Time Sight

by Lynne Jonell

  “Lunch!” said Nan, pulling a large packet out of her ever-present satchel.

  There were roast beef sandwiches on thickly cut bread, with tomatoes and cheese. There were three apples, red and crisp with juice. There were packets of chips—Nan called them crisps—and carrot sticks, and hard-boiled eggs, and nearly half a chocolate cake. Nan cut the cake with her penknife and opened three bottles of fizzy lemonade. They sat down on a low, lichen-covered rock to eat. For a long time there was a steady sound of chewing and not much else. When Gormlaith appeared, drooling happily, Nan snapped the dog’s leash around a convenient tree and gave her two sandwiches.

  Jamie finished eating first. He dug inside Nan’s satchel and pulled out the Magic Eyeball book.

  Will slanted a look at Nan. “Did you have to bring that?”

  Nan lifted one shoulder and grinned. “You never know, it might come in handy. See, I have this history project due after the school break—”

  “Forget it.” Will resolutely ignored her dimple. “I’m staying in my own time, thanks very much.”

  Jamie opened the book. “But how do you do it? I want to know.” He faced the cliff behind them, held the book out at arm’s length, and squinted. “Nothing’s happening. How come you can do it, and I can’t?”

  A small satisfaction warmed Will’s chest. Jamie had bragged about seeing the hidden pictures when his brother couldn’t, but the pictures Will could see were real.

  Jamie’s lower lip pushed out. “Show me how, please? Please please please—”

  “Go on, why don’t you?” Nan began to pack up the litter from their lunch. “It’s not likely he’ll be able to do it, anyway,” she added in a low voice.

  Will didn’t let himself get close to the book. Nothing would happen if he didn’t touch it. “Okay,” he said. “Just look at the page—only sort of gaze past it, like you’re looking at something farther on, see?”

  Jamie frowned. “That’s what you do to see the hidden pictures. I can see those all right.”

  “No, you have to look past the hidden pictures, too.” Will had never seen the hidden pictures in the first place, but it was as good a guess as any.

  “Should I look all the way to the cliff?”

  Will wasn’t sure. How far away did he usually focus his eyes? He stared at the cliff face, and the crack in the rock that looked as if it, too, might be a cave if only it went a little farther in. Then he pulled his focus back a little, so he was focused on a spot of nothing in the middle of the clear air. He pulled back a little more—and a little more—

  The air shimmered; the cliff face seemed subtly changed. Gormlaith whined. Instinctively Will jerked his head to one side, and the shimmer in the air disappeared. His pulse beat rapidly in his throat.

  Jamie, who hadn’t seemed to notice, said, “I’m going to try from farther away.” He stepped back as Nan was clearing the picnic things off the rock, and looked down. Then he let the Magic Eyeball book fall. “Hey, look! Circles in the rock!”

  Will peered over his brother’s shoulder. Amid the dull, fuzzy lichen, the rock was dotted with small round holes, less than an inch wide, and not very deep. At first glance they just seemed like natural flaws in the stone. But some of the holes were surrounded by concentric rings, and a few of those had a straight line running out from the center. Somebody had worked a long time to pound those holes. Will squatted down to trace one of the rings with his finger. He felt strangely crowded, as if there were someone behind him, pushing.…

  “They’re called cup marks,” said Nan. “My dad says people made those thousands of years ago, maybe in the Copper Age. Nobody knows why.”

  Jamie gave an excited bounce. “Did they leave stuff we can dig up?”

  “Aye, if you want to dive for it,” Nan said. “They found some dugout canoes under Loch Tay, buried in the mud, and pilings from a crannog, and they’re digging up more now. But the water’s cold and dark.”

  “What’s a crannog?” Jamie was hopping on both feet now.

  “It’s a big sort of hut built out over the water, with a walkway to it. You can see one at the Crannog Centre, and walk right into the hut, and look down into Loch Tay—”

  “Can we go? Would your dad take us?” Jamie bobbed up and down, waving his arms as if he were about to fly.

  Nan sighed. “He’d take you in a heartbeat. The problem is, he’d probably make me come along and learn something.”

  “Yay!” shrieked Jamie, his arms windmilling. “Let’s go ask him right now! Come on, Gormly!” He unsnapped the leash and tore down the path, Gormlaith galloping alongside.

  Nan’s dimple flitted into sight. “Back to the old Jamie.”

  “Yeah.” Will grinned.

  Nan stuffed the Magic Eyeball book into her satchel with the picnic things. “We’d better dampen his enthusiasm a bit, or Dad will have us all signed up for classes before you know it.”

  Will hesitated. “Go ahead. I’ll come in a minute.”

  He watched Nan skip down the path and round the bend. Then he turned. Before him was Saint David’s Well, dark and still, below the massive, looming cliff.

  Had he really done it? Had he opened a window into the past, without the book? This was as good a time as any to find out.

  Will gazed at the air in front of the rock, focusing his eyes in small increments forward, back, trying to sense the spot in the past where he had almost opened a window before, probing with the strange, delicate new awareness that was as sensitive as a moth’s antenna. There was no thin transparent golden thread, this time—of course not, no one had gone through—but he could feel something like a little rounded dent, or a dimple, in the fabric of the past. He was almost … there.…

  The air before him moved slightly, like a sheer gauze curtain in a breeze. Will kept his focus steady. He found it even easier than before; perhaps it was because he didn’t have anyone distracting him. How big, he wondered, could he make the window?

  The edges were hard to locate without moving his eyes; the cliff looked almost the same in both times. But the light on the rock, and the bits of lichen, were different. Could he lengthen the time window slightly, make it the shape of a door? He experimented, carefully.

  No, it didn’t change shape; it remained squarish with rounded corners. Like anyone’s field of vision, it was sharpest in the center and fuzzy around the edges. But he could enlarge it, he found, by moving his focus slowly away. Now the opening was taller than he was, and touching the ground. Just a little bigger, and a car could drive through.

  Will’s chest expanded. He’d mastered it! He didn’t need the Magic Eyeball book to open a window into time; he could do it all by himself. Anytime he wanted, he could walk into the past.… Where would he end up, if he stepped through right this minute? He wasn’t crazy enough to do it; he’d probably end up in another clan war. But maybe, if he moved the window to the side, he would see a clue to how far back in the past it was.

  He rotated slowly in place. The time window, large as a garage door, moved with his gaze, past the cliff, past the well, across the path. The giant window hung there, wavering slightly. If you gazed straight ahead and not off to the sides, it looked almost ordinary: just a simple trick of the light as it filtered through the branches.

  Leaves rustled overhead; behind him a bird trilled. There was a muffled, rhythmic sound, like a branch knocking in the breeze, or perhaps footsteps. Suddenly a man rounded a bend in the path, lifted his hand, and walked through the window into Will’s time.

  Will gasped; he blinked. The time window snapped shut, and the man looked at him.

  He was tall, with gray hair in a fringe around his ears. He held a cloth bag in one hand and a walking stick in the other, and he seemed to be wearing a kind of bathrobe.

  “Who are you, my lad? Art from the village, then?” The man’s eyebrows were thick and untidy, but his eyes were vividly green. They rested with what looked like astonished amusement on Will’s shorts and T-shirt.

  Will
opened and shut his mouth, like a fish.

  “Dumb, are ye?”

  Will felt the red rise to his ears. He shook his head. He might not think of things to say as quickly as Nan, but he was far from stupid.

  “If naught is wrong with your speech, why not answer my question?”

  The flush left Will’s face as he realized the man had used the word dumb in the old sense, meaning “unable to speak.”

  “My name is Will,” he said. “William Menzies.”

  The man’s face crinkled into a smile. “And I am David Menzies.”

  Will stared. “Are you the hermit? Saint David?”

  The man laughed out loud. “Certainly not a saint yet, though the good God knows all, and he sees I try! I am Sir David Menzies, once laird of the castle and chief of Clan Menzies.”

  “You’re not the chief anymore?” Will blurted out. “Why not?”

  Sir David shrugged. “I tired of worldly things.” He lifted the hem of his robe briefly and let it drop. “I wear the garb of a monk now, and it suits me. I have had enough of power and the tumults of kings.” His smile deepened, and for a moment a dimple showed in one cheek, exactly like Nan’s. “And what are you doing up here, young William?”

  “Nothing.” Will took a step back as the man came closer.

  The monk put up a hand. “No fear, laddie. You can run faster than I, in any case.”

  Will took another look at the man leaning on his stick, decided this was probably true, and relaxed. “What are you doing up here, sir?” he asked. Maybe, if he kept the man distracted by talking, he could open the time window and get him to walk through it.

  Sir David lifted the bag in his hand. “Gathering herbs, and roots, and things I need. This is tansy, see? It makes a lovely tea, good for the bones. And here is Saint John’s wort, good for all sorts of ills.” He smiled a little, and stooped to look into Will’s eyes. “And what ills might you have?” he asked gently. “Did you come up to seek my counsel?”

  Will frowned. “No,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  “Truly?” said the monk.

  Will looked away. The only problem he had right now was how to get Sir David back to his own time. Unless you counted worrying about his mother, but no monk from the Middle Ages could help with that.

  Sir David nodded gently some seven times, crossed the green wedge of lawn, and seated himself on the picnic rock. “Sometimes it is good to speak of what ails you,” he said mildly.

  Will cleared his throat. “Do you ever think about time?” he asked.

  The monk didn’t look surprised. “Time present, time past, or time to come?”

  “All of it.” Will crossed the green terrace and looked out over the valley. The River Tay twisted here and there, and off to the west he could see a glimmer that he thought was Loch Tay … but in the other direction, much farther than he could see, he knew the river flowed on and on until at last it reached the sea. “I think time is like a river,” he said slowly. He broke off a stray branch and swished it in the air, watching the leaves flutter.

  Sir David sat quietly on the rock, tracing the cup marks with one long finger. “Tell me what you mean,” he suggested.

  “Well, where the river comes from is like the past,” Will said. “And where it goes to is the future.”

  “True enough,” said the monk, smiling. “And we cannot see around the twists and turns, can we? But we ride on the current, always moving, and the river carries all souls to the sea, which is eternity.”

  Will whacked the tops of weeds off with the branch. “But if someone swam to the bank, got out of the river, and walked around the bend, he could get to a different time.”

  The man’s smile made deep creases appear on his face. “Ah, I have often wished to do so, laddie. I would go back and undo all my mistakes.”

  “No, you can’t do that,” said Will, “but you can visit a time you haven’t already lived. Like, way in the past. Or even the future,” he added, looking sideways at the monk.

  “No man knows the future, save God,” said the man. He spoke gently, as if to a young child.

  The breeze lifted Will’s hair away from the sweaty back of his neck and cooled his skin. “You can do it. In fact, you just did. Sir, this is going to sound odd … but did you notice that you passed through a sort of shimmering in the air when you came up here? Something that looked different, somehow?”

  Sir David stroked his chin. “’Tis odd that you should say that, lad. There was a sort of disturbance, a troubling of the air, but I held up my hand and pronounced a blessing, and stepped through. I am not afraid of the spirits of the air.”

  “Not spirits,” said Will, “just a different way of seeing. You saw into a future time, my time, and you stepped into it. Just like stepping up onto the riverbank, and walking forward.”

  The man frowned. “I think I should give you some yarrow leaf, to soothe your mind. It is clear it is unsettled. Did you say you were from the village? Has someone been giving you black hellebore?”

  “I’m not crazy.” Will threw his branch over the cliff. “Come here, and I’ll show you. Look there!”

  The monk stood by Will and looked down. Below him, the modern town of Aberfeldy spread out in buildings of two and three stories. Roads crisscrossed, with cars on them like fast-moving beetles, and on the river a motorboat left a foaming wake.

  The man clutched Will’s shoulder as if to keep himself from falling. “What witchcraft is this?” he muttered.

  “No witchcraft, sir,” Will said. “Haven’t you heard of the Second Sight?”

  Sir David passed a hand over his eyes. “Aye,” he said hoarsely. “My mother had it, and the good Saint Columba himself, so it cannot be an evil thing—”

  “Well, this is like Second Sight, only it’s Time Sight, and it just means you can see through a sort of window into another time than your own. And if the window is open, anyone can just walk right through it.”

  The monk’s brow contracted into a mass of wrinkles. “You opened this window? You, yourself?”

  Will nodded.

  The man looked down again. “Know you,” he said quietly, “what year it is, yonder?”

  Will had been waiting for this question. “It’s 2019,” he said.

  The monk wavered slightly, as if his knees had grown suddenly weak. Still, when he turned, his expression was as stern as the cliff’s rock face. “You must know that you have brought me here from the year of our Lord 1470. How did you come to choose my time, out of all the times you could have chosen? Did you have some purpose in coming here to trouble us?”

  “No! I was thinking about you, because of Saint David’s Well, and so I guess the window just naturally opened onto your time.” Will pointed to the rock basin of water, against the cliff.

  “I told you before, I am no saint, and that is Saint Cuthbert’s Well.”

  “People will call you a saint, though, later on. In five hundred years, people will still call this place Saint David’s Well, after you.”

  The monk sat down abruptly on the rock once more. “So I have left something good after all, in spite of my past mistakes,” he said in a low voice, clasping his hands on his knee. He looked up, smiling. “I would like to see this wonder. Can you open the window to my time again? I want to see you do it.”

  “Yes, sir. You’d better hold on to my shoulder, though.”

  The monk’s grip was firm. Will gazed into the middle distance, feeling with his mind for the spot where the man must have come through.…

  The air before them moved slightly, like a sheer gauze curtain. Behind Will, the old man gasped. Within the rough-edged opening, like a picture frame enclosing the past, they could see the figure of a boy running up the path. His hair was dark and long, and his feet were bare, but his plaid was pinned with a silver brooch, and his belt was of polished leather. He stopped to look in all directions, lifting his chin with a distinctive sideways jerk that seemed familiar.

  “Robert!” breathed the
monk.

  Will almost lost his focus. Was it possible? He had only ever seen one person do that exact chin motion before … but Jamie’s beloved Sir Robert had been a grown man.

  “Grandfather!” the boy called, putting a hand to his mouth like a megaphone.

  The monk let go of Will’s shoulder to step forward. Then he whirled, his eyes wide. “That was my grandson! Where did he go?”

  Will held himself perfectly still and kept his focus steady. “You have to touch me to see him,” he said. “He can’t see or hear you, either, unless you go through.”

  The monk laid a trembling hand on Will’s shoulder. “Get me back to my own time, then, and quickly,” he said. “This is a wonder too great for me.”

  “All right,” said Will, “but let’s wait until your grandson goes away. If he sees you appear out of thin air, he’ll think it’s witchcraft for sure.”

  They watched as the boy glanced here and there, disappointment clear on his face. He slanted his chin up, frowning, and then Will was sure. It was Sir Robert, only thirty years younger than when Jamie had known him. And why not? Even the grand laird of Castle Menzies must have been a boy, once.

  Robert turned with a snort of impatience and trotted farther along the path, around the bend.

  “Quick,” said Will, “he might come back.”

  Sir David cast his bag of herbs through the time window. “You’re a good lad,” he said. “Be careful with your gift, now, will you? For it might be dangerous, indeed.”

  “I’ll try,” Will promised.

  Sir David gave him a wink and a nod, and the dimple like Nan’s flashed into his cheek once more. Then he stepped through to his own time, picked up his bag of herbs, and called to his grandson. In a moment Will saw the boy running back up the path, gladness on his face.