Interloper at Glencoe Read online

  “Stop it.”

  “Well, in any case, Dad doesn’t really think you are. He just doesn’t understand why you don’t get out more.”

  “You know why.” In spite of the wide disparity in their ages, Darlene knew him better than anyone on the planet. “My current job does not exactly make me a babe magnet.”

  “Hey, anyone can get laid if they set their standards low enough.”

  That made him laugh. “Oh, yeah! There’s a goal! Mmm, wanna get me some of that there low-quality booty.”

  Darlene giggled. Then she went from giggly teenager to nearly adult in that I’m growing up way she had. Serious now, she said, “Mom is pretty peeved you avoid coming home, though.”

  “I do. It’s boring.” His thumb picked at a spot on his steering wheel. “Whenever I come around I get the third degree about my life, and to be perfectly honest my life just isn’t interesting enough to spend the evening talking about it in intense detail.” He rubbed his thumb hard against that spot.

  “It would make her so happy if you would come for dinner.”

  He sighed and looked out the windshield at the rain drumming on the hood of his car. Then he said, “Tell them I’ll be around next weekend.”

  Darlene smiled wide enough for her eyes to crinkle. “Great! Okay, see you next weekend. Thanks for the ride, and thanks for the break on the car repair.”

  “It should be ready by Wednesday.”

  “You’re my favorite big brother!” Of course, he was her only big brother, so he laughed. “‘Bye!” And she yanked the handle to let herself out, slammed the door behind her, and scurried through the rain up the lawn to the front door.

  Nick sighed again, shifted, and eased the car away from the curb to head home.

  When he got to his apartment he tossed the bag with the book in it onto the coffee table, then hung his rain-dripping jacket on the hook behind his door before heading into the kitchen in search of something to eat.

  Nothing in the refrigerator to catch his eye, except he did notice a few carrots that were about ready to be tossed. He’d give them another day, and then feel less guilty for throwing them out. Nothing in the upper cabinet but boxed pasta and sauce. Rats. He didn’t feel like cooking, and now he wished he’d picked up something on the way home. He looked in the freezer. Frozen enchiladas and waffles. Neither was enticing. A rack of frost-encrusted ribs that had been there so long he was certain they were freezer-burned beyond hope. He threw them in the trash. The lower cabinet held popcorn, chips, dried fruit, coffee, and boxes of tea, herbal and otherwise. Peanut butter, ramen noodles, chili seasoning mix, and a jar of sandwich peppers. No bread in the breadbox. He needed to buy some bread. And maybe some more sandwich meat while he was at it. All he had was ham. And mayo. According to the jar on the refrigerator door he was almost out of mayonnaise.

  He went to the lower cabinet and snagged the potato chips, then opened a bag of dried figs and went into the living room to settle on the couch in front of the TV. The chips and figs were no more appealing than anything else in the kitchen, except he didn’t have to do anything to them. The TV running with the sound off, the way he left his system most of the time, he left the game show on and waited until something good might come at the hour. That was ten minutes away.

  The rain outside was a loud hiss on the concrete around the pool, and Nick’s thoughts drifted to work tomorrow. One of his mechanics at the shop had been coming to work stoned, and Nick intended to fire him. The other two guys would get pissy about the extra workload, but Nick figured better that than having a stoned guy handling power tools in the shop.

  Chewing thoughtfully on a fig, he leaned over to the coffee table to take that book he’d bought from its bag. When he touched the binding again, he shivered though there were no voices now. The book seemed even smaller than it had in the thrift store, and older if that was possible. He flipped it open and bit into another gooey fig as he read the even, decorative script. The hand was so perfect, he could hardly believe it wasn’t type.

  Herein I put forth details of the heinous and terrible crime committed by myself and my clansmen of Argyll. For the brutal slaying of thirty-nine MacIain men, women and children there can be no forgiveness, and I ask for none. For my part in that evil I have spent a lifetime of sorrow. In telling the tale, my desire is not to clear my conscience, blackened beyond any relief save mercy from my Saviour, but to lay forth the truth as warning...

  ...a low moaning seemed to rise behind the words inside of Nick’s head as he read. He laid the book back on the coffee table, then rubbed his hands against his jeans. More curious now of what was said in the book, he nevertheless was reluctant to touch it anymore. He left it there, closed against the pained voice, and picked up the remote to restore the volume on his TV. The game show was wrapping up, and maybe something good would be on now. For the remainder of the evening he lost himself in a string of mediocre sitcoms and let the strange book slip from his mind.

  That night he stripped for bed and slid between the sheets. He’d brought that weird book with him, thinking he might read some more, but left it on the nightstand unopened and turned off the light instead. His hands just couldn’t bring themselves to touch that creepy, too-soft binding again. As he scrunched his pillow beneath his head then lay in the darkness, tomorrow’s firing drifted across his mind and he went over how he would handle that. The rain beat hard on the bedroom window near his head, and the sound, like the roll of drums, lulled him to sleep.

  For a while.

  There was a voice—a man’s voice, low and tense—telling him to wake up. Nick didn’t want to. It was comfortable in the darkness. Somehow he knew if he opened his eyes he would be cold. So he kept them shut and struggled to stay sleeping.

  But the voice was insistent. A note of desperation tinged it, and it cut through to Nick’s soul. The intensity of it made him shiver, and brought him around to wakefulness. He opened his eyes and felt the cold, reached for the bedside lamp, but couldn’t find it. His hand grasped at empty air, though he cast about a wide arc. Only a dim idea in the back of his mind made him wonder how the man speaking to him had gotten into the apartment. Dream. It was a dream. He was concerned more about his missing lamp and nightstand. He groped farther into the darkness, but couldn’t find them.

  The voice said, “Look at me.”

  “Hang on.” Where was that damned lamp?

  “Look at me!” The trembling voice had an accent. Scottish, maybe. Nick’s skin crawled, but he was too groggy to know why. Slowly, he pulled in his hand and turned in the direction of the voice. The room was dark, except for a light that seemed to come from a figure slouching just beyond the foot of Nick’s bed. It was an old man, gray and disheveled, hunched nearly into a question mark, neck horizontal and his head hung off the end of it like a well-balanced mobile. His coat was red, or had once been so, with faded yellow facings, crossed with tattered baldrics that had perhaps been white but now they were nearly brown with age and use, and held no sword or musket. Beneath the coat was a plaid vest. The pants were gray-brown and hung loose at his thighs. From his bony knees down his legs were bare and spindly, even to his feet with their blue veins and crusty brown toenails. Yeah, dream all right. Nick settled in for it. For a moment he thought of Jacob Marley, and wondered why this guy’s jaw wasn’t bound, but the thought fled when the figure before him spoke again.

  “I am William Campbell.”

  Nick took a guess. It was his dream, after all. “The guy who wrote that creepy book.”

  Campbell’s mouth twitched. “I laid bare my guilt.”

  “You’re an awfully old man to have committed a massacre.”

  The old soldier’s red-rimmed eyes flitted this way and that. “I lived many long, grief-filled years before my own death. Years of knowing what I’d done. Knowing that no matter what the reasons for it, there had been no justice in the act and its evil would hound me all my days...” A sob erupted from him, and for a moment he only stood ther
e with his mouth gaping, his eyes shut hard against his own weeping. Then he continued in a strangled voice, “...and beyond.”

  “What beyond?” Nick yawned and wished he could go back to sleep. Or deeper sleep. Whatever.

  The old soldier recovered himself enough to speak coherently, then said in a gummy voice, “Do you not see me here?”

  Nick shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “You see this broken soul before you, and you are not God?”

  That made Nick blink. “Uh, no, I’m not.” Weird dream.

  “So you see I am trapped. Imprisoned so as not to reach even the reward deserved by a murderer. No repentance can save me. No end to my suffering.” The old guy went back to sobbing, and tears rolled down his pale, wrinkled face.

  Nick thought about offering a tissue, but figured if he couldn’t find his nightstand he probably wouldn’t be able to locate his dresser, either, and he was pretty sure that was where he’d left the box. So he leaned an elbow on his knee and waited. When the guy stopped crying, Nick said, “Who did you murder?”

  “A woman.” A fresh sob came. “It was a woman.”

  “Only one? In a massacre?”

  The freshly reddened eyes peered into Nick’s, the man’s head hung low. “I was forced by duty to blood my sword, or there would have been none at all.”

  “I bet you weren’t the only one killing people. Lots of guilt to go around.”

  The dream-soldier grimaced, and the thought didn’t seem to ease his pain. “Aye. Some of the slaughter was accomplished with hideous relish. The MacIains were a bad lot among a bad lot. Even within Clan Donald they stood out as trouble.”

  “You were following orders.”

  “I was saving my own skin. Making my reputation, so my loyalty to the Crown and to my laird wouldnae be questioned. I was a coward. Am a coward still.”

  By now Nick was tiring of the self-pity. He was tiring in general, and wished to go back to deep sleep where it wasn’t so cold. Maybe if he’d worn pajamas he’d be more comfortable, but he was au naturel under these blankets and not entirely sanguine about the presence of even an imaginary stranger in his bedroom.

  He said, “So... why are you here?” Another yawn took him by surprise, and he struggled to get his mouth closed. Man, he was sleepy!

  “’Twas the wee folk.”

  “You mean, like, faeries? Elves? Things like that?”

  “Aye. Fey ones living among the mountains of Glencoe. They say the faeries tried to warn the clan. One woman who survived reported having seen a faerie woman at the river, washing the shrouds of those who would die. Over and over, she washed them, but none who saw her dared to ask whose shrouds they were. And they plagued us after. Throughout my days, I could never turn about but there would be a figure barely glimpsed as it disappeared. Eyes watched me. Voices whispered to me from the air. And finally when I made my confession to posterity, written in my own hand, one of them pounced upon it and used it to his evil ends. I’ve a spell over me, and I pay the devil for my crime.”

  Now Nick thought back over what he’d eaten earlier that might have brought on this bit of bizarreness. A blot of mustard? Underdone potato? He mentally swore off potato chips and figs. “A spell? Magic?”

  “Aye. A binding spell. By my effort to cleanse my soul, I gave him the means to trap me after my death. With my own words he bound me, and after my death, with my skin he bound the pages.”

  Nick remembered how creepy the leather cover had felt, and a more uneasy feeling stole over him. This was really too weird. This dream wasn’t like him at all. His were all about quarterbacking in the Super Bowl, or dating Sheryl Crow. Never about killing people or using skin for book binding, for crying out loud. Not to mention... faeries? What could he know, or want to know, about faeries? He searched for a place within himself that might have given rise to this, but found none. A terrible feeling dawned: this might not have originated with himself.

  “What do I have to do with these things?”

  “I dinnae ken.”

  “I thought it was your book.”

  “It was my skin, and my words.”

  Nick turned up his palms. “I wish I could help you, man, but—”

  “No!” The figure fell silent, tense, looking around at the darkness as the air grew colder. Tears welled in his eyes again, and Nick thought what a pathetic old man he was, undone by this thing eating at him more than half his life. Then, with quivering lips, the old guy spoke. “What have you done?”

  “Me?” Nick shivered. What felt like a gust of wind blew across him, and he drew in his knees to hug them.

  “Forgive me, I beg you.” The old man’s voice cracked.

  “For what?”

  “For what will befall you. I know not what, but I fear ’twill be terrible. For the wee folk are angry, have dark powers we cannae imagine, and are daft in the bargain.”

  “I don’t believe in faeries.”

  The man in the tattered red uniform coat tilted his head to peer at him and said with infinite sadness, “You will.”

  As he said that, there came a blinding light. Nick fell from his bed and landed hard, flat on his back, with a grunt. Something poked his buttock. A rock, it turned out, and as he shifted his weight from it his vision cleared to a view of blue sky and fluffy white clouds. The cold swept in on him, biting, and he began to shiver immediately. He sat up. Somehow he was now outdoors, surrounded by a thick pine wood, in a clearing scattered with ferns.

  “Ow.” He checked for blood, but the jagged rock under him hadn’t broken the skin. His bed and bedroom were gone and he was sitting on some grass, without a stitch of clothing on. Now the dream seemed a little less weird. He’d had the naked-in-public nightmare once before. This cold was a drag, though, and he wished he’d dreamed up some warm weather instead.

  o0o

  Beth NicDonald hurried along the path through the woods near Inverrigan, a seldom-used shortcut that was little more than a game trail through thickets of bracken, gorse, and spreading Scotch pine. She avoided the clearing that lurked at the center. Everyone preferred to skirt the spot where a faerie ring of brown toadstools danced in a circle on the soft, mossy ground, and only game trails went through it. She was on her way home from her uncle’s house in Achnacone up the glen, to another cluster of peat houses near the River Coe, which was Inverrigan. On her hip she held the straw basket in which she carried the raw wool she’d exchanged for the thread she’d spun for her aunt. Father would be annoyed if he learned where she’d been. He thought his brother’s wife should do her own work, but Beth felt sorry for her aunt who had lost three children in as many years, and after her most recent stillbirth was hardly up to the task of caring for the rest. Beth hurried, knowing Father would reprimand her for taking the spinning up the glen, and she hoped she could slip back into the house unobserved and pretend she’d never gone.

  Just as she was passing the faerie clearing, she heard a man’s voice say “Ow” in a matter-of-fact way that caught her attention. She stopped short. Had he heard her? Who in God’s name would be in that ring? Nobody she knew, certainly, which was everyone who lived in Glencoe, for the wee folk were treacherous and not to be trusted. Deeply curious, she stepped down a narrow side trail and between the fronds of some bracken to look, and her breath caught.

  It wasn’t just a man, but a skyclad one, sitting square in the middle of the ring, looking about as if he’d lost his way. She tried to duck back into the forest, but too late. He caught sight of her, smiled, and called out.

  “Hey!”

  She paused. Hay? “Oats to you, then,” she replied, also in English, and adjusted the plaid over her shoulders. Whatever a Sasunnach could be doing this far into the glen all alone, and naked as well, she couldn’t fathom. If Father or Dùghall were here the man would certainly not be smiling like that.

  Her words gave him a puzzled frown as he pulled in his knees so she could no longer see his private bits. Not that they weren’t anything she hadn’t seen
every day of her life since her brother was born. He sat, folded like that with his knees under his chin, looking as if he didn’t wish to move.

  She said, “Have I interrupted a ritual, then?”

  “I beg your pardon?” The smile came to his face again, and in spite of his violent shivering she realized he was quite handsome. His teeth were the whitest she’d ever seen in anyone over the age of ten, and his mouth wider than any man of any age thereabouts. Perhaps it was just as well Father and Dùghall weren’t near, for they would chase him away and she figured she wouldn’t care for that.

  “With ye all skyclad there, I expect you might be communing with the wee folk.”

  The man’s eyes shut for a moment, then he looked at her again. He was shaking like a newborn calf in snow, and even paling with a cold that for most men would have only pinked their cheeks. “No, I don’t do that.”

  “Have ye been robbed?” Unlikely in this spot, unless it were the faerie folk playing tricks again.

  The fellow hesitated, then nodded. He didn’t seem all too certain what had happened, and she thought he might have taken a blow to the head. He bore no other marks, so that seemed likely.

  “Och, you poor man,” she said. She removed her plaid from her shoulders and went to him with it. “Here, take my plaid and cover yourself. Who was it robbed you? If it was Calum’s boys, I’ll have your things back myself. Was it them as robbed you?”

  “I... uh, I wouldn’t know. I’m a stranger here.” He rose and accepted the plaid, in his shivering fumbling with the heavy length of brown and green wool until he finally worked out that he should secure one end of it around his waist. Then he threw the remainder of the wool over his shoulders and wrapped it around himself like swaddling. The day wasn’t so cold as that, and it was puzzling to see him tremble.

  A chuckle rose from her. “Of course, you’re a stranger. I’ve lived here all my life and never seen you before. And even if not for that, your speech would give you away as a Sasunnach.”