The first time he tried it up by the symbol stone he had risen from his body, but the old panic had set in. The second time he had drifted quietly in a mood of solemn practise round the stand of Scots pine, and had gone a little way down the burn, following the water, but not too close. To get back to his body he had only to form the intention and there he was. It seemed simple. Too simple.
Halloween was a time when traditionally the veil was thin. It was a shame the weather was so foul, but needs must. He could not wait another year. Carefully he had made his preparations, rehearsed his words, and set out for the stone. His mind had been so totally on the journey to come he had not noticed that he had failed to latch the door properly behind him. Nor had he noticed the prowling cat still waiting in his drive, obsessive, blind, fixated on revenge and hate, trapped in his time as surely as was the victim she waited for, yet not seeing the very man she yearned for and sought so hard.
He was aching in every limb when he reached the stone, and shivering violently, but his excitement was intense. Some part of him, still the highly-trained doctor and twentieth-century man, noted that he would probably die of hypothermia and that he was undoubtedly out of his mind. The rest of him was determined to press on. He sat down, leaning with his back against the stone, and fixed his mind on Brid’s time. On Gartnait and Gemma, and Broichan. Above all on Brid, as he had first known her, young and carefree and wild. It should be easy. After all, he had been there before.
‘He’s in a coma.’ Liza glanced up as Beth and Giles made their way into the intensive care side-ward and stood looking down at the still body on the bed in front of them. At his side the steady electronic beep of the life support machine was the only sound in the room. Adam had been transferred to Edinburgh in the early hours of the morning.
‘Will he be all right?’ Beth asked quietly. She stepped forward and put her hand on the old man’s thin white fingers.
Liza shrugged. ‘No one knows. They can’t find anything wrong now that his temperature has stabilised. He’s just not there.’
‘And you can’t tell them where he is?’ Beth gave a rueful glance at Giles.
Liza shook her head. ‘Hardly! But I’ve asked them to see if they can get hold of Ivor Furness. He took care of Brid many years ago when they had her in a psychiatric hospital in North London somewhere. I remember Adam saying he was the only person who had worked out what might be happening. He had actually watched Brid go into a coma and out of her body and then come back. She murdered one of his nurses.’
Beth shuddered. ‘Murder seems to come very easily to her, doesn’t it.’
She and Giles had spent hours with the police when they had eventually staggered down off the mountain and directed the search party back to where Moira’s body lay, covered by Giles’s jacket. By unspoken agreement they let the police assume that they had been attacked by someone lying in wait in the trees. The only thing which the police found hard to understand was that Moira’s murderer was a woman. She had, they assumed, fled under cover of the explosion of the flare. They were still waiting at Ken’s bedside to tell him of his wife’s death when he was sufficiently recovered from what was thought to be an angina attack.
Liza stood up wearily and stretched. ‘I don’t suppose she was killed.’
Beth shook her head. ‘I don’t know. She just vanished. Completely. No trace.’
Liza looked back at Adam. ‘Perhaps by now she has found him?’ She touched his forehead gently.
Behind them the door of the ward opened and closed again softly. No one turned round. Their eyes were fixed on Adam’s face.
The figure behind them was hazy, almost transparent, as it drifted towards the bed. Her clothes were torn and blackened, the knife sheathed at her girdle. Her gaze was fixed on Adam as he lay motionless on the white sheets.
A-dam.
Liza frowned. It was the merest whisper, somewhere in the back of her head. In the hot room with its relentless hum of air conditioning and electronics, Liza felt a slight draught brush against her skin. She looked up. ‘Beth!’ The fear in her voice made Beth jump. ‘She’s here.’
‘She can’t be.’ Beth backed away from the bed, staring round.
Giles put his good arm round her and pulled her against him. ‘We shouldn’t have come. We’ve brought her with us.’
‘We can’t have.’ Beth shook her head. ‘Oh God, I hate this. Grandfather!’ She looked at him helplessly. ‘Please, come back.’
‘He can’t hear you, Beth.’ Giles was looking at a spot a few feet from the bed, near Liza. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. ‘She’s there. Look.’
The two women stared at the place he was pointing at, and first one and then the other saw her – no more than a faint shadow. Liza stood up and backed away. She was conjuring up the protective light, visualising it around them all, but it wasn’t working.
A-dam, come back to Brid. I love you, A-dam …
‘He hasn’t found her, then.’ Beth’s voice was very sad.
At the sound of it, Brid looked up. She half turned and before their eyes her shadow seemed to become stronger. She looked straight at Beth and her hand went to her girdle, freeing the dagger from its leather sheath.
‘No!’ Beth backed away, clutching at Giles’s arm.
‘Not again.’ He pushed her behind him. ‘Why can’t the bitch leave you alone?’
‘Go away, Beth,’ Liza said quietly.
‘But what about you?’
‘Don’t worry about me. Just go. Take her away, Giles. I’ll follow. She won’t hurt Adam. And don’t call a nurse. She doesn’t like nurses.’
Leave A-dam, child of A-dam’s child!
The voice seemed to echo through all their heads as Brid launched herself across the small room, the knife raised.
A stand holding a plasma drip hurtled sideways against the sink and toppled over. One of the visitors’ chairs was pushed against the bedside table and suddenly an alarm rang. The door flew open and a nurse appeared, behind her a doctor. As they stared, startled, into the room there was a vicious growl.
‘It’s a cat!’ The doctor gave an astonished cry as, with a shriek of rage the cornered animal shot past him out of the door.
‘Leave it, see to the patient!’ The doctor shouted as another alarm went off in the corridor. The ward seemed to be filled with the sound of running feet.
In his bed Adam slept on oblivious. Where he was it was cold and raining, but he had spotted the warmth of a fire down by the edge of the stream outside Gemma’s hut.
* * *
The tea shop was small and crowded. It smelled of warm bread and cake and was extremely cosy. Seated at the little round table Liza and Beth and Giles looked round at the other customers – mainly ladies who had finished their shopping and were carefully shepherding treasured carrier bags full of trophies from a hard afternoon’s spending. There were one or two men – exhausted and stressed – but all were cheerful and relaxed in the warmth. Every now and then the shop door would open and they could glimpse outside the dark evening, the wet pavement, with its reflections of street lights and the hiss of car tyres on the road.
Liza picked up her cup and drank from it thankfully. ‘I couldn’t believe it when they accused us of smuggling a cat into the ward!’
‘How else, logically, could it have got there?’ Giles was piling cream and jam on to a fat, crumbling home-baked scone. He felt as though he had only just stopped shaking. Glancing at the two women he knew they felt the same.
Liza rubbed her face with her hands. She had just phoned home again. She wanted Michele there beside her in Edinburgh. Except Michele didn’t come. Her phone calls to him had gone unanswered and their donna delle pulizie had said she did not know when he would return from Rome.
‘I wish I knew how to contact Meryn,’ she went on, shaking her head in frustration. ‘He would know what to do. Listen, I want you two to go back to Adam’s house.’ She reached over and poured herself another
cup of tea, noting grimly that her hands were still trembling. ‘Two reasons. I want you to be there in case …’ She hesitated. ‘In case Adam is there – up there, by the stone. All alone.’ She glanced at them both. ‘You understand, don’t you? If he managed it, to travel out of his body, and is trapped somehow.’ She shrugged. ‘I can’t bear to think of him all alone. I don’t know which is him, the man in the hospital bed or the man travelling somewhere out there amongst the stars. And the other reason is that if Brid is going to hang around Adam here in the hospital, you’ll be safer there, well away from her. Out of her reach.’
In the street outside, Brid moved closer to the window. She could see them through the condensation-streaked glass. She remembered Edinburgh, this street, even perhaps this café from when Adam was young and a student and she had been befriended by an old woman called Maggie.
People hurrying through the rain to catch their buses and find their way home barely noticed the shadowy dark figure on the edge of the patch of light which spilled from the window. Without realising why, they parted and moved round her, leaving her alone in her circle of dark stillness, then they moved on, part of the noise and the bustle of the early evening rush.
Brid smiled to herself. The woman Beth had taken refuge inside the café, but she would have to come out soon. She would have to go away on her own and leave this big man who seemed to follow her everywhere. And then she would kill her. Then she could make the blood flow; the blood of the child of A-dam’s child would be rich and strong and full of energy and be perfect for saving A-dam’s life.
The wind was lashing round Shieling House, making the windows rattle. Draughts played across the floor and Beth, huddling in front of the stove, was shivering violently. The place was damp and cold, and there was a strange atmosphere of fear and anger in the air.
‘She’s been here.’ Beth looked round the room after they finally got the wood-burning stove lit. ‘I can feel her. It’s like a poison.’
Giles followed her glance. He could feel nothing but the rather stale, unlived-in feeling of a house that has been shut up for several days without any heating on.
‘I don’t think so.’ He grinned at her. ‘Let’s not worry about Brid. She’ll be in Edinburgh with Adam if she’s anywhere.’
She glanced at him doubtfully. If only she was as certain as he was. She changed the subject. ‘Giles, when are you going back to London to sort it out with Idina?’ She didn’t look at him. ‘You can’t just pretend she doesn’t exist any more.’
‘Why not? She’s pretended I don’t exist often enough.’ He was leafing through one of Adam’s books at the table. In the pool of light beneath the desk lamp the drawings of the symbols were stark. He glanced up as somewhere nearby there was a sudden sliding noise followed by a crash. ‘It’s all right, it’ll be a slate from the roof,’ he said reassuringly. He had seen the immediate terror on her face.
When his phone rang they both looked at it for a moment, then Giles picked it up. Beth watched him anxiously.
‘You gathered what that was about.’ Giles came over to her and put his hand on her shoulder after he switched the phone off. ‘It was Ken. He’s home and he wants to talk about Moira.’
Beth bit her lip. ‘Poor man. Giles, I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I would cry and make things worse.’
Giles nodded. ‘Listen, I think I should go down and see him. Would you mind? Will you be all right on your own up here for an hour or two?’
She wanted to say yes, I do mind, she wanted to scream at him don’t leave me, but she shrugged and forced a smile. ‘No, of course I don’t mind. Poor Ken. It must be so awful for him. You go. But come back before it gets dark. Please.’
Giles turned to the door and reached for his coat. ‘Lock up after me. I won’t be long, I promise. And I’ll leave you the phone.’
She stared at the door after he had gone. The wind seemed to be stronger than ever now, screaming in the eaves, roaring across the hillside like a train. Shivering, she threw some more logs into the stove and went to stand looking down at the book Giles had been studying. It showed a series of rather beautiful stylised Celtic animals and symbols. She stared down at one, a comb and a mirror. Adam had ringed the mirror and scribbled in pencil: Denotes female burial spot or clan totem. Next to it was another rough note – Mirror used in fortune-telling; scrying; necromancy; magic; signifies one world and its mirror image. Then he had drawn five ornate question marks.
‘I wish I knew about this stuff. I wish I could help Grandfather.’ She turned the page. Listening. For what, she wasn’t quite sure. The wind? Voices? The sound of ghostly hoof beats in the dark? Brid?
She shivered and suddenly making up her mind, she walked to the back door and pulled it open, staring outside. There was an icy sharpness to the wind, a fresh clean bite against her face which indicated snow, but the afternoon was empty. There was no one out there.
She tensed. Behind her, in the house, Giles’s phone was ringing. She turned and ran back inside, the door banging behind her. As she reached out for the phone, it stopped. She shrugged. Suddenly she didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway.
Brid felt the pain as though it were in her own chest. She tensed and fought it, not knowing for a moment where she was. She could not focus. She was distracted. Part of her had been on the hillside near the house, watching the child of A-dam’s child standing out there in the garden, her hair blowing in the wind, the other part was with A-dam in the hospital, unseen as doctors and nurses crowded round the bed.
The flat line had appeared on the screen at three p.m. to the accompaniment of a shrill alarm. Frantically they were trying to resuscitate him. Brid wept quietly in the corner, Beth for the moment forgotten. Where was A-dam? Why had he left his body? Surely he would not have risked going back to look for her in a place where Broichan waited at her bedside.
‘He’s gone.’ The voice by the bed was sober.
‘One more try.’ The doctor had picked up the paddles. ‘Stand back, everyone.’
As Adam’s body arced on the bed and the ECG picked up the faintest beat once more, he leaned against the hill-top tree which had supported him as he began to fall and put his hand to his chest, surprised at the agonising pain which had shot through him.
He closed his eyes and tried to breathe calmly. Now was not the time to dive back into his body. Things were getting too exciting. He had seen Gemma come out of her hut to stand by the fire. She was older than he remembered, her hair white now, and her face lined, and she was talking to Gartnait in quick, frightened tones. Adam drifted closer. He called out to them but they did not seem to hear him. Gartnait looked smarter than Adam had ever seen him. Gone was the dusty tunic and leggings. Instead he was wearing an embroidered cloak fastened with a silver brooch, leather thongs criss-crossed his calves and at his waist hung a serviceable-looking sword. They were speaking their own language but he found he could understand them easily.
‘He intends to sacrifice her to the gods. If I do not rescue her, she will die and so probably will we. Don’t you understand, Mother? We have to act!’
Brid! They were talking about Brid.
‘He is waiting beside her day and night. The moment she reenters her body he will seize her and then she will die up here, by my stone. I marked it with her symbol and by doing so I ordered her death with my own hand.’
Gemma shook her head. ‘She will not return. She is not so foolish.’
‘She has grown weak. She is no longer rational, Mother. I’m sorry, but she was not sufficiently trained. She was a fool. A besotted fool.’ He smacked his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘If I could only reach her, out there in the land of dreams, before she tries to come back.’
‘No, Gartnait!’
‘What else can I do? Do we sit and watch Broichan lead her to her death?’
‘If you go to the other world, you may not find her. You may be lost too.’
He turned and stared down into the fire. ‘I shall consult the om
ens. If I watch the birds I shall know whether to fly with them after Brid into the sunset or turn my back on her and fly towards the dawn.’
‘Gartnait!’ Adam stepped forward and stood above him on the bank.
Gartnait did not turn.
‘Gartnait, I am here, in your time. I came to find Brid!’
It was Gemma who turned and faced him, her face alert like a dog scenting a rabbit. ‘There is someone there!’
‘Gemma! Can you see me?’ Adam stepped forward.
‘Who is it?’ Gartnait turned and looked straight at Adam, and through him. He frowned. ‘Is it Broichan?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Beware, my son. We are not alone.’
‘Gemma! Gartnait! Please, it’s me.’ Adam stepped down nearer to them and stood by the fire. The flames dipped and flared a warning and he saw Gemma watch it, wide-eyed, as though listening to its message.
‘Take care. Take care.’ She put her hand on Gartnait’s arm. ‘Broichan is near and he has spies everywhere. Go. Quickly.’
He looked down at her as though trying to read the message in her eyes, then he nodded. ‘I go, Mother. Let your gods go with me.’ He leaped onto the bank where a few seconds before Adam had been standing and he began to run towards the stone.
‘Gemma. You can see me, can’t you?’ Adam moved closer to her. ‘Please!’ He was desperate.
She paused as she was about to go back inside her hut and looked round again, shaking her head as though trying to rid herself of the sound of his voice. Then at last she stopped. ‘A-dam, is that you? I cannot see you, boy, nor can I help you. Go back to your own people, A-dam. Brid is lost. She is no longer with us. She followed you into your time and she is under Broichan’s geas, his curse. She is lost to us all, A-dam. Lost.’
She paused for a moment, as though listening for his reply, then she turned and ducked back into the hut.
On the Edge of Darkness Page 54