“It must be,” Mary breathed. “The pattern holds true.”
“Gavin's wife? Seriously? The one he never talks about? But didn't she die — what, twenty years ago? Longer?”
“Longer,” Mary said softly. “Well before we lost Maeve, even. It was a dark time...” She hesitated, glancing down at Delilah as though only just remembering she was there. “To be spoken of later,” she concluded firmly, reaching out to give Delilah's arm a gentle pat.
“But if she's his wife, why did he storm off like that?”
“Excuse me, his wife?” Delilah interjected. “Look, I appreciate that this is a pretty big story you've all written, and don't get me wrong, it's great, but I can't play. I've got work to do — I got a pretty significant grant to do this research, I can't just spend my whole trip doing a historical re-enactment or a LARP or whatever this is, okay? So just — break, okay?” She raised her hands in the universal symbol for Out Of Character.
Mary and Fiona just looked at her. There was an unexpected expression in Fiona's eyes — something almost like sadness.
“Listen, babe, get some rest, okay?” she said gently, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder. “We'll go for a walk in the morning and I'll show you where you are.”
Delilah sighed. “Alright. But if you could get a message to the bed and breakfast in the village that I'm here, and safe, that'd be great.”
“You're not in the twenty-first century anymore, I don’t know how many times I have to —”
“Fiona,” Mary sighed, and Delilah saw the younger woman's shoulders slump in defeat.
“Fine. Fine, yes, we'll get a message to the bed and breakfast.”
“Sleep well, dear. We'll talk more soon,” Mary said softly, smiling down at Delilah.
There was something very strange about all of this — but for the life of her, Delilah couldn't do anything but trust Mary. She reminded her a little of her mother — the same quiet, knowing energy, the same infinite kindness in the lines around her eyes. And whatever it was that was happening, wherever she was, whatever had caused her sudden illness and rescue to this strange little place — well, she'd simply have to figure it out in the morning. Because with a warm meal in her belly, the warmth of the bed was suddenly an irresistible black hole of comfort that was drawing her in and down.
The last thing she saw before she dropped into sleep was Fiona and Mary, moving quietly toward the heavy wooden door. As it creaked open, she glimpsed the hallway beyond it — stone walls, with what looked for all the world like wooden torches mounted in brackets, their flickering light keeping the corridor lit. No trace of electric light. No sign at all, in fact, that there was anything post-medieval within a mile of her bed. Fiona glanced back at Delilah, her face full of a worry that her brash voice and mannerisms had not betrayed earlier. And though she spoke in a low voice to her companion, Delilah was just able to make out what she was saying as the door creaked shut behind them.
“How long is this going to keep happening, Mary? How many more women are going to have their lives ripped away from them like this?”
Chapter 4
She knew she was dreaming. Delilah had always had a strange ability to tell the difference between dreams and reality. She'd told her father about it once as child, assuming that everyone on Earth had a similar ability to simply play with the dreamscape as though it was a particularly compelling imagination game, and he'd been very surprised — and a little jealous.
She never had asked him what kind of dreams he had, that he'd be so interested in gaining control over them. As a child it hadn't occurred to her that her father's late nights and early mornings often had to do with poor sleep, and as an adult, she knew too much about his work to want to know too many details about the nightmares that kept him awake.
Lucid dreaming, he had called it. She'd looked it up online, years later, and found to her surprise that there were entire communities of people who had dedicated themselves to trying to learn how to do it. It felt a little like discovering that you'd had a superpower your whole life — she'd rather smugly posted on a few forums to let people know she was one of the rare ones who did it naturally. Her favorite thing to do in dreams was simply to take off and fly around the world, arms spread wide like wings. Depending on how realistic the dream was, she could sometimes feel the cool, damp mist of cloud on her face, or the warmth of the sun on her back when she broke through cloud cover.
But this dream felt different. For a start, it opened abruptly — there was already a whole world surrounding her when she opened her eyes. Usually it was up to her to fill the world, to populate it with whatever she felt like playing with — but here it all was, already set up. She chalked it up to stress, looking around. Stone walls, just like the ones she'd woken up to, but with a chill in the air that was not banished by a cozy crackling fire. There were metal bars at her back and in front of her, crisscrossing across her field of view. Through force of habit, she made to dismiss them — to use her control over her imagination to dissolve the bars, dissolve this strange dungeon setting she'd pulled from some part of her imagination and maybe go flying again. Strange, to find herself in such a dark space when so much of the last few days had been spent on an airplane, soaring through the skies for real.
But to her surprise, the dream resisted her attempts to shift its setting. The bars stayed bars — the dungeon walls stayed cold and dank, pressing in on her. She frowned, flexing her fingers and realizing she was dressed in a medieval-era dress made of black fabric. That was understandable, at least — she'd been thinking a lot about medieval re-enactments, it made sense that she'd dream about being dressed up like this. But what didn't make sense was the fear in her chest — the fear, and the anger. They were emotions that she didn't sympathize with, didn't feel. Dreams had never been a frightening thing to her. She'd always had control over them, so how could they frighten her? But the fear she could feel was real and gripping, threatening to overwhelm her even as she struggled to find its source. And underneath it was anger. Why on Earth was she angry? A little frustrated by the strange people around her and the unusual goings-on, certainly — but not angry. Not this bone-deep rage that felt like it was pulsing behind her eyes and inside her ribcage. She felt as though she'd been wronged so deeply she may never recover. And — Delilah examined her emotional state, prodding at it as if it was an animal she was dissecting in high school science class — what else was she feeling? Something like — desperation? There was something she needed to do... something desperately important, some grave mistake she'd made that she needed to fix... but what was it? What could she have done? What person had she woken up inside of?
A man came toward her from the corner of the dungeon. She hadn't seen him before, and she turned in shock — another unfamiliar experience. Dreams never surprised her. It would be like being surprised by your own daydream. She was the one writing the script here, after all — or at least, that was how it was supposed to be. But not this time, it seemed. The man was dressed in black as she was, but she was distracted from any historical analysis of his outfit by the glinting of his green eyes through the visor of his helmet. He was a huge man, broad and powerful, built like a bear — and a shock of recognition ran through her. This had to be Gavin, the man she'd seen so briefly that evening. The man who'd stared at her with suspicion and fear, then fled the room without so much as greeting her. Why was he here now? Why imagine him in a new outfit, when she’d seen him wearing something different? Where had her imagination pulled these details from in the first place?
“Gavin?” she said aloud. Perhaps speaking would restore her control over the dreamscape. But her voice echoed, eerily realistic, from the walls, and the man simply moved closer and closer. He reached out with one gloved hand to unlock the door of the cell she was locked in. And she saw, with mounting horror that she had no way of controlling, that he was holding a wickedly sharp knife in his other hand, a knife with a curved blade that glinted dully in the low light of the dun
geon.
“Gavin,” she tried again, willing herself to gain control of this dream — or at least to wake up. “What are you doing?”
He didn't seem to hear her. And then, at the same time as he came closer to her, she felt herself speaking again — her mouth was moving, her voice was sounding, but to her shock she had no control whatsoever over what she was saying. It was as though she was possessed. Or was she the one doing the possessing? Who was she? What was this? Was this why her father sat bolt upright in his bed in the night sometimes, his face twisted with fear, tears he would never let fall standing in his eyes?
“You have to let me fix it,” her voice was saying, and there was an unfamiliar lilt to her vowels that she couldn't recognize. “You have to free me. You don't understand what you're doing.”
And then the man was upon her, his huge hands gripping her by the shoulder. Delilah felt like screaming, but she had no control anymore — not of her mouth, not of her voice, not of her body. She knew how to get out of this hold, she wanted to scream. She'd done it a thousand times in training, and a few times in real life! If she could just move her body, she'd be able to seize his arm — if she got her body weight behind it in the right way, she could even dislocate his shoulder — but instead, her body just shook in terror. She felt herself pulling against his grip, ineffectually, her voice pleading with him for mercy with those strange intonations she didn’t recognize as belonging to her — but the knife was coming up, closer and closer to her abdomen.
Surely she was going to wake up. Surely this dream couldn't drag on any longer. But she felt the lightning bolt of pain shoot through her body as the man stabbed her in the abdomen — and stabbed her again, and again, and again, until she had curled over and dropped to the cold stone floor. The sensations were incredibly real — the pain throbbing through her body, the cold feeling of her blood leaving her in streams, the desperate clawing of her hands on the stone. And the fear and anger and sadness raged so powerfully through her body that she couldn't even make out what was going on around her, what was happening — only that she was desperately trying to speak, to summon the willpower to say something... but what? What was she trying to say?
And then she sat bolt upright in bed, her voice hoarse with screaming, surprised to find Gavin's name on her lips. Her heart was pounding and her whole body was vibrating with fight-or-flight reflex — she almost sobbed with the relief of being in control of her limbs again, wiggling her fingers and toes and moving her legs to reassure herself, again and again, that she was never going to feel that horrible sense of depersonalization again. As her breath began to settle and her heart rate returned to normal, she tried to get hold of her thoughts by staring around the room, reminding herself that whatever may have happened in her dream, she was safe here. Safe in these stone walls, safe in this warm bed, safe under the protection of the two women she’d met earlier that evening.
Or was she? It was Gavin that had murdered her in the dream — a man she'd only seen for a few seconds, but who had clearly had enough of an impact on her subconscious to cause her to hallucinate about him murdering her horribly in the first dream of her life that she hadn't had complete control over. Was her mind trying to tell her something? Was it her woman's intuition, warning her away from him? He'd certainly stared at her with a confusing amount of suspicion — and it wasn't as though they lived in a world that was free from violence against women.
Her father had started teaching her to defend herself when she was eight-years-old — taught her the warning signs to look for, how to disable an attacker as quickly as possible, and how to run as fast and as far as possible from them. As she'd grown, she'd developed some more proactive skills, especially after she'd joined the SCA. They liked to think that the modern world was better than the medieval one they spent so much time re-enacting and reconstructing, but the grim truth was that in many ways, not a lot had improved. Women were still abused and killed by men all over the world, every single day.
Well, if he was going to make trouble for her, he was going to find a surprise waiting for him. She resolved to keep her wits about her, especially if she encountered him again. Delilah stared into the few lingering embers of the fire in the fireplace, feeling her heartrate settle. She took a sip from the goblet of water still standing on her bedside table, and was feeling almost ready to attempt sleep again — despite her apprehension that another dream would wake her up — when she was distracted by a strange noise.
Just the slightest sound. If she hadn't been so sharply aware of her surroundings as the result of her leftover adrenalin from the dream, she wouldn't have heard it — just the slightest creak of the door to her room, as though someone had pressed their weight against it. She tensed up in bed, suddenly running a lot of hypothetical situations through her mind — if someone came in, how would she go about fighting them? How quickly could she get these blankets off her body and be ready to fight? Would the lingering dizziness and nausea prevent her from fighting properly?
She was ready, regardless. Nobody was going to kill Delilah in her bed. If she was going to be stabbed in the abdomen like in that horrible dream, she’d be on her feet — and she’d be doing as much damage as she possibly could to her attacker before she went. She tensed her hands, ready to gouge at the attacker’s eyes, some part of her almost looking forward to the conflict. At least in hand-to-hand combat she’d be able to do something with all the fear and panic that was throbbing in her chest — channel that adrenaline into something useful. Like tearing out a would-be murderer’s eyes.
But after a long, long moment, the door remained closed — and she heard, just gently on the stones outside, the sound of footsteps retreating from the door. She tried to relax again, heart still pounding. Okay. Nothing to worry about, Delilah. You screamed up a storm in your sleep and someone came to check on you, that's all. But why hadn't they come in all the way, if she'd been screaming, came the immediate rejoinder from the paranoid section of her mind. Why hadn't they checked on her properly? She couldn't imagine Fiona or Mary hearing her scream like that and remaining on the outside of the door. They'd want to know what had disturbed their guest, surely.
She fell into an uneasy sleep some time later — maybe minutes, maybe hours. The only thing she was sure of was that something very strange was going on in this castle. Maybe she'd get a few answers in the morning, before she left. That was a comforting thought. This whole castle was just a brief stop on her journey — the real work would begin when she reached Castle MacClaran. All of this would be a weird little side-story she told when people asked her about her trip — the night she spent in a castle full of LARP-ers. The real story hadn’t even started yet.
Chapter 5
She awoke a little after dawn, not feeling especially well-rested, but the stream of sunlight on her face was hard to ignore. Her military father had instilled the habit of rising early in her from a very young age, and it wasn't something that was easy to shake. It was as though it had been drilled into the very cells of her body, the habit of rising as soon as she was awake. A little sleepy, but nonetheless alert, she sat up, pleased to notice that the dizziness and nausea of the day before seemed to have eased almost completely. A little lingered when she stood up — her feet chilled by the flagstones beneath her feet — but it was nothing she couldn't handle. Good. Time to get to the bottom of whatever the hell was going on around here. Maybe if she could just reach the out-of-character zone, they'd stop trying to embroil her in whatever science fiction game they were playing here.
Yes, it was interesting, yes, if she'd been here on holiday she'd absolutely have spent the rest of the weekend playing with them — but there was a lot of grant money riding on her getting to the bottom of what had happened at Castle MacClaran, and even the most exciting LARP in the world wasn't going to draw her away from it. God, she could imagine trying to tell her supervisor what had happened — returning to America in a few months, the grant money spent and no project to show for it. Li
sten, I can explain… there was this amazing LARP, really inventive and immersive, and they just would not let me leave!
Delilah was glad of the big fluffy jacket that had been carefully placed on the back of a chair in the room for her — the air in the castle was bitterly cold, despite the sunlight. No wonder there had been a fire set in her room overnight. As she emerged into the corridor, she was impressed by the size and scope of the game. A handful of people dressed in convincing peasant garb bustled past her — had they really gotten so many players interested in being servants for a whole weekend? There must be some great sub-plots going on in the kitchens and sculleries, she thought with amusement. They all glanced over their shoulders at her and whispered to one another, and she sighed. She hoped her role hadn't been over-emphasized — it would be disappointing for anyone to have made any big game decisions based on the time-travelling woman they'd decided to add in, especially if she was leaving straight away.
God, this set is amazing. She'd have killed to play in a castle like this. Delilah kept going down the winding hall, passing door after door as she went — some of them out-of-character rooms, she assumed, but there was a good chance that scenes were going on in there too, and she didn’t want to disturb anyone. Not if she was just going to leave. There was a distant scent of breakfast on the horizon, and she felt her stomach grumble. Did the game even have food? Her friend Ben would have loved this — medieval cooking was his favourite subject, and he was always bringing experimental snacks along to meetings to share, enthusing over the various cooking methods he was learning about. Could they really have catered for the whole game with medieval methods? Incredible. She’d have to send Ben an email as soon as she got back to her room — he’d definitely want to look into this. Everyone at her branch of the SCA would, in fact. It almost made up for getting lost, thinking about how excited her friends would be about this game. Perhaps they could organize a group trip out here… it’d involve a few fundraisers, for sure, but it would be worth it.
Highlander Cursed: A Scottish Time Travel Romance Page 4