CHAPTER 14
NOLIE HAD WATCHED ENOUGH TV AND READ ENOUGH books to know that hiding boys in closets was bound to happen sooner or later. It was just a part of every girl’s life, and honestly, she’d kind of been looking forward to it. Hiding boys, and then having to say things like “This isn’t what it looks like!”
That had seemed like a good time.
But she hadn’t planned on doing it quite this soon, and she’d definitely never thought she’d be pushing a boy who was over a hundred years old into an overcrowded wardrobe in the corner of a tiny bedroom in Scotland.
Thankfully, Bel had locked the door with a little hook-and-eye closure when she’d come back with those clothes, which gave them enough time to hustle Albert into the closet and out of sight.
“Love, you know I don’t like you locking this door!” Bel’s mum called, and Nolie closed the wardrobe in Albert’s scowling face before giving Bel a thumbs-up, hoping that meant the same thing in Scotland as it did in America.
Bel nodded and went to her door, unlocking it.
Hiding Albert was one thing, but Nolie knew there’d be no space for her, so she figured they’d just hope for the best on that one.
When the door opened to reveal Bel’s mum standing there, she didn’t even look all that surprised to see Nolie.
“Does your da know you’re here?” she asked, and Nolie didn’t have to fake a guilty expression. Hiding boys and sneaking out. She was really breaking all kinds of rules tonight.
But hey, a dead kid had come back to life, which was apparently a thing that happened here, so it seemed like rule breaking had been called for.
“No, ma’am,” she answered, trying to make her expression as serious as she could. “But Bel and I wanted to talk after everything that happened tonight.”
She hoped that threw some guilt on Mrs. McKissick, too, as though the argument between Bel’s parents and her dad had really gotten to her and Bel. And it had, a little bit. Until Albert MacLeish showed up again.
Bel’s mum sighed, moving her gaze back and forth between the girls. “Okay, but just for a bit,” she said. “Then I’ll drive you home, all right, Nolie?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nolie said quickly, and Bel’s mom gave them both a final once-over with her eyes, then stepped out of the room and shut the door.
Nolie turned back to Bel. “Is this a bad time to say that I really like your room?”
Bel rolled her eyes, but Nolie was telling the truth. This cozy, dim space up high in the McKissick house seemed like the perfect bedroom to her. She was already itching to check out Bel’s overstuffed bookcase.
But for now, there was a much more pressing matter.
Nolie stepped over to the wardrobe and opened the door, pressing a finger to her lips to remind Albert to be quiet.
He crept out and sat on the edge of Bel’s bed, his bare feet pale against the hardwood floor. Shoes. That was another thing they’d need to work out.
“Okay, we’re going to use whispery voices,” Nolie told him, demonstrating just how quiet she wanted him to be, “and you’re going to tell us what you meant about wanting to help.”
“The light—”
“SHHH!” Nolie and Bel hissed in unison, and Albert frowned again. He did have a very stern look, but maybe it wasn’t that he was stern so much as that it was weird to see a boy wearing such fancy clothes.
“The light in the lighthouse,” Albert continued, finally keeping his voice low enough. “It must have gone out again. That’s why the Boundary is moving closer.”
Nolie blinked, taking that in. “I was okay with you being a ghost or maybe a zombie, and I was way here for killer fog, but the magic lighthouse keeping the fog back?” she asked. “That seriously sounds like a fairy tale.”
Another frown. This kid’s face was going to stick that way if he wasn’t careful.
Bel sat down on the floor near the bed, folding her legs underneath her. “Maybe start at the beginning,” she suggested. “Where have you been since 1918? How did you get here? Why were you—”
Albert held up his hand, then moved it to his head, rubbing at his temple.
“Give him a sec, Bel,” Nolie encouraged. “Coming back from the dead is probably really stressful.”
Albert’s dark eyes met hers. “I was not dead,” he told her stiffly. “The Boundary had been moving closer. Close enough that it was taking boats from the harbor, and getting too close to the village. Everyone was scared. There had always been a story about the lighthouse—that so long as it was lit, the fog stayed where it was. The town asked for volunteers to go light it. The volunteers never came back.”
“Your brother,” Bel said softly, and Nolie turned her head, surprised.
“He has a brother?”
“Had,” Albert replied. “Edward. He volunteered, but never came back, and the fog kept getting closer. So I decided to do it. Go out there myself. I couldn’t even tell you why, really.” Pausing, he rubbed the back of his neck, looking at the floor. “I’d found a wee rowboat on the beach one day, and it just seemed . . .”
Albert looked up, fixing Nolie and Bel with his dark eyes. “It seemed as though I were meant to take it. And it worked. I lit the light, but when I tried to row out, the fog was too thick. I kept rowing, though, and then the fog finally thinned out. And then I rowed to shore.”
He started rubbing his temples again.
“To shore, and right into the twenty-first century,” Nolie finished, shaking her head. “How long did you think you were rowing?”
Albert shook his head, too. “Felt like forever and only a few minutes all at once. The fog does tricky things to your mind.”
Bel had pulled her knees up to her chest now, arms wrapped tight around them.
“It was . . . strange,” he said. “When the fog broke and I got closer to shore, the boats in the harbor were different, and louder, and . . .” He shook his head. “And then I met the two of you.”
He said it all so easily, like he was describing any regular day. But he’d come back to a world that was missing everyone he’d loved, everyone he’d cared about. Didn’t he feel that? Or did people from his time do a better job holding in their feelings?
It had started to rain outside, the sound soft against the roof and windows, and Nolie huddled a little deeper into her hoodie.
“What happened last time?” she asked. “When the fog came into the village?”
Al was looking at the jersey in his lap, but he lifted his head at that, lips pressed tightly together. “It took things,” he said slowly.
Nolie felt goose bumps prickle her arms and legs. Maybe it was because they were sitting in a dim room on a rainy night with a boy who might not be a ghost, but was definitely something weird.
“What kinds of things?” she asked, imagining the fog sliding into people’s pockets, stealing whatever it was people carried in pockets in 1918. Pipes? Watches?
“Houses,” Albert replied. “People. Anything it touched vanished, just like the boats.”
“Oh,” Nolie said, sitting back in the chair. “That’s . . . pretty serious.”
From her spot on the floor, Bel asked, “So the light went out, the fog came in. You went and lit the light, and the fog must have rolled back to the lighthouse, but you were still stuck in it.”
Albert nodded.
Bel sat up a little straighter. “All right, so as long as the light is lit, the fog doesn’t come closer?”
“Seems that way,” Albert said.
Bel thought that over, her fingers playing with the fringe at the edge of the little floor rug underneath her. “Which means someone must have lit it before, right? And maybe gotten stuck rowing around in the fog like you did?”
“Nice one,” Nolie said, stretching out her leg to nudge Bel’s arm with the toe of her sneaker. “You’re probably really g
ood at word problems in math.”
Bel waved her off, but she was smiling a little, and Nolie looked back to Albert, waiting for his answer.
“I think there had been,” he said at last. “But it wasn’t a proper story. Just whispers. There was a bit of strangeness, though. When the fog moved closer, the village called a meeting. My brother and I weren’t allowed to go, but . . .”
“You sneaked,” Nolie supplied. “Which is legit.” She pointed at herself and Bel. “We totally sneaked tonight.”
Al paused, but then gave a little nod and continued. “Yes, we . . . sneaked. And there was a girl in that meeting, a girl I’d never seen before. One of the men, our neighbor, Mr. MacMillan—he asked her why she’d come back.”
“So maybe she lit the light, then came back when it went out, just like you,” Nolie said, lifting her chin from her hands.
Al shifted on the bed, looking back to the jersey spread across his legs. “Perhaps. There was certainly something important about her.”
The three of them sat in silence for a moment. Just an hour ago, Nolie had been in her bedroom, reading and thinking that the next day, she might go check out that ruined castle on the hill.
Now she was standing in Bel’s bedroom with a boy from 1918 who was telling them that they had to light a magic lighthouse to keep fog from eating the village.
Before she could ask Albert any more questions, though, there was another knock at the door.
“Nolie?” Bel’s mum called. “I’ll drive you back now.”
Sighing, Nolie thrust her hands in her hair. “Okay,” she called out. “We’re coming.”
Then she turned to Bel and Al. “So for now, Albert can go back to the caves. Tomorrow, we’ll see if we can sneak him somewhere less damp and deadly, and also free of girls.”
“And then what?” Bel whispered, her hazel eyes wide.
Nolie stood up. “And then we’ll figure out what to do next.”
FROM “THE SAD TALE OF CAIT MCINNISH,”
CHAPTER 13,
Legends of the North
AND SO ON ONE BRIGHT, COLD DAY, CAIT WAS TAKEN to the water’s edge and put into a rowboat. The wind had teeth that bit through the simple shift she wore, the water so cold it seemed to burn when it touched her bare feet.
The laird’s men were in another boat, tied to hers with a rope, and they rowed her out into the gray water while her stomach churned like the waves. They were just off the small rocky outcrop where, years before, men from her village had built a lighthouse, when the laird’s men untied the rope from her boat and rowed away again.
Her own small boat creaked and Cait shivered, smelling salt and sea and stone. Overhead, the light in the lighthouse flickered, and she stared at that bit of flame. Her father had helped build the lighthouse, had been the first to light the beacon. This is what Cait’s family had done for the village, and the village had still left her to drown or starve or go mad with thirst all the same.
Cait did not believe in magic, but there must have been some magic in her veins. Or if there was not, perhaps her heart was so broken that something dark was able to slither through the cracks.
She stared at that flame until her eyes burned, until her hands, still tied behind her back, began to tingle.
And the flame went out.
CHAPTER 15
“I FEEL LIKE THE HAT MIGHT BE A BIT MUCH.”
Bel frowned as she said it, studying Al from the other side of the tearoom table. He’d stayed at the caves last night, and they’d met him on the beach earlier, bringing him into the village for lunch. Before he’d left the night before, Bel had managed to sneak a few things from her kitchen, but some apples, string cheese, and a few granola bars weren’t a real meal.
They were planning on moving him into the Institute’s attic later today, and as such, Nolie had thought he’d needed a better disguise than Simon’s old clothes. Hence the baseball cap she’d found for him somewhere in the Institute, which would’ve been fine had it not had a plush Loch Ness monster attached to it. Nessie’s head stuck out over the bill of the cap while her tail poked out in the back, making it look like Al had a sea serpent swimming through his head.
Nolie looked over at him as she used the side of her fork to cut a hunk out of her piece of chocolate cake. “What? No, it makes him look like a tourist, Bel. He’s blending in.”
Al scowled slightly, casting his eyes upward even though he couldn’t actually see the bright green head with its googly eyes. “I don’t know what a tourist is, but they must be mad silly things to wear caps such as these.”
They’d decided to have lunch at the tearoom today since, as Nolie pointed out, that’s where all the tourists went, so it would help with Al’s “hidden in plain sight” thing. It wasn’t a bad idea—the place was pretty full of unfamiliar people, all with cameras or backpacks—but Bel was beginning to think Nolie had suggested it mostly for the cake.
Al seemed pleased with the food, too, tucking into a bowl of carrot soup and an egg-and-cress sandwich. It was gray today, with the smell of rain in the air, and Bel wrapped her fingers around a Styrofoam cup of tea. She’d made one for Al and Nolie, too. Al’s was plain because that’s what he liked, but she’d put loads of milk and sugar in hers and Nolie’s. Breathing in the sweet steam from her cup now, she rested her heels on the rung of her chair.
Leslie’s family ran the tearoom, so Bel hadn’t ventured in ever since their . . . whatever it was that’d happened. Strange how with Al and Nolie at her table, it hadn’t given her pause to come in today, though.
Of course, that might have been because she had more pressing things on her mind than why Leslie Douglas didn’t like her anymore.
“Was this a tearoom when you were alive?” Nolie asked Al, and he paused in demolishing his own slice of cake to glance around.
“No, it was a shop.”
He seemed more interested in eating his cake than giving them further details, but Bel still said, “My family owns a shop. We’ll take—”
She stopped, her face feeling warm. She’d been about to promise to take him by the shop after lunch, but how could she? His face was on the back wall, and, Nessie hat or no, Bel felt fairly certain her mum would think he looked familiar. Also, she wasn’t sure she wanted to explain the memorial to Al.
Nolie looked over at her, eyebrows raised, but Bel just shook her head and took another sip of tea.
The three of them sat there in silence for a bit, and Bel was beginning to think Al would just eat all the cake in the tearoom in silence when he suddenly said, “The fog took the shop.”
Bel sat her cup down with a thump, sloshing some tea over the side. “What?”
He kept shoveling in cake, the Nessie head bobbing. “When it started coming closer. Got all the way up to here, and the shop vanished.” Then he raised his head and looked around. “Pretty sure it didn’t come back once I’d lit the light. This place doesn’t look the same.” He wrinkled his brow, dark eyes searching the walls.
Like Gifts from the End of the World, the Foghorn Tearoom had been designed mostly to appeal to visitors, so there were green-and-blue plaid curtains in the windows, photographs of the Boundary on the walls, a few posters of other pretty spots in Scotland. Even the placemats were plaid, and bagpipe music drifted from little speakers in the corner.
Back when Bel and Leslie were friends, it had been one of Bel’s favorite places to come, and not just because Leslie’s mum’s chocolate cake was so good. It always smelled nice, the earthy scent of tea in the air, the sweet smell of baking drifting out of the kitchen. Especially on a cold gray day like today when the sea just beyond the window looked like stone, and drops of mist seemed to hover in the air.
Nolie had finished her cake, and was looking out toward the sea now. “The fog came in this far?” she asked. “All the way up here?”
They could just barely se
e the Boundary from here, and it was almost impossible to believe that it had once slid this far inland.
It was impossible. It had to be. Fog could move, of course it could, but it didn’t take things.
Bel said that now, and both Nolie and Al looked at her.
“You really want to start calling things ‘impossible’ when you’re having lunch with a dead kid?” Nolie asked, and for once, Al didn’t argue with her.
Sighing, Bel sat forward, her nails digging little crescent moons into her cup. “There could be some . . . I don’t know, scientific properties in the fog, preserving him. That I can believe. But the fog coming in closer, and taking buildings? Then going back because someone lit a magical lighthouse light?” She shook her head. “Wouldn’t we know? Wouldn’t there be stories?”
“They were probably sad. And ashamed,” Al said quietly. He was stirring a spoon in his soup, looking out the window. “The year I left, Journey’s End sent six people into the fog, and they never came back.”
If it meant saving the village, would people send someone out into the fog now? Bel chewed her bottom lip, thinking about it. She wanted to say that no, of course they wouldn’t, but then she thought of Jaime with his bright eyes and quick smile.
He’d go, she realized. In a heartbeat.
The door opened, and with it a gust of cool, damp air, and then Leslie was standing there, the hood of her slicker pulled up over her brown hair, and as always, Cara and Alice right behind.
When Leslie’s eyes met Bel’s, Bel wished she could suddenly become invisible. It was one thing to see Leslie out and about, but here, in her family’s own tearoom, there wasn’t anywhere to hide, or any way to avoid her, really.
Al and Nolie had clearly picked up on the tension, Nolie looking over at the three girls, and Al lifting his shoulders a little, like if he could just make his neck low enough, no one would notice his hat.
But Leslie had noticed, all right, and she and the other two girls came over to the table, the soles of their trainers squeaking on the hardwood floor. “Hiya, Bel,” Leslie said, and Bel gave her a weak smile.