Storm at the Edge of Time

by Pamela F. Service

  Carefully she inched forward. The stones were cold and slick with dampness. After maybe eight feet, she could feel the space open out around her. Cautiously she lifted her head. Weak gray light filtered through a hole in the ceiling, now ten feet above. Slowly her eyes made out a stone-paved floor and walls of stacked stone that gradually slanted inward until they formed the roof. She also saw, resting on the floor, a yellow flashlight with some government logo stamped on it.

  Gratefully Jamie grabbed it up and by its weak beam made out patches of deeper darkness in the walls, entrances to low side chambers. No way she’d crawl into those and maybe get stuck. She switched off the light, leaned against the cold walls, and tried to pick up ghostly vibrations.

  After ten minutes, all she felt was cold and hunger. From her jacket pocket, she pulled the soda and slightly squashed pie. Luncheon in a 5,000-year-old tomb. Weird. She frowned. “Weird” as in “offbeat,” not as in “creepy.” She felt cold, cramped, and kind of closed in, yes, but she didn’t feel a whiff of fear. This was just the sort of place fantasy writers described. But where were the wispy wraiths, the grasping skeletal hands? The only ghastly things she’d seen were little black slugs.

  Wadding up the pie wrappers, she jammed them into a pocket and pulled out her camera. In the sharp sudden light of the flash, the dark recesses and shadowy stone walls became clear, close, and even more un-spooky.

  Closing her eyes, Jamie tried again to sense that she was surrounded by something other than cold, lifeless air and piled-up stone. With her feelings, she reached and reached until she touched a chill, spreading fear. The same fear she’d felt before, but it had grown. The fear that her one talent was just an empty hope, a grasping for worth where there was none. Heavy and cold, the fear spread through her.

  No! She knew she was right. It was the place that was wrong. It was too old. Wind and rain had scoured away the ancient spirits centuries ago. But surely somewhere on this island conditions were right for ghosts. There must be something, other than a stupid nagging doubt, to be frightened of.

  Angrily Jamie crouched down and began crawling back out the low, dank passage. She moved too fast, but ignored the scrapes and bruises. At last she edged past the rusty gate and stood up.

  Suddenly she was very frightened indeed.

  Chapter Four

  The world was gone. A few feet in front of her there was nothing but gray. Grayness in all directions. It was like in one of those books. She’d gone through a door in her world and come out in another. In a world of gray nothing.

  It was gray and wet, like mist. Like a cloud, that was all! The cloud had crept farther down the hill while she’d been inside the cairn. Around her, the usual raging wind was muffled into a ghostly sigh.

  Jamie felt a quick surge of relief, but it just as quickly faded. In this mist, she’d have a hard time finding the path back. She thought of that Sherlock Holmes story about a ghostly hound in which someone strays off a misty path and gets sucked into the mire.

  She’d left the government flashlight back in the tomb, but it was too weak to do much good here. With her eyes on the ground a few feet ahead, she slowly set out, trying to remember her route. Past the gate, turn right. Go uphill.

  For a while the path was clear enough, cutting through peat, heather, and coarse curly grass. Sometimes where the ground was boggy, the path braided, but the strands always came back together. Once, taking a branch that petered out, she had to backtrack to the other. A white wooden arrow solidifying out of the mist showed she was right.

  Instead of thinning, the mist seemed to be getting denser. A white wall of silence bounded her world, shrinking it to a few feet of boggy hillside. Then Jamie realized she had lost the path altogether. She’d sidestepped around a particularly muddy patch, and now there was nothing in sight but untrampled heather.

  Panic seeped like cold from the ground. This wasn’t some half-remembered story read in the warmth of her room. It was real, it was now, and she was the person wandering lost. Frantically Jamie stumbled about, looking for the trail.

  There it was, a little trench of hard earth cut through the heather. Swiftly and gratefully she followed it, eager to be free of this nightmare. But the trail led on and on and didn’t rise when she thought it should. And there were no helpful white arrows along the way. At last Jamie admitted this was just a sheep trail.

  But surely she couldn’t be too far from some road or farm by now. She called out a hello. The sound fell to the ground, heavy and muffled. She tried again, but the blanketing mist soaked up the words almost as soon as they left her mouth.

  Jamie strained her ears. Had that been an answer? She called out again, and again came an answering call. She looked around, straining to see through the mist.

  “Where are you?” No answer, but she saw a smudge of darkness in the mist ahead. With a sigh of relief, Jamie stumbled forward.

  Again she called. Still no answer, but the shape seemed clearer. It was moving along the same path as she. Another hiker? Putting on speed, she tried to catch up. She could see more clearly now. He or she was short. A child? Closer, and the moving object was taking shape. A wide, four-legged shape. It was a sheep.

  In shock, Jamie stopped and stared. The sheep stopped too, gazing back at her with calm blue eyes. Then it turned and trotted on ahead.

  What choice had she now? Shrugging, she followed. Even sheep go somewhere.

  Her woolly guide faded in and out of the mist but always stayed enough in sight to keep Jamie on the trail. Slowly other vague shapes began to form through the mist—a fence post, a stunted hedge.

  Then suddenly she had stepped below the cloud. The island, sea, and inland loch spread out before her. In the west, other clouds had folded themselves along the horizon. At that moment, two slid apart, loosing a shaft of sunlight onto the landscape below. In a golden river, it slid across the fields. That house on the edge of the light, surely that was hers. Yes, across from it was the lone standing stone. And from here, Jamie could see the chain of stones and stone circles that were clearly linked to it. Together they glowed in that path of light.

  She laughed with relief, and in front of her the sheep bleated. It gave her another blue-eyed stare, then trotted quickly down the hillside. Happily Jamie ran after it, but she didn’t need a four-footed guide anymore. The ground was firm, and she could see her goal. She stopped once, exuberantly taking a picture, then hurried on. When she turned to wave to her guide, it was gone, probably settled into the grass somewhere.

  By the time Jamie got home it was early evening, but her parents weren’t back yet. They’d stay out watching birds until last light, she knew. Exhausted, she went upstairs and changed out of her dank, stained clothes.

  Looking out her window, she saw that the clouds had closed in on the sun again, but she could clearly see the tall dark stone standing alone in the field. In her mind, Jamie again saw the pattern which it and the other stones had made, linked together in that golden path of light.

  The picture brought an odd tugging into her mind. Uneasily she tried to shake it away. It seemed to be tugging toward something dark and dangerous—something that reminded her of how, as a little kid, she’d played she had supernatural powers, until that horrible time when one of them seemed to work. She’d been wrong, of course. Surely she hadn’t been able to move that glass with her mind, but the chasm that the moment had shown her had been deep and frightening.

  Jamie shook her head firmly. No, it definitely wasn’t make-believe powers or mysterious ancient stones that interested her. It was ghosts. The ghost of some fallen soldier or murdered heiress—a spirit she had a special talent to see, a spirit she could link to some real, understandable past. If she could just crank out a little more patience, she knew she’d find it.

  The next morning it was raining. Not a gentle rain, but rain that the wind snatched up and hurled like BBs against the windowpanes. Her parents postponed their birding plans for the day and decided to go into town to look at the
museum. Jamie chose to stay behind and delve into the suitcaseful of ghost stories she’d brought along. To use up her film, she took one last picture out her window into the rain, then sent the roll with her parents, hoping they’d find a quick developer. Kirkwall was a tourist town, after all.

  The book she started was pretty good, but Jamie had trouble getting into it. A couple of kids whose teacher’s house was haunted were trying to help him find where the ghost’s unburied bones were. What annoyed her was reading about this sort of thing when she should be living it. When her parents returned, she was in a thoroughly rotten mood, but hope soared again when they handed her a packet of developed photos.

  Charging up the stairs, Jamie plunked onto her squeaky bed and tore open the packet. She flipped through the photos, each one driving her a little further into gloom. The spare room, the kitchen, the parlor: all perfectly ordinary rooms. Not one misty shape where nothing should have been, not one unexplained shadow. The outside pictures hadn’t even captured the windy wildness of the night. The only touch of quirkiness was where the flash had reflected in blue glints from the eyes of the owl perched on the standing stone. It gave her a moment’s shiver, but it was nothing. She got a similar effect when she took a picture of her cat at home.

  The cemetery pictures were just as useless: no glowing inscriptions on the stones, no pale auras lingering over the grass. The shots on the foggy hillside were a total washout, and the inside of the burial cairn looked like a cozy stone house.

  At the next picture, she gasped. Nothing supernatural, but a good picture. No, a great one—like a professional postcard shot. It was taken from the hillside, looking over shadowed fields to a slate-gray sea. Mountainous clouds were slashed by a chasm of light, and through it a stream of sunlight poured across the island, highlighting the chain of ancient stones. The one flaw was that the sheep in the foreground had caught the light so that its eyes looked like two glowing blue marbles. Weird, but just another trick of the light.

  She sighed, tossing the snapshot onto her bed. The only good picture, and it would be of those wretched stones. The glowing blue aura in the last photo gave her a brief surge of hope, but it was just the reflection of the flash in her window. Fuzzily, through it and the rain, she could make out the standing stone with another stupid bird on top. Great, a clean sweep. A hundred-percent waste of film!

  Smoldering, she stomped downstairs.

  Two days later Jamie had read most of the books she’d brought and, out of intense boredom, had agreed to go birding with her parents. On the drive to the island’s west coast, she paid little attention to their bird chatter. When they finally parked the car and all started crossing a field, she fell behind, stopping to watch some cows grazing. She found them impressively big.

  Looking up, Jamie realized that her parents had disappeared over the top of a hill. She plodded after them. The hill sloped up steeply, giving the feeling of climbing right into the cloud-racked sky. She reached the top and gasped. There was nothing below.

  Ten feet in front of her, the land dropped abruptly away. In the distance beyond, gray sky and sea almost blended together. At the base of the cliff, she could hear surf pounding onto rocks.

  Her fear of heights hit with the same force as the wind, and she staggered back. Crouching down against both, she clutched the grass and dizzily scanned the clifftop for her parents. She spotted them, in their turquoise jackets, some thirty feet away. They were lying on their stomachs above a narrow cove, studying the opposite cliff with binoculars. Fighting back queasiness, she crawled along the ridge to join them.

  “Careful of those burrows,” her mother yelled over the wind, pointing to small dark holes slanting into the sandy earth. “They’re mostly old rabbit burrows—the puffins use them as nests during the summer. It’s still early for puffins, but there are some great gannets over there.”

  Jamie was handed the binoculars and dutifully looked through them at some long-necked white birds with dirty-yellow heads. Big deal. Actually she wouldn’t half mind seeing some puffins—funny fat bouncy birds with huge, colorful beaks. She sighed. It was too much to ask to have any birds about worth looking at.

  She handed the glasses back to her mother and, using her parents as windbreaks, snuggled into the sand and grass. Maybe she could imagine being a puffin tucked into its burrow. No, she wouldn’t even imagine being that close to a cliff edge. How about flat beaches instead? Flat, warm, sunny beaches. Flamingos flying over. Palm trees swaying in a soft quiet breeze.

  She managed to drift into sleep, but the rain awakened her. It started as big heavy drops, splashing little craters in the sandy soil. Then the drops became smaller and harder. They bounced off the ground like tiny marbles. Hail.

  “Back to the car,” her father said. Jamie couldn’t believe the reluctance in his voice, but she jumped up and tore down the slope, past the grazing cows, and into the car. When her parents joined her, she found their conversation equally hard to believe.

  “It’ll pass over soon,” her mother assured them. “There’s a major seabird sanctuary marked farther down the coast. Let’s head there.”

  Stifling a groan, Jamie said, “Sounds delightful, but could you drop me off at the house first?”

  “That’s a bit out of our way,” her mother commented.

  Her father was studying the map. “How about a compromise? It looks as if we can take this road and let you off where it crosses this other one. Then it’s a straight walk back to the house. Kind of a long one, but the hail’s stopped and the day’s still young.”

  “Yeah, fine,” Jamie agreed. Anything but more birds.

  When she stepped from the car at the crossroads the wind hit again, but already the sky’s gray cloak was tearing and blue was showing through. Recalling the map, she turned east and headed down the road, stepping to the grassy verge whenever a car passed.

  The way ahead was obvious even without a map. A single road dipped to where two lochs pinched closer and closer until the land was only a narrow strip. When the land broadened out again, the road would lead almost directly to their house.

  Abruptly Jamie stopped. She remembered something else, not from the map but from the view two nights earlier from the other side of this valley. This route also followed the chain of ancient standing stones and circles she had seen spotlighted after the sheep led her from the mist.

  She suddenly felt angiy and oddly afraid. Every time she turned around, there were those stones again—birds perching on them, sheep pointing them out—and now her only route home passed by them. It was almost as if she was supposed to go there. She turned a shiver into an angry shrug. Jamie Halcro was not the sort of person who liked to be told where to go!

  With an annoyed laugh, she started walking again. The stones kept showing up because there happened to be a lot of them around here. A lot more stones than ghosts, that was for sure. But if a search for ghosts didn’t scare her, why should a few old stones?

  The sun was making her feel better. On both sides of the road, the lochs were a sparkling blue, and the wind had dropped from a gale to a strong breeze. Overhead, it rolled billowy white clouds across a blue sky, casting a moving pattern of cloud shadows over the fields and the sweep of darker hills. What Jamie at first thought were whitecaps on the water turned out to be swans—wild swans, not the tame type people threw breadcrumbs to in parks.

  Ahead and to the right, she could see what must be a stone circle. Again a twinge of fear jabbed her, but she pushed it down. This was one of the things people came here to see. What could be the harm in walking past it?

  The closer she got, the more impressive the circle seemed. It was larger than she’d imagined, maybe 300 feet across, and the stones—big irregular slabs—were taller. Some were missing, but it was easy to tell where they had stood to complete the circle.

  Now she was passing the gate of the fenced-off enclosure. Across the road was a small parking lot with a few cars, but there were no guides or admission takers at the ga
te. She really ought to go in, she told herself. It was supposed to be a big local deal, and she was right here. At the same time, a nagging fear whispered that she shouldn’t do what everything had been pushing her to do.

  Well, I won’t be pushed around by stupid nameless fears either, she said to herself, and walked through the gate.

  Briefly she joined a pair of Asian tourists at several information plaques. This circle, a little younger than one farther up the road, dated from the third millennium B.C. That was old. And like her dad said, no one was quite sure why such circles were built, except that the purpose was probably religious or astronomical. A second plaque went on at length about keeping to the paths so the “natural heather mat” could be reestablished. Jamie followed the path across a deep ditch to the circle itself.

  The stones almost all towered over her. Wide and flat, they were broken at the top into sharp angles, looking like large, rotting teeth. The thought made her shiver again. Deliberately she walked up to a stone twice her height and gingerly touched it. Its surface was smoother than she’d expected, like fine sandpaper, and the reddish gray was flecked with specks of glitter and splotched with lichen—irregular patches of white, orange, yellow, and even pale blue. It was also warm, as though greedily soaking up the rare sunshine. For a while she stood on the stone’s sunny side, letting its broad shape shield her from the wind.

  Then, slowly, Jamie began walking around the circle, following the path of mown grass just inside the stones. The inner part of the circle was covered with low purplish heather. She wondered what the circle looked like from the center.

  She veered from the path only to find a small insistent white sign at her feet—Keep to the Perimeter Path—fussily protecting the precious heather mat.