Page 22 of Highland Games
Zoe glanced sideways. ‘Now who’s sounding like an old biddy?’
By the timeFiona set off home, the moon was ascending in the night sky. Zoe made herself some food and brought Basil out to run around whilst she gingerly sat on the last chair standing and made sense of Fiona’s books. She soon realised it wasn’t going to take her long. Fiona was organised and her business was simple. Zoe wanted to get them done that evening and take them back tomorrow when she went for lunch. She wanted to show Fiona and her family how much she appreciated everything they were doing for her.
By eleven they were done, she had it all on a USB stick and the papers filed neatly away. She was ready for a good night’s sleep. She brushed her teeth, banked the Rayburn, gave Basil a kiss and crawled into her sleeping bag ready for oblivion.
Oblivion did not come. She slept fitfully, tossing and turning. For hours she hovered, restless and agitated, on the edge of true sleep. She endlessly replayed Rory walking off, her spreadsheets, the warning from Fiona about the cold night, the Rayburn, and her parents. All her anxieties, confusions and fears stirred into an alphabet soup of sleep, as dreams morphed into waking thoughts, then back to dreams again.
Each time she rolled over, she would be awake enough to see the time, groaning as the hours limped by. By five o’clock she’d had enough. Her brain hurt and she wanted this night filed in the past. She got up, stretched, put on her coat and went outside onto the porch.
The moon was still high in the sky and the world was lit up before her, full of brilliant whites, deep blacks and shadowy greys. The light from the moon and the stars danced on the loch and shimmered across the frosty ground. She exhaled, watching her breath condensing out in front of her. It was indeed the first hard frost of the year. Winter was on its way.
She thought about Willie, spending his adult life here, watching the seasons unfolding, year after year. He took life in his stride, never fearing what winter might bring. Zoe had only ever known summer here, now she was about to meet its colder sister.
A memory came of one of her first nights in the cabin. She had missed home, was worried about her mother, and had woken herself calling out in her sleep. Willie had made a watery hot chocolate, poured it into a battered tartan thermos flask, and told her they were going to wake up the sun. Standing now, in the ice-still air, the memory seemed frozen in time, as if the adventure was about to unfold again. And all she needed to do was turn, and her great-uncle would be standing there beside her. She squared her shoulders. She would wake the sun once more and drink to his memory.
Ten minutes later, she was prepared with warm clothes, hot chocolate, her phone and a torch for good measure. Basil was sleeping so she let him be. She also didn’t want to lose him so far from home. As she stepped off the porch onto the ground, her boots crunched on the frozen grass. The world was still, and sounds that would have been lost in the day were now audible. She could hear a dog barking in the distance, the sound of her trousers as they rubbed together with each step, and her breathing. She turned the torch on as she walked along the track to the road between the tall trees. However somehow that made everything scarier; the tiny point of light bobbing in front of her amplifying the blackness all around. She turned it off and let her eyes open to the shadows and subtleties of the night.
Crossing the road and leaving the tree line behind, the moon guided her way. It was utterly unchanged, the heather undulating on either side of her. The moon was just as bright above her, the path just as clear. She knew exactly where to go. As the path became steeper, she felt a stab in her heart and a memory in her palm remembering Willie holding her hand and leading her on. The cold air burned her lungs and stung the end of her nose. She paused a few times to blow it and catch her breath, but didn’t look back. She wanted to save the view as the reward for her climb.
As a child she thought the walk went on all night, but now, after an hour of striding uphill, the path levelled off and she saw a dark shape growing out of the side of the glen in front of her. It was an abandoned bothy; a one-room house even smaller and more basic than the cabin. There was no glass in the one window, the roof was a bog and the whole place smelled damp and alive. As a child, she had refused to go further than the rotten door and Willie had laughed, laying an old blanket on a tussock outside, facing the view, and bringing out the thermos flask. They had sat together, drinking their hot chocolate whilst the world became lighter and opened out below them.
Zoe turned from the bothy to the view, finally getting to see just how high she had climbed. She sucked in a breath. It was as if she were suspended between heaven and earth. The glittering, undulating shape of the loch far below, the stars so close above she imagined she could reach out and pluck one out of the sky.
‘You’re the queen of the world,’ Willie had told her. Despite being small and having big worries, seeing the landscape stretched out before her made things seem more manageable. She stood, taking everything in as her breathing quietened, feeling again like the queen of the world; a tiny figure in the landscape but able to hold it all within her vision.
Zoe sighed, exhaling a plume of mist to be lit up by the moonlight. She missed Willie and she missed her parents. Her heart swelled with love and she raised her eyes to the stars, sending out a prayer of thanks to her great-uncle for a new beginning in life, and a prayer of gratitude that her parents were still alive to see it.
She walked the last few steps to the bothy. Before she allowed herself the hot chocolate, she would take a peek to see if it really was as harmless as Willie had told her. It was exactly the same; dark and completely lifeless. She put her bag on the ground and took out her torch, pushing tentatively at the old wooden door which swung inwards. It was pitch black, and she shone the beam onto the far wall, highlighting bright green ferns growing out of the cracks. She crossed the threshold and flicked the torch to the right-hand wall. There was an open fireplace, empty and blackened with old soot. Clearly no one had lived here for a very long time.
She took a big, confident step further in, her torch moving along the back wall, then tripped over something large on the floor. She cried out, throwing up her arms to cushion the fall, the torch flying out of her hands, smashing against the wall and breaking, plunging the bothy into darkness.
Suddenly a figure was above her, pressing her to the ground, one hand around her neck. She couldn’t breathe, a loud barking filled her ears and panic shot through her. She frantically tried to tear the vice-like grip from her throat, her legs tried to free themselves from the weight above.
Zoe saw stars. This was it. She was going to die.
9
As soon as the nightmare had started, it stopped. The hand let go of her neck, the weight moved away, and she was licked all over.
‘Bandit! Heel!’
The licking stopped and she brought her hands to her face, rolling to the side, wheezing and coughing.
‘Oh god, Zoe, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Are you okay?’ Large, trembling hands stroked her hair. She heard Bandit whining. ‘Shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay. It’s only me, it’s Rory.’
Zoe felt a total disconnection. She could feel his hand on her hair but was detached, as if watching a scene being played out on stage. Everything was unreal, not of this world.
‘Talk to me, Zoe. Are you okay? What are you doing here?’
Slowly she drifted back into her body and took her hands away, staring dully at the dark wall and the rectangle of moonlight from the open door. Rory removed his hand from her hair.
‘I came to wake up the sun,’ she replied.
There was a long pause.
‘I feel like we need hot chocolate,’ said Rory.
‘What?’
