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Authors: Pamela F. Service

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BOOK: Storm at the Edge of Time
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Tyaak shrugged and replaced the scanner in his belt. Not that he cared what they were, but they were a goal, something to turn his bored footsteps toward. Meanwhile, his thoughts could stubbornly trudge over the same ground. Why had his parents chosen this has-been planet as a place to “learn about himself”? This barren rock represented all the things about himself he wanted to forget. A world reeking with Humans, with their barbaric ways, their primitive animal instincts. Tyaak shivered. He had nothing to do with that. Nothing! Doggedly he marched on.

In the distant heather, the deer stopped grazing. With keen blue eyes, it impatiently watched the boy's grudging advance.

The first child had been relatively easy, the watcher reflected. Belief is a simple thing to play upon. For the final one, the timing had been tricky, but ignorance is even easier to use than belief. But with the middle one, ignorance and belief were almost evenly mixed, raising stubborn walls of fear. That one would be a different story.

Chapter Two

Jamie was trying hard not to be disappointed. But this was very nearly the last straw.

She stepped out of the car and looked grimly at the house. It looked back just as grimly. Hopeless! Gray stone, like everything else on this cold bleak island. Big and solid, but hardly the “Scottish mansion” she had envisioned. No turrets, no interesting angles, no likelihood of secret rooms or mysterious abandoned wings. Even a cheap dollhouse would have had a more imaginative layout. “A typical Orkney house,” her mother had gushed when they'd driven up. Two stories, central stairs, each floor with two rooms in front and two in back, a chimney at each windowless end. The whole boring box capped with a gray slate roof patched with lichen.

No mystery, no glamour, and definitely no inkling of ghosts!

“Jamie Halcro!” her father called. “Stop gawking and help me get the luggage out of the boot.” He smiled, relishing the quaint English term.

“Trunk,” Jamie muttered as she yanked her suitcase from the tumble of luggage. She staggered with it through the open gate in the stone wall and into the yard. Some yard: scruffy pale grass, with a few wind-shivering daffodils lining the path. Not even one tree. In fact, they hadn't seen any trees on Orkney since they'd left that little port town on the south coast. It was too windy and cold even for trees.

The thought of that port reminded her of the four-hour ferry trip from the north coast of Scotland. Over the sea to her father's generations-back ancestral home. Her stomach lurched. Seasick. She'd never known one little word could spell such misery. And definitely, this island had not been worth the suffering.

She stepped through the front door. The house smelled dank, with a sharp overtone of coal smoke. The house-rental lady had started a fire for them in the sitting room and was still puttering around. Jamie hauled her suitcase upstairs. It would take more than one measly fire to drive the cold and damp out of this place.

“Choose whichever room you want,” her mother called cheerily from below. Jamie plunked her bag on the landing and opened a door. The room was dark, its one window looking up a hillside of pale grass and purple brown leather. Not much of a view. The other room in the back was a bathroom, with one of those stupid showers on timers that she'd struggled with on their trip up from London.

Both front rooms had a view over fields and a couple
of lochs to a gray stretch of open sea beyond. One room had blue bedspreads and a painting of fishing boats. She took it. It wasn't quite as blah as the pink-bedspread room with the painting of smug nesting ducks.

Heaving her suitcase on one bed, she flopped onto the other and stared up at the white-plastered ceiling. Face it, Jamie, she told herself, you really lost out this time. As usual, her can-do-no-wrong brother had come out on top. He was spending his college spring break with friends in Florida. But of course, a mere middle school student like her couldn't do that sort of thing. No, she had to be dragged along on another of her parents' birding vacations. Why couldn't they ever look at birds on warm tropical beaches with palm trees?

After her initial outrage, Jamie had been consoling herself with the thought of staying on a romantic island in a 300-year-old Scottish mansion. A place like that, she had figured, was sure to have ghosts. At long last, she would see ghosts.

Not that she hadn't tried before. She'd been trying since she'd first heard about ghosts, at age three on Halloween. But so far all of her Ouija boards, seances, and hanging out in graveyards hadn't produced one wisp of a ghost.

Still, she had psychic powers; she
knew
she did. Maybe she couldn't draw like her father the commercial artist; maybe she couldn't cope with numbers like her mother the accountant; and certainly she wasn't clever with juggling words, like her debate-team captain and would-be lawyer brother. But surely she must have
some
talent. Being sensitive to the supernatural, Jamie had decided long ago, was it.

She used to experiment with all kinds of things supernatural. But most of it had been creepy, stupid made-up stuff. Ghosts, though, were different. Throughout history responsible, grown-up people had believed in ghosts. And now she'd decided that this must be where her talent lay. Surely she could see ghosts.

Up to now, the problem must have been the setting. There just weren't any ghosts around when she'd tried to conjure them up. After all, America was a pretty new country, as history went, and Jamie lived in a very new house in a very new suburb. Not much time for lost souls to build up there. Even the local cemetery wasn't much help. Instead of having spooky tilted tombstones, the graves were marked with neat little plaques lying flat on the ground so as not to trouble the riding lawn mowers. What unquiet spirit would hang around a place like that?

But Scotland: That place was
old.
And Jamie'd read enough British kids' books to know that Scotland was teeming with old mansions, ruined abbeys, castles, and dungeons—and ancient graveyards where tombstones jutted through the weeds like hags' teeth.

So now here she was, and the place looked anything but promising. Still, there had to be ghosts somewhere around here. And she would find them! There was no way she was going to admit she had no talent for anything.

Laughing wryly, Jamie sat up. Her brother always teased her by claiming that she was at least stubborn enough to be a lawyer—stubborn and goal-oriented. Well, now she had a goal.

With renewed energy, she trotted back downstairs and got her overnight bag out of the car. The house-rental lady was just leaving. Jamie wavered a moment, then decided. If she was going to make a fool of herself, she might as well get started.

“Excuse me,” Jamie said as the woman opened her car door. “This is really an old house. I suppose it must be haunted—at least a little bit?”

The woman looked shocked. “Haunted? No, no, don't you worry. I never heard of it being haunted, I assure you.”

“No, really, it wouldn't bother us,” Jamie said urgently. “I mean we'd still want to rent it and everything.”

“Well, I am glad of that. But I am sure that everyone who lived in this house was too well behaved to leave any ghosts about.” Smiling weakly, the woman climbed into her car and drove away.

Jamie just stared after the car. “Too well behaved?” she said to herself. “Bah! Too boring, more likely.”

Her “bah” was echoed from across the road, where several sheep grazed on the coarse grass. One of them rubbed itself on a tall irregular stone standing in the pasture. From the gray sky, a seagull flashed down and landed on the stone. Looking at Jamie with sharp blue eyes, it let out a raucous laughing cry.

“Shut up, you stupid bird!” Jamie snapped as she tromped back inside. “The sheep has it right. ‘Bah' on the whole thing.” With an indignant-sounding squawk, the bird flew off over the fields.

That night they made dinner from cans of soup, spaghetti, and rice pudding they found in the cupboard.
Boring, but Jamie wasn't too interested in food. Her stomach was still reliving the ferry trip, and her head was still out of whack after the jet flight from the United States. She poked at her meal while her parents talked eagerly of the bird species they hoped to see.

“It's the right season for skuas and kittiwakes,” her father said. “Did you know, Jamie, that there are over three hundred and thirty species of birds on the Orkney Islands, and even more when you count the occasional visitors?”

“You have mentioned it,” she said dryly.

“It's an ornithologist's paradise, all right,” her mother said enthusiastically. “The flat limestone beds weather into ideal ledges for nest building, and the moorlands support an amazing variety of raptors.”

Jamie wasn't even interested enough to say something sarcastic.

Her room was bitterly cold when she went upstairs. She rummaged in her bag for a nightgown, but the one she found clearly wasn't warm enough. Her parents had warned her to pack warm things, but that had been hard to do when it was already getting hot and humid back home. After a quick dash to the bathroom and a battle with the uncooperative plumbing, she leaped into bed wearing both nightgown and bathrobe and pulled the down-filled comforter up to her chin. Too cold to even think of sleeping, she watched a patch of moonlight slide slowly over the flowered wallpaper.

Cold moonlight shining on a barren island in the middle of a dark icy sea. Her brother was probably seeing the same moonlight pouring over a warm tropical sea as he walked with friends in soft sands and breathed
perfumes from exotic flowers. How could he have everything—all the talent, all the prospects, all the luck? Her “spring break” promised to be an ordeal, and the chances of using it to prove her one natural talent were looking grim.

She woke up in the dead of night. Her body still seemed to be on U.S. time and was giving her all the wrong signals. The moon patch had moved from wall to ceiling, but there was no change in the ceaseless blowing of the wind. She felt fully awake. Should she read one of the stack of ghost stories she'd brought along?

No, that'd be admitting defeat. Here she was in the middle of the night in a 300-year-old Scottish house. No matter what the rental agent said, this place must have a filmy lady in white or some gaunt tormented specter floating about. Not everyone was as sensitive as she was. They couldn't see those things, that was all.

If she was going to ghost-hunt, though, Jamie decided, she'd better take along a camera as backup. She'd read that sometimes ghosts invisible to the human eye could be captured on film.

Climbing from her now warm cocoon of a bed, she quickly pulled on jeans, sweater, jacket, and sneakers. Then, grabbing up camera and flashlight, she tiptoed out onto the landing.

Her father's steady snoring rumbled from the other front bedroom, but otherwise the only sound was the wind playing roughly with the roof slates. The landing did not look promisingly ghostly.

Putting her hand to the knob of the unoccupied bedroom, Jamie dramatically flung open the door. The window was a pale smudge of light in the far wall, but
even in the misty moonlight there were no filmy shapes, no mysterious lights. It didn't feel even vaguely eerie. It was just an unused, cold, and slightly damp bedroom. Without much hope, she took a couple of flash pictures and returned to the landing.

Well, that was just one room.

Slowly Jamie crept downstairs. What with the noise of the wind and her father's snoring, she could have charged down, but tiptoeing was what one did in a haunted house.

She slipped into each room, stood silently, and tried to sense supernatural vibrations. Nothing. All Jamie felt was cold: not the soul-chilling cold of the grave, but just plain cold. She'd flick on her flashlight and check the walls hoping to spot secret passages that had been walled over, tormented skeletons trapped behind. Nothing but smooth cheery wallpaper. Methodically she took pictures, convinced that she was wasting film.

People didn't call her stubborn for nothing, she told herself. There was still the outside.

Easing open the back door, Jamie slipped out. The wind battered her with cold, but with no particular sense of evil. In the low moonlight, the house cast an inky shadow over the backyard. Promising. But through it, there wafted no pale woman in white. Big surprise, Jamie thought disgustedly. In this climate, nobody, alive
or
dead, would waft around in filmy white draperies.

Taking pictures, she walked to the dilapidated stone outbuildings and shone her light inside. An old carriage house, without the faintest outline of ghostly carriages or misty white mares. Just a sawhorse, some lumber,
and a jumble of old tools. Thoroughly annoyed, she tromped around the house to the front yard.

Pale, shivering shapes were moonlit daffodils twisting in the wind. Jamie glared up at the old house. Its bland stone face slept contentedly. The dark windows opened onto no terrible secrets. The splotches on wall and roof were lichen, not blood. The—

Something white wavered on the peak of the roof, glimmering in the moonlight. It shifted, changed shape, and floated through the air toward her. In sudden terror, Jamie crouched on the grass. With a mournful cry, the thing sailed over her head, glaring at her with ice-blue eyes. Then it swooped over the wall and landed on the tall stone in the pasture across the road. Trembling, Jamie stood as the thing settled its silvered shape onto the stone. Again, it cried into the night.

An owl.

Her parents could probably tell her what kind of owl. Big and white, with blue eyes and a cry like a soul in torment. But just a dumb bird! With a final cry, it flew off westward over the fields.

Angrily, Jamie snapped a few pictures in the yard and stomped back toward the house. All this spooky atmosphere, and the only thing that frightened her was a stupid owl!

No, that wasn't true, she admitted when she stepped inside, out of the wind. There was another tiny fear growing in her. A fear that even if this place was filled with things supernatural, she would not know it. A fear that maybe she was no good at this either.

BOOK: Storm at the Edge of Time
2.97Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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