Page 3 of Beyond Dreams

This was her third trip to Scotland in as many years. The first one had been her gift to herself when she’d finished college and had her degree in hand. Last year’s vacation and now this one were simply to appease her great love of Scotland, every blessed inch of it. Thankfully, her job as volunteer coordinator at a historic house near Erie, Pennsylvania, allowed her a fairly flexible schedule, and since she’d worked there for years, having started as a volunteer herself while still in high school, she now had enough vacation time each year to allow for her Scotland tour and the obligatory Christmas trip to Green Valley, Arizona, where her parents had retired.

Having lived all her life in a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania, she was accustomed to plenty of flat, uninspiring farmland and the oft-abandoned or just plain unsightly eyesores of industrial landscapes, mining, railyard, and steel among them. Before coming to Scotland, she’d never known a land so vast, had never stood upon a mountain and saw nothing but God’s hand all around, in every direction; she’d never traveled for miles and miles upon a one-lane, rutty road encountering more wildlife than people; she’d never felt at the same time so brilliantly isolated upon the gorgeous landscape and at the same time so un-alone. The nerd in her that felt things so deeply attributed this to communing with nature, but Holly had some idea it was more just the wildness of the rugged landscape that called to her, that it was Scotland itself. It wasn’t untamed, wasn’t unsettled, but it sure looked that way. If a person could feel at home in a place that truly wasn’t theirs, where they hadn’t been born or didn’t even know anyone, that’s how she felt almost from the first minute she’d come to Scotland.

Sadly, the man of her dreams was ruining this trip for her. Even last year’s trip, and the one before that had not been disrupted to this degree by the man or her dreams,

Yesterday, she’d hopped on a tour through Fort William and Inverlochy and couldn’t recall half of what she’d seen for having slept so little. Today she was aboard another tour bus headed out to Skye. They’d taken Highway A87 until they reached the southeast tip of Loch Duich and then turned onto an old military road, as described by their tour guide, a sometimes hard to understand Scotsman curiously named Arnold. Arnold talked constantly, wonderfully, giving so many little tidbits and details of everything they saw. Holly was certain he loved his job, infusing so much excitement into even the most mundane details. She’d have guessed him around seventy years old—he’d said earlier he’d been guiding this tour for more than a quarter century. He stood only as tall as Holly’s five and a half feet, being very thin except for his belly, which seriously looked as if he carried a basketball there under his wrinkled button-down shirt or as if he were about to give birth.

“And there ye have the Five Sisters, folks,” said Arnold when they stopped at a viewpoint along the Ratagan Pass, pointing to the fog-shrouded range of mountains across Loch Duich included in the magnificent vista. “Five peaks—though I see only three are visible now. And that’s the fog for ye, innit? The maidens be shy, no doubt.” Arnold stood at the front of the bus, sharing the lore before the passengers might disembark and take pictures. “Five sisters, you ask? Sure and no legend carries more sorrow than this one. The five sisters were originally seven, ye see, until two brothers sailed into Loch Duich, come from Ireland, seeking bonny wives. They fell in love with the two youngest sisters, the bonniest of them all but the lasses’ father would no’ allow them to wed until their older sisters were first betrothed.” Arnold paused, having presented the conflict, raising his thick white brows into the middle of his forehead. “Och and no problem, mate, says the two Irishmen. We’ve five brothers at home. We’ll send them over straightaway, will we no’? The father says aye and the two brothers sail away with their new brides and ye might guess, they were never to be seen again. The five sisters waited...and waited...and waited—waited and pined so long they turned to stone, their feet in the loch and their heads in the clouds, waiting on husbands who never came.” He chortled heartily, his face turning red. “Sure and that’s a man for ye, innit?”

Ten minutes later, when the mini-bus was once again filled with all sixteen persons on the tour, Arnold advised next they would stop at the Brochs at Glenelg, iron-age structures that were somewhat, amazingly still intact.

“And that’s what you call a palindrome, innit?” He asked. “Glenelg, same forward and backward.”

The bus meandered up and down hills on the old, one lane road, and around a few hairpin turns for almost ten miles from where they’d paused at the Ratagan Pass. Holly stared out the window, enchanted by the old alpine road, with the occasional stone fence noticed along the side of the road and a spectacular view in almost any direction, hills of green and brown and so many pine trees and daffodils. All this unspoiled beauty just made Scotland seem and feel so blessedly ancient. She didn’t know a place in the States—she hadn’t been out West yet—that felt or looked so timeless.

Soon, the bus stopped again, pulling off the narrow road onto a short, paved shoulder that might have been added to accommodate tourists and tours, to keep vehicles from clogging the road—though this seemed unlikely to Holly, who couldn’t recall passing even one other car all morning. This area of Scotland, Arnold had said, was only “scarcely peopled”.

Once more, Arnold stood at the front of the bus, giving his little spiel before he allowed them off to investigate for themselves. “Now, right here in Glenelg we’ve three brochs, each at least 3,000 years old. No one can quite agree if these would be forts or fortified houses or even symbols of status,” he said. “This close one here is Dun Telve and down there a wee bit is Dun Troddan. Aside from their excellent state of preservation, they are noteworthy for their design—looks like a roundhouse, does it no’?—and their scale, and the quality of the build. All around, you canna miss the fine, fertile land, where surely farmers labored long and hard. Sheep, of course, populate the area, and we must imagine this land right here might have one time been smothered in the woolly ewes and mates.”

With that, he stepped off the bus, and the tourists followed single file, taking heed of Arnold’s caution as they strode toward the very cool building. “Dinna take the stairs inside, folks. Sound they were at one time but today, we just doon know.”

Holly stepped off the bus and glanced upward with some accusation at the gray sky which now sprayed a fine mist over everything and everyone beneath it. When she’d gotten on the bus more than an hour ago, the sky had been blue.

That was probablyhisfault, too. Aside from her enormous fatigue, she would blame the turn of the weather on the man of her dreams as well, merely because it suited her.

“I cannot control the weather,” he said in response.

Actually, he didn’t say it, but because he’d become such a real figure to her, she did occasionally have conversations with him. Of course, she had to invent his responses but that was easy. Holly simply disagreed with or countered her own words, supposing that his habit of constant wrath meant he might do so in reality...if he were, in reality, not only a figment of her imagination.

“And if you’d leave me alone, just tell me what it is you want and get out of my head,” she grumbled quietly as she went through the small gate that likely had been built more recently, “maybe then I would be able to enjoy my vacation.”

“Pardon me?”

Holly gasped and grimaced, facing the elderly woman who walked beside her around the broch, who held up her travel itinerary sheet over her head to impede the misting rain.

“Sorry,” Holly murmured with an apologetic wince. “Just...um, talking to myself.”

“Jetlag, dear?” The woman guessed with a sympathetic smile.

“Yeah,” Holly readily agreed. “Must be.”

Arnold followed them around the broch. The front side was almost completely intact, standing more than thirty feet tall. The back side was more ruined, and they were able to step inside the round and sunken interior. Arnold stood outside yet and asked them to take note of the double walls, which were exposed because of the ravaged-by-time state.

“You can plainly see how the stones were laid, and that’s flat flagstone they used for the stairway that splits the double walls,” he said. “Reinforced with steel bars, they say,” He said next.

Holly could make out no steel, saw only the stone, thousands of them stacked and stacked into a tower.

She turned back to Arnold and wanted to ask if this open middle would have at one time been several floors and the exterior stairs would have reached each floor. Before she could have, Arnold stared directly at her, looking more serious and grim than he ever had, briefly startling her for the way he stared directly at her.

“And this will be where your story begins, Holly Wright,” he said.

Stricken by this—she hadn’t been aware he’d known any of their names—her mouth went slack. “My story?” She repeated, just as a chill tingled down her spine.

Arnold nodded, appearing yet somber and not looking at or speaking to anyone else. “That’s right.”

She gasped outright now, since the tour guide’s voice suddenly was not his own. “W-what?” she croaked, needing him to speak again—in his own voice—so that she knew she wasn’t losing her mind.

“Your journey starts now, Holly Wright,” he said next.

---