The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [62]
I sprang to my feet, realizing only then that I had no shoes on. Frantically, I groped about the floor, covering the small space again and again. But it was no use. My shoes were gone.
I seized the skull and stood barefoot, turning to face the light.
I CLUTCHED THE SKULL closer. It wasn’t much of a weapon—but somehow I didn’t think that whatever was coming would be deterred by knives or pistols, either.
It wasn’t only that the wet surroundings made it seem grossly improbable that anyone was strolling through the woods with a flaming torch. The light didn’t burn like a pine torch or oil lantern. It didn’t flicker, but burned with a soft, steady glow.
It floated a few feet above the ground, just about where someone would hold a torch they carried before them….
It is an Indian who holds the torch; a man dressed in breechclout and war paint, a man with his face painted black.
I was invisible, completely hidden in the darkness of my refuge, while the torch he held washed him in soft light, gleaming off his hairless chest and shoulders, shadowing the orbits of his eyes. But he knew I was there.
I didn’t dare to move. My breath sounded painfully loud in my ears. He simply stood there, perhaps a dozen feet away, and looked straight into the dark where I was, as though it were the broadest day. And the light of his torch burned steady and soundless, pallid as a corpse candle, the wood of it not consumed.
“WHATEVER DO YOU WANT?“ I said, and only then realized that we had been in some sort of communication for some time. Whatever this was, it had no words. Nothing coherent passed between us—but something passed, nonetheless….
“What do you want?” I said again, feeling helpless. “I can’t do anything for you. I know you’re there; I can see you. But that’s all.”
Nothing moved, no words were spoken. But quite clearly the thought formed in my mind, in a voice that was not my own.
That’s enough, it said.
With the disappearance of the mysterious apparition, Claire sinks gradually back into a troubled sleep, waking again to the welcome realization of daylight and of rescue: Jamie, Ian, and Ian’s dog Rollo have found her.
Once past the relief of reunion, Claire asks how they found her, so far from home and with no knowledge that she was lost in the first place. Jamie replies that they had been asleep the night before, but were suddenly awakened by Rollo’s baying, flinging himself at the cabin door, insistent on a pursuit of some kind. Catching up their plaids and mounting their horses, they had followed the wolf-dog to Claire’s refuge.
Delighted to be rescued, but still puzzled by the means, Claire wonders how Rollo could have led them to her.
“We searched the clearing” Jamie said, “from the penfold to the spring, and didna find a thing—except these.” He reached into his sporran and drew out my shoes. He looked up into my face, his own quite expressionless.
“They were sitting on the doorstep, side by side.”
Every hair on my body rose. I lifted the flask and drained the last of the brandy-wine. The brandywine was buzzing in my ears, swaddling my wits in a warm, sweet blanket, but I had enough sense left to tell me that for Rollo to have followed a trail back to me… someone had walked all that way in my shoes.
RETURNED TO THE SAFETY of home on the Ridge, Claire tells Jamie of her experience on the mountain, and shows him the stone that was buried with the skull; it is a large opal, the rocky matrix incised in the shape of a spiral, showing the fiery stone beneath.
If the stone and the apparition were mysterious, the skull is more so. Examining it for the first time in the light of day, Claire notes both the severed vertebrum that indicates the victim was beheaded, and the shattered teeth that further betokened a violent end. The real shock, though, lies in the teeth that are whole— the molars of the skull have silver fillings.
“My God,” I said, all tiredness forgotten.