Haunted

Alma Alexander

Copyright Alma Alexander 2011

ISBN

Published by Kos Books at Smashwords

Kos Books

A & D Deckert

343 Sudden Valley Drive

Bellingham WA 98229

Cover Photo: Copyright Sean P Jones

Table of Contents

Foreword

We’ll Meet Again

Skye Child

The Old Pier

What Reviewers Say

Other Books by Alma Alexander

Contact Alma Alexander

About the Author

Foreword

I like ghosts.

Or at the very least, I like the idea that they might exist, and that they still have business with us, the living. And that the business in question doesn’t always have to be something that requires scaring us to death.

Back in the dawn of my publishing career, in South Africa in the mid-to-late 1980s, I used to write short stories which got picked up by various local magazines – the sort of thing that these days might be labeled “chicklit”, light romances, fiction whose entire purpose was to entertain the casual reader of a weekly or monthly magazine. I didn’t do a whole LOT of them, but I did a few, and what do you know, I couldn’t quite make myself go mainstream, not even then. At least two of my contributions were ghost stories as well as romances. I just can’t help myself, you see – I am indissolubly wedded to things that are not QUITE of this world, and even in what was supposed to be straight romantic fiction the ghosts manage to make their presence felt.

They’re good stories. As far as I am concerned, they’re the better for the spectral presences that haunt them. So here they are, my ghosts. I promise, they’re perfectly safe; come right in and meet them.

Welcome to the Alexander Triads, Book 3: Haunted.

Alma Alexander

Summer 2011

When I was young, before it was superseded by other and more accomplished tales, this was my Blessed Story. It was published in South Africa, in the UK, and even in a women’s magazine in Dubai (how THEY got hold of it I will never know). It won a writing competition for me. It was one of those stories that just kept on giving. It’s hard to even think about the fact that this was a tale which I dreamed up almost as long ago now as I’d had Wally haunting his cigarette case – but it still has… a certain… something. Wally was one tenacious ghost. He might have let his lady-love Alex go to the arms of a real live young man and live out a bright and blessed life that was of this earth, but he’s haunted me ever since. See him take another bow, in a new electronic medium which would no doubt have completely confused him if he’d still been around today…

We’ll Meet Again

I don’t know what made me reach for the cigarette case, out of the whole pile of junk on the stall.

“That’s a good piece, Miss,” the stall-holder said earnestly. “It’s pre-World War Two.”

Another customer claimed his attention and I was left to examine the cigarette case in peace.

It was plain to a fault, made of tarnished gunmetal. The clasp was still in good working order and I clicked it open. On the bottom right-hand corner of the lid, just next to the hinge, a set of three intials had been engraved. I could just make them out: WCH. They seemed to want to make up for the plainness of the case, for they were full of unexpected twists and curlicues.

Apart from these initials, the case was quite empty.

“Not very pretty,” said a youthful male voice beside me.

I looked up at met a pair of guileless blue eyes, set in a smooth and boyish face and rather fetchingly fringed by a lock of fair hair which managed to flop over his forehead despite the army-like short back and sides he sported. He smiled, showing a set of perfect teeth and two small dimples in his cheeks as he did so. Despite myself, I smiled back.

“Are you English?” I asked. He had spoken with the clipped, precise accent no local would use.

“I am… or I suppose I was,” he said cryptically.

“How long have you been in this country?” I asked, for that is what I took his words to mean – simply that he had been out of England for a long time, or perhaps had even been born in South Africa.

“Oh… some forty years,” answered the young man diffidently.

“Now you’re pulling my leg,” I said sharply, doing a swift double take. He couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20 at the outside.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Not at all. I’ve been in this country for as long as that case you’re holding has been here. And that is about forty years. Yon good gentleman has exaggerated a bit about its age – it’s not, strictly speaking, pre-war, since it was brand new when my father gave it to me in 1940…”

“Now wait a minute!” I said, startled into loudness. “You can’t possibly mean - ”

“But I assure you, Miss, it’s perfectly true,” the stall-holder said earnestly. He had disposed of the other customer and was taking my remark, quite understandably, to be a response to his own earlier words.

“I’m sorry, I was talking to this young gentleman here.”

“Who?” asked the stall-keeper blankly.

The fair young man beside me gave half salute which the stall-keeper ignored entirely.

“The young…” I began, and my voice died agonisingly as the fair boy carried on smiling and the stall-keeper looked at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses.

Gradually, the horrible truth dawned.

“Would you like to take the case, Miss?” said the stall-keeper carefully.

“Oh, do get it,” the boy said at the same instant. “You’ll be doing me a great favor.”

I opened my mouth to say no, but what came out, despite my best efforts, was, “Yes, I’ll take it.”

Bemused, I scrabbled in the jumbled contents of my bag for my purse, which, as usual, had migrated to the bottom. As I did so, a square of white cardboard floated down to cobbles, coming to rest with the writing uppermost. My invitation to the local RAF society’s annual Battle of Britain Ball.

“You dropped something, Miss,” the stall-keeper observed, relinquishing the cigarette case.

“Battle of Britain Ball, what?” the fair youth said. “Nice to know someone still cares. Are you going?”

I refused to answer. Not in front of the stall-keeper. I picked up the card with great dignity, restored it to my bag, in the company of my newly-acquired cigarette case, and strolled slowly away from the market-place and into the quiet streets beyond.

The fair youth, hands in pockets, kept pace.

“Look, who are you anyway?” I said crossly.

“Oh, I am sorry, didn’t I introduce myself?” He sounded contrite. “Walter Charles Hawke at your service. But you can call me Wally. All my friends do.”

“I’m not your friend,” I informed him. “Besides…”

“Oh, I know we’ve only just met, but I can assure you that I think of you as a friend already,” Wally said with the same endearing smile that had captured my attention earlier. “After all, you do hold my immortal soul in the bag, so to speak.”

“I – what?”

“The cigarette case,” Wally supplied helpfully. And then, when I gazed at him with blank incomprehension, he sighed. “I can see I’m going to have to explain from the beginning.”

“I would be much obliged,” I said sarcastically. “But I absolutely refuse to walk around town talking to a piece of thin air. Enough people already think I’m crazy – I don’t need to add to the number.”

“Oh,” Wally said, in all seriousness. “I can probably solve that. Give me a moment.”

If I’d had any doubts, they vanished now. Before my eyes he sort of flickered, disappeared, then formed again, causing one startled passer-by to turn and gape after us, probably doubting his eyesight. After all, he had just seen a man materialize out of nothing. And a man, as well, who was dressed in… I gave a squeal of indignation.

“Are you really going to walk around Cape Town wearing what I presume is a World War Two uniform?”

Wally looked down, as if this was the first time he’d noticed that he was wearing anything at all.

“You’ve got a point,” he conceded. “Give me another moment.” He faded again.

Scarlet with embarrassment – another man had stopped to goggle – I turned and studied a nearby shop window. In its reflection, I saw a shape form in the hitherto empty space beside me, and Wally popped into existence wearing jeans and a red T-shirt with a jersey tied loosely round his shoulders. His hands were still stuffed into his pockets.

“Will this do?” he inquired hopefully.

I glanced around. Nobody was paying us any attention. A jeans-clad youth was not an unusual sight, and anyone who had seen this particular youth appear out of nothing had already hurried home to take two aspirins and call the doctor.

“Now, about the case…”

It transpired that Wally’s father had given him the cigarette case when he had joined the RAF in February 1940. And then, towards the end of August in that same year, he had scrambled with the other pilots in his squadron to a warning of the approach of enemy planes.

Wally’s plane was hit at the outset of the battle. It plummeted and exploded into a ball of flames…

“They didn’t find much,” Wally said sadly. “Only bits and pieces. The case got flung free and they never found it.

“It was discovered three weeks afterwards by a local urchin who sold it to a pawnshop in town. And from there it was bought by a man, left on a train, picked up by another man, lost again... and so on for a year or so.

“Then some chap chucked it into the cases when he was packing for his trip to South Africa. Found it when he got there and wondered why he’d brought it. He got rid of it… and you picked it up off the stall in the market.”

“Well-travelled case,” I commented. “Do you mean to tell me that you haunt a cigarette case? I thought that ghosts always lived in grand old houses and rattled their chains around four-poster beds and floated down wide staircases with their heads in their hands…”

“Well, the truth is, most of such places are actually already occupied,” Wally said. “Besides, I’m a bit young to be toting chains… there you go again. What’s so funny?”

“You really are one of the most unorthodox specters I have ever met… not that I’ve met many, of course.”

“I can see that,” Wally said, aggrieved. “I got left behind on earth when I died, and I had to get attached to something, and this case was the only thing that survived the crash more or less in one piece. All right?”

“OK. I am sorry. The truth is, I don’t quite know what to make of you. Or what you want of me.”

“Just send the case back to my family,” Wally said plaintively. “Tell them what happened, and if they can bury it where they buried what they could scrape together of me, well, maybe then I can finally go and rest in peace.”

“A ghost in the post,” I said, and fought valiantly with another attack of hysterics.

“What?” Wally said.

“Never mind. All right, I’ll send it. Does that mean I’m stuck with the pleasure of your company until I do get rid of it?”

“Well, you don’t have to…” Wally began, affronted, and his edges began to blur.

“No! Wait!” I said, flinging out an arm. “Don’t do that to me again! And besides, I must admit, I quite enjoy having you around.”

He firmed again, and grinned. And you’re nice, too. It’s a pity I didn’t meet you back in 1939.”

“That would be a fine thing,” I snored. “My parents were toddlers then. By the way, how old are you?”

“Forever nineteen,” he said, with infinite sadness. “That’s when I stopped growing old.”

I did some mental arithmetic. “Well, you’re younger than my grandparents, but not my much,” I said. “It’s hard to think of you as a grandfather.”

“I don’t want to think of myself as a grandfather,” he retorted, “especially not yours. I wish I could take you to dances, not dandle you on my knee!”

“I wish you could, too,” I sighed. Too deeply. He looked up.

“What’s the matter?”

“Read my mind?”

“Don’t be silly, we can’t do that,” Wally said with asperity. “To take a good guess, though. I would say it’s to do with dances and partners. To take it a guess further, I would hazard the dance is the Battle of Britain Ball, and the problem is that there is no partner around.”

“You’re too astute.”

“You’re too kind,” he returned. “What’s with the fellows around here? Haven’t they eyes in their heads?”

“Now you’re too kind,” I said, and looked down to hide a sudden rush of tears. Maybe this was the real reason I was seeing things – I was tired and overwrought, and Michael didn’t want to know me any more. I was all dressed up with somewhere to go and no-one to go with.

“You still haven’t told me your name,” Wally said gently.

“It’s Alexandra,” I said, my voice unsteady. “Alex to friends.”

Afterwards I was never too clear how it had come up, but when I came out of my fit of despondency and self-pity, I discovered I had a date for the Battle of Britain Ball. A date quite out of this world.

But when I woke up to the fact that I was to be escorted to the Ball by what was in effect a Battle of Britain casualty, I suddenly saw a black mass of pitfalls in the scheme and began, panic-stricken, trying to convince Wally of them.

“It will be all right,” he kept saying to all my bleak predictions.

And so it was that I found myself driving to the ball, not quite knowing how I got drawn into it at all, wearing a sky-blue gown, white gloves and imitation diamonds at my throat.

I had started out alone, but soon a presence materialized beside me. Wally turned a frankly admiring gaze my way.

“My word,” he said, eyeing me up and down, “aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

“Do they rent tuxes in the Other World?” I asked, glancing at him. He was dressed in one, with a white scarf draped elegantly round his neck.

“So to speak,” he said.

I removed a hand from the steering-wheel to tuck-up a stray strand of hair. It was shaking and he saw it.

“Hey,” he said. “Relax. Get into the spirit of the occasion.”

I gave him an incredulous look but he appeared to be sublimely unaware of what he had just said. Then he made the error of glancing my way. I saw the devilry that danced in those blue eyes, and we both burst out laughing.

After this, I could almost believe that things were going to be all right after all.

At the hotel, I parked the car and climbed out, carefully smoothing my skirts. Wally politely offered me an arm.

I hesitated. So far he had been a shadow, a spirit, something that one’s hand would go through if one reached for it. He had never touched me. But now…

He noticed the pause, and waited until I looked up to meet his eyes. There was a wealth of understanding in them.

“I swear to you it will be all right,” he said. “For tonight I’m as human as I ever was, as you are. Take my hand, Alex. Please. Take my hand.”

His words echoed hollowly in the deserted garage. Very slowly I reached for the hand he held out to me. Our fingers met; my hand slipped into his as if it had always been there, as if it had been made for this, and his fingers curled protectively round it.

“Come on,” he said softly. “The music is waiting.”

The evening passed like a dream. Wally was a hit. His charm and ready wit enchanted the other three couples at our table. But he danced only with me, and when I was whisked off by a hoary patriarch from our table to do a Scottish dance, Wally didn’t take the opportunity to ask anyone else but sat and watched me with a smile in his eyes.

My own eyes kept wandering back to the table, and I realised I was in real danger of falling in love with a man dead for 40 odd years. Dead and yet young and vibrantly alive and with a disturbing pair of blue eyes which knew how to smile at me.

Dancing with Wally was an experience which went beyond anything I had ever known. His touch was firm and sure, he knew how to guide a partner, and in his arms I found a calmness and a confidence that gave me the freedom to do anything.

During the slower numbers he held me close and I laid a cheek on his shoulder and dreamed that he was real.

He did not turn into a pumpkin or disappear at midnight, but remained clear and solid and debonair, and made outrageous comments about the people around us which made me laugh and them glower, because sometimes it was impossible to conceal whom the laughter concerned.

The patriarch and his lady went home at 12.30; the other two couples gave up at approximately 1 a.m. Wally and I stayed until the end, until the last magic note; and then, just as we thought it was over, the band, after a small pause, began to play its final number, a farewell song.

“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…”

“…but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day…” Wally sang softly into my hair as we swayed, very slowly, barely moving at all, while the mellow World War II melody wove its spell around us.

A song from his day, played in mine – it seemed impossible then that we could overcome even the towering barrier that divided us from one another, and yet – we clung to each other for a long moment after the song had ended, with the desperate and despairing strength of those who knew they were doomed to be torn apart despite anything they might do.

It was Wally who finally broke free. “Well,” he said, with a queer catch in his voice, “it’s over.”

We went to our table and retrieve dour things, and I placed the thin white silk scarf, which he had earlier removed, round his neck with an infinitely tender gesture, because that was all I would ever get to do for him.

He held my wrap while I shrugged into it, as a true gentleman would, and kept an arm around my shoulders as we went down to the car. I pulled away slowly from the parking spot and then out into the empty street.

We drove in a cocoon of companionable silence all the way to my flat. As I stopped the car and took the key out of the ignition, Wally sighed and withdrew his hand. I saw with the keys in my lap, staring at them.

One of those cool, alabaster hands came up to tilt my chin gently, so that I was forced to look at him. The blue eyes were serious and sad.

“I told you that tonight, I am as human as I ever was,” he whispered. “But only for tonight. Ah, Alex, dear Alex, it’s many years too late for us. I will be back into shadows and darkness before long, but you are still of the real world…

“I’d have to leave you in the morning more finally than anyone ever left before and it’s better, much better, that I leave you tonight, before things happen that will leave us both even more deeply unhappy the next day.”

He leaned over and brushed my lips with his and even the kiss was cool, like the touch of a snowflake.

“Good night, my love,” he said. “Goodbye.”

And then there was only the empty seat where he had been sitting the instant before.

I packed and sent off the cigarette case the next morning. Wally’s words had been a farewell – I would not see him again – and although I did wish to keep the cigarette case to remember him by, I sent it.

For a myriad of different reasons I sent it. One was that only this was would he find true rest; another, that I needed to memento to call to mind Wally’s blue eyes and that lock of fair hair. That was burned in me for ever.

Wally had given me the address; I suppose I should have checked to see if it was still correct, but I could not bear to have the delay while, via the cigarette case, Wally was so close and yet so far from me.

I wrote a small explanatory note, which I hoped didn’t sound too ludicrous, and posted off the small parcel with Wally’s spirit, trying to put it from my mind. The fact that I did not quite succeed is neither here nor there.

However, I had not been thinking of Wally when I went to answer my doorbell some six months later, and opened the door to find Walter Charles Hawke standing there. A Walter Hawke too disturbingly solid to be the dear ghost I had recalled.

I think I would have passed out if my visitor hadn’t reached over to steady me.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said, and even the voice, the words used… “I didn’t mean to startle you. I knew I should have phoned.”

I got my voice back. “Who are you?” I whispered.

“I’m Ben Hawke,” said the apparition. “I’m Walter Hawke’s great nephew. And you, from the way you reacted, must be Alex. Great-uncle Wally sent me here, so to speak.”

“How…? Where did you…?” I swallowed and straightened. “You’d better come in.”

He did. Then my heart, back in its natural place, gave a queer tug and showed every sign of bolting again. For, almost like an after-image, Wally Hawke stood in the doorway that Ben had vacated. He was very dim and distant, but I knew the smile in those eyes.

Before he faded away completely Wally gave me a slow, casual salute and finished by blowing me a kiss. It landed, even if only in my imagination, like a long-remembered snowflake.

And as I looked away from the door towards the real, live Hawke in my living-room, smiling such a Wally smile, the words and the promise of an Old World War II song woke a memory in my mind, something that Wally had sung at our last dance, something that he, against all odds, had meant.

He did know we’d meet again one sunny day.

I wrote this one after my one and only trip to Scotland – and yes, I DID go to Skye, and I found it beautiful. And haunting. And I honestly didn’t mean to people it with ghost children until this story came tumbling out some months after I had returned home and all those Skye memories had a chance to gel and re-form and come together in the shape of the sweet little ghost presence which haunts this romantic tale – originally published in a Cape Town magazine called “You” – oh, too many years ago now. But it still has a scent and a sound of Skye and Scotland for me, an amazing haunting feat for something that happened so long ago. So come walk the shores of Skye with me – with me, and with the ghost I brought home with me…

Skye Child

He seemed to have the most peculiar ability to slip behind his shadow. Marian saw the urchin hanging precariously over the cliff edge, laughing, reaching for something just underneath – even as she started forward to pull him away by the seat of his pants, she became aware that she could not hear that laughter. And in the time it took her to blink, he was gone.

She first saw him two days after she and Jamie had arrived on Skye. That had been on the cliff, just next to where the waterfall plunged off Kilt Rock in Trotternish.

The next time the ghost-boy had been playing hide and seek around the monument on the grave of Flora MacDonald, and that time Marian had gasped and pointed, but Jamie had just stared.

“What child? Where?” he asked somewhat impatiently. It had not been a good topic to raise. The subject of children hung between them like a sword. There would be none, not if Jamie had anything to do with it. Not after Charlie.

But the urchin had gone again by the time Marian looked back. And she didn’t insist. His toussled dark curls and laughing peat-water colored eyes etched themselves into her memory, though, and it was as if recognising an old friend that she encountered him again, on their way down into Portree from the northernmost fringes of Trotternish along the road skirting Uig Bay and Loch Snizort.

He waved at her once from the roadside as they drove past in their rented red VW Golf; Jamie picked that moment to perform one of the grinding gear changes for which the car was rapidly acquiring a reputation, and Marian was distracted – the eyeblink was all it took. The child had cloaked himself in his shadow again. He was gone.

Jamie was bad-tempered with everything. He almost resented Marian’s obvious enjoyment of the landscape and the late summer sunshine which was a bonus, gliding the spreading, shimmering waters of the Inner Sound and Loch Ainort as they had driven up the coast on their way to Flodigarry.

“It’s only because you haven’t seen this place with horizontal rain which doesn’t stop for the Lord’s forty days and nights,” Jamie muttered darkly as his wife begged him to stop the car in an impossible place yet again to that she could drink in the beauty of the sea which divided Skye from the mainland.

“You’re a Sassenach anyway; what’s with you? You’re behaving like Bonnie Prince Charlie is on the threshold of returning, and you the last of the faithful Highlanders waiting to welcome him home.” He snorted. “You’re all the same, you romantic Englishwomen. You fall for the Highlands and conveniently forget that you English destroyed it, for what it was worth.”

“Oh, stop it,” snapped Marian, annoyed. “You fawned over Devon and Cornwall. Did I say a word?”

They squabbled over the silliest things of late. Jamie’s first wife Morag and their son Charlie – named after Morag’s father and not after the Bonnie Prince – regularly look a sizeable chunk of Jamie’s monthly income; even with Marian’s salary, things were tight in the MacDonald household, and money always talked.

Charles MacDonald was an obnoxious little brat of seven, spoiled by his mother beyond exasperation, but it was only of late that Jamie was waking up to the fact that he had lost his son to his embittered wife.

It was enough to sour him, enough to declare, halfway through the first year of his second marriage, that he wanted to children at all. Marian had been almost forcefed the Pill.

Not only that, but it seemed that the entire episode of his marriage had turned Jamie anti-Scotland as a whole.

Marian had begun to suspect not long after her wedding that part of her desirability as a bride was the fact that she hailed from good English yeoman stock form the deep South of England, people who had nothing to do with Scotland for generations.

She had wanted to come see the island where her husband had been born, but Jamie had steered her to a honeymoon in Italy and if they travelled anywhere in the months that followed it was always south, south into the sun and the Mediterranean. If it hadn’t been for old Duncan MacDonald they would never had come back.

Jamie’s father was 89, and fading. He had known better than to order his only son to his side so that he could see him once more before he died. Duncan had humbled himself, and pleaded. And Jamie had ranted and raged, but he had come. Marian thought she would be awkward with the old man whom she had never met and to whose deathbed, in effect, she had come.

But by the time she had reached Duncan’s house she had already been bitten by Skye. It was this that bridged the gap between them, for this love was something thse two strangers shared.

“Take her up tae Flodigarry,” Duncan had said, sitting bravely up in his armchair, wrapped in a tartan rug. He had been grey in the face when Marian and Jamie had arrived at the house, but the love of Skye had put some of the colour back into his cheeks and his eyes shone with the brightness of excitement, not fever. Even to Marian’s professional eye he looked almost recovered.

“We came to see you,” said Jamie.

“Dinna fash yersel w’ a’ auld man,” said Duncan firmly. “I’ll be here when ye coom back.”

Jamie had acquiesced in the end, but with an ill grace; it said much for Marian’s capability of enjoying herself, and the power of the old man’s blessing on the trip, that she got anything out of it at all. It had been a magical few days. But now they were heading back to Portree, and Duncan. Returning to give back his gift of freedom.

Mrs MacKinnon, who kept a neighbourly eye on Duncan, was opening the door of his house almost before Jamie had turned off the ignition of the Golf.

“I think he’s deid,” she greeted Jamie, twisting her fingers. “I spiered him twae times if she was all right, but he’s been gey quiet the last hour or so. He didnae even want his dram when I coom tae gie it him. I cannee see him breathin’.”

Marian always lost half of these exchanges, because even the bits that were cohered English lost every ounce of their Englishness in the mouths of the older islanders, who appeared to be speaking what they called English only under duress. Certainly these two, Mrs MacKinnon and Jamie’s father, had never used the language amongst themselves; Gaelic was the order of the day.

Whatever, the import of Mrs MacKinnon’s words appeared to be painfully obvious this time. Marian slammed the Golf’s door behind her and strode over the house, her trainers softly slapping the pavement.

“Let me in,” she said quickly, “I’m a nurse. Let me see.”

Mrs MacKinnon stepped back reluctantly, and Marian ran up the stairs into Duncan’s bedroom. He wasn’t dead, but only just not; his breathing was shallow and irregular, his eyes closed, his eyelids flickering only slightly when Marian called his name.

She took his frail old hand into hers, and it was cold, the wrist blue with the tangled veins of old age. Watching him drift slowly away, with his limp, winkled hand cradled in her own, Marian’s eyes filled with tears. She had only known him for a week, and that was the first time he had laid eyes on his son for almost five years, and yet he had selflessly send them away from a vigil for the dying to a vision of beauty when he saw how much she loved his island.

He had seemed so much better when they had first come, weak, but spunky, his cheeks flushed with what Marian only now recognised as nothing more than happiness. “If I had known…” Marian whispered guiltily, rubbing his hand with gentle fingers. “I wouldn’t have gone, Duncan, I wouldn’t have taken him. He came because you begged him, because you needed him. And I took him away…”

“Marian?”

“He’s going, Jamie. Come here, hold his hand. I’m sure he knows you’re here.”

Jamie’s eyes were wide and oddly defenceless. He came in slowly; it was almost with reluctance that he took his father’s hand. Marian relinquished it, wiping her eyes with the back of her own, and turned away.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m leaving you a bit of time, Jamie. It’s you and him now. It isn’t me he begged to come to him.”

“But where are you going?” Jamie repeated, almost straining to follow her, with something very like fear in his eyes.

“I’ll be close,” she said. “Talk to him, for God’s sake, Jamie. I don’t know if he can hear you, but it’s the last chance you’ll get!”

She walked out, only half-closing the door behind her. Mrs MacKinnon was clattering with something in the kitchen. The parlour was empty and quiet; Marian entered it, crossing creaking floorboards to the window where she stood looking out. It was still light outside, although it was past eight already. She wondered how it was possible for her to miss so much an old man she had hardly known at all.

“Will ye have a coop o’tea, then?” said Mrs MacKinnon at her elbow suddenly, startling her. The older woman’s hair was coming out in straggles, and her hands were still uneasily lacing her fingers in and out of one another.

She was unsettled, and far from a calming presence. Besides, she spoke what was only nominally English and really an acutely foreign language. Marian didn’t feel up to deciphering Scotticisms at that moment.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I’m going out for a breath of air. Will you tell my… will you tell Jamie I’ll be right back? I’ll just walk to the harbour and back.”

Not waiting for a reply, she turned and almost ran out of the house and into the street. A young woman passing by gave her a sort of half smile; Marian nodded back. Everyone acted as though they had known you all their lives up here. Perfect strangers greeted you heartily in the street; people struck up conversations in pubs with wide and open-hearted friendliness that was none the less pleasing because it was usually more or less completely incomprehensible to Marian.

But there was nobody else around at this time, the street echoingly empty of people, and Marian struck out alone towards the little fishing harbour of Portree.

That’s when she saw him again, her little boy. He ducked behind a corner, and then peered back at her mischievously as though he wanted her to follow him. As he was going in her direction, she did. He seemed to appreciate this. He vanished, but reappeared again in a different shadow a moment later, smiled, and was gone. Marian quickened her step, and swiftly rounded the last corner.

The fishing boats bobbed quietly in the mirror-still harbour, their reflections seemed to them so flawless that they almost looked painted on the ocean. A few gulls hovered in church-like silence in the pale amethyst sky of the long summer twilight, and one paced the narrow beach, across which ropes stretched taut from the motionless boats to the wall which rose at the back of the water-lapped half-moon of pebbly shoreline, with great deliberation, as though he were seeking buried treasure. A pale cream cat startled at Marian’s approach and sloped off into the purplish shadows of a narrow lane between houses.

On the prow of the closest boat her little boy say, feet dangling over the side. As if aware of her stare, he raised his eyes and laughed, stretching his arms out towards her, almost begging to be picked up and hugged.

There was something achingly familiar about him, something that constricted Marian’s heart with the nameless pain of it; and then suddenly had it. The eyes. The eyes were old Duncan’s eyes, grown young again. Jamie’s eyes.

The little boy was not reflected in the still water – there was too much of shadow in him to cast one. That was why she didn’t expect to see him mirrored in the ocean when he suddenly leapt off the ship and skipped, across the top of the water, towards her, his arms still outstretched.

Marian stood still, transfixed, her arms going out to meet him even without her knowledge or her command. As their hands touched he was gone, vanished into the evening, a curious warmth spreading in her body from somewhere deep in her belly.

In the same instant she left another hand, heavy, very much of his world, descend on her shoulder. She whirled with a little cry and stared up into Jamie’s face.

“He’s gone,” Jamie said quietly.

Marian hugged him wordlessly and they stood there as the breeze picked at their clothes with impatient fingers.

“He said…” Jamie’s words seemed to trail away into the silence of the evening.

“He said?” she prompted after a moment.

“Yes. He blessed me. Us. And also his grandson. And – this is the strangeness of it – he did not mean Charlie. I know it.”

Marian suddenly smiled against Jamie’s blue anorak, understanding all too well. That warmth in her belly, waiting only for the seed to make it grow. The child had followed her across Skye, old Duncan’s spirit, his true grandchild, himself.

Marian turned herself in Jamie’s arms, moulding her back into his body, taking his arms and curling them around her, crossed at her belly. She looked up at the sky where the stars were beginning to wink on, and smiled, entirely at peace.

“We’ll call him Duncan,” she said softly, the decision made, firm. “He’s going to have Duncan’s eyes.”

And now for another treat – an unpublished one, never before seen by anyone’s eyes. Romantic ghosts haunted my literary output for some time, it would seem – because as best I recall this story was written some time after the previous two. But by this stage I’d quit writing for the ladies’ magazine romance market as such, and anyway this one was just a little darker, just a little more ‘literary’, than anything before it had been. I love it dearly, for the characters who crowd its pages, but it was a difficult story to find a market for, especially for the young and inexperienced writer that I was, and so after a while I left it to haunt nothing more public than my own collection. I present, for your reading pleasure, the debut of…

The Old Pier

It was a quiet night. There had been too many of those lately; they were beginning to add up not to weeks, not to months, but to the first beginnings of years. Ever since Crawford Cove had started its metamorphosis from the lowly grub of a working fishing village into the small social butterfly of a town which it had become, with its new suburbs of red-tiled white villas stretching out along the emptiness of sand which used to be the Long Beach. Ever since the summer people came, and started driving away those who had been living there for countless calm years in the comforting grip of their own tragedy and joy.

Terry's bar, once packed with jovial fishermen in to celebrate a good catch or drown the sorrows of a thin one, had been increasingly sparsely populated until it was down to this, now - old Adam looking for tuna in the bottom of his whisky glass at the darkest corner of the long counter, Will and Georgy arguing pointless politics - for neither had voted in any election, ever - perched on the edges of their tall stools, Sam Sharkey telling a dozing Jake for the umpteenth time about his encounter with the Great White (Terry knew the story almost as well as Sam; without thinking, she'd catch a phrase and her mind would run on mechanically, choosing words which would, as if by magic, come falling out of Sam's mouth a moment later), and John and Tom Grey playing their everlasting chess game which never seemed to end, with Tom Wiggins offering the same hoary nuggets of wisdom to one or the other from the sidelines without ever taking a hand himself.

Terry's was the first bar people came to when returning to the center of town from the piers, but not one of the summer people had ever stepped inside - perhaps it was just too uninviting, with its drab, peeling paint and the faint smell of liquor hanging about outside, hinting at an establishment which served "rough trade". Terry had to smile at the thought. Thinking of any of the old faithful fishermen who still came to drink her rye as rough trade was more than funny, it was ridiculous. They were all, in a way, relics, left-overs from a past which, perhaps, the summer people didn't care to contemplate. But Terry had long since stopped expecting someone from the other side of the great divide to deign to darken her door. That was why she was so surprised when the door did darken - she wasn't expecting anyone else, all her regulars were already ensconced - and the sight of the young, tanned youth wearing a pair of denim shorts and a loud Hawaiian print shirt (like Magnum, P.I., Terry thought; she watched a lot of television) struck her with a ludicrous sense of surprise which could hardly have been topped if it had been Tom Selleck himself who had walked in.

The unexpected visitor looked a bit pale beneath his tan, though, and Terry was, after all, a businesswoman. She coaxed a smile onto her face.

"Can I offer you something, sir?"

"Brandy," he gasped. She had been right, he needed that drink. "Make it a double."

Sam Sharkey had been interrupted in the middle of his story and watched the new arrival with a jaundiced eye; Jake had roused from his Great White induced stupour and himself warily watched the young stranger stumbling towards the bar. Terry put a glass in front of him, and he reached for it and poured it down his throat as if it had been water.

"Hey, steady," said Terry, almost involuntarily. She wasn't usually in the business of mothering her customers, but this one seemed to cry out for it. "What seems to be the trouble, youngling? You look like you've just seen a ghost."

The face that he turned to her made her literally step back. All at once, she knew; turning, she poured another glass of liquor and plonked it down forcefully on the counter before him.

"This one's on the house," she said firmly. "Sit down. You've just met our Sally, haven't you?"

"Your Sally?" The youth's voice was still not quite steady, but he was beginning to come back to himself, here in the comforting earthiness of Terry's half-empty bar with its workaday smells and sounds.

"Yep," said Sam, quite distracted from sharks. Sally was a topic not raised in the bar for a long time. "A girl with funny, chopped short hair? That darned flowered dress she always used to wear, flapping about her ankles?"

"She ain't been around for quite a stretch," said Jake slowly.

The young man laughed shakily, running a hand through his thick, dark hair. He eyed the three people who had addressed him, and then seemed to plumb for Terry as the most reliable, turning back to her. "Sally?" he prompted.

Terry was half-turned away, straightening a row of bottles on the shelf behind the bar with unusual fussiness. "Sally died in 1933," she said at length, briefly, when the pause seemed to stretch too long. "Sally Munro. She was twenty nine, unmarried, and quite mad."

Jake ventured a wheezy laugh at that trenchant summary. "I remember her," he volunteered suddenly, "just. I was five when she died. And her Pa was fishing mates with mine. He mourned old man Munro for a long time."

"Old man Munro?" The visitor's eyes had swivelled over to Jake's leathery brown face, weather-beaten into a mask. "I thought it was his daughter who died? Why did your father mourn the old man?"

"Oh, he died first," said Terry. "Him and Ma Munro. But first of all, Mikey died."

"Who's that?"

"Her brother," said Sam Sharkey.

"Her son," said Terry, in the same breath.

Tom Wiggins, overcome with curiosity, had finally drifted over to the bar under the pretence of wanting another drink. Used to offering advice, he took the glass which Terry tendered him, settled down comfortably on the stool on the other side of the new arrival, and came up with another nugget of the same.

"Why don't you just tell the poor fella the whole story, from the beginning?" he suggested serenely. "It ain't every day you see a ghost, and y'all are just making things a sight worse."

Everyone seemed to look to Terry then. They had been fishermen; and after that, they were drinkers. Terry was the educated one, the one to tell the tale, even though most of the men there had had a personal brush with the story and Terry herself hadn't even been born when Sally Munro had died. But Terry sighed, parked her elbows firmly on the counter, and leaned her full weight on them. "I suppose you'd better know," she said.

The life of a fisherman's wife was a hard and tough one; drudgery wore the women out fast. But Sally Munro was not yet a wife, and she was still young enough to be beautiful - she had been only a few weeks shy of nineteen when Lazarus had come to the village. They called him that because he had been snatched back from the sea, brought back from the edge, so nearly dead that a lot of his mates found it hard to believe that he was still with them, plying the same nets. Perhaps it was because of that near-death that he had been so wild, so reckless; he took without thought for the consequences, because he had been vouchsafed a glimpse of the end of the world and now lived only to delay its second coming for as long as possible and to cram as much living into the rest of his days as was humanly possible before he would be finally called to account. Sally was eighteen, fresh and pretty, and Lazarus was there, young, headstrong, charismatic. By the time Sally found out she was pregnant, Lazarus was gone.

They hid the pregnancy; instead, Sally's mother put padded cushions under her clothes as Sally grew large, eventually pleading a bad pregnancy and withdrawing more or less completely from the public eye. Only a very few knew the identity of the real mother-to-be; and people whispered a bit about the strangeness of it all, but by and large the baby boy who made his appearance in the Munros' hut in due course was accepted as being Sally's little brother.

His real father and his grandfather, whom he called Pa, both earning a living eking out a silver harvest from the sea, it wasn't surprising that young Michael (that had been Lazarus's real name, and Sally had insisted, but that was the last decision she got to make about her child) soon took it for granted that this was in his own future, too. He began pestering his "Pa" to let him go out with the men on the fishing boat when he was as young as five. Sally said he was too young; her parents agreed. But he asked the next year, and the year after that, and in the year he turned nine his Pa's answer changed.

"I suppose you're old enough to be useful," he had said.

"He's too young," said Sally desperately.

"Pa said I can go! Pa said I can go!" lilted the boy, dancing round the kitchen. It was the best birthday present, ever, he assured his parents when he was put to bed that night. If he groused a little at being waked before sunrise the next morning, the bad mood was soon swept away by the excitement. Sally watched in morose silence from the door of the cottage as her father and her son walked away into the whitening darkness of impending morning.

The boat limped back after the sudden storm which had swept the coast, crippled, no longer fully manned. Three crew they had lost in the ocean's fury. One of them was Michael Munro, who had turned nine a few short hours before. Sally's father had suffered a broken arm trying to save him, but it had been impossible to hold on. He returned, to his wife's tears and lamentations and the dry-eyed, burning gaze of his daughter. The man who'd helped Pa Munro home remembered later the words Sally had flung like rocks at his feet, words which he had been puzzled by:

"You killed my son," she had said. Only that.

"She must have repeated what the missus had been saying," the man would tell his wife later, snug in their own bed. "Mikey was her brother, we all know that."

Sally may have had to come to terms with the deception her life had had to embrace, she may have ceded Mikey to her parents, because she could see that had been the only way. But if she had given up her son's life, she could not forgive his death. Her parents had both indulgently said that Mikey could go on that fishing trip. But she, Sally, she had known he was too young. The fact that death came impartially to the fisher-folk, that two other men, both grown, had also drowned, was something she had pushed to the back of her mind. All she could think of was that her parents had said yes, and Mikey had died; her parents had killed her son.

While those who had been spared gave thanks for their deliverance in the only way many knew how - in the bar, then kept by Terry's grandfather, or in the bed of either wife or one of the two painted "ladies" whose trade, in a tumbledown little house at the far end of the village, was well-known to all - Sally's father was dying in his own bed, stabbed twice by the sharp gutting knife Ma Munro used for cleaning fish. And Ma Munro herself was already dead beside him, the blade which, in her hand, had slit so many fish bellies now turned against her own.

Sally left them there, in the bloody bed, the knife dropped beside them on the floor, and wandered barefoot, in the long, shapeless floral dress she had taken to wearing constantly, as if to hide a voluminous secret about her body, towards the old pier. She'd hacked off her long hair, quite mindlessly, without even thinking about it, just before she had turned the barbering blade on her sleeping parents - the cottage kitchen floor was awash with long, tangled dark strands; perhaps she was trying to convince herself that it was Sally who was really dead, and she was no longer the girl but Mikey, her son, the boy claimed by the sea. It hadn't worked. That was when she must have turned the knife on her parents. She looked a bit of a scarecrow, the chopped hair, the flapping dress, the huge dark eyes in the white, pasty face.

She stood there for a long time, at the far edge of the pier, shivering in the cold wind that blew in from the sea, as though she were waiting for a boat to come in. For Mikey. But Mikey would never come home again. And then, sometime towards dawn, she simply stepped off the pier into the element which had taken her son. They found her body washed up a mile or so down on Long Beach the next day.

"By this stage it was all known, of course," Terry said. "Lazarus, the seduction, the baby. The village blamed her for what she did when the boy was lost, but they wouldn't have blamed her for conceiving him. At least that's what my mother always said."

"She knew them? The Munros?"

"No, not really; second-hand hearsay, most of what she knew. But I think she was right. The place wasn't half as mediaeval as they liked to make out, not even back then."

"And what happened after?"

"Well," shrugged Terry, "you've seen the 'after'. She wanders on the pier sometimes. We haven't seen her for a while, but hers is an unquiet spirit, and do you blame her? Still, she's never harmed anyone... after she was dead, I mean. And there's no ill omens, nobody dies after she's been seen, or anything like that. She's a sad little thing."

The young man sat in silence for a while after that, pondering the story over yet another glass of brandy. Terry drifted away to attend to her nightly duty of rescuing old Adam before he fell quite asleep and off his stool, doing his old bones an injury. Sam seized his chance and sidled over, muttering something about "this place" having plenty of good stories, and did the visitor know that he, Sam, once faced off a Great White shark - man eater, that was... Jake left the counter in disgust, nursing his drink, crossing over to where the nightly instalment of the chess game was beginning to be drawn towards its usual inconclusive end to offer advice diametrically opposed to that of Tom Wiggins, annoying the latter considerably at this intrusion into what he considered to be his own private territory. The visitor, to whom, after all, the oft-told shark tale had the virtue of not having been heard a hundred times before, listened with commendable patience, and Sam blossomed under the attention.

He was all set to start again when he reached the end, but the young man said he had to go. So they escorted him outside like royalty, Terry and Sam and Will and Georgy, who had left off politics for the night and were best friends again, and Terry asked him to drop by again, and he said he would, although they both knew he would probably be gone by the end of the weekend, back to the big city where he wore a grey suit and programmed computers for a living - or something like that. He was, after all one of Them, the summer crowd, the weekend people who drifted in and out of the town, who had taken the place from those to whom it had always belonged but who were themselves, nevertheless, insubstantial wraiths, as much ghosts in their tenuous presence as the hapless spirit which haunted the old pier, empty now of even the ghosts of the old fishing boats which bobbed there once.

This had occurred to Terry as she was cleaning up that night, after closing time. She was strangely disturbed by the evening, almost as if it had been Sally Munro herself who had troubled the peace of her establishment rather than one of the witnesses to Sally's sudden reappearance on her pier. Terry's head ached oddly, a dull pain behind her eyes, and she decided to take a walk before bedtime, just to clear her mind. She wasn't altogether surprised when her feet took her unbidden towards the old pier; and perhaps even less so to see the rather too corporeal shape of her erstwhile young visitor sitting on the edge, dangling his feet over the dark water lapping quietly around the wooden piles supporting the jetty. Waiting for the ghost, perhaps, from whom he had fled so hastily. Or just watching the dusting of stars on the quiet ocean in the quiet night.

What Reviewers Say

Midnight at Spanish Gardens: "Alexander's language is lovely and poetic...the imagery is beautiful, the setting is compelling...But it's the characters that drive this story, in all of their imperfection, in all of their passion or disconnection or feeling of failure." - Alana Abbott, Flames Rising

The Secrets of Jin-shei: "Vivid and involving'... both an exotic journey into the imagination, and a graceful exploration of the heart." - SF Site

Changer of Days: "Powerful characters and a powerful setting help to deliver what I am thrilled to say is a great bloody book." - Altair

Gift of the Unmage: "This latest book seems as if it is going to be your standard coming-of-age magician tale, but then you realize it is so much more. It is philosophy, it is science fiction, and it is beautiful." - Kelly A. Ohlert

Other books by Alma Alexander

Dolphin's Daughter and Other Stories (Macmillan, UK, 1995)

Houses in Africa (David Ling, New Zealand, 1995)

Letters from the Fire (Harper Collins New Zealand, 1999)

Secrets of Jin Shei (HarperCollins, USA, 2004/2005)

The Hidden Queen (Eos, USA, 2005)

Changer of Days (Eos, USA, 2005)

Embers of Heaven (HarperCollins , UK, 2006)

Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax, (Kos Books 2010)

Midnight at Spanish Gardens (Sky Warrior Publishing 2011)

WORLDWEAVERS Series

1) Gift of the Unmage (HarperCollins, USA, 2007)

2) Spellspam (HarperCollins, USA, 2008)

3) Cybermage (Harpercollins, USA, 2009)

Alexander Triads

Once Upon a Fairytale, Kos Books 2011

Cat Tales, Kos Books, 2011

Haunted, Kos Books 2011

Contact Alma Alexander

Website: http://www.AlmaAlexander.com/

Blog: http://anghara.livejournal.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander

Email: angharakirhama@gmail.com

About the Author

Alma Alexander was born on the banks of an ancient river in a country which no longer exists.

She began telling stories as a child and never stopped. To date, Alma has written close to three million words in more than a dozen published books.

Her novel, The Secrets of Jin-shei, has been published in 14 languages in more than a score of countries. Her popular Young Adult Worldweavers series features New World magic and a heroine who is as American as Harry Potter is British.

The woman underneath the author likes books, embroidery, music ranging from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" to Dvorak's New World Symphony, animals, coffee, chocolate, snow, velvet -- and, in people, kindness, intelligence and an off-the-wall sense of humor.

She is a punaholic, a chronic worrier, sentimental and passionate. She is married to a man who wooed her over the Internet and lured her to America, where she is currently owned by two cats.