Waterfall Glen

by Davie Henderson

  And it was the quality of light, subtly transformed in ways more magical than any filter on a lens could achieve: soft in some places, hard in others; falling in bright tigerstriping or enchanted, slanting beams and shafts with little universes suspended in them; or hanging in ethereal, pearlescent mists.

  Maybe it was instinct, maybe it was just an overwrought imagination, but the forest outside Blace had seemed strangely different. He’d felt that from the moment he set foot in it. There were no slanting shafts of daylight, just bone-chilling tendrils of mist. The trees were gnarled and twisted, more dead than alive. The branches lacked leaves and the wind didn’t whisper through them, it howled and wailed and moaned. Raindrops gathered on the bare branches like tears on eyelashes before falling to the ground in a ceaseless sobbing, and he had the feeling that if you drank from the little hollows where the water pooled it would be as bitter as bile. It seemed like a place that spring would never reach, let alone summer; where sweet-scented flowers would never blossom and butterflies would never flutter their brightly-colored wings. It was a place where you could feel lonely even when surrounded by other people, and lost even when you had a map in one hand and a compass in the other. It was a place that held shadows where there shouldn’t be any; where the silences could be uncomfortably long, and far more disturbing than any sound.

  It was a place where rumour had it the inhabitants of a village had been taken after being rounded up in the middle of the night.

  The rumour said that the villagers had been herded into a clearing in the trees, and never came out of the forest again.

  Even before Cameron’s unit came across the forest clearing, with its tell-tale dark swath of recently disturbed earth, he’d known instinctively that the rumour was true.

  Cameron thought he’d seen the worst things a person could see at the bottom of that hastily covered pit…

  But a few days later, in another forest, he realized he’d been wrong. It wasn’t just that there were twice as many bodies this time, it was the fact that they were ethnic Serbs, not Albanians. It was the shocking realisation that there were no good guys or bad guys or righteous causes, just human nature. He came to a new understanding of what people were, and it horrified him. He came to a new understanding of what they weren’t, and that horrified him even more. He was seeing what people did when there was no one to stop them doing what they wanted to do, when all the checks and balances and restraints were removed, when the illusions and pretences were stripped bare and the reality was revealed. If it had been the work of soldiers acting on orders it would have been bad enough, but the word was that it was paramilitaries operating on their own initiative and acting on instinct. It was men who a few months earlier had been shopkeepers and farmers, builders and bakers and neighbours before they all became butchers. It was ordinary men who wore uniforms but weren’t really soldiers.

  Cameron’s world had been profoundly altered by the realization, and he was no longer able to think of people in quite the same way. Colors didn’t seem so bright and sunlight didn’t have the same warmth. Friends looked like strangers, and strangers didn’t look like people who might become friends. Things he’d previously thought of as permanent suddenly seemed passing. Things he’d once valued above all others suddenly seemed worthless. Things that once held comfort now seemed cold.

  Cameron Fraser couldn’t believe in God any more.

  He found it hard to believe in anything any more.

  Laniste, Kacanik, Prizren, Studencarne, Rogovo, Dakovica, Racak, Urosevac, Gorne Obrinje, Likosane, Vucitrn, Mitrovica … Somewhere along the line his hands started shaking when he held the camera, and he began finding it difficult to focus the lens. At first he thought it was the Leica’s eyepiece that was misting up. He cleaned it with a cotton swab soaked in alcohol but everything still seemed misty when he looked through it, and he realized that it was his eyes he had to wipe.

  Even when he managed to focus, it wasn’t on what he was looking at, because the images he saw on the ground-glass of the camera viewing screen were generated by his mind.

  He would close his eyes for a moment but the images filled the darkness inside his head just as they’d filled the viewfinder of his camera, just as they’d filled those hellish holes in the ground. A gallery of ghastly faces with expressions ranging from resignation to helpless rage, bewilderment to awful understanding.

  Somewhere along the line he began to be startled by any sudden noise, however innocuous, and even soft sounds set his nerves on edge.

  He forgot how to smile and laughter became a foreign language that he no longer knew how to speak and could never hope to learn again. It was accented by cruelty or irony but never by good humor, and while he could understand the subtle accents of the language, he couldn’t understand the words.

  He started feeling so dirty that even ten minutes under a shower so hot it left him lobster red didn’t make him feel clean.

  He stopped seeing the victims as purely innocent and began thinking that everyone must be at least a little bit to blame, because that was the only explanation which made any sense for the fate that had befallen them. Then he would see young children who were already old, and others who would never get any older, and the only explanation that had made some sort of sense no longer made any sense at all.

  Somewhere along the line Cameron stopped being able to sleep even when he was exhausted, and stopped feeling hungry even when he’d had nothing to eat. He found it difficult talking to people and impossible to concentrate on what they were saying.

  He stopped being the person he was and became someone else he didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

  The one thing that allowed him to keep it together was the thought that he wasn’t capable of acting anything like those other ordinary men in uniforms had acted, no matter what the circumstances.

  But something had happened which meant that soon he didn’t even have that consolation. Something shatteringly awful, wholly unforgivable and completely unforgettable.

  Even now he couldn’t bear to think about it. He’d hoped Jamie’s Cottage would provide the distraction he needed to take his mind off what had happened, but instead it was doing the opposite.

  Cameron knew he would have to confront the darkness within the ruined shell sooner or later, but decided to put it off another day. He wanted to spend the last light of this day in the sunshine that bathed the glen, not opening a door that led to darkness and the awful ghosts of his past.

  Turning away from the cottage’s filthy little window, he went over to the camper and took out his two cameras: a Leica M6 rangefinder with a 35mm wideangle lens, and a Nikon FM2 with 105mm telephoto. They lacked any automatic features but he’d never been tempted to trade them in for newer models. He loved using his head rather than a programmed metering pattern to determine exposure, getting so caught up in the challenge of controlling light and composition that for a little while he could forget about everything else in the world, leave his past behind and lose himself in the moment.

  With the Leica hanging around his neck and the heavier Nikon slung over his shoulder he started walking back down the track he’d driven up a few minutes earlier. Constantly assessing his surroundings, he appreciated the world around him in a way he seldom did if there wasn’t a camera around his neck or in his hands. He continually framed shots with his eyes, experience and instinct giving him a good idea of the coverage he’d get with either the wideangle or telephoto. Whenever he saw something that stopped him in his tracks he asked himself a series of questions without even realizing it: was what had caught his attention unusual or beautiful enough to look good not just as a slide but as a poster-sized print that could be hung on a wall? How could he make the most of the elements that made the shot worth taking? What unwanted details would be included with the wide angle lens? What would he have to compromise and leave out with the telephoto? Was the contrast range between highlight and shadow too great for the film in his cameras to record?

>   He switched from wideangle to telephoto as the sun started setting and the lochan changed from darkest blue to palest amber. Every so often he pointed the camera directly overhead, determining exposure from that part of the sky as he always did for sunsets, then framing the shots to make the most of the colors of lochan and sky and the dramatic silhouette of the crags in between.

  When the sun dipped below the crags he fastened the studs on the ever-ready camera cases and made his way towards Greystane.

  He stopped once, to pick a bunch of wild bluebells …

  And, watching him from her bedroom window in the tower house high above, as she had been for the last half hour or so, Kate Brodie felt her heart turn over.

  CAMERON PUSHED OPEN THE OLD DOOR IN THE WALL AT the top of Castle Crag, having to stoop a little under the low archway. In the twilight he was only vaguely aware of the cobbled courtyard and the crumbling ramparts which enclosed it. Up ahead, the tower house was silhouetted against the darkening sky. As he walked up the flagstoned path towards it, he hid the bunch of wild flowers behind his back to surprise Kate.

  The door of the tower house was a bigger version of the one in the outer wall—stout planks hammered together with hand-forged nails and reinforced by enough iron strapping to thwart all but the most determined assaults with a battering ram. There was no sign of a doorbell, so Cameron announced his presence with a giant, hoop-shaped knocker that was in keeping with the scale of the door itself.

  There was no answer. He reached for the knocker again, but stopped with his hand halfway there when he heard approaching footsteps echoing inside the tower house. Moments later the door was opened by a dapper old man in tweeds, with a military bearing and neatly-trimmed silver moustache. The man smiled and said, “Mr. Fraser, I take it?”

  Cameron nodded, “And you’ll be Finlay?”

  “Aye, but how did you know that? What’s that lass been saying about me?”

  “Just that you saw off some bad guy with a camera the other day. She thought it was me.”

  Finlay smiled, “Let you have both barrels, did she?”

  “Point blank.”

  Finlay’s smile turned to a laugh. “Come in, man,” he said. “Come in.”

  Cameron entered the dimly-lit chapel. A door to his left opened and Kate walked through it, wearing a short black dress. “Welcome to Greystane,” she said.

  Cameron’s throat tightened up and for a moment he wasn’t able to say anything more than, “Kate!” Then he managed, “You look beautiful.”

  Kate smiled with delight, and the tightness in Cameron’s throat spread to his chest. “I’m sorry I haven’t dressed up, but I didn’t have anything to dress up in,” he told her. “I didn’t think I’d need any grown-up clothes, so I didn’t bring any with me in the camper.”

  “I’m sorry: I didn’t mean to make you feel awkward. Want me to change?”

  “Not in any way,” he told her.

  Glowing, Kate turned to Finlay and said, “Have I got time to give Cameron a guided tour, or should I wait until after dinner?”

  “Miss Weir’ll be a wee while yet,” Finlay told her. “In fact, I better see if she needs a hand or I’ll be getting called for everything for ‘deserting my post’, as she puts it when I’m not wherever it is she wants me to be.”

  Kate and Cameron watched the ghillie leave, then looked at each other. Kate broke the silence that followed, saying, “Have you got something for me?”

  Remembering about the flowers, Cameron brought them out from behind his back, and said, “Why do I get the idea that these aren’t a surprise?”

  “I should make some demure allusion to feminine intuition, I guess, but the truth is that I saw you from my window when you were picking them.”

  “I wish I had something nicer to give you.”

  “Cameron, they’re lovely,” she told him, as delighted with the bunch of wild flowers as if they’d been a hundred-dollar bouquet of roses. “That was so sweet of you.”

  Looking around at the chapel, Cameron said, “This place is amazing.”

  “Wait until you see the banquet hall.”

  Cameron smiled at the way the elegantly dressed woman in front of him was as excited as a child. “Other people have a dining room, you’ve got a banquet hall,” he said.

  “Until a week ago all I had was a breakfast bar.”

  “Where were you a week ago?”

  “I had a small craft shop just across the bay from San Francisco. Well, I still do. I run it with my dad.”

  “This must be quite a change from California,” Cameron said, looking around the chapel.

  “The whole thing still seems like a dream,” she told him. Her mood changed when she added, “The thought of having to give it up feels like a nightmare. But I don’t want to think about that tonight, Cameron. Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the tower.”

  Following her over to the same door she’d entered by, Cameron found himself loving the way the shortness of her hair showed off the elegant, flowing lines of her neck, and the low back of her dress showed off the smoothness of her shoulders. Again he was aware of a tightness in his throat, and of something else—a lightness in his chest, the stirrings of a nameless longing.

  When they reached the stairs she said, “Watch the steps, Cameron. It’s not very well lit and they’re steep—so steep, in fact, that I think modesty dictates you go first.”

  “I was just about to suggest that myself.”

  She laughed. “I’m relieved to say you make a most unconvincing liar.”

  When they got to the top of the stairs she showed him the “big room”—where she picked up a vase for the flowers—and the study. Then she took him up the stairs to the master bedroom, pausing to fill the vase from her en-suite, arrange the bluebells in it, and set them on her dresser. Before she could show him the rest of the tower, Finlay called up from the foot of the staircase: “Lady Kate! Mr. Fraser!” His voice echoed from the chapel walls. “Dinner’s about to be served.”

  “We’re coming, thanks!” Kate shouted down to him.

  As the two of them made their way down the staircase, Kate said, “I don’t know how Finlay manages all these stairs.”

  “He looks very fit. Maybe this is one of the reasons why.”

  “Maybe it would be better for him if he wasn’t working here,” Kate said, but even as she spoke the words she thought they didn’t ring true. Although she’d only known Finlay and Miss Weir for a couple of days, she couldn’t imagine them living anywhere else. They were as much a part of Greystane as the portraits in the banquet hall.

  As if echoing her thoughts, Cameron said, “I couldn’t picture Finlay in an old folks’ home.”

  “I think he’d go from being Finlay to just another old guy in a home,” Kate said.

  When they reached the foot of the stairs Kate led the way back through the chapel. She didn’t know if they’d subconsciously fallen into step with each other, or if it was merely a coincidence, but their footfalls were in such perfect unison that it sounded as though only one person was crossing the stone flagged floor, not two. She wondered if Cameron had also noticed. She glanced at him and saw that he was glancing at her, and somehow she had a strange certainty that in that fleeting moment their thoughts were as in-synch as their footsteps.

  And then there was silence in the chapel, because they’d reached the double doors that separated it from the banquet hall. “You’re going to love this, Cameron,” she told him. After pausing for dramatic effect, Kate flung the doors open and stepped aside to reveal the banquet hall in all its glory.

  “Kate, this is incredible!” Cameron told her, looking at the long table with its silver candelabra and, above it, the fully-lit chandelier; and beyond it, a roaring peat fire in the grand fireplace which dominated the far wall. “I’m so embarrassed to be standing here in jeans and a denim shirt,” he told her.

  “It’s just the two of us, Cameron, and even if it wasn’t I wouldn’t care how you were dressed
.” Taking his hand, she said, “Come on,” and led him inside.

  Sensing a hesitation in Cameron’s step when they entered the hall, Kate looked at him and saw that his gaze had fallen on the painting that hung the wrong way around. Guiding him over to the picture she said, “Can you give me a hand to turn it?”

  “You want it put the right way around?”

  She nodded. “I think it’s about time, don’t you?”

  Cameron hesitated, then lifted the picture off the wall hooks, which had been digging into the front of the top section of the ornate gilt frame. As Cameron took a step back to balance the painting on his knee and get a better grip, Kate got her first look at the man it depicted. Her expression changed.

  “What is it?” Cameron asked.

  “It’s your long-lost relative: he looks just like you!”

  Cameron appeared taken aback.

  Kate laughed and said, “Damn, I wish I had one of your cameras in my hand: that was a ‘Kodak Moment’ if ever I saw one. Sorry, Cameron, I couldn’t resist it.”

  “You’ve got me curious about what he really does look like.”

  “His face is broader than yours, and he’s got a beard…” Her voice tailed away.

  “What is it?”

  “The longer I look at it, the more I think there actually is something a bit like you, Cameron. It’s just across the eyes … It looks like he had the same hazel-colored eyes as you.”

  “Is this you kidding again?”

  She shook her head. “If you hang the picture up the right way around, you’ll see for yourself.”

  More than a little curious, Cameron turned the painting around and eased the picture wire onto the wall hooks. At first he was too close to the canvas to get a proper look. He took a few paces back and then stopped in mid-step because he saw what Kate meant. The man in the painting did, indeed, have the same hazel eyes that he saw staring back at him from the mirror when he shaved each morning.

  Kate moved back, too, to get a proper look at the picture. All the other portraits were faded to varying degrees by time and dulled by dirt and dust, placing their subjects firmly in the past. However—turned away from the light of day and the smoke of glowing cigar, flickering candleand blazing peat fire for two and a half centuries—Jamie Chisholm’s portrait had been spared the ravages of time. Its colors were more vivid than those of any other painting, even that of Colin Chisholm, giving it a presence and immediacy the others lacked. It showed a man in his early twenties with a face framed by dark curls. He wore a baggy white shirt, with a maroon and turquoise tartan plaid over his left shoulder, held in place by a silver brooch in the shape of an owl. “He looks every inch the Highlander,” Kate said.