Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Christopher Huang
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Mysteries
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ALAN
APRIL1921
THERE WERE BETTER reasons for coming home, Alan supposed, than
Father’s funeral. Standing on the platform of the Linwood Hollow railway
station, he waited until the train had chugged its way around the bend, then
turned towards the village before taking a deep breath of the crisp Yorkshire air.
He held it in his lungs, letting Yorkshire diuse into his being, then expelled
the air and, with it, all his previous cares.
It was just past dawn on a clear spring morning, the Monday a week after
Easter. e yellow buds were thick and heavy on the gorse, as though someone
had spilt an industrial quantity of Colman’s Mustard over the countryside, and
their scent, reminiscent of coconuts, made Alan’s nostrils twitch. For the past
two years, he’d told anyone who’d listen that it was the other way around, that
coconuts gave o a scent reminiscent of gorse—of the Yorkshire moors, of
home.
Yes. ere were better reasons for coming home.
Linwood Hollow was nestled in what was likely the crater of some
prehistoric meteor strike. Alan imagined the event as occurring in the dead of
night: a ash of light in the heavens, and then a bolt of ame descending into
the wild, primeval world below. e ground shook at its impact, clods of earth
thrown up into the air as dust settled over the trembling greenery. en, in the
silence, a barren hole where once there had been a verdant forest, slowly
turning verdant itself over the ensuing millennia. e jungle gave way to the
moors; tightly furled yews twisted up from the ground within the crater, while
clumps of gorse and heather spread along its slopes. And then, in time, came
man: rst the Celtic Britons coming up from the south to meet the Picts to the
north, and then the Danes landing on the coast to the northeast.
Gazing across the valley as it was now, to Linwood Hall, that haphazard,
mediaeval jumble of crooked stone walls gathered on the opposite ridge, Alan
was struck by a queer sense of familiarity: not the expected familiarity of a man
returned to his childhood home, but the familiarity of a parallel experience.
After two years of archaeological study in Peru, he’d come to look on his own
home with an archaeologist’s eyes, or a historian’s. He saw Linwood Hall as it
rst began: a hastily constructed military outpost as William the Conqueror
harried the north. An inferior brother of Pickering Castle to the south, it
consisted of a roughly square keep with an assembly ground surrounded by a
wooden palisade and a short tower
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