Chapter 18 : Duels in the Temple

The Count and his two remaining companions slipped cautiously through the recently deserted oak wood at the base of Claremont Crag. The arrival of the spirits of Halloween had thrown a very satisfactory degree of confusion into Winter's assault. Colonel Frost was obliged to conduct a hasty rearrangement of his forces and suddenly the men found themselves free of encircling ice warriors. They took the opportunity to make a run for the trees where they were hidden from view. Now they were looking for the way to the Temple.

"There is only one route which leads to the top of the Crag," the Count said. "It is called Sandy Gate road and it begins near a small lake known as Cross Pool."

A few minutes later they saw a white expanse of flat ice. The shallow mere was frozen over with only a few dark green reeds breaking through the slippery surface. They skirted the edge of Cross Pool and began their ascent of the Crag.

The Sandy Gate road was rough, poorly maintained and full of pot holes. It looked as if it had been subjected to years of Winter's abuse rather than the few days it had actually endured.

I really should get this road repaired when conditions return to normal, the Count thought irrelevantly to himself in a rare moment of distraction from the matter in hand.

In the black welkin, two weather systems now clashed like a hammer and an anvil. The Halloween horde liked to work under the cover of their own gothic storm and they had brought it with them. Sheet lightning flashed from cloud to cloud and peels of thunder rang out loudly like cannon fire. The Winter wind was meeting bitter opposition from Autumn's rallying warm air masses. Snow and hail fought with will-o-the-wisp ball lightning and driving rain that occasionally blasted the ground only to be driven back into the sky.

The road wound between giant gritstone boulders taking an undulating but steadily rising course for a few hundred metres then suddenly turning a hairpin bend into a much steeper ascent. It ran under towering escarpments and circled all the way round the Crag three times before it reached the top. Fortunately, in almost all places the route was out of the direct line of sight of the Temple approaches. Nevertheless the Count and his men were very wary and crossed the short exposed stretches rapidly. The Colonel might not be able to see them but he would surely be expecting them.

Something nasty followed the men slowly up the Sandy Gate road. It had no true name but we can call it the Swamp Thing. The Swamp Thing was a long time resident of the Autumn Country and a lesser known member of the Halloween horde. It lived in the warm depths of the forest where it swallowed careless travellers whole and reduced them to mulch. It was the essence of squelch and it lived off anything that rotted away. And if victims weren't rotting away before they met the Swamp Thing then they usually were soon after. The Swamp Thing wasn't a fussy eater - rotten fruit and rotting flesh were all the same to the Swamp Thing - food. The Swamp Thing thrived on the heat at the heart of compost heaps. It loved sucking bogs warmed by hot Autumn sunlight, the stench of night soil from unsanitary cess pits and the sweet sickness of overripe middens. Its breath carried the vile aroma of putrefaction and its metabolism ran on decay and marsh gas. Clouds of flies followed it, wherever it went and mould and fungi grew from the weeping sores of its body.