Lethal Intent

Two

The snow was as deep as he had ever known it, falling so hard that it obscured the bulbs of towering sodium street-lamps above, diffusing and merging their beams into a single glow in the night sky, overarching everything like a sinister orange cloud.

'Should we be trying this?' he asked, as she turned left at the roundabout and headed up the hill. He thought it was Drumbrae but, oddly, he found that he was not sure. She said nothing in reply, nor did she glance his way. Instead she peered into the blizzard ahead, her knuckles white as she grasped the wheel, her face seeming to reflect the weird light outside.

The incline was slight at first, and the car took it with only a little difficulty. 'Where are the road gritters?' he heard himself mutter.

'This is Sunday night in Edinburgh,' she hissed. 'There are no gritters.'

'Then should we be doing this?' he repeated.

'Shut up!' Her voice became a strange, insistent croak. 'You have to know.'

She drove on, hunched forward in the driving seat, as the slope became more severe. Still the car made steady forward progress, as she kept it in the highest gear possible. But soon they came to the real hill, rearing up before them at an impossible angle. The snow was fresh, crisp and unmarked, forcing upon him the knowledge that not only were they alone but that no vehicle had come this way in some time.

She pressed on, but gravity began to take its toll. They were maybe halfway up the incline, he reckoned, when the wheels began to spin beneath them and they lost what little forward momentum they had left.

'Go on,' he urged, 'we've got this far.'

'We're too heavy,' she snapped. 'You'll have to get out and walk up. Get back in at the top.'

'You're daft!'

'Just do it!' The words came out as a raw scream. He had thought that he was a stranger to fear, but a wave of panic swept over him and he jumped out of the car.

At first he found it difficult to balance on the pavement: he reckoned that the snow had to be at least eight or nine inches deep. He took a step forward and then another, inching up towards the crest.

Yet the hilltop seemed no nearer.

Each pace grew shorter, each footfall more tentative, each movement threatening his precarious hold on the vertical and threatening to send him tumbling backwards into the growing blizzard. His breathing grew heavier, and he felt his heart beat faster in his chest.

'No bloody use,' he gasped, and risked a look over his shoulder, through the snow, for the car. But there was no car: it had gone. He looked for the tyre-tracks: there were none. Even the light had changed: the orange glow of the lamps had turned dull and bluish grey. He gazed around him: if they had started to climb Drumbrae, he was somewhere else now, somewhere alien, somewhere wholly malignant.

He stared and he knew that what he felt had gone beyond panic, transcended fear and crossed the threshold of pure terror. He turned back to face the hill. It looked like Everest before him, but he sensed that there was no way back, only forward. He thrust upwards into the blizzard, gulping in mouthfuls of air and snow. Each step grew more laboured, until he was practically powerless to move.

Yet even standing still, his chest heaved as he forced the cold air into his lungs. The hill had no summit, he realised: it would go on for ever, or at least until it had drawn from him everything that he had. He slumped to his knees, then fell on to his face, his breathing still impossibly heavy.

'Can you drown in snow?' The crazy thought bubble seemed to flash up in Neil McIlhenney's mind as the sure knowledge came to him that he was going to die.