Finding Fraser (15 page)

There were three of them in total. The
two outer cairns looked like piles of gray rock in the deepening twilight. I
could see they were hollow in the center, though, like two giant, rocky
doughnuts. The mist lightened a little as I approached the final cairn, and
right away it was clearly different from the other two. Standing stones
radiated around it like the numbers on a clock face, and there was a path
running through to an opening in the center of the mound.

It was definitely too dark to look up
details in my book, but I figured that fifteen more minutes at the site would
still leave me with enough light in the sky to get back to the main road, if I
stood up and really pedaled. In spite of Susan’s advice, my gut instinct had
been right about this not being anything like how I pictured
Craigh na Dun
. There were standing
stones, yes, but the ancient graves were clearly the main focus of this site.
Mammoth circles of piled stones, the two outer cairns each with a clear
passageway to the center.

The Heritage Scotland sign had mentioned the
presence of
cists,
which apparently
were an ancient version of small, square coffins. The standing stones encircled
the middle gravesite in a kind of sunburst pattern.

I wished there was less rain and more time.
And maybe my laptop. I really wanted to know what had led people to leave these
cairns here so many millennia ago. Long before Jamie’s time, anyway.

But dusk was already falling, and I needed a
restroom. Also, I was hoping for a half an hour’s battery life on my bike lamp,
so the whys and wherefores of this ancient place would have to stay on my to-do
list for the time being.

I felt my hair lift a little off my neck as
a thin breeze began to blow, and above me the heavy cloud that had shrouded the
day began to break. This gave the brief illusion of a lightening of the sky,
highlighted by the sight of a single star, low to the horizon.

The evening star.

How many times had Claire looked up at the
stars, longing for her Jamie?

I made up my mind, dropped my pack near the
path and stepped into the trees to relieve myself. It might cost me a minute or
so of extra darkness, but it would make for a much less painful ride back into
Inverness.

Moments later, I shuffled back toward the
path, grateful for a pocketful of old Kleenex. Looking around, I tried to
orient myself with the single, twinkling star. It seemed to be almost due east
of where I stood, and I knew the road I needed to take would head almost
straight north before bearing west and south down to Inverness.

I stopped for a minute, just staring into
the darkness between the stones. What was I doing here? I mean, I know my plan
was to retrace Claire’s steps, but maybe I needed to rethink it a little. Much
as I was enjoying every minute of this visit, I had made exactly zero progress
toward my goal of meeting an actual, flesh-and-blood Scottish guy.

The day had been full of so much that was
wonderful, but I needed to get back to my room and work on my focus. I swung my
pack up onto my shoulder and turned toward my bike when I saw a light bobbing
between the Cairns.

I dropped behind one of the stones like a
ninja, all thoughts of the return trip to Inverness gone from my brain.

The light must have come from somewhere behind
the center cairn, because I could see the shadow of one of the standing stones
nearby. I sidestepped back into the trees, carefully avoiding the small puddle
beneath the third tree over.

All I could think of were Evelyn’s words.
“But what about the ghost we saw, Angus?
What about that?”

What
about
that?

The light bobbed once more, and then
vanished.

My hair lifted again in the breeze, and a light
suddenly shone down on me. I slowly turned to face it. My guts twisted like a
prisoner who had attempted escape, only to be caught at the forest edge by
guards and a collection of slavering, killer dogs.

But there were no guards, and thankfully no
killer dogs. Only a moon that had risen, pale yellow on the eastern horizon. It
wasn’t a spotlight, but it cast a strange glow across the trees. Across the
cairns.

Ghosts don’t walk in moonlight, do they?

I decided they didn’t, and then I tiptoed
closer to the standing stones in the middle of the site, to see for myself.

As I crept forward, I decided to use the
stones themselves as camouflage. This place was so different from the mental
image I had of
Craigh na Dun
. It was
in a field, for one thing, not a mountainside. But the stones still formed an unmistakable
circle, and drew me forward. They were mostly taller than my head, and the
solid feel of the cold, hard rock under my fingertips was reassuring, somehow.
The trees offered little cover, as the area around the ancient site was in a
clearing, and the stones circled the low, gray lumps of the cairns in the
darkness. Unlike Claire’s experience at
Craigh
na Dun
, these stones did not scream when I touched them and for that I felt
strangely—torn.

The sensible part of my brain knew that I
hadn’t visited this circle to find a ghost, and yet—Claire’s life had
been completely changed when she touched the stone. A wee small part of my
heart told me I wanted that same thing. A different life. Something else to
consider when I returned to Inverness.

But for now, I needed to find out more about
that bobbing light.

I peered around the edge of the giant rock
and scanned the area. The light had not flickered into view again since I had
first seen it, and I began to wonder if the moon had been playing tricks with
my eyes. Maybe it had glanced off a fleck of metal in one of the stones piled
in the center cairn?

Whispering through the dead leaves
surrounding the trees behind me, the breeze rustled just like the sound of
shuffling footsteps in the dark. The hair on the back of my neck was standing
at full alert. I took a deep breath, slipped out from behind the shelter of the
standing stone and half crab-scuttled to the edge of the center cairn itself.
The stones of the cairn had a different look and feel than those standing
sentinel behind me. As I crouched by the low mound, my fingers traced odd
indentations on the stone’s surface—the strange, unexplained cupping that
the information sign had told me helped date the site to its ancient origins.
The hypothesis was that the marks were strictly decorative, but the texture under
my fingers made me feel uncomfortable. Like I was touching the back of an
ancient, sleeping guardian.

Just then, the moon shone out again from
behind a tattered bit of cloud and flooded the place like a spotlight. And
directly in front of me, standing, legs spread in the center of the opening of
the cairn, was the clear silhouette of a Highlander.

I’m pretty sure I fainted for a moment,
right there on the side of the mound of rock. My vision blurred and swam, but
when I rubbed my eyes, there he remained. Clouds scudded across the moon, but
could not obscure the unmistakable outline of a tall man in a kilt. He wore
some kind of heavy boots on his feet, and the plaid was topped by something
that could have been a substantial fur cape.

A strange feeling of unreality slipped over
me. It was like in those dreams where I tried to run, but couldn’t. My feet
felt mired in mud. I must have been holding my breath, because right about then
an actual wave of nausea washed over me. I had to close my eyes a moment to
stop from delivering my clam chowder from lunch onto the dead grass beneath my
feet.

When I opened my eyes again, he was gone.

I stood up immediately and stepped toward
where he had been standing, but the moon dropped back under the cover of the
cloud again and my sore knee made crushing contact with one of the ancient
stones. I bit my tongue so as not to cry out, and my eyes filled with sudden,
hot tears. I’m not sure if it was from the effort to keep silent through the
pain in my knee, or from the reality that I had somehow misplaced my Highlander
once again.

In a few short, limping steps I was at the
entrance to the cairn. There was nothing—no one—there. Leaning
forward, I peered along the pathway that led to the center of the burial mound,
but it was open to the air, and I could see nothing. I spun outwards and looked
around behind me, but the darkness had closed in again as the clouds drew their
curtain across the full moon.

If my eyes hadn’t deceived me and a man had
really been there, he was there no longer. I slumped against the rock mound,
completely at a loss. Had the nattering of the old ladies from the tour bus
been the truth? Was wishful thinking making me see things? Or was I really
losing my mind?

In the distance the wail of a siren rose up.
Ambulance, or police or fire—I couldn’t tell. But it was a purely
contemporary sound. As I listened to it fade away, my heart rate slowed enough
to allow logic to begin to seep back into my brain. He had been there—he
had. I had seen him. I had seen the dark lines of his plaid moving against his
knees in the light breeze. I wasn’t sure what he had been wearing over the
plaid—some kind of heavy cloak, certainly—but I
was
sure of the heavy boots.

I dropped to my knees. Perhaps the damp
ground would give evidence of boot prints to prove I was not completely losing it.
I glared up at the sky, willing the cloud cover to part at least enough so that
I had a bit of dappled moonlight to see the ground.

In answer, tiny raindrops began to spatter
my upturned face. I shook them off and concentrated on the ground. By feel
alone I could tell the entrance to the cairn was not rock, but mud. Fairly
frozen mud, to be sure, but maybe …

My bicycle lamp. I pushed all thoughts of
low batteries and returning safely back to the hostel to the back of my brain.
I needed to know if there were fresh boot prints, and for that, I needed light.
I jumped to my feet and ran smack into the unmistakably solid body of a
non-ghostly human male.

Just after midnight, March 16

Inverness, Scotland

Jotting a quick note while my
co-ghost hunter (very kindly) pays the cabbie. Have had the strangest and most
unique day of my visit. Perhaps of my whole life.

Back in my room, I didn’t even turn on the
light, just dropped my pack in the corner and sagged into my bed.

Stretched out, and fell asleep to the memory
of the screaming …

Yes, there had been screaming, but not
all of it had come from my throat. Screaming, slipping, falling, grabbing, slapping,
snatching, pushing, recriminations and finally, breathless, panting silence as
I’d stared at the man in front of me, bathed in the reflection of his
flashlight.

“I thought you were a ghost,” he said, at
the very moment I blurted, “You’re not a ghost.” If we had been in a movie, we
would have both laughed wryly and compared notes.

As it was, he glared at me, a streak of mud
on one cheek and his left eye beginning to swell from its untimely meeting with
my elbow. I stood, arms crossed, at the entrance to the ancient tomb, my heart
sunk just about as low as it had been at any point along this strange journey.