Except for one. One had bright paint, but it had something else.
“Hey, Doug.” He waved a fellow over. “Look at this, will ya?”
Doug took the device and appeared to be having trouble focusing.
“What the fook is that?”
“Does it look familiar?”
“It looks like a migraine.”
He tossed the device back to Stuart.
“Look again, you great scrotum,” said Stuart. “I think I know this place.”
“It’s a place?” Doug took it and looked again. “On earth? Poor ones.”
“Not just on earth, down the road.”
“You’re pissed,” Doug said, but continued to study the picture. Then his eyes widened and he looked at Stuart.
“Speculation, lad.”
“Aye,” said Stuart. “I thought so too. It’s cosmic.”
* * *
Next morning, Constable Stuart got up early and drove six miles north. The sun was just coming up and burning off the mist when he parked the car and got out.
He changed into rubber boots and took his cell phone with him. Studying the photos Gamache had sent, Constable Stuart set off across the grass.
Once away from the road, the land dipped and he found himself in a gully where the mist and fog pooled. He wore a sweater, but suddenly wished it was thicker, heavier. And he suddenly wished he wasn’t alone.
Constable Stuart was not given to flights of imagination. Not more than any other Celt. But standing there, all color drained from the world, most color drained from him, the ghouls of his maternal grandmother’s tales came back. The warnings of his paternal grandfather came back.
The ancient ghosts, the restless souls, the malevolent spirits came back. They took all the colors from the world, and in the drained mist they settled around him.
“Pull yourself together,” he told himself. “Do this quickly, then get back in time for a coffee and a bacon butty.”
The very idea of the bacon sandwich cheered him as he walked carefully through the fog, his feet testing the ground in front of him.
He kept the image of the bacon butty in the forefront of his mind, like a talisman. A charm. A replacement for the crucifix his grandmother once wore.
Pulling out his device, he paused to send the Québec fellow a message.
“It’s cosmic” he typed, and got no further.
His foot slipped on the grass, wet with dew. His arms pinwheeled, trying to move backward in time. To before the misstep. To before he arrived. To before he’d decided to come to this God-forsaken place.
His right leg slipped out from under him. Then his left. His hand opened and his iPhone flew away. It went sailing through the air, to be grabbed by the ghouls in the mist. For an instant, Constable Robert Stuart was suspended in midair. Flying.
And then he fell, hitting the ground hard, knocking the wind out of him. Everything became a confusion of images and sensations as he skidded and tumbled and somersaulted down the slope, disoriented and grabbing, grappling for purchase. And finding none in the dew-slick grass.
He hurtled and skidded downward. Where would it end? With a tree? A cliff?
And then, as suddenly as it started, it was over. It took him a moment to realize he was no longer moving. His head swam, his eyes unfocused, his body and brain in two separate places.
Constable Stuart lay still. It was over.
And then the panic. It wasn’t over.
His eyes widened. His mouth widened.
He couldn’t move and he couldn’t breathe. He was paralyzed. The blades of grass, so close to his eyes, were huge. He knew they were the last things he’d see. Trees of grass.
He was about to die. His neck broken. Internal bleeding. He’d die in the gully. Where no one would find him for days. Weeks. And when they did he’d be unrecognizable. He’d seen enough bodies like that, and thought them grotesque. He was about to become grotesque.
They’d hold a state funeral for him, of course. His coffin draped in the Scottish flag. They’d sing “Flower of Scotland,” his grieving widow, his friends and colleagues. Inconsolable, his—
A whoop of air was sucked into his lungs. Expanding them. And then he exhaled. A long, painful moan.
He breathed in. He breathed out. He closed his hands, clutching the grass. The soft, sweet grass. He could move. He could breathe.
Stop the music. Put the funeral on hold. His life wasn’t over yet.
Robert Stuart lay there for a long time, breathing in. Breathing out. Staring up as the ghostly mist burned off into blue sky.
He sat up slowly. Then stood up on shaky new legs. And looked around.
He’d never been here before. This place rumored to exist by its own rules. In its own reality, its own space and time. With the power of life and death. Or death then life. This place that first killed and then resurrected.