Dark Peak

Ellie bent over, hands on knees, head bowed and fought the trembling in her legs.    Her ankle ached savagely from the punishing climb to the open moorland on the edge of the Dark Peak.  The joint still did not have a full range of movement.  Ellie rubbed it, impatient with the weakness.  Still trying to catch her breath, she was hit by a vivid flashback.  The man’s eyes, crazy on drugs, signalling his desire to maim.  To kill.  She pushed the vision back into the deepest recesses of her mind.  The injuries she had suffered in the attack had damaged her physically but, buried deep inside, admissible to no-one, Ellie knew there had been a greater psychological cost.  Because of that night, she would always be afraid.

She straightened and looked around.  Winter had bleached the hills, stripping the landscape of colour.   One stunted hawthorn tree, sculpted into an angular shape by the dominating wind, had managed to gain a foothold in the barren landscape .  Beyond it, two small fields, barely sheltered in the lee of the tor, provided poor pasture for hardy sheep.  A line of pylons, marched across the bleak landscape, skeletal giants,  a reminder of man’s desire to dominate the land and force nature to his needs.  Ellie grimaced.  Come the next bad winter, the electricity wires would be burdened with ice many inches thick, sagging until they broke.  Up here nature would always win.

She was about to turn back when a flash of scarlet caught her eye.   There, at the base of the nearest pylon, she could see something fluttering.  Ellie scowled.  Some careless hiker who had left litter, not bothering to clear up his mess.  A townie, probably, oblivious of the risk to animals from a discarded plastic bag.

She hesitated.  A barbed wire fence blocked her access and the ground beyond looked boggy and uneven.   The object fluttered again, as though beckoning her across the damp, peaty ground.  It was madness to push herself further she knew but the thought challenged her.  Ellie looked around.  There was no living soul in sight, not even one of the hardy hill sheep.  There was no-one to see her fail.

Making up her mind, she took a few steps back and launched herself at the fence like a hurdler, relishing the moment of exhilaration as her body responded, flying free from the pull of gravity.  The landing jarred her ankle and she feared she would go down but her feet picked up the rhythm of the run and she flew onwards, only stumbling as she neared the pylon.  Now she could see that the scarlet flutter was a scarf.  Walking forward, Ellie saw the scarf lay around a girl’s body, her sightless eyes staring at the looming pylon which stood, like a gaunt sentinel, above her.