Gaelan’s mind had always provided a fertile landscape for such horrors and delights to conjure from his unconscious at will. To terrify or soothe. Yet, his mind had never before ventured here, to this place, neither in dream nor vision.

Yet, why would it not, other than it hadn’t? And why not now, at long last, a dream of safety he’d not felt for hundreds of years? Why not this place? And who knew what havoc the poison had wrought?

Ah, the poison . . . Was this his death, and this his singular heaven?

For the moment, Gaelan was satisfied to avoid the question and go along for the ride—wherever it took him. Not that he had much choice. And that meant, for now, up the staircase and out of the stale air of the cellarium.

The narrow, steep stairs spiraled up toward ground level, and Gaelan stayed close to the retaining wall, a small lantern his meager guide up the pitted and cracked stones.

The hospice Dernwode House had been notorious in its day. A place of mystery, its black-hooded brethren but phantoms, the remnant few of a once-grand monastery at Soutra, most of whom had been exe- cuted long before Gaelan was born. Yet, a small band survived, said the legend, haunting the Borders in perpetuity. Gaelan believed it a tale perpetrated by the brethren themselves as means to an end—keep the secret and continue their practices of medicine and scholarship. Work and study.

Yet, Dernwode, even in its veil of secrecy, became welcome sanc- tuary for those in need of its generosity, and the skill of the monks, whose medical skills were far more advanced than any known in Britain. Skills gladly offered, but only on the promise of absolute dis- cretion beyond the hospice walls, well sequestered within the arms of the Eildon Hills.

For Gaelan, Dernwode House had been sanctuary and more.

A third of the way up the stairs, Gaelan was breathless, drenched in sweat. The trek up to the surface was more arduous than he recalled; his injuries must have been worse than he’d imagined. He needed to rest.

Sitting on a mud-caked stair, he raked filthy fingers through his equally filthy hair and closed his eyes, elbows on his knees. The voice of his tutor Brother Hugh echoed softly through the dark, reminding Gaelan of the first time he’d been down these stairs as a lad of twelve and only just arrived. Turn of a new century, 1600.

“We are a house of healing, a house of learning and work. A hospice to those who have need of us, who will find our door, no matter how hidden we are—or whom we shall find, as we did you, my lad.

“Your dear papa and grandfather we considered great friends and allies and could never forsake. We worried for your safety after the execution, lad, and grieved the loss of them, both bright lights in the darkness of ignorance, which flourishes yet upon these shores.”

Two years it had been after King James burnt his father alive on the pyre. In the midst of winter the Dernwode brethren had found Gaelan half-frozen and barely breathing, nearly dead of starvation, only a short distance from the monastery gates.

Two years living beneath the oppressive thumb of his moth- er’s father in the cruel emptiness that followed the horror of that morning, which still preyed upon him four centuries on. He had little choice but to carefully pack all that remained of his father’s work and flee.

Gaelan sighed and the memory disintegrated, as a large spider crept silently into the periphery of his vision, ambling its way along the wall. Another joined it, and another after that. Soon, they covered the entire wall, weaving away at a complex web. Gaelan blinked, and they’d vanished.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

He looked up, noticing now, not so high above, the orange-black of early dawn. Or was it twilight? With no watch, Gaelan had no idea.

Time to push on.

The stairs were ever-more eroded and cracked the higher he climbed, many of them separated by gaping crevasses. He paused before a particularly wide gap, wiping away the sweat dripping into his eyes. Twenty-one more steps to the top.

The land whereupon Dernwode House stood had once been part of his own family’s estates. Centuries earlier, long before even his grandfather was born, House Learmont forged an eternal bond with the black-hooded monks of Soutra. Lord Thomas Learmont de Ercil- doune, poet, philosopher, prophet, friend to the fairy folk, keeper of the great book of healing.

Thomas had shared the book with the monks—Augustinian Canons—of Soutra. Airmid herself had insisted upon it after releasing him from his seven years’ captivity in the thirteenth century, or so said the legend.

“They will understand how to interpret these cures,” she’d explained to Thomas, who explained it to his sons and their sons after until the story was passed on to Gaelan, not by his father but by his tutor Brother Hugh at Soutra. On these very stone steps.

“The Brethren of Soutra shall for you and your heirs ever be friend and ally. No matter what comes to pass. We are all that remain of the Black Canons, who long ago dwelled here, but we dare never admit it. To any. This be Dernwode House now, and we but mere lay folk here, who do endeavor to continue their goodly works.”

Gaelan departed Dernwode—all that remained of the Soutra legacy—after three years, not to return for more than two hundred after that. By then, the monks and their legacy were long gone, the hospice consumed by tall grasses and dense woods. There’d been little remaining of its grounds, its buildings and gardens.

The amber glow of the lantern reflected against the retaining wall, drawing Gaelan’s eye to something just above his head, just barely visible beneath centuries of grime. He moved closer, boosting himself up to the next stair to take a closer look.

It required nearly half the case of water bottles Gaelan had found to clear away the centuries of mossy filth. By the time he finished, he was drenched with sweat; he gripped the wall for support as a wave of dizziness fell upon him and leaned his head against the cool, rough stones for a moment’s respite.

Holding the lantern close, he saw it clearly. An inscription carved deep into the wall and clearly the work of an experienced artisan—of a time very long past.

“’Twas there above a beam o’ light danced owre them mair bonnie than starshine. Wi’ green scarves on, but ane that rade foremost, and that ane was a good deal larger than the lave wi’ bonnie lang hair, bun’ about wi’ a strap whilk glinted like stars. They rade on braw wee white naigs, wi’ unco lang swooping tails, an’ manes hung wi’ whustles that the win’ played on. This an’ their tongue when they sang was like the soun’ of a faraway psalm.”

Gaelan knew this story well; had heard it over and over as a boy— this telling of the Rhymer’s abduction away to Elfenland. To Elfen- hame. The fae, their queen, and her court on parade. Visible, but only in the blink of an eye, a shadow in the periphery, but no more than that—and only then to those who knew how to see them.

The inscription glowed in the amber light, penetrating through the centuries, the letters dancing, as if they themselves were the fae, arrived from another plane.

Gaelan’s ancestor was called by many names in legend. Lord Thomas Learmont. True Thomas. Thomas the Rhymer, borne away by the fae queen Airmid and kept as her consort for seven years. Abducted quite near this very place they rode through on the hallowe’en.

The Scots inscription nudged at the far reaches of Gaelan’s mind and lapped at the slipping bonds of Gaelan’s wakefulness. Before him, in the peculiar light of the stairway, marched the fae, dressed not in green velvets but in rags of faded color, not on white steeds with braided manes and decorated tails but on foot, slow and weary. Their song not a psalm but a plea for help. They stared at him from within the vision, gazes dark, desperate.

Gaelan blinked and they vanished. Desolate, alone, frustrated that the poison had not, evidently, worked—or worked so strangely as to drive him insane—he’d had enough. Powerless to do anything about it, he wept.

Tears cascaded down his face unabated, his hands, his now-filthy shirt, his jeans, bathing him of everything that had transpired in these past several days. Or had it been weeks by now? The last century. The past five. Of regret and revenge. He wept until his eyes were dry and the tears dried to caked streaks as sleep claimed him.

A single ray of sunlight split the dark space of the stairway. Enough to wake him. Gaelan stood, stepping into its unexpected warmth. His mood had not improved.

“Enough!” he shouted up through the stairway until it reverber- ated all around him, disembodied voices. Until he was hoarse, and his throat was as dry as burnt paper. “Enough!” Until no sound had the energy to emerge from between his parched lips.

He pounded on the stairway wall until his fists bled. Ignoring the pain, and the itch of blood trailing down his forearms, Gaelan again leaned his head against the cool stone, exhausted, spent of all reserves. A block of cracked masonry disintegrated in his hands when, finally, he pushed away, and a large granite block popped out of its place in the wall. No matter how hard he tried to force it back into

position, it would not budge an inch.

Now what?

Gaelan edged the heavy block from the wall, resting it carefully on a step, and dusted off his hands. What the hell had lodged itself behind the block? He squinted into the opening, the dim lantern light no more help than the scant rays of sun filtering through from above.

A petrified rodent? Vines? A jug of five-hundred-year-old rum?

Now that would be worth the effort!

Groping far into the breach, Gaelan located the offending object. A sheaf of papers bound up in a leather cover, secured with braided cords and a heavy strap, brittle with age. But not even decades, centu- ries, of grime and dust, moss and mildew could completely mask the richness of the tooled leather.

He’d been an antiquities dealer too long to risk opening some- thing ancient and fragile in the dark, difficult stairway. Curiosity tugged at him, recharging his flagged energy, and he trudged up the remaining stairs, mindful of the increasingly fractured stone, finally reaching the top.

The midmorning sun cut like a laser, too bright after however much time he’d spent below ground. The cool cleanliness of a spring morning replaced the oppressive, dark chill of the cellarium. The fresh air swathed him, and the forest perfume wafted down from the hills, swaddling him against the dark spirits that had just before threatened to suffocate him.

Holding it up to the light, Gaelan examined the cover. The leather tooling was crude, certainly not professional. A primitive sketch. Random lines. Rubbing away more of the grime revealed no useful clues about the document’s age or contents. It was old, yet not so much as Gaelan imagined a document hidden within the subterranean wall of a medieval structure might be.

The handwriting was neat. Quill.

First of May 1930

It is no figment of my imagination, and despite what my critics write about me and my penchant for the fairies and their world, I must here finally assert they are all wrong. I am at last vindi- cated! There is no mistake, and I am proven no fantasist.

I have seen them with mine own eyes, and have acquired here- abouts—or from your perspective, dear reader, thereabouts— validation of all I have for so long believed true, though perhaps not exactly as I’ d imagined. Sadly so, I am sorry to report, for their condition—their world, just a hair’s breadth beyond our own—is far from what is fancied. However, after writing for so many years, indeed, most of this decade, of others’ personal encounters, I am happy at last to give in these pages my very own accounting.

You may think I do not know the Cottingly fairies are but a hoax. A bloody good one, but a hoax nevertheless. Yet, despite my knowledge of it, you may further wonder why I did not expose it, and, indeed, did embrace the very idea of it. Most assuredly, it was neither pride nor vanity—an old man refusing to say out- right he has been fooled, and so soundly at that. For the fairies do exist, real as you and I, and I did not wish to harm my own case by dispelling the Cottingly prank.

And so, this journal I leave for whomsoever may discover it, wanderer or plunderer. Consider it the ravings of a madman or the insight of one who has seen beyond normal seeing, perceived beyond the everyday of life and into the world of the fairies. I am a journalist of some reputation still, and I only ask you consider that as well.

This was madness. It could not be. Conan Doyle’s writings?

Bloody hell. Conan Doyle?

He closed the cover. How was it possible?

A red fox bounded across the field and into the shadow of the hills in hot pursuit of a hare. Gaelan’s stomach growled in protest. How long had it been since he’d eaten?

Conan Doyle had lived not far from this place, and it was not uncommon to read, even in the American press, of a newly discovered unpublished manuscript turning up in a nearby attic or cellar. Was this yet another? A story? An unfinished novel? Would Holmes pop up on the next page or the one after that? Gaelan continued reading.

My hope for some time has been to track down the history of an elusive, perhaps magical, book of healing attributed to a particular sect of the fairy folk and given over to our world through Thomas of Erceldoune, a man of legend and ballad, to be sure, but also of historical significance. That I have been unsuccessful is of little matter, for what I discovered was of far greater import. Hard to fathom it has now been more than a quarter century since first I set out on this hunt for what you might suggest is the great white whale of my existence. But at long last, I am successful, knowing that although I am not long for this world— perhaps a year, perhaps less—I have my proof of the existence of fairies in my own hands.

Conan Doyle died only two months after the date of the entry. July 1930, years after they had last been in contact. As Conan Doyle more and more concerned himself with the supernatural world of ghosts and fairies, Gaelan placed himself at an increasingly safe dis- tance from the author’s often too-probing inquiries.

He quite understood Conan Doyle’s obsession, his dogged pursuit of facts to support his understanding of the fairies, despite the risks to his reputation. Conan Doyle obviously witnessed something. And had written it down for posterity. But why stash the papers here and not at his home in Sussex?

More likely, and far more tragically, these papers represented the mad ravings of an elderly, dying man. His last testament to a theory for which he could never acquire even the merest threads of evidence.

Never mind the unlikelihood of Gaelan, of all people, discovering it here, and now. The idea that all this was his grand delusion weighed heavily. If ever he awoke from it, would he still be in the sea cave? Had the poison destroyed his sanity and left his body alive? A cruel fate, if true.

The probability of discovering a journal—or whatever it was— documenting events triggered by his own conversation with Conan Doyle more than a century ago—insane. And mention of Gaelan’s healing book to boot! What other rational explanation could there be? A madness brought on by the poison he’d consumed. Yet, he was curious enough to learn where this delusion led.

You undoubtedly think me insane, or this entire diary a fiction fabricated for the benefit of my loyal readers, perhaps to be published in The Strand as an addendum to The Coming of the Fairies. But where that was anecdote, this is a first-hand chronicle, worthy of a journalist of my standing. I ask only, dear reader, that you keep about you an open mind—open to the holding possibility that what I suggest is true and no fairy tale, as it were.

As Gaelan set the folio on the ground, a piece of glass fell from within the sheaf of papers. Curved as if blown and not cut from a plate. Smooth as weathered quartz. Opalescent.

Turning it in his hand, he held it up into the sunlight with an art- ist’s eye. The piece was in perfect condition, no cracks. No weathering or erosion.

Then it hit him. And he froze, stunned, as if struck by lightning. That piece. Crafted by his own hands, missing for more than a century. Impossibility upon impossibility. None of it made any sense at all, but how could he not believe his own eyes? Not trust his own memory of it? The feel of the glass, its smoothness, the weight of it in his hand? What next? A white hare bounding by, asking about the time?

Clasping the piece to his chest, running his thumb along the curve of it, Gaelan closed his eyes, picturing . . . her. His beloved. His wife.

END CHAPTER