Jack

by L. L. Muir

  As Jack walked out onto the battlefield, he tried to form a coherent argument just in case Soni was about. Though she was rarely on the moor in daylight these days, she might assume he was finished with his quest and ready to call it done. But he wasn’t.

  It was a fact, the closer he’d come to Culloden, the less finished he felt.

  Perhaps it was the habit born of 269 years, and then some, that compelled him to return and take a close look at the place with mortal eyes. And though he’d suggested to Callie it might be a mistake to come, Fate had delivered him in front of the memorial cairn once again.

  The light fingers of a breeze played around him, then moved on, uninterested. The air stilled, then grew heavy, and though he could not see his fellow spirits, he felt he was being watched. Did they recognize him without his milk-white hair? Did the color of his tartan seem familiar?

  His own vision seemed so much sharper, the colors of even the drying heather were beautiful to him now. Orange points of fern made the dying shrubbery seem festive.

  Harvest time.

  He could taste it.

  Time for warm fires and crisp wind that made your eyes water. But this small sampling was all he would have. Another day of living seemed generous indeed when all he had wished for, once upon a time, was another twenty minutes.

  His feet carried him to the edge of the moor where weather had unearthed a stone. He knew it well—knew the shape of it, both above and below ground. And though it seemed impossible, he wondered if all his ethereal stomping about had contributed to its unearthing.

  How many times had he stood here, since April of 1746?

  As he’d done hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, he lifted his gaze to the distance and looked for the stand of trees. Like a phoenix, they grew old, died, and were reborn again. Always in the same place. And always, the mist found them again.

  And always, the cry of a lone babe would reach out to him…

  Jack shook his head and blinked to clear away the memories. For there, in the middle of the field…grew nothing at all. Mosses that had bristled with life in the spring now lay dormant and faded along with the uninterrupted spread of heather. A defiant sprig of pink, here and there, hinted at the colors that recently abounded at the height of tourist season.

  Even though the trees were gone, merely figments of his haunted imagination, the goal was the same.

  One dramatic step at a time, his boots took him off the battlefield. Nothing stopped him. No demons rose up to snatch him down to hell. None of Culloden’s 79 begged him back again. After a point, he stopped and looked back to judge the distance to the rock. Then he turned and looked around him.

  “Here,” he whispered. “They should be here.”

  Whether he’d meant the trees or the woman, both appeared. Above his head, mist and branches wove an intricate pattern. The trunks of the trees grew round with life. The woman, with her green gown and black cloak, stood before him with no babe in her arms.

  “Ye’ve come, finally,” she said, her shoulders sagging as if she’d grown weary with waiting.

  “I’ve…been trying,” he explained.

  She nodded. “We did not die that day, as ye feared. Others came, and led us away.”

  “But the babe. I could hear him.” Jack lifted the carton of milk that had somehow turned into a wineskin, like before. “I brought milk…”

  Once again, she was seated at the base of one of the trees with a complaining babe in her arms.

  “Wheesht,” he crooned. “I’ve come back.”

  “I have this.” She lifted a hollow horn. “Pour it here.”

  He pulled the stopper on the wineskin and poured. The milk flowed smoothly into the wee hole. None of it splashed on the ground.

  The woman pushed a small piece of cloth into the hole, pushed a cork to hold it in place, then tipped up the bottom of the horn. The wee’un suckled the milk from the cloth, and its mother turned her tear-stained face up to smile at Jack.

  Just as it should have happened…

  “This,” he whispered. “This was my quest all along. My noble deed.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Business seemed a little slow at the visitor’s center that day. I saw only a couple of people ahead of me in the long corridor that held artifacts and pictures and told the story of the war, called The Rising, that ended in the Battle of Culloden Moor.

  What I found most interesting was that most stories stressed that getting a Stuart back on the throne was the end all/be all. But in the car, Jack had explained that most people were fighting against the union of Scotland and England. The Stuarts were just the best way to rally everyone to fight.

  Bonnie Prince Charlie, who had to be a tiny man to fit into the outfit on display, would have been pretty disappointed if he knew he was just an excuse. Apparently, he believed in some divine right of kings, and thought it was God’s will that he be king.

  Poor little guy.

  I prayed Jack wasn’t going to quiz me on all the details I ignored. If history was what made him happy, I was sure those details would sound much lovelier coming out of his mouth. And why listen to a regular old story when you can hear a man with a brogue tell it?

  I went into the theatre room and was an audience of one when the movie began to play on all walls, while I stood in the middle. It was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen. I didn’t last three minutes. And when I hurried out, no one in the weapons room seemed surprised. And the two people who’d gone before me looked a little shaken, too, as they wandered around staring at the actual weapons that had been used in the battle, or recovered from the ground.

  There was a reenactment going on in the middle of a table twice the size of a pool table, but I wasn’t interested in watching the details. The movie had made its point.

  I declined the offer of headphones, nodded when they warned the center would be closing soon, then hurried out the big glass doors to go find Jack. And I couldn’t think about Jack without thinking about that kiss…and how badly I wanted another one.

  He’d had some private time. Maybe he was feeling a little lonely too.

  I no longer doubted the possibility that my mother and John had fallen in love. They’d had two years together, and after that much time, it was probably difficult for John to be alone again. And I was glad he had an entire town eager to help him recover.

  They’d had two years. Jack and I had been together for about twenty-four hours, and already I knew I was going to have withdrawals. He was just so…comfortable. Like he’d always been there, invisible, sitting in the passenger seat of my life.

  The next twenty-four hours loomed like a big hourglass in front of my face, and the sands had already started to fall...

  I thought it would be an easy thing to find a man in a kilt on the battlefield, but I’d underestimated the size of that field. Flat would have been helpful, too. I had no choice but to strike out along the paths and hope I found him before the place shut down for the night—some of the blue flags looked a mile away.

  I passed an ancient cottage that looked like a combination of all three houses of the Three Little Pigs. Stones, sticks, and straw. Visitors posed for pictures in front of the little building, but I didn’t know the significance of it, and I was much more interested in finding my Scotsman than reading the little plaques.

  A good distance—and I mean a really good distance—beyond the house was a twenty-foot tall monument of stone that was flat on the top. I chose the path down one side of it and headed west. Or at least, I thought it was west. Either way, it was a bad decision, because the path in front of me was suddenly packed with a bunch of middle-school kids. Like a big flock of sheep jamming the road, I had to wait or risk twisting my ankle in the boggy spots to my right.

  Standing at the juncture of the bumpy section of ground and a field beyond, a darling young woman in a green cloak waited for the kids’ attention. She held a wooden pole with a sign at the top that read, “Ghost Story Lady.”

>   It was October. Of course they’d be telling ghost stories where so many men had died.

  After a minute, I realized it was kind of morbid to tell ghost stories in a cemetery, though plenty of people probably did it. Then I wondered if any of those ghosts ever rose up to complain, or to chase off the intruders.

  The girl pounded the bottom of her pole on a flat stone beside her. “Here lies the spirit of a man,” she called, “who died within the first seconds of the battle. A woman and child lay at the other end of this field, starving, waiting for the milk he’d promised to bring them. But before he could step off the battlefield, the round shot began to fly.”

  Watching the kids was as entertaining as listening to the girl. They shifted back and forth on their feet, probably trying to get warm, hoping she got to the good part so they could climb back onto a warm bus. Or maybe they were just nervous, wondering if a ghost might pop up out of the bumpy ground and order them to get out of his grave!

  “He never delivered the precious milk,” the girl continued. “But so determined was he, that his spirit refused to move on.”

  She held her hands wide and moved back and forth like an oscillating fan. “Look around, children! Notice the milk cartons strewn about by the wind. They say, if ye place a new box of milk on the stone at night, by morning it will be empty, as these are.”

  “A thirsty ghost?” A young heckler got a big laugh. Then his friends gasped when the robed figure seemed to fly forward, to get in his face. Her big eyes and wide smile made the kid relax again, but I suspected she was about to make him pee his pants.

  “The ghost of Jack MacGilles haunts these footpaths, laddie. And if ye’re ever unlucky enough to hear his whisper in yer ear, I suggest ye do as the milk man commands…and bring him some milk.” She pointed at a crushed carton lying in the dried heather. “As ye can see, ye willnae be the first.”

  Jack MacGilles? Milk man?

  I wondered if she’d just spoken so fast I only thought she’d said his name, or if my ear was just accustomed to hearing it.

  The mob started to spread out and I was able to walk through the gaps toward the other side, but my ear caught on the name being repeated to my right, then my left.

  “Jack MacGilles.”

  “Jack MacGilles.”

  I stopped to listen, to make sense of what I was hearing. Was Jack a cast member of Culloden’s Halloween entertainment? It would explain the costume.

  The man in mixed plaids came huffing along the path and stopped when he spotted the kids. “Glory be! Are ye deaf, then? Yer bus awaits ye, aye?”

  The young heckler pushed forward. “But where did she go?”

  “Where did who go?”

  “The Ghost Story Lady!”

  A dozen young heads nodded vigorously, and I started searching for a green cloak and a long pole sign. Kids ran to the monument, then around it, looking for her, which was just what I would have done, you know, if I ever ran anywhere. The man started herding them back toward the main path and the waiting bus now parked at the edge of the road, that was still quite a distance away.

  “Disappeared,” the kids whispered to each other. “She was a ghostie, too.”

  Though the breeze was gone, a chill ran up my spine and I laughed out loud—until I noticed how quiet it was. The bus and the children were gone, as in poof--including the kids that had been ten feet away from me only a second ago. It would have taken at least ten minutes to get everyone to and on the bus, and that was if they’d have been obedient!

  If they were all just playing a trick on me, I had to know, so I rubbed my cold hands together and marched back to the monument.

  Standing with his back against the stones, his eyes wide, was the brightly dressed man, who jumped when he saw me. “Are ye real then?”

  It was a serious question. He wasn’t joking. So I gave him a serious answer.

  “I am. Are you?”

  “Aye.” He stretched out his hand and we shook, as if testing each other. His hand was just as cold as mine, probably for the same reason. “James,” he said.

  “Callie.”

  “Ye saw the bairns?”

  I nodded.

  “And the woman the laddie spoke of?”

  I nodded again, waiting for him to say it was all a trick.

  “I didnae see her,” he said. “We’ve few female spirits here, as ye can imagine.”

  “She was telling them about the milk man?”

  “Auch, aye. I’ve heard Jack many a time. Brought him milk myself, truth be told. He’s a mite intimidatin’.”

  I decided I didn’t want to clarify Jack’s last name and gestured to the road, where the bus had been waiting. “Has that happened before?”

  The man shook his head, then laid his finger beside his nose, though I didn’t understand what that meant. “Ye never ken what ye’ll see, or hear, on the moor. Especially at the gloamin’.” He nodded toward the building. “Shall I walk ye back?”

  I shook my head. “My friend’s out here, somewhere.”

  “That’s me, then.” He put his fingertips to the edge of his cap in a quick salute, then moved around me, headed back toward the milk man’s stone. Just to make sure he didn’t disappear, I walked around the monument, and followed him.

  He got to the flat rock and started collecting the little white cartons off the ground. There were more than half a dozen in his arms before he straightened and headed toward the Visitor’s Center.

  They looked a lot like the carton of milk Jack bought at the gas station, and I wondered if he’d simply been following a tradition, bringing the milk man what he asked for.

  But the girl said Jack MacGilles was the milk man…

  I laughed out loud again, just to scare away the wild thought trying to plant itself in my brain—that I’d just heard a ghost story, told by a ghost, to the ghosts of children—about the man who’d been holding my hand all day…

  Happy Freaking Halloween.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Someone called Jack’s name. He faced the battlefield, but couldn’t see beyond the mist. When he turned back, the babe was gone and the woman stood before him again, empty handed. “Come with me, Jack. I’ve been waitin’ to show ye the way.” She gestured off to the south, then held out her hand.

  “Jack, please!”

  It wasn’t Soni’s voice beckoning him, it was Callie’s. He narrowed his eyes and the mist faded to nothing. She stood not five feet away with her own hand out to him.

  “If you go now, I’ll wish I had twenty more minutes with you. Won’t you wish the same thing?”

  He grinned at her. “I’ll wish for twenty years, lass. And twenty after that. I’m greedy when it comes to ye. But aye, I’d give up the peace this woman offers for a mere twenty minutes.” He reached out and took her hand before he dared look behind him. When he did, the woman was gone, along with the mist and the trees. The shapes of Culloden were merging with the evening shadows. The night birds began to stir.

  He pulled Callie into his arms, not wanting to waste another moment. Before he bent to kiss her, he tipped his head back and shouted. “Twenty-minutes, Soncerae. Dinna come before then!”

  The bar at Culloden House wasn’t so much a bar as it was a living room. In a castle. Where you’re allowed to hold a drink.

  I sat in front of the fireplace, trying in vain to get warm. Jack sat across from me on a red velvet couch that matched my own. There were possibly twenty other people in the room, but it seemed like less because it was just so massive, with furniture arranged in little groups for conversations. We had the best spot in the house, but no one tried to join us. Maybe they could tell, by the looks on our faces, that we were having a very intense conversation.

  Although we hadn’t spoken since we sat down.

  Thank goodness I had my drink to keep my hands busy.

  “Callie,” he said, and I jumped. “Ye seem calm considering ye’ve just seen a ghostie.”

  “A ghostie? A ghostie?” I shook m
y head and laughed. “That woman wasn’t the first ghost I’d seen tonight.”

  “Oh?”

  I told him about the kids, the bus, and the fact that I wasn’t the only living soul to have witnessed it. Then I said the words I’d been waiting to say since I’d seen him, standing in that field.

  “You’re the milk man, aren’t you? The ghost the woman was talking about? Or rather the man the ghost girl was telling the ghost kids about.”

  He shook his head and frowned. “Tell me again about the lass. Ye say she wore a green cloak? Were there, by chance, shiny stones around the cuffs?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Then she was no ghostie. That was Soncerae, the mischievous wee witch who gave me life again and delivered me to that pub, in Fort William, with the express order to perform some heroic deed. I assumed aiding a charming American woman was the deed expected of me.”

  “Charming was nice, but I’m still stuck on the gave-me-life-again part. So you’re saying you are the milk man.”

  He leaned forward, set his drink on the table, and hung his head in his hands. “Aye, lass. I have been called such.”

  “Sooo… When I say milk man, I mean…”

  “Ghost. Aye.”

  “Forgive me if I’m a little slow, here. I rarely drink whisky. But, if you’re the milk man, and the milk man is a ghost, that makes you…” He was going to make her say it! “A ghost.”

  “Yer math is fine. Drink up.”

  I emptied my glass, then I stood up, joined him on the other couch, and hit his arm. “Oh! I’m so sorry!” I lowered my voice. “I thought my hand was supposed to move right through you.” Then I hiccupped.

  He waved at someone behind me, then just held my hands, rubbing them like he had the night before. A few minutes later, a nicely dressed waiter brought me a cup of coffee and a big smile. “Ye’ll find the Kelpie whisky quite powerful, aye?”

  Since I figured he was talking to me, I answered, “Aye.”