Dark Possession

by Carol Goodman

  “Puir bairn,” Una cooed. “Una’s here to watch ye now. Close yer een and go to sleep.”

  Obediently, Mairi closed her sightless eyes. So did Tom. I looked at Nan and she nodded. “It’s best ye bide here with the two of them to make sure they’re safe,” Nan said. “Callie and I will go visiting and see who else is sick.”

  Una nodded but didn’t look up. She was gazing at Mairi’s face, stroking her tangled red hair back from her brow. As Nan and I went down the ladder, I heard Una singing softly. “Hush, hush, my bonnie sweet lamb,” she sang.

  At the bottom of the ladder we were greeted with the body of Malcolm Brodie, my own great-something-grandfather.

  “If I’d figured out how the tartan worked before—”

  Nan tsked. “Aye, ’tis no use cryin’ o’er spilt milk, lass. Not when there are others who need saving. Half the village will have passed by here in the last fortnight to have their grain ground. There’ll be others fallin’ sick with the pest as we stand here ditherin’.”

  The thought of more households besieged like this one turned me cold. How would we know where to go first? Would people die while we took care of others? We had no phones or Internet to track the contagion. And what if the pest was carried out of the town while we went from house to house? It could spread over all of Scotland …

  “There’s too much to do for the two of us,” I said, turning to Nan. “We need help.”

  “We can help.”

  The voice came from the doorway. I turned and saw William, resplendent in his glowing tartan, like an electric Highlander. The plaid wasn’t the only thing that was glowing. His skin, hair, but most of all his eyes, burned with a fierceness I’d never before seen. What I saw in his eyes wasn’t magic or fairy dust—it was purpose and determination. This was the man he’d been meant to become before the Fairy Queen stole him.

  “We?” Nan asked.

  “Aye,” William replied, giving her a brilliant smile. “I’ve rounded up a few of the lads.” He stood back and Nan and I moved to the door. Outside was a small troop of Ballydoon men.

  “What did you tell them?” I whispered to William.

  “I told them we were going to save the town,” he replied. “They didn’t care how we do it.”

  I turned to Nan, wondering if she was thinking the same thing I was—that if we told these men we were outfitting them with a magical tartan that could heal the sick and protect the well, we opened ourselves up to charges of witchcraft. Nan’s forehead was creased, her solemn blue eyes raking the faces of each man. She looked less like the kindly middle-aged woman I’d come to know than a general surveying her troops. Under her stern regard, the men straightened their shoulders and stood up straighter.

  “James Russell Gordon McPhee,” she called, as if the men did indeed stand across a battlefield from her. A pimply, gawky lad stepped forward, surreptitiously wiping his nose. “Can ye be trusted with the Order of the Plaid?”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “And do ye solemnly swear to uphold the honor of the plaid and to never divulge the secrets of the plaid to any save your brothers in the plaid?”

  “Nay … I mean aye, I swear it.”

  “Mmppff,” Nan huffed, looking at Jamie McPhee dubiously. But then she cleared her throat. “I do hereby endow you with the Order the Plaid.” She plucked the edge of her own tartan and measured out an arm’s length of it into the air. It separated from her cloak without leaving hers any smaller. Then she swirled the glowing plaid over Jamie McPhee’s shoulders. At first he only looked confused, but then a change came over him. He held his head up higher and squared his shoulders. A glow came into his sallow cheeks and dark-brown eyes.

  “God bless ye, lad,” Nan said softly. Then she moved on to the next recruit. She repeated the procedure with each man. When Nan was done, the shambling motley crew had been transformed into a glowing honor guard. Nan regarded them with a look of fierce pride. “I declare ye all to be brothers in the Order of the Plaid, Stewards of Ballydoon.”

  I’d thought that the Stewarts I’d met in Fairwick had inherited their ability through family, but now I saw that the origin of their clan came from this small group of ordinary men who were willing to risk their lives to save their neighbors. Somehow it made them seem even nobler.

  “There’s one more thing I must tell ye,” Nan said, the pride in her eyes wavering. “If we do this, the witch hunters will come for us.”

  A tremor moved through the group, like wind passing over a field of grass, riffling their glowing tartans. It was only right for Nan to warn them of the danger, but I was afraid now that they would back down and disband. But then young Jamie McPhee stepped forward, his tartan glowing like a beacon.

  “Then we’ll have to go for them first,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  WE SPLIT UP into two groups—William and me with three of the men, and Nan with four of them—and went from house to house. When we found ailing folk—and we found plenty—we wrapped them in the tartan. When we were done, a man of the newly formed order stood at each corner of the house and stretched his arms out to his comrades on either side, making a protective shield to surround the house.

  A few didn’t let us in. The MacDougals would not permit us into their fine castle—but we spread the tartan over it anyway. Nor would the Reverend Fordick let us into his manse. When we tried to surround it with the tartan, he came out brandishing a crucifix in one hand and the King James Bible in the other, and he ordered us “sinners, witches, and demons to be gane.”

  Only those initiated into the Order of the Plaid could see the tartan. The people we helped didn’t know how we helped them. We brought salves and herbs and broths. We told them that the men who stood outside their houses were there to make sure no one entered with infection. When we’d gone to every house, we joined back with Nan’s group. To cast the plaid over the whole village, she directed us to a spot along the town walls.

  When we were done with the protective plaid, William and I walked back to our croft. We were both so tired we didn’t talk much at first. William put his arm around my shoulders and I leaned against him, grateful for his strength and warmth. I looked up at his face, which still glowed with the light of the tartan—and with something else. Today I’d watched him tending to the sick, carrying the bodies of the dead to burial, rallying the young men to seek out every household in the town and every ailing citizen. He was no longer the young boy I’d saved from the Fairy Queen. He’d changed shapes then—to a snake, a lion, and a firebrand—but now he’d changed into a man.

  “Do you think the town will be safe?” I asked when we got to the top of the hill. For answer, he turned me around to face Ballydoon. For a moment it seemed the sun was rising, even though it was cold winter dusk. Nestled in the folds of the surrounding snow-rimmed hills, the village glowed like a handful of jewels cupped in a velvet cloth. All the colors of the tartan I’d woven with Nan and Una had spread throughout the town, burning like rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and yellow citrines. Rays of the jeweled light soared up into the sky and swirled together like the aurora borealis—beacons in the dark, shielding the town from harm and proclaiming its survival.

  But above the town still loomed the ominous shape of Castle Coldclough, like a black crow perched over its prey.

  “What do you think they’ll do when they see the tartan?” I asked.

  “I think they’ll come for us—but not until tomorrow, the darkest day of the year. But we’ll be ready, because of you.”

  I felt something cool kiss my cheek and then William’s hand brushing a snowflake away from my face. I turned and looked at him, his face glowing in the swirling snow like a lamp lit in a window. Snowflakes clung to his hair and eyelashes. “Not because of me,” I said. “You rallied the men.”

  “Aye, but only because I had your magic tartan.”

  I shook my head and stepped forward to brush the snow from his hair. “I wove the tartan by thinking of you.”
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br />   As our eyes met, I felt something click inside me, like a key turning over the tumblers of a lock. Unlocking something. I heard the words of the spell I’d said to become the hallow door. I open myself to love. For a second, I wanted to turn the key back. If I loved William, I would open myself to pain. I stepped into William’s arms and lifted my face to his. He pulled me to him, crushing me against his chest. His mouth latched on to mine so hungrily that for a moment I thought he was the incubus, come to suck the very life out of my flesh. But then I was returning his kiss with equal force. His hands slid down my back and pressed me so hard against him that my feet came off the ground and I thought we would fall, but we didn’t. We were surrounded by a cocoon of warmth and light. The tartan I’d woven out of my love—and that he wore, I saw now, out of his love for me—wound around us like a fiery cloud, buoying us above the ground and sheltering us from the now-driving snow. I felt as if we had been lifted above the hills—above Ballydoon and the horrible sickness we’d seen today, far away from the monsters we’d have to face tomorrow, and outside time itself, so that the man I kissed contained the man he would become, the man I’d someday love. But when I looked at him, I saw and loved only William.

  There was a moment after we came back to the cottage when William paused uncertainly by the hearth, where he usually unrolled his sheepskin pallet, but I held out my hand to him and drew him upstairs to the bedroom. Outside, the blizzard raged, but in our bedroom William and I made our own heat, burrowed beneath soft layers of sheepskin and wool, like two animals gone to ground beneath the snowdrifts. We had been given this brief time together before we would have to deal with the nephilim. In the pale white light of our snow cave, he touched me and looked at me as though he was trying to memorize my body. I traced his long lean back, his hips, his thighs, as if I could read his future in the lines of his body. When he hovered over me, his face blurry in the dim snow-lit room, I felt for a moment that if I took my eyes off him he might vanish. He must have seen the fear in my eyes, because suddenly we were surrounded by the tartan glow. It illuminated his face, and as he came inside me he said, “I’m here with you, lass. I’m not going anywhere else.”

  We made love surrounded by the tartan glow, the multihued threads binding us. By dawn we had woven something new between us, a tapestry of our history together—our past, present, and future—indelibly written on our skin. Outside, the world appeared to have been unwritten by the snow. Staring out the bedroom window past William’s bare shoulder as he slept, I entertained the hope that the world had vanished. Ballydoon, Castle Coldclough, Fairwick … I would have traded it all for a few more hours here in this room with William, watching the glow of dawn climb up his legs, gild the ridges of his ribs, wash up the curving muscles of his arms, and limn the planes of his face. But when the glow reached his face, he stirred and opened his eyes. He met my gaze and smiled.

  “So you’re not a dream,” he said, reaching out for me. Halfway to my face, his hand turned deep red. He twirled it in the light, a puzzled look on his face, then turned toward the window. Streams of crimson, yellow, and blue were pouring between the curtains and through the unglazed window. As William rose to his feet, his skin was bathed in light, as if he’d already put on his battle tartan. I watched him walk to the window, feeling as if I was watching him walk across a battlefield.

  “They’re here,” he said, turning back to me, every bit of the boy washed out of his face. I’d lost that boy forever. Today would tell me if I would lose the man, as well.

  We quickly dressed without speaking and went down to meet the brigade. There were more men than yesterday—at least two dozen—and they all wore the glowing tartan over their homespun breeks and shirts.

  “Did Nan give the rest of you the tartan?” I asked.

  Jamie McPhee stepped forward and shook his head. “Nay, we passed it one to the other. The witch hunters came this morning and took Nan and Una. They vow to burn the witches today at sunset. My ma’s one of them …” Jamie’s voice wavered, his brave façade of manhood faltering, but then one of the other men—his brother, I guessed from the family resemblance—clapped his hand on Jamie’s shoulder, and the tartan glowed more fiercely. Jamie straightened up, the tears on his face reflecting the blue and crimson glow.

  “We’ll get her back,” Jamie’s brother said.

  “Aye,” William said, “we will not let these monsters take our women. We’ll march against the bastards today!”

  He pumped his fist in the air, and the two dozen men let out a deafening cheer. Their faces were all streaked with red and crimson now, like the war paint and blue woad tattoos their ancestors the Picts had worn when they went up against the Romans. I had no doubt that they would have stormed Castle Coldclough right this minute, but, remembering the fate of those warriors—and several other doomed Scottish campaigns—I had another thought.

  “What say you all come inside and we talk strategy over breakfast?”

  Making breakfast for two dozen Scotsmen pretty much exhausted our meager stores, but as I scooped out the last bit of oatmeal from the bin, I realized that if our plan worked I might not be coming back to the cottage. William and I had convinced the men that it made no sense to storm the castle walls, since the whole village had been summoned to the castle for the burning. We would simply join the procession from the village. Once inside the castle walls, the men would form a cordon around the witch hunters. At my signal, they would isolate the other witch hunters and I would take the angel stone from Endicott. Once I had it, I would be able to destroy the nephilim.

  “Are you sure you can get the stone off that monster?” William asked when the men left. “The last time you looked at the stone, you fell into a fit. I …” His voice faltered. “I thought I was going to lose you then.”

  The look in his eyes told me the distance we had traveled from then to now—only seven weeks, but it felt as if we had known each other for a lifetime. For many lifetimes.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, making myself sound surer than I was. “The stone draws on loss and regret, but I know now that everything I did has led to being here with you, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.” Even if I can’t stay. The unsaid words echoed in the air between us. I knew from the shimmer in William’s eyes that he was thinking them, too, but he only nodded and withdrew a soft leather pouch from his pocket. He handed it to me. “I had this made for you—an early Christmas present, since we may not have a chance to exchange presents later.”

  “I was making something for you,” I said, “only it’s not done.” I went to the basket by the hearth and retrieved the scarf I’d been knitting. It was long enough, but I’d delayed finishing it because I’d somehow felt that, once it was done, I’d really be ready to go. Well, there was no point delaying now. I hurriedly cast off the stitches and tore the undyed yarn with my hands. As I broke the thread, I felt something break inside my chest. I gulped back the sob that had risen in my throat. You have to be strong for him, I told myself, as I wove the broken thread back into the scarf with the knitting needles. They were the wooden needles that William had carved for me, and I suddenly couldn’t bear to leave them behind. I tucked them into my knotted hair and turned to William to give him his Christmas present—a scarf that had turned as crimson as heart’s blood when I’d torn off the last thread.

  “Ah, with this on I’ll feel like a knight wearing his lady’s favor into battle,” he said, wrapping the scarf around his neck. “I hope my present to you protects you, as well.”

  I opened the leather pouch and slid a heavy piece of silver out of it—the Luckenbooth brooch, the two halves made whole.

  “I had a traveling silversmith repair it when he passed through town a few weeks ago, so it would keep ye safe when you face that monster.”

  Bound together, the two hearts formed a tear-shaped loop for the angel stone. I had guessed that the brooch was made as a receptacle for the stone, but I’d wondered why its maker chose the double-heart design. Now,
as William pinned the brooch to my cloak just over my heart, I felt a warmth spreading through my chest and I understood. It took two hearts, linked as one, to contain and overcome the grief inside the angel stone.

  “Are ye ready?” William asked.

  “Yes,” I told him. “As long as you’re by my side, I’m ready for anything.”

  An hour before sunset, the village seemed as quiet as it had on the first day I passed through it, when everyone was hiding from the witch hunters. But I soon saw there was a difference. In almost every window hung a small scrap of tartan. The brightly colored bits of cloth waved in the wind like battle flags. Each family that would send one of their sons to carry the tartan to the castle had hung the banner, just as someday British families might hang a Union Jack in the window when their sons went to war. As we passed each house, the door would open and a young man would come out and fall into step behind us. Their mothers and sisters came, too. I even saw Jeannie MacDougal and Aileen join the crowd, their arms linked. By the time we reached the town gate, we had assembled a crowd. When I turned around and saw all their faces bathed in the glow of the setting sun and the tartan, I thought of what Nan Stewart had told me—or would tell me in the twenty-first century: You’ll need a village.

  Well, we certainly had one.

  The road to the gloomy castle plunged into a deep ravine and then climbed back up the steep, rocky ascent. As soon as I stepped into the abyss called Coldclough, I felt a deathly chill travel from the soles of my feet up my spine and understood why the place had been so named. Strangely, though, the snow that had fallen last night and blanketed the surrounding countryside did not cover the ravine. It had either melted or—I felt with a queasy certainty—dissolved in midair, as if even the snow refused to touch this tainted ground. Certainly nothing grew from the black rocky soil on either side of the cobblestone path. The land looked as if it had been blasted by an atomic bomb. No bird or animal stirred through the wasteland. The only sounds were the footsteps of the villagers following me, but even those were muffled. Halfway down, I was seized by the fear that the entire population of Ballydoon had been swallowed by the gaping mouth of the ravine and I had been left alone.