Amber slept soundly that night as far as I could tell. I, for one, got spooked again as soon as the lights were turned off. I slept in hour-long dreams broken by half-hours of uneasy wakefulness. Therefore, I disliked her the next morning, but, luckily for her, she didn’t have to see me before I left for work.
Gil did not call me at the Monteith Hotel, which discouraged me. And when I got back from work I found a note on my bed from Tony.
Dear Pudding Face: Laurence is taking me to the U district for lunch. I’m going with Amber to Charlotte Square (wherever that is!) tonight after dinner because there are supposedly lots of ghosts there and she wants to test how it goes. Hope you can come! Love, T.
Fabulous. Even though I didn’t have a date with Gil, I would still have to bundle up in wool and huddle outside on a frigid winter night. Not that the hostel was much of an improvement. The high ceilings, thin windows, and ancient steam-heat radiators conspired to keep us all in double sweaters around the clock. I hadn’t really known the meaning of cold until coming to Scotland. It got equally cold in Oregon, on the thermometer, but the persistence of the Scottish chill was what made it so formidable. Plus, our smaller houses in Wild Rose were heated better, and in Oregon I tended not to spend so many winter hours outdoors as I’d been doing here.
I searched for Shannon, who should have been back from work by now, but I couldn’t find her. I texted her, and soon she responded: she wouldn’t be back until tomorrow; she was spending the night at Thomas Chester-Brighton’s flat. This was at least the third time she had shacked up with him.
“Why even pay rent here, Shannon?” I muttered to my phone, and went back upstairs, wondering why the world intervened to keep me from seeing the people I wanted to see.
True to Laurence’s prediction, Amber spotted ghosts that night, and every subsequent night of Tony’s brief stay. He went out with her to some haunted location, she saw ghosts, then she came back and flung herself all affrighted onto Laurence’s lap. I went with them every night except one, but saw nothing. Tony didn’t see anything either. Laurence, who had a cold, didn’t go at all that week, giving us no chance to test whether her visions would crop up in his company.
On Tony’s last night in Edinburgh, the three of us snuck into Canongate Cemetery, tiptoed around the gravestones, and settled into a dry spot beneath the overhanging roof of a monument. Tony wrapped one side of his coat around me for warmth. His low-toned conversation with Amber about burial practices didn’t disturb me. Dozing, I thought in a happy dream-like state that I would be sad to see Tony go tomorrow, but glad to have more time with Gil. Maybe my next meeting with him would tip the scales one way or the other and help me figure out my love life.
I must have fallen asleep for a minute because when I next opened my eyes, Tony was shifting upward, climbing to his feet. And Amber was across the cemetery, in the moonlight and the December wind, advancing on an ominous vault. The box-shaped stone building stood about twelve feet high, with a wooden door swinging ajar on one hinge.
Deep shadow swathed the interior, so I couldn’t see what was in there, but I pictured a stairway descending to a tomb full of shrouded corpses on stone shelves. I scrambled to my feet with a shudder, getting away from the tombstone I had fallen asleep under. “What’s she doing?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Tony. “She just looked over there and got up, like she was possessed.”
She reached the door, caught hold of it, and vanished inside.
“Crap. She’s lost her mind,” I said.
Tony and I ran over, reaching the vault in about ten seconds. That was longer than you could have convinced me to stay in there, and she still hadn’t reappeared.
I stopped on the square of stone in front of the door and swore under my breath. The most unpleasant thing I could imagine doing was to reach out and open that creaky spider-infested door and widen the ribbon of darkness to a yawning mouth of black.
Yet Amber was in there.
“I can’t do this. I can’t touch the damn thing.” I bounced on my toes in frustration. “Why the hell didn’t we bring a flashlight? Amber! Come out!”
“Amber!” Tony shouted. He, too, eyed the door with a wince. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he muttered, then seized the edge of the door and pulled it open.
Cobwebs swung from the inner corner. I couldn’t see a thing inside.
“Amber!” he called again. “Are you okay?”
“Please come out,” I tried.
No answer.
I looked at Tony. “I am not going in there,” I told him.
Then, with a whimper and a burst of footsteps that made Tony and me skitter backward, Amber shot out of the vault and slammed the door behind her. She took half a second to catch her breath, then took off shrieking, “Let’s get out of here, let’s get out of here, let’s get out of here!”
A game, right? She was screwing with us...right? Just like that other time, with Bloody MacKenzie?
Still, you could never be too sure when creepy cemeteries were involved. We took to our heels, and I, for one, did not look back.
On a street corner two blocks from the cemetery, the three of us tumbled to a halt, catching each other by the arms, barely able to breathe.
“You were joking,” I panted. “Right?”
“No,” she whimpered.
“No?”
She shook her head, hair whipping across her face.
“Then what the hell,” I asked, “did you see?”
“My name.”
“Your name?”
“I saw a light, and it was my name written in red letters, like fire, on one of the drawers in the wall. Those mortuary drawers where they put people. And there was a date.”
To my shock, she broke down sobbing. The daring, intrepid Amber reduced to crying in public. Chills crawled up my neck.
“I couldn’t get out,” she continued, mittens pressed to her face. “I swear I only took one step inside, but it was like I was a hundred feet from the door. It said ‘Amber C. Willock, 19 February 2008’.”
Two months away. My chills broke into goose bumps.
Looking shaken, Tony laid a hand on her back and guided her along the sidewalk. “I’m sure it was nothing. Eyes playing tricks on you.”
“It was there. I can still see it, the way the light spelled out the letters...”
“Probably doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Your imagination, all this stress.”
“It was there,” she echoed.
“Even if it was--heck, just a date. Maybe you’ll win the lottery that day.” Though truth be told, if I’d seen my name written in a tomb with a date under it, I would already be out hiring a shrink. And probably buying a Kevlar vest. And writing a will. God, poor Amber.
“How am I going to live two months till then? Wondering if I’m going to die?”
She wept. I hugged her against me as we walked back to the hostel. Tony and I murmured reassurances, and joked that she was surely just reacting from some hallucinogenic mold in Scottish bread. But from the looks we exchanged, I knew he felt as troubled as I did.
When we arrived, she said she wanted Laurence, so we took her up to his room. He let us in, holding a book and wearing his robe and sweats, looking perplexed to find us pounding on his door at midnight. Amber burst into tears afresh, collapsing against his chest. We explained what had happened, and he agreed to let her sleep on his sofa.
The unkind thought did occur to me, as Tony and I returned to the third floor, that maybe she had made up all of this--subconsciously or not--simply to get into Laurence’s room for the night. All her other attempts had failed. She had complained to me about that just the other day. She confessed she was still ludicrously jealous of me for the time I slept against him under the same blankets when I was sick in October. (Once again I suggested she try catching a stomach bug, which for some reason didn’t appeal to her.)
But that was ungenerous of me. Amber would not break down in tears in the middle of a city sidewalk for a mere chance at bedding someone who wasn’t even there at the moment. She had better tricks up her sleeves. Whether or not she was hallucinating--and for once I hoped she was--she wasn’t doing it on purpose.
“Kind of scary, huh?” said Tony.
“Yeah. I’ve never seen anything scare her that much.”
“Doesn’t exactly make me want to get on a plane tomorrow.” Tony laughed uncertainly.
“Hey, don’t worry. It wasn’t your name she saw.”
* * *
The next morning Amber and Laurence came down about ten minutes apart to say goodbye to Tony. He had to leave at 7:00 a.m. to catch a cab to the airport.
If Amber experienced any afterglow from having spent the night in Laurence’s room, she didn’t show it. She still looked unsettled, dark shadows lurking under her eyes.
Laurence sniffled with the remainder of his cold, but otherwise looked the same as ever. He, of course, would probably not tell me if anything romantic took place. Amber would normally, but under the somber circumstances she might not. I wondered if Miss Manners had any suggestions on how you should ask a friend shadowed by the Angel of Death whether she got any action last night.
Laurence and Tony shook hands in farewell. Then Amber stepped up and hugged Tony, which was surely a first. He took it gracefully, giving her a solid hug in return.
“I know you’re not into this,” I heard him say, “but I’m going to pray for you, whether you like it or not.”
She smiled. “I can handle that. Thanks, Tony.”
I followed him out to the curb, where he flagged a taxi. He gave me several long kisses, then spent a moment stroking my ear and gazing at me. “It’s dangerous to leave you here; you’re so pretty.”
The guilt stole up and bit me. I tried not to twitch.
The cab was waiting, so we said our farewells and he got in.
“Tell Shannon Merry Christmas for me!” He shut the door.
I watched the cab drive away, and turned back to the hostel with mingled sorrow and relief. My daily life now featured one less complicating factor, anyway.
Replaced by so many others.