Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  “It’s her first husband,” said Joanna, pointing at the screen. Another Highland lord and a great clan chief: Hugh fraser, fifth Lord Lovat.

  I skimmed down through the entry. After their fall from power, she and her third husband had withdrawn from the glittering world of the court, where many people wanted them dead, to her dower lands in the wilds of Inverness-shire.

  “How about Lovat’s castle?” asked Joanna.

  But Beaufort Castle was not on a loch.

  “It’s near a river,” said Joanna hopefully. “Do you think that counts?”

  I shook my head. “Catherine was clear. Walls rising sheer from the water. Besides, according to this article, Beaufort wasn’t built until the late nineteenth century. Too late. And its predecessor was destroyed just after the Battle of Culloden, in 1746: too early.”

  Trying not to watch the time ticking away in the lower right-hand corner, I looked back at the biographical entry. The sources weren’t much help.

  “Not much out there on Lady Arran,” said Joanna.

  “We don’t need books about her,” I said slowly. “We need books about the frasers. And clan histories were popular in the nineteenth century.” I pulled forward to the keyboard and started typing. “It means they’re out of copyright. It means there’s a good chance they’ll be searchable on Google Books. The largest library on the planet, in digital—and searchable—form.”

  It didn’t take long to find her, scattered in venomous mention across a number of fraser histories. “The Lady Jezebel.” “An ambitious, avaricious, and ill-natured woman.” A whore who consorted with witches.

  And yet, in fear for her life, she’d gone back to these people who despised her.

  It was a measure, I supposed, of the depth of the hatred she faced farther south and the thickness of clan loyalties in the north. The frasers might have reviled her, but she was the mother of their chief. So long as she lived among them, they’d allow no one else to kill her.

  The details of her exile among them, however, seemed wrapped in a forbidding wall of silence. I’d have to sift through the histories one by one, wading through their thick Victorian prose from beginning to end.

  The first turned up nothing. As did the second. The third wasn’t really Victorian: a nineteenth-century edition of an obscure seventeenth-century manuscript called the Polichronicon, or the Wardlaw manuscript.

  In the lower right corner of the screen, the time sped on.

  Six hours into the flight, I sat up. Tucked away in a passage that mentioned neither her nor her husband by name—and thus slipped beneath the radar of word searches—I read that “the great, though not good lady” and her husband had whiled away their time in exile by hunting.

  Being under continuall feare, their residence was in the Isle of Lochbruyach, a fort remoat from any roade….

  Lochbruyach.

  “Loch Bruiach, in the Kiltarlity Hills,” read a terse footnote. With shaking fingers, I entered it into Google Maps, and a Loch Bruicheach popped up, southwest of Inverness.

  “Think that’s the one?” asked Joanna.

  “There’s no island.”

  “There has to be.” She toggled over to the satellite view, which showed a tiny white speck in the water.

  I looked at the clock. We’d have one chance to find Lily. Did I trust it to a speck seen by satellite on a loch with a not-quite-right name? And why had people called it the Boiling Lake?

  Out of curiosity, I searched “Loch Bruiach Place-Name.”

  “Look at this,” I said softly. “‘Bruiach’ comes from an old Gaelic word, brutach, meaning ‘boiling or raging one.’ It is, quite literally, the Boiling Lake.”

  “That’s it, then,” said Joanna.

  I looked back at the map. It was still remote from any road. “I’ll arrange for a range rover,” said Joanna. “How are you at backcountry driving?”

  The last hour of the flight, perversely, was the hardest. We phoned Lady Nairn again, but there was no answer. There was nothing further I could do, save pace back and forth in the aisle, willing the plane to hurry.

  By the time we finally landed, it was long since dark; the full moon had risen huge in the east. “Call the police,” I said as we drove out of the airport in the range rover, heading west along the sea.

  “Lady Nairn didn’t—”

  “She’s not thinking straight,” I said. “Call the goddamned police.”

  Joanna put in a call. “I need to report a kidnapping,” she said. As she began to go through the details, I heard her voice harden. “No, no relation. No, she hasn’t been reported missing. At the Samhuinn festival in Edinburgh, I understand…. She’s being held, we think, on an island in a loch. Loch Bruiach…Heard a threat of rape against her. In New York…”

  She hung up pale and shaking. “Bastards. Clearly think I’m a nutter. But they promised to send a constable round to check the place.”

  Prickles crept over me. I hoped to God he’d be discreet.

  “Drive like the bloody wind,” said Joanna.

  We drove briefly through the glare of city lights and then back out into country darkness. It had snowed that morning and was supposed to snow again that night; the slush on the road squealed against the car’s tires. We left the sea, turning inland through snowy fields and then climbing into hills. The road narrowed, its curves tightening. Traffic, sparse to begin with, thinned and disappeared, until we were the only car I’d seen for miles.

  The shrill of Joanna’s phone made us both jump; she answered in half a ring and hung up with a sour face. “The police have checked. There’s no one there.” She gave me a sideways look. “And there’s been no one there, apparently, for over a century.”

  “They’re wrong,” I said, tightening my grip on the steering wheel. “They have to be.”

  Soon afterward, we left the pavement altogether for a deeply rutted track. A forest closed around us, glowing an eerie blue and silver in the moonlight, and the track veered steeply downward. I thought of Catherine hurtling along in the black carriage. Hushed with the anticipation of snow, the world was utterly silent save for the grind and slip of the car.

  Just beyond the edge of the forest, we came to a stop at a fence. Tracks in the snow looked as if another car had stopped here recently. I stepped out, shivering in a wind sharp with the needling tang of pines. Beyond the gate, open moorland rolled down and away, stark and strangely beautiful, about as blasted as a heath could get. No loch was visible, only the moor bound in the far distance by ancient, worn hills. The moon hung in the southeastern sky like an immense luminous pearl, but clouds were thickening in the west, fingers of darkness upon darkness.

  There were no buildings and no lights. Save for a single set of tracks leading out and the same track coming back, there was no evidence that humans had ever walked here at all. Had ever existed, for that matter—as if not only my species but our history had been obliterated. Or had not yet occurred.

  Back where it all began.

  If Lucas and Jamie were here, there was no sign of them. Either we had somehow passed them or there was another way in.

  The track wound down into a shallow fold between two slopes. Half an hour later, we curved to the right and struggled back up a slope. Beyond, the loch suddenly appeared, dark, cold, and menacing, lapping at our feet with greedy little slaps. Close to the opposite shore, a castle rose from the water. Wind ruffled the loch’s surface, however, so there was no reflection, no second castle in a dark mirror. And no sound, either, save the slap of the wavelets and the moaning of the wind.

  And then a wolf’s howl rose into the night, in a place where no wolves should be. I glanced over at the moon. A sliver at its edge had darkened to orange. The eclipse was beginning. I looked back at the island and caught a spark of light. Flame flickered and grew. Someone had set one of the turrets ablaze.

  “They’re starting,” I said. I pulled out my phone. No service. Joanna had none, either. I put the car key in her hand. “Go back t
o the road. Drive if you have to…find somewhere with a signal. Call the police again and drag them here if you have to tell them you’ve witnessed murder yourself.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To find Lily.”

  I took off around the loch at a run.

  44

  THE PATH SKIMMED the edge of the lake. Bent low, my feet slipping in icy mud, I ran until the cold air scoured my lungs and it hurt to breathe. On the island, the fire licked upward into the night. The shore curved in toward the island, and I came to a stop in a dark stand of trees opposite the main entry.

  The place was ruinous, some of the towers half-crumbled away, but I recognized it all the same. It was Fonthill, writ large. Or rather, fonthill was this place writ small and drawn from memory. Catherine forrest had shown her husband the castle all right…. She had designed for him a copy, remembered rather than exact.

  Behind me, another howl rose through the night. On the hill at Dunsinnan, wolves had heralded the attack that scattered Lady Nairn’s rite and left Sybilla dead. I had no wish to wait and see what would emerge from the trees. I waded into the loch, hoping the shallow causeway Catherine had described was still there. The water was icy, and ten feet in, I could no longer feel my feet. I had to move slowly. But the water came no higher than my knees.

  A stone drive sloped up from the water’s edge, leading through the archway into a small courtyard. Icy snow crunched underfoot, the sound of my footsteps loud in the silence as I made my way through stones fallen from the surrounding towers. The shape of the castle’s main doorway echoed the arch in the wall behind. The doors themselves were missing.

  Around the main hall clustered battlemented towers of various heights, their walls pierced with windows like staring eyes. The hall was a great octagon; if it had once been domed, like fonthill’s, the dome had long since disappeared. It was open to the sky. For a moment, I stood in the shadow of some fallen stones in the courtyard, listening. The only sound was the crackling of the fire and the skittering of leaves across the ground. Easing the safety catch off the pistol, I stepped inside.

  Around the floor stretched a circle of candles such as Lily had once danced within, except that these were enclosed by hurricane glasses. Even so, their small flames bent and fluttered in the wind. But there was no dancer here; the hall was empty. Directly across, a large window framed the moon, its disc being devoured by a deep orange shadow. The floor was paved with stone, not tile, but just as at fonthill, there was a central stone different from all the others. An eye.

  Stepping into the circle, I walked forward through the room. Cut into an octagonal stone in the center of the floor was a small circular groove with an irregular protrusion. In it—the groove clearly made for it—lay a handled disc of polished black stone. It was not, as at fonthill, a translucent eye. It was a mirror.

  Dee’s mirror.

  In its surface shone a small reflection of the dying moon.

  Off to the side, I heard a small noise and turned. In a doorway stood Lily, a blue silk gown rippling around her, her eyes wide with terror. Behind her stood a hooded and cloaked figure with arms around her neck, a knife at her throat.

  “Drop your weapon,” someone said, and I whirled toward the voice.

  In another doorway stood Lady Nairn. She wore her own clothes, but she, too, had a keeper with a knife at her throat.

  “Drop,” said another voice in a whisper.

  Lily and Lady Nairn were both being used as shields; I had little chance of rescuing either of them by force and none of freeing them both. Carefully I set the gun down on the floor, cursing my own stupidity.

  A shadow flittered over me and I looked up. Another gown of blue silk floated down toward me like wings. Blue silk shimmering with beetle’s wings.

  “Put it on.”

  Pulling it from the air, I wrapped it around me.

  A deep, slow drumbeat boomed through the space. A high voice rose, twining up to the sky. As if drawn by it, from every door drifted figures cowled in black, their faces invisible. In their right hands, each one held a knife.

  “Let her go,” said a voice behind me. I turned. In the doorway to the courtyard stood Lucas. “Lily is mine.” He stepped forward to the edge of the circle, flinging away one of the hurricane glasses, which shattered, and picking up the candle within.

  “Enter two kings, old and young,” said the figure holding Lily. “Double, double toil and trouble…Not one king and the double deeds of sex and death, but two kings, young and old. Shall we guess which of them ravishes the maiden?”

  “I don’t need to guess,” said Lucas. “I have the manuscript.” He raised the candle’s flame near its edge. “As it happens, the answer is neither. Which is why we’re not following the script. Not this time. Let her go.”

  Behind him, a shadow detached itself from the rocks strewn across the courtyard and slipped silently up the steps.

  The figure gripping Lily did not move. “She is mine,” said Lucas, touching flame to the paper.

  In a flash of silver, steel slashed across his abdomen. A deep scream burst from him as he pitched forward onto his knees, and the burning pages fell to the ground. The shadow darted from behind, smothering the flames.

  On his knees, Lucas was holding his entrails in his hands, blood welling through his fingers. The figure turned, and the knife flicked out again, slashing his throat.

  Stepping back from the blood spilling across the stones, the figure loosed the cloak and let it fall away, revealing a woman clad in another blue gown. She turned back toward the circle and I saw her face.

  Joanna.

  Still holding the knife, she raised bloody arms to the moon. In a deep voice, she called aloud to the darkness: “Nothing is but what is not.”

  45

  “MEET MY NIECE,” said Lady Nairn in a voice of loathing. “Cerridwen Douglas.”

  Joanna? Joanna, not Jamie, was Carrie. Jamie was probably dead in a corner at fonthill, while I’d brought Joanna with me every step of the way. Discussed every piece of evidence with her, shared everything I knew. Spilled my sorrow and my fury to her. Wept in her arms, for Christ’s sake.

  Left her to call for help…

  In a wash of despair, I realized no help would come. There would be no police. There had probably never been any police—just one of her followers on the other end of the phone, someone who’d driven out to the gate and made believable tracks in the snow.

  Why? The only reason to do that was to lure me on.

  Which meant she still needed me.

  Double, double toil and trouble, Lucas had said. One spirit draining into death, another rising into life at the same time.

  What role did she mean to hand me? Victim or killer? Another voice slipped out from memory. My own, facing Eircheard’s body. I will kill her. I will find Lily, and then Carrie will die.

  Around me, the candles guttered in a gust of wind. I stepped forward, heart knocking against my ribs. “You have the manuscript. You have me. Let Lily go.”

  Joanna—Carrie—looked up from the manuscript. “When we are finished with her.”

  “That was the deal. I bring the manuscript, you release her.”

  “And we will. When you are finished with your role and she with hers.”

  “What role?” My throat was dry.

  “Have you not guessed?” She folded the pages and slipped them into a pocket. “Thou shalt be queen hereafter. Hecate, queen of witches. Not the cackling fool added by some later hack. The triple Goddess: maiden, mother, crone. There and not there, as Ellen Terry put it, in the three witches. A girl to gaze, a mother to mate, and a crone to kill.”

  I frowned. “That’s not how Shakespeare wrote them.” What are these, so withered and so wild in their attire, Shakespeare had made Banquo say. You should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so.

  “Come on, Kate,” Joanna chided.

  Not Joanna, I told myself. Carrie.

  “Yo
u of all people should know better than to trust what one character says…. In any case, there’s a stage direction here that disputes Banquo’s observation as illusion.”

  All was illusion, nought was truth.

  “In any case, without Lily, we have no maiden. No one to see…Lucas was right about one spirit draining into death and another rising into life.” She lifted her voice to a ritual cry. “The old king is dying. The new king must take his queen.”

  The drumming rolled out again, and the wordless song rose once more into the night. The figure behind Lily pushed her forward into the center of the circle. “Dance,” he commanded.

  The instant she was clear of him, a man hurtled down from above, landing like a cat in the center of the circle, pulling Lily close and hauling her to the door, sweeping the room with a gun. The cowled figures who’d begun to close in on him pulled back.

  All but one. Lady Nairn had pulled loose from her captor, wresting the knife from his hand.

  “Let her go,” said Ben.

  It was only then that I realized he was talking about me.

  In the confusion, a man had come up behind me. Now his arm snaked around me, pulling me back into the corridor from which Lily had emerged, using me as a shield for both himself and Carrie. As he dragged me into a spiral stairwell, I twisted and writhed, catching a glimpse of his face.

  He was the dark-haired man. The Winter King.

  I slammed his arm against the wall, and he dropped his knife, but before I could reach it, Carrie tossed him hers, which he brought up against my throat. Beneath the blood clotting the blade I saw runes and a pattern of blue-gray whorls.

  Nothing is but what is not.

  I caught one last glimpse of Ben’s face before I was dragged backward up the stairs.

  46

  UP AND UP we wound, the blade cold against my throat, the stone wall on one side hot to the touch. It was the tower adjoining the stair turret that was burning. We passed floors opening onto rooms that were empty and others that were missing floors. On the fifth floor, all that remained of the corridor was a narrow ledge. I was pushed across it at knifepoint and shoved into a vaulted room holding a table, two high-backed chairs, and an unnecessary fire glowing in the grate. Two crumbling windows looked over the loch and the dark orange moon; wind moaned through the room.