Highland Tales Series Box Set

by Rory B. Byrne

  Alice then felt the pressure change against her back. Something upstairs moved around her. Too weak to look, too blind to see, Alice felt hands grab her shoulders and pull. She clung to flabby arms. Tears in her eyes, Alice couldn’t see who had ahold of her. She felt lifted off the floor, thrown over a shoulder, and carried away from the burning stairs.

  They moved through a room off the upstairs hallway. Smoke chased them out a window. Alice’s lungs screamed for clean air. She gasped like a fish out of water. The refreshing air on her face wouldn’t pull through the collapsed throat, and she squirmed on the shoulder. She blinked away the soot and tears. Then, Alice saw the spinning of the ground below. They were on a porch roof, and suddenly, she felt her stomach flop from a great height and come to an abrupt stop.

  Alice grabbed at the fabric around the waist of her savoir, fisting the material against a bulky frame. Short, heavy-set, and moving around, it was impossible to understand what had happened.

  Alice caught a clear view of the Weatherspoon Guesthouse from several meters away. It was the only light among the dark houses around it. It was glowing yellow and orange as the inferno consumed the house, and the smoke obscured the details of everything inside.

  She groaned and tried to lift her head. Air seeped through her throat and cooled her burnt lungs. She gulped and swallowed drafts of cool air. Her head felt light; her vision narrowed. The energy Alice had left to keep herself alert was entirely sapped from her. She fell against the body carrying her to safety. Alice lost consciousness.

  Prologue

  Morgan Goodlet grew up in a household of missteps and disinterest. Her mother used a bottle to hide away from the frustration and angry wrath of her father. Her father never let Morgan forget that he had wanted a boy, not a girl. As if to mock the man’s fury, Morgan was a beautiful girl. She had spiral locks of vibrant copper, and her hair spilled over her shoulders in unruly corkscrews. Morgan had emerald eyes that caught everyone doing double-takes, as if she wore some expensive and over-exaggerated contact lenses. It was genetic, and it didn’t match her father’s traits. Morgan’s red hair, green eyes, and pale beauty further reminded him that she was not of his kin.

  Morgan used her striking features and attributes as a means to escape the tyranny of her father and the complacency of her mother. With her tender years behind her, Morgan left her parents’ home at the age of sixteen. She never looked back.

  Morgan grew up in the ancient city of Stirling. Its foundations were erected on the craggy volcanic basalt. The town in central Scotland was a medieval settlement and the location of battles between William Wallace and the English. Wallace’s men defeated the English in 1297, and the remains of Stirling Bridge brought some tourism to the community. Morgan used the highway to connect to the south and escaped her family, hoping for a better life.

  She slipped from one problem to another. It seemed any man who she found or who found her had shadows of her father’s vehemence. Morgan struggled to find a place where she felt part of something important. She longed for a purpose. When Morgan turned eighteen, she met a young man named Roy Hall, and her troubled life of parental neglect became the least of her worries.

  “Where are we going?” she whispered. It was late, and Morgan sat in the back of the stolen Ford Fiesta. She leaned forward to whisper into her boyfriend’s ear. Roy sat in the passenger seat. She saw the darting fear on his face by the dashboard light.

  “Shut her up,” Archibald Fontaine growled.

  Morgan immediately pressed her back against the rear seat. Archie was a monster, a criminal who took advantage of people everywhere he went. If it wasn’t attached to something when Archie saw it, he nicked it. If there was money involved, Archie conspired and planned to make it his own.

  Somehow, over the last few months, Roy convinced Morgan they had better chances of finding their way if they teamed up with Archie. It was a mistake. Morgan felt it in the pit of her stomach. A man like Archibald Fontaine didn’t care about anyone but himself. But her feelings for Roy meant Morgan went along with their schemes anyways.

  Stealing from wealthy people seemed natural. Roy and Archie broke into a lot of houses around Bannockburn. They took trinkets and cash. They moved south along the M9 and boosted the Ford through Linlithgow towards Edinburgh. Roy had warned Archie not to get too close to the bigger city. It wasn’t stuff from rich people that would get nicked; it was the three of them.

  They had had too many close calls. Too many people had set alarms in their homes. It was a fatal mistake, and now they were running from the law. Morgan couldn’t forgive Archie or Roy.

  “We need to get north,” Roy said. His experience with Archie had soured. The man had a way of belittling Roy. Morgan saw that whatever remained of his spine evaporated when Archie made decisions. “I got an uncle who has a boat.

  “What, are you mental? We can’t get out of here on a boat. We’re going north to Inverness. I know somewhere we can lay low until it blows over.”

  It was too much for Morgan to hear Archie’s poor planning and bad decisions. He didn’t think about the future. He lived in the moment. Archie was impulsive, and it was his thoughtlessness and spur of the moment, uncontrollable anger that took the lives of two elderly folks in their home. Archie did the deed, but each of them, including Morgan, had to live with the blood on their hands.

  In the dark of the back seat, Morgan looked at her hands. She saw shadows in her palms. A blackness that made her feel like it consumed the rest of her.

  “There’s a hut near the town. We can lay low there.” If Archie had a definitive plan, it wasn’t something he’d shared until that moment.

  Morgan had had enough.

  “And then what,” she asked.

  “You shut your mouth,” Archie shouted. “I had enough of you.”

  “You can’t run away from this, Archie. The police is coming for us, all of us.”

  She saw the fear on Roy’s face. His chin quivered in the dark. He stared at Archie. The man stared at the road ahead that looked like a tunnel surrounded by brown and green foliage.

  “You shut up your woman, Roy, or I will.” It came out with a finality that frightened her.

  Morgan sat quietly in the dark of the back seat as the Ford raced north to Inverness on the A9. She was miles from home, too far away from anyone she knew, and Morgan feared Archie. She once stood up to him when Roy never did; she faced off with him. That was before she knew Roy wasn’t afraid to take lives. Now Morgan knew to face off with Archie was to put her life in his hands.

  Morgan realized in the hours on the road, running from their crimes, that she had no one. She had no friends, her parents turned their backs on her, and she had no love for Roy. Morgan knew if she was to survive, she had to get away from Archie. That meant she had to abandon Roy, too.

  To kill the silence between them, Archie snapped on the car stereo. He scanned the airwaves for music. Instead, the radio picked up a snippet of news. It was a reporter talking about the wrongful death of an elderly couple found in their home by a concerned neighbor. Morgan listened and knew the couple died by Archie’s hand, and they’d all go to jail for it.

  “They’re onto us,” Roy said. It was the last of his words because Archie struck him across the bridge of his nose with an elbow. Archie was left-handed, which meant he had pinpoint accuracy and enough strength to break Roy’s nose.

  “You shut your mouth,” Archie said through gritted teeth. “I will have the end of you both.”

  Archie had a gun. It was a revolver from the 1950s. It was something stolen from one of the houses. He never went anywhere without it. Morgan knew there were four bullets in the chamber. When he got it, there were six. Archie used two rounds, ended two lives. She knew if Archie killed strangers, he’d kill people he knew, too.

  “Archie,” Roy whispered. “Maybe we should turn ourselves in.”

  There
was blood on his face, over his shirt. Morgan saw the flickering of tears in his eyes. He didn’t look at her, ashamed for the choices he’d made in fast-friends with the wrong man. The blood on his face and shirt looked like black ink in the dashboard light. It reminded Morgan of how the palms of her hands looked in the gloomy back seat.

  “You’re in it up to your neck, Roy. You’re in it as deep as me.” His grip on the steering wheel turned over the sound of the news broadcast and the advertising over the radio. “I’m not going down for this alone.”

  Morgan saw the road sign pass by the window. They had reached the hamlet of Eskdale. She saw the sky had turned from murky black to shady overcast gray from the clouds hiding the morning sun.

  “I need to pee,” she said.

  “We need petrol,” Archie said. “We’ll stop at a filling station. You can go there.” Archie scanned the roadways. Early morning traffic didn’t exist on the small backroads once they had left the main thoroughfare. The houses and shops of stone and brick reminded Morgan of Stirling. Small towns throughout Scotland looked alike. They all looked like the same place Morgan had been running from her entire young life. She knew that if she stayed with Archie and Roy, she’d never see nineteen.

  “Wipe your face,” Archie hissed. “You need to change that shirt. Get him another shirt, Morgan.”

  She didn’t like taking orders from Archie. He took his eyes from the road to look over his shoulder at her. That’s when Morgan saw the police car, parked with its nose jutting from a side street.

  As Archie glared at her, she saw out the windshield. There it was, a steely color Citroen with its lights off. Somehow, she saw it when both Roy and Archie didn’t see it.

  Morgan handed a shirt to Roy from the duffle bag beside her. He took off the other shirt, wiped at his face. Morgan saw the lights behind them. The headlights flashed through the rearview mirror, catching Archie’s eyes. He stared at the road ahead, maintaining a cruising speed through the narrow streets, between the cobblestone walls on either side of the way.

  Roy changed his shirt. He looked back at Morgan. She knew it was the police. Roy and Archie suspected as much. So far, Archie wasn’t trying to outrun the Citroen behind them. It wasn’t too close. And after a few blocks, it turned off to the right.

  Archie breathed out through his teeth.

  “There’s a petrol station,” Roy said.

  Archie rolled to the pumps and stopped. Morgan had to climb over the front seat to get out of the two-door Ford. Archie stood at the gas pumps. He scanned the empty roadway and then used the stolen credit card in the gas pump.

  Morgan walked to the filling station. The clerk looked up from the magazine as she slipped through the door. She wore a black jacket with a hood over her fiery curls.

  “The loo,” she said.

  He nodded with his chin toward the backroom. The attendant turned and watched Archie and Roy standing by the car. Morgan went through the hallway. To her right was the bathroom. To her left was the fire exit. If she went through the door, the alarm sounded. If she stayed with Archie, she’d lose whatever left she had of her life.

  That’s when the Citroen pulled up behind the Fiesta. The blue lights flared. Morgan took the chance. She bolted through the fire exit, and the crash bar set off the alarm.

  Running for the bracken and field behind the station, she heard the gunshot. One gunshot that made her blood run cold. She slowed and turned around.

  In the coming light, she saw Archie running toward her, the pistol in his hands. She knew in his blind hatred of her, Archie suspected she alerted the police. Behind him, a man in a business suit chased Archie. He was too far from Morgan to make out details of his face.

  “I’ll kill you!” Archie shouted, the poisonous words directed at Morgan. When he lifted that revolver and pointed it at her, she knew better than to wait for him to catch up.

  She ran. Morgan ran as fast as her boot heels could clod across the uneven marsh. She felt the wetness creeping over the top edge of boots, soaking her pant legs. Morgan ran as the monster stalked her. Archie was tall, lean, fierce, and angry at the world. He got closer. If the mud sucked at his legs as hard as it did at Morgan’s, it didn’t seem to slow down the man.

  “Stop, Archie!” the man called. Morgan heard the voice from several meters away. She dared to glance over her shoulder. “You can’t get away!” the man shouted.

  Between her and the stranger, Archie’s determined face got closer. That revolver still in his grip, when Archie saw Morgan looking, he raised it again. Morgan thought she’d be safe if she got around the far side of the steep grassy mound. If nothing impeded the other side of the heap, she could double back again. Morgan wanted to give up, give herself up to the police, and take the punishment instead of facing down Archie. Morgan knew what he intended for her. Morgan touched the steeping grassy mound that towered overhead. She used its surface to draw closer, trying to put earth, rock, and grass between her and Archie’s drawn pistol.

  Then the gunshot rang, too loud in her ears. Instantly, she felt something collide into her back, a penetrating blast that slammed into her, and Morgan fell forward. Her lungs felt on fire, and she couldn’t catch her breath, that searing pain devoured her spine and ribs. Unable to keep moving around the high mound, Morgan fell forward. It was as if she fell off a cliff, the darkness consumed her, and she felt weightless.

  When Morgan hit the ground, icy water splashed her face. Her head swooned; her breath didn’t come back again. Morgan gaped like a fish out of water. She couldn’t catch her breath.

  It felt as if her back burned from an invisible fire. Her fists pushed into the cold mud. Her arms sank up to her elbows. When Morgan managed to turn over, she expected to see Archibald Fontaine standing over her, ready to snuff out her light.

  But it wasn’t Archie standing there.

  Untested

  Dealing with thirty men wired to think as a single unit instead of individuals made it difficult for Simon Hinton to give the lecture. They weren’t the brightest of men. They served a purpose that needed military precision. Simon had to listen to the off-color comments about his missing arm since the teams arrived at the facility. They were a paramilitary outfit that took orders from one man, Cole Fraser. Fraser had nothing valuable to say to Simon. Instead, he sat in the folding chair in the Equinox facility’s lounge and allowed the men to ridicule Simon.

  Simon knew asking Brian MacIomhair for a reprieve would prove Fraser’s theory about him. Simon was a coward. The group tolerated him. They had to listen to Simon because his experience with the void inside the mound meant first-hand accounts of two isolated events.

  The first event that claimed Phoebe Biel had corrupted video footage. The staged CCTV cameras and the digital recorder within the chamber caught some electrical burst that erased the data. That was how Simon explained it after the fact. The second time, they had limited digital video footage from Amy Miller’s smartphone. The CCTV camera over the door didn’t capture the incident fully, only obscured dusty views.

  “As you can see here,” Simon said. He pointed to the image on the whiteboard. “The circumference of the opening extends well beyond a threshold we first anticipated.”

  They used stills taken from the video, ran the images through a digital processor, and projected it on the wall. It was as clear a picture as possible before the surge sapped the battery life in the phone, moments before the portal claimed Simon’s right arm. Even the amputation didn’t make it to video.

  “What makes you think you can keep the hole open?” Fraser asked.

  “It’s theoretically—”

  “We don’t want to hear about theories, Hinton. You need to convince my men and me that your wormhole, or portal, the void, whatever you want to call it, opens long enough and big enough for us to pass through with the equipment.”

  “Yeah, how do we know one of us won’t
lose more than an arm next time?” one of the men commented.

  There were too many faces to keep track of, too many unintelligent and uneducated men to remember their names. Simon didn’t want to think about them individually. He hated them, all of them. They were nothing more than Brian’s strong-arm attempt to go through the portal and seize immediate control of the world on the other side.

  “We’ll maintain the stability of the portal this time,” Brian said. “Simon and I, with a few trusted others, have speculated how and why the portal opens and closes for certain people.”

  Simon saw Brian watching him. The facility owner knew how Simon felt about the whole business of military exploration into the unknown. It was Brian’s expense, his expedition. The mound and chamber, the countryside, all belonged to Brian. Simon had no control over what the owner of the property did with the portal. All Simon wanted was credit for the discovery. He’d lost his first love to the void. Then he lost his arm to the void when it claimed the daughter of his beloved Phoebe.

  It was in the aftermath, when Simon had learned to function again in society without the use of his right arm, that clarity found him. It was in the blood. The lifeline of the Biels had opened the portal. Only, it wasn’t the ‘Biel’ family with the connection to the entrance, it was the deep historical lineage of the Weatherspoons that opened the gate between the worlds.

  How profound to suddenly learn all it took to open the portal was an ancient Scottish bloodline? Again, it was Simon’s expertise in Scottish Gaelic and ancient scribing, where he found the archival evidence of the bloodline connection. Research and patience, two qualities none of the men sneering at him understood.

  Simon looked at Brian, standing on the other side of the whiteboard. The millionaire and his horde of unruly, thickheaded men had no idea what awaited them on the other side. Simon had no reason to believe the lands on the other side of the portal varied too far from the environment where humankind thrived and poisoned the earth for the last 200,000 years—from the Middle Paleolithic when Homo sapiens began to walk upright. He felt in his scientific understanding that evolution had taken different turns in creating life on the other side.