Chasing Ghosts Madalyn Morgan (free e books to read txt) 📖

when Thomas returned with two glasses of brandy, putting one in front of Claire and taking a drink from the other. ‘You were right. The weather was too bad today, and it was too late to start looking for the escape route.’

‘I understand why you wanted to go on,’ Thomas said, smiling. He lifted his glass. ‘Here’s to a good night’s sleep and finding the route out of the prison tomorrow!’

‘Tomorrow,’ she said, and took a drink.

Fingers of ice seized Claire’s heart as the memory of the prison came into her mind. Like the pull of a magnet, the feeling that she must return there was luring her. She craned her neck and looked out of the window to get a glimpse of the prison, which lay beyond the trees to the right. Thomas turned the car in the opposite direction. He steered it off the road, down a narrow lane that ended on the south side of the wood and turned off the engine. ‘We have to go on foot from here.’ He pointed to a clump of small spruces. ‘We’ll enter by those saplings and walk straight ahead until we find the path. Then we’ll follow it down to the clearing.’

‘Listen?’ Claire said, getting out of the car. ‘Can you hear that?’

‘No,’ Thomas whispered, ‘what is it?’

‘Nothing. There is no sound at all. Yesterday at the prison, the noise the storm made was so loud we couldn’t hear ourselves speak. But now?’ Claire fell silent and strained her ears. ‘Not even birdsong. This place is as quiet as the grave. There is not even the sound of the breeze in the trees.’

In the eerie stillness, Claire followed Thomas into the wood. The saplings on the edge allowed daylight to filter through for a few yards, but further in, the fully-grown firs were so tall that, with the winter sun low in the sky, only the tops of the tallest trees would see daylight.

Claire stumbled. Thomas stopped and turned round. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. My eyes haven’t fully adjusted to the darkness but go on, I’ll be fine.’

‘Take this.’ Thomas took a torch from his rucksack, switched it on and gave it to Claire. They had only taken a further half a dozen steps when Thomas stopped and took the torch back. ‘I think this is it,’ he said, shining the beam of light across a patch of barren earth in a small clearing. ‘Come,’ he said, taking Claire’s hand. ‘Stand here. Can you feel the ground is hard?’

‘Yes.’ Claire scraped the sole of her shoe from side to side, disturbing a thin layer of moss. Excited, she took a couple of steps and stopped. ‘The ground here is slightly raised and is soft under my feet.’ Taking smaller steps, she followed Thomas along a sloping path and within a short distance she saw rays of light flickering through the trees. They were near the edge of the wood.

With fewer trees there was more light. They could see where they were going but with every step the gradient of the path became steeper. Putting out her hands and holding onto the trunk of each tree as she came to it, Claire was able to defy gravity and stay upright. Thomas was not so careful and when the path suddenly dipped his strides turned into short staggering steps. The momentum of the downward slant pulled him forward, he lost his balance, and went hurtling down the mossy path on his backside.

‘Stay where you are!’ Thomas shouted when Claire reached the edge of the wood. ‘Can you see me?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you were a sniper, you wouldn’t have to find any higher ground than where you are standing now, would you?’

‘No.’ Claire raised an imaginary rifle, her left arm and hand the barrel, the butt against her right shoulder and her right elbow crooked. She curled her right forefinger loosely around the imaginary trigger, and with Thomas in her sights, she tightened it. ‘Click!’

With no trees to hang on to, Claire slipped and stumbled and, on her hands and knees, slid down the path stopping only when she reached level ground. ‘Thomas?’ she looked around. There was no sign of him. ‘Thomas?’ she shouted, ‘where are you?’

‘Here,’ he said, scrambling out of a ditch. ‘That’s what Alain did, didn’t he? He rolled into a ditch and stayed there until the Germans stopped looking for him?’

Claire nodded. She looked up at the trees. ‘The sniper wasn’t lying in wait after all. He followed them from the prison.’

‘That’s what it looks like. Alain took a bullet because he was the last man down the hill from the wood. A few seconds later and he would have been away.’

The clearing was littered with chunks of the mountain that had broken off or been worn away over the years by the weather. Claire hobbled over to a large rock and sat down.

‘Have you hurt your ankle?’

‘No. It’s mud.’ She lifted her foot. ‘It’s so caked on it’s difficult to walk properly that’s all.’ She picked up a stick and began digging out clods of mud from between the ridges of tread on the soles of her boots. ‘Ouch!’ She threw the stick away and lifted her hands. The ends of the fingers and the palms of her gloves were ripped to shreds, and her hands were bleeding.

‘What about you?’ Claire looked up at the steep bank that they’d slid down, and then back at Thomas. ‘Did you hurt your bottom?’ she asked, trying not to laugh.

‘What?’

‘You said you had trained in the Alps, and…’  Claire began to laugh. ‘You looked so funny flying down the bank on your rear end.’

Thomas stood up and put both hands on his backside. ‘It is muddy. Other than that, my bottom is fine, thank you. So unless you wish to be left here, I