Beyond the Highland Myst

by Highlander 01-08

  Would the professor be more upset if she opened it—or if she refused the delivery and it cost him a fortune to have it reshipped?

  She sighed again, feeling damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.

  In the end it was the constantly-broke college student in her who flipped the coin and made the call.

  “Fine. Let’s do this. Open it up.”

  Twenty minutes later the deliverymen had secured her wearily scribbled signature and were gone, taking the remains of the crating with them.

  And now she stood, eyeing the thing curiously. It wasn’t a sarcophagus after all. In fact, most of the packaging had been padding.

  From deep within layers and layers of cushioned wrapping, they’d unearthed a mirror and, at her direction, propped it carefully against the east wall of bookshelves.

  Taller than she by more than a foot, the mirror’s ornate frame was a shimmery gold. Shapes and symbols, of such uniformity and cohesion to imply a system of writing, were carved into every inch of the wide border. She narrowed her eyes, pondering the etchings, but linguistics was not her specialty, and the symbols were nothing that, without searching through books or notes, she could identify as a letter, word, or glyph.

  Inside the gaudy gilt frame, the outer edges of the silvery glass were marred with a cloudy, uneven black stain of some sort, but aside from that, the glass itself was startlingly clear. She suspected it had been broken and replaced at some point and would ultimately prove centuries younger than the frame. No mirror of yore had achieved such clarity. Though the earliest artificial mirrors discovered by archaeologists dated back to 6200 B.C.E., they had been fashioned of polished obsidian, not glass. The first glass mirrors of significant size—roughly three-by-five-foot panels—hadn’t been manufactured until the 1680’s by Italian glassmaker Bernard Perroto for the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, commissioned by the extravagant Sun King, Louis the XIV. Exceptional glass mirrors of the size of the one before her—an impressive six and a half feet tall—generally proved to be a few hundred years old, at most.

  Considering this one’s pristine silvering, it was likely less than a century in age, and no one had gone mad or died from slow mercury poisoning making it. Hatmakers, or “hatters,” hadn’t been the only ones to suffer from the toxic fumes of their trade (though, for some reason Jessi’d never been able to figure, the idiom “mad-as-a-mirrormaker” had never quite caught on).

  Eyes narrowed thoughtfully, she scrutinized it. The archaeologist in her itched to know the piece’s provenance, wondered if the frame had been accurately dated.

  She frowned. What did the professor want with a mirror, anyway? Such an item wasn’t at all in keeping with his usual tastes, which ran toward replica weapons and reproductions of ancient timepieces such as the sixteenth-century German astrolabe adorning his desk. And how could the professor possibly afford something worth “boo-koo bucks” on his teaching salary, anyway?

  Fishing the key from the pocket of her jeans, she turned to leave. She’d done as he’d asked. Her work here was finished.

  She flipped off the light and was just stepping through the doorway when she felt a chill. All the fine hair at the nape of her neck lifted, tingling as if electrified. Her heart was abruptly pounding against the wall of her chest, and she felt the sudden, terrifying certainty that she was being watched.

  In the manner that prey was watched.

  Flinching, she turned back toward the mirror.

  Dimly illumed by the pale blue glow of the computer’s screen saver, the artifact looked positively eerie. The gold appeared silvery; the silver glass, smoky, dark and deep with shadows.

  And in those shadows something moved.

  She sucked in a breath so fast she choked on it. Sputtering, she groped for the light switch.

  Overhead light blazed down, flooding the room.

  She stared into the oblong glass, a hand pressed to her throat, swallowing convulsively.

  Her reflection stared back.

  After a moment, she closed her eyes. Snapped them open. Stared into the glass again.

  Just her.

  The hair at her nape continued to bristle, icy chills rippled up her spine. The pulse at the hollow of her neck fluttered frantically beneath her palm. Eyes wide, she glanced uneasily around the room.

  The professor’s office, precisely as it should be.

  After a long moment, she tried for a laugh but it came out shaky, uncertain, and seemed to echo unpleasantly in the office—as if the room’s square footage and actual occupiable space didn’t quite coincide.

  “Jessi, you’re losing it,” she whispered.

  There was nothing, no one with her in the professor’s office but her overactive imagination.

  With a dismissive toss of her head, she turned, flipped off the light again, and this time pulled the door shut behind her hard and fast and without a backward glance.

  Hurrying down the corridor, she dashed out into the back parking lot, kicking up a swirl of red and gold leaves as she hastened to her car.

  The more distance she put between herself and the building, the more ridiculous she felt—really, getting all spooked alone on campus at night! One day she would be working on excavations in the middle of nowhere, quite likely late at night and sometimes alone. She couldn’t afford to be fanciful. At times, though, it was hard not to be, especially when holding a twenty-five-hundred-year-old Druid brooch, or examining a fabulously detailed La Tène period sword. Certain relics seemed to carry lingering traces of energy, the residue of the passionate lives of those who’d touched them.

  Though not anything like what she thought she’d just seen.

  “How weird was that?’ she muttered, shaking off a lingering shiver. “God, I really must have sex on the brain.”

  Watching the hottie and his girlfriend earlier had apparently done quite a number on her. That, coupled with exhaustion and the low lighting, she decided firmly as she unlocked her car and slipped behind the wheel, must have pushed her over the edge, into a brief, eyes-wide-open kind of hallucination/fantasy.

  Because for a moment she actually thought she’d seen a half-naked man—an absolute sex-god of a man, no less—standing in Keene’s office, looking back at her.

  A trick of the light, strange shadows falling, nothing more.

  A towering, muscle-ripped, darkly beautiful man, dripping power. And hunger. And sex. The kind of sex nice girls didn’t have.

  Oh, honey, you so need to get a boyfriend!

  Looking at her like she was Little Red Riding Hood and the big, bad wolf hadn’t been fed in a long, long time.

  Definitely a trick of the light.

  Looking at her from inside the mirror.

  In a place that was not a place, yet was place enough to serve as an inescapable fortress prison, a place to terrify, to drive the common man stark raving mad, six feet five inches of caged ninth-century Highlander stirred.

  A hungry animal sound rumbled deep in his throat.

  Just as he’d thought: He smelled woman.

  * * *

  2

  A FEW DAYS LATER . . .

  When next Jessi unlocked the professor’s office—late on Monday night—a distant part of her brain noted something askew, some tiny niggling detail, but she failed to process it, as she was currently the guest of honor at her own festive and highly enthusiastic pity-party.

  That she turned the key, and back again, actually locking then unlocking the door, eluded her utterly.

  Had she not been busy muttering beneath her breath about the depressingly huge stack of freshman papers that had been dumped on her in the professor’s absence, that she might have actually gotten time to work on grading if he hadn’t left her a message last night with a list a mile long of periodicals and sources he wanted her to collect from a dozen different places and bring to the hospital so he could flag notes for the book he was writing while laid up recuperating, she might have been cognizant enough of her surroundings to have reconsid
ered walking through the door.

  Maybe closed it again, locked it for real, and gone and gotten campus security.

  Unfortunately, enthused celebrant of her own misery, she didn’t notice a thing.

  She paused with the door slightly ajar, puffed a few strands of hair from her face, and shifted the crammed-full backpack on her shoulder so her textbooks would stop gouging the back of her ribs.

  “A hundred and eleven essays? Would somebody just shoot me and put me out of my misery?” She’d counted them in disbelief when Mark Troudeau, smirking openly, had handed them over. There went any hope of sleeping for the next few days.

  Hey, I agreed to teach Keene’s classes, Jess, and you know how tight my schedule is. He said you would grade.

  She knew exactly why Keene had said she would grade. Because, no doubt, Mark had called him over the weekend and “suggested” she grade. Mark had been a shit to her ever since last year, when he’d hit on her (unsuccessfully) at the department Christmas party. She couldn’t stand men who talked to her breasts, as if there was nothing above them worth noting, and he was one of the worst. She didn’t go around talking to men’s crotches.

  Sure enough, the professor had left her another message while she was in class, bringing his total in the past twenty-four hours to five (would somebody please either take that man’s phone away or knock him out with sedatives?), and thanked her for being “such a lovely assistant and helping out. Mark really does have his hands full, and I told him you would be happy to assist.”

  Right. As if anyone had given her a choice. And as if Mark’s hands were any more full than hers. But the world of academia was, like the rest of the world in many ways, still an Old Boys’ School, and anytime Jessi began to forget that, life invariably gave her a refresher course.

  Nudging the door open with her hip, Jessi pushed inside, leaving it ajar. Skirting the desk, she headed straight for the wall of bookshelves. She didn’t bother turning on the light, partly because she’d organized the office herself and knew exactly where to find the two books on Celtic Gaul that Professor Keene wanted, and partly because she was determined not to get distracted by the mirror, and the slow, relentless burn of questions it had ignited in her mind.

  She’d made peace with that weird little trick of the eye she’d suffered on Friday—a product of nothing more than low light and exhaustion. But she was dying to know if the mirror was a genuine relic. How had the professor come across it? Was its origin provable? Had any valid dating been done? What were those symbols, anyway?

  Jessi had a sticky memory—a useful ability in her field—and several of the symbols had gotten embedded in it from her single, cursory inspection. She’d been subconsciously pondering them since, wondering why they seemed so familiar, yet somehow . . . wrong. Trying to pinpoint where she’d seen something similar before. Her specialty was the archaeology of Europe from the Paleolithic to the “Celtic” Iron Age. Though the mirror was clearly of recent manufacture, she was titillated by the possibility that the frame might actually date to somewhere in the late Iron Age.

  She knew herself well enough to know that if she took another look at the relic tonight, curiosity would get the best of her and the next thing, she’d be digging through the professor’s reference books trying to determine what the symbols were and doing her best to guesstimate a date. Been there, done that, she thought wryly. Blew an entire night without even realizing it, poring over one artifact or another, especially on those rare and glorious occasions the university was briefly entrusted with a collector’s piece for study or verification. She always paid for it double the next day. With that infernal stack of papers waiting for her, she couldn’t afford to waste any time. In and out, swift and efficient, was her plan and she was sticking to it.

  She was just reaching up to pluck the two thick volumes from the shelf when she heard the soft snick of the door closing behind her.

  She stiffened, froze midreach.

  Then snorted and pulled the first book from the shelf. A draft. Nothing more. “No way. I am not getting all freaked out on campus again tonight. That blasted mirror is just a mirror,” she told the bookcase firmly.

  “Actually, it’s not,” a smooth, faintly accented voice murmured behind her. “It’s far more than a mere mirror. Who else knows it’s here?”

  Jessi gasped and turned around so fast that the book went flying from her hand, hit the wall with a solid whump, and slid to the floor. She winced. The professor was going to kill her if she’d spindled the spine; he was funny about his books, especially his hardbacks. Across the office, in the dim light afforded by the computer, she could just make out the silhouette of a man leaning back against the door, arms folded across his chest.

  “Wh-what—wh-who—” she stammered.

  Light flooded the room.

  “I startled you,” the man said softly, dropping his hand from the wall switch.

  Later Jessi would realize he’d merely noted a fact, not apologized.

  She blinked against the abrupt increase in wattage, taking him in. His arms were crossed again; he leaned casually against the door. Tall and well built, he was extremely attractive. Longish blond hair was pulled back from a clean-shaven, classic face. He wore a dark, expensive tailored suit, a crisp shirt, a tasteful tie. His accent held distinct Slavic undertones, perhaps Russian, she mused. A young professor visiting from abroad? A speaker engaged by the university? “I didn’t realize anyone else was still in this wing,” she said. “Are you looking for Professor Keene?”

  “The professor and I have already had our time together this evening,” he replied with the ghost of a smile.

  An odd way of phrasing things; his comment passed through her mind absently, as she was still hung up on his opening gambit. She pounced on it, pursuing it eagerly: “What did you mean, ‘it’s far more than a mere mirror’? What do you know about it? Where is it from? Are you here to authenticate it? Or has it already been? What are the symbols? Do you know?”

  He stepped away from the door, moved deeper into the room. “I understand it was delivered this past Friday. Has anyone else seen it?”

  Jessi thought a moment, shook her head. “I don’t think so. The deliverymen opened it up, but other than that, just me. Why?”

  He glanced around the office. “There’s been no cleaning crew in since then? No other persons such as yourself with a key?”

  Jessi frowned, perplexed by the direction of his questions. And getting irked that he wasn’t answering any of hers. “No. The cleaners come on Wednesdays and the only reason I have a key is because I’m Professor Keene’s assistant.”

  “I see.” He eased forward another step.

  And that was when Jessi felt it.

  Menace. Rolling off him. She’d not picked up on it right away, disarmed by his good looks, curious about the artifact, peripherally distracted by her own brooding. But it was there—a wolf beneath the sheep’s clothing. For all his seeming civility, there was something cold and dangerous beneath that elegant suit. And it was focused on her.

  Why? It didn’t make any sense!

  And suddenly the tiny niggling detail that had eluded her when she’d turned the key in the door swam up from the murky waters of her subconscious: It had already been unlocked! He must have been inside the office, concealing himself behind the door when she’d pushed it open!

  Keep him talking, she thought, fighting panic. She drew a careful, deep breath. Adrenaline was kicking in, upping her heart rate, making her hands and legs feel shaky. She concentrated on betraying no sign of her belated recognition of danger. Surprise might be the only advantage she had. Somewhere in the office was something she could use as a weapon, something more threatening than a book. She just had to get her hands on it before he figured out she was on to him. She snatched a surreptitious glance to her right.

  Yes! Just as she’d thought, there lay one of the professor’s replica blades on a nearby curio table. Though a reproduction piece, fashioned of steel not
gem-encrusted gold, it was every bit as lethal as the real thing.

  “So how old is the mirror, anyway?” she asked, donning her best wide-eyed, I’m-not-the-brightest-bulb-in-the-box look.

  He moved again. Smooth, like a well-muscled animal. A few more steps and he’d be past the desk. She eased right a tad.

  It seemed he was pondering whether or not to answer her for a moment, then he shrugged. “You would probably place it in the Old Stone Age.”

  Jessi sucked in a breath and for just a moment, the briefest of instants, fear fell by the wayside. The Old Stone Age? Was he kidding?

  Wait—of course he was. He had to be! It was patently impossible. The earliest forms of writing, cuneiform and hieroglyphics, weren’t even in existence until the mid to end of the fourth century B.C.E.! And those etchings on the mirror were some kind of writing.

  “Ha, ha. I’m not that stupid.” Well, today, she ceded dismally, she certainly seemed to be, on just about all fronts, but normally she wasn’t. Normally she suffered only one or two stupid fronts, not this all-encompassing, blanket idiocy. “That would put it at pre-ten-thousand B.C.E.,” she scoffed, as she stole a few more inches. Had he noticed what she was doing? If so, he was giving no indication.

  “Yes, indeed it would. Considerably ‘pre.’ ” He took another step forward.

  She considered screaming but she was nearly certain there was no one else in the south wing this late at night, and suspected it would be wiser to conserve her energy to defend herself with. “Okay, I’ll go with this a minute,” she said, inching, inching. Just a little farther. Keep him talking. Dare she make a leap for it? “You’re claiming the frame is from the Old Stone Age. Right? And the carvings were added later, and the mirror inserted in the last century or so.”

  “No. The entire piece, in sum, Old Stone Age.”