I found nothing. Only silence.
When I opened my eyes I saw Rob with his back to me, shaking his dark head as though he were puzzled. ‘It’s gone.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The cottage,’ he said. ‘It’s not here. I only went a short while forwards, not too far, to see if I could find her as a teenager, but all of this’– he nodded at the cottage walls that he alone could see –‘is gone. It’s all in ruins.’
He turned. His gaze dropped briefly to my hand, still resting on the stone, and with that damnably quick way of adding two and two he asked, ‘Did you see anything yourself?’ Like that, so normally. As though I could.
I felt the small smile twist my mouth, and raised my hand to push the wind-whipped hair back from my eyes again. ‘Of course I didn’t. I don’t … I can’t see the way that you do.’
Rob’s expression grew more thoughtful, as though he’d heard something in my tone I hadn’t put there by design. He crossed the ground between us, thinking. Sitting on the stone beside me, he asked, ‘Would you like to?’
There was no good way to answer that. My envy of Rob’s gifts was so at war with my own yearning to be normal and the warnings of my grandfather that I could only shake my head and say, ‘It doesn’t matter. Really. This is working fine, with you describing things.’
He gave an absent nod, as though agreeing, and then studied me in silence for a moment before asking, ‘Can I try something?’
My voice turned wary. ‘What?’
‘Give me your hand.’
‘Rob.’
‘You said that you trusted me.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘Then give me your hand.’ His was outstretched, and waiting.
Reluctantly, I slipped my hand into his and then raised my defences as I felt his fingers close warmly round mine.
‘D’ye mind that first day at the Emerson,’ Rob said, ‘when we did the ganzfeld? Try doing that now.’
‘Rob …’
‘It’s not so hard. Clear your thoughts, close your eyes, just hear the wind and the waves and the gulls now, and focus.’
I tried. ‘It’s not working.’
‘Relax.’ A faint squeeze of his fingers. ‘You’ve managed to find your way into my mind afore this.’
A small warmth spread from his hand to mine and I strove to ignore it, while focusing all my attention on clearing my mind of its whirlwind of thoughts and emotions. At last I felt the calming sense of peace, as though I’d settled in a warm, relaxing bath, and from the blackness that surrounded me the little moving images began their cinematic play, a filmstrip running in reverse.
I wasn’t in Rob’s mind at all, I thought. This was how my own visions started.
I waited for the moment when one image would project itself and grow to blot the others out, when gradually I realised that these images weren’t running at the speed I was accustomed to. The filmstrip slowed, and paused, and ran a few frames forward.
In confusion I asked Rob, Is that you?
Is what me?
Doing that.
He didn’t answer straight away. He’d found the frame he wanted, and already it was growing and expanding as it took us in, but where my visions would have stopped and settled in their boundaries this one widened far beyond what I had ever seen before, so very swiftly that it flooded all my senses with a dizzying assault of scents and sounds.
I felt, in that first moment, like a seagull hanging on the wind high over sea and shore, and looking down with a perspective only flight could give. I saw the grey horizon and the darkness of the waves, and felt the stab of winter’s cold as I looked down upon the little cottage, thatched and shuttered as Rob had described it, drifted deep with snow that showed two lines of dragging footprints leading to the door, which was half-blocked now by the figure of a man.
These things I saw before my line of vision swooped and started lowering and raced across the snow until it reached a level just above the one it would have been at if I’d stood upon the ground. The line of vision of a man about Rob’s height, I realised.
God. My voice, yet even I could not have said if I had meant it as a prayer or as a heartfelt exclamation.
Rob responded with, You’re with me now? You’re seeing this all right?
I gave a nod, or thought I did, and we went once around the cottage like a panoramic camera, past the man who stood within the cottage doorway with his back to us, his rough dark cloak of woollen cloth still caked in places from the snow, and smelling thick with smoke that seemed more acrid than a wood fire’s.
It was so early in the morning that the sun still showed as glints of red and spreading gold behind the windborne clouds above the sea towards the east, and when that same wind blew it nearly robbed my lungs of breath.
I couldn’t turn from it as quickly as I might have done, because I wasn’t in control. Rob was, so if he stood a moment longer looking out towards the sunrise, I could only wait and brave the wind until he turned away to face the cottage.
Rob?
Hang on.
This time the movement didn’t feel like flight. It felt like we were running as we swiftly crossed the few feet of remaining ground and slipped straight through the cottage walls as though they had been made of mist, as though we both were ghosts.
We were inside.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The man behind the colonel filled the doorway of the cottage, with his great dark cloak that blocked the light and dripped with melting snow. His breath had frozen in his beard and left it white and ragged, so to Anna’s eyes he looked like some fierce Highlander, like those she’d often heard about in tales but never seen, although this man did not wear Highland dress. Beneath the cloak his legs were tightly cased in breeks and boots, though one was wrapped above the knee in strips of cloth soaked through with brownish stains. He favoured it, that leg, and put his weight upon the other as he waited in the doorway while the colonel talked.