Storm at the Edge of Time

by Pamela F. Service

  Laughing wryly, Jamie sat up. Her brother always teased her by claiming that she was at least stubborn enough to be a lawyer—stubborn and goal-oriented. Well, now she had a goal.

  With renewed energy, she trotted back downstairs and got her overnight bag out of the car. The house-rental lady was just leaving. Jamie wavered a moment, then decided. If she was going to make a fool of herself, she might as well get started.

  “Excuse me,” Jamie said as the woman opened her car door. “This is really an old house. I suppose it must be haunted—at least a little bit?”

  The woman looked shocked. “Haunted? No, no, don’t you worry. I never heard of it being haunted, I assure you.”

  “No, really, it wouldn’t bother us,” Jamie said urgently. “I mean we’d still want to rent it and everything.”

  “Well, I am glad of that. But I am sure that everyone who lived in this house was too well behaved to leave any ghosts about.” Smiling weakly, the woman climbed into her car and drove away.

  Jamie just stared after the car. “Too well behaved?” she said to herself. “Bah! Too boring, more likely.”

  Her “bah” was echoed from across the road, where several sheep grazed on the coarse grass. One of them rubbed itself on a tall irregular stone standing in the pasture. From the gray sky, a seagull flashed down and landed on the stone. Looking at Jamie with sharp blue eyes, it let out a raucous laughing cry.

  “Shut up, you stupid bird!” Jamie snapped as she tromped back inside. “The sheep has it right. ‘Bah’ on the whole thing.” With an indignant-sounding squawk, the bird flew off over the fields.

  That night they made dinner from cans of soup, spaghetti, and rice pudding they found in the cupboard. Boring, but Jamie wasn’t too interested in food. Her stomach was still reliving the ferry trip, and her head was still out of whack after the jet flight from the United States. She poked at her meal while her parents talked eagerly of the bird species they hoped to see.

  “It’s the right season for skuas and kittiwakes,” her father said. “Did you know, Jamie, that there are over three hundred and thirty species of birds on the Orkney Islands, and even more when you count the occasional visitors?”

  “You have mentioned it,” she said dryly.

  “It’s an ornithologist’s paradise, all right,” her mother said enthusiastically. “The flat limestone beds weather into ideal ledges for nest building, and the moorlands support an amazing variety of raptors.”

  Jamie wasn’t even interested enough to say something sarcastic.

  Her room was bitterly cold when she went upstairs. She rummaged in her bag for a nightgown, but the one she found clearly wasn’t warm enough. Her parents had warned her to pack warm things, but that had been hard to do when it was already getting hot and humid back home. After a quick dash to the bathroom and a battle with the uncooperative plumbing, she leaped into bed wearing both nightgown and bathrobe and pulled the down-filled comforter up to her chin. Too cold to even think of sleeping, she watched a patch of moonlight slide slowly over the flowered wallpaper.

  Cold moonlight shining on a barren island in the middle of a dark icy sea. Her brother was probably seeing the same moonlight pouring over a warm tropical sea as he walked with friends in soft sands and breathed perfumes from exotic flowers. How could he have everything—all the talent, all the prospects, all the luck? Her “spring break” promised to be an ordeal, and the chances of using it to prove her one natural talent were looking grim.

  She woke up in the dead of night. Her body still seemed to be on U.S. time and was giving her all the wrong signals. The moon patch had moved from wall to ceiling, but there was no change in the ceaseless blowing of the wind. She felt fully awake. Should she read one of the stack of ghost stories she’d brought along?

  No, that’d be admitting defeat. Here she was in the middle of the night in a 300-year-old Scottish house. No matter what the rental agent said, this place must have a filmy lady in white or some gaunt tormented specter floating about. Not everyone was as sensitive as she was. They couldn’t see those things, that was all.

  If she was going to ghost-hunt, though, Jamie decided, she’d better take along a camera as backup. She’d read that sometimes ghosts invisible to the human eye could be captured on film.

  Climbing from her now warm cocoon of a bed, she quickly pulled on jeans, sweater, jacket, and sneakers. Then, grabbing up camera and flashlight, she tiptoed out onto the landing.

  Her father’s steady snoring rumbled from the other front bedroom, but otherwise the only sound was the wind playing roughly with the roof slates. The landing did not look promisingly ghostly.

  Putting her hand to the knob of the unoccupied bedroom, Jamie dramatically flung open the door. The window was a pale smudge of light in the far wall, but even in the misty moonlight there were no filmy shapes, no mysterious lights. It didn’t feel even vaguely eerie. It was just an unused, cold, and slightly damp bedroom. Without much hope, she took a couple of flash pictures and returned to the landing.

  Well, that was just one room.

  Slowly Jamie crept downstairs. What with the noise of the wind and her father’s snoring, she could have charged down, but tiptoeing was what one did in a haunted house.

  She slipped into each room, stood silently, and tried to sense supernatural vibrations. Nothing. All Jamie felt was cold: not the soul-chilling cold of the grave, but just plain cold. She’d flick on her flashlight and check the walls hoping to spot secret passages that had been walled over, tormented skeletons trapped behind. Nothing but smooth cheery wallpaper. Methodically she took pictures, convinced that she was wasting film.

  People didn’t call her stubborn for nothing, she told herself. There was still the outside.

  Easing open the back door, Jamie slipped out. The wind battered her with cold, but with no particular sense of evil. In the low moonlight, the house cast an inky shadow over the backyard. Promising. But through it, there wafted no pale woman in white. Big surprise, Jamie thought disgustedly. In this climate, nobody, alive or dead, would waft around in filmy white draperies.

  Taking pictures, she walked to the dilapidated stone outbuildings and shone her light inside. An old carriage house, without the faintest outline of ghostly carriages or misty white mares. Just a sawhorse, some lumber, and a jumble of old tools. Thoroughly annoyed, she tromped around the house to the front yard.

  Pale, shivering shapes were moonlit daffodils twisting in the wind. Jamie glared up at the old house. Its bland stone face slept contentedly. The dark windows opened onto no terrible secrets. The splotches on wall and roof were lichen, not blood. The—

  Something white wavered on the peak of the roof, glimmering in the moonlight. It shifted, changed shape, and floated through the air toward her. In sudden terror, Jamie crouched on the grass. With a mournful cry, the thing sailed over her head, glaring at her with ice-blue eyes. Then it swooped over the wall and landed on the tall stone in the pasture across the road. Trembling, Jamie stood as the thing settled its silvered shape onto the stone. Again, it cried into the night.

  An owl.

  Her parents could probably tell her what kind of owl. Big and white, with blue eyes and a cry like a soul in torment. But just a dumb bird! With a final cry, it flew off westward over the fields.

  Angrily, Jamie snapped a few pictures in the yard and stomped back toward the house. All this spooky atmosphere, and the only thing that frightened her was a stupid owl!

  No, that wasn’t true, she admitted when she stepped inside, out of the wind. There was another tiny fear growing in her. A fear that even if this place was filled with things supernatural, she would not know it. A fear that maybe she was no good at this either.

  No, no, no! she felt like screaming to the dark, placid house. This was her talent. She just had to find the right place to practice it. And Jamie Halcro was never one to give up. She had two weeks on this wretched island, and if it held one shred of a ghost, she would find it!

  Chapter
Three

  At least the cupboard’s stocked with marmalade,” Mr. Halcro said, plunking a jar onto the table. “The staple of the English breakfast.”

  “That, and frying everything in a lake of grease,” his wife added.

  Bundled up in the chilly dining room, Jamie was not interested in the breakfast habits of the British, only in their haunting habits—or lack thereof.

  She had roughly shoved away last night’s doubts and was now forming a battle plan. But the failure of her first effort still annoyed her, as did the fact that the only thing that had sent shivers up her spine was a stupid blue-eyed bird landing on a tall rock.

  She glanced out the window at the gray wind-churned morning. The top of that tall stone was just visible beyond their wall, taunting her. “Why did they bother to set up that big rock in the pasture over there?” she asked sharply as she spread marmalade on toast. “Just as a sheep back-scratcher?”

  Her father followed her gaze out the window. “The standing stone there? No, that’s really ancient. That’s one of the things these islands are noted for: their Neolithic monuments. Our guidebooks say that this stone is part of a whole chain of standing stones and stone circles leading across the middle part of the island. They’re supposed to be about five thousand years old.”

  “What did they set them up for?”

  “No one knows for sure, except that it was probably something astronomical, lining up with sunrises and eclipses and such—like Stonehenge in England.”

  “Oh. So they’re not gravestones or anything?”

  “No; more like temples, I guess.”

  With a discouraged shrug, Jamie turned to her canned peaches. For a moment, she’d thought that the reason the owl and stone had seemed so creepy was that there was really some sort of ancient cemetery out there and that she’d been picking up ghostly vibrations. So much for that theory.

  Sitting across from her, Jamie’s mother was jotting down a list on the back of an old envelope. “Sorry, no birding excursions, Doug, until we go into town and stock up on groceries. You’ll want to come too, Jamie. Kirkwall’s supposed to be an interesting town, and the bus line stops right by this house, so you can go in on your own later if you don’t want to go birding with us.”

  “Got that right,” Jamie muttered. How, she wondered for the thousandth time, could two grown people get such a kick out of sitting still for hours watching birds? She considered asking them what sort of local white owl had blue eyes, but thought better of it. They’d probably tell her at great length.

  In the car on the way to town, Jamie’s father lectured on the variety of seagulls that could be found in the Orkneys, and then slid into a discussion of the local economy. “Beats me how folks ever made much of a living here. Sheep and fish mostly. One of the big exports seems to have been dried seaweed. It’s no wonder my ancestors cleared out.”

  His wife laughed. “The way you used to go on about it made it sound as if your ancestors held grand estates in the Scottish isles.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” he said indignantly. “All I knew was that my ancestors emigrated from the Orkney Islands a couple of hundred years ago. Of course, I may have embroidered the details just a little.”

  Jamie had been half listening, half watching the landscape. They came to a small town, just a cluster of houses really, with a church and cemetery. For a moment she was afraid that this was the big town of Kirkwall. But they drove on through.

  When they did get to the capital of the Orkney Islands, it didn’t seem much bigger. There was a little harbor smelling of sea, oil, and coal smoke, and back from the water were several shopping streets. In addition to the few grocery stores and bakeries, there were numerous shops apparently dedicated to selling toy puffins, jewelry, and wool sweaters to tourists.

  These streets also seemed the place for the local teenagers to hang out, flaunting their toughness in the cold by wearing jeans and tank tops. Jamie could feel them looking her over and pegging her by her stylish warm clothes as a clueless tourist. She blushed with resentment until she thought about how awful it would be to be stuck here year round. What was there to do besides watch puffins and bother tourists? Good thing her father’s family had got up and gone.

  In the center of the town stood a red stone cathedral surrounded by an old-looking cemetery. This might be a place to try and scare up some ghosts, but would any hang around a busy town square with cars and trucks rumbling by? Maybe the little cemetery they’d passed on the way would do better.

  When they had finally finished shopping and were heading back, Jamie suggested they drop her off at the village so she could do some walking and exploring.

  “You don’t want to go to Deerness and look for guillemots?” her mother chuckled. “Well, I suppose there are worse forms of teenage rebellion than rejecting birds.”

  “Mother!” Jamie objected. “It’s not the birds I mind, it’s the hours spent watching them. They’ve got enough sense not to sit around and watch us, after all.”

  Her father sighed theatrically. “Well, at least take this guidebook and map so you can figure out what you’re seeing and how to get back.”

  Once they’d let her off, Jamie stuffed the guidebook and map into one of her pockets and walked toward the church and its little walled cemetery.

  Opening the creaking iron gate, she slipped in. It was a lot quieter here than in town. Other than the wind, she heard only a few droning cars and an occasional distant voice or barking dog. Much better for ghosts.

  Systematically she walked up and down the ragged rows of tombstones, taking pictures but feeling nothing—not the faintest twinge of the supernatural. The only thing that startled her was suddenly seeing her own last name on a tombstone. Halcro. Then she found several other Halcros scattered about. So her father’s family had come from around here. Good. Maybe if she had some kind of link, the ghosts would be more cooperative.

  She sat on the grass beside the lichen-splotched stone of Duncan Halcro. The writing was worn, but the dates looked like “1706—1753.” She closed her eyes, spread her hands over the grass, and felt—nothing. Minutes passed. Still nothing. Whatever had happened to Duncan Halcro in 1753, it hadn’t left him an unquiet spirit waiting to be summoned by some distant descendant.

  Discouraged, Jamie got up and walked away from the headstones to sit on the cold stone steps of the little church. Searching her pockets for a candy bar, she found the map and guidebook and pulled them out.

  Halfheartedly she flipped open the guidebook. Now, where else might she find ghosts? This whole island seemed to be dotted with “megalithic chambered cairns”: earth-covered stone tombs where the people of 5,000 years ago buried their dead. One of the cairns, Maes Howe, was considered the best example of this sort of thing in all of Europe. There was also an admission price and a guide to take you through it.

  Forget that. Jamie doubted any 5,000-year-old ghost would hang out in a tourist trap. But according to the guidebook, there were also smaller cairns around the countryside that people could just walk into if they wanted. Maybe she’d have better luck there.

  Unfolding the map, she studied it for a while and finally found where she was, a village with a “cemy” marked beside it. Kind of a cheery abbreviation for a usually gloomy sort of place. She also found several cairns marked on the nearby hills. Jamie looked up from the map. Gray and windy, not exactly a great day for a walk, but so far that seemed the only kind of weather they had here. A walk sounded better than hanging around a totally unhaunted house all afternoon.

  At a small corner store Jamie bought a meat pie and a soda for lunch; then she set off along the road shown on the map. She passed a few modern houses, but the rest were old ones built of gray stone. The only color in the landscape came from nodding daffodils and laundry on clotheslines flapping in the constant wind. The hills were all gray-green or purple-brown heather. Her dad said that heather in bloom was a beautiful bright purple. April was obviously not the month it bloomed.


  The higher she climbed, the fewer the houses. Sheep grazed behind stone walls, and the wind filled the air with a steady dry roar. The tops of the hills had disappeared in cloud, not fluffy white but a frayed blanket of gray.

  She stopped and struggled with the wind to unfold the map. Already she seemed to have missed the turnoff to one cairn, but there should be another one ahead. On the ground, these roads certainly didn’t look the way they did on the map. Jamie trudged on, getting hungry but refusing to stop and eat until she had reached her goal.

  At last she came to a parking lot where a small sign marked “Chambered Cairn” pointed to a path. It was narrow, little more than a sheep track worn in the springy ground. Peat, Jamie guessed. Weren’t peat bogs like quicksand, the kind of place people sank into and were never heard of again? She kept carefully to the path and watched for the white wooden arrows marking the way.

  The path slanted down the hillside. Above, the clouds were creeping lower, but below she could see headlands, bays, and the silver sweep of ocean. The only sounds were the wind and the ciy of birds riding upon it.

  Where was this wretched cairn? If she wanted an out-of-the-way grave site, this certainly was it. The little arrows kept urging her on. Then the path split. One fork angled up, disappearing into cloud, but the lower one led to a distant rectangle of fence surrounding a hump of earth. She grunted. This had better be good.

  When she finally reached the entrance to the tomb, Jamie realized that the guidebook’s phrase “walk in and visit on your own” hadn’t been quite right. “Walk in” if you were a foot high, maybe.

  A little grilled gate closed off the entrance. She tugged on it and it creaked open. Good sound effects.

  The low passage was made of large stone slabs forming the walls, floor, and ceiling. At the entrance, a few black slugs slithered slowly across the stone. Trying not to squash them, Jamie got on her hands and knees and started crawling. Her body blocked out most of the light. Suppose the passage ahead dropped into a pit, she thought suddenly with a jolt of fear that had nothing to do with ghosts. She didn’t mind tight places, but she really hated heights and even the thought of falling. Still, she wouldn’t give up now.