Chapter 5
Time was a strange concept.
Wallace had never really considered it before. More than a few centuries in the dungeon of MacCallister Castle had given him plenty of time to catch up on the philosophy of it all. Was he alive? Dead? Both? Neither?
He had no answers. If he had been told the tale of his own incarceration he never would have believed it. The barefoot man had left out one crucial element of their deal. His death.
He remembered vividly looking down at his own body, laid beside the skeleton of his father. He saw the barefoot man leave. How was that possible?
At first he thought he was dead, about to ascend to heaven, hopefully not in the other direction.
Nothing happened. He blinked and his feet were solidly on the floor. He tried touching his body but his hand passed through it. He tried again, concentrating this time.
If he’d been older, it might have broken his mind to undergo the torment of dealing with his own death as a spirit. He moved his hand and this time he was able to move the body. It was only slight, the arm shifting a fraction to the left but it was enough. With time, he could maybe hone that skill.
Time.
Time was something he had plenty of. It passed whether he wanted it to or not. Time had taken his father’s body and turned it to nothing more than a skeleton. Would the same thing happen to his body?
That was the only way he knew time had not frozen upon his death.
His body slowly decayed. And yet he remained in the dungeon, unable to open the door or pass through it.
He paced back and forth, nothing more than a zephyr to anyone who might be walk into the cell, a slight chill to the back of the neck.
As the weeks turned into months, his anger grew, threatening to consume him. The barefoot man had tricked him into this eternal half-life. What was to be at the end of it? Would it ever end?
He sat. He stood. He walked. He never ate. He never slept. More months went by. How many? There was no way of knowing.
All he knew was that he was trapped until the last of the MacCallister line made themselves known to him.
When the door to the cell opened, he tried to make himself visible. A man in the strangest of clothes walked inside, holding a lantern. Wallace waved. He spoke. The man heard nothing. He left, locking the door behind him. Wallace had already squeezed through the gap and was heading up the stairs.
That was the first day of his freedom. It was the seventeenth century, not that he knew that. He had been held in the dungeon for more than three hundred years.
He drifted through the castle. Soldiers were everywhere. None of them could see him. As an experiment he walked up behind one and placed a hand on his shoulder. The soldier turned, looking straight through him, seeing nothing.
He tried again, picking an apple from a barrel, tossing it through the air. It hit a sergeant square on the nose. The man yelled abuse, spitting out his words in his hunt for the culprit. Wallace raised another apple and hurled it into the group of assembled soldiers.
They saw it lift itself from the barrel. They saw it hover for a moment in the air and then come flying toward them.
Their flight was swift. Within an hour the soldiers had fled the castle, leaving weapons and armor behind. The talk of witchcraft and spirits went with them, along with many apples hurtling their way over the battlements.
Wallace was alone. For the next three hundred years his method was the same.
Anyone who entered the castle got the same treatment as the soldiers.
He wanted to be left alone. The only person he wanted to see was the last of the MacCallisters.
Until then he haunted the castle and scared away anyone foolish enough to enter.
He would know her when he saw her. Since being freed from the dungeon he had been able to sleep again.
Sleep brought dreams and dreams brought her.
He knew what she looked like already. Only her face.
It swam above him whenever his eyes closed, looking past him not at him.
It felt as if he were spying on her, though he knew it was only a dream.
She would appear at some point. He would know her by her face.
When the twenty-first century began, so did the attempts to sell the castle. It had slowly fallen into ruin around him, the crumbling stone his long-term companion.
In the late 1960s, restoration work began. It continued for a long time, the workmen not seeing him, not caring for his attempts to scare them away. He felt himself becoming thinner, more see through, fading like the light at dusk.
The restoration took a long time and when it was done he was little more than a dark shadow haunting the dingiest parts of the castle, barely able to move without immense mental effort.
After the restoration came the selling people. The ones who talked about the value of the place. Then they went away and once again nothing happened for a long time.
More restoration work, the men with strange tools and curse words fouler than any he had heard before. Then attempts to move people into the castle. He saw them off though, his strength slowly returning as each one scurried out the door, never to return.
Until her.
She was a woman and a pretty one at that. Her hair was blonde, framing her face perfectly. She smiled little, her eyes lighting up the few times she managed to laugh.
He recalled well the first time he saw her. He was in the dungeon asleep when she arrived. He rattled the chains, enough normally to scare some of the meeker ones away. Not her.
He flitted up the stairs, slamming the door to the restored section of the castle, screaming as he did so. The man she was with ran, his face white as a sheet.
She did not move, just stood there smiling, as if she could see him. Her clothes were odd but it was not her clothes that drew his eye, it was her face.
He peered closely at her. Was she the woman he’d dreamed of for so long? He waved his hands in front of her face but she saw nothing. Then she left.
She came back the next day. He caught her name when she stood by the drawbridge talking to the man who’d brought her. She was Natalie MacCallister.
He could barely contain his excitement when he heard that. She was a MacCallister. Fate had done it. The last of the MacCallisters.
He watched her unpacking, though she did not see him. He watched her settle in, seething at the sight of the descendant of his bitter enemies.
Soon, she would be locked in chains in the dungeon. He waited for any sign of the silver key but when the last box was unpacked, he realized she did not have it. What did that mean?
He needn’t have worried. She was barely settled in before she began exploring the castle. He followed her in silence, watching closely, waiting patiently.
During the day she wrote. At night, she often cried. He left her when she did, feeling for the first time as if he were intruding on her privacy. He felt a strange tug deep inside her when she cried, wanting to hold her, tell her it would be okay.
He shook the feeling away. She had MacCallister blood pumping through her. He must not forget that no matter how pitiful she looked, sobbing in the armchair by the fire, a small black rectangular object in her hand.
He didn’t know what it was. Sometimes she spoke into it and it seemed as if a tiny voice spoke back. Other times she attached it to a wire and left it for a while.
It was just one more thing about this time he didn’t understand. Not that it mattered. What mattered was the silver key. Where was it and when would she find it?
The third day after she moved in, it happened. She had already clambered up onto the battlements, standing with the wind blowing her hair as she looked out at the village across the valley, the village that had raised him.
It all looked different to his time, not that it mattered. He would not be here much longer. Soon he would be back in his own time and his father would be alive and together they could be a family, go find his mother.
On the morning of the third day she stood at the top of the steps that led down into the dungeon. “If you’re down there,” she said to the staircase. “I’m coming down. Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you.”
Don’t be afraid. Wallace managed a grim smile. It was not he who should be afraid. It was her. Not that she would know it until it was too late.
She descended the stairs with a lantern more powerful than any he’d seen before. It lit up the stairs and then the door that led toward the dungeon. She stopped, shining the lantern around her. He stopped too, the light passing through him. He waited.
“I’m hoping you’re friendly,” she said. “Lord knows, I could do with a friend.” She began walking again, stopping in front of the locked door he knew so well.
“I wonder,” she said out loud, reaching into her pocket and drawing out a keychain.
He hadn’t seen it before. Where had she kept that hidden?
There was only one key on the chain, a small silver one, the top marked with an M. He held his breath, watching as she slid the key into the lock. She turned it and there was a dull thud from deep inside the door followed by a scraping sound. She was opening the door.
She gasped when she pointed the lantern into the dungeon.
On the floor were two skeletons of indeterminate age.
He expected her to fall back, to run screaming from the sight.
Instead, she stepped inside, kneeling beside the skeleton of his father, crossing herself as she did so.
“May you rest in peace,” she said. “I wonder who you were.”
She stood once more and turned around, stopping dead. “Who are you?” she asked.
Wallace looked behind him. There was no one there.
She continued to stare at him. “I asked you a question. Who are you and what are you doing sneaking up on people like that?”
He blinked. Surely not. He lifted one hand and waved it slowly in front of her face.
“Don’t wave at me. Answer me before I chuck this flashlight at you.”
“You can see me?” he asked, hardly daring to believe what was happening.
“Of course I can see you. You’re standing right there. Who are you?”
“I am Wallace MacGregor.”
“Very funny. Who are you really?”
“I am Wallace MacGregor.”
“You’re Wallace MacGregor? The son of Jock and Daisy MacGregor?”
“Aye.”
She took a step toward him. “The MacGregor who died more than seven hundred years ago. That’s you, is it?”
“I can prove it.”
“Go on then, prove it.”
“Unlock this door at midnight tonight.”
“That’s convenient. Can’t prove it now but I just have to come back here alone into a dungeon at midnight. Go on, get out of here before I call the police. You’re trespassing.”
He stood up tall, his fists clenching. “I’m trespassing? You are in the castle I have haunted for centuries and you suddenly claim it as your own. You should be careful what you wish for. The MacCallister who owns this castle will pay a pretty price for it soon enough.”
“I don’t own it, I’m just renting for a while. And you’re stalling. I told you to get out of here.”
He shook his head. None of this was going the way he’d planned. “What are you here for?” he asked, trying a smile. “Maybe I can help.”
“Not that it’s any of your business but I’m writing a book.”
“I know that, I saw you.”
“You mean you’ve been spying on me?”
“What’s your book about?”
She scratched her head, looking at him closely.
“You’re an odd one, do you know that? Not that it matters but it’s about the MacGregors and the MacCallisters.
I’ve been looking into their history.” She sighed.
“What I wouldn’t give to go back in time.
Why, are you going to tell me you know all about them?
Got a time machine on standby have you?”
“In a manner of speaking. I’d like to make you an offer.”
“Go on, get out of here. There are two skeletons here I need to report to the police. Who knows how long they’ve been here.”
“Seven hundred years,” he said, walking past her and kneeling by his father’s side. He brushed her shoulder as he went by, the sensation strange after so long alone. “This is Jock MacGregor and by his side are my own mortal remains.” He bowed his head in respect.
“Come on,” she scoffed. “What are you supposed to be, a ghost?”
“Aye,” he said, standing once more.
“A ghost?” She prodded his chest. “You seem pretty real to me.”
“I make you this offer,” he said, ignoring her comment, reaching out for the key. “Unlock that door at midnight with that key of yours and I will show you the world of my time.”
“You…you really are barmy, aren’t you? What happens if I don’t? Will you haunt me forever rattling your chains and telling me to repent my sins like Scrooge?” She pulled the key away from him.
He lunged for it, moving faster than her. But as soon as his fingers brushed against the key, he vanished as if he’d never been there at all leaving Natalie alone in the dungeon with only the skeletons for company.