Spellbound

was healthy. He’d had a complete physical only weeks before.
    But you didn’t tell the doctor about the dreams, did you? he reminded himself. The dreams you can’t quite remember when you wake up. The dreams, he admitted, that had pulled him three thousand miles over the ocean.
    No, damn it, he hadn’t told the doctor. He wasn’t going that route again. There had been enough psychiatrists in his youth, poking and prodding into his mind, making him feel foolish, exposed, helpless. He was a grown man now and could handle his own dreams.
    If he was having a breakdown, it was a perfectly normal one and could be cured by rest, relaxation, and a change of scene.
    That’s what he’d come to Ireland for. Only that.
    He started the car and began to drive aimlessly.
    He’d had dreams before, when he was a boy. Very clear, too realistic dreams. Castles and witches and a woman with tumbling red hair. She’d spoken to him with that lilt of Ireland in her voice. And sometimes she’d spoken in a languagehe didn’t know—but had understood nonetheless.
    There’d been a young girl—that same waterfall of hair, the same blue eyes. They’d laughed together in his dreams. Played together—innocent childhood games. He remembered that his parents had been amused when he’d spoken of his friend. They had passed it off, he thought, as the natural imagination of a sociable only child.
    But they’d been concerned when he seemed to know things, to see things, to speak of places and people he couldn’t have had knowledge of. They’d worried over him when his sleep was disturbed night after night—when he began to walk and talk while glazed in dreams.
    So, after the doctors, the therapists, the endless sessions, and those quick, searching looks that adults thought children couldn’t interpret, he’d stopped speaking of them.
    And as he’d grown older, the young girl had grown as well. Tall and slim and lovely—young breasts, narrow waist, long legs. Feelings and needs for her that weren’t so innocent had begun to stir.
    It had frightened him, and it had angered him. Until he’d blocked out that soft voice that came in the night. Until he’d turned away from the image that haunted his dreams. Finally, it had stopped. The dreams stopped. The little flickers in his mind that told him where to find lost keys or had him reaching for the phone an instant before it rang ceased.
    He was comfortable with reality, Cal told himself. Had chosen it. And would choose it again. He was here only to prove to himself that he was an ordinary man suffering from overwork. He would soak up the atmosphere of Ireland, take the pictures that pleased him. And, if necessary, take the pills his doctor had prescribed to help him sleep undisturbed.
    He drove along the storm-battered coast, where wind roared in over the sea and held encroaching summer at bay with chilly breath.
    Rain pattered the windshield, and fog slithered over the ground. It was hardly a warm welcome, yet he felt at home. As if something, or someone, was waiting to take him in from the storm. He made himself laugh at that. It was just the pleasure of being in a new place, he decided. It was theanticipation of finding new images to capture on film.
    He felt a low-grade urge for coffee, for food, but easily blocked it as he absorbed the scenery. Later, he told himself. He would stop later at some pub or inn, but just now he had to see more of this haunting landscape. So savagely beautiful, so timeless.
    And if it was somehow familiar, he could put that down to place memory. After all, his ancestors had roamed these spearing cliffs, these rolling green hills. They had been warriors, he thought. Had once painted themselves blue and screamed out of the forests to terrorize the enemy. Had strapped on armor and hefted sword and pike to defend their land and protect their freedom.
    The scene that burst into his mind was viciously clear. The flash of sword crashing, the screams of battle in full power. Wheeling horses, wild-eyed, spurting blood from a severed arm and the agonizing cry of pain as a man crumpled. The burn as steel pierced flesh.
    Looking down as the pain bloomed, he saw blood welling on his thigh.
    Carrion crows circling in silent patience. The stench of roasting flesh as bodies burned on a pyre, and the hideous and thin cries of dying men waiting for release.
    Cal found himself stopped on the side of the road, out of the car, dragging air into his lungs as the rain