Chapter 2
I must have hit my head on the way down because after the initial confusion of the fall there was blackness.
Darkness and silence and – nothing. Eventually though, by very fast blinking, I managed to get my eyes to focus on a faint glow coming from somewhere to my left.
I couldn’t see light from above, where I’d fallen, but my neck and back were too stiff for me to turn and examine where I’d come from.
My jeans felt dragged around the backside and where my jacket and sweatshirt had ridden up during my slide my skin was sore and basted with dust.
I gave myself one of those quick once-overs that everyone does after an accident.
Teeth? All intact. Skull didn’t seem to be cracked, there was no dripping blood and I could see, even if all I could see was faintly illuminated darkness.
Arms and legs all worked and apart from a stinging along my back and an ache in one knee that was most definitely going to be a huge bruise – I was okay.
Okay, but stuck in a cellar in the dark.
The blackness behind me was so total that I couldn’t even see the staircase I had come down, so any attempt to climb back up was off the cards.
Cautiously I clambered to my feet and nothing fell off, cracked or buckled.
The vague light ahead wavered at me in a narrow line and I could just about make out the outline of a door from beneath which the light was creeping.
Not daylight, it was too yellow and insubstantial, so perhaps a lantern?
What the hell? Perhaps there were squatters here in the ruins?
Or the vanished archaeologists were hiding?
Why on earth would a bunch of archaeologists want to hide in a castle basement?
Presumably they’d all got a bit past the ‘dash out and shout “boo!”’ stage some while back.
And even the most dedicated hide-and-seek champion was going to give up before the three-month mark.
I didn’t fancy trying to clamber up a sheer slope of loose rock without being able to see, so, keeping one hand on the gritty wall for support and limping rather extravagantly, I crept my way around the outline of the room towards the door.
It must lead somewhere and I was going to have to get myself out of here.
Given Lenny’s general ability to become obsessed with trivia, it might be some time before he realised that I had vanished, and even longer before he tried to find me.
I’d have to make my own way out. There must be a way, possibly on the other side of that door.
There was a smell of ancient burning, coming from the huge crumbling fireplace that my fingers found in the wall, where the smouldering remains of a fire threw out a meagre warmth.
A big iron pot sat above the ashy detritus, with liquid in.
Were there people living down here? Had Lenny and I stumbled on a camp for down-and-outs?
That would put the cherry on the icing, I thought as I carried on bumbling my way around to the door.
We seemed to have bought not only a ruin, but a ruin from which we’d have to evict a bunch of people with nowhere else to go.
Great. Thanks, Lenny. Just what I needed.
The door, when I reached it, was built of solid planks of wood and latched with an enormous metal catch that looked more suited to sealing a bank vault than holding a door shut.
But the flickering light was squeezing itself between the hinges and oozing in a narrow sliver underneath like a promise of freedom and I had to get out before Lenny signed us up for more ruinous expense.
Carefully and trying to be as silent as I could in case there was a gang of international jewel thieves or murderers on the other side – because most of my reading erred towards the Agatha Christie and Famous Five end of the book spectrum – I put my thumb on the latch and pressed it down.
The door groaned and opened inwards and I performed a kind of ‘please don’t see me’ slither around its open edge and into the room beyond.
Four people were in there, sitting around a table. In the middle of the table a candle guttered and flared as the door opened, making them all look up, except for one, who had his head in his hands.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked, although their ages, number and general state of dishevelled clothing were making me suspect that these were the missing archaeologists.
‘Oh, bloody hell, not another one!’ This was said by a thin, edgy-looking man whose hair was standing in short spikes around his head.
‘Don’t mind Mal,’ a very Scots accent came wrapped around words spoken by another man, who pushed aside his stool and wandered over. ‘He’s still salty about being here. Who are you, lass?’ I was about to answer when he confounded me completely by adding, ‘And when did you come from?’
‘Er,’ I said, it being all the vocabulary I had to hand.
‘Let the poor woman come in and sit down.’ This was a woman, younger than me and with an American accent. ‘She’s only just arrived and it’s going to be a freaking trip.’ She pushed out a stool and smiled at me. ‘Come here. It’s okay, we don’t bite.’
The man with his head in his hands didn’t even look up. ‘Oh God,’ he moaned. ‘Is there no end to this? What are we going to do?’ Everyone ignored him.
‘Who… who are you?’ It was all I could come up with and it sounded a bit pathetic. Surely why a group of people were sitting, seemingly miserably, around a candle in a basement was more worthy of an answer?
The man with the Scots accent, and who was unshaven to the point of reddish-blond stubble and dressed in a tatty waxed jacket, looked at me critically. ‘I think, perhaps, that you ought to sit down first. Kaylinn, is there any more coffee in your flask there?’
Kaylinn, evidently the American girl, shook her head. ‘We finished it way back.’
‘Bugger. Anyone got anything else that might help with shock?’
The man with his head in his hands gave a short and sarcastic laugh. ‘Given our situation, Lachlan, I don’t really think that there’s much that’s going to “help”, is there?’
‘David,’ said Kaylinn, evenly. ‘We agreed. No downers, right? We gotta stay positive.’
I would have felt a lot better about her statement had her final words not been lost to a gulp that was clearly the precursor to tears.
David harrumphed and went back to staring at the table from between his fingers.
Edgy man, who must be Mal, dug around in the pockets of an ancient and torn hoodie and brought out a pack of throat sweets.
‘Sugar,’ he said. ‘It won’t help but it will give your mouth something to do other than scream.
’ He handed me a wrapped morsel. I stared at it as if I’d never seen a lozenge before.
‘You tell her, Lachlan. I’m prepared to do the Heimlich manoeuvre if she inhales. ’
‘Okay,’ said muddy-jacketed Lachlan. ‘Okay. Now, this is going to be hard to believe…’
David harrumphed again. ‘Understatement of the year,’ he said sullenly to the candle.
‘Look,’ I said as firmly as I could manage. ‘I don’t need to know. I just want to get out of here and go about my business. Whatever it is that you’re doing, it’s nothing to do with me.’
Mal, whose cultivated ‘edgy’ look was rather spoiled by a cherubic round face and intelligent eyes, snorted. ‘I don’t think you get a choice.’ He ran a hand through his hair, which stood up as though he’d recently been very, very startled. ‘Go on, Lachlan, give her the really unbelievable bit.’
‘We seem to still be in Dunaire Castle but…’ Lachlan took a deep breath. ‘I know how daft this sounds and I’m sorry, but – the castle is as it was in the eighteenth century.’ There was a silence into which I unwrapped the throat sweet.
‘Well?’ asked Mal, clearly eager for some response from me.
I sucked the sweet. I had obviously either fallen in among a bunch of deluded crackheads, or they were up to nefarious doings and needed to confuse the hell out of me so that I’d be glad to get out of here.
I’d seen Scooby Doo, I knew how this went.
If they even let me get out of here, of course.
Maybe they were going to kill me to stop me revealing their presence?
Perhaps this throat sweet was really poison?
It tasted all right so I crunched it. It had been wrapped, after all.
‘Okay,’ I said eventually when I’d swallowed it and when the concentrated stares were beginning to get a bit much.
‘But I need to get out of here. My brother is up there in the castle and he will be looking for me.’ He wouldn’t, of course, not yet, but it was the only way I could think of to let them know that there was someone else on the site who would be concerned about my disappearance.
‘He will call the police if he can’t find me,’ I added, in case they were thinking, One man? What can he do against all of us?
Mal sighed loudly and his previously perky hair flopped. Kaylinn patted my arm and Lachlan began to stride around the table. ‘You’re not understanding,’ he said, with a touch of impatience.
‘Hardly surprisingly,’ David said, still slumped. ‘Come on, Lach, we still haven’t got our heads around things, we can’t expect this poor lady to go, “Oh yes, all right, you’re all clearly such a sane and sorted bunch that of course I’m going to believe that we’ve all fallen through time.” Can we?’
‘I suppose not.’ As he stomped around a bit more, I could see that Lachlan was wearing muddy trousers beneath his jacket, and huge boots.
Everyone else was in T-shirts and hoodies and trainers.
It looked as though their morning run had been interrupted.
‘It’s just such a mad situation, it’s hard to know what to say. ’
‘You could show her?’ Kaylinn was still patting me soothingly as though I were a nervous pony. Her eyes were sympathetic but slightly too reddened to give me confidence. ‘It’s the only way. Remember that we didn’t really understand until we tried to go out there.’