The Winter Ghosts

Kate Mosse

The violent persecution of the Cathar heretics in medieval France is the inspiration for a supernatural romance spanning the centuries to the 1920s. The novel follows the tradition of the supernatural stories of M R James and Wilkie Collins and therefore the interpretation of the story is very much left to the reader's imagination. The added bonus is in the author's atmospheric descriptions of the terrain.

Extract

Whispering. I could hear whispering, voices slipping between the mountains.
'I am the last, the last, the ....'
Heard over the howling of the wind sometimes far away, sometimes closer, so close I imagined I could feel real breath upon my cheek.
'The others have slipped away into darkness.'
'Here,' I tried to say, but no sound came.
Then the sound of sobbing, a desperate scratching of rock upon rock and a terrible weeping ....
'Over here,' I murmured. 'Please. Help me.'

Parallels