Страница 18 из 285
The old man looked at Ian for a moment, heavy brows wild with curling iron-gray old-man hairs—and the eyes beneath them iron-gray, too, and cold as steel.
“Too easy, boy,” he said at last, in a voice like rusty iron.
He looked down at Rollo, who was standing next to Ian, ears pricked and wolf eyes wary.
“Will ye give me your hound to kill?”
Ian’s mask broke in an instant, shock and horror making him suddenly young. I heard him gulp air and steady himself, but his voice was cracked in reply.
“No,” he said. “He’s done nothing. It’s my—my crime, not his.”
Arch smiled then, very slightly, though it did not touch his eyes.
“Aye. Ye see, then. And he’s no but a flea-ridden beast. Not a wife.” “Wife” was spoken in barely a whisper. His throat worked as he cleared it. Then he looked carefully from Ian to Jamie, and then at me.
“Not a wife,” he said softly. I’d thought my blood ran cold already; that froze my heart.
In no hurry, Arch turned his gaze deliberately upon each man in turn; Jamie, then Ian, whom he regarded for an instant that seemed a lifetime.
“When you’ve something worth taking, boy—you’ll see me again,” he said quietly, then turned upon his heel and walked into the trees.
MORALITY FOR TIME-TRAVELERS
THERE WAS AN electric desk lamp in his study, but Roger often preferred to work by candlelight in the evening. He took a match from the box, and struck it with one soft scratch. After Claire’s letter, he didn’t think he’d ever light a match again without thinking of her story of the burning of the Big House. God, he wished he’d been there.
The match flame shrank as he touched it to the wick, and the translucent wax of the candle went a dim, unearthly blue for an instant, then brightened into its normal glow. He glanced at Mandy, singing to a collection of stuffed toys on the sofa; she’d had her bath and was meant to be keeping out of trouble while Jem had his. Keeping one eye on her, he sat down at his desk and opened his notebook.
He’d begun it half as a joke. The other half as the only thing he could think of to combat paralyzing fear.
“You can teach kids not to cross the street alone,” Bree had pointed out. “Surely you can teach them to stay the heck away from standing stones.”
He’d agreed, but with substantial mental reservations. Small kids, yes; you could brainwash them into not sticking forks in the electric outlets. But as they became teenagers, with all that inchoate yearning for self-discovery and things unknown? He recalled his own teenaged self much too vividly. Tell a teenaged boy not to stick forks in the outlet, and he’d be off rifling the silverware drawer the minute your back was turned. Girls might be different, but he doubted it.
He glanced again at the sofa, where Amanda was now lying on her back, legs thrust into the air and a large, ratty-looking stuffed bear balanced on her feet, to which she was singing “Frère Jacques.” Mandy had been so young that she wouldn’t remember. Jem would. He did; Roger could tell, when the little boy woke up from nightmares, eyes huge and staring at nothing, and could not describe his dream. Thank God, it didn’t happen often.
He still broke out in a cold sweat whenever he remembered it himself. That last passage. He’d clutched Jemmy to his chest and stepped into … God, there was no name for it, because humanity at large had never experienced it, and lucky for them they hadn’t. It wasn’t even like anything to which it could be compared.
None of the senses worked there—and at the same time, all of them did, in such a state of hypersensitivity that you’d die of it if it lasted any longer than it did. A howling void, where sound seemed to batter you, pulsing through your body, trying to separate each cell from the next. Absolute blindness, but the blindness of looking into the sun. And the impact of … bodies? Ghosts? Unseen others who brushed past like moth wings or seemed to hurtle right through you in a colliding thump of entangling bones. A constant sense of screaming.
Did it smell? He paused, frowning, trying to remember. Yes, it damned well did. And oddly enough, it was a describable smell: the scent of air burnt by lightning—ozone.
It smells strongly of ozone, he wrote, feeling remarkably relieved to have even this small foothold of reference to the normal world.
This relief disappeared in the next instant, as he returned to the struggle of memory.
He’d felt as though nothing save his own will held them together, nothing but raw determination to survive held him together. Knowing what to expect hadn’t helped in the slightest; it was different—and much worse—than his previous experiences.
He did know not to look at them. The ghosts, if that’s what they were. “Look” wasn’t the right word … pay attention to them? Again, there wasn’t a word, and he sighed in exasperation.
“So
“Din dan don,” he sang softly with her chorus. “Din dan don.”
He tapped the pen on the paper for a minute, thinking, then shook his head and bent over the paper again, trying to explain his first attempt, the occasion on which he’d come within … moments? inches? Some unthinkably small degree of separation of meeting his father—and destruction.
I think you ca
He assumed it was that phenomenon that had come so close to killing him on his first attempt. He had been thinking of his father when he entered the stones, and—presumably—of his father as he, Roger, had known him. Which was, of course, during the period of his own life.
He tapped the pen on the page again, thinking, but could not bring himself just now to write about that encounter. Later. Instead, he flipped back to the rudimentary outline in the front of the book.A Practical Guide for Time-Travelers
I. Physical Phenomena
Known Locations (Ley Lines?)
Genetic Inheritance
Mortality
The Influence and Properties of Gemstones
Blood?
He’d scratched through that last one, but hesitated, looking at it. Did he have an obligation to tell everything he knew, believed, or suspected? Claire thought that the notion of a blood sacrifice being required or useful was nonsense—a pagan superstition without real validity. She might be right; she was the scientist, after all. But he had the uneasy memory of the night Geillis Duncan had gone through the stones.
Long blond hair, flying in the rising wind of a fire, the whipping locks silhouetted for an instant against the face of a standing stone. The gagging scent of petrol mingled with roasting flesh, and the log that was not a log lying charred in the center of the circle. And Geillis Duncan had gone too far.
“It’s always two hundred years, in the old fairy tales,” Claire had told him. Literal fairy tales; stories of people stolen by the fairies, “taken through the stones” of faerie hills. It was a time, two hundred years ago, such tales often began. Or the people were returned to their own place—but two hundred years past the time they had left. Two hundred years.
Claire, Bree, himself—each time they had traveled, the span of time was the same: two hundred and two years, close enough to the two hundred years of the ancient tales. But Geillis Duncan had gone too far.
With great reluctance, he slowly wrote Blood again, and added a parenthetical (Fire??), but nothing beneath it. Not now; later.
For reassurance, he glanced at the spot on the bookshelf where the letter lay, weighted down by a small snake carved of cherrywood. We are alive….