Storm at the Edge of Time Read Online Free PDF

down the hillside. Happily Jamie ran after it, but she didn’t need a four-footed guide anymore. The ground was firm, and she could see her goal. She stopped once, exuberantly taking a picture, then hurried on. When she turned to wave to her guide, it was gone, probably settled into the grass somewhere.
    By the time Jamie got home it was early evening, but her parents weren’t back yet. They’d stay out watching birds until last light, she knew. Exhausted, she went upstairs and changed out of her dank, stained clothes.
    Looking out her window, she saw that the clouds had closed in on the sun again, but she could clearly see the tall dark stone standing alone in the field. In her mind, Jamie again saw the pattern which it and the other stones had made, linked together in that golden path of light.
    The picture brought an odd tugging into her mind. Uneasily she tried to shake it away. It seemed to be tugging toward something dark and dangerous—something that reminded her of how, as a little kid, she’d played she had supernatural powers, until that horrible time when one of them seemed to work. She’d been wrong, of course. Surely she hadn’t been able to move that glass with her mind, but the chasm that the moment had shown her had been deep and frightening.
    Jamie shook her head firmly. No, it definitely wasn’t make-believe powers or mysterious ancient stones that interested her. It was ghosts. The ghost of some fallen soldier or murdered heiress—a spirit she had a specialtalent to see, a spirit she could link to some real, understandable past. If she could just crank out a little more patience, she knew she’d find it.
    The next morning it was raining. Not a gentle rain, but rain that the wind snatched up and hurled like BBs against the windowpanes. Her parents postponed their birding plans for the day and decided to go into town to look at the museum. Jamie chose to stay behind and delve into the suitcaseful of ghost stories she’d brought along. To use up her film, she took one last picture out her window into the rain, then sent the roll with her parents, hoping they’d find a quick developer. Kirkwall was a tourist town, after all.
    The book she started was pretty good, but Jamie had trouble getting into it. A couple of kids whose teacher’s house was haunted were trying to help him find where the ghost’s unburied bones were. What annoyed her was reading about this sort of thing when she should be living it. When her parents returned, she was in a thoroughly rotten mood, but hope soared again when they handed her a packet of developed photos.
    Charging up the stairs, Jamie plunked onto her squeaky bed and tore open the packet. She flipped through the photos, each one driving her a little further into gloom. The spare room, the kitchen, the parlor: all perfectly ordinary rooms. Not one misty shape where nothing should have been, not one unexplained shadow. The outside pictures hadn’t even captured the windy wildness of the night. The only touch of quirkiness was where the flash had reflected in blue glints from the eyes of theowl perched on the standing stone. It gave her a moment’s shiver, but it was nothing. She got a similar effect when she took a picture of her cat at home.
    The cemetery pictures were just as useless: no glowing inscriptions on the stones, no pale auras lingering over the grass. The shots on the foggy hillside were a total washout, and the inside of the burial cairn looked like a cozy stone house.
    At the next picture, she gasped. Nothing supernatural, but a good picture. No, a great one—like a professional postcard shot. It was taken from the hillside, looking over shadowed fields to a slate-gray sea. Mountainous clouds were slashed by a chasm of light, and through it a stream of sunlight poured across the island, highlighting the chain of ancient stones. The one flaw was that the sheep in the foreground had caught the light so