I don’t even know if they’re real or not. These feelings I get-the feelings that I’m with other people-I have no idea what they are, or where they come from, or why I get them. Cole once asked me what it was like to know everything there is to know, and not know anything about it. I don’t know how to describe these feelings I get. Then a gust of wind caught the sign over the gates, and as it creaked on its rusty chains and I looked out through the shattered back windscreen and read the familiar faded words-FORD & SONS-AUTO PARTS: CRASHED CARS, VANS & SUVS, MOT FAILURES, INSURANCE WRITE-OFFS, BOUGHT FOR CASH-that’s when I first felt Rachel in my heart. I liked seeing the raindrops as threaded jewels, the heaps of scrap metal as mountains and hills, the tottering piles of broken-up cars as watchtowers. I liked the way the lights over the gates shone crystal-white in the dark, making everything look special. I liked being alone in the yard at night. I liked the sound of it hammering down hard on the roof of the car. I could have taken shelter in one of the old storage sheds, or I could have gone back to the house, but the sheds were dark and full of rats, and the rain was really pouring down, and the house was all the way across the other side of the yard… I could have gone somewhere else, I suppose. I’d spent an hour or so checking it out, seeing if it was worth stripping down, and then the rain had started-and that’s when I’d got in the back. My brother, Cole, had brought the Mercedes into the yard a few hours earlier and asked me to look it over while he went off to see someone about something. When the Dead Man got Rachel I was sitting in the back of a wrecked Mercedes wondering if the rain was going to stop. Kevin Brooks Talks About…The Road of the Dead To resort thither for baptisms and funerals.įearsome almost beyond belief must have been that journey over the desolate and sinister land, with the sphinx-like grey rocks ranged like perpetual mourners beside the trail…no sound save the raven’s croak or the stumbling steps of the mourners “as silent and slow they followed the dead,” and before them mile after toilsome mile of rock and mire and flood…This must often have necessitated setting forth by the light of a flying winter moon, or the even more eerie and less effectual beams of storm-lanterns flashing like will-o’-the-wisps along the way.

Of Dartmoor, who lived nearer to Widdecombe than Lydford, Until, in 1260, Bishop Bronescombe gave licence to the inhabitants From Post Bridge starts the Lych Way, the Road of the Dead,Īlong which corpses were conveyed to Lydford, the parish church,

The road of the dead