‘Yes.’ I had a sudden thought and dipped into my pocket. ‘But I can ring him!’ My fingers closed around my phone. ‘Let him know I’m… well, that I’m down here.’ I nearly added ‘with a bunch of weirdos’ but stopped myself just in time.
‘Aye, well, you can try.’ Lachlan’s despondency seemed to be falling out through his boots now. ‘We all did, after all.’
There was a series of sad nods.
I’d supposed that they meant that there was no signal down here, but my phone wouldn’t even turn on. I pressed as many buttons as I dared, but the screen stayed black and reflected my confused expression back at me. Nothing. Not even the hopeful little apple floating in the middle. ‘Bugger. I must have clouted it when I fell.’
‘It was the same for all of us,’ Lachlan said. Again there was that note in his voice, a tiny vibrato that sounded a little like fear. ‘Anyway, we have bigger problems than that. Come on.’
There was a creaking sound as he opened another door. As it too opened on darkness, I was neither reassured nor enlightened.
‘Just go,’ Mal said. ‘We’ll come when we hear the hysterics.’
‘We have to stay here,’ David said to the tabletop. ‘We agreed. So we don’t influence anything.’
‘We have to go up for supplies,’ Lachlan said from the doorway. ‘We’ve managed not to obliterate ourselves so far.’ Then, with an attempt at an encouraging tone that was so huge it was probably visible from space, ‘We’ve got a unique opportunity for research, actualresearch, and we’re hiding in a basement – where’s your sense of adventure, man?’
‘In the twenty-first century,’ Mal said. ‘With my job, my money, my thesis and my cat.’
Lachlan paused as though he was trying to think of a witty comeback, but couldn’t, so he beckoned to me instead. ‘Let’s show you the worst,’ he said. ‘Then we can talk.’
I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I followed him through the creaky, half-open door and into the darkness beyond.
The darkness turned out to be strewn with barrels and wooden crates. ‘Storeroom,’ Lachlan said. ‘This way.’
Now I could see a dim glimmer of light coming from above and illuminating a rickety set of wooden stairs, which seemed to be standing only because they were leaning against a wall. ‘Hang on, I’m not going up there.’
Somewhere in the back of my mind a tiny voice was shrieking like a car alarm.A second set of stairs. Wooden stairs. Which Lenny had said had once been here.I bit my lip and concentrated on not tripping over the rough floor.
Lachlan took me by the shoulder, not unkindly, and steered me to the bottom of the steps, which shook slightly as we approached, as though our presence terrified them. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘We use these stairs because they come up outside. The others come out in the hall and if the door’s lockedwe’re stuck.’ He pushed lightly at the wobbly staircase. ‘Besides, I don’t think we can die here.’
I wasn’t sure what part of that sentence was the most terrifying and had to gulp to force air into my lungs. It did, however, seem as though the stairs were my only way up and out and as soon as we were in the open air I was going to break the sound barrier getting away from this strange, crumpled figure in the muddy coat. ‘All right,’ I said, trying hard not to fill my voice with the gentle ‘talking to mad people’ tone that it wanted to assume, and I followed Lachlan up the staircase, keeping one hand on the wall in case of another traumatising stair failure.
3
From my vague mental map of the location, annotated by Lenny’s persistent monologue about what we could put where, I’d reckoned that these stairs must come out at the far side of the tower house, facing the bleak, stretched expanse of the grassy headland. So I was slightly surprised when we climbed the steps to a gradually increasing smell of warm animals and dung, and emerged through a doorway to stand in something that seemed to be a cross between a stable yard and a shanty town.
A few metres from where we stood, three horses were tied up outside an open-fronted building built of tilting rough stone walls, a muck heap quietly steamed in one corner and a lot of the rest of the ground was taken up with small wooden huts, in and out of which a collection of chickens was squawking and pecking. A man, with his back to us, was quietly brushing one of the horses, whistling to himself and seemingly in the trance of one doing a repetitive job and hoping not to be disturbed.
None of this had been there when Lenny and I had toured the site only an hour or so earlier. None of thisshouldbe here.
I looked at the stabling. I looked at the horses. I stared at the chickens and then, with a dropping sensation somewherearound my diaphragm that made my breath catch, I turned around and eyeballed Lachlan. ‘Very funny,’ I snapped. ‘A film set, I suppose?’
I wasn’t sure that this was what I believed. Everything lookedsoaltered that there was no way this could be the same place I had left only minutes ago. And yet – what elsecouldit be? A dream? Hallucination? All I could do was go along with it for now and ignore the rapidly building sense of complete bewilderment and that shrill mental alarm that was now so loud it was shaking my brain.
Now we were in full daylight I could see the man inside the muddy coat properly for the first time. He looked… I mentally groped for a description. No. There were no words I could put around that expression. There was a trace of fear in his eyes, which he was trying to cover with a smile, but otherwise his face seemed frozen into a struggle for blandness. He was blondish, with sandy-coloured hair brushing the collar of the coat and a total lack of whimsical amusement. He looked real. He smelled real. But none of this could be happening. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s what it looks like. A stable yard in a castle.’ Then a long-fingered hand with grimy knuckles came onto my shoulder. ‘You’re not going to faint now, are you?’ He sounded concerned.
‘No, of course I’m not going to bloody faint.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off the man brushing the horse. His movements were so regular and even that it looked like clockwork, and while fainting was off the table, I did have a sour taste in my mouth that said that being sick might not be out of the question.
‘Oh. Only Kaylinn came over a bit funny.’ The hand came away from my shoulder. ‘When she saw this the first time.’
Over in the yard the horse lifted its tail and deposited a large heap of droppings. The man stopped brushing and shouted something I couldn’t hear and a young boy ran in with a basket and small shovel to clear it up. The brushing continued and thehorse rested a hoof. A thin sun shone on its slightly rough coat and ragged mane and it dipped its head, relaxing in the warmth and the personal attention.
Lachlan sighed. ‘I suppose it was easier for us,’ he said almost to himself. ‘We could discuss it. And there was nobody here at all when we started digging, so we knew something was up. Also, young Davey there reads aninordinateamount of fantasy fiction.’ Now, and for the first time, he looked me in the eye. His eyes were a steely grey colour and held an expression I couldn’t even guess at. ‘Go and try to talk to them.’
‘What?’
‘We thought it was a film crew. Thought we must have missed the notices, and that there’d been a mistake when the permission to dig was granted; some kind of double-booking. So when we came away from the castle and there was – this—’ he waved a hand ‘—we thought we were going to get thrown out. Until we tried to talk to them. Go on, give it a go.’ He pushed my shoulder gently.
