The Ghostly Past

Chapter 7

 "Someone, please help me!" The sound floated up from around the corner.

"Did you hear that?" Harriet frowned.

"Someone's in trouble!" Clara hurried on, jogging around the curve in the road. She didn't really know what she expected to find, perhaps a car with a flat tyre or broken down. Maybe someone had hit a deer or something.

What she didn't expect to find was a lone woman collapsed, sobbing on the side of the road.

Clara reached her first, kneeling down beside her as Harriet caught up. She looked to be perhaps in her fifties, greying hair pulled into a tight ponytail, her face blotchy with tears, bags beneath her eyes. She was exhausted.

"Oh, thank goodness. Thank goodness somebody found me." She wheezed and then slumped forwards in a faint.

"Harriet do you have some water?" Clara said urgently, putting the woman in the recovery position after looking her over.

"I'm a singer, I always have water." Harriet's smile didn't reach her eyes as she rummaged in her backpack. "Should we call for an ambulance? Who is she? How did she get out here?"

"I don't know." Clara replied as the woman groaned, coming to. The woman was wearing hiking boots, and thermal clothes, a waterproof coat over the top. "Here," she handed over the water as the woman sat up.

"Thank you." The woman mumbled, drinking deeply. "What happened?" She said groggily.

Harriet and Clara glanced at one another. "We hoped you could tell us." Clara was gentle. "We found you here by the side of the road."

Realisation crossed the woman's eyes as she looked around, then horror. "Oh, oh Philip!" She cried out, tears starting to flow again. "I have to go back. I have to go back for him!"

Harriet seemed more comfortable taking a step back, so Clara continued. "Who's Philip?"

"My husband! He's...he's dead!" She seemed to curl up in on herself. "Please, you have to take me back to him."

"Just...slow down alright." Clara said nervously. "Start from the beginning. What's your name? I'm Clara and this is my friend Harriet."

"Anne. I'm Anne. My husband and I, we often go on weekend camping breaks. We've stayed here in the forest so many times, at registered campsites and off trail, we've never had problems, we know what we're doing!" Her voice rose with hysteria.

"So you came here when?"

"Yesterday afternoon. We're both retired now so we came mid week. We hiked a few miles in until we reached a site we remembered. Stony Brook, the site's called." Clara glanced at her friend to see if she knew the name but Harriet shrugged.

"And then?"

"We set up, we went to sleep. I woke up around 4:30, I'm pretty sure there was only an hour at most until dawn, but it was cold. I'm not just talking the chill of night, I'm talking about arctic cold, icy, the kind of cold that gets into your bones."

She was strangely coherent, Clara thought, as though shock was making her deathly calm.

"Didn't you read the warnings about the freak cold spots?" Harriet asked. "The village has a curfew at the moment."

"We did. We just didn't...you don't understand." Anne trailed off. "I've seen them."

"Seen what?"

Anne wiped more tears from her swollen cheeks. "The ghosts."

Clara flinched. Harriet took a step back, a closed, sceptical look appearing on her face.