Numb with shock, Holl followed her to the house. His brain raced as he sat in the kitchen while the kindly woman bustled around him. Where could Keith be? Did he just fall down the hill? Surely he would have answered if he was able, if he hadn’t been knocked unconscious. The strong sensation of power he had noticed by the stone during the day was amplified now.
“Now you drink that, and off ye go to bed. Your cousin will be in soon.” She left him alone, and padded away down the corridor. Obediently, Holl drank the milk, which relaxed his tightly wound insides, and listened closely. The woman had shut her door and was already lying down in bed. In a moment, all was silent except for the gentle breathing of the others in the house.
“Oh, I’ve missed my ears,” Holl said, clapping his hands over them. “Imagine having to live with the sorry level of hearing the Big Folk have.” Feeling somewhat restored, Holl slipped toward the door, and eased it open. He heard an inquiring sound near his knees. It was the female cat.
“Now don’t you hinder me, miss,” Holl commanded her. “You’re part of the reason he’s in trouble.” The cat sat down on her haunches with an ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ expression, and began to wash her breast fur with nodding licks. Holl closed the door behind him and hurried down across the grass to the holed stone.
He couldn’t shout for Keith Doyle again, not unless he wanted to raise the household. He and Keith hadn’t yet met Mr. Mackenzie, but they had seen him once or twice from the back as he left the house early in the morning. He had an uncompromising way of walking. Holl got the impression that Mrs. Mackenzie’s husband didn’t approve of her telling silly folk tales to strangers.
More than anything else, Holl didn’t want to be hindered in his search. If Keith had been swept away by a thing, Holl needed to be able to deal with it and not have to worry about Big Folk bystanders wandering into the line of fire. He unsheathed his whittling knife, and started poking around. Between the knife and his own abilities, he should be well able to take care of himself.
He had better night vision than the average among his Folk, and there was a full moon overhead, with only wisps of clouds across it. The sun was out of sight now, but the sky still wore a dawn-colored cloak that made it nearly as light as it had been at eight P.M.. They were far enough north that there was no true night during the summer months. He tried listening for Keith, but he realized that he was too shaken to sense properly, so he would have to seek him in the mind-blind, Big Folk way. Still, Holl had his hunter’s training and all the book learning available to him from the stacks of Gillington Library.
The site of Keith’s disappearance had little to tell him. The whitewashed stone bowl was dry. Somehow, the bodach had taken the traditional offering without actually touching the stone. The whiskey bottle lay smashed into glistening fragments on the pavement nearby. Holl hadn’t noticed it before, but there was no smell of spilled liquor. The bottle, like the bowl, was dry. The tax seal on the neck hadn’t been broken, but there wasn’t a drop of liquor left on the grass or the ground. The bodach had taken Keith Doyle’s gift and Keith Doyle as well.
The ground had sealed up seamlessly above them, if this was where the two had vanished. This place had nothing more to tell him. Perhaps he could try Mrs. Mackenzie’s suggestion, and examine the scree outside of the garden. He hoped that Keith might be there, nursing a sore leg or arm, but in his heart, Holl doubted it. He smelled magic. Not the simple tricks and bending of rules that his Big friend called magic. This was the real thing: the raw, wild power.
“Keith Doyle, you were right,” Holl said out loud, “and I’m sorry you’re not here for me to tell you so.” He clutched Keith’s camera at his side. Whatever was on the film would tell him a lot about what he was dealing with. Holl slipped out of the garden and went to have a look.
O O O
Michaels emerged from the bushes, and surveyed the ground next to the stone. That was a pretty trick. Must have been something to do with the light. One minute O’Day and his contact were on the top of the hill in plain sight. A bright flash, and suddenly they were nowhere to be seen. Good optics, and good timing with it. He hadn’t had even so much as a glance at the face of the contact. The chief wouldn’t be pleased about that. The office still had no clue as to whom O’Day’s client was. Michaels had missed his brief chance to make an identification.
“Hey, presto, and they’re gone.” O’Day and his contact had eluded him, their minder, and gone off somewhere to have their private chat. Obviously, they hadn’t let the boy in on the secret of the vanishing act, from what Michaels could see of the lad running to and fro on the hilltop. He seemed genuinely worried. Well, better to have one than neither. He would get what he could out of the boy. Certainly neither of them could have seen Michaels. The agent prided himself that he had been completely discreet in tailing them, even down to watching them at their third, interminable archaeological dig. Here was a perfect opportunity to approach the young one and take him into custody. No fuss, no fight. He could get the older one when he turned up again.
***
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Holl left the farm by the road and trotted downhill until he found a break in the fence that would let him in under the bottom of the garden. Stones and chunks of peat lay tumbled in a heap against a sheer face at the top of the field. Evidently, one of the hidden air bubbles in the uneven gneiss had given way in the same explosion that had exposed the Leodhas Cairns. It had crumbled away the edge of the bluff on which Mrs. Mackenzie’s garden rested, leaving a dangerous patch that could cause any unwary walker to tumble over. Easy to see why she thought Keith had simply fallen.
No footsteps, no signs were here at all to suggest that anyone had been here in the past week, let alone the last hour, but that also could be a trick of camouflage played by the bodach. Holl started poking through the tumbled rocks, hoping to find the way into the earth. The shifting mass was too heavy for him to deal with on his own. He didn’t feel any natural openings in the stone wall behind it.
He stood up, unsatisfied. For all appearances, the bodach must have opened up the ground and gone straight through it with Keith Doyle in tow. That smacked of true experience, familiarity with the terrain, and great power. Holl’s heart sank. He didn’t have enough of what Keith called “oomph” to open the way for himself, even if he knew where to start. Once he had rested and calmed down, he might be able to trace where Keith had gone by listening for him, and try to figure out what to do from there. Holl felt very small and alone. The situation was too much for him to handle by himself; that he knew.
Resigned, he left the field and made his way down to the telephone booth at the bottom of the hill. He would have to call home. It griped at his very sense of independence, but there he was. There was no good reason to put off the inevitable, humbling as it would be. He had plenty of change in his pocket. He calculated it was no more than mid-evening at home. He didn’t want to alarm the other Folk unduly, even if it was an emergency. The only person who could be hurt by a delay was Keith Doyle. It wouldn’t serve the Big Person at all for Holl to be proud and stiff-necked. He owed Keith that, at least.
His heart was beating like a bronze gong in his chest as he dialed the international number, and waited for the distant phone to ring. It didn’t bode well for his hope of future responsibilities to have to cry for help, but he knew he was too much a stranger in the outside world.
One of the children answered the ringing. Holl cleared his throat.
“Good evening, Borget. It’s Holl.” He spoke in the Folks’ own language in case there was anyone near to overhear him. “It is late; shouldn’t you be asleep…? Ah, how is Keith Doyle?” Holl grimaced, and quickly devised a phrase that wasn’t a falsehood. The Folk never lied to children. It was counterproductive to their development. “Well, he is much as you would expect he is.” In trouble, as usual, he thought. “Can you fetch the Master and tell him that I would like to speak with him? Thank you.”
&nb
sp; The Master came on the line, and Holl explained the situation to him, keeping his voice under tight control. “I’ve done all that I can, except continue to search and hope I am lucky,” he concluded. “I could go on until I stick my foot in it, but if the bodach takes me, too, then there’s two of us lost, instead of just one, and no one will be left to look. I’m unequal to the problem, which is well out of my ken. I would welcome any help or suggestions you can offer.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Holl shifted uneasily, waiting.
When at last he answered, the Master sounded curiously distant. “I vill see to it that help vill reach you within a day.”
Holl felt a wash of relief. “Thank you, Master.”
He hung up, buoyed up by lighter spirits than he’d felt in hours. Who would come? Probably Aylmer, or Dennet, Holl’s own father, two who were good at hunting and tracking. Possibly Enoch, the Master’s own son, who had been giving Keith lessons, and with whom the Big Person might have a traceable bond. In the meanwhile, Holl had best keep trying to pick up a trail. There was no sympathy to be had for one of the Folk who met a situation without having all the facts at hand. He decided to go back and examine the fallen rock again.
In thirty paces, it hit him again that he had abrogated his responsibility for finishing his task on his own. Someone older and wiser was coming to take over. He felt suddenly that he had failed in his mission by calling for help, showing that he was really in tow to his Big Person protector, and not out on his own. He kicked a stone, which skipped noisily over the road and into the nettles at the side. Well, he couldn’t just abandon Keith Doyle, no matter whether his pride was whole or in tatters.
A few minutes more careful examination of the field convinced Holl that there was nothing more to be learned from the scree or the garden. The bodach had hidden his path well. The whole hill was imbued and riddled with old magic, the product of thousands of years. Holl needed to catch the precise end of the latest thread to have it lead him back to Keith Doyle. That would take time. He stood up, wiping his hands forlornly on his trouser legs and directing a sensing around for clues. He wondered where to start, for there was a lot of geography to cover. “Thank heavens you didn’t vanish in Asia, Keith Doyle. I’m fortunate this is only an island.”
“Hallo?” A man’s head appeared through the break in the hedge. “Lost something, my lad?” The man stepped over the fallen bracken and approached him. He was a kindly-faced, middle-aged, middle-sized Big Person with a droopy moustache and spectacles. He was wearing a rumpled tweed suit and carrying a walking stick.
“My cousin, sir,” Holl answered. He combed his hair down with his fingers and concentrated on keeping the man from looking at his ears.
“What, down here?” The man surveyed the scene with an eye of concern, and poked at the tumble of rocks with his stick.
“I don’t know!” Holl lost control of his voice, and the reply sounded like a wail.
“Now, now,” the man said soothingly, hooking the cane over his wrist and patting Holl on the back. “None of that. We’ll soon turn him up. You come with me, and we’ll find him. What’s your cousin’s name?”
“Keith Doyle. He’s an American.” Meekly, Holl accompanied the man down the edge of the field. Big People certainly could be kind. It was very fortunate that this man had turned up when he had. There was sure to be a procedure for finding missing persons, though he didn’t know how much good it would do if the person had been kidnapped by a mythical being.
Together, they searched the farm and the area around it, calling in low voices for Keith. It turned out that the landscape lent itself amazingly well to concealing things. There were places among the boulders and shallow ravines where an entire house could be hidden, invisible from all eyes except for those of birds. It promised to be a long job on foot.
Michaels was still convinced that O’Day must have disappeared to make a rendezvous with a contact, but the boy was genuinely upset by his companion’s disappearance. It began to occur to him that perhaps O’Day had been abducted by someone who didn’t bid high enough for his services. On the other hand, it might be that the meeting with the mysterious contact was still going on. That wasn’t uncommon in these illicit matters. Where there was little trust, negotiations could take hours, or more. Michaels himself had sat surveillance on days-long “stake-outs,” as the Americans liked to call them. Or perhaps he had just gotten lost. This island had fewer signs and directions than any place he’d ever been, and that included London. Michaels could understand his being lost.
Delicate questioning of his young associate revealed that the boy didn’t seem to know that he’d been under scrutiny. In fact, he seemed grateful for Michaels’ assistance in helping him to look for O’Day. He was refreshingly naïve. It was almost as if he didn’t realize that there was any reason to hide their presence in the island. Michaels was struck by a horrific thought: could O’Day have brought this innocent with him, and not revealed the mission to him? The boy would be in genuine danger, with a prison sentence at one end, or death at the other, never knowing he was a target. That was monstrous! Indecent! He wanted to find O’Day now to give him a piece of his mind.
Together, Michaels and the boy explored the fields nearby. They scrambled over huge hillocks of peat, calling Keith’s name among herds of huge, somnolent sheep. Holl skidded to a halt and clung to a wet clump of heather when a voice that sounded like Keith’s answered their call.
“Do you hear that? I think that’s him!”
“Yes, I do. Which way is he?”
The cry came again, sounding more distressed. Holl clambered almost on all fours over the next rise, and dropped flat on his belly. On the other side, there was a pit six or eight feet deep. In the bottom stood a half-grown lamb. As Holl appeared, the lamb started calling again, in a consonant-less cry that sounded just like the one they had been following. “Eeeehhhhhhh-hhhhh!”
The ewe was on the lip of the pit, peering through the heather fronds at her offspring, wondering how he got down there.
“That’s … my cousin, without a doubt,” Holl said, disappointed, slumping partway down into a sitting position. “The lost lamb.” He slid down the slope, and dropped cautiously into the pit. With a heave, he boosted the young sheep out. Both it and its mother ran away while Michaels gave Holl a hand up. “But no Keith, anywhere around here.”
“You’d very likely need a helicopter to survey the place properly,” the man said resignedly. “If you broke a leg, no one might find you for weeks.”
Holl thought about spending weeks searching the island, and his heart sank.
“By now, he’d have wandered farther afield,” Michaels speculated. “We can describe a greater radius tomorrow. I’ll lay on a car. You’d best get some rest now, lad.” There was no fear that he’d run away overnight, the agent told himself, or wonder where Michaels had come from. The boy’s concern was genuine.
Holl was too exhausted by the end of the day to do more than thank his newfound friend and stagger back into the Mackenzie home. It was disorienting; the light was no different than it had been early that morning when he had begun his search. He had the hopeless feeling that no time had passed at all, and that all his efforts were in vain.
Mrs. Mackenzie caught up with him as he was making his way back to his room. She was taken aback by his ragged and dirty appearance, but more concerned by the worried look on his face that made him look many times his years.
“Lad, where have you been? Your Miss Anderson’s been here seeking after ye. Where’s your cousin Keith?”
“I’m not sure,” Holl croaked. His voice was worn out from calling Keith’s name. “I hope he’s all right.”
The landlady looked him up and down with a calculating eye. “Ah, he’s just gotten himself lost. Possibly a thump on the head, and he’s mooching about. You’ve had nothing to eat all day, I’ll gi’e odds. Hmm?” Holl nodded. Suddenly he was hungry. The delicious aroma of the family dinne
r was still in the air. “Well, there’s a bacon sandwich or so that needs a home. I’ll bring you a plate in the sitting room, with some tea. Go and sit down, and warm yourself.”
“Mrs. Mackenzie, would you have another sleeping room?” Holl asked hopefully, trying to hold himself upright though exhaustion was tugging at his muscles. “I think there’s going to be another one of us here by tomorrow.”
“Of course I do,” the woman asserted heartily. “And happy to have him. Now, you go and sit down and eat, and then you sleep a good sleep. You must think of nowt more to worry you. All will be well in the morning.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” Holl said wearily.
Michaels picked up Holl the next morning in a small car requisitioned from the local authorities. There was only time for a quick circuit of the area before the boy directed Michaels to drive to the Stornoway airport.
“Some of our relatives have heard that Keith has gone missing. They’re concerned. I think one of our cousins is coming to see if he can help,” the youth explained enigmatically.
Michaels shrugged. It was a transparent story. Without a doubt, this was the original contact coming to verify O’Day’s disappearance for himself before the youth would be let off the hook. Best to stay on guard, or he’d likely be missing this lad, too. At the youth’s request, Michaels stopped at a chemist’s to let him drop off a roll of film. It was Keith’s, the boy explained. Michaels began to think that the next time that film manufacturer declared a stock dividend, they could attribute it solely to Danny O’Day.
The airport was small, and not set up for international travel, so Michaels was stunned when the passenger turned out to be two, not one, and both had foreign accents. The caper had begun to take on more and more of an international flavor.
“Holl!” a girl cried. She was a pretty thing, slim and fairly tall, with blue-green eyes and long blond hair unimproved by nature, so far as Michaels could tell, and quite young. She and the boy met halfway in a warm embrace that all but swept the lad off his feet. An American. “Oh, Holl, what happened to Keith?”
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