Chapter 6
Stress must have made me more tired than I’d thought because I fell asleep almost instantly. Or perhaps it was just my brain, needing a break from the thinking and overthinking that I was doing, because the peace was wonderful.
I dreamed about Lenny, about him taking me to a cliff edge and telling me to jump off into the water, because ‘it’ll be fine, you’ll float’. Then I woke up to the slight snores of Kaylinn in the bed beside me and the sound of floorboards creaking.
I sat up. The darkness was total and at first I felt as though I couldn’t breathe, then a draught blew across my face from the window and I orientated myself properly. ‘Who’s there?’ I hissed.
‘Och, it’s just me, you’re fine,’ Lachlan whispered back. ‘I need some water, that’s all. Go back to sleep.’
But the adrenaline of the sudden waking plus everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours flooded through my bloodstream as though I were being pumped full of energy.
‘How can I? You’ve woken me up properly now.’
Kaylinn muttered and turned over. I looked at her but, even though the faintest light greyed the little window, she was no more than a blob.
‘Come with me, then.’ The shuffling darkness that was Lachlan took a couple more steps. ‘I want a word with you anyway.’
I had a sudden hot flashback to asking him if he was moving into his cottage alone and hoped that it wasn’t going to be the sort of ‘I like you, but not in that way. Let’s stay professional and, besides, we’re three hundred years in the past so any “where do you see this going?” talks can only really consist of the word “forwards”’ that I probably needed.
False intimacy, I reminded myself. Stress. None of this was real.
‘All right.’ I groped about and found my coat. The night air beyond the linen and body heat was chilly and I was glad I had kept my socks on.
‘Downstairs. I’m not overkeen on being listened in to by this lot.’ The latch to the door was lifted; I heard the metal rattle. ‘They’re great, but they’re a bit young and green.’
‘Are you saying I’m old?’ I shuffled after him with my socks snagging against the wooden planks of the floor.
‘You’ve more experience on you is what I’m saying, Pax.’
‘That’s just saying I’m old but in a different way.’
The staircase was even darker, having no windows to let the meagre starlight in, and we edged our way down and around with one hand on the wall and carefully placed feet.
On past the doors that led to the lower rooms we shuffled, with my socked feet sweeping the gritty steps clear on the way, and down to the ground floor.
Here a wooden window shutter was slightly ajar, which meant that a narrow trickle of moonlight could come in and illuminate a patch of floorboards.
Outside the sea was audible now that the gulls had gone quiet, a gentle rhythmic slapping against the cliffs, and the air smelled of a clean salt breeze.
I had a sudden burst of homesickness for my flat in York, with the constant background noise of neighbours and the fumes of the city.
I squashed it down. People paid good money for fresh sea air and if it came with the terror of being trapped in the past, well, there were worse things, weren’t there?
Not really, the intrusive little inner voice tried to insist. I did my best to ignore it.
Lachlan found the bucket and dipped in a cupped hand to drink.
‘Aren’t you worried about typhoid? Or some other horrible water-borne disease?’ I asked, watching him gulp.
‘We’ve been drinking it since we arrived.
Well, once the two bottles of Lucozade and Kaylinn’s coffee ran out, anyway.
’ He used his wet hand to rub over his face in a rather pointless gesture to cleanliness.
I sympathised, because I was already feeling a little bit ‘festival’.
‘And, like I said, I don’t think we can die here. ’
‘But why do you think that? Who made you Doctor Who?’ I sat on one of the sacks stuffed with straw that were laid around the wooden floor like a scarecrow graveyard. It was prickly but warmer than the floor and, after a moment of wiping his hand down his jumper, Lachlan came to join me.
‘Until you arrived I’ve been thinking it was just some fluke, you know? Just something random, a pocket of time that we fell into somehow,’ he said, his voice a little echoey against the half-plastered walls.
‘But how can that happen? People would be disappearing all the time!’ I drew my knees up to my chin to try to keep warm and wrapped my arms around them.
‘Pax, people do disappear all the time,’ he said patiently. ‘But when you arrived, and you’re a McKell, I started thinking, what if there’s a point to all this? What if we’re here for a reason?’
I stared at him, although there wasn’t much to see in this muted light.
An outline of a head with hair at an angle that made him look like a monster, a body made of shoulders and shadows.
‘A reason?’ It came out louder than I’d intended and my inflection made it sound like the maddest thing I’d ever heard.
‘What the hell kind of reason could there be? And anyway, doesn’t that imply that time is somehow sentient?
And if it is then I’ve got some very stern words I want to have with it about 1999, 2007 and 2020! ’
‘Sssh, now.’ Lachlan put a hand on my arm. ‘We don’t want to disturb anyone.’
‘They are two floors up in a building that’s so solid it could probably withstand a siege!’ I snapped and then realised that it had likely been built to withstand possible sieges and closed my mouth.
‘Fergus might be out seeing to the horses.’
‘Fergus can’t see or hear us,’ I pointed out. ‘And if the horses get arsey he’ll put it down to them just being awkward, like he did earlier. He’s hardly going to be out there shouting, “Jeannie, Jeannie, come quick, I think we’ve got invaders from another time in the castle!” is he?’
‘You’re still finding it hard to get your head around?’ Lachlan sounded kind and he gave my arm a bit of a squeeze. ‘That’s perfectly natural.’
‘Nothing about this is “perfectly natural”, Lachlan,’ I snapped and then felt odd for using his name because there was something very intimate about the two of us sitting here alone in the dark in the middle of the night.
‘And now you’re telling me that we might be here for a reason? How? What reason?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, letting his hand drop away from me. He sounded tired now. ‘Really, I don’t.’
‘Oh.’
‘What’s your life like? Back in our own time, I mean?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
A half-laugh. ‘Absolutely nothing. I’m making conversation, Pax, to save me from screaming into the void. Play along, please.’
Great. Now I felt guilty. ‘Pretty boring really. Live in York, teach chemistry at a local school, Mum lives down south, Dad is trying crofting on one of the small islands off the coast. There’s nothing really to know.’
‘Anyone else going to miss you?’
‘Only my brother,’ I said, and then wondered if he was trying to find out if I had a Significant Other, only a bit more tactfully than I’d tried it on him.
‘I was engaged, but we split up a few weeks ago. We’d just outgrown each other,’ I added as my mind was flooded with images of Jack, bored and restless and wanting to go out and be a young couple; none of which was concomitant with marking, lesson prep or target setting.
‘A few weeks ago, three hundred and maybe a few more years ahead.’
‘Yes, thanks for pointing that out.’ But I couldn’t keep away from the topic he’d begun to raise. ‘Do you seriously think there might be some kind of purpose to us being here?’
Lachlan made a movement. I couldn’t see well enough in this sieved moonlight to tell what it was – it could have been a shrug or a headshake.
‘I’ve no idea. But, and I haven’t said this to the others, so don’t breathe a word, please, I’ve got a feeling that there must be.
A feeling almost as if… I was brought here deliberately.
’ The shadow of a frown creased what I could see of his face.
I turned so that I could look at him directly, rather than sideways on. ‘So you think this is all about you?’
‘No, no, listen. I was just outside the keep when the storm came in. Literally, by the doorway there.’ He pointed in some vague direction beyond the wall.
‘And I’d started on my way down the steps when Mal, David and Kaylinn came tearing across the grass and kind of piled in after me.
But, you see, they weren’t supposed to be here.
All the other diggers had gone back to the campsite and it was only because Mal had found something he thought might be a Pictish carved stone that they stayed. ’
‘Doesn’t that make the whole process sound a bit – inept?
’ I rubbed at an ankle. Something bitey had clearly not found us as invisible as almost everything else, and twenty-first-century blood seemed just as nourishing as the eighteenth-century variety.
‘And what on earth would we be here for, anyway?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Lachlan sounded tired again now.
‘I’m thinking aloud here, Pax, you understand.
It’s a wee bit lonely when the guys there think I’m in charge because I’m that bit older, and they’re looking to me to guide them through all this.
I’m floundering around as much as they are, truly.
’ He watched me scratch my ankle for a moment.
‘I’m terrified,’ he went on. ‘Scared and out of my depth and trying to hold it together as much as anyone else. But if we start going to pieces then there’s no hope at all, is there?
’ Now I got the edges of a smile and he pointed to my leg.
‘Jeannie grows chamomile out in the garden over yon,’ he said, sounding more conversational. ‘Rub a bit on, it stops the itching.’
I gave him a slightly weak smile. His unasked-for confidences, while flattering, made me realise that even Lachlan was flailing around as much as the rest of us, which was not a comforting thought. ‘Thank you, I’ll try that,’ I said. ‘As soon as I find out what chamomile looks like.’
Lachlan laughed quietly. ‘One of the others will show you. But don’t get caught picking it.
Poor Jeannie has enough to put up with without worrying that her herbs have been possessed.
’ He started to get to his feet and held out a hand to help me up.
‘I suppose we just have to watch and wait,’ he went on.
‘If there is something behind us being here it will show itself sooner or later.’
‘And if there isn’t?’ I’d begun to look thoughtfully at the bucket of water. I was thirsty and the back of my neck felt sweaty.
‘Then we wait anyway.’ His voice fell away for a second. ‘Nothing else we can do. I’m away back to my bed, even if young Mal is snoring fit to wake the castle. Are you coming?’
‘I’ll follow you up,’ I said, realising that this sounded domesticated and twee, as though we were a couple heading up for the night after turning off the TV. ‘I want a drink first.’
‘The garderobe is on the next floor,’ he said. ‘Hole in the wall behind the tapestry.’
‘Thank you,’ I said tartly.
‘There’s some sheep’s wool in a bag next to…’
‘Stop it.’ I was laughing now. ‘I really do just want a drink.’ As well as time to think, I didn’t add as Lachlan waved a farewell and scuffled back to the staircase.
Were we really here for a reason? And what on earth could that be?
I mean, surely we couldn’t change time, could we?
I’d always thought if I could go back in time I’d be doing something involving the winning Lottery numbers.
I couldn’t even remember last week’s Lottery numbers and it wouldn’t do me any good even if I could, unless I was prepared to sit it out for a really, really long time.
I drank some water, which tasted slightly salty but cold and refreshing, then I splashed my face and gave my armpits a furtive scrub and stumbled my way back up through the dark walls to the itchy warmth of the bed, where Kaylinn was mumbling to herself in her sleep.