She looked as if she was about to faint again. She staggered, knocking a ewer of water onto the floor. He caught her but she kept her eyes open.
For a moment he held her in place, looking down at her in silence. The moment ended and he let go, his hands still tingling from where he’d touched her.
“Are you faint?”
“I’m all right,” she said, looking down and seeing her feet in the spilled water. “Just a bit woozy. Sorry about that. It takes a bit of getting used to. As far as I can see, there are two options.
“One, I’m dreaming and none of this is real.
“Two, I’ve traveled back in time through to the Middle Ages. If Tabby is right, when I use this key I should go back home. Something tells me the key is the answer.
“Every time I’ve dreamed about this in the past, when I turn the key, I wake up. That’s what’s going to happen this time.”
She turned the key, locking and then unlocking it a moment later.
“Did it work?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” She swung open the door and stepped through.
Jock followed but by the time he’d made it out into the corridor, she was nowhere to be seen.
“Daisy,” he shouted. No answer. He looked down. There were her wet footprints leading from the bedchamber. They crossed the threshold of the door and he frowned, kneeling down to look closer.
One footprint had been sliced in half. The heel was there but at the point where it crossed the doorway it wasn’t there anymore. He ran his finger through the water. That was real.
Where had she gone? What had the key done to the door?
More importantly, what had it done to her?
Chapter Eleven
Daisy was sitting in her car. “That’s weird,” she said, looking around her. “Very weird.”
She opened the car door and stepped out, half expecting to see Jock standing there. Nobody was around.
It was dark but there was enough moonlight for her to make out the shadowy form of the castle in front of her. “Parking lot gravel,” she said, putting her feet down outside the car. “Just like it’s always been.”
Her head began to hurt. What had happened? She had walked through the door after unlocking it with the silver key. Then what?
Then she was sat in her car. She tried to rationalize things but there was no real way of explaining it. The only possible explanation was that the key moved either the doorway, or her.
It can’t have been a dream. What had she done? Turned up at the castle and then fallen asleep in the car for hours? Was that more likely?
She stepped out into the warm summer’s night. There was no breeze, not a sound anywhere apart from her feet crunching on the gravel. The door to the gatehouse swung open on its hinges. The wood was rotten.
“Weirder and weirder,” she said, pausing to let the pounding feeling behind her eyes subside a little.
She walked through the gatehouse and out into the courtyard just as the moon disappeared behind a cloud. She waited and it emerged a moment later, lighting up the empty grass. No buildings, no highlanders in tartan baldrics. No torches on the walls. The place was empty.
She walked up the stairs, noting the missing door at the top. Inside she could hear nothing at all. The silence was overwhelming and she longed for the clash of swords as on her first visit, something that would tell her life went on, that she wasn’t alone in the universe.
More by feel than by sight she made her way to the laird’s bedchamber. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open, wondering what had happened to the silver key. Had she left it behind when she’d come through time to her car?
Where was Jock?
Was he back there wondering what had happened to her? Without the key would she ever be able to get back there again? It would be the most frustrating thing in the world if she had found a way to travel through time only to lose it before she could prove to anyone it was possible.
Inside the bedchamber was a single window, the moon shining through it, revealing a completely empty space. The plaster on the walls had long since vanished, the floorboards gone, rough undressed stone all that was left.
