‘Glad to hear it. I’m a history lecturer over in Glasgow, and I wouldn’t want anyone intruding on my expertise, now, would I?’ He’d lost the tremulous tone now, I was glad to hear. One of us hysterical with fear was enough right now and I was fulfilling our quota.
‘It’s not my fault if you’re insecure in your profession.’ I knew this was rude, but I was unsettled to the point of near-breakdown and didn’t feel that there was much benefit in being nice to what, after all, might turn out to be a hallucination. ‘I just want to know what is going on.’
‘Come and sit down.’ He patted a log that was covered in chopping marks and was hopefully used as a support for wood being cut, rather than a serial killer’s practice board.
‘Why? I told you I’m not going to faint.’ I felt a moment of pride when I remembered that he’d told me Kaylinn ‘came over a bit funny’. I was handling all this rather well, I thought. Given that I had no idea what ‘all this’ even was.
Over in the yard, grooming man moved on to the next horse, with a sharp word for stone-throwing boy.
‘Maybe not. But it’s still a shock.’ Lachlan sat on one end of the log and surprised me by crumpling forward to put his head in his hands. ‘God knows, it’s still terrifying the hell out of me.’
I looked behind me. What had been a few crumbling walls with window arches when I’d walked around it with Lenny was now a solid, four-square tower three storeys high and roofed at various pitches and angles in stone. A pale scribble of smoke issued from one chimney but otherwise it was quiet. All the activity seemed to be going on out here in this odd little side yard, where the horses were still looking around nervously and the man was rubbing down the second one with a handful of straw. The small boy had stopped throwing stones and was trying to help, despite not coming up much further than the horse’s shoulder.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, probably on a loop but I’d lost the ability to listen to myself. Shock wasn’t manifesting in screaming or crying but it was there, a deep stone of cold in my chest. And Lachlan was right, Ididneed to sit down; my legs were shaking again.
‘None of us understands,’ Lachlan said, slightly muffled. His voice sounded thick and I wondered ifhewas crying. ‘It’s mad. Completely mad. Or we are.’
‘I mean…’ I ran out of words. The evidence of my own eyes was telling me that the castle was here, a big solid building behind me, with the watery sun throwing it as an enormous shadow across the thin grass. My nose told me there were horses and other animals around that hadn’t been a feature an hour or so ago. Even my bum, as I sank onto the rough wooden makeshift bench, gave me feedback that this experience was absolutely, totally and incontrovertiblyreal.
But it couldn’t be.
‘There’s something else too.’ Now Lachlan sat up. His hair was spiked around the front and his eyes were red but I said nothing. If any situation warranted a quick sob, this was it and I couldn’t even express my own fear sufficiently to sum things up. I wasn’t going to judge someone else for trying.
‘There’smore?’ That stone of shock wasn’t moving. Usefully, though, it was tamping down emotional reactions and I had another moment of quiet pride. It was making me sensible and able to take in information, when I’d often suspected that I’d go to pieces in a crisis. Of course, this wasn’t a crisis, as such. It was – something else.
‘What do you see? What do you feel?’ Lachlan rubbed a hand over his face. I didn’t know if he was doing it subconsciously to give me a clue, but I focused on it anyway.
‘You think you’ve been here a couple of days, but you’ve been gone three months. Youlookas though you’ve only been gone a few days, none of you are filthy and you don’t have beards to your knees, but it’s July back…’ I stumbled over having to put my present into the right tense for the now. ‘When I left,’ I finished. ‘But it doesn’t feel like July here.’
All of a sudden Lachlan gave me a big broad grin. There was a twinkle of mischief at the edges of it and all teariness seemed to be forgotten. ‘Yes! The others can’t see it. They’re southerners, well, not Kaylinn, but she’s only been over here a year so she’s not quite in tune with the seasons yet. To them, it’s Scotland, it always feels cold and wet. But you’re not a Scot?’
‘Oh, I am.’ I sighed. I’d had my heritage recited to me with my bedtime stories whenever I’d stayed at Dad’s. He was very – some might say overzealously – proud of his ancestry and I apparently had a family tree that stretched back almost as far as Robert the Bruce. ‘We’re McKells through and through. This used to be our…’
I stopped. Lachlan wasn’t smiling now. His eyes seemed to have grown bigger, which made his skin look very pale. ‘McKell? Like… like Earl McKell? Who owned…ownsthis castle?’
I shrugged. ‘Lennox – that’s my brother – thinks so. The land came up for sale a year or so ago and he decided we’d buy it. We’re restoring the castle,’ I said, slightly hollowly, because it was what I considered way beyond restoration and had passed through ‘demolition’ into ‘clear the land for sheep’ territory. Except now it was a solid structure. ‘To start a hotel,’ I finished, even more hollowly because the impossibility of the venture dawned on me anew every time I said it.
Lachlan took a deep breath. ‘Well now,’ he said. ‘Well now, that puts rather a different complexion on things. I need to think about this.’
‘Can we go back to the other thing?’ His sudden seriousness after that smile was beginning to threaten the solid shock rock. The sledgehammer of ‘oh, shit’ was dangerously close.
‘Other thing?’
‘You said there was something else. About time, perhaps? How you got lost in April, it’s July in my time?’
‘Oh, yes, sorry. I’m easily distracted these days.’ He shook his head. ‘I never know whether to be upset by that or not. I mean, I’m a professor of early medieval history so, excluding sudden manuscript discoveries, there’s not been many surprises in my job. I’m having to adapt.’ The smile was back now, but it was more thoughtful than it had been. ‘What time of year do you think it is here?’
I tried to concentrate. My thoughts wouldn’t line up, skittering like startled mice around my brain, and when I put my hands up to my face, both fingers and cheeks were icy cold. I was in shock, I realised. But sorting through facts, coordinating them and presenting them was myjob.I could do this.
I took a deep breath. ‘It’s cool but not cold. The horses have winter coats.’ I stared around. There were no trees around to give me a clue, the headland was bare of most vegetation, although there was a small patch over behind this makeshift yard that could have been a garden. It was ragged with old growth and patchworked with bare earth. ‘October?’
‘Yes!’ He jumped to his feet and made a movement that might have been an air-punch, then looked quickly towards grooming man and stone-throwing boy. It must have been instinctive because they, of course, carried on as though we didn’t exist, which to them, I supposed, we didn’t. ‘You can see it too! There’s something not right about that, surely – leaving in April and ending up in October?’
Lachlan turned an eager face to me, wanting my confirmation, and I didn’t know what to say. If we’d actually, really,genuinelyfallen backwards through time because of some mechanism that I didn’t want to eventryto get my head around, then the simple matter of a few lost or gained months was nothing, surely?
‘Maybe…’ I began cautiously, ‘maybe wearen’tin the past? Perhaps this is an alternative reality?’ Then I rememberedPlanet of the Apes, a film that Dad had had an obsession with and that we’d watched regularly during every school holiday when it had been his turn to have Lenny and me. ‘Or a future? Just because it looks a bit… primitive, doesn’t mean it has to be the past, does it?’
Then I cursed my stupid brain. Being in shock was no excuse for thoughts like this. I wanted – Ineeded– to get a handle on what was going on so I could get back to where I should be and forays into speculation of this kind were not going to help.
