Siege of Stone Read Online Free PDF

then Molly hoped for just a little excitement.
    Maybe, she thought, the glowing cloth in the boot would provide a little interest.
     
    T he first ghost was seen the next day. At six o'clock in the morning, the driver of a delivery truck on his way to Melvaig ran off the B8021 and got stuck in a ditch. When the tow truck arrived to pull him out and the garageman asked what had caused him to slide off the road, the driver said that he had seen a glowing white shape floating above the roadway, like a man without a face.
    It didn't take long for the story to spread down to Gairloch, where the young people laughed at it and the older ones frowned. A ghost made more sense, thought the elders, than blaming it on drink at the crack of dawn.
    They were proved right quickly enough. A crofter came into the pub in town that evening, anxious to tell his tale. He claimed he had been looking for a lost ewe, and was driving her back from the steep gully in which he had found her, when he heard a sound like the wail of a woman, and when he looked behind him, he saw, only a few feet away, but a foot or two in the air, the figure of a woman in a long white dress. She had a face like something out of a nightmare, all smooth and almost featureless, and her arms were reaching out for him.
    When he finally got over his shock and knew that he could move, he left that ewe in his dust, but she came running along behind him until they had both outdistanced that bogle. And the funny thing was, he finished, it was broad daylight, the sun shining, for a change, as bright as you please.
    The crofter was believed, since his description pretty well matched the truck driver's, and the crofter hadn't been in town to hear the driver's story. But what kind of ghost, the drinkers wondered, would show itself in daylight?
    That night, four people discovered that the ghost or ghosts had no exclusivity on sunshine, nor did they seem to be limited to certain places. A fisherman on Loch Ewe, bringing his dory in at dusk, saw a luminescent humanoid shape fifty feet in the air above the waters of the loch. It too had no discernible face, but the fisherman continued to watch instead of flee, and swore that he saw the shape rise higher into the air until it vanished. "Soared up like an angel," he said. "I wasnae a bit afraid of it."
    A hiker and his wife from Glasgow who were planning to spend the night on the gentle summit of Cnoc Breac changed their minds when a throbbing sound awakened them shortly after midnight, and more gleaming shapes than they could count seemed to be standing all around them before they vanished into the trees. When they told their story later, the husband said they looked like ghosts, but the wife held out for aliens, "Like in that Close Encounters , wee fellas."
    And in Kenley House, her Gairloch bed and breakfast, Mrs. Ross was helping a young English boy's parents to clean up him and her carpet after he'd wakened in the middle of the night and thrown up the lovely salmon, brown potatoes, and carrots she had cooked them for supper, along with three helpings of raisin pudding. She was taking the sodden paper towels out to the rubbish can in the alley, when two shapes appeared on either side of her, "Burning like hell's fires," she said later. She screamed, and fainted dead away, for the first time in her life. When she came to, the only detail she could remember was that "They didn't have faces . . . not proper faces, anyway."

Chapter 5
     
    W hen Chief Inspector Fraser heard the next morning about the multiple hauntings, her first thought was to attribute it to a hoax. So she and Ian and Kevin, her Deputy Inspectors, set out to visit some of the locals who specialized in such shenanigans, but found all of them sincerely puzzled about what had happened.
    When she got back to her office in the late afternoon, there was a message on the machine: "This is Martin Leech calling for Inspector Fraser," the man said. He then gave a number and requested