Callie swallowed, unsure if her voice would work.
“Claustrophobia. I suppose I panicked.”
“I didn’t know you had claustrophobia.”
“Neither did I.”
They sat in silence for a while. Callie gradually loosened her grip on her knees. As they watched, a group of tourists reached the steps at the entrance to the mine.
“They won’t get far in the dark,” Callie said, still sounding a bit odd.
“But the lights came on again – remember? When you were crawling out of the top bit.”
“No they didn’t. It was still dark when I got out.” She gave a shaky laugh. “And I certainly wasn’t crawling. I was running as fast as I could.”
She’s confused, Josh told himself. She was so frightened back there she doesn’t remember what she did.
Callie had unlaced her hands from around her knees now, and was rubbing at her sooty left hand and wrist.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, getting to her feet.
“Should we tell Mrs Dunlop about the lights?” Josh wondered aloud.
Callie shook her head. “Let’s just go. You said they came back on. Someone else can tell her if they go off again.”
Back on the street, Josh would have liked to pause and look at the circular grating again, but Callie kept up a determined pace and ignored it.
“Do you want to have a walk round the cathedral?” he asked.
“No,” said Callie firmly. “I’ve had enough of ruins for today.”
“Fudge doughnut?”
“Much better idea.”
By the time they had eaten the doughnuts and licked the last of the custard off their fingers, Callie seemed, outwardly at least, back to normal.
“What time is it?”
Josh checked his phone. “Nearly one.”
“Rats! I’ve got to go. I promised George I’d go down to Fife Ness with him this afternoon. You know – the place on the coast where he’s got his birdwatching patch. He wants help with some birding thing. Dunno what, but I’ll have to get the next bus to The Smithy. Do you want to come? You probably don’t, it won’t be very exciting. You’d be better staying in town.”
“No, I’ll come. I like George. He’s cool.”
“You must be joking.”
“No, he is. He knows lots of stuff. About birds for instance, and plants. I don’t know anybody in Edinburgh who knows things like that. It’s interesting.”
Callie laughed. “Wait until I tell him he’s cool. He’ll love that.”
***
As they walked through The Smithy garden, Josh said, “Are you sure they won’t mind me just turning up for lunch?”
“Course not.” She shoved open the front door and Luath came to greet them, wagging his plume of a tail. “He still remembers you, or he’d bark.”
Josh tried to remind himself how friendly Luath was, instead of noticing afresh how big he was.
“Rose? George? I brought Josh for lunch.”
“Oh well done, dear. I wondered when we’d see him,” said Rose, appearing, inevitably, from the kitchen. “Goodness, why are you both so grubby? You look as though you’ve been down a tunnel. Why are you laughing?”
***
Josh ate so much of Rose’s chicken pie and strawberry fool that he could hardly bear to get out of the car at Fife Ness.
“Come on, you pig,” Callie teased as he levered himself up with a groan. “Or shall I see if I can borrow a golf trolley to push you round on?”
“Yes, please,” he said, squinting into the sunlight at the golf course off to their left. “If a golf ball comes this way and hits me, I might just explode.”
“Exercise, that’s what you need,” said George.
Josh doubted it, but he dutifully followed George and Callie.
“Right,” said George, opening the holdall he’d been carrying. “Hatchet or saw?” He held them up for Josh to inspect.
“Er… hatchet please. I think. What are we doing?”
“Stalking holidaymakers,” said Callie with an evil grin.
“Not quite that exciting,” said George, handing another hatchet to Callie and keeping the saw himself. “Cutting branches that are in my way when I’m trying to ring birds. It’s all right, I’ll show you what to do.”
It was hot work, hacking away at the gorse and scrubby trees that George wanted trimmed. Stopping to mop her brow, Callie noticed a sooty mark on her left wrist. She rubbed at it, but it wouldn’t come off.
Witch-girl…
She whirled round to see who had spoken, but there was no one there. She could hear George and Josh on the other side of a huge gorse bush, laughing, but the voice had come from the opposite direction. She swallowed, holding tightly to the hatchet, looking about as if she expected someone to leap out of the undergrowth.
“Callie!”
She jumped at the sound of Josh’s voice.
“What?”
“You must be slacking. We can’t hear you chopping.”
“Just having a quick rest.” She shook her head at her overactive imagination, and started hacking away at branches again.
Half an hour later, the trimming was finished to George’s satisfaction and he was settling down in the shade with his binoculars to see which birds were around.
Josh and Callie wandered off along the shore. Unlike Pitmillie beach, it was almost deserted.
“Wind’s going round,” Callie observed. “Should be good for body boarding tomorrow if you still fancy it?”
“Definitely.”
After half an hour or so they made their way back to George’s birdwatching patch and found him finishing a mug of tea.
“Nothing around. Too hot, I expect. They’ll all be lying low in the shade,” he said with regret. “We may as well go, but we’ll go back by Dane’s Dyke just in case there are any birds around there.”
“George, tell Josh the story. The one you used to tell me when I was small.”
“The one I regretted telling you, you mean.”
“What story?” asked Josh.
“It’s not a story really, Callie, it’s local history,” George corrected her. As they walked on, he began to talk.
“Long ago, the Danes came raiding in Fife over and over, and there’s supposed to have been a great battle here in eight hundred and eighty something. I forget the exact date. It’s not very clear what happened: either they won and killed King Constantine of Scotland, or they didn’t win and they didn’t kill him. Nobody seems to know either way.” He led them up onto a grassy bank about a metre high. “Anyway, you’re standing on what’s been known as Dane’s Dyke ever since.”
From the name, Josh would have expected something impressive: a wall maybe, or a defensive earthwork at least a couple of metres high. The bank they stood on was covered in grass and scrubby weeds. It stretched off in a gentle curve, getting lower and lower until it merged with the ground around it.
It really wasn’t that interesting. However, he didn’t want to seem rude, so…
“What is it? Was it some sort of defence?”
George beamed. “Everyone assumed so, but it turns out it’s more than that. There was some excavation done a few years ago, and it turned up human bones.”
“It’s a grave?” That was more interesting.
“It seems to be – or part of it is, anyway.”
“He hasn’t told you the best bit,” Callie said. “Go on George. Josh won’t think you’re nuts. He already knows there’s more to this part of Fife than meets the eye.”
Now Josh was really intrigued.
George hesitated for a few seconds, then started to speak again.
“When I was a couple of years older than you I used to come birdwatching down here with an old chap called John Fordyce who’d lived in Crail all his life. One day he took me along Dane’s Dyke, right to the far end.” George pointed towards the sea. “Up at the top of the bank he showed me a big stone slab. He levered it up and there wa
s a human skeleton underneath.
“Well, you can imagine what went through my mind; I thought I was being shown the scene of a murder at first. Then I looked at the bones properly and realised they must be pretty old. They were dark brown, some of them were broken into fragments. Even to me, it was obvious they must have been there for a very long time.
“John Fordyce called the place The Longman’s Grave, said it was where a great Danish warrior was buried. The Longman had sworn to protect his men, and the legend was that he did so even after they were dead, to stop them roaming the earth as ghosts. John claimed the Longman still took – what was it he called them now – the unquiet dead, that was it – down to the underworld occasionally, to keep our world safe from them.
“I asked my parents about the grave as soon as I went home. They’d come across the name, of course – you can find that on maps – but they’d never heard of there actually being a grave there.”
“Can we go and have a look now?” asked Josh eagerly.
“No,” said George. “That’s the strange thing. I was never able to find the grave again. Not a sign. I’ve looked for it on and off for years. There are references to Longman’s Grave in a few books, but nothing about a slab or a skeleton. I know what I saw, but I stopped talking about it to other people after a while, because I could see they didn’t believe me. They thought I was just making it up.”
“Why didn’t you ask John Fordyce?”
“It was a few weeks before I got the chance to look for the grave again, and he’d died in the meantime.”
“But I thought you said bones had been found in the dyke a few years ago?” Josh said, confused.
“Yes, but that was at the other end,” Callie replied.
The bank had been getting lower as they walked and now it petered out, merging into the landscape.
“I’ve looked too,” said Callie.
“I used to wish I’d never told you the story, you pestered me about it that much when you were small,” said George ruefully. “Anyway, Josh, if you’re thinking of going digging for it yourself, it’ll have to be another day – I’ll need to be getting back now.”
***
“Anybody home?” Callie yelled as she went into her own house.
“Just me,” replied her father, David, his voice coming from the back garden.
She found him sitting in the sun with the newspaper, a cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits.
“Had a nice day?” he asked.
“Yeah. Just mucking about with Josh.” She shoved a biscuit into her mouth. “We’re going body boarding tomorrow, but I don’t think he’s realised how cold it’ll be. Can I lend him your wetsuit?”
“Will it fit?”
“It’ll be better than no wetsuit at all. And he’s only a few centimetres shorter than you.”
“No problem.”
“Where’s Mum?”
“Gone to see your grandmother.” He looked at her questioningly. “Is there something going on with them? It seems a bit… tense… these days.”
Callie knew that her father was a clever man, but he could be very slow to notice things going on in front of his nose sometimes.
She shrugged. “Dunno,” she said evasively. “When’s tea? I’m going for a shower.”
“In about an hour. I’m on barbecue duty.”
“Cool. Will there be prawns?”
“Of course.”
“Yum.”
Callie was glad to get into the shower. She still felt grubby and gritty from this morning’s episode at the castle. It was strange just how spooked she’d been when the lights went out, imagining all that stuff. It seemed ridiculous now; Josh must have thought she was crazy. She pushed away the memory of the voice at Fife Ness.
The black mark on her left wrist wouldn’t come off, no matter how hard she rubbed. Odd. It wasn’t a graze, and it was the wrong colour for a bruise. It looked almost as if some soot had got under her skin. It was an unwelcome reminder of what had happened earlier in the day, and when she got dressed again she pulled her sleeve down to cover it so that her parents wouldn’t notice and ask about it.
***
There were prawns, and tuna and sausages too. And corn on the cob. And bananas with chocolate in them. They always made too much when they had a barbecue.
“You should have invited Josh over,” said David, looking at the leftovers.
“He’s going out somewhere with his mum,” Callie replied quickly.
“At least we can say hello to him tomorrow if he’s coming in to borrow your dad’s wetsuit,” said Julia. “Have you dug it out for him yet, David?”
“Not yet, but I haven’t forgotten,” said David, basking, eyes closed, in a patch of sunlight.
“You will bring him in to meet us, won’t you? Your grandparents have seen him today. Now it’s our turn,” Julia pressed on.
“All right. I’ll bring him in.” It was probably best just to get it over with.
Julia beamed.
***
It was a warm night. Another warm night. Callie slid the bedroom window up a few more centimetres, but the wind had dropped completely and now there wasn’t even enough breeze to stir the curtains. Chutney Mary lay on the bed in a purring heap.
“Don’t dare snuggle up to me, cat. If you make me too hot I’m shutting you out for the night,” Callie warned her as she climbed into bed, pushing the cat to one side. Chutney Mary gave a chirp of protest and settled down again as Callie opened a book.
***
Deep in the night, the cat woke suddenly, ears pricked, alert. At this time of year the sky never seemed to be totally dark, and there was enough light for her eyes.
She watched her mistress, quietly asleep, covers flung back because of the heat, then her eyes narrowed at something: a tiny, hunched, formless blot of darkness that moved across the bed. The cat’s ears went back as the darkness drifted to the floor, and settled, and slipped down through a narrow gap between the floorboards.
Chutney Mary hissed.
5. BAD DREAM
The doorbell rang. Callie hurried to answer it before her mother. “Come in,” she said to Josh.
He propped his body board against the wall just inside the gate and slid his bag off his shoulders.
“Waves look good,” he said. “I thought when the wind dropped last night it was going to be rubbish, but it’s back up this morning.”
Callie yawned.
“Late night?” Josh asked.
She shook her head. “Weird dreams.”
“Weird how?”
She found she didn’t want to talk about her dreams. They had been oddly disturbing. Don’t be so stupid, she told herself. They were only dreams. “People whispering to me.” She felt her palms itch. “Lots of hammering. I must have been building a wall or something.”
Without warning, the gate swung open behind Josh and banged shut, making them both jump.
“Er… Callie… you don’t use a hammer to build a wall,” Josh said, eyeing the gate suspiciously.
“Knocking it down then. Whatever. I’ll get the suit,” said Callie, keen to change the subject.
“Callie, is that Josh?” her mother’s voice called from upstairs.
“Yes,” Callie yelled back. “She wants to meet you,” she said to Josh, making a face.
“I’d quite like to meet her. And your dad.”
“Really?” Callie looked astonished. “Go into the kitchen and have a seat while I get the wetsuit.”
“It’s really warm out there, though.”
She laughed. “There speaks someone who’s never been in the sea in Fife.”
Callie, going out, almost collided with Julia, coming in. “Back in a minute,” Callie said, continuing determinedly on her way.
The wetsuits were hanging in the garage where Callie’s father was tinkering with his ancient and beloved Morris Traveller car. Callie took down her own and her dad’s.
“I take it Josh has arrived?”
&
nbsp; “Yeah. Mum’s got him cornered in the kitchen.”
“Now, now. She’s just interested. We don’t often get to meet your friends. And this must be quite a friendship to have kept going when you’ve seen so little of each other.”
Callie thought about that and nodded. “I suppose it is. Are you coming in to meet him too?”
“Am I allowed to?”
“Ha ha.”
When they got back to the kitchen they found Josh chatting to Julia without looking in the least bit cornered, but Callie was itching to go, and after giving her dad a brief chance to say hello she dragged Josh away.
“At least that’s over,” she said grimly as she shut the gate behind them.
“You make it sound like some sort of torture,” Josh laughed.
“It was for me.”
They started to walk down the beach road.
“Dunno why. They seem okay.”
“It’s just they – well, Mum really – always want to know what I’m doing, and why I’m not hanging out with other people. And she disapproves of some of the stuff I do and just goes on and on about it.”
Josh couldn’t imagine Callie doing anything much that a parent would disapprove of.
“What sort of stuff?”
Oh, just the usual sort of witchy stuff: conjuring lights, talking through water, casting the net to protect things. I did mention I’m a witch, didn’t I?
“Just stuff. Never mind – it’s too good a day to waste it talking about parents.”
***
The waves were as good as Callie had predicted and they spent a couple of hours messing about in the surf before hunger pulled them back to the beach and the picnic lunch they’d brought.
“Okay,” said Josh, round a mouthful of sandwich. “You were right. I’d have been frozen without the wetsuit. You never know, I could have been the first person in Scotland to get sunstroke and hypothermia simultaneously if it wasn’t for you.”
“Told you so,” Callie said with a triumphant smirk as she rummaged in the bag for a drink. “You just need to learn to accept that I’m always right.”
Dark Spell Page 4
