Excerpt from The Moor and the Boy

Chapter One

Towards the end of yet another tedious trek over the moor, Dougal stopped dead in his tracks and tilted his head curiously to one side, as though he could hear something faint in the wind, there but not there. After a moment, he sighed a slow and laborious breath and wearily continued on his way. “Nearly,” he thought to himself, “maybe next time.”

Ten minutes later, as he opened the door to the bothy, he thought, just for a second, that he heard it again. “Strange,” he said aloud, “ne’er heard it twice like that,” but as had become increasingly common, no one answered him. With a shrug of his shoulders, he accepted the silence and pulled a match from his pocket, struck the head against the striker plate, and put the flickering flame to a battered old oil lamp that sat on the table beside his old, worn-out cot. The weak smell of sulfur drifted into the darkness.

Slowly, he lay back on the bed and, too exhausted to do anything more, fell into a restless slumber, but it came slowly, as he knew it would, as it always did. Then the dream slowly crept into his mind, always starting the same way: in the rain, upon the moor…

It fell in a torrent, cold and stinging. The boy was small even for a three-year-old, undernourished, and painfully thin. Holding his left hand was an older child, at least five years his senior, but this child, too, was ill. Not sickly like the smaller one, but something dark and brooding lay behind the eyes.