I Do Not Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page B

held no attractions for children. I remembered there was a proper kids’ playground with swings and slides behind the Inn, and felt grateful that, for the moment, I had this squelchy, slightly slovenly spot to myself.

Except I wasn’t alone.

Chapter Nine

    Jamaica Inn
    Lore and legend surrounded Jamaica Inn, enveloping it in a miasmic cloak of mystery, full of ghoulish ghosts and murders, all of which meant the place did a roaring trade. I was sceptical of course; well, wouldn’t any educated person think it was a load of old nonsense? A good tale to scare children with, and rope the punters in, but really just a spooky old Cornish yarn, the kind of stuff tourists loved to tell each other sitting next to a roaring fire in an ancient pub, holding a pint or a large glass of Merlot.

So what was I doing here, feeling idiotically ‘drawn’ to a place I knew, rationally, was a nest of fraudulent but profitable legends? The field I’d wandered into was no atmospheric Scaddick Hill Meadow. No haunting presence hovered over this unlovely spot.

In fact, there was nothing much to see in the grey light. Mud; scuffed grass. The churned-up holes and messy mounds that meant badgers dwelled here. My gaze swept restlessly over a prosaic vista that looked utterly unrewarding. Nothing mystical, nothing at all noteworthy here, certainly nothing to suggest why the insistent voice in my head had told me to come. There was a scruffy fence at the bottom of the meadow, neglected for years, its struts rotten and broken, a rickety property marker that would these days deter neither man nor beast from invading the deeply unattractive little plot it guarded.

I sighed. What a waste of time, I thought. How utterly stupid of me to listen to the nonsense in my head. I’d had some kind of nightmare, not the revelation or discovery I longed for, and I’d let it take me over, bring me to this desolate spot where I had hoped to find salvation, only to find all that awaited me was boredom and crushing disappointment.

Feeling foolish, I turned back towards the car park. And then I stopped in my tracks. I was an English teacher. Lines from classic plays and poems were never far from my head. And suddenly what leapt into my mind was one of the scariest passages I had ever taught to a breathless sixth form. It was Coleridge. From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner :
     
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread…

As the words reeled in my head, I knew there was something behind me. Something that made my nerves quiver, my skin shrink and the hairs on the back of my neck stiffen with fright.

There had been something in the field after all. I had barely registered it, so commonplace was the sight in these parts. A decrepit old scarecrow leaned drunkenly against the sagging fence. Little was left of it; just a bent, rotting, half-collapsed effigy, loosely wrapped in tattered remnants of black cloth clinging stubbornly to desiccated twig-thin limbs.

I looked back nervously at the dilapidated fence. My vision blurred. Was it a scarecrow, or just an old black tarpaulin flapping in the wind?

I turned away again, my sight diminished by the fog floating now across the meadow, thickening as it drifted. My eyelids fluttered. A small wave of dark light, so suppressed, so charcoal grey that it was hardly visible, flitted across my brain. A swift shadowy impression, so indistinct it almost missed my retina, and yet there it was. A movement throbbing across a ruined useless boundary that may once have served some practical farming purpose, but was now merely an indication, a warning, that something wicked this way comes.

The scarecrow turned its head.

My heart almost stopped. I stood still though I wanted to run. Because I knew instantly that this terrifying vision was what had summoned me to the moor. Slowly,