on the big screen are images showing the prehistoric landscape of the White Peak. As Bob moves through his talk, he flicks though his images. Standing stones. Stone circles. A massive earthwork and a nearby burial mound. These images are increasingly of Three Wells. Bob is talking about his home.

So, these edifices from prehistory, erected well before the birth of Christ still dominate a few select landscapes in the remoter areas of Britain. But even then, with the increasing Christian domination of religious thought and practice in the British Isles, the remnants of these Pagan and Druidic practices based around these once holy places died out. With the near elimination of the native languages of these areas, these remaining Druidic customs have mostly died out too. In Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the remoter parts of England, remnants of the Druidic religion became folk customs. And some have survived through assimilation. Christianised forms are held in a handful of places. Like in the remote English region of The Peak District, including my home village of Three Wells.

Bob projects a series of slides showing groups of villagers Well Dressing; parading a large picture made of flowers, mounted on a board through a Peak District town. The Well Dressing is placed beside a stone drinking fountain in a school yard.

Wow Professor, this is your home? Morgan, a recently graduated student of his.

Not quite. This is a neighbouring town called Bakewell. Also known for a style of tart or pudding.

Laughs from the crowd. Bob watches the rapt faces and smiles. He’s loving the chance to come off his curriculum and talk on his pet subject. The ceremony still practiced here is known as Well Dressing, basically decorating a local well with a picture made of flowers. Its purpose today, apart from drawing the community together, is to thank God for deliverance from the Great Plague that ravaged Britain in the mid 1660s. And once again very apt in the wake of Coronavirus. This quaint practice actually has its origins as a Druidic sacrificial ceremony…

Professor, you mean human sacrifice? In England? I thought you limeys were more genteel? Courtland, the newly graduated class clown. He’ll actually miss this student. Some laughter from the class.

Oh yes. The Celts had their own empire stretching across Europe before the Romans. The Druids were the priests of their religion. They were bloodthirsty times, and they performed human sacrifice as a part of their religion, yes.

Courtland is on a roll, as this may be his last chance to bait Bob. What religion? Worshipping trees? Come on Professor Farmer. Sniggers again from some of the audience. But others are not laughing.

Morgan rounds on Courtland. Why not? Trees are the oldest living things on earth. But it’s worshipping nature, right? So, the well would be a source of water. A source of life? Like the fields where they grew things?

Bob butts in, happy that the crowd is getting more involved, but not wanting his talk derailed by some sort of Christian vs. Pagan debate. That was not the idea. Yes, absolutely Morgan. We know very little about the Druid’s religion because they never wrote anything down. All we have is what the Romans and later scholars have told us about them.

Morgan again. And that’s biased right? I mean, Christian history! Wicca comes from these ancient arts…

Courtland wants the last word. Witches and wizards. Very Harry Potter. More laughs.

Bob has learned never to lose a point to a student in a lecture. Absolutely. You know you’re right Courtland. Wizards and their magic wands come from the Druids and their staffs.

Bob minimises his PowerPoint show and digs into his files. He calls up an animation. A cartoon wizard, blue cape and pointed hat with a little magic wand in his hand. Bob presses play and the cartoon wizard morphs into a druid priest with his wooden staff. Laughs and applause from the audience. Bob smiles as Courtland bows his head, smiling, beaten by his old professor.

Bob starts to talk again, getting the attention of the crowd as he restarts his PowerPoint. This is a big area I’ll be covering in my next book. How ancient cultural practices are still with us in the modern world.

The PowerPoint resumes. The slide changes to etchings of the Black Death. "As I was saying, in the villages of The Peak District, including in my home village, the Christian Church reinterpreted Well Dressing from a sacrifice to the Old Gods to a celebration of deliverance by God from the Great Plague of the mid 1660s which wiped out over a third of Europe’s population. This event is still alive in our culture today. For example, the children’s nursery rhyme Ring a Ring of Roses comes from the symptoms of the plague. A red rash, sneezing and sudden death."

The black and white etchings of angels, dead figures, and the terrifying Plague Doctors, with their hats and long snouts making them look like monsters amongst the dying quieten the audience to reverential silence.

The slide changes again. A picture postcard perfect view of Three Wells. Taken from the top of a hill, the brown stone built village nestles in the fold of the hills. Now this is my home village. You know I haven’t been to a Well Dressing there since I was a teenager.

Chapter 3: Bad Dreams

They’ve promised that dreams can come true – but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.

— Oscar Wilde.

A warm idyllic summer’s morning. The smell of freshness after the overnight rain during the hottest summer in decades. Three Wells nestling snugly in the folds of the green valley. The light yellow browns of the stone buildings are a part of the landscape. Earth coloured in the sunlight.

These hand-hewn local stone structures rising out of the land like the limestone crags up on higher ground which overlooks the village. Three Wells has been a part of this landscape for hundreds of years. Ancient. Unchanged. Fixed. Its residents a part of the cycle of life up here, like all of the creatures of The Peak.

Everything is good in her world as she runs away from it. The sun is too bright. Too glorious. It hurts her eyes as it rises. But she runs onwards towards it. Drawn to it.

She runs through the village, across the deserted village square with its Market Hall, passing her school, out of the village passing The Druid’s Inn. Down the lane passing The Druid’s Rocks which tower over the pub and her father’s Church beyond. Seeing the churchyard briefly through the iron gates. She closes her eyes. She keeps running. The dread of the churchyard being overtaken by something else.

She feels eyes watching her from up above. Up in The Druid’s Rocks? She doesn’t turn around to look. She is too scared. She feels the eyes following her from above as she runs along this road as it climbs the steep hill into the greenery which surrounds Three Wells.

Cathy is out of breath. Trying to run but her legs are failing her. Her lungs straining. And the sun is getting hotter now. She has to hurry. Not a sound except for her beating heart, her breathing and her feet hitting the tarmac.

Cathy is dressed for school. So why is she running up to Three Wells Moor? She doesn’t know. Nor does she know why she is running towards the darkness of the trees up there beneath the rising sun.

The Moor. Where her father had made her promise never to go alone, nor with her friends. But that is where she is going. Desperate to get there along the narrow lane with high green hedges enclosing her from the bright deep green fields beyond.

Cathy reaches the junction with the top road and joins the old straight road. Miss Farmer said it’s called a Roman Road, but it was probably older. The old straight road connects the villages on this part of the Peak. There is usually a lot of fast moving traffic. Her father says it’s really dangerous. But all is silent. Cathy is alone. Or is she? She can still feel the eyes watching. A dark shadow swoops across the road up ahead. Cathy stops. Frightened. She looks up into the empty sky catching her breath.

She has to keep running. The hedges are too high to climb and there is barbed wire on the top to keep the sheep in and her out. Keeping her on the road to The Moor. Cathy runs onwards closing her eyes, running along the perfectly straight road.

The sun hits her with a wall of heat. She opens her eyes. She has reached the end of the endless towering hedges. She looks towards the sun. Through the bright light she sees the open brown ground rising to her right. Three Wells Moor.

The Moor. At last. Just behind the fence. Fencing posts and wire mesh. But no way through. Up ahead there is a wooden gate as tall as she is. Cathy climbs it at the end with the hinges like her father has taught her. That’s how you climb gates. Swinging over the top is tricky in her school skirt, but she climbs down the other side quickly.

Her feet on the brown soil of the Moor. It feels different. Not like the cold tarmac of the Roman Road. Cathy can feel the warmth of the soil through the soles of her school shoes. She takes off her shoes and socks. Her bare feet on this brown ground; warm, enfolding her feet as she walks. Hugging her into itself.

She walks away from the road, climbing the hill onto The Moor. Open. Unowned. Common ground since before the Romans were here, Miss Farmer said. The grass kept down by sheep. Brown grass. Brown-black gorse and the pathways the sheep and people took through it.

Cathy sees it for the first time. The Moor is the place her father told her that she should never go. She can hear his voice calling her back to safety. She looks around to see her father standing on the road below screaming at her to come back down. He is unable to climb the gate to come and get her. Something is stopping him. She can’t see what it is.

Cathy keeps walking up the hill, her feet sinking into the ground so deep that she can feel the warm rock below. The shouting has stopped. She glances around. Her father has gone. But she is still being watched. The eyes are nearby. She can feel them. Just up ahead but the sun is blinding. She can’t see anything.

But as she reaches the top of the hill, she sees it for the first time. She has spent all of her short life in Three Wells but has never seen it. The King Stone.

Just like her friends described, when they told her about the times they went there to play. A huge standing stone beside the pathway running off across the Moor. Standing above the remains of a little quarry, where the stones have been taken away to build something important, way back before the Romans and before Christ were born.

The King Stone looks like it was too big to move elsewhere. Cathy remembers another lesson she had with Miss Farmer. It must be like an iceberg, with far more reaching down into the earth than can be seen above. Its roots deep inside the earth. Its huge like those stones in pictures she saw of Stonehenge. But brown. As tall as a house. Brown stone growing out of this brown soil. A part of the landscape since the time of the gods. The silence starts to hurt Cathy’s ears. Her ears start to ring.

Cathy walks towards The King Stone. She feels something moving behind the stone. Then it’s gone. No shadow. No sound. It’s gone. Is it safe now? Cathy walks around The King Stone. Someone has cut footholds into the rear like steps so the stone can be climbed. But they are too high for her to reach. Cathy looks upwards into that sun. Blinding. Something is on top of the stone. Something black. Something growing taller. A shape silhouettes against the light. A man in a wide brimmed hat and full length leather coat carrying a stick. Piercing red eyes despite the brightness of the sun. The man smiles.

Cathy is rooted to the spot in fear. Her father and mother’s voices somewhere nearby. Not behind her. Up ahead. She runs towards them. Deeper into The Moor, following the sheep trail through the gorse towards the black woods. The woods on Three Wells Moor: a place she is not allowed to go. Never! Her father and mother shouting somewhere up ahead. Something black following her.

She runs into the trees. Old trees but thin like plague victims. Irregularly spaced. Some lying dead on the ground. Others reaching out to her for help. Grabbing at her as she runs past.

Cathy runs along the path, glancing backwards. Whatever is following her is not on the path. It’s in the trees, fading and forming unnaturally from tree to tree. There one second, gone the next. Chasing her.

Cathy closes her eyes and runs on blindly. She trips on something and falls flat on the brown-black ground. She looks at her shin – scuffed and bleeding. The blood dripping onto the ground and disappearing. Like it’s being sucked into the earth.

Around her are small standing stones. Arranged in a circle. Nine of them. Weathered stones like the King Stone. Old. Worn. Used. She is at the centre of the stone circle. The Nine Ladies. This is another place she is never to go.

Miss Farmer had done a class on The Nine Ladies and the King Stone up on here on Three Wells Moor. They are the same brown stone. Cathy sees her blood, red on the dry stone. The blood soaks into the stone and is gone.

Beyond the stones in the woods the Dark Figure moves through the dark trees forming and fading into the shadows, coming into view at the edge of the clearing.

She can see him clearly now as he walks into the sunlight. The wide hat. The long coat. His face blackened and shining. He is carrying a wooden staff. His teeth smiling through the rough beard and his red eyes burning against the darkness of his face beneath the wide brimmed hat. His eyes are full of blood. His eyes watching her as he walks around the circle.

He steps into the stone circle and reaches out to Cathy. Up close Cathy can smell something metallic. Like when she had a tooth out. Blood. The smell and taste overcome her. The man’s face is blackened, as are his clothes. Red black. Blood. The man is covered in blood.

Cathy screams and runs out of the stone circle and into the black trees. Back the way she came. Back down the track. Back towards home. She is on the rough path across the open moor towards the King Stone. Beneath it, down at the foot of the quarry is a dark hole. A cave opening in the rocks. Cathy can feel the eyes following her. Catching up with her. The coppery smell fills the air. She slides down the bank to the quarry and dives inside the cave to hide.

There should be darkness but there is faint light. Cathy goes deeper. The cave becomes a tunnel, narrow but wide enough for her to pass through. Going downwards quite steeply, and all the time lit by a faint glow up ahead. The air starting to taste of something different as she goes downwards. The silence has returned. Just the sound of her breathing and the beating of her