If he’d been older, it might have broken his mind to undergo the torment of dealing with his own death as a spirit. He moved his hand and this time he was able to move the body. It was only slight, the arm shifting a fraction to the left but it was enough. With time, he could maybe hone that skill.
Time.
Time was something he had plenty of. It passed whether he wanted it to or not. Time had taken his father’s body and turned it to nothing more than a skeleton. Would the same thing happen to his body?
That was the only way he knew time had not frozen upon his death. His body slowly decayed. And yet he remained in the dungeon, unable to open the door or pass through it. He paced back and forth, nothing more than a zephyr to anyone who might be walk into the cell, a slight chill to the back of the neck.
As the weeks turned into months, his anger grew, threatening to consume him. The barefoot man had tricked him into this eternal half-life.What was to be at the end of it? Would it ever end?
He sat. He stood. He walked. He never ate. He never slept. More months went by. How many? There was no way of knowing.
All he knew was that he was trapped until the last of the MacCallister line made themselves known to him.
When the door to the cell opened, he tried to make himself visible. A man in the strangest of clothes walked inside, holding a lantern. Wallace waved. He spoke. The man heard nothing. He left, locking the door behind him. Wallace had already squeezed through the gap and was heading up the stairs.
That was the first day of his freedom. It was the seventeenth century, not that he knew that. He had been held in the dungeon for more than three hundred years.
He drifted through the castle. Soldiers were everywhere. None of them could see him. As an experiment he walked up behind one and placed a hand on his shoulder. The soldier turned, looking straight through him, seeing nothing.
He tried again, picking an apple from a barrel,tossing it through the air. It hit a sergeant square on the nose. The man yelled abuse, spitting out his words in his hunt for the culprit. Wallace raised another apple and hurled it into the group of assembled soldiers.
They saw it lift itself from the barrel. They saw it hover for a moment in the air and then come flying toward them.
Their flight was swift. Within an hour the soldiers had fled the castle, leaving weapons and armor behind. The talk of witchcraft and spirits went with them, along with many apples hurtling their way over the battlements.
Wallace was alone. For the next three hundred years his method was the same. Anyone who entered the castle got the same treatment as the soldiers. He wanted to be left alone. The only person he wanted to see was the last of the MacCallisters. Until then he haunted the castle and scared away anyone foolish enough to enter.
He would know her when he saw her. Since being freed from the dungeon he had been able to sleep again.
Sleep brought dreams and dreams brought her. He knew what she looked like already. Only herface. It swam above him whenever his eyes closed, looking past him not at him. It felt as if he were spying on her, though he knew it was only a dream. She would appear at some point. He would know her by her face.
When the twenty-first century began, so did the attempts to sell the castle. It had slowly fallen into ruin around him, the crumbling stone his long-term companion.
In the late 1960s, restoration work began. It continued for a long time, the workmen not seeing him, not caring for his attempts to scare them away. He felt himself becoming thinner, more see through, fading like the light at dusk.
The restoration took a long time and when it was done he was little more than a dark shadow haunting the dingiest parts of the castle, barely able to move without immense mental effort.
After the restoration came the selling people. The ones who talked about the value of the place. Then they went away and once again nothing happened for a long time.
More restoration work, the men with strange tools and curse words fouler than any he had heard before. Then attempts to move people into the castle. He saw them off though, his strength slowlyreturning as each one scurried out the door, never to return.
Until her.
She was a woman and a pretty one at that. Her hair was blonde, framing her face perfectly. She smiled little, her eyes lighting up the few times she managed to laugh.
He recalled well the first time he saw her. He was in the dungeon asleep when she arrived. He rattled the chains, enough normally to scare some of the meeker ones away. Not her.
He flitted up the stairs, slamming the door to the restored section of the castle, screaming as he did so. The man she was with ran, his face white as a sheet.
She did not move, just stood there smiling, as if she could see him. Her clothes were odd but it was not her clothes that drew his eye, it was her face.
He peered closely at her. Was she the woman he’d dreamed of for so long? He waved his hands in front of her face but she saw nothing. Then she left.
She came back the next day. He caught her name when she stood by the drawbridge talking to the man who’d brought her. She was Natalie MacCallister.
He could barely contain his excitement when heheard that. She was a MacCallister. Fate had done it. The last of the MacCallisters.
He watched her unpacking, though she did not see him. He watched her settle in, seething at the sight of the descendant of his bitter enemies.
