Highland Tales Series Box Set

by Rory B. Byrne

  “Where did you put the screen?” I asked.

  “I left it leaning against the barrel. Why? Was I supposed to bring it inside?”

  “I don’t know. I never committed a burglary before.”

  “I did once, but this is a lot cooler. Besides, it’s only burglary if you intend to steal something. We’re not here to steal anything, right?”

  “I didn’t plan to get this far. I certainly don’t want anything from this place that can put either of us inside. Let’s get a look around. All I want to know is what they do here and why my mom came here.”

  “Fair enough,” Amy whispered. She opened the bathroom door enough to peek out before slipping through. I quickly and quietly followed her.

  Into the Void

  It was a research facility. The large Quonset hut had straight walls inside like an ordinary building. Only the lack of ceiling with the tract lighting suspended over the hallways gave away the curved roof far above the lights.

  Inside, we followed one passageway after another. At the end of every hallway, we checked for the company. Amy was right. At night, the place didn’t have any onsite personnel.

  “This equipment looks expensive,” Amy said.

  I wondered if she was getting second thoughts about having sticky fingers. I watched her closely because the moment she lifted something, I intended to shut it down and leave immediately. Instead, like me, she noticed the rows of prefabricated desks, computer towers, and lines of flat-screen monitors.

  At the far end of the monitoring station, we reached the end of the interconnecting huts. Outside it looked like they stacked side by side, catty-corner sometimes. Inside, it was a sophisticated grouping of interlocking hallways and doors. We didn’t find any section of the interior locked. Each door handle turned and opened as we moved deeper inside.

  “What’s this?” Amy said.

  Part of the mountainside was exposed inside. We’d reached the end of the tunnels. They had built the hut cut into the mound. The grated steel walkway ran along each wall from the doorway before two sets of stairs reached ground level below us.

  “It looks like some archeological excavation,” Amy said.

  I stared over the center railing with the last door behind us. It closed once we entered the enormous space. The mound went up, higher than the building. The area had steel girders evenly spaced around the hollow circle in the soil. Each steel post had cement feet and tops to reinforce the cave walls and ceiling.

  The air inside the hollow mound was cold. The chill came from the exposed ground, radiating up from the black soil. I saw clouds around Amy’s face as she stared at the ancient site. Along both cave walls surrounding the dig site were rows of sophisticated computer tower banks, workstations, and other electronic analyzing equipment that looked expensive and well used.

  “This is so cool,” she said. “It’s some Celtic burial site, obviously.” She spoke as if the statement had something to do with a conversation in her head instead of directed at me.

  Amy walked on the railed platform and down the steps. I waited, watching her climb down the segments of exposed earth. The floor of the mound had an intricate stone edifice with chiseled Gaelic iconography. She walked upon exposed stone carvings that took up several meters of the exposed chamber floor.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. I saw Amy reach inside her jacket to retrieve the smartphone.

  “I just want a picture of this.”

  I moved along the platform, ran down the steps, and found myself inside the broad circle floor with stone mosaic. The crews carefully removed top layers of black soil to expose the symbols on the floor. Even at the edges where earth met the floor, I saw more carvings hiding below the sides of dirt as thick as a meter.

  “You can’t take pictures,” I said. “That’s incriminating evidence. You can get in a lot of trouble having pictures of this place.”

  That’s when I looked up to the CCTV camera above the door where we’d entered the tomb. I saw the camera watching the area where I stood near Amy. She gave me a funny look and followed my line of vision.

  It wasn’t the camera she saw. Amy stared at the older gentleman in the button-down shirt and prescription glasses that gawked at us. He had a mug in his hand. He had disheveled, peppered white hair and a gaping mouth.

  “Where the devil did you two come from?” he asked. His sharp British accent caught me as much by surprise as seeing him standing there on the platform.

  Amy had the phone in her hand. I didn’t know if she had it turned on or off. I stood next to her, facing the one living obstacle that was about to destroy my entire future. No school, no finishing vacation, no scholarship, I was bound for a cold dark prison cell somewhere in the Scottish countryside for the foreseeable future. That’s when I discovered, it wasn’t the guy on the platform I had to worry about at that particular moment.

  Amy stumbled out of the pit. At the same time, cutting the distance between us, I saw the guy hop over the railing and stumble into the hole. He grabbed my arm. I resisted. It was unnerving, and I felt violated and strangely entangled with him all at once. It was as if I shared some electrons between us, linked by his hand, grasping my arm.

  I felt my head grow hot and heavy. My stomach flopped as if I’d fallen deeper into a hole in the ground. But I stood still, and the precipice rolled over me like a rollercoaster ride. I felt the static electricity rise through my feet. I didn’t see anything except the blank, frozen expressions between Amy and the stranger. Amy blurred first. I noticed she’d lifted the smartphone in front of her face. I don’t know if she tried making a call for help or caught the manhandling assault on camera.

  The rollercoaster that made my stomach roil and surge suddenly crashed the moment I saw the blinding flash of light that was a cross between a lightning strike and a train wreck. My ears rang as I saw nothing but blackness. It was as if I’d lost all bodily control and hurtled through endless space while simultaneously standing still in the center of the ancient Celtic floor design: all the while, intense energy coursed through me.

  I heard the man screaming. I felt the grip of his right hand squeeze my arm like a vice. Before I cried out in pain, as I pulled away and pinched and clawed at his wrist, I felt the rendering of everything between us snapped my body, flashed like phosphorous in my eyes, and everything changed.

  As soon as I felt gravity take over, my vision clouded, my head struck the hard stone, and I blacked out.

  Reaching the Unknown

  Simon Hinton loved his job, even though he couldn’t tell anyone about it. Growing up in Birmingham, he took a lot of peer pressure, a lot of bullying abuse, because he chose to keep his head in the books and didn’t care about football or pubs. He finally gave up on keeping up with the forgotten friends of his youth.

  All his life, Simon thought he had a purpose. He knew to turn his back on social gatherings and the pursuit of girls; chasing the academic career was more important than happiness. It wasn’t that Simon considered himself unattractive. He didn’t compare himself to other young men growing up. Instead, it was about what he sought over what people thought of him.

  Simon knew that one day, all those lonely nights reading ancient Celtic history and writing volumes of academic papers would eventually pay off for him. He’d show the world there was much more to him than what people saw on the surface.

  West Midlands, England, wasn’t glamorous. But living in the city of five universities gave Simon a sharper edge than most research students engaged in higher education enlightenment. There was no other place in England with more full-time students than Birmingham. Simon knew his calling resided in the city of academia.

  By the time Simon enrolled in Birmingham Metropolitan College, one of the largest colleges in the country, he knew all the way to his bones that his life as a devoted student of Scottish Celtic history was the right future for him. Once he acqu
ired his master’s degree in Scottish history, Simon went on to King Edward’s School, the university founded in 1552 by King Edward VI. Simon knew the moment he followed his feet into the ancient institution, everything he ever wanted, everything Simon thought possible, would happen once he obtained his doctorate in Celtic languages, written and oral translation. Simon took the lonely path through his early decades, learning everything about the Scottish language in all its variations.

  Somewhere in his past, Simon had a Scottish bloodline. It had something to do with ancestors practicing the Droit du seigneur, or the lord’s right. Some called it ‘right of the first night’ or jus primae noctis, it was a form of prima nocta, which gave ruling lords legal rights in medieval Europe to sleep with a bride on the wedding night before the groom. It was a lot of nasty business between the British and the Scots, and somehow, Simon’s lineage rewound to darker times and less favorable parts of the country’s history that bled two feuding people for generations.

  Simon wasn’t interested in how he became the person he was. He wanted to be a part of something significant. Yet, the quest for future importance by understanding every part of the Scottish past meant long sleepless nights for Simon.

  At twenty-seven, when he completed his doctorate, Simon accepted a tenured position teaching at King Edward’s—teaching a modest class of Scottish fairy tales to freshmen students who had more interests in their dumbphones instead of irrelevant parts of Scottish folklore.

  At forty-seven, Simon forgot more than he knew about Scottish history. He had touched every volume of work regarding the country. He wrote several published papers on their culture. He sometimes found it difficult to face another day surrounded by students who had nothing in common with him because they didn’t understand the significance of the ancient Celts.

  Simon hated teaching. It was a means to an end for him. He took academic courses too dry for the modern age, became proficient in all things Scottish. People came to Simon for any insight into the history of the ancient Highland people. The trouble with the Scotts didn’t have to do with knowing everything about them. It had to do with the fact that before the English took an interest in Scotland and its people, no surviving documents existed about the country before the early 1700s. Simon was one of the very few people on the planet who knew everything written about Scotland, its people, and the finite history they had established.

  Yet, out of all the knowledge Simon acquired throughout the years, it was his insight into Scottish folklore that drew the most attention to his educational passion. Simon didn’t care for, nor believe, any of the Scottish fairytales. It made it easier to draft tomes on the subject because he was not only its most prominent critic, but also a born skeptic. Simon had gained notoriety, not because he understood and spoke fluent Gaelic, but because he wrote tomes about Scottish fairytales. It was the last thing he wanted people to take seriously about his decades of hard work. Yet, it was the one thing the Chief Master at King Edward’s School wanted from him. It was in the fuss of writing trite texts—that’s how Simon saw it—that a man named Brian MacIomhair eventually gave Simon an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  Brian MacIomhair, CEO of Equinox Technologies, was a hands-on company director. He was a secretive man who had followed Simon’s career closely. It was Simon’s immense understanding of Scotland, its people, and their culture that drew Brian to Simon. When Brian explained he needed Simon—not just someone like Simon, but exclusively Simon himself—to head up the satellite research facility, how could he refuse?

  That was ten years ago, two years before the most extraordinary thing happened—something they never expected possible. And eight years later, Simon—standing before the excavated Celtic design—not only witnessed what happened but became a part of its history.

  “Simon?” the voice said.

  It was male, close to his ear. Somehow, Simon found his way to consciousness again. He followed the voice to the surface and opened his eyes.

  “Simon, can you hear me?”

  Simon looked at the speaker. A man almost eight years his senior, had a hulking stature that took up a lot of view before Simon’s eyes. Brian MacIomhair traced his Scottish heritage back to the Viking and Germanic invasion of Scotland. He was a businessman who didn’t have a lot of time for friendship. It made their relationship easier for Simon because he didn’t have to worry about how the gentleman felt personally about Simon. He had hired Simon for his experience, not his personality.

  Simon moved to talk but found it challenging. His body began waking up, including the patches of memory that had happened sometime before he awoke in a hospital bed with Brian hovering over him.

  “Where am I?” he whispered. He had to speak softly through what felt like shards of glass in his throat.

  “You’re in Edinburgh. You’ve been here for nine days,” Brian said.

  “Nine days,” Simon repeated. His brain kicked around ideas and images. The fog of medication filled most of the space between his ears. He felt constricted. He remembered—

  “The girl,” he whispered. Brian sat up, nodding. “The girl, what happened? Where is she?”

  “We’ve got her friend. She’s a fiery American bitch,” Brian said. “Her boyfriend got arrested by Police Service on possession charges of hashish. So far, Simon, you’re our best witness. Our CCTV footage failed. We had a catastrophic power failure. We lost all the data within the chamber. Anything that hadn’t been backed up that night on the external servers got lost during the surge.”

  Brian stared at Simon. There was more he held back than he said. Simon knew the man for over ten years. He knew Brian had a low threshold for waiting. Yet, something in the way his employer stared at him made the man hold back.

  Simon tried to sit up farther, but they had restrained him in place. Wedged against the thin mattress and the slight pillow under his head, Simon cleared his throat. He wanted water, but Brian wasn’t a friend, he was an employer.

  “Do you remember what happened?” Brian asked, his voice low because Simon knew they weren’t alone in the hospital room.

  Memories were important. They made up the whole person. Without memories, Simon didn’t have a career. Everything he’d learned throughout his forty-seven years wasn’t worth anything if he wasn’t able to recall important pieces. Still, he remembered the girl’s face. The way she looked at him with her dark honey eyes and the chestnut-colored choppy hair. There was a look on her frightened angular face that made Simon think she seemed extremely familiar.

  “The girl,” Simon said.

  “Yes,” Brian said. He leaned over Simon. His hands on the bed rail, his breath washed over Simon’s face; he smelled like coffee and cigarettes. “We know about the other girl, Simon. What happened to her? Did it happen again?”

  Those few words, the two questions pushed back to back, slammed Simon’s brain into working harder. The pieces he’d lost in the fog began to come forward in vivid details. He saw more of the girl, the familiar face. He grabbed her, held onto her arm. Simon remembered holding her arm. She’d scratched and pinched his wrist. Then it was nothing but a flash of intense white and deep inky darkness that followed.

  Simon tried to move again. He felt the scratches on his wrist from where the girl dug at his hand to make him let go of her.

  “I think there was an explosion,” Simon said. He lifted his left hand. Unlike his right, it was the one appendage not strapped to the bed.

  “It wasn’t an explosion,” Brian said. He continued to lean over Simon. Uncharacteristic of Brian, he took Simon’s left hand and held it. “Do you remember now? It was like before.”

  Simon closed his eyes. Brian stood up straight again. The towering Scotsman held Simon’s hand in a death grip. He wasn’t letting go. Simon heard others around them, but when he opened his eyes again, all he saw was the pale stripes of the privacy curtain.

  “My arm feels like it�
��s on fire,” Simon said.

  “I understand. It’s healing well. When they got you to the clinic in Inverness, they stabilized you enough to come here. Somehow the incident cauterized your wound. I need you to keep quiet, Simon. Scotland Yard wants to talk to you. You are not talking to anyone without me or the solicitor present. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand, Brian.”

  The flood of memories came back to Simon. The girl evaporated into oblivion. He pulled his hand, but Brian held fast. Simon realized at that moment. It was the man’s way of stopping Simon from touching his right arm. Simon knew once Brian freed his hand, he’d find nothing on his right side. The bed strap secured Simon and kept him from moving too much. He suspected surgery had something to do with his immobility.

  “It was like before,” he said. “It was exactly like before.”

  Brian nodded and released Simon’s hand. Slowly, he lowered his left hand to his right side. The burning sensation continued, but it wasn’t real, Simon knew it. He never understood the phantom limb syndrome. Perceived pain or experiencing the feeling that the arm remained when it wasn’t there anymore was something Simon had to endure. If it meant unlocking the mystery of what happened, then Simon gladly gave up his right arm for the secret of the Celtic mosaic.

  “Do you know who the girl was?” Simon asked. “They showed up out of nowhere. When they tripped the motion sensors in the cave, I went down to the site.”

  “I know all that, Simon. We got everything up to the system crash.”

  “You know who the girl is, don’t you?”

  Brian nodded. “Her name was Harper Biel, Simon. She’s Phoebe’s daughter.”

  Simon felt the urge to sit up. He wanted to wrench the straps from his body and tear off the bandages to see what remained of the severed limb.

  “She’s gone,” he said.

  He felt a wave of nausea at the thought he’d touched Phoebe’s daughter. Harper Biel was the living representation of the only woman in Simon’s entire life that understood him and his passion for the past. They had shared secrets.