What Scotland Taught Me

by Molly Ringle

  I tried to talk about Amber’s psychosis with Tony instead. We made tea in the kitchen, scooted our table up against the wall radiator, and dissected the topic.

  He definitely did not take Laurence’s point of view on it.

  “A theory occurred to me,” he said. “If these really are dead people’s souls, then why are they here? They’re supposed to be in hell, heaven, or purgatory, right? Those are the three options.”

  “Well, only if you literally believe--”

  “I know, but see where I’m going? Maybe this is purgatory. Earth. Having to re-live the scene of your death.”

  “Okay, maybe. But first I want to know if these ghosts even exist.”

  “I believe that Amber believes it. And that convinces me that, if nothing else, God is causing her to hallucinate. What I can’t figure out is why.”

  “I’ve had people tell me it’s demons,” said Amber’s voice.

  We turned.

  She sauntered in, draped her scarf on a chair, and plopped down at our table. She pulled over my tea mug and took a sip.

  “Can I make you some?” I asked pointedly.

  She shook her head and pushed it back to me. “Just sampling.”

  Are you just sampling Laurence, too? I managed not to ask it out loud.

  “See, I don’t think it’s demons,” Tony said. “I’d rather think it’s God. Plenty of the saints had grueling experiences, terrifying visions, before they--”

  “Ugh, you and your saints.” Amber fluttered her hand near her face as if smelling something gross. “Not all of us buy into the Pope’s little stories, you know.”

  “Okay, whatever. But how can you be sure the ghosts aren’t a message of some kind? Plenty of people--I won’t say saints--have had harrowing visitations like that before a major religious epiphany.”

  “Why does it have to be religious?” she said. “Demons, God, it’s unnecessary. Why not just tortured souls?”

  “Because I believe God and souls go hand in hand, and I believe He has a plan for everyone.”

  “Now you’re taking away my free will?”

  “Not at all. I just think He’s telling you something in the strongest possible terms. Stronger than most of us are lucky enough to get.”

  “Lucky? You think I’m lucky?”

  “She has a point,” I put in. “I wouldn’t want her skills for a million bucks.”

  “I’d love to see something from God, something special,” Tony went on. “Something that only I could see.”

  “And worry that you might be a nutjob?” she said. “Yeah, it’s a real thrill.”

  “Maybe for a million,” I amended, still calculating my imaginary fortune. “But not for a thousand.”

  “But to know that God had sent me a message like that...” he started.

  “So,” Amber said, “I’m an idiot because I don’t think God has anything to do with it?”

  “I never said that.”

  “You’re trying to convince me you’re right, though.”

  “That’s what a debate’s for. You’re welcome to present your side.”

  “Oh, I will, believe me. Where do you want me to start?”

  I got up to rinse out the teacups. They would obviously be swinging their swords for hours.

  After putting away the dried cups and hanging the dishtowel on its metal bar, I wandered back to the debating theologians. I yawned and kissed Tony on the ear. “I’m going back to our room. Come up when you like.”

  “Okay, I’ll be up soon.” He hardly glanced at me. “But in the New Testament, it says...”

  I didn’t stay to hear what the New Testament said.

  I started up the stairs, then, for some reason, swiveled around and trotted down to the front desk.

  Laurence sat writing notes in the guest book. Two Spanish boys took photographs in front of the lobby’s Christmas tree.

  I leaned on the counter and picked at a piece of tape stuck to it. “So, I imagine it goes without saying, but...sorry about the other night. I was a bitch.”

  I fortified myself against the cutting reply sure to follow.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “You were stressed.”

  I twitched in surprise, but he looked calm and sincere as he glanced up from the guest book.

  Okay, then. Rather than express my amazement, I opted to milk his good mood while it lasted. “So. Unstuck Amber from your shirt, I see.”

  “Yeah.” Laurence laid down the pencil and leaned back in his chair. “More ghosts than ever? I’m worried about her. I think this schizoid news about her grandmother might have triggered some wild psychosomatic effect.”

  “Same here.” I rested my arms on the countertop. This was the conversation I had hoped to have. “Or maybe she really does have schizophrenia.”

  “There is the chance. Unfortunately, it turns out extra stress or anxiety in late adolescence can contribute to someone developing it. And I’m concerned she might be inflicting that stress herself by being so freaked out.”

  “We should tell her that. Give her a reason to calm down.”

  He squinted, and took off his glasses to rub his nose. “Yeah, but that can backfire with a drama queen. Deep down they like the stress, in some fashion.”

  I smiled wryly, remembering I’d thought of her as a drama queen myself, less than an hour ago. “Who knows? Maybe she’s really just a ghost seer like we always thought.”

  “I didn’t always think it. And I still don’t, but that’s because I’m a skeptic.” He slipped his glasses back on. “For example, you know what it really was, those ghost sightings in Mary King’s Close back in the old days?”

  “Marsh gas?” I guessed, the guide’s spiel still fresh in my mind.

  “Exactly. Methane, basically. It glows faintly, hovers in small clouds, and sometimes burns with a blue flame. Almost all marshy areas have ghost stories about women in white dresses, men with gray beards, or disembodied heads floating in the air.”

  “Seems obvious. Case closed.”

  “And I did try to tell Amber that. But nope, nuh-uh. She said she could count hairs on these people’s knuckles. Far too much detail for a cloud of gas. Besides, there shouldn’t be any methane anymore. Not since they drained Princes Street Gardens however many years ago.”

  “The Nor’ Loch,” I said. “Then it became Princes Street Gardens.”

  “Right. Give me a break; I don’t have a personal Scottish tour guide like some people.”

  I lowered my eyes and toyed with the tinsel garland taped to the edge of the counter.

  “By the way,” he said, more quietly, “how’s it going with Anthony?”

  “Oh, fine. He’s a saint, as always.”

  “Amber even likes him this trip.”

  “She might not, after the debate they’re having now.”

  “Still, she thinks it might be his ‘super-pure Catholic aura’ that attracted all the spooks tonight. She told me she wanted to test this theory and take him ghost hunting again tomorrow.”

  “But if they’re all in her head...”

  “Right. Then he’ll become the placebo effect. And she’ll see lots more ghosts in his presence than she ever does in mine.” He actually sounded rueful.

  I frowned. “How could you...”

  I stopped. I wanted to say something like, “How could you, a smart and rational guy, even consider dating a girl with all these mental, or at least emotional, issues?”

  But I didn’t want to be confrontational and disturb this smooth rapport Laurence and I had achieved. So I turned it into a different question. “How could you explain ghosts that weren’t anywhere near marshes?”

  He pushed his hands through his dark golden-red hair, and clasped them behind his head. “I can’t, since I wasn’t there. And though I still think they’re figments of people’s imagination, I admit science hasn’t figured everything out yet. In quantum physics, much stranger things than ghosts can happen. So, tell me...”

  He looked into
my eyes, and an anxious flash pulsed through me. Was he about to taunt me? Or--something intimate in his gaze made me wonder --was he about to hit on me?

  “Which colleges are you applying to?” he asked.

  My mind stalled and restarted. “What?”

  “Deadlines are coming up. Chop chop. Which ones? Marylhurst?”

  “Oh. Maybe. I don’t know. That is, Tony likes it, and obviously I want to be near him.”

  “Obviously.” He let the sarcasm pool around the syllables.

  I twisted tinsel in my fingers and pressed onward. “But a Catholic school might not be right for me. So probably U of O and a couple others. My parents are sending me packets for that one and OSU, for starters.” The two main Oregon universities were all I had answered so far to my dad’s email summons. I promised to give them the rest of the list by Christmas.

  “Majoring in...?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet. Isn’t that allowed? Not knowing yet?”

  “Yeah, but it helps to have some idea. I did the ‘Chemical Engineering, training with Dad, yadda yadda yadda’ for my essays.”

  “You already wrote them?”

  He nodded. “Sent them all in. Early consideration. I’m done.”

  I thought about hating him for that, but recalled that the universities I was applying to so far didn’t even require essays. Saved by my low standards once again. “Which schools, then?” I asked him.

  “MIT, of course. Also Stanford, Cal Tech, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley. Though the hippie-ness of the latter might destroy my soul.”

  “All out of state.” For some reason the fact saddened me. College tore friendships asunder by mere geography. I would miss even Laurence, once I got plunked down among strangers. I smoothed the bit of tinsel I had been mangling. “Maybe I should wait another year. Till I know better.”

  “Up to you. But I wouldn’t make a habit of this indecision thing, little lady.”

  “Yeah.” I pulled back from the counter. “In that case I’ve decided I should go rescue Tony. It isn’t very nice of me to leave him up there with Amber.”

  “Not nice at all.” He settled back in his chair. “Nighty night.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Canongate Cemetery

  Amber slept soundly that night as far as I could tell. I, for one, got spooked again as soon as the lights were turned off. I slept in hour-long dreams broken by half-hours of uneasy wakefulness. Therefore, I disliked her the next morning, but, luckily for her, she didn’t have to see me before I left for work.

  Gil did not call me at the Monteith Hotel, which discouraged me. And when I got back from work I found a note on my bed from Tony.

  Dear Pudding Face: Laurence is taking me to the U district for lunch. I’m going with Amber to Charlotte Square (wherever that is!) tonight after dinner because there are supposedly lots of ghosts there and she wants to test how it goes. Hope you can come! Love, T.

  Fabulous. Even though I didn’t have a date with Gil, I would still have to bundle up in wool and huddle outside on a frigid winter night. Not that the hostel was much of an improvement. The high ceilings, thin windows, and ancient steam-heat radiators conspired to keep us all in double sweaters around the clock. I hadn’t really known the meaning of cold until coming to Scotland. It got equally cold in Oregon, on the thermometer, but the persistence of the Scottish chill was what made it so formidable. Plus, our smaller houses in Wild Rose were heated better, and in Oregon I tended not to spend so many winter hours outdoors as I’d been doing here.

  I searched for Shannon, who should have been back from work by now, but I couldn’t find her. I texted her, and soon she responded: she wouldn’t be back until tomorrow; she was spending the night at Thomas Chester-Brighton’s flat. This was at least the third time she had shacked up with him.

  “Why even pay rent here, Shannon?” I muttered to my phone, and went back upstairs, wondering why the world intervened to keep me from seeing the people I wanted to see.

  True to Laurence’s prediction, Amber spotted ghosts that night, and every subsequent night of Tony’s brief stay. He went out with her to some haunted location, she saw ghosts, then she came back and flung herself all affrighted onto Laurence’s lap. I went with them every night except one, but saw nothing. Tony didn’t see anything either. Laurence, who had a cold, didn’t go at all that week, giving us no chance to test whether her visions would crop up in his company.

  On Tony’s last night in Edinburgh, the three of us snuck into Canongate Cemetery, tiptoed around the gravestones, and settled into a dry spot beneath the overhanging roof of a monument. Tony wrapped one side of his coat around me for warmth. His low-toned conversation with Amber about burial practices didn’t disturb me. Dozing, I thought in a happy dream-like state that I would be sad to see Tony go tomorrow, but glad to have more time with Gil. Maybe my next meeting with him would tip the scales one way or the other and help me figure out my love life.

  I must have fallen asleep for a minute because when I next opened my eyes, Tony was shifting upward, climbing to his feet. And Amber was across the cemetery, in the moonlight and the December wind, advancing on an ominous vault. The box-shaped stone building stood about twelve feet high, with a wooden door swinging ajar on one hinge.

  Deep shadow swathed the interior, so I couldn’t see what was in there, but I pictured a stairway descending to a tomb full of shrouded corpses on stone shelves. I scrambled to my feet with a shudder, getting away from the tombstone I had fallen asleep under. “What’s she doing?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Tony. “She just looked over there and got up, like she was possessed.”

  She reached the door, caught hold of it, and vanished inside.

  “Crap. She’s lost her mind,” I said.

  Tony and I ran over, reaching the vault in about ten seconds. That was longer than you could have convinced me to stay in there, and she still hadn’t reappeared.

  I stopped on the square of stone in front of the door and swore under my breath. The most unpleasant thing I could imagine doing was to reach out and open that creaky spider-infested door and widen the ribbon of darkness to a yawning mouth of black.

  Yet Amber was in there.

  “I can’t do this. I can’t touch the damn thing.” I bounced on my toes in frustration. “Why the hell didn’t we bring a flashlight? Amber! Come out!”

  “Amber!” Tony shouted. He, too, eyed the door with a wince. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he muttered, then seized the edge of the door and pulled it open.

  Cobwebs swung from the inner corner. I couldn’t see a thing inside.

  “Amber!” he called again. “Are you okay?”

  “Please come out,” I tried.

  No answer.

  I looked at Tony. “I am not going in there,” I told him.

  Then, with a whimper and a burst of footsteps that made Tony and me skitter backward, Amber shot out of the vault and slammed the door behind her. She took half a second to catch her breath, then took off shrieking, “Let’s get out of here, let’s get out of here, let’s get out of here!”

  A game, right? She was screwing with us...right? Just like that other time, with Bloody MacKenzie?

  Still, you could never be too sure when creepy cemeteries were involved. We took to our heels, and I, for one, did not look back.

  On a street corner two blocks from the cemetery, the three of us tumbled to a halt, catching each other by the arms, barely able to breathe.

  “You were joking,” I panted. “Right?”

  “No,” she whimpered.

  “No?”

  She shook her head, hair whipping across her face.

  “Then what the hell,” I asked, “did you see?”

  “My name.”

  “Your name?”

  “I saw a light, and it was my name written in red letters, like fire, on one of the drawers in the wall. Those mortuary drawers where they put people. And there was a date.”

  To my shock, she broke down s
obbing. The daring, intrepid Amber reduced to crying in public. Chills crawled up my neck.

  “I couldn’t get out,” she continued, mittens pressed to her face. “I swear I only took one step inside, but it was like I was a hundred feet from the door. It said ‘Amber C. Willock, 19 February 2008’.”

  Two months away. My chills broke into goose bumps.

  Looking shaken, Tony laid a hand on her back and guided her along the sidewalk. “I’m sure it was nothing. Eyes playing tricks on you.”

  “It was there. I can still see it, the way the light spelled out the letters...”

  “Probably doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Your imagination, all this stress.”

  “It was there,” she echoed.

  “Even if it was--heck, just a date. Maybe you’ll win the lottery that day.” Though truth be told, if I’d seen my name written in a tomb with a date under it, I would already be out hiring a shrink. And probably buying a Kevlar vest. And writing a will. God, poor Amber.

  “How am I going to live two months till then? Wondering if I’m going to die?”

  She wept. I hugged her against me as we walked back to the hostel. Tony and I murmured reassurances, and joked that she was surely just reacting from some hallucinogenic mold in Scottish bread. But from the looks we exchanged, I knew he felt as troubled as I did.

  When we arrived, she said she wanted Laurence, so we took her up to his room. He let us in, holding a book and wearing his robe and sweats, looking perplexed to find us pounding on his door at midnight. Amber burst into tears afresh, collapsing against his chest. We explained what had happened, and he agreed to let her sleep on his sofa.

  The unkind thought did occur to me, as Tony and I returned to the third floor, that maybe she had made up all of this--subconsciously or not--simply to get into Laurence’s room for the night. All her other attempts had failed. She had complained to me about that just the other day. She confessed she was still ludicrously jealous of me for the time I slept against him under the same blankets when I was sick in October. (Once again I suggested she try catching a stomach bug, which for some reason didn’t appeal to her.)