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By Root 285 0

is no distance at all on a smooth road on a sunny morning, but in the wet and moonless dark in which I soon found myself, picking my way down a slick, rutted track, following the course of a small river which I could not see, but could hear, smell, and occasionally step in, two miles was a fair trek. And there was something else as well: I felt as if I were being followed, or watched. I am not normally of a nervous disposition, and when I have such feelings I tend to assume that they have some basis in reality, but I could hear nothing more solid than the rain and the wind, and when I stopped there were no echoing splashes of feet behind me. It was simply a sense of Presence in the night; I pushed on, trying to ignore it.

I stayed to the left when the track divided, and was grateful to find, when time came to cross the stream, that a bridge had been erected across it. Not that wading through the water would have made me much wetter, and admittedly it would have cleared my lower extremities of half a hundredweight of mud, but the bridge as a solid reminder of Civilisation in the form of county councils I found encouraging.

Having crossed the stream, I now left its burble behind me, exchanging the hiss of rain on water for the thicker noises of rain on mud and vegetation, and I was just telling myself that it couldn't be more than another half mile when I heard a faint thread of sound. Another hundred yards and I could hear it above the suck and plop of my boots; fifty more and I was on top of it.

It was a violin, playing a sweet, plaintive melody, light and slow and shot through with a profound and permanent sadness. I had never, to my knowledge, heard the tune before, although it had the bone-deep familiarity possessed by all things that are very old. I did, however, know the hands that wielded the bow.

"Holmes?" I said into the dark.

He finished the verse, drawing out the long final note, before he allowed the instrument to fall silent.

"Hello, Russell. You took your time."

"Holmes, I hope there is a good reason for this."

He did not answer, but I heard the familiar sounds of violin and bow being put into a case. The latches snapped, followed by the vigorous rustle of a waterproof being donned. I turned on the torch in time to see Holmes stepping out of the small shelter of a roofed gate set into a stone wall. He paused, looking thoughtfully at the telltale inundation of mud up my right side to the elbow, the result of a misstep into a pothole.

"Why did you not use the torch, coming up the road?" he asked.

"I, er…" I was embarrassed. "I thought there was someone following me. I didn't want to give him the advantage of a torch-light."

"Following you?" he said sharply, half-turning to squint down the road.

"Watching me. That back-of-the-neck feeling."

I saw his face clearly by the light of the torch. "Ah yes. Watching you. That'll be the moor."

"The Moor?" I said in astonishment. I knew where I was, of course, but for an instant the book I had been reading on the train was closer to mind than my sense of geography, and I was confronted by the brief mental image of a dark-skinned scimitar-bearing Saracen lurking along a Devonshire country lane.

"Dartmoor. It's just there." He nodded over his shoulder. "It rises up in a great wall, four or five miles away, and although you can't see it from here, it casts a definite presence over the surrounding countryside. You'll meet it tomorrow. Come," he said, turning up the road. "Let us take to the warm and dry."

I left the torch on now. It played across the hedgerow on one side and a stone wall on the other, illuminating for a moment a French road sign (some soldier's wartime souvenir, no doubt), giving us a brief glimpse of headstones in a churchyard just before we turned off into a smaller drive. A thick layer of rotting leaves from the row of half-bare elms and copper beeches over our heads gave way to a cultivated garden—looking more neglected than even the season and the rain would explain, but nonetheless clearly intended to be a