Devil's Peak. Brian Ball

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ got to!” Jerry muttered to the rock face.

      He wriggled with his shoulders and arms until the rucksack was hanging over his right shoulder. The beer cans clanked. How tall were they? Seven inches? Eight? Enough height, but it would take the talents of the Sheffield Monkey Man to be sure of getting them just right! He worked the stiff leather straps free and reached for one of the cold tins. Long Life it said on the label.

      He had to catch the can between the good ledge on which his left boot rested and his leg, hold it in position, and locate the other beer can. Then that had to go on top of the other. It wasn’t possible, he told himself.

      The other can was lodged below the spare sweater and the Hovis loaf. It came free and he let the rucksack drop into the space below him, not watching it vanish into the swirling blizzard. He screwed his nerves to give maximum concentration. There would only be one chance. If he failed, Hagthorpe’s cemetery would know another moving little ceremony, with Andy and Anne sobbing at the graveside and going back to Sheffield to swill beer until they forgot him, and maybe Debbie there too if she wasn’t busy with her trawlerman. The Pakistani landlord whose name he could never remember would chuck out the stack of indecipherable notes that were all he had to show for three years’ work on his thesis. Long Life! Exit Jerry Howard in a late-April blizzard!

      With infinite care he lowered the can, arcing his body outwards to give the greatest leverage to his feet. Snowflakes made a dancing stream of white light between his body and the slippery rock face. Then the can was quivering against its mate, two ice-cold cans of beer whose contents should have been safely inside his belly by now.

      And they held upright. There was plenty of room on the ledge for both his left foot and the upright cans; there must be at least another quarter of an inch to spare, he thought.

      He looked once back at the blackness that was the High Peak and saw the mask of Devil’s Peak smiling enigmatically through the blizzard; he moved before he completely lost his nerve. Up! And arms, legs, belly, bearded face against rock, all that could be brought into play did their part. And he was on the cans, left hand searching for the good wide crack above, right hand on a sliver of rock that the yob hadn’t smashed away, right foot up and over the glassy expanse above the orange slice and on to a real ledge!

      Five minutes later, Jerry was on the top of Toller Edge in six inches of snow, completely exhausted.

      “Never again!” he whispered. “Never again!”

      He lay for nearly ten minutes, slowly freezing and enjoying it. He realised that he was slightly delirious. He looked at his watch, saw that there were two hours of daylight left.

      He lurched to his feet, and began to trudge along the footpath that was outlined by an indentation in the snow blanket. It would take perhaps half an hour to get down off the Edge. He tried to urge himself into a loping run but abandoned the idea after twice falling perilously near the rock face. The wind bit through his anorak as if it hated him. There was nothing to be seen all about him but the gusting, billowing snow. He made a snowball and tossed it into the wind. It was thrown back, to take him on his face.

      At the same moment, he tripped over an unseen chunk of rock deep below the snow and wrenched his ankle. Jerry bawled with pain above the roaring of the wind. As he went down, he caught a glimpse of the High Peak in a freak, clear moment; there was Mam Tor, bald and white. And, before it, the unpleasant black scar that the local people called Devil’s Peak.

      Yelling helped, so he cursed his luck, the snow, the weather forecasters who’d promised blue skies with an occasional shower later in the day, and he also cursed Professor Bruce de Matthieu for a bald-headed ponce who didn’t know the difference between a good researcher and a lickspittle. It would take him an hour at this rate to get off the damned Edge. The snow was coming now in great feathery chunks that built up drifts in minutes.

      “I’ll lose my way,” Jerry said suddenly, aware that he had moved off the path in his pain. He limped back but his footprints had gone. And he was only halfway down the sloping ramp that led from the Edge to the Hagthorpe track. Tracks that were as familiar as the bottles on the shelf at the Furnaceman’s Arms could lose their contours in six inches of snow. When the drifting started, the High Peak became a foreign country, its ridges, tracks, hills and valleys given an altogether outlandish appearance. Jerry knew he was lost.

      After leaping like a gazelle up Toller Edge, to be overcome by fatigue in a blizzard—no! Only fools did that! Or innocents like the two Boy Scouts last year and the clot of an Army Lieutenant two years earlier. He put on a spurt and howled with pain as he did so. And he had no food, nothing! Chocolate, cheese, Hovis—all down in a two-foot deep drift of snow at the bottom of Toller Edge with the spare sweater and the compass and map.

      He hobbled on in the blizzard, silent now. There was a grimness about the wind, a cold certainty about the whiteness. How had they felt, the poor young lads last year when they’d wandered on to the black crags of Devil’s Peak? Cockily assertive, until they realised that after all they hadn’t been prepared? Like me, Jerry thought; and their bodies were never found!

      The grinding pain in his ankle kept him aware of his surroundings. He had to walk in a lop-sided manner down the path he had found. It wasn’t the right path, but it led down, and that was the important thing: to be off the heights, where the wind was an Arctic killer.

      Where the sheep went, into the sheltered chimneys and corners—that’s where he would go. And rest.

      An hour later, he lay down without realising that he had done so. Actually a delirium had claimed him, one in which he thought himself opposite Janice, she of the disastrous marriages, huge bosom and hauteur at the Furnaceman’s. She’d got a drink called a Snowball, and he had gin and Italian vermouth, iced. The ice was very cold. He opened his mouth to suck on it He didn’t realise that he was face down on a slab of stone, Darkness came, but he was not aware of it.

      In another hour or two, he would have been quite cold, and some time in the night his corpse would have solidified. It was the thrumming of the Diesel engine that brought him to a last flickering of consciousness. The noise was the background murmur of the crowd in the pub; Janice told him to pay no attention, they were a set of creeps and why didn’t he have another drink, on her this time because his grant hadn’t come through yet.

      He opened his eyes and saw the frozen rock he had rested against. “Oh, Jesus!” he whispered.

      And so he heard the noise for what it was and realised that he might, just, save himself. He crawled towards the heavy throbbing noise, careless of falling now, too scared of freezing to worry overmuch about suddenly pitching into emptiness as his rucksack had done a couple of hundred years before. Terror urged him on. The heavy beat of the engine was near, very near. But it was so dark!

      Not a glimmer of light! Just the glare of the snow on the ground, and the thick curtain of whirling snow all around, still driven by a howling gale! He moved on, slowly. And there was a light.

      It was a dim corona, seen through snow, but it was like some vast dawning of religious inspiration to Jerry. He pitched into the snowdrift and clawed on unconcerned.

      He burst through to the roadside at a point where it ran between a cutting in the rock. He was about ten feet above the level of the road. Up against the drift from which he emerged was the source of both noise and light. It was an enormous red tanker, though Jerry was not aware of this yet.

      He saw a window with a light inside. He brushed snow from his face and peered inside. Jerry saw the two writhing figures of a man and a girl. He could see the bare narrow shoulder blades of the girl and her ridged СКАЧАТЬ