Chapter Twenty-Six
“We had wandered contentedly along the coastal path for some time without thought or reference to the hour as we discussed various plants along the path as we came upon them, and much engaged we were also in our ongoing talk of the myths of King Arthur and the poetry of Tennyson,” the diary continued, “until, with some small concern, I felt a droplet of rain fall from the skies. For the first time in perhaps an hour I looked upwards to see that the heavens above had changed as we were engrossed in our conversation. From the gentle, glittering blue of that morning, the skies had transformed to a fierce, swirling mass of grey and white. I stared up at the skies, altered from a benign appearance to one which seemed most ominous and threatening, and I felt fear quake in my heart.
I looked ahead and behind us, but from what I could tell, having done that walk a few times on my days off, we seemed to have walked an equal distance along the coastal path from the village as there was remaining to the house. There was still much path ahead of us to walk, but to go back now would do us no good, and there was little shelter along such an exposed route which wended above the clifftops. I had nothing with me which would offer protection from the weather aside from the hooded cloaks which Anna and I had fortunately put on that morning over our coats. At least they would afford us a little protection from the coming rains, I thought, although not enough if truth be told.
Anna too seemed to have suddenly noted the change in the weather, and looked up at me with a rather pale, frightened face. I remembered her fear of the storm of the previous night, and silently cursed myself to having managed to walk her into the middle of one with so little fortification against its ills. The skies over us seemed to creak ominously, and more rain started to fall, so I urged her on, up the path where the woodlands met the edge of the path, where I thought the covering of the trees might afford us a little shelter against the rain.
As we reached the dark covering of the trees, I made Anna stop as I looked out and up, trying to ascertain as to whether this might only be a short squall, and we might be able to shelter for a while then walk on without becoming too wet. But as I looked up at the skies, I seemed to almost hear a voice on the air, laughing at me for my foolish hopes. The shrill, mad laughter of my dreams echoed in my mind, and I shivered.
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