Chapter 3 #2
‘So, what is going on?’ I spared another look over at the yard behind us, where the man had resumed his grooming but the horses were shifting nervously as though they half expected me to run out at them screaming.
‘What the hell?’ I noticed my voice rising towards panic, tried to stop it and wondered why.
Although teaching could be full of moments of high drama and we were taught to keep emotions in check and never show fear, if any situation warranted hysterics this was it.
Lachlan sighed. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that,’ he said, removing his hand from the pocket and tortoising himself inside the collar of his coat.
‘What? You seriously thought I’d have a moment like – that…
’ I waved to indicate the still-sweating horses and the unconcerned groom.
The boy had stopped scraping muck now and was sitting throwing pebbles at a chicken in an impersonal way.
He didn’t seem to have any real grudge against the hen in question, he was just occupying time.
‘And I’d sit down and say, “Well, that’s a bit odd. ” Seriously? You really thought that?’
I must have had my Big Teaching Voice on because Lachlan backed away a couple of steps and widened his eyes. ‘No. Of course not. Unless you fall backwards through time regularly.’
‘Lachlan, nobody “falls backwards through time regularly”!’ I snapped.
‘Nobody falls backwards through time at all. There’s something going on here that I am trying to get my head round.
I’m confused and I’m upset and I’m… well, whatever it is that I am, it’s not something that I experience every day. ’
Now he smiled and it was a nice smile, I had to admit.
Lachlan was older than I’d taken him for when he’d only been a muddy coat and an accent, but the smile lit his eyes and made him – I hated to even think it given that I was in a situation that seemed to tread a fine line between insanity and the unimaginable – quite cute.
‘Glad to hear it. I’m a history lecturer over in Glasgow, and I wouldn’t want anyone intruding on my expertise, now, would I?’ He’d lost the tremulous tone now, I was glad to hear. One of us hysterical with fear was enough right now and I was fulfilling our quota.
‘It’s not my fault if you’re insecure in your profession.’ I knew this was rude, but I was unsettled to the point of near-breakdown and didn’t feel that there was much benefit in being nice to what, after all, might turn out to be a hallucination. ‘I just want to know what is going on.’
‘Come and sit down.’ He patted a log that was covered in chopping marks and was hopefully used as a support for wood being cut, rather than a serial killer’s practice board.
‘Why? I told you I’m not going to faint.’ I felt a moment of pride when I remembered that he’d told me Kaylinn ‘came over a bit funny’. I was handling all this rather well, I thought. Given that I had no idea what ‘all this’ even was.
Over in the yard, grooming man moved on to the next horse, with a sharp word for stone-throwing boy.
‘Maybe not. But it’s still a shock.’ Lachlan sat on one end of the log and surprised me by crumpling forward to put his head in his hands. ‘God knows, it’s still terrifying the hell out of me.’
I looked behind me. What had been a few crumbling walls with window arches when I’d walked around it with Lenny was now a solid, four-square tower three storeys high and roofed at various pitches and angles in stone.
A pale scribble of smoke issued from one chimney but otherwise it was quiet.
All the activity seemed to be going on out here in this odd little side yard, where the horses were still looking around nervously and the man was rubbing down the second one with a handful of straw.
The small boy had stopped throwing stones and was trying to help, despite not coming up much further than the horse’s shoulder.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, probably on a loop but I’d lost the ability to listen to myself. Shock wasn’t manifesting in screaming or crying but it was there, a deep stone of cold in my chest. And Lachlan was right, I did need to sit down; my legs were shaking again.
‘None of us understands,’ Lachlan said, slightly muffled. His voice sounded thick and I wondered if he was crying. ‘It’s mad. Completely mad. Or we are.’
‘I mean…’ I ran out of words. The evidence of my own eyes was telling me that the castle was here, a big solid building behind me, with the watery sun throwing it as an enormous shadow across the thin grass.
My nose told me there were horses and other animals around that hadn’t been a feature an hour or so ago.
Even my bum, as I sank onto the rough wooden makeshift bench, gave me feedback that this experience was absolutely, totally and incontrovertibly real.
But it couldn’t be.
‘There’s something else too.’ Now Lachlan sat up.
His hair was spiked around the front and his eyes were red but I said nothing.
If any situation warranted a quick sob, this was it and I couldn’t even express my own fear sufficiently to sum things up.
I wasn’t going to judge someone else for trying.
‘There’s more?’ That stone of shock wasn’t moving.
Usefully, though, it was tamping down emotional reactions and I had another moment of quiet pride.
It was making me sensible and able to take in information, when I’d often suspected that I’d go to pieces in a crisis.
Of course, this wasn’t a crisis, as such. It was – something else.
‘What do you see? What do you feel?’ Lachlan rubbed a hand over his face. I didn’t know if he was doing it subconsciously to give me a clue, but I focused on it anyway.
‘You think you’ve been here a couple of days, but you’ve been gone three months.
You look as though you’ve only been gone a few days, none of you are filthy and you don’t have beards to your knees, but it’s July back…
’ I stumbled over having to put my present into the right tense for the now.
‘When I left,’ I finished. ‘But it doesn’t feel like July here. ’
All of a sudden Lachlan gave me a big broad grin.
There was a twinkle of mischief at the edges of it and all teariness seemed to be forgotten.
‘Yes! The others can’t see it. They’re southerners, well, not Kaylinn, but she’s only been over here a year so she’s not quite in tune with the seasons yet.
To them, it’s Scotland, it always feels cold and wet. But you’re not a Scot?’
‘Oh, I am.’ I sighed. I’d had my heritage recited to me with my bedtime stories whenever I’d stayed at Dad’s.
He was very – some might say overzealously – proud of his ancestry and I apparently had a family tree that stretched back almost as far as Robert the Bruce.
‘We’re McKells through and through. This used to be our… ’
I stopped. Lachlan wasn’t smiling now. His eyes seemed to have grown bigger, which made his skin look very pale. ‘McKell? Like… like Earl McKell? Who owned… owns this castle?’
I shrugged. ‘Lennox – that’s my brother – thinks so.
The land came up for sale a year or so ago and he decided we’d buy it.
We’re restoring the castle,’ I said, slightly hollowly, because it was what I considered way beyond restoration and had passed through ‘demolition’ into ‘clear the land for sheep’ territory.
Except now it was a solid structure. ‘To start a hotel,’ I finished, even more hollowly because the impossibility of the venture dawned on me anew every time I said it.
Lachlan took a deep breath. ‘Well now,’ he said. ‘Well now, that puts rather a different complexion on things. I need to think about this.’
‘Can we go back to the other thing?’ His sudden seriousness after that smile was beginning to threaten the solid shock rock. The sledgehammer of ‘oh, shit’ was dangerously close.
‘Other thing?’
‘You said there was something else. About time, perhaps? How you got lost in April, it’s July in my time?’
‘Oh, yes, sorry. I’m easily distracted these days.
’ He shook his head. ‘I never know whether to be upset by that or not. I mean, I’m a professor of early medieval history so, excluding sudden manuscript discoveries, there’s not been many surprises in my job.
I’m having to adapt.’ The smile was back now, but it was more thoughtful than it had been.
‘What time of year do you think it is here?’
I tried to concentrate. My thoughts wouldn’t line up, skittering like startled mice around my brain, and when I put my hands up to my face, both fingers and cheeks were icy cold.
I was in shock, I realised. But sorting through facts, coordinating them and presenting them was my job. I could do this.
I took a deep breath. ‘It’s cool but not cold.
The horses have winter coats.’ I stared around.
There were no trees around to give me a clue, the headland was bare of most vegetation, although there was a small patch over behind this makeshift yard that could have been a garden.
It was ragged with old growth and patchworked with bare earth. ‘October?’
‘Yes!’ He jumped to his feet and made a movement that might have been an air-punch, then looked quickly towards grooming man and stone-throwing boy.
It must have been instinctive because they, of course, carried on as though we didn’t exist, which to them, I supposed, we didn’t.
‘You can see it too! There’s something not right about that, surely – leaving in April and ending up in October? ’
Lachlan turned an eager face to me, wanting my confirmation, and I didn’t know what to say.
If we’d actually, really, genuinely fallen backwards through time because of some mechanism that I didn’t want to even try to get my head around, then the simple matter of a few lost or gained months was nothing, surely?