Truthfully, I was no stranger to magic, the paranormal, or whatever you wanted to call it. In the end, my absolute certainty that I had the rock in my possession and two things that happened to me in my past finally made me accept the fact that I truly had landed in the seventeenth century.
The first happened when I was eighteen. On the day of my high school graduation, I walked up the steps to the front door of the only real home I’d ever known to collect my foster mother, Lilly, for the ceremony. With my hand on the knob, I twisted it, but for some reason the door simply wouldn’t open. I tried over and over, but it wouldn’t budge. Suddenly, I heard a voice, clear as day as if someone were right beside me. I glanced over my shoulder but found no one. Again I heard the same words. “Don’t go into the house alone. Call Jep and wait for him to get here.”
I started to cry. Since the door wouldn’t budge, I did as the voice insisted. Once Jep arrived, the door opened with ease. Inside, we found the remnants of a break-in, with things smashed and broken everywhere, anything worth value stolen.
We called the police immediately, and Lilly arrived at the house with them. Thankfully, she’d been out getting her hair done during the robbery. From a surveillance camera of a neighbor’s house, the men had been armed and the time stamp showed they were still inside when I arrived at the front door. The thieves fled out the back.
The other incident occurred in college. During Winter Break, Lilly took me to Wales. Her parents moved from Wales to the States when she was a little girl, and she’d always wanted to make a trip back there to revisit her childhood. It was the most terrifying experience of my entire life.
We spent the day driving through Snowdonia National Park and decided to stop for the night at a small family run inn in a nearly deserted town. With the hotel virtually empty, we were the only one in a room on our side of the old house.
The evening passed normally and both of us slept like exhausted and weary travelers. But in the morning, things changed. We packed our bags, rolled them to the door, and opened it to see a figure staring at us not ten feet down the hallway.
The ghost stared at us as we stood frozen in the doorway, seemingly deciding if she approved of our presence. Neither of us breathed. After a few very long seconds, the woman turned and walked down the hallway, evaporating in the distance. If Lilly hadn’t seen it also, I would have been certain I imagined it.
Both instances couldn’t be explained, yet I knew with absolute certainty that both happened. Confident in the reality of those instances, I didn’t see how I could continue to deny the possibility that something truly unexplainable happened here as well.
If I believed without doubt in guardian angels and ghosts, why couldn’t I believe in time travel?
Chapter 11
I woke on the fifth morning with a fully renewed attitude about my current situation. Sure, it terrified me to realize that I’d somehow ended up in a time nearly four hundred years before I was born, but I also had hope that when I was ready to return, I would be able to. After all, I had the rock, didn’t I?
According to Morna, the entire purpose of the rock depended on it. So far she’d told the truth about almost everything. Skipping the rock indeed sent me back in time and the rock magically returned to me after I tossed it, just as she’d promised it would. Bri, however, Morna lied about. While Baodan confirmed that she lived in this time as well, the innkeeper made it seem like I would find her here at McMillan Castle, and Bri wasn’t. She probably didn’t even know that I was here in this time with her.
I twirled the rock in between my fingers. It scared the bejeezus out of me to find it inside the pouch, but now I prized my possession of it as my lifeline back to home. As long as I had that with me, I saw no reason not to enjoy my time spent with Bri in a place and time most people would only ever dream of visiting. I might as well enjoy this place as well, until Baodan took me to Conall Castle.
I slipped out of the gown I’d been given to sleep in and reluctantly crawled back into the now-dry gown that I traveled here in. I found it uncomfortable, which made me self-conscious. I was a jeans and a t-shirt, sweats and hoodie kind of girl. Dresses were no less than a tolerable form of torture.
I spent half of an entire day trying to figure out how to do up the laces myself. While I figured out how to keep the dress up, it was sloppy work. As long as I wouldn’t reveal myself to the man sitting outside my door, I felt satisfied.