Chapter 23
‘Hello?’ I knew there was nobody to answer, but somehow the sound of my own voice made me feel better. ‘Where are you all?’
It was eerie – the silence and the darkness continued. Then, just as I was really getting twitchy, there was a half-forgotten sound and a peculiar sensation from the pocket of my jacket.
My phone was buzzing as a text came in.
Where are you? Your car is here but I didn’t see you arrive.
Lennox. I was getting a text from Lennox’s number. I couldn’t help it, I let out a small gasp and tried to lean against the rough-hewn table that should be beside me. But wasn’t.
I rang back. ‘Lenny?’
‘Come on, Pax, where are you?’
How did I say it? How could I sum up what had been happening to me over the last – how long had I been gone? Why didn’t Lenny sound more worried?
‘I’m… I’m not sure.’
‘You sound weird. Have you hit your head?’
It was so wonderful to hear his voice, I found my throat clotted with impromptu tears. ‘I…’
‘Nope, you still sound weird as hell. Are you on site?’
I don’t know, I wanted to say. I have no idea where or when I am or what the hell is going on. Or even what’s been going on for however long I’ve been away. I am, in fact, at a total loss. ‘I’m in the cellar. I think I might have bumped my head. I’m a bit…’
Concern crept into my brother’s voice. ‘Wow. You might have concussion. You know we’re not meant to go down there – it’s not safe. Stay where you are. I’ll come and find you.’
He disconnected but now my vision was clearing a little and I could see where I was. Still in the cellar, at the foot of the half-gone stone staircase where I’d fallen so many ages ago. Alone, and exactly where I had been.
I put a hand to my head and felt around.
Nothing was bleeding, nothing hurt any more than was occasioned by my trying to think my way around what was happening.
So I hadn’t hit my head. Had I fallen asleep?
Was everything that happened – Lachlan, George, the goat, the inescapable turnips – was that all a dream?
‘Oh no,’ I said to the dim silence. ‘No. That’s not fair. ’
Then I looked at the fallen staircase. The stony chute that had precipitated me into the cellar wasn’t completely smooth, and I ought to be able to scramble my way back up, using the missing steps as footholds and hanging onto the wall to steady myself.
I hand-over-handed my way up, like a spelunker groping their way towards a cave mouth.
‘Ow.’ Daylight hit me and my head echoed to the sudden resumption of sound outside. Voices, laughter. Someone holding forth, broken by occasional intercessions from another voice. Then the light was blocked by a shape.
‘Pax!’
‘Lachlan? Lachlan?’
A pause. I didn’t know about him, but I had an encyclopaedia’s worth of questions to ask, I just didn’t know how to phrase any of them.
‘I think we need to talk,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I said faintly.
The light was sliding over his shoulder and spearing me in the retinas, so I couldn’t see anything other than the outline of Lachlan on a white background.
It briefly crossed my mind that we might be dead, but I dismissed that because of the phone call.
I doubted that The Other Side had Wi-Fi and a phone signal.
‘All right. Look, don’t say anything at all for a minute or two. Whatever and whoever you see, don’t speak. I’m going to take you somewhere quiet and get you up to speed, all right?’
‘But my brother is here.’ I really meant, why you? Why isn’t Lenny here, dragging me out of the cellar doorway and into…?
Into the castle. Which stood around us, firm and four-square. The hall, its floor now sanded and varnished, the great fireplace empty but for an arrangement of flowers fanning from a ceramic urn.
‘Like I said, best stay quiet for a minute.’ Lachlan’s voice was low and urgent.
‘But—’
‘Honestly.’ Lachlan took my arm and led me out.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that he hustled me, almost bundling me along.
We moved out onto the steps, concrete now, and I could see the headland spread out in front of us.
There was no sign of the muddy stable yard or the rickety cottages.
Yet the postern-gate archway was complete, the wall running around the periphery stood undamaged and, over at the far side of the site, a group of people were crouched in a wide area stripped of grass. Two of them were David and Mal.
I gasped and tried to say ‘What’s happening?’ but Lachlan kept bustling us along until we stood in the shadow of a buttress, immaculately mortared and pointed, with not the least sign of imminent collapse. ‘Take a deep breath, Pax. You’re green.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, against the available evidence. My legs were shaking and my palms were sweaty, and I did have the horrible lurchy feeling that I might, at any moment, throw up. ‘Please tell me what’s going on.’
Lachlan let go of my arm and scrubbed a hand through his hair.
He was wearing another horrific jumper, I noticed, hairy and looking hand-knitted from scrubbing-brush bristles and pan scourers.
‘I’m not entirely sure where to start.’ Then he moved forwards suddenly and caught me up in a tight hug that squeezed what breath I still had out of my lungs and scraped a layer of skin from my cheek.
‘God, I’m glad to see you,’ he said, with such fervour that I gained another layer of worry.
‘Lachlan.’ I took a small step back; he was squashing me so hard that I feared for my ribcage. ‘Please.’
‘Well, we’re back. But…’
He was interrupted by a sudden looming presence. ‘Oh, you found her, good man.’
It was Lenny, looking smarter than I’d ever seen him, with his hair cut and wearing designer jeans. Designer jeans? Lenny? ‘Lenny?’ I said, with my voice crawling out as a pathetic thing. ‘Lenny?’
Then I took a further step away from Lachlan and flung myself at my brother in a sudden flurry of sobs and unaskable questions.
‘Oh dear,’ Lenny said. ‘You must have hit your head. You haven’t hugged me since you were seven. What’s up?’
He sounded so normal, so untroubled, so… so… Lenny that it made me sob harder.
‘Probably relief,’ Lachlan said. ‘And my overwhelming presence, of course. We’ve not seen each other for two days and if Pax isn’t subsumed beneath Scottish culture every twenty-four hours she goes all to pieces.’
Two days. I stored that away. Even with my shaky brain and sudden outburst of emotion I hadn’t lost my ability to reckon time, and it could only have been a few minutes since we’d stood together in that cellar. Then the rest of his words filtered through and I let Lenny go.
‘Oy,’ I said, snottily. ‘Less of the making me feel as though I’m incomplete without a Scotsman, Lachlan.’
Both men laughed a casual and amused laugh. On Lenny’s part it did not sound like the laugh of a man who’d been urgently searching for his sister for the best part of a month and Lachlan’s sounded a little forced.
‘Did you hit your head?’ Lachlan asked me, cocking his head. Then he whispered, ‘Good move, that will help,’ under cover of handing me a handkerchief. This one was a good deal cleaner than the previous one.
‘I think… I might have done?’ I mopped my face.
‘I found Pax in the cellar.’ Lachlan looped a casual arm across my shoulders and Lenny didn’t say a thing. ‘She maybe fell down that deathtrap of a stairway.’
‘Oh, Pax!’ Lenny gave me a look. ‘We’ve always been told to stay away from that bloody place!’
Always been told. Another phrase to squirrel away. Nobody had ever mentioned the dangerous staircase, except for Lenny’s passing remark of ‘We’ll have to get that sorted’ when we’d first arrived on the site.
‘I’m having a bit of problem with my memory,’ I said, feeling Lachlan squeeze my shoulders in acknowledgement. ‘I seem to have got a bit of a gap, and I can’t remember the last…’ I petered out.
‘Three months,’ Lachlan interrupted. ‘Pax was saying that she can’t remember the last three months.
Complete blank. Very strange. I’ve checked for a head injury and I can’t see one and she says she feels fine so I don’t think we need to take her to hospital or anything.
’ Lachlan gave me another squeeze and a sotto voce, ‘Well done. Good thinking.’
Lenny gave me a worried look, but then his face cleared and he grinned.
‘Oh, I see! Research, is it? All right, well, I’d have said a head injury severe enough to wipe memory would mean at least we ought to get you to a doctor…
’ His expression changed to one of hopeful enquiry. ‘Is this what we’re doing? Research?’
My mouth fell open but Lachlan saved me. ‘I think it might be,’ he said. ‘Bit of role play, check out reactions, that sort of thing. It’s what makes Pax McKell so unique, isn’t it?’
I had no idea why he used my full name. I took a half-step away from the pair of them and felt the immediate solidity of the rough stone at my back. This, at least, was consistent and unshifting.
‘Oh well, I’ll leave you to it, then.’ Lenny’s voice was the same, but the words were more…
I tried to rationalise it. He sounded more certain, that was it.
More definite than my normally diffident and random brother.
Lenny had been a drifter all his life, never settling to anything in particular, using his history degree for nothing more than luring in employers.
‘I’ve got some stuff to get on with. I’ll catch you in a bit. ’
My brother loped off across the grass and out of sight. I rounded on Lachlan, my previous tears forgotten. ‘All right. Now you’d better tell me what’s going on right now, because I am this close to screaming!’
Lachlan scrubbed at his head again and took a deep breath. ‘Ah. Right,’ he said. ‘Well. You might have noticed that things look a wee bit different…’