Haunted by Love

Chapter 4: Back to Reality

I had feared that Ruth was going to expect me to navigate but, mercifully, the map remains folded on the dashboard and she seems confident about where she's going.

I try to concentrate on where we're going and memorize landmarks, something I've never been terribly good at, as Ruth points out places or sights. It's almost as if she's trying to convince me that Cornwall is a lovely place, something I can see for myself. However, I am apprehensive of returning to the hill that had scared me so badly.

We turn right and I'm surprised by a sense of déjà vu until I realise that we've arrived from the opposite direction and we're now on the road on which I broke down. Mr Bump bounces along the increasingly narrow and uneven road until, at last, there is my car looking very forlorn and abandoned with one wheel on the grass where I slewed on the track.

I look nervously up the hill as we pull up behind Gumdrop but it is just a hill, covered with grass and dotted with clumps of gorse, a stunted, wind-sculpted tree near the top that I hadn't seen in the darkness.

"It's just a hill, Bethany," Ruth's voice speaks my own thoughts but, somehow, the fact that she says it helps.

"I know, but it was so scary last night."

"Come on," she says, opening her door and climbing out. I do the same and she walks around the car and takes my hand. She starts to lead me up the hill but I hesitate. "Beth, it's okay, we'll be fine," she promises and, reluctantly, I allow her to lead me.

The climb is much easier in the light and as we reach the top the view is amazing: the Moor lies open and it falls away in front of us to rise again in hills and tors in the distance. Releasing Ruth's hand I step up onto a half buried boulder and take in the vista. The breeze is strong and cold but there is nothing scary, not now. "You're right, Ruth: this is just a hill and the Moor is just wild and lonely, not evil," I admit. "It was just that the shadowy shape seemed so real last night."

"Perhaps last night it was. You know, for a woman who works on a programme about ghosts and mysteries, you're very, I don't know, not cynical but... humdrum and prosaic." I look down to see her looking up at me and notice again the silver glitter of the pendant around her neck, hanging inside her jumper and the checked shirt she's wearing underneath. I hadn't paid much attention earlier, given she was sitting topless, but now, without thinking, I reach down to gently pull the jumper's neck opening a little wider to see the pendant better.

"A pentacle?" I exclaim, surprised. I wonder if it's just an ornament of if whether she wears it for a reason.

"You're wondering if I'm a witch or a pagan, aren't you?" she asks, an amused look in her eyes and I nod a little awkwardly, suddenly feeling that I might be trespassing in something very private and personal. "I suppose I am a bit," she admits, "but... not properly, not really. Mum is pagan so I grew up with it, though she never tried to indoctrinate me. She gave me this just after I started working at BJK and said it was to remind me never to forget that the important things in life weren't a career or money and that life in a big city wasn't real life. At the time I thought she was just finding another way to criticise my choice of career."

"But now you think differently?" I ask and she looks out over the wild moorland as the wind whips her hair.

"Yeah, she was right and you know living here, on the Moor, it's not difficult to feel the earth and sky and wind and rain as spiritual forces. I'm not a witch though!" she adds firmly.

"I never suggested it," I assure her, "though I'm sure you'd be stunningly brilliant at it if you chose to be one."

"Thank you," she smiles as we walk back down the hill. "Well, here's your car."