Overview
Dark Peak is a short story in No Return. It follows Irving Platt, a postwar flight sergeant flying a decommissioned aircraft through a storm that leads him and his crew into a supernatural moor.
Publication History
The story appears in No Return. The official Askari listing describes the stories other than “Presence” and “The Palisade” as previously unpublished before the collection.
Plot
Four years after the war, Platt pilots Sea Witch, a worn Wellington aircraft formally identified as SR131, toward a Royal Decommissioning Yard near Inverness. His crew consists of American Master Sergeant Martin Mercure in the co-pilot’s seat and Corporal Brendan Childs at the wireless post. Platt is tired, prickly, and privately haunted by the remembered voice of Captain Wallis, his former captain.
The flight becomes tense as Mercure jokes with Platt, drinks from Platt’s brandy, and reacts angrily when Platt mentions his wife. Childs tries to enforce discipline, then reveals that his own family died on a channel ferry because its captain was drunk at the wheel. The confession turns the crew’s drinking into more than a breach of regulation.
The weather worsens, even though command reports clear skies. When the wireless fails, Platt realizes that Sea Witch is over Dark Peak, a moor tied in Childs’s family stories to wraiths and fetches. Lightning strikes the aircraft, the cockpit breaks apart, and the controls fail. Platt loses consciousness as the plane falls.
Platt wakes on a silent, fog-covered moor with no sign of the aircraft. He meets Peggy Mercure, who says she is looking for her husband and that no one can leave anymore. Childs then emerges from the mist after seeing a man in Platt’s uniform named Wallis, and Platt begins to understand that the crew has entered a place of the dead.
Mercure appears and reunites with Peggy. Childs sees his dead family and runs to join them. After the others disappear into the fog, Platt is left alone until Captain Wallis appears, tells him he is proud of him, and says that the others are waiting. Platt closes his eyes and lets himself pass to the other side.