Finding Fraser(36)

The day had been full of so much that was wonderful, but I needed to get back to my room and work on my focus. I swung my pack up onto my shoulder and turned toward my bike when I saw a light bobbing between the Cairns.

I dropped behind one of the stones like a ninja, all thoughts of the return trip to Inverness gone from my brain.

The light must have come from somewhere behind the center cairn, because I could see the shadow of one of the standing stones nearby. I sidestepped back into the trees, carefully avoiding the small puddle beneath the third tree over.

All I could think of were Evelyn’s words. “But what about the ghost we saw, Angus? What about that?”

What about that?

The light bobbed once more, and then vanished.

My hair lifted again in the breeze, and a light suddenly shone down on me. I slowly turned to face it. My guts twisted like a prisoner who had attempted escape, only to be caught at the forest edge by guards and a collection of slavering, killer dogs.

But there were no guards, and thankfully no killer dogs. Only a moon that had risen, pale yellow on the eastern horizon. It wasn’t a spotlight, but it cast a strange glow across the trees. Across the cairns.

Ghosts don’t walk in moonlight, do they?

I decided they didn’t, and then I tiptoed closer to the standing stones in the middle of the site, to see for myself.





As I crept forward, I decided to use the stones themselves as camouflage. This place was so different from the mental image I had of Craigh na Dun. It was in a field, for one thing, not a mountainside. But the stones still formed an unmistakable circle, and drew me forward. They were mostly taller than my head, and the solid feel of the cold, hard rock under my fingertips was reassuring, somehow. The trees offered little cover, as the area around the ancient site was in a clearing, and the stones circled the low, gray lumps of the cairns in the darkness. Unlike Claire’s experience at Craigh na Dun, these stones did not scream when I touched them and for that I felt strangely—torn.

The sensible part of my brain knew that I hadn’t visited this circle to find a ghost, and yet—Claire’s life had been completely changed when she touched the stone. A wee small part of my heart told me I wanted that same thing. A different life. Something else to consider when I returned to Inverness.

But for now, I needed to find out more about that bobbing light.

I peered around the edge of the giant rock and scanned the area. The light had not flickered into view again since I had first seen it, and I began to wonder if the moon had been playing tricks with my eyes. Maybe it had glanced off a fleck of metal in one of the stones piled in the center cairn?

Whispering through the dead leaves surrounding the trees behind me, the breeze rustled just like the sound of shuffling footsteps in the dark. The hair on the back of my neck was standing at full alert. I took a deep breath, slipped out from behind the shelter of the standing stone and half crab-scuttled to the edge of the center cairn itself. The stones of the cairn had a different look and feel than those standing sentinel behind me. As I crouched by the low mound, my fingers traced odd indentations on the stone’s surface—the strange, unexplained cupping that the information sign had told me helped date the site to its ancient origins. The hypothesis was that the marks were strictly decorative, but the texture under my fingers made me feel uncomfortable. Like I was touching the back of an ancient, sleeping guardian.

Just then, the moon shone out again from behind a tattered bit of cloud and flooded the place like a spotlight. And directly in front of me, standing, legs spread in the center of the opening of the cairn, was the clear silhouette of a Highlander.

I’m pretty sure I fainted for a moment, right there on the side of the mound of rock. My vision blurred and swam, but when I rubbed my eyes, there he remained. Clouds scudded across the moon, but could not obscure the unmistakable outline of a tall man in a kilt. He wore some kind of heavy boots on his feet, and the plaid was topped by something that could have been a substantial fur cape.

A strange feeling of unreality slipped over me. It was like in those dreams where I tried to run, but couldn’t. My feet felt mired in mud. I must have been holding my breath, because right about then an actual wave of nausea washed over me. I had to close my eyes a moment to stop from delivering my clam chowder from lunch onto the dead grass beneath my feet.

When I opened my eyes again, he was gone.

I stood up immediately and stepped toward where he had been standing, but the moon dropped back under the cover of the cloud again and my sore knee made crushing contact with one of the ancient stones. I bit my tongue so as not to cry out, and my eyes filled with sudden, hot tears. I’m not sure if it was from the effort to keep silent through the pain in my knee, or from the reality that I had somehow misplaced my Highlander once again.