Chapter 4
Up until then I’d been – not reconciled to what had happened exactly, not accepting, but I’d almost got my head around the fact that something out of the ordinary was going on.
The stone-cold shock feeling had sunk deeper into my chest to allow room for function to continue.
I was breathing and rationalising and keeping calm and carrying on.
But when the small child ran right through my body as though I were nothing more than an image on the air, all my careful thought and reasoning shattered, the strength left my limbs and I sank to my knees on the ground.
Part of me watched the boy clasp the woman around her thighs, to the detriment of much of the water, while she tousled his head and led him away.
The rest of me did not know where to put myself.
Fear blanked out rational thought, cognitive dissonance warred with the very real feel of the ground beneath me and my throat was full of bile and blocked by screams that wouldn’t come out.
I sank my head down inside my jacket in an attempt not to see what was right in front of me, smelled the very twenty-first-century perfume that I’d put on in the guest-house bathroom only this morning, and howled.
It was close to hysteria, a complete loss of control.
None of this, none of it could be real! Sobs rose in waves up and out into hiccups and partial words as I went under, letting the horror of what was happening to me take over.
I could feel the thin, sandy soil under my hands, smell the salt-flecked air around me, and hear the thin wails that issued from me, but all at one remove, as though I were watching myself.
Deep inside I knew this wasn’t helping, knew that I should try to regain some measure of control before I lost all reason and tried to hurl myself from the cliffs, but I was beyond rational thought.
At last I lay flat out, exhausted with weeping and yelling, having arrived at that plateau of emotional overload when continuing starts to feel a bit self-indulgent.
Overhead there were gulls calling and when I rolled over to face the sky, they were gathering in a wheeling, circling mob above me like a bunch of cut-price vultures around a corpse.
‘Bugger off,’ I said, vaguely. They were there.
Undeniably, absolutely there – I could see the savage orange beaks and the outline of feathers against the sky.
My imagination was good, but why would I bother imagining seagulls?
And when one of them dropped a blob of white bird poo onto the grass near my head I had to face the fact that this, whatever it was, was actually real.
‘You’re all right down there, aye?’ To my extreme embarrassment, Lachlan was standing a few feet away, hands in pockets and with his coat collar rucked up on one side, watching me.
‘I don’t know. I might not have finished yet,’ I said, from the ground.
I lay there for a few moments longer, trying to work out how to get up without further mortification, while Lachlan rocked on his heels. Eventually he said, ‘I reckon that was it. Do you want a hand up?’
‘No, I’m fine,’ I said, still supine and staring at the gulls.
‘Come on away now.’ He held out a hand and I reluctantly grasped it, being jerked to my feet by muscles that were well concealed inside that muddy coat. ‘I hope you’re feeling better after that. Are you hungry?’
‘Hungry?’ I stared at him as though he were speaking in tongues. I’d missed breakfast at the guest house and I ought to be hungry, but my stomach felt sealed shut.
‘Yes. You know, that feeling where you’d kill someone for a bacon sandwich?
Or you might be a vegetarian, I suppose, in which case you’ve come to the right place.
’ He gave me a bright smile, which sparkled in all the wrong places, and I realised that he was struggling for normality as much as I was.
‘We have to eat? We’re not like – ghosts, or something?’
He laughed, and this was a proper, genuine laugh. ‘Of course we have to eat! And pee and… well, everything else. We’re real people here, even if you don’t think it. What’s your name, by the way? I’m calling you Woman From York in my head, but that’s just weird.’ He smiled again.
It felt to me as though he was trying to use ridiculousness to detract from my embarrassment, which was nice of him, so I pulled myself together. ‘My name is Pax. Pax McKell.’ I wondered whether I should shake hands but reasoned that it was a bit late for that.
‘Pax? Unusual name now.’
I sighed. ‘Yes. Bit of a long story there.’
Lachlan put his hands back in his pockets and began to lead the way across the stretch of headland around the keep. ‘I think we’ve got time. About three hundred years, by my reckoning.’
I shivered. I did not want to think about time just now.
Talking about family was a good distraction.
‘My parents were a bit… They don’t make a great couple.
They had Lenny, Lennox, my brother, then they got divorced.
Then they decided they couldn’t live without each other, got married again and had me.
Called me Perdita, but nicknamed me Pax because I symbolised peace in their relationship.
And then they promptly got divorced again.
’ Usually saying any of this would start the anxiety flaring with the resultant heart-rate increase, but my heart was already whirring like overwound clockwork and had nowhere further to go so the words came out factually and flat.
‘Sounds to me as though they just liked the letter X and needed an excuse to use it in another name,’ Lachlan said cheerily.
‘I did think that they could have called Lenny Xerxes and have done with it,’ I agreed.
Anything to take my mind off the fact that we were going back inside a building that ought to have been tumbled walls but wasn’t.
Our feet clattered as we went back down the wooden staircase and I tried to ignore the solidity of the sound and the very real smell of something soupy from below.
‘So, we have to eat? What do we eat? Where does it come from?’
‘We steal it.’ This sounded like David, who had clearly roused himself from his position of sadness, for which I now felt a deep sympathy.
‘We wait until nobody is looking and then take it from the kitchen, out there.’ He nodded towards the door.
Now I could see his face properly. He had a dark, thin face and an expression of carefully suppressed anxiety.
But then so did everyone else. I doubted that I was the picture of relaxed serenity either.
‘But we have to take care.’ This was Kaylinn. ‘That nobody sees us.’
‘But nobody can see us!’ I almost wailed as we went back into the dark, smoke-smelling room.
Everyone exchanged a look. ‘Bad, was it?’ Mal asked Lachlan.
‘Och, she bore it surprisingly well, considering,’ he replied, taking off his coat to reveal a baggy and pilled jumper and scruffy jeans. ‘Only a bit of screaming.’
Mal made a face. ‘David banged his head on the wall for an hour or so, and Kaylinn…’
‘Yeah, you didn’t cover yourself in glory either,’ she snapped. ‘And you still haven’t washed those pants!’
‘Trousers,’ Lachlan said, in my ear. ‘Mal had a bit of an… incident.’
‘Yes, I have,’ Mal responded smartly. ‘Just because you have no standards, just because we’ve found ourselves…’ He stopped talking and swallowed visibly.
‘So, we steal food,’ I said carefully. Everyone was obviously functioning on a knife-edge of sanity and I didn’t want the chasm of madness to open any further because I could quite easily have abseiled in with the rest of them.
‘We don’t know what the rules are about when the food becomes invisible. Like, is it when we pick it up, or what?’ Mal picked up the subject. ‘So we shove it up our jackets or whatever, in case the sight of a floating turnip drives poor Jeannie into hysterics.’
The oddness of that sentence made my own hysterics threaten again. ‘Who’s Jeannie?’ I asked, to distract it.
‘Jeannie and Fergus, they’re who’re basically keeping the castle ticking over.
’ David stepped into the room from the other direction carrying the iron pot I’d seen on the pitiful fire when I arrived.
‘There’s nobody else here, just them and the boy.
’ He hauled the pan onto the table and Kaylinn picked some metal plates from a corner.
‘They don’t come down here, so we’ve been okay cooking stuff, although lighting the fire was a bit of a challenge. ’
‘We’ve used up nearly all our matches, by the way,’ Lachlan said, patting himself down as though more matches might be expected to materialise in a pocket. ‘So someone had better start practising rubbing sticks together.’
‘But this is a castle,’ I said, as though I were personally insulted by the lack of sexy knights in armour and ladies in gorgeous frocks.
‘Don’t blame me.’ David dug a wooden ladle into the pot and began lifting out stringy lumps.
‘I studied the Picts.’ His cheeks sank in a little further as he said this, as though there was something bitter associated with the subject.
‘Also, apparently, I have become chief cook and bottle washer. We need to take turns here, guys. I have enough looking after people back…’ He stopped suddenly.
Memory hot-wired itself into action, unprovoked. ‘He walked through me,’ I said with a shiver that started in my brain. ‘The young boy. He walked right through me.’
Mal looked at me with close interest as he took a plate. ‘Are you sure she’s finished?’ he asked Lachlan.
‘There may be a wee bit more screaming to come yet,’ Lachlan said equably, taking another plate. ‘We’ll have to see.’ He threw me a glance. It was three-quarters concern, but spared a percentage and a raised eyebrow for levity.
‘Come on, sit down.’ Kaylinn waved us all to the table. ‘We might be stuck in the past, but that’s no reason not to have some manners.’
And so, like the most bizarre dinner party in, well, history, we sat down around the bleak wooden table and ate lumpy lukewarm stew off metal plates with wooden spoons.