Chapter 3
From my vague mental map of the location, annotated by Lenny’s persistent monologue about what we could put where, I’d reckoned that these stairs must come out at the far side of the tower house, facing the bleak, stretched expanse of the grassy headland.
So I was slightly surprised when we climbed the steps to a gradually increasing smell of warm animals and dung, and emerged through a doorway to stand in something that seemed to be a cross between a stable yard and a shanty town.
A few metres from where we stood, three horses were tied up outside an open-fronted building built of tilting rough stone walls, a muck heap quietly steamed in one corner and a lot of the rest of the ground was taken up with small wooden huts, in and out of which a collection of chickens was squawking and pecking.
A man, with his back to us, was quietly brushing one of the horses, whistling to himself and seemingly in the trance of one doing a repetitive job and hoping not to be disturbed.
None of this had been there when Lenny and I had toured the site only an hour or so earlier. None of this should be here.
I looked at the stabling. I looked at the horses. I stared at the chickens and then, with a dropping sensation somewhere around my diaphragm that made my breath catch, I turned around and eyeballed Lachlan. ‘Very funny,’ I snapped. ‘A film set, I suppose?’
I wasn’t sure that this was what I believed.
Everything looked so altered that there was no way this could be the same place I had left only minutes ago.
And yet – what else could it be? A dream?
Hallucination? All I could do was go along with it for now and ignore the rapidly building sense of complete bewilderment and that shrill mental alarm that was now so loud it was shaking my brain.
Now we were in full daylight I could see the man inside the muddy coat properly for the first time.
He looked… I mentally groped for a description.
No. There were no words I could put around that expression.
There was a trace of fear in his eyes, which he was trying to cover with a smile, but otherwise his face seemed frozen into a struggle for blandness.
He was blondish, with sandy-coloured hair brushing the collar of the coat and a total lack of whimsical amusement.
He looked real. He smelled real. But none of this could be happening.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s what it looks like.
A stable yard in a castle.’ Then a long-fingered hand with grimy knuckles came onto my shoulder.
‘You’re not going to faint now, are you? ’ He sounded concerned.
‘No, of course I’m not going to bloody faint.
’ I couldn’t take my eyes off the man brushing the horse.
His movements were so regular and even that it looked like clockwork, and while fainting was off the table, I did have a sour taste in my mouth that said that being sick might not be out of the question.
‘Oh. Only Kaylinn came over a bit funny.’ The hand came away from my shoulder. ‘When she saw this the first time.’
Over in the yard the horse lifted its tail and deposited a large heap of droppings.
The man stopped brushing and shouted something I couldn’t hear and a young boy ran in with a basket and small shovel to clear it up.
The brushing continued and the horse rested a hoof.
A thin sun shone on its slightly rough coat and ragged mane and it dipped its head, relaxing in the warmth and the personal attention.
Lachlan sighed. ‘I suppose it was easier for us,’ he said almost to himself.
‘We could discuss it. And there was nobody here at all when we started digging, so we knew something was up. Also, young Davey there reads an inordinate amount of fantasy fiction.’ Now, and for the first time, he looked me in the eye.
His eyes were a steely grey colour and held an expression I couldn’t even guess at. ‘Go and try to talk to them.’
‘What?’
‘We thought it was a film crew. Thought we must have missed the notices, and that there’d been a mistake when the permission to dig was granted; some kind of double-booking.
So when we came away from the castle and there was – this—’ he waved a hand ‘—we thought we were going to get thrown out. Until we tried to talk to them. Go on, give it a go.’ He pushed my shoulder gently.
I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to find Lenny and get out of here.
I was even willing to take the hit on the bank loan for early payback penalties.
I did not want to be here on this precarious headland, looking at – well, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but I didn’t want to see it, whatever it was.
‘Go on, now.’ Lachlan gave me another small push. ‘They won’t hurt you. They can’t.’
I couldn’t say anything. All that would come out of my mouth was a small squeak, but I had to do something.
Figuring that the small boy, tipping horse dung onto the big heap and shaking the basket to make sure all the bits came out, was my least-threatening bet, I walked over.
‘Hello,’ I tried to say. What actually came out was ‘hnnnnerrr’.
Nothing. The boy didn’t glance my way or acknowledge me at all.
Apparently scraping horse poo off the inside of a basket was more important.
He must have been about four or five, with a haircut that would be getting him teased to hell in school and a shirt and trousers that looked as though they were his dad’s and made to fit with string and a few pins.
I walked a few wobbly-legged steps towards him, but I’d only got a few metres before the horse noticed me.
Its head came up and it snorted wildly while the others tied up alongside did the same, all blowing at the air as though trying to keep me at bay through the power of breath.
‘It’s okay,’ I squeaked. ‘I won’t hurt you. ’
For some reason this did not reassure them as much as I’d hoped.
The grooming man laid a hand on the neck of his beast. ‘Hey now,’ he said.
‘Easy.’ But the horses were terrified, eyes bulging so that they were more white than pupil, hindquarters swinging, heads up.
Grooming man got a hefty kick when he tried to push his horse over and he turned around to see what they were all looking at.
I waved, feebly.
He stared straight through me as though I didn’t exist. ‘Get away now, you daftie,’ he said in a friendly tone, but it was aimed at the horse, not me. ‘There’s naught to see. Is it a cleg biting you?’
The horses continued to boggle in my direction, heads high, eyes wide and a film of sweat beginning to form on their coats.
‘Animals can see us. Or sense us. Or something. People can’t.’ Lachlan sounded as deadpan as though he were delivering a lecture. ‘They particularly dislike Mal, for some reason.’
I turned on him. ‘It’s a trick. It’s got to be.
’ For some reason the non-acknowledgement of the grooming man and the very much apparent acknowledgement of the horses was absolutely terrifying.
It was like walking into a room at a party and absolutely nobody at all even looking in your direction.
It made me feel – vulnerable, which was ironic.
How could I be vulnerable if nobody could see me?
This was mad. Someone, somewhere, had to be behind this. Was this Lenny’s idea of a joke? I dismissed that thought almost immediately. Lenny’s sense of humour leaned more towards the whoopee cushion and ‘knock knock’ jokes; this was too subtle for him.
‘Look.’ Lachlan took me by my now unresisting sleeve and led me over behind one of the small wooden coops.
These were built of random pieces of wood piled up and covered with brushwood and looked more like potential bonfires than animal accommodation.
‘It’s okay. It’s a shock. We’ve all been there.
’ He stared away into the middle distance now, twitching his hair out of his eyes with the back of a hand.
‘We don’t know how it happened, but one minute we were there on the excavation, then it started to rain, we came inside in search of shelter and…
’ The hand went wide. ‘Then this. We all went through what you’re feeling – you’re a day or so behind us, that’s all. ’
There was that wobble in his voice again, as though good sense and practicality were at war with what he really wanted to say.
‘A day or so?’ I whipped my head around to stare at him now. ‘You’ve been here a couple of days?’
Lachlan shrugged. At least, the collar of the coat went up and down and there was movement inside it. ‘Roughly, aye. We’re not counting or anything.’
I stared a bit longer. He had stubble on his chin and didn’t look as though he’d slept well for a few nights, but… ‘If you’re the archaeological expedition who was working on the castle, you’ve been gone for more than three months.’
Now he dropped the air of world-weary, ‘seen it all before’ man-in-charge, and gave me a look of pure fear. ‘Three months? Seriously? It can’t be.’ The hand he’d pointed with began to shake and, without acknowledging this, he stuffed it back into his pocket.
‘You went missing in April. It’s the middle of July now. School broke up last week.’
‘You’re still at school?’ His horrified look almost made me laugh, decidedly unflattering though it was.
‘I’m a teacher. Chemistry,’ I added, as though holding on to details was very, very important right now.
‘Oh.’ His jaw twitched convulsively. ‘Well, that… makes things complicated. I was in the middle of moving. I’ve probably been repossessed by now, and that was a lovely wee house too.’
‘And people will be missing you,’ I said, somewhat sarcastically.
This didn’t seem to have occurred to him. ‘Oh, that too, I suppose,’ he added as though he felt he ought to. As though he was trying not to let the words occur to him.