Every year until I was fifteen, the family and I would make the drive up to Wales to make camp for a long weekend. The Welsh spring was a funny thing, especially near the mountains. The days would be warm and sunny, enough to get some colour on your skin, but at night, the temperature would drop like it was in free-fall. Practically freezing. You had to put on extra layers if you didn’t want to shiver right through the night, and of course I was a kid so I always cried when it got cold. I used to put on all the clothes I’d packed for the trip, and got so bulky I couldn’t put my arms down fully. I stood there, looking like one of those winged corkscrews when it was halfway to opening a bottle. The grown-ups would laugh at me, standing there stiff as a board with tears streaming down my cheeks. And it was still too damn cold to sleep. 

One year, when I was eight or nine I think, we went with Mum, Dad, Dad’s brother Alex, and his son Ricky. We rented a private pitch near the mountains in the north, and had the whole place to ourselves. There was a stream nearby where Ricky and I played most of the day, and in the evenings we’d play football near the camp site as Dad and Uncle Alex built a fire and Mum prepared dinner. We had one of those big family tents with the individual pods, although Ricky and I had to share and obviously Mum and Dad did anyway, so the only actual person with their own “room” was Alex. I liked it that way, having Ricky sleeping next to me added some extra warmth when the temperature got really low at night, and the guy slept like a log. 

On Sunday, (the last full day of the holiday), Dad took Ricky and I hiking in the mountains. Alex said he was going into the next town to find some fishing gear, and hiking wasn’t Mum’s thing at all. Besides, she was always paranoid about leaving our stuff unattended, even in the middle of nowhere, and felt better about staying behind to protect it. We wished Alex had come but we didn’t miss Mum all that much – she was too fussy about outdoors stuff. Had she come, she’d likely have insisted on stopping every half hour or so and rub sun cream on our faces. Dad was chill. He even let us do the riskier stuff like climb the rock falls or leap between river banks, which would’ve induced a panic attack in Mum. 

A couple hours into our hike, we stopped so Dad could show us the view of the forests far beyond. He looked genuinely awestruck by the beauty of it all, and insisted we keep quiet for a minute and appreciate it properly. He had grown up near these parts, moving to England when he was in his twenties. Mum had been studying in Bangor when they met, but she hadn’t been willing to stay there after she graduated, so Dad compromised on the condition they would come visit Wales whenever they could. I could tell he was still deeply in love with the place, and looking out over the woodlands below I could understand why. It was the last truly innocent place on Earth for my father, and he couldn’t bear to turn his back on it.

‘Are there monsters around here?’ Ricky asked, breaking the silence Dad and I had been enjoying. Ricky was seven, and in the last year had become obsessed with folklore after getting a book on it from his dad. 

‘I don’t think so,’ my father told him. ‘But there is a tale from around these parts.’ 

Ricky’s ears pricked up at that, and he begged my dad to tell us, so we found a boulder nearby big enough to sit on, and Dad told us the story of Y Brenin Llwyd. 

‘They call him the Grey King,’ he told us. ‘He roams the mountains, always silent, and his cloak is made from mist. He has horns on his head like a ram!’

‘Is he a ghost?’ Ricky asked, hoping the answer would be yes. 

‘I’m not too sure,’ Dad answered. ‘Maybe. But I never thought of him as a ghost.’

‘What does he want?’ I asked. ‘Why does he roam the mountains?’

‘Well, because this is his home. That’s why you should never come here when it gets dark. He roams the mountains to protect his kingdom, and he’ll eat anyone he finds!’

‘Even kids?’

‘Especially kids.’ 

When he noticed our faces drop he laughed, and said:

‘But don’t worry. He won’t do nothing when I’m around. Now come on, let’s get going.’

We followed him, but the whole walk back to the camp site, Ricky and I were quieter than usual, and often looked over our shoulder to make sure that Brenin Llwd wasn’t following us. On the home stretch, it had started to get dark, which spooked us, and we couldn’t be more thankful when we finally saw the tent again, where Mum and Uncle Alex were waiting for us. Dad didn’t stay long before he went off up the road on his own, saying he needed supplies. He returned an hour later with a case of beer, though it seemed like he’d already made his way through a couple of cans on the walk back. He was strangely quiet during dinner, and went to bed not long afterwards. By then the temperature had dropped significantly, and I had put on all my clothes again. The sight never failed to make everyone laugh, and Mum insisted on taking a picture of me before Dad poked his head out of the tent and asked us to keep it down. 

I had to roll into my pod after Ricky, considering the amount I was wrapped up meant I could barely move. Mum said if I needed the toilet in the night then I’d need to shed a couple of layers just to get out of the tent, but I told her I’d hold it if need be. Before he closed his eyes, Ricky asked me if I thought Brenin Llwd was out there, and I told him maybe but that he was in the mountains, and we were safe so long as we were here with Dad. He wasn’t convinced, and said that he would stay up to try and catch him if he came creeping into the tent, but soon enough his eyelids grew heavy and Ricky was fast asleep beside me. I couldn’t bear the cold myself, and found that every time I nodded off I shivered myself awake again. So I just laid there, stiff and bulky in all my clothes, listening to the wind outside. 

Then I heard one of the pods unzip and forgot all about the cold at once. My eyes, the only thing I could move with ease, went to the flap of the tent and waited for something to happen. I knew it was probably one of the grown-ups getting up to use the toilet, (maybe Dad after all those beers), but something seemed off. The zip had moved very slowly, like it was keen on not disturbing anyone. Then came the gentle thud of feet treading carefully on the floor of the tent, with a slight crunch on the cold grass underneath the tarpaulin. Whomever’s feet they were stood for a moment, anticipating, and I started to get scared. They didn’t want to be heard, and I asked myself why someone wouldn’t want to be heard so badly, and realised with horror, that it was because they shouldn’t have been there. At that moment I knew it was him, Y Brenin Llwd, the Grey King, the Monarch of the Mountains, come to eat us up for going into his home. He was coming for me and Ricky because we were kids!

I heard the zip on Uncle Alex’s pod and my heart started racing. He wasn’t coming for me and Ricky after all, he was going for the grown-ups first and then he would come for us when no one was left to protect us. I was certain of it then, and was going to wake up Ricky to warn him when…

I heard the faintest whisper of my mother’s voice, not a trace of fear in it, talking to someone. I don’t know what she said but the voice that answered was Uncle Alex’s, whose own voice was just as soft and calm as hers. Then I heard my mother climb into his pod and slowly zip it up behind her. For several minutes I heard nothing at all, but eventually I heard the soft, careful rustling of his sleeping bag. After a while, I could start to hear my uncle’s breathing get heavier, and a stifled moan escaped my mother’s lips before the sleeping bag rustled a final time. For the next few minutes all I could hear were their breaths, slowing gradually. Even though I was only a kid, I worked out what was going on. 

There was a snuffling sound coming from somewhere in the tent but it wasn’t my mother or uncle this time, it was my dad. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was crying very quietly, like he didn’t want anyone to hear him. But I did, and I understood that whatever my mother and my uncle were doing in that pod, my father knew about it, and possibly had for a very long time. But he didn’t do anything about it; he didn’t get out of bed and confront them, he even muffled his crying to make sure they wouldn’t hear him, wouldn’t know how much it was hurting him. To this day, I don’t understand why he wouldn’t do anything. Why my dad, who had promised to protect us, wouldn’t protect himself. Why he was so willing just to lie there, so pathetically, and cry silently into the night. 

I turned my head away from the flap and looked up, assuming I would go to sleep and forget about this. That in a moment I would shut my eyes and in the next it would be morning, and warm, and I could shed all these layers and be free again. That we would go home, and I wouldn’t have to look at all three adults sitting awkwardly around the camp fire anymore. But not yet.

As I turned my head back and looked up he was there, that ghostly figure in a cloak of mist with horns upon his head. Brenin Llwd had come after all, and was hovering barely two feet from my face, staring at me, ready to devour me. At once, I lost control of my bladder and I started to feel the warmth spread from my crotch to my legs and then underneath me, but I didn’t make a sound. I was frozen not in the cold, but in my own terror, my eyes pinned to his as he opened his mouth to feast upon me. I wanted to scream, to call for help, but from whom? I wasn’t thinking. I only knew I had to scream for someone, someone who could protect me. I screamed:

‘UNCLE ALEX! UNCLE ALEX! HELP ME!’