Читать книгу Laying a Ghost - Alexa Snow - Страница 5

There was a sharp smell, something acrid like a chemical. It felt like it was pounding at Nick’s temples, trying to get into his head, and he gasped and twitched. As soon as he did that, the ache that had been un-ignorable in his arm flared to life, white-hot and stabbing, his nerves screaming from fingertips up past his elbow. Nick whimpered and tried to curl up around the pain, but he couldn’t move.

He opened his eyes. It was dark, and his chest hurt, too, but not half as much as his arm. Where the hell was he?

Memory came flooding back, leaving him gasping. In the road ... and he’d swerved, he had to have. He couldn’t remember that part, but he did remember the screech of tires on the road, the way the wheel had felt in his hands, stuttering as the car spun out of control, and then there’d been ... nothing. He couldn’t remember anything else.

No, that wasn’t true.

He remembered Matthew’s muttered curse.

“Matthew?”

Nick turned slowly, rolling his head toward the passenger seat because there was no way he could try to move the rest of his body, and ...

Nick woke up with a gasp and a start, his heart racing, the light pressure of the seatbelt across his chest immediately sending him into a panic. He was on the left-hand side of the car and that was just wrong; he didn’t sit there anymore. Even thinking about it was enough to make his breathing shallow and his heart pound. At least the latch for the seatbelt was on the right and he could get to it with his good hand, which he did, fumbling at the unfamiliar button in his haze of dream-memory until it clicked and he was free.

Too late, though. The panic had already taken over, and there was nothing to do but ride it out. The appropriateness of that phrasing made Nick give a gasp of laughter as he reached across his body with his good hand and opened the car door, wondering where the hell the guy driving the car had gone as he tumbled out onto the hard packed earth, luckily managing not to catch his weight on his left hand as he fell. He was making little scared sounds with each breath, trying not to lose it completely, reminding himself that this was just adrenaline and it would pass. It had been a while since it had been this bad, but it would pass.

On the springy turf that seemed to lap at the walls of the house a man could walk quietly, and it wasn’t until John’s boots struck the hard-packed earth of the driveway that Nick heard him coming. He’d regained just enough self-control to guess at once who was coming, but as he tried to stand up and stammer out some excuse about falling, the green of the grass and the gray of the house spun around him wildly and he sank back.

John squatted beside him, and he felt a warm, callused hand take his, strong fingers wrapping around his and holding on.

“You fell asleep,” John murmured, in that lilting voice that reminded him of his mother’s when she was excited or angry. “It’ll be that jet lag, isn’t that right? Your body’s here and your head’s still thousands of miles away.”

He sounded matter-of-fact and completely undisturbed by Nick’s inability to do more than stare at him, but the hand holding Nick’s tightened a little as he carried on talking, not stopping long enough that Nick had to answer him, which was just as well.

“Want to try standing up again? I’ve opened the door and a few of the windows. It’s not so bad. The beds were stripped, but I’ve found the sheets and put them out on the line to air. We’ve a few hours before the rain comes in and this wind will have them fresh by then.”

“Just give me a minute,” Nick said roughly, not letting go of John’s hand even though he probably should have. The world was feeling a little bit too bright and sharp just then, making him slouch in on himself, keeping himself small, protected. John’s presence, undeniably solid and real, was a comfort that he couldn’t quite bring himself to surrender.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The air was salt-tinged and crisp, and Nick blinked at John, still squatting across from him, watching him with a concern that did more to warm him than the sunshine. John’s eyes were blue, and his lips were thin and curled up a little bit on one side like they were used to smiling. They made Nick want to do things to make John smile, to make John smile at him. He was more drawn to John than he could have explained.

“Okay.” Nick got up with John’s help, although the other man released his hand once it was clear that he was steady on his feet now. “Sorry,” Nick offered. “It was ...” No, there was no way he was ready to describe what it really was. He might never be. “Like you said, jet lag, I think.”

“Aye.” John gestured towards the house, seeming happy to accept that as an explanation. And it wasn’t a complete lie. Getting from New York to a remote Hebridean island involved a complex coordination of planes, trains and ferries that had left Nick either racing along corridors to make connections with minutes to spare, or spending hours sitting waiting for the next stage of his journey to begin; he’d been traveling for so long that it was no wonder the earth felt as if it was spinning too fast. “Well, there it is. Rossneath House. If you want to go in, I’ll get the shopping from the car. I started a kettle boiling, so you’ll be able to have a drink, if you’d like.”

“Thank you.” Nick absently took a look at the house for the first time, as the wind ruffled his hair.

It was bigger than he’d expected it to be -- not a huge house by any means, but still larger than what he’d been picturing. The exterior paint on the trim, a medium gray, was peeling in some places, no doubt from the wind that came up off the sea. Nick was turned around and unsure where they’d come from, but he’d seen maps of the island and knew that wherever they were, the sea wasn’t far off.

There were white shutters that looked functional rather than decorative, and he noted that one of the windows on the second floor was cracked. He hoped the glass wouldn’t need to be replaced right away -- actually, he was hoping that there wouldn’t be too much he’d need to do to the place right off the bat. He was so tired that all he wanted to do was sleep and get settled in. Then he’d deal with whatever needed to be dealt with.

John walked past him with two handfuls of shopping bags, and Nick went back to the car and took out the last few bags with his good hand, leaving the one that contained John’s groceries, and following him into the house. As they walked, he let himself study John from behind, noting the way the man’s clothes fit. It wasn’t, Nick told himself firmly, anything more than curiosity.

Inside his new home, Nick paused on the threshold, letting the dusty smell of the place wash over him, and waiting.

There was nothing, and he sighed with relief and walked over to John, glancing around the kitchen, which looked pretty much as if it had been abandoned for a couple of years, a thick layer of dust and grime on top of the stove. “This is so weird.”

John finished rinsing out a mug and shook it free of water before setting it aside to dry. “Seeing it for real, you mean? Is it not what you were expecting then?” John glanced around the kitchen, at wooden cabinets and a solid, functional table and chairs, and didn’t seem to find it bare, or ill-equipped. Nick tried to picture his mother in this house, in this kitchen, and failed.

“I guess.” Nick set the bags down on the table and just stood there. He felt like a stranger; the house felt more like John’s than his. There were things in those cabinets that had belonged to his uncle, sometimes talked about but never seen. Some of those things had probably been his grandparents’, things that his mother had used when she was growing up here, anxious to leave school by the time she was fourteen. She’d talked about it a lot; about how she’d hated living here. She’d always encouraged Nick to live a casual existence, teaching him that setting down roots just meant stagnation, leaving him stuck to the earth instead of free to roam, to do whatever interested him.

They’d been lessons he’d taken to heart, words he’d lived by until ...

Nick cleared his throat. “No.” John was putting the eggs into the small refrigerator and fiddling with the temperature dial. “It’s not what I was expecting. I think I’d been picturing it empty. Furniture, sure, but not ... his whole life is here.”

“He left knowing that he wouldn’t be coming back.” John slammed the fridge door. “I’m sure of it. But even so, he insisted nothing be changed and the house be locked up and left alone. My mother went to visit him now and then, and she says the first thing he asked was always if the house was safe, and she’d tell him it was. It was all he had left, you see. While it was waiting for him, just as it’d always been, he could picture it and know what he saw in his head was true.” John rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, flushing slightly. “Och, listen to me run on. Sit down and I’ll make you a drink and then leave you in peace.”

To his mild surprise, Nick found himself obeying, sitting down at the table. He knew from previous experience that peaceful wasn’t a state that he was likely to achieve when John left. Matthew had understood and hadn’t left him on his own for the most part, which was something Nick had always been grateful for, although maybe not quite as grateful as Matthew would have liked; Nick knew that his friend had wanted more from him.

“That’s nice -- that your mother went to visit him, I mean. Were they friends?” Nick was struck with a sudden desire to know more about the man who had lived in this house.

“Friends?” John frowned. “Not as such, no.” He walked over to the kettle and with a minimum of fuss produced a cup of instant coffee, bringing it over to the table and setting it down in front of Nick before dragging out a chair for himself. “He was just -- he was from here, d’ye see? And she knew fine that he’d be missing the place. She’d take him the local paper, tell him what’d been going on, smuggle in a drop of whiskey too, if I know her.” He smiled. “She’s not one for following rules when they don’t suit her.”

Nick smiled at the thought, and then realized that he was looking into John’s eyes a little too warmly and dropped his gaze. If he was going to stay here, the last thing he needed to be doing was making anyone uncomfortable with unwanted attraction, even if it wasn’t Nick’s fault that John was warm and charming and much, much sexier than he seemed to realize. A small community like this, one made up of families that had been here for generations ... it would be asking for trouble to open up. “Did he have any friends? Anyone I could talk to?”

“Start with my mother,” John told him. “She’ll know. But I think you’ll not find many he was close to. He wasn’t unhappy, not exactly, but he was a lonely man.” John pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’ll bring in your cases, shall I? And it’s a little chilly in here; when it’s aired out a little, you’d best light a fire or two. There’s peat stacked behind the house ...” John paused and chuckled at himself. “Imph. You’ll not be knowing how to build a peat fire, now will you?” He pursed his lips in thought. “Look; if you’re wishing me long gone, say the word, but I’ve nothing I was planning to do this afternoon and I can help you get settled in if you’d like.”

Almost pathetically thankful, Nick nodded. “If you don’t mind, that’d be great. I don’t even know where to start.” He drank a good third of his coffee in one swig and stood up. “But I can help with the bags. And if you could show me where the peat is?”

They went outside into the fresh air. Some clouds were threatening, but not enough that rain seemed imminent. Nick realized that he really needed to go through the house and find out where everything was. If they lost power, he’d need candles, or a flashlight at least. He’d need to know how to work the chimney -- he knew vaguely that there was something called a flue, but he wasn’t sure what it did -- and if there was a washing machine. He hadn’t planned this properly. All he’d thought about was getting as far away as possible, and Traighshee had seemed to fit the bill.

“If you plan on staying, and you’ve got the money, you might want to think about installing radiators,” John told him as they walked back to the car and got out Nick’s luggage. “The smell of a peat fire doesn’t make up for the dust they make, and if the peat’s damp, you’ll be choking on the smoke.” Nick’s face must’ve been more expressive than he’d intended, because John grinned again. “There’s a water heater, and that’s electric, so you’ll be able to have a hot bath tonight -- oh, and the water will likely be brown, but that’s the way it comes up here, so don’t panic.”

“Is that why you drink so much tea here?” Nick hitched the strap of his bag over his shoulder -- God, it was heavy; he should have had all of the books shipped, instead of trying to bring some of them with him -- and watching as John closed the trunk of the car again. “To hide the color of the water?”

John’s mouth twisted in a smile as he picked up Nick’s suitcase. “Maybe,” he agreed, beginning to walk back to the house. “But the best way to do that is to put it inside a dram.”

Nick had been doing a fair amount of drinking himself in the past month, once he wasn’t taking what felt like a small arsenal of pills every day -- painkillers, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics -- so he was no stranger to a good glass of whiskey. The thought that the water in said glass of whiskey might be brown, though, noticeable or not, wasn’t all that appealing. Maybe he’d switch to vodka.

Inside again, Nick considered putting the bag down, but realized he’d just have to move it upstairs anyway. Might as well do it now. “Have you been upstairs?” He gestured toward the staircase that he could see through the doorway between the front hall and what seemed to be a sitting room.

“The first time was when I helped carry your uncle down them,” John replied. “But, aye, I went up there when I brought down the bed linen, remember? There’s a bathroom and three bedrooms. Only two beds though; your uncle wasn’t much for visitors and I know he had one room shelved for his books, for it was my father who put them up for him.” John stepped back, allowing Nick passage. “After you,” he said with a courteous inclination of his head. “And while we’re up there, I’ll take a look at the water heater.”

The thought of having a room just for books was appealing; the discovery that his uncle had cared for books, something that Nick had never known, made him smile. He started up the stairs carefully, feeling the creak of solid old wood underneath his feet, noting the scars and scratches in the finish.

He kept going when he reached the top of the stairs, making room behind him for John with the heavier suitcase and glancing into the room that overlooked the front yard, which had only a single bed in it along with a bureau and a small bookshelf.

At the top of the staircase to the left was the bathroom, painted a pale shade of gray and containing an old-fashioned claw foot tub as well as shower fixtures. The hallway was larger than Nick would have expected, with another, taller bookcase full of books and a bench with a padded seat that appeared to open for storage. At the back of the house were the other two bedrooms -- the makeshift library on the left behind the bathroom and the master bedroom to the right.

Nick moved into the master bedroom and set his bag down onto the mattress, which was covered with a thin mattress pad but otherwise stripped. There was a phone on the bedside table, he noted.

John appeared in the doorway but didn’t cross the threshold. His gaze went around the room, and then came to rest on Nick for a long moment before he looked away. He put the suitcase down just inside the room and left without speaking, heading toward the bathroom.

Nick frowned, but assumed that John would be back in a few minutes. He moved about the room slowly, picking things up and setting them down where they’d been. A watch, of the wind-daily variety, which he was pretty sure was real gold. A handful of coins, still foreign-looking to him. He wondered how long it would take living in another country before the money looked like actual money and not Monopoly money.

The wallpaper was dark; navy blue stripes with cream and, when he ran his fingers down along it, thinly coated with the same dust that lay thick everywhere else. An asthmatic would have a hell of a time getting settled here, Nick thought. He opened a dresser drawer and looked inside at the neatly folded sweaters.

Wandering over to the bookshelf against the wall near the window, Nick crouched down and looked at the books. A few titles that he recognized, but for the most part none of them were ones he was familiar with.

When he stood up and glanced out the window, the first thing he saw was a small white church.

The second was the graveyard that lay between the church and the house -- his house. Nick froze, staring at it without blinking, his eyes tracing over each headstone, most of them old and rounded with time and weather, only a few of them appearing to be more recent. Possibly a hundred in total.

“My father’s buried there.”

The voice behind him was quiet, but in the silent house a whisper would sound loud, Nick thought. Unwilling to make a fool of himself in front of John twice, he forced himself to look away from the graves, dropping his gaze to the wide windowsill, bare of ornaments, like the rest of the house, and staring blindly at the cracked, peeling paint.

“Does it bother you, then? The graveyard?” John crossed the room, coming to stand behind Nick. “I can see it from my house too.”

A hand came to rest on Nick’s shoulder, turning him slightly so that he was looking beyond the cemetery to a small gray house in the distance. The warmth of the touch was a welcome distraction. “Over there, see? On top of the hill. If you don’t count the sheep and the rabbits, I’m your closest neighbor, now I come to think of it.”

There was a faint whisper in the back of Nick’s head, but he didn’t want to listen to it. “I remember. I must have still been awake when we drove past it.” Nick didn’t comment on the graveyard because there was nothing he could say that would change anything, and anything he did say was likely to make him sound even stranger than he probably already did, an outsider and an American. The graveyard was there. Sooner or later, he’d have to deal with it.

“I didn’t know there was a church so close by. Does everyone on the island go?” He hoped that might be an indirect way of asking if John went.

“Most do, aye.” John’s hand dropped away, leaving Nick standing alone. “I go myself once in a while, but I can’t say that it’s for more than the chance to make my mother smile. I’m not much for being told what to do and I can’t be doing with the notion that something’s sinful on Sunday and not on Monday.” He sighed. “There’s people on the island won’t watch television on the Sabbath, let alone fish. Pure foolishness to my mind.” He paused, and then added diffidently, “I’ve not offended you? Are you a churchgoer yourself then?”

Nick looked out across the fields between the house and the church, the blue sky and clouds, the rays of sunshine, then shook his head. “No. I’m not ... no.” He turned again to John, who was watching him with what might have been relief. “My mother always said that she thought God could hear her better when she wasn’t in a building full of other people all trying to talk to him, too.”

“She sounds like she was a sensible woman. Although I’ve sat in the church as a boy, when every soul in it was praying for one thing and felt the comfort of it.” John’s eyes clouded. “I can’t seem to recall a time when the prayers were answered, mind you.” He shook himself and gave Nick a small smile. “Not even when it was for Scotland to do well in the World Cup, and you’d think the Lord would’ve been merciful then, if only to prove that he could still pull off a miracle or two.”

There was something there, hovering at the edges of Nick’s vision, but he couldn’t quite see it, and more importantly he didn’t want to. He didn’t want whatever memories -- memories that didn’t belong to him -- waiting for him; and he didn’t know John well enough to say anything. Nick thought that if he wanted to get to know John better, which he did, this wasn’t the time.

Nick realized he’d been staring at John for several very long seconds, memorizing the lines of his face, the shape of his lips. “I’m sorry,” he said, which was the wrong thing to say.

“For what?” John gave him a quizzical smile and then shook his head. “We keep chatting like this and we’ll never get you settled. If you’ve the energy, unpack what you’ll need and go and take a shower; the heater’s working fine. I’ll start a fire and bring in the bedding so that you can get some rest. I’m thinking it’s what you need more than anything, although if you’re hungry?”

“No, you’re right -- sleep’s probably top of the list.” Nick looked over at his suitcase, feeling weariness wash through him now that it had been acknowledged, leaving him warm and weak. “That’d be great. If you’re sure you don’t mind.”

John had disappeared downstairs before Nick had finished unlatching his suitcase. He found a pair of flannel pants and a sweatshirt, thinking that he’d definitely need to buy some new clothes once he’d figured out what the weather was going to be like long term.

He struggled briefly with the shower, trying to get the water to the right temperature, but once he had, he was able to wash away the worst of the travel grime. There were towels on a small shelf, and he pulled out the bottom one, shaking it out and sniffing it tentatively to check for mildew, but it seemed okay. He quickly scrubbed himself dry, pulled on the clothes, and went back to the bedroom, where John had moved his suitcase to the floor underneath the window and was just starting to put the sheets onto the bed.

“I can do that,” Nick protested, putting the clothes he’d been wearing and the ace bandage from his wrist down on the chair near the wall.

“You can help me do it.” John sounded as if that was as much of a compromise as he was willing to make.

Nick moved to the opposite side of the bed and caught hold of the edge of the sheet, pulling it taut and tucking it under, using his good hand to lift up the edge of the mattress. There was an unfamiliar smell drifting through the house that had to be the fire; smoky, yes, but oddly homey.

John must’ve noticed him sniffing at the air, because he said, “I’ve banked the fire up well and the chimney’s drawing nicely; it should burn for a good few hours and just take the chill off. There’s rain coming in, and you’ll be glad of the warmth when you wake.” He shook out a thick blanket, letting it settle on top of the sheet, and then added another and a feather quilt, thick and soft.

“There. That’ll do.” He gave Nick one of the nods that seemed to say more than his words sometimes and stepped back from the bed, heading towards the door. “I’ve left you my number on the kitchen table if you’re wanting anything. I’ll drop by tomorrow and see how you’re faring, though.”

The urge to ask John not to go was there, but Nick bit back the words. “Thank you. For everything. You’ve been great. I really appreciate it.”

John paused in the doorway and glanced back at him. “You’re welcome.” Words that would usually have been an automatic response regained their meaning in his soft voice. “Sleep well.” His unhurried footsteps sounded loud on the thin, worn stair carpet as he left.

Nick crawled between the sheets, laid his head on the pillow, and was instantly asleep.