Haunted Read Online Free Page A

completely incomprehensible to Marian.
    But there was nobody else around at this
time, the street echoingly empty of people, and Marian struck out
alone towards the little fishing harbour of Portree.
    That’s when she saw him again, her little
boy. He ducked behind a corner, and then peered back at her
mischievously as though he wanted her to follow him. As he was
going in her direction, she did. He seemed to appreciate this. He
vanished, but reappeared again in a different shadow a moment
later, smiled, and was gone. Marian quickened her step, and swiftly
rounded the last corner.
    The fishing boats bobbed quietly in the
mirror-still harbour, their reflections seemed to them so flawless
that they almost looked painted on the ocean. A few gulls hovered
in church-like silence in the pale amethyst sky of the long summer
twilight, and one paced the narrow beach, across which ropes
stretched taut from the motionless boats to the wall which rose at
the back of the water-lapped half-moon of pebbly shoreline, with
great deliberation, as though he were seeking buried treasure. A
pale cream cat startled at Marian’s approach and sloped off into
the purplish shadows of a narrow lane between houses.
    On the prow of the closest boat her little
boy say, feet dangling over the side. As if aware of her stare, he
raised his eyes and laughed, stretching his arms out towards her,
almost begging to be picked up and hugged.
    There was something achingly familiar about
him, something that constricted Marian’s heart with the nameless
pain of it; and then suddenly had it. The eyes. The eyes were old
Duncan’s eyes, grown young again. Jamie’s eyes.
    The little boy was not reflected in the still
water – there was too much of shadow in him to cast one. That was
why she didn’t expect to see him mirrored in the ocean when he
suddenly leapt off the ship and skipped, across the top of the
water, towards her, his arms still outstretched.
    Marian stood still, transfixed, her arms
going out to meet him even without her knowledge or her command. As
their hands touched he was gone, vanished into the evening, a
curious warmth spreading in her body from somewhere deep in her
belly.
    In the same instant she left another hand,
heavy, very much of his world, descend on her shoulder. She whirled
with a little cry and stared up into Jamie’s face.
    “He’s gone,” Jamie said quietly.
    Marian hugged him wordlessly and they stood
there as the breeze picked at their clothes with impatient
fingers.
    “He said…” Jamie’s words seemed to trail away
into the silence of the evening.
    “He said?” she prompted after a moment.
    “Yes. He blessed me. Us. And also his
grandson. And – this is the strangeness of it – he did not mean
Charlie. I know it.”
    Marian suddenly smiled against Jamie’s blue
anorak, understanding all too well. That warmth in her belly,
waiting only for the seed to make it grow. The child had followed
her across Skye, old Duncan’s spirit, his true grandchild,
himself.
    Marian turned herself in Jamie’s arms,
moulding her back into his body, taking his arms and curling them
around her, crossed at her belly. She looked up at the sky where
the stars were beginning to wink on, and smiled, entirely at
peace.
    “We’ll call him Duncan,” she said softly, the
decision made, firm. “He’s going to have Duncan’s eyes.”
     
     
    And now for another treat – an unpublished
one, never before seen by anyone’s eyes. Romantic ghosts haunted my
literary output for some time, it would seem – because as best I
recall this story was written some time after the previous two. But
by this stage I’d quit writing for the ladies’ magazine romance
market as such, and anyway this one was just a little darker, just
a little more ‘literary’, than anything before it had been. I love
it dearly, for the characters who crowd its pages, but it was a
difficult story to find a market for, especially for the young and
inexperienced writer