One corner of the curtain wall was covered in vines that were lush green even in the teeth of the icy weather, and which crept down the cliff face to intertwine with the heather below. I stepped into the shelter of the castle wall. The sun had sunk below the line of the mountaintops, and the sky had taken on a particular color that I’d only ever seen in the Highlands. It was an otherworldly combination of purple and blue and black, bringing thoughts of kelpies and other more malevolent Highland faeries somehow nearer.
The path wound around behind the castle, but still in sight of the road. I figured I still had at least ten minutes of twilight left, so I continued on, keeping a close eye on the ground so as not to stumble. Craning up on my toes, I looked over at the castle to see fingers of fog beginning to wrap around it from the loch-side.
I turned and scanned the roadway. Still no headlights in sight. The blue light on my watch showed 7:10. My cabbie’s dram had kept him late, and strongly reduced any appeal I’d felt earlier. A decent man doesn’t leave a lady—or anyone for that matter—waiting. I shivered and cursed the Scots predilection for drink, and cabbies in general, and turned to walk back toward the roadway.
That was when the moaning started.
If it had come from the castle it would have been bad enough. But the fact that it was coming from right under my feet would have caused me, under any other circumstances, to pretty much jump out of my skin, my coat and all my underclothes before dying of fear on the spot. Fortunately, it was too cold for that, so I kept everything on and decided to get the hell out of there, instead.
Forget waiting. It was less than a couple of miles to the nearest village, plenty of time to work up a speech guaranteed to sear that cabbie’s ears right off his pleasant-faced, dram-drinking head. I had his torch. I could make the walk.
Years of ankle-wrenches and knee-scrapings had given me a certain inner caution against running along any path, so instead of a full-out bolt in the nearly total dark, I limited myself to a barely-contained hysterical scurry, muttering a mantra of “Don’t-run-its-not-a-ghost-don’t-run-it-can’t-be-a-ghost-don’t-run-you’ll-trip-and-kill-yourself,” or something along those lines.
Which is why I saw the hole in the ground open up at my feet before I could fall into it. I stopped so suddenly, the toes of my Converse sneakers kicked pebbles into the darkness. And squinting up through the hole, into the beam of my flashlight was a face I could not quite believe I recognized.
“Jack?” I said into the pit. “What the hell …?”
“Aye,” came a puzzled voice from beneath me. “How d’ye know my name?”
I dropped to my knees and shone the light into the hole.
It was Jack Findlay, all right. I could see his face, pale and a bit squinty in the light, looking up at me. He was wrapped in what looked like a sheet of tin foil, sitting on the rocky floor of the strange little room beneath me.
“It’s me, Emma,” I said. “What are you doing down there?”
“Emma Stuart?” he said, holding up a hand to deflect the light. “Or … Emma Angus? Whichever one of you it is, can ye please no’ shine the light ri’ in my eyes?”
I flipped the switch on Alec’s torch, and Jack and his small room were immediately swallowed by darkness. “Emma Sheridan,” I said. “You know—from the floor of the hotel bar last month?”
Shit.
“I—I mean—we shared a cab in Philadelphia. I’m the one with the blog?”
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Emma Sheridan of the blog. I can’t believe it. I’m still readin’ it, y’know. Every time ye post somethin’ new. Ye got robbed!”
I smiled a little to myself. It pleased me more than I could have expressed that an actual human was following my blog, but it was definitely the wrong time for basking.
“Never mind that, now. How’d you get down there? Are you hurt?”
I could hear his sigh echo in the darkness. “Through the hole yer hollerin’ down, o’ course. And yes—I’ve hurt my foot. Cannae walk, anyway.”
I felt a moment of smugness, not having fallen through the hole myself. But the seriousness of the situation won out.
“I—I don’t know if I can climb down to you,” I said. “I don’t have a rope or anything.”
“Oh, ye needn’t climb down,” he said, his voice indicating shock at the very idea. “Jes’ walk round the way ye came. Here—flick the damn torch on again and I’ll show ye.”
With the light carefully aimed away from his eyes, I soon saw what he’d meant. The small room held nothing but Jack, and a large charred patch of ground in the center of a pebbly floor. But just to one side of him was a full, doorway-sized opening in the stone. I got to my feet, followed the path down the side and was sitting beside him in under a minute.