by A. L. Knorr
I cleared my voice. “The man looks like he is comforting her. She looks pretty upset.”
The man took the woman’s face tenderly by the chin. He kissed each cheek, then the two turned away from me. He released the woman to pick up the wheelbarrow and she stayed close to his side.
“They’re leaving the way they came.”
The woman looked back over her shoulder once, glancing at the wall. Her expression was laced with a complexity of emotion. Fear, relief, grief, weariness, and a touch of smugness.
“Now can I drop the soil?” My heart thudded with sadness after watching the whole scene. It was much more impactful than watching a film. This was real; it had happened right here where we were standing.
“Just a moment longer,” Jasher replied. “Let’s see if they come back.”
“I’m tired, Jasher.” And I really was. After watching the long, tedious exercise in covert medieval murder, I was exhausted.
“A minute longer, then we’ll go. They might come back, offer some clue we’ll be happy we didn’t miss. You said the residual blinks out and resets itself when it’s done, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, has it started over?”
“No.” I was still watching the couple navigate the woods, but they were growing smaller and difficult to make out. “Nothing else is happening, Jasher.”
“Okay.” He sounded ready to give up, finally. It was cold and dark out here, and I was feeling spooked.
I was about to drop the earth when something moved. I gasped and took a step back. Every hair on my body stood on end.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s…it’s a…” But I was lost for words.
It was a shadow, really. But it was more than a shadow. It was a roughly human shape, with unusually long limbs. It was hunched over and the head was thin and stretched long, giving it an oblong profile.
“It’s like a ghost,” I said, unwilling to look away. “But not a ghost. There’s no details, it’s just a black shape.”
“Moving?”
“Yeah, moving around the house, like it’s looking for something…or maybe dancing.” I felt mesmerized, watching the wisp of thick shadow move. Its arms and legs curled and uncurled, its long hands crooked and flexed. “It’s so graceful.”
I felt Jasher tug on my jacket. “Does it have a face?”
“No face. It’s just a dark shape. It’s circling the house, stopping now and then. It almost looks like it’s…sniffing.”
“Maybe it’s looking for the woman?”
“Maybe. That’s a good guess. Why else would it turn up right after she’d been walled up?”
The shape had gone still. It was bent at the waist, its spine a long ‘c’ shape. Its oval head hung out by its thin neck, crooked at a curious angle. Its long arms and legs were all bent. The long fingers at the ends of its hands were thin, with little curls at the end of each digit that seemed to dance and move, like candle flames, only they were void of all light. The thing was spectral, unearthly.
“So creepy,” I whispered.
The thing’s head turned as I spoke and my body went cold. It looked as though––if it had a face, if it had eyes––they would be narrowed in on me.
I took a step back.
“It can see me,” I choked on the words, reaching my hands out blindly for Jasher, the fingers of one hand gripped tightly around the dirt. Jasher grabbed my free hand and I saw his form in my periphery, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the apparition. Panic rushed up my throat. “It can see me!”
I took another step back and the thing took a step toward me.
A scream was rising in my chest.
Jasher was there, squeezing my hand, an arm circling my waist. Distantly, I heard him say my name, saying it wasn’t possible. He sounded so far away, like an echo.
Throwing down the soil as though it had become a writhing mass of worms, I staggered backward, heart pounding.
But the residual didn’t fade and the specter was still coming for me. The scream expanded, my lips opened, my heart felt as though it was going to explode with fear. A hand clamped over my mouth. I tore at it, trying to back up, get away.
The long black shape floated over the ground on footless legs. Where its feet should be were black candle flames, smoking and flickering.
“It can’t hurt you,” I heard Jasher whisper fiercely in my ear.
But it could, and it was going to. Clawing at his hand, I struggled. He put his arms around me in a great bear hug, holding me steady. The specter was upon me and the world blinked out, and it was gone. It had passed through me.
The residual was over.
Panting, and with my heart sprinting at a frantic pace under my ribs, I grasped at Jasher’s arms. I couldn’t find words. My legs trembled and then failed me.
“Georjie,” Jasher said, alarmed, as he took my full weight and we sank slowly to the ground. “Are you okay? Hey?”
He turned my face toward him. His face came into view, solid, in living color, real. I put my hands on his cheeks, leaving dirt on his face.
“I thought it was coming for me, Jasher. That awful thing.”
“You’re all right, Georjie.” He pulled me to him and squeezed me. I could feel his own pulse throbbing in his neck. “I promise. It can’t get you.”
My mouth felt dry and pasty, my hands were clammy. I pulled back and tugged at the neck of my jacket, thirsty for big gulps of air. We sat there on the wet ground, Jasher’s arms around me, until my breathing returned to normal.
“I’m sorry if I scared you,” I said when I’d recovered a sense of safety. My voice cracked. “That was one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen. It moved like it was made of candlelight, only it was totally black. Its limbs and hands flickered like small flames in a breeze. It was so…eldritch.” Come to think of it, that was the perfect word for it.
Jasher’s face was all serious shadows as he listened. “How tall?”
“Taller than you, but thin. So thin. With long arms and legs, always bent, never straight. Its back, too. It was always curved over, like it had something heavy hanging from its neck.”
A millstone, I thought. Like it had a millstone looped over its neck and it was dragging it around.
“What else?” Jasher brushed some hair away from my eyes.
I sat up straighter, using my hands to show him. “It had a long face. Like its chin was down here,” I held my hand four inches from my chin, “and its forehead was up here.” I held my other hand four inches from my own brow. “And its cheeks were only this wide.” I held my palms facing one another, only about five inches apart. “It looked right at me, right through me.” My heart skipped a beat at the memory. “And it had cheekbones.”
Jasher’s shadowed face went still. “Really?”
“Yes, because it turned its head and I saw its quarter profile for a second before it looked right at me.”
“That’s when you started backing up?”
I nodded and made to stand. Jasher helped me up.
“Yes.” I straightened and faced Jasher. “I could have sworn it knew I was watching it. Even through the centuries.”
“But that’s impossible,” Jasher said. “Whatever that thing was, it’s part of the past.”
“Yes. It was silly of me to think it could get me.” Now that the residual was over, I felt embarrassed. “Sorry, Jasher. I must have scared you.”
“Don’t worry about me. Are you going to be able to sleep after that?” He put an arm around me as we headed into the trees. The air was biting and my dirty hand felt coated in ice. Off in the distance, a crow gave a hoarse cry and took to the air.
“I’m totally shattered, actually. Sleep is exactly what I need.”
He planted a peck on my forehead and we walked back to the maze in silence. We’d just passed by the fountain in the center of the maze when he asked, “Do you think the thing had something to do with the body in the wall?”
“I
don’t know. We could ask Lachlan or Evelyn if there’s anything in the local myths about a specter like the one I saw.”
“Like it was made of candle-flame,” Jasher muttered.
“Even the wraith I faced in Ireland didn’t scare me like that thing did.”
Jasher paused with his hand on the back door. He looked down at me. “Are you sure you’re okay? You know that thing can’t hurt you, right?”
I nodded. “I know.”
“Good. But I’m just next door if you can’t sleep or if you need a cuddle-buddy.” Jasher winked at me in the moonlight. “It’s not like we haven’t done it before.”
I laughed. “What about Evelyn?”
“She’d understand. She’s not the jealous type.” Jasher turned away and opened the door, holding it wide for me.
At another time I might have flirted back, but my mind was already running back to the image of that thing. A creepy, stealthy, phantom made of nightmares. But there was something else. Using only negative adjectives to describe the thing wasn’t entirely fair.
Because it had beauty, too.
Chapter 9
Life fell into a comfortable routine. While Jasher and the team worked on the cottage, I buried myself in the library. I tried asking Maisie about the chant again but she wouldn’t talk and I didn’t want to keep harassing her about it. I went to the café often, hoping to catch the girls skipping rope again. So far, no luck. Between my classes and assignments, and brief sprinting stints around the castle’s extensive yard to keep myself awake, I perused every book I could find in Blackmouth Castle’s library about the myths and legends of Scotland. When I’d exhausted Gavin and Bonnie’s meager collection on that subject (they were more interested in collecting books on the true history of Scotland and real events), I migrated to the library in town.
The amount of bright unfiltered sunlight Blackmouth experienced in one year could be counted in mere days. It rained every day for at least a few hours as the highland winter crawled slowly toward spring. Pellets of what sounded like ice against the thin glass, but I knew was only rain, hammered the window near the long wooden table I’d parked myself at. I’d learned a lot about the Loch Ness Monster, the Loathly Lady, Magic Mist, redcaps, and kelpies. The Scots loved their myths, but nowhere in the dozens of beautifully illustrated and poetically written books on the subject did I come across a Wise, or a creature that fit the description of the flickering shadow-creature I’d seen in the residual. I’d taken to calling it ‘the eldritch thing’ until a better identifier could be used. I felt like the odds of defining it were rapidly running out as I scanned the pile of encyclopedic tomes. If it were a recognized thing in mythology, surely I would have found it by now.
The smacks of heavy wet soles on the hardwood drew my attention up.
“Well spotted.” Lachlan stood between two narrow bookshelves, dripping on the floor from his raingear. He pushed the hood of his jacket back. His eyelashes were wet, making his blue eyes look wider and sweeter. “Jasher said you’ve been burying yourself in your schoolwork. I was hoping you might drop by the project every once in a while so I could say hello.”
I closed the book and batted my own eyelashes at him. “Did you come here just to find me?”
“Sure.” He raked a hand over his unruly hair. “Gavin gave us the afternoon off. The tarp doesn’t do much against sideways rain.” He glanced out the blurry window and its cold gray light.
“So that’s how you’ve been managing.” They’d constructed a tarp over the worksite. “Clever. How’s the project going?”
He hooked a toe around the leg of the chair across from me and pulled it smoothly from the table. “Footings and framing are done.”
“No more problems with thorns?”
“So far, so good.”
“Will has stopped complaining that the body shouldn’t have been removed?”
“Aye, he’s over it.” Lachlan’s eyes fell to my pile of research, sifting through the titles. “Is one of your subjects mythology?”
“More of a personal interest.” I eyed him thoughtfully. “Hey, you’ve never heard of a creature that looks like it’s made out of flames, have you? Black flames, no face, kind of flickery when it moves?”
“Like a ghost?” he offered doubtfully.
“Different from a ghost. Longer limbed and thinner.”
I flipped open my notebook and showed him a drawing Jasher had done for me as I’d described the creature.
“Kind of like this.” I pushed the drawing toward him.
He gazed at it, forehead creasing. He pushed it back, sans expression of enlightenment. “The ghost of a starved elf?”
I laughed. “Never mind. I’ll take that as a no.” I closed the notebook.
“Why? Where did you come across a creature like that?”
Time for some artful dodging. “It’s all your fault, really.”
He blinked. “Do tell.”
“It all started the day you said that thing: Which, Fae or Wise? I got to wondering what a Wise was and looking for that just kind of sparked my interest, I guess. I haven’t found anything about Wise, but Evelyn suggested that it’s the same as a witch.”
“Unless the saying is ‘Witch, Fae, or Wise.’” Lachlan leaned back in his chair. “In which case, witches and Wise are not the same thing.”
I stared at him. “Fair point.” Why hadn’t I thought of that?
His gaze held mine and the corners of his mouth twitched up. “Nice way to procrastinate from your schoolwork.”
We sat there smiling at one another for a minute, the sound of water dripping from his clothing punctuating the silence.
Those eyes, they were so naked and transparent with his attraction to me. When I looked into them, I felt like he was baring his soul and asking me if I was up for doing the same. I cleared my throat and gestured to the gathering pool of rainwater. “You might catch hell from the librarian shortly.”
He looked down and made a face. “Mrs. Heron isn’t one to mess around.” He got up and brushed the water off the chair before putting it back. “I came to find you for a reason. You haven’t left Blackmouth since you arrived, and there are other beautiful seaside towns nearby. Jasher and Evelyn are up for an outing tomorrow. The rain is supposed to let up in the afternoon. Can I interest you in a little adventure?”
I brightened. “Yeah, you can. What did you have in mind?”
He put up a hand. “Nothing fancy. There’s a network of trails south of here that run parallel to the coast. We could go for a hike and then drive into Inverness for dinner. There’s a charming three-hundred-year-old pub I think you’d love.”
“Count me in.” I began to stack the books. “Jasher and Evelyn will come, too?”
I was about to tease him about it looking like a double date when he said, “Like a double date.” He followed this with a shameless grin and his eyes sparkled. “Are you okay with that? Best to say no if ye’re not interested. I wouldna want to waste your time.”
I grinned in answer, suddenly needing a big glass of water and a breath of fresh air.
His impish smile didn’t diminish, but his eyes had gone soft. “You’re the bonniest lass I’ve ever seen, Georjayna Sutherland.” He said it with a sincerity that took my breath away.
“Wow.” I swallowed. “You go straight for the jugular.”
“Wouldn’t want my intentions misread,” he continued in that same serious tone. “I intend to kiss you one day soon, too.”
My jaw dropped as a cloud of tiny butterflies battered featherlight wings against my insides.
He tipped me a wink and strode away before I could say anything else.
Lachlan’s bald statement of intention gave me something else to think about over the rest of the week besides mythology and eldritch shadow creatures. I hadn’t been self-conscious around Lachlan before, but as Saturday approached, I found myself distracted by a more superficial problem: what I should wear. Not that I had a lot of material to work with.
I had only packed one dress, and given that we were hiking, it wouldn’t be appropriate. I’d have to settle for a lined rain jacket, a warm sweater, jeans, and waterproof boots…again.
Jasher and I met Evelyn and Lachlan in front of Blackmouth Castle shortly after noon on Saturday. Lachlan was driving his Jeep Renegade and had picked up Evie on the way. Jasher insisted I take the front seat while he shared the small rear seat with Evelyn.
“I thought you said the rain was supposed to let up, Lockie?” Jasher said as he poked his head between the two front seats.
“Lockie?” I glanced at Lachlan.
“An unfortunate nickname I mean to eradicate.” Lachlan shot a mock glare at Jasher.
“Good luck with that.” Evelyn laughed as we pulled away from the castle and made our way to the highway which skirted the coast. “He’s been known as Lockie since he was a baby.”
“It’s not raining,” Lachlan said in a loud voice, before adding to me in a much softer one, “see that clever change of subject?”
“But would you look at those thunderheads.” Jasher gave a low whistle as he settled back in his seat and peered out the window. They’d begun to fog up and Lachlan turned up the air.
“What’s our plan B?” Evelyn asked from behind me.
Lachlan looked properly horrified. “There is no plan B. We made a plan to go hiking and hiking we shall go.” He held up an authoritative finger. “We are due at least two solid hours of sunlight this afternoon.”
Speckles of water began to spatter the windscreen. I shot Lachlan a look.
“What? You doubt me?”
I leveled a finger at the glass.
“Just a fine mist,” Lachlan said, “mark my words. It’ll clear up by the time we reach the trailhead.”
Thunder boomed from somewhere out over the sea, and the speckles of rain didn’t let up. Twenty minutes later, Lachlan steered the Jeep into a vacant gravel parking lot bordered with trees. Jasher’s face appeared between the front seats as he squinted at the signpost beside the trailhead.
“What does the sign say? I can’t read it through all the water pouring down the windscreen.”
