Storm at the Edge of Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

books. She’d gone through a door in her world and come out in another. In a world of gray nothing.
    It was gray and wet, like mist. Like a
cloud,
that was all! The cloud had crept farther down the hill while she’d been inside the cairn. Around her, the usual raging wind was muffled into a ghostly sigh.
    Jamie felt a quick surge of relief, but it just as quickly faded. In this mist, she’d have a hard time finding the path back. She thought of that Sherlock Holmes story about a ghostly hound in which someone strays off a misty path and gets sucked into the mire.
    She’d left the government flashlight back in the tomb, but it was too weak to do much good here. With her eyes on the ground a few feet ahead, she slowly setout, trying to remember her route. Past the gate, turn right. Go uphill.
    For a while the path was clear enough, cutting through peat, heather, and coarse curly grass. Sometimes where the ground was boggy, the path braided, but the strands always came back together. Once, taking a branch that petered out, she had to backtrack to the other. A white wooden arrow solidifying out of the mist showed she was right.
    Instead of thinning, the mist seemed to be getting denser. A white wall of silence bounded her world, shrinking it to a few feet of boggy hillside. Then Jamie realized she had lost the path altogether. She’d sidestepped around a particularly muddy patch, and now there was nothing in sight but untrampled heather.
    Panic seeped like cold from the ground. This wasn’t some half-remembered story read in the warmth of her room. It was real, it was now, and
she
was the person wandering lost. Frantically Jamie stumbled about, looking for the trail.
    There it was, a little trench of hard earth cut through the heather. Swiftly and gratefully she followed it, eager to be free of this nightmare. But the trail led on and on and didn’t rise when she thought it should. And there were no helpful white arrows along the way. At last Jamie admitted this was just a sheep trail.
    But surely she couldn’t be too far from some road or farm by now. She called out a hello. The sound fell to the ground, heavy and muffled. She tried again, but the blanketing mist soaked up the words almost as soon as they left her mouth.
    Jamie strained her ears. Had that been an answer?She called out again, and again came an answering call. She looked around, straining to see through the mist.
    â€œWhere are you?” No answer, but she saw a smudge of darkness in the mist ahead. With a sigh of relief, Jamie stumbled forward.
    Again she called. Still no answer, but the shape seemed clearer. It was moving along the same path as she. Another hiker? Putting on speed, she tried to catch up. She could see more clearly now. He or she was short. A child? Closer, and the moving object was taking shape. A wide, four-legged shape. It was a sheep.
    In shock, Jamie stopped and stared. The sheep stopped too, gazing back at her with calm blue eyes. Then it turned and trotted on ahead.
    What choice had she now? Shrugging, she followed. Even sheep go somewhere.
    Her woolly guide faded in and out of the mist but always stayed enough in sight to keep Jamie on the trail. Slowly other vague shapes began to form through the mist—a fence post, a stunted hedge.
    Then suddenly she had stepped below the cloud. The island, sea, and inland loch spread out before her. In the west, other clouds had folded themselves along the horizon. At that moment, two slid apart, loosing a shaft of sunlight onto the landscape below. In a golden river, it slid across the fields. That house on the edge of the light, surely that was hers. Yes, across from it was the lone standing stone. And from here, Jamie could see the chain of stones and stone circles that were clearly linked to it. Together they glowed in that path of light.
    She laughed with relief, and in front of her the sheep bleated. It gave her another blue-eyed stare, then trottedquickly