Chapter Twenty-One
Landon had many fears, but he’d never considered he might also be claustrophobic until he was forced to hunch his shoulders and tuck his face into his chest to descend into the vault, each step dragging him deeper into the stifling dark.
“Are you hanging in there?” Rose whispered behind him.
Landon gulped. “Never better.” He took a step down but didn’t stoop quite low enough, banging his head on the ceiling. He let out a small whimper despite his every effort not to.
“These vaults were built in the late eighteenth century,” the tour guide said from somewhere in front of them, her lantern keeping only the nastiest of the shadows at bay.
“The idea was that they’d be used for storage, but there’s a damp down here that seeps into your bones.
Ruined their goods, too, so the merchants abandoned them.
That’s when the scavengers descended: thieves, smugglers, body snatchers.
People lived here, starved for air and light, sometimes with no way out. ”
“What the hell is a body snatcher?” Landon asked.
“Ask the guide.”
There was nothing on earth that could have convinced Landon to prolong this tour. “You know, it’s probably pretty self-explanatory.”
A jarring crack rolled through the chamber. The man in front of Landon swore loudly. He wondered if anyone but Rose was truly enjoying themselves.
“Many people died down here,” the guide continued.
“Some people say you can still hear them, screaming, clawing to get out on these cold, dark nights.” Landon wished this tour guide was a little less good at her job.
Why couldn’t they have been blessed with a gangly teenager, with pimples and a cracking voice?
He would have been able to find some humor in that.
Landon wanted to see the bright lights of High Street very, very badly.
Finally, the cramped stairwell let out into a chamber with high ceilings. It was a relief to stand up straight, though Landon still didn’t want to linger longer than they had to.
“This is where they lived, and slept,” the guide said. “One of many arched chambers under the South Bridge. If you feel a cold gust of air, hear a voice, or feel something, try not to run. I’ll give you all a moment to explore.”
Rose tapped a finger on Landon’s shoulder and he jumped. “Easy there,” she said with a smile. “Explore with me?”
His heart lurched—the foolish, untrustworthy thing—and hope flared before he could stop it. “As long as you lead the way.”
Landon could hardly see two feet in front of him, but Rose moved with the grace he’d quickly grown to associate with her; a confidence that she could navigate any space at all.
“You know, I thought our guide was going to get a little more specific about the ghosts down here. It feels like the world’s most sanitized history lesson. ”
He chuckled. “What sorts of details were you hoping for?”
Rose turned around, and he caught the bright whites of her teeth. “My friend told me that when she was down here, her guide told her about a ghost named Mr. Boots. He pushes people and throws rocks at them.”
Landon scoffed. “And you’d like to meet him?”
“I’d at least like to hear about him! And what about William Burke and William Hare?”
“What about them?”
“The famous serial killers? Apparently they used these vaults as a hideout. And I mean, they killed like seventeen people. That’s worth a mention!”
“Well the tour’s not over yet,” Landon said, though that sort of morbid history held no appeal for him. “If you know all this stuff already, why come?”
“It’s one thing to know something. It’s another thing to feel it.”
She was an artist, historian, and scientist, this new Rose. “I’m very sorry no ghosts have stoned you yet. All I’ve got is a mild case of claustrophobia, but I haven’t felt anything.” Thank God.
Rose shrugged. “I thought I felt something earlier, but I can’t tell if I only think I felt it because I was hoping to feel it.”
Landon was very done exploring, or whatever the hell it was they were doing down there in the dark. “What do you think you felt?”
“A little hand,” she said.
The damp air threatened to choke him. “What makes you think you felt that?”
Rose placed her hand on the wet stone of the room’s archway as if trying to force the room to tell her its secrets. “There was no weight to it, but it was warm. Then it was gone. I got so cold, after. Honestly, I still can’t shake off this chill.”
Landon stripped off his jacket without thinking, the way he’d always done for Rose when she expressed even an ounce of discomfort. “Here, take mine.”
She let him drape it over her shoulders, studying him in the dark. “Now you’ll be cold. What if a ghost grabs your hand?”
“Oh, ghosts don’t like me very much,” said Landon.
“Let’s keep moving, folks!” their guide yelled from somewhere Landon couldn’t quite see. “Don’t want to leave anyone behind, but we’ve a few more vaults to see and you’ll not want to miss the story of Mr. Boots.”
“There it is!” Rose said triumphantly. “Just a few more vaults, and you’re a free man.”
Landon chuckled but could not conceal his unease. He told himself the cold in his chest was just his imagination running wild. But he remembered too well the feeling of a small hand inside his own. What he felt now was close enough to set his heart racing.
“Are you okay?” Rose asked, reading something on his face he hadn’t meant her to see.
“Never better.” The small hand in his tightened, and he closed his eyes, willing himself to be unaffected. But he’d never been able to shake the feeling before. Why on earth would he be able to here?
The lights of High Street were a glorious sight. Landon considered dropping to his knees in gratitude but stopped himself, mostly because Rose was watching. “I get the sense I may have some damage control to do,” Rose said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he lied.
“Let me take you out for a drink. There’s a great cocktail bar through a close halfway to the castle. It’s not a secret, but I promise it’s not filled to the brim with tourists.”
“I’m a tourist,” Landon said.
“I don’t think of you that way. And anyway, you won’t be one for much longer.”
Landon was an expert at not getting his hopes up.
He was so practiced it felt antithetical to his entire being to feel the hope he did now, with her encouragement.
But she wanted him to stay. She’d said it loud enough that even through his thick skull he could hear her. “You really think I belong here?”
“I do,” she said. “There’s just something about you I can’t put my finger on. I don’t really know how else to say it, you just…” She paused and looked up at him from beneath the black eyelashes he loved so much. “Fit.” Then she reached her hands into the pocket of his raincoat.
“A drink sounds nice,” he said.
Her right hand flew out of the coat, clutching a bit of crumpled paper.
Landon should have taken the receipt out of the pocket the day he’d found it, but outside of his home, in this magical city where anything was possible, Rose’s handwriting on the back had turned it into a talisman of sorts.
A reminder of all he could have again if he just kept moving forward.
“‘Dentist appointment—1:15,’” she read. Rose turned the crumpled paper over in her hands. “‘Two coffees and two croissants.’ Why do I remember this?”
Landon froze. There had been no reports of anyone who’d taken the pill remembering anything. There were some people whose families and friends told them about their lives in such great detail that they felt like they remembered, but that wasn’t the same thing. That wasn’t what this was.
“What does it feel like?” he asked, suddenly desperate. Could his Rose be closer than he thought? What would he say to her, if she appeared? He should have written something down; he should have—
Rose laughed. “It feels like you told all of us about this at our last pill meeting. Took me a minute to put my finger on it.”
Landon tried to disguise his deflation, but the punch to the gut was hard to walk off. “Right,” he said. “Yeah, I completely forgot.”
Rose tilted her head, looking at him like she didn’t quite believe his reply. “Why did you hold on to this?”
“What do you mean?” Landon asked, trying to buy time to think about how Jamie might answer the question.
“I mean, I’m always curious when people hold on to things from their others. Do you ever want to remember?”
Landon couldn’t puff himself up enough to answer definitively one way or another, so he settled on an equivocation. “Sometimes.”
“That’s interesting,” she said. “I never, never do.” And because this time Landon was looking her dead in the eyes and not sitting side by side, leg to leg, on a chaise lounge reading Moby-Dick, he saw the nosebleed start.
“Hey, I think you—” he began, but Rose was faster this time.
“Fuck,” she said, flinging her head back. “I need to find tissues.”
“Use that receipt,” Landon said, “and I’ll find you some.” She brought the crumpled paper to her nose, and it was immediately clear it wasn’t designed to absorb. “Hold tight.” Rose waved him off with one hand, as if to say Where the hell am I going to go like this?
Mercifully, the shops on High Street were open late, preying on tipsy tourists they could entice to buy miniature castles, toddler kilts, and commemorative whisky drams. He ran into a souvenir shop and asked if the large, bearded man at the register could spare some toilet paper.
Landon must have looked as alarmed as he felt because the man pulled a box of tissues out from under him and gave him the whole box, sparing only a grunt of acknowledgment.
Rose’s face was streaked with red when he returned. “Here,” he said, all but flinging her the box. It was an effort not to ask if he could help clean the blood from her face, especially the thick, dried-on marks she would need a mirror to rinse.
“Thank you,” she said, the words muffled by the tissue. “I must be getting sick or something. Or maybe my other got horrible nosebleeds all the time, too.”
Landon couldn’t remember a single nosebleed his Rose had ever had. “Or maybe it’s the cold,” Landon supplied. “Or the wet. It’s so damp here.” And dark. But not boring. He and Rose had been wrong about that.
Rose pressed her right hand to her nose and used her left to pull tissues. “I don’t think this is going to let up. It really doesn’t feel like it is.”
“How long did the nosebleed last the other day?” Landon asked.
“Most of the walk home.” Rose tilted her head back a little farther.
“Do you want me to call Graham?” It pained Landon to ask the question, but in a strange way, he also felt it gave him the upper hand.
“Don’t call Graham,” she said, but it was so muffled Landon felt the need to clarify.
“Call Graham.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Would you just walk me home? It worked last time.”
“Oh,” Landon said. “Yeah, of course. Toward New Town?” Spending time with Rose was the name of the game, but the walk to Graham’s flat would take him about as far away from his hostel as anywhere in the city could. He would do it anyway, of course. He would do anything for her.
“Too far,” she said, grabbing another fist full of tissues. “Walk me to my place on Holyrood. It’s close by.”
Landon knew the place: 39 Holyrood Road, flat 5B. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, yeah.” He held out his arm for her, and she took it, a bit of blood seeping into the blue of his long-sleeved shirt.
“I feel a little dizzy,” she said, and corroborated the statement by tripping over her feet. Landon slipped an arm around her waist without thinking.
“I have to warn you that if you faint, I’m going to call an ambulance.”
Rose giggled. “That’s fine,” she said. “They’ve got subsidized health care here.
When all’s said and done, it probably won’t be much more than a cab ride.
” Despite the cold, her body was warm, comforting, and just as soft as he remembered.
It felt dangerous to be this close to her.
“You know your way to Holyrood by now?” she asked.
“It’s not far from the Cowgate. Just keep your eye on Arthur’s Seat and you’ll find it. ”
“You’re talking like you’re absolutely going to pass out on me.”
“Less talking, more walking!” Rose laughed as blood seeped through the tissue.
Landon ignored the creeping feeling that he was in far deeper than he realized and tried to forget anything other than how good it felt to hold her. It’s what Jamie would have done.