An interminable night
I could no longer see my hand before my face: I might as well have been blind. I thought of the miners, who had worked down here. At least they had had lanterns. But even...
Author: thesylep-dev
John Christopher is coming!
As The Independent’s Invisible Ink article put it, was there ever an author with so many pseudonyms? With its third publication, The SYLE Press turns its attention from the Hilary Ford novels to those of...
On a knife-edge
Jane had been there before – or rather, Cynthia. In John Christopher’s The Caves of Night, after a caving accident, she finds herself clinging on to the edge of an abyss, with the weight of...
‘Scream, if you like’
He moved towards me without haste. For an instant I was paralysed, a rabbit in front of a stoat; before fear changed and spurred me to action. I managed to get to my feet as...
The White Voyage
Dublin to Dieppe to Amsterdam. A routine trip for the cargo ship Kreya, her Danish crew and handful of passengers. Brief enough for undercurrents to remain below the surface and secrets to stay buried…
Like a rat in a drain
I had already noticed a small hill rising out of the rolling contour of the moor, and now saw a building huddled beside it, or the ruin of one. It was low-lying, with a shattered...
The second Lady Bedivere
From his pocket he took a small black velvet bag, tied with black cord. He undid the cord and opened it, tipping the contents into his free hand. Stones flashed in the lamplight. They were...
I thought it was tin!
Long before Jane was pushed down a mine-shaft, before her fictional contemporary Alice fell down the rabbit-hole, even before King Arthur trod the bleak landscape, people had been coming to the west country for tin....
A darker face
I would not deny what had happened to me under the Arthur tree, nor belittle it. His kiss had aroused a feeling in me I had never known or imagined. I could vouch for my...
A Bride for Bedivere
‘I cried the day my father died; but from joy.’
Jane’s father had been nothing but a bully. His accidental death at the dockyard where he worked might have left the family in penury but it had also freed them from his drunken rages. He was scarcely cold in his grave, though, when another tyrant …
