Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,41
they put her in place. Talk to us.
“I don’t understand. What do you want me to say?”
Isis gasped at the sudden sound of her own voice. She was back in her own body again, arm outstretched, her fingertips touching the cold, grainy surface of the standing stone.
She put a hand to her chest, feeling its rise and fall. Put her other hand to her cheek and the curves of her face.
“What did you just do?” asked Gray, his voice trembling and scared.
“I…” She shook her head. “How long was I standing here?”
“No time at all,” said Gray. “You haven’t even been there a second.”
Their walk back was quick, both of them keen to get away.
Gray was ahead of Isis, his shoulders hunched and pulled in on himself. Isis was relieved he wasn’t speaking. She didn’t want to talk, because she had no words to fit what had just happened to her. Merlin led the way, his few attempts at conversation trailing off in the face of their silence. After a short distance, he glanced back at them, then took out his mobile phone and began to chat with someone. “No, I’ve been up at the stone. I’ve got a couple of kids, found them in the woods, just wondered if… Oh, you have, okay… No! I’m bringing them straight back! Haven’t taken them anywhere!”
In front of Isis, Gray slowed down, letting Merlin go ahead of them. Then he turned around.
“Are you contagious?” he hissed.
Isis looked at him, astonished. “What are you talking about?”
“Being psychic,” said Gray. “Are you like a carrier or something? Is that what all the stuff with me holding Angel’s hand, and seeing the Devourer and… everything! Is that what it was all for, so you could make me like you?” The last word was grated out. “Because I don’t want it! I don’t want any of that stuff!”
Isis stared at him, pulled out of her own strange experience by his anger.
“Have you… seen a ghost?”
Gray nodded.
“When?”
He nodded his head, back towards the clearing. “And in my garden.”
“What did they look like?” she asked, not caring about what he’d seen in his garden. But at the standing stone, had he seen them too, the succession of people going backwards and forwards in time?
But Gray only frowned, and muttered, “Me.”
“What?”
“They looked like me.”
Isis found herself smiling in answer, trying to puzzle what he meant.
“Ghosts of yourself?”
“Don’t laugh!” snapped Gray.
“I’m not. I’m sorry. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ghost that looked like me. And if you’d caught being psychic from me, wouldn’t you be able to… I don’t know, see Angel for yourself?”
“I must be going mad then,” he said miserably. “I thought I was getting better, but then up there…” He looked at Isis. “Maybe it’s post-traumatic stress from what happened in the summer? Maybe my brain can’t cope with what yours can.”
“No!” She wasn’t going to believe that! She couldn’t bear to think she might be hurting him, by pulling him into her strange world. “It’s got to be something else.” She tried to think. “What exactly have you seen?”
“These fuzzy shapes at the standing stone. Some of them looked like me.”
Isis held onto a small tree, steadying herself on the steep little track they were heading down. The trees and the slope of the land all looked so ordinary, yet completely alien, as if she’d never seen such things before. And it didn’t feel right to be walking either, one foot after another, only going forwards, when she knew that wasn’t how it worked at all.
“Maybe we’re both crazy,” she said to Gray. “Something really strange happened to me up there too.”
His mouth opened with a question, but before she could tell him more, Merlin was stamping back up the path to find them.
“Your parents are at the protest camp, having hysterics about you,” he said. “You never told me you’d gone off without telling them. Sounds like they were about to call out Search and Rescue.”
He looked at the two of them, and whistled. “You two got a real faceful of energy at the standing stone, didn’t you? Told you that place was powerful. You gotta be careful around that many ley lines.”
Chapter Sixteen
Gray
When Dad and Cally reached us – led by a couple of pretty grimy-looking protestor types wearing camo gear – Dad started shouting about how irresponsible and reckless I was, even though the whole thing had been Isis’s idea.
“Do you know what your mum would’ve done if we’d had