by kc dyer
A car pulled up on the road beside me, and the driver leaned across and rolled down the passenger side window.
“Need a lift?”
I opened my mouth to decline, and then I noticed the hand-painted logo on the side: Alec’s Cab—Inverness-shire. No trip too small!
The wizened-tortoise face of an old man on a bus flashed through my mind. Could it be?
I slid into the front seat, putting the map on the seat between us. “Just a sec,” I said, and yanked my wallet out of my pack. The cabbie looked at me expectantly. I fished around inside, pulled out a tattered card and held it up to him.
“Is this you?” I demanded.
He took the card and held it under the dashboard light. “Aye, tha’s me, awright. But this is one of my old cards—where’d ye find it?”
“I met your dad on a bus-ride to Inverness, and he gave it to me.”
He laughed. “Ye’d never believe how many ride’s the old codger has gotten me. Auld Alan is a marketing machine, he is. So—where to?”
“It’s a little odd,” I began …
It was nuts. We both agreed—Alan’s son, Alec-the-cabbie, and me. But when had that ever stopped me before?
CL, Gerald’s notes read on the very margin of the map. Tidal castle. Definitely haunted.
CL? What did that mean?
Alec, who turned out to be as convivial as his father, could not decode the CL acronym, but filled in a few other details of what he did know as we bumped along the winding route.
“Ainslie Castle, eh? Aye, it’s an auld ‘un,” he confirmed when I showed him the place on the map.
“Bi’ of a sad story, actually. The Laird who owns this property is what you’d call a mite cash-poor. He’s tried for years to get government money to help restore the place, but it’s too far off the beaten track.”
“Is it a complete ruin, then?” I asked, straining my eyes to see the road in front of us. The afternoon sky was lowering, and I hoped he could see the road beyond better than I could, as it twisted through the trees on the old mountainside.
“Aye, pretty much. Ye can’t get inside the place atall—it’s blocked off to stop tourists from having the walls come down on their heads. Nice ta spend the day there, if ye want a picnic in high summer, mebbe, bu’ it’s tiny, so no’ much to see, for all that. An hour should give ye a’ the time ye need.”
I held the map under the flickering light shining out from Alec’s broken glove box. “I’m pretty sure there is no circle here,” I muttered. “But it’s near Fort William and it’s on a mountainside.”
“Why not ring yer friend?” Alec asked, not at all put off by my conversation with myself. “Mebbe he can gi’ ye his reasoning.”
“He’s in the hospital with pneumonia,” I said, absently. “He’s written something else here, in the margin. Cattle … something. Thane? Maybe? Cattle thane—does that make sense to you?”
“Gi’e ‘er here,” said Alec, and without missing a beat he grabbed the map. To his credit, the cab wavered not at all while he squinted at the tattered page.
He thrust it back at me as we careened around a sharp curve.
“Cattle thievery,” he said, firmly. “Though cattle thane does make a bit o’ sense, as the lairds around these parts are known as thanes, sometimes. It was a title—kinda like an Earl, ye ken?”
“Right,” I muttered, trying to hold my head steady. The narrow roads and great speeds, not to mention the whole driving-on-the-wrong-side thing was reintroducing me to my good friend nausea. “I remember a Thane in MacBeth,” I said, to take my mind off my shaky stomach. “The Thane of Cawdor?”
Alec slapped the seat between us delightedly. “Righ’! Righ’! And there still is a Thane up in Cawdor, for all tha’! But I reckon in this case, yer friend wrote ‘thief’ or ‘thieven’.”
I thought back to the story. Cattle stealing made up the background behind a lot of scenes in the book. The opening scene, where Jamie is wounded and requires Claire’s medical expertise—he was with his uncle Dougal and his men, who had definitely been up to no good. Stealing cattle may have been a part of that.
I also remembered how large a part cattle thievery had played in Jamie’s rescue from the evil clutches of Black Jack Randall.
The car took yet another corner on two wheels. “There has to be a reason,” I said, teeth clenched to keep the contents of my stomach down. “If Gerald marked it, it has to be important.”
“Y’er sure ta freeze,” Alec said, as I stepped out of the cab onto ground beside the dirt trail that passed for a road. “I’ve a rug in the boot—can I please jes’ leave it with yeh?”
I glanced down at my watch again. It was nearing six o’clock and the sun was almost down. “I just need an hour,” I said. “I only want to be here until dark. I’m sure I won’t freeze in that time.”
I pulled up my hood and jammed my hands in my pockets.
“Well, at least take my torch, then. And mind ye don’t walk too near the far side. The drop’s steep and it’s straight down into a damn cold loch.” He thrust a flashlight into my hands.
“Thanks. I’ll wave it at you when you come back so you can see me.”
“Righ’, then. I’ll jes’ nip inta Mallaig for a dram an’ be back for ye by seven, latest,” Alec promised me. “Stay away from any wee ghosties!”
Mallaig was the last tiny, seaside village we had passed through, following the notes on Gerald’s map. It was a testament to my newly acquired faith in the Scots constitution that I didn’t even blink at the thought of the driver hitting the road after a ‘wee dram’. I just clutched my copy of OUTLANDER to my chest and nodded.
As soon as he pulled away, the truth of his assessment of the weather became clear. I thought fondly of the extra sweater I’d pulled out of my pack at Auntie Gwen’s place, to lighten my load on the walk to the hospital. Susan hadn’t stolen that one from me, as I’d been wearing it the day we went to Culloden.
I wished I was wearing it again.
As I watched the cab bump off up the road, the insanity of the situation settled in my brain. It was Gerald who was searching for ghosts, not me. I was looking for a flesh and blood Scotsman. And I’d just had a very nice one right beside me in the car. The chances of meeting another in this windswept corner of nowhere were below calculable.
“You need to focus, Sheridan,” I muttered to myself.
A thin line of yellow reflected off the top of the mountains to the West, but the last of the sunlight rode atop a bitter wind. Above me, a castle stood on a rise of land, perched like a tall box on the back of a turtle hunched by the sea.
Alec—who was appearing more fetching in my memory as every moment passed—had given me a brief history. The castle had been built in the fourteenth century, long before Jamie’s time. As castles go, it was pretty tiny. I’d seen bigger mansions on Hollywood reality television.
When it was built, the rise of land it was on had served to protect it from the enemies of its Laird and people. Alec assured me that four hundred years ago the tide did indeed sweep in and cover the road twice a day, cutting the castle off from the mainland.
“But these days, the roadway has been silted up. Now it jes’ serves as a route in for the Laird tae shoo his sheep along,” Alec had explained. In his handsome Scottish way.
I kicked myself mentally, and kept walking. The place was entirely deserted. Above the castle, the craggy peaks in the distance were all snow-topped, and the wind carried every frozen degree down with it. I tightened the cord on my hood and started across the causeway.
The tide was out, but Alec had declined to drop me along the pathway closer to the castle. “It’s protected passage, against motorized vehicles,” he’d said. “Not to mention private property. I’ll just leave ye here, and be back in a tick.”
From the direction I faced, at least, the wind was behind me, and it pushed me along toward the old building, now haloed in light from the setting sun. The castle was much tinier than any castl
e had a right to be, but perhaps this was as big as they could make them in the fourteenth century. It stood sentinel on its small tidal island, with the loch lapping the far shore. The line of the high rock wall was tessellated, and unbroken even by arrow slits. There were two triangular-shaped protrusions at the very top that may have once supported a roof, which probably would have been made of wood. But it was long gone, and all that remained were the bones of the place, cast in ancient, gray stone.
As I approached, the corona of the setting sun rested briefly on the curtain wall of the castle, and for a moment, I was entirely bathed in golden light. With the light … came clarity.
“Leoch,” I breathed. “Gerald, you devil—you thought this might be the Castle Leoch.” Dougal’s home. Home, in fact, to Jamie’s mother and her politically astute brothers, who together had ruled the entire MacKenzie clan.
Book in one hand and Alec’s torch in the other, I began to climb the slope toward the old monument.
Walking briskly, I circled the building in under five minutes, at least the parts of it that did not hover on a cliff above the water. Along that side, as Alec the winsome cabbie had noted, the curtain wall rose three stories above the cliffs, most of it constructed with carefully placed rocks. Very little, if any, mortar was in evidence, and I had a sudden pang of sympathetic vertigo for the young stonemasons who climbed those long-ago heights and had put this jigsaw puzzle of a wall together.
One corner of the curtain wall was covered in vines that were lush green even in the teeth of the icy weather, and which crept down the cliff face to intertwine with the heather below. I stepped into the shelter of the castle wall. The sun had sunk below the line of the mountaintops, and the sky had taken on a particular color that I’d only ever seen in the Highlands. It was an otherworldly combination of purple and blue and black, bringing thoughts of kelpies and other more malevolent Highland faeries somehow nearer.
The path wound around behind the castle, but still in sight of the road. I figured I still had at least ten minutes of twilight left, so I continued on, keeping a close eye on the ground so as not to stumble. Craning up on my toes, I looked over at the castle to see fingers of fog beginning to wrap around it from the loch-side.
I turned and scanned the roadway. Still no headlights in sight. The blue light on my watch showed 7:10. My cabbie’s dram had kept him late, and strongly reduced any appeal I’d felt earlier. A decent man doesn’t leave a lady—or anyone for that matter—waiting. I shivered and cursed the Scots predilection for drink, and cabbies in general, and turned to walk back toward the roadway.
That was when the moaning started.
If it had come from the castle it would have been bad enough. But the fact that it was coming from right under my feet would have caused me, under any other circumstances, to pretty much jump out of my skin, my coat and all my underclothes before dying of fear on the spot. Fortunately, it was too cold for that, so I kept everything on and decided to get the hell out of there, instead.
Forget waiting. It was less than a couple of miles to the nearest village, plenty of time to work up a speech guaranteed to sear that cabbie’s ears right off his pleasant-faced, dram-drinking head. I had his torch. I could make the walk.
Years of ankle-wrenches and knee-scrapings had given me a certain inner caution against running along any path, so instead of a full-out bolt in the nearly total dark, I limited myself to a barely-contained hysterical scurry, muttering a mantra of “Don’t-run-its-not-a-ghost-don’t-run-it-can’t-be-a-ghost-don’t-run-you’ll-trip-and-kill-yourself,” or something along those lines.
Which is why I saw the hole in the ground open up at my feet before I could fall into it. I stopped so suddenly, the toes of my Converse sneakers kicked pebbles into the darkness. And squinting up through the hole, into the beam of my flashlight was a face I could not quite believe I recognized.
“Jack?” I said into the pit. “What the hell …?”
“Aye,” came a puzzled voice from beneath me. “How d’ye know my name?”
I dropped to my knees and shone the light into the hole.
It was Jack Findlay, all right. I could see his face, pale and a bit squinty in the light, looking up at me. He was wrapped in what looked like a sheet of tin foil, sitting on the rocky floor of the strange little room beneath me.
“It’s me, Emma,” I said. “What are you doing down there?”
“Emma Stuart?” he said, holding up a hand to deflect the light. “Or … Emma Angus? Whichever one of you it is, can ye please no’ shine the light ri’ in my eyes?”
I flipped the switch on Alec’s torch, and Jack and his small room were immediately swallowed by darkness. “Emma Sheridan,” I said. “You know—from the floor of the hotel bar last month?”
Shit.
“I—I mean—we shared a cab in Philadelphia. I’m the one with the blog?”
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Emma Sheridan of the blog. I can’t believe it. I’m still readin’ it, y’know. Every time ye post somethin’ new. Ye got robbed!”
I smiled a little to myself. It pleased me more than I could have expressed that an actual human was following my blog, but it was definitely the wrong time for basking.
“Never mind that, now. How’d you get down there? Are you hurt?”
I could hear his sigh echo in the darkness. “Through the hole yer hollerin’ down, o’ course. And yes—I’ve hurt my foot. Cannae walk, anyway.”
I felt a moment of smugness, not having fallen through the hole myself. But the seriousness of the situation won out.
“I—I don’t know if I can climb down to you,” I said. “I don’t have a rope or anything.”
“Oh, ye needn’t climb down,” he said, his voice indicating shock at the very idea. “Jes’ walk round the way ye came. Here—flick the damn torch on again and I’ll show ye.”
With the light carefully aimed away from his eyes, I soon saw what he’d meant. The small room held nothing but Jack, and a large charred patch of ground in the center of a pebbly floor. But just to one side of him was a full, doorway-sized opening in the stone. I got to my feet, followed the path down the side and was sitting beside him in under a minute.
His face was creased with pain, so I directed the flashlight away.
“Fact-checking,” he explained, when I asked again why he was there. “It’s an old sentry station. They’d keep the fire burning low here, in the hearth, while they watched the loch for sea-borne enemies. That’s why the path rings round to the doorway.” His voice dropped in embarrassment. ”The bit I fell through was the chimney hole.”
I felt shame wash over me at my earlier smugness. If it hadn’t been for Alec the cabbie’s flashlight, I would likely have taken the quick route down into the hole, too.
“If I put my shoulder under your arm, do you think you might be able to walk?” I asked. “I’m supposed to have a cab coming for me, but he’s late.”
“Oh, that’s grand,” Jack said, wincing as he struggled to stand. “And I am right grateful for his tardiness.” He placed his arm around my shoulders, and took a tentative step.
“I reckon I can manage, if I don’t put all my weight down on it,” he said. “Here—gi’ me yer pack, so ye don’t have to carry that and me, too.”
“It’s okay, I can manage,” I said, but he slid it off my shoulder and onto his own.
“No’ much in it, now yer laptop’s gone, eh?” he said, as we awkwardly shuffled toward the sentry-room opening.
“So you read that bit?” I gasped. The man was heavier than he looked. “It was a pretty awful day.”
“I can imagine.”
We continued our slow, shambling progress along the path leading down to the causeway, pausing every few feet for one or the other of us to catch our breath.
Above us, a low moon hung over the craggy dark line of the mountains. The hoot of an owl rang out, and some distance away, another echoed in the dark. The sound seemed so old a primal shiver worked its way
through me.
“You’re cold,” he said. “Hold up a bit.”
“No—no, I’m fine,” I said, lying through my chattering teeth.
The brilliant moon spoke to a crystal clear sky and though the wind had stopped, the air felt like a solid wall of ice. With one arm, he grabbed the edge of the strange silvery blanket he was wearing and pulled it around my shoulders. I stood there a moment, enveloped in his warmth. “That better?”
My teeth were still chattering, but I nodded. SO much better.
“It’s a space blanket,” he explained. “Helps a bit, aye? I did think to bring a safety kit, but no food or phone. Daft.”
We started along the path toward the road again. My face was still exposed to the icy air, but if we moved carefully, the blanket created a sort of a circle of warmth that surrounded us both.
In the distance, a set of headlights jounced into view.
We stopped to rest against a big rock near the castle-end of the causeway. “Can you make it across here?” I asked. “The cabbie said he wasn’t allowed to drive on this bit.”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s much easier on the flat.”
The light of the moon showed me he was lying just as surely as I had been when I declared myself warm. His jaw was tightly set with pain, but I could feel him trying to bear more of his own weight as we inched forward again.
“What were you doing there in the first place?” I asked, more to take his mind off his pain than anything else. “I thought you were working on some secret project after the BBC gig.”
“Yeah, well, not much of a secret now, is it?” he said, stopping to rub his good leg, which was clearly getting pretty sore. “I could kill Rebecca for suggesting it, too. The plan was to stand the watch for the length of time a sentry would have done.”
