He laughed, and this was a proper, genuine laugh. ‘Of course we have to eat! And pee and… well, everything else. We’re real people here, even if you don’t think it. What’s your name, by the way? I’m calling you Woman From York in my head, but that’s just weird.’ He smiled again.
It felt to me as though he was trying to use ridiculousness to detract from my embarrassment, which was nice of him, so I pulled myself together. ‘My name is Pax. Pax McKell.’ I wondered whether I should shake hands but reasoned that it was a bit late for that.
‘Pax? Unusual name now.’
I sighed. ‘Yes. Bit of a long story there.’
Lachlan put his hands back in his pockets and began to lead the way across the stretch of headland around the keep. ‘I think we’ve got time. About three hundred years, by my reckoning.’
I shivered. I didnotwant to think about time just now. Talking about family was a good distraction. ‘My parents were a bit… They don’t make a great couple. They had Lenny, Lennox, my brother, then they got divorced. Then they decided theycouldn’t live without each other, got married again and had me. Called me Perdita, but nicknamed me Pax because I symbolised peace in their relationship. And then they promptly got divorced again.’ Usually saying any of this would start the anxiety flaring with the resultant heart-rate increase, but my heart was already whirring like overwound clockwork and had nowhere further to go so the words came out factually and flat.
‘Sounds to me as though they just liked the letter X and needed an excuse to use it in another name,’ Lachlan said cheerily.
‘I did think that they could have called Lenny Xerxes and have done with it,’ I agreed. Anything to take my mind off the fact that we were going back inside a building that ought to have been tumbled walls but wasn’t. Our feet clattered as we went back down the wooden staircase and I tried to ignore the solidity of the sound and the very real smell of something soupy from below. ‘So, we have to eat? What do we eat? Where does it come from?’
‘We steal it.’ This sounded like David, who had clearly roused himself from his position of sadness, for which I now felt a deep sympathy. ‘We wait until nobody is looking and then take it from the kitchen, out there.’ He nodded towards the door. Now I could see his face properly. He had a dark, thin face and an expression of carefully suppressed anxiety. But then so did everyone else. I doubted that I was the picture of relaxed serenity either.
‘But we have to take care.’ This was Kaylinn. ‘That nobody sees us.’
‘But nobodycansee us!’ I almost wailed as we went back into the dark, smoke-smelling room.
Everyone exchanged a look. ‘Bad, was it?’ Mal asked Lachlan.
‘Och, she bore it surprisingly well, considering,’ he replied, taking off his coat to reveal a baggy and pilled jumper and scruffy jeans. ‘Only a bit of screaming.’
Mal made a face. ‘David banged his head on the wall for an hour or so, and Kaylinn…’
‘Yeah, you didn’t cover yourself in glory either,’ she snapped. ‘And you still haven’t washed those pants!’
‘Trousers,’ Lachlan said, in my ear. ‘Mal had a bit of an… incident.’
‘Yes, I have,’ Mal responded smartly. ‘Just because you have no standards, just because we’ve found ourselves…’ He stopped talking and swallowed visibly.
‘So, we steal food,’ I said carefully. Everyone was obviously functioning on a knife-edge of sanity and I didn’t want the chasm of madness to open any further because I could quite easily have abseiled in with the rest of them.
‘We don’t know what the rules are about when the food becomes invisible. Like, is it when we pick it up, or what?’ Mal picked up the subject. ‘So we shove it up our jackets or whatever, in case the sight of a floating turnip drives poor Jeannie into hysterics.’
The oddness of that sentence made my own hysterics threaten again. ‘Who’s Jeannie?’ I asked, to distract it.
‘Jeannie and Fergus, they’re who’re basically keeping the castle ticking over.’ David stepped into the room from the other direction carrying the iron pot I’d seen on the pitiful fire when I arrived. ‘There’s nobody else here, just them and the boy.’ He hauled the pan onto the table and Kaylinn picked some metal plates from a corner. ‘They don’t come down here, so we’ve been okay cooking stuff, although lighting the fire was a bit of a challenge.’
‘We’ve used up nearly all our matches, by the way,’ Lachlan said, patting himself down as though more matches might beexpected to materialise in a pocket. ‘So someone had better start practising rubbing sticks together.’
‘But this is a castle,’ I said, as though I were personally insulted by the lack of sexy knights in armour and ladies in gorgeous frocks.
‘Don’t blame me.’ David dug a wooden ladle into the pot and began lifting out stringy lumps. ‘I studied the Picts.’ His cheeks sank in a little further as he said this, as though there was something bitter associated with the subject. ‘Also, apparently, I have become chief cook and bottle washer. We need to take turns here, guys. I have enough looking after people back…’ He stopped suddenly.
Memory hot-wired itself into action, unprovoked. ‘He walked through me,’ I said with a shiver that started in my brain. ‘The young boy. He walked right through me.’
Mal looked at me with close interest as he took a plate. ‘Are you sure she’s finished?’ he asked Lachlan.
‘There may be a wee bit more screaming to come yet,’ Lachlan said equably, taking another plate. ‘We’ll have to see.’ He threw me a glance. It was three-quarters concern, but spared a percentage and a raised eyebrow for levity.
‘Come on, sit down.’ Kaylinn waved us all to the table. ‘We might be stuck in the past, but that’s no reason not to have some manners.’
And so, like the most bizarre dinner party in, well, history, we sat down around the bleak wooden table and ate lumpy lukewarm stew off metal plates with wooden spoons.
5
