A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows (Outlander, #8.5)(8)

* * *

It was full dark when he came to himself, but the clouds had broken and a three-quarter moon shone in the deep black of a country sky. He moved, and groaned. Every bone in his body hurt—but none was broken. That was something, he told himself. His clothes were sodden with damp, he was starving, and his knee was so stiff he couldn’t straighten his right leg all the way, but that was all right; he thought he could make shift to hobble as far as a road.

Oh, wait. Radio. Yes, he’d forgotten. If Dolly’s radio were intact, he could …

He stared blankly at the open ground before him. He’d have sworn it was—but he must have got turned round in the dark and fog—no.

He turned quite round, three times, before he stopped, afraid of becoming dizzy again. The plane was gone.

It was gone. He was sure it had lain about fifty feet beyond that one stone, the tallest one; he’d taken note of it as a marker, to keep his bearings. He walked out to the spot where he was sure Dolly had come down, walked slowly round the stones in a wide circle, glancing to one side and then the other in growing confusion.

Not only was the plane gone, it didn’t seem ever to have been there. There was no trace, no furrow in the thick meadow grass, let alone the kind of gouge in the earth that such a crash would have made. Had he been imagining its presence? Wishful thinking?

He shook his head to clear it—but in fact, it was clear. The buzzing and whining in his ears had stopped, and while he still had bruises and a mild headache, he was feeling much better. He walked slowly back around the stones, still looking, a growing sense of deep cold curling through his wame. It wasn’t f*cking there.

* * *

He woke in the morning without the slightest notion where he was. He was curled up on grass; that much came dimly to him—he could smell it. Grass that cattle had been grazing, because there was a large cow pat just by him, and fresh enough to smell that, too. He stretched out a leg, cautious. Then an arm. Rolled onto his back, and felt a hair better for having something solid under him, though the sky overhead was a dizzy void.

It was a soft, pale blue void, too. Not a trace of cloud.

How long …? A jolt of alarm brought him up onto his knees, but a bright yellow stab of pain behind his eyes sat him down again, moaning and cursing breathlessly.

Once more. He waited ’til his breath was coming steady, then risked cracking one eye open.

Well, it was certainly still Northumbria, the northern part, where England’s billowing fields crash onto the inhospitable rocks of Scotland. He recognised the rolling hills, covered with sere grass and punctuated by towering rocks that shot straight up into sudden toothy crags. He swallowed, and rubbed both hands hard over his head and face, assuring himself he was still real. He didn’t feel real. Even after he’d taken a careful count of fingers, toes, and private bits—counting the last twice, just in case—he still felt that something important had been misplaced, torn off somehow, and left behind.

His ears still rang, rather like they did after an especially active trip. Why, though? What had he heard?

He found that he could move a little more easily now, and managed to look all round the sky, sector by sector. Nothing up there. No memory of anything up there. And yet the inside of his head buzzed and jangled, and the flesh on his body rippled with agitation. He chafed his arms, hard, to make it go.

Horripilation. That’s the proper word for gooseflesh; Dolly’d told him that. She kept a little notebook and wrote down words she came across in her reading; she was a great one for the reading. She’d already got wee Roger sitting in her lap to be read to after tea, round-eyed as Bonzo at the coloured pictures in his rag book.

Thought of his family got him up onto his feet, swaying, but all right now, better, yes, definitely better, though he still felt as though his skin didn’t quite fit. The plane, where was that?

He looked round him. No plane was visible. Anywhere. Then it came back to him, with a lurch of the stomach. Real, it was real. He’d been sure in the night that he was dreaming or hallucinating, had lain down to recover himself, and must have fallen asleep. But he was awake now, no mistake; there was a bug of some kind down his back, and he slapped viciously to try to squash it.

His heart was pounding unpleasantly and his palms were sweating. He wiped them on his trousers and scanned the landscape. It wasn’t flat, but neither did it offer much concealment. No trees, no bosky dells. There was a small lake off in the distance—he caught the shine of water—but if he’d ditched in water, surely to God he’d be wet?

Maybe he’d been unconscious long enough to dry out, he thought. Maybe he’d imagined that he’d seen the plane near the stones. Surely he couldn’t have walked this far from the lake and forgotten it? He’d started walking toward the lake, out of sheer inability to think of anything more useful to do. Clearly time had passed; the sky had cleared like magic. Well, they’d have little trouble finding him, at least; they knew he was near the wall. A truck should be along soon; he couldn’t be more than two hours from the airfield.

‘And a good thing, too,’ he muttered. He’d picked an especially godforsaken spot to crash—there wasn’t a farmhouse or a paddock anywhere in sight, not so much as a sniff of chimney smoke.

His head was becoming clearer now. He’d circle the lake—just in case—then head for the road. Might meet the support crew coming in.