This is where it walks…

Washing her hands, Merrily looked up and became very still, convinced in this grey, lingering moment that she was seeing the imprint.

What she saw, in the cracked and liver-spotted mirror, was a smudgy outline hovering beyond her left shoulder in the women’s lavatory with its stone walls and flagged floor. Through the bubble-glass in the door, a bleary ochre glow seeped from the oil lamp in the passageway where, for some reason, there was no electricity.

This was where it walked, Huw had explained in his soft, mat-flat Yorkshire voice – David Hockney on downers.

It.

Rumoured, apparently, to be the shade of a preacher named Griffith who heaped sermons like hot coals on hapless hill-farming folk towards the end of the nineteenth century. But also known as the Grey Monk because this was what it most resembled, and this was where it walked.

Where it walked.

Merrily focused on her own drained face in the mirror.

Was this where madness began?

‘Are they often caught short, then?’ the ex-Army chaplain, Charlie Headland, had asked a few minutes earlier, while Merrily was thinking: Why do they always walk? Why don’t they run like hell, in desperation, looking for a way out of this dismal routine?

The course tutor, Huw Owen, had blinked, a crumpled old hippy in a discoloured dog-collar.

‘No, I’m serious,’ Charlie insisted. ‘Do any of them still feel a need to pee, or do they leave all that behind?’

‘Charles…’ Huw being patient, not rising to it. ‘There hasn’t always been a lavatory at the end of that passage.’

Not smiling, either.

Huw would laugh, sometimes wildly, in the pub at night, but in the stone-walled lecture room he never lost his focus. It was about setting an example. Outside of all this, Huw said, you should always strive to live a full, free life but in ‘Deliverance’ remain watchful and analytical, and careful not to overreact to something as innocuous as an imprint.