Chapter Text
People disappear all the time. Young girls run away from home. Children stray from their parents and are never seen again. Housewives take the grocery money and a taxi to the train station. Most are found, eventually. Disappearances, after all, have explanations. Usually.
Lima, Ohio, 2011
"See you next year, Lady!"
The sneering words were quickly followed by pain bursting across his skull as Kurt's head forcefully impacted with the metal lockers. He hissed as his fingers gingerly touched his throbbing forehead. Kurt didn't bother to look. He knew it was Azimio who gave him that parting shot. And to think just a second ago, Kurt was actually feeling almost happy.
He'd cleared out the last of his personal belongings, a change of clothes. All the textbooks had been returned, notebooks tossed into the recycling bin. He closed the door on the empty locker. Last day. A whole glorious summer without knuckle-dragging Neanderthal jocks. But this latest locker check only reminded Kurt — painfully — that he still had another year of hell to survive. And he was tired.
Kurt could feel his Dad's eyes on him all through dinner. He knew something was off. Kurt went through the motions of the day like he was on remote control, doing the things he was supposed to be doing, speaking words when words were spoken to him. He hadn't realized Burt had gotten up from the table until two packets were dropped next to his dinner plate. Kurt looked up in surprise.
"What do you say we get out of Ohio?" Burt announced.
Kurt's eyes drifted down to the packets. Slowly he opened one. Inside was a plane ticket… to Scotland.
***
One year while riding a roller coaster at the state fair, when the car tipped over the peak and plummeted straight down, Kurt's body lifted slightly out of his seat in a split second of zero gravity. It felt like his heart dislodged from its place inside his chest and flew up into his throat.
That was the last thought Kurt's mind latched onto as it tried to make sense of the sensation of the earth falling away from beneath his feet, while tilting and spinning at the same time, just before he blacked out.
***
Little bits of information began to seep into Kurt's mind. There was a chill in the air. Had he fallen asleep without pulling the blanket over himself? He was lying down… but the mattress was lumpy… and smelled of grass! A weak light pressed against his eyelids. Scrunching up his face, Kurt cracked open his eyes, blinking several times but all he saw was gray. As his vision began to focus once again, he realized that he was staring up at an overcast sky. No, it was more than that. A fog blurred and shrouded the world in a white-grayish mist, cool and damp. Or was that the dew on the grass? Kurt tried to sit up but his body was heavy and sore; he groaned at the effort.
It was all coming back to him now. He was in Scotland, Inverness to be precise. It had been his idea to rent a room from Airbnb. Mrs. Baird was a pleasant woman in her 50s, happy to share local gossip and a decent enough cook for the comfort-food meals she made. Last night though, Kurt hadn't been able to sleep and finally got up to sneak down to the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea or maybe some warm milk. That's when he caught proper Mrs. Baird in the kitchen, wearing a diaphanous gown of thin gauzy layers and not much else. She pulled on a coat while a half dozen women and girls grouped together with similar dresses peeking out at the hems of their coats. Kurt recognized a couple of them from the town. They whispered and laughed quietly, clearly trying not to make noise. What in the world were they up to at this hour?
It was that curiosity that compelled Kurt to follow them out into the night in nothing more than his pj bottoms, plain cotton t-shirt and soft leather slippers. Mrs. Baird's home was on the outskirts of the city and the women took a trail that led through the woods and up a hill. Several minutes into this trek, Kurt was regretting his impulsive decision and certainly regretting not having a coat and sturdier shoes. He should have been concerned about getting lost should he lose sight of the women, but he was pretty sure he knew where they were going... Craigh na Dun, a circle of standing stones, much smaller than the famous Stonehenge. He and Burt had visited it earlier in their trip and according to their guide book, England and Scotland had several lesser known standing stones scattered about, relics of a by-gone era, passing through time like silent witnesses to the human drama that unfolded around them.
If only they could talk, Kurt had thought while Burt recited facts from the guide book. What stories they could tell.
Kurt had wrapped his arms around himself in a fairly useless effort to fend off the cold night air by the time the women arrived at the circle of gray stone slabs. Kurt circled around the outside looking for a place to watch unseen. He realized now that the women weren't carrying flashlights – torches, Kurt corrected himself of the British word – actually they were torches or meant to be, would have been torches lit with fire long ago, but were now battery-operated lanterns at the end of short sticks. Wise precaution. It would be pretty embarrassing if you inadvertently started a fire while cos-playing druids at a historical landmark.
The women shed their coats and took up their glowing torches and positioned themselves within the stone circle. In their dresses and veils they looked like a cross between nymphs and Maid Marion from Robin Hood or maybe nuns if their habits were all white, or maybe all these things weren't so very different from each other after all. It should have been ridiculous as they glided through their choreographed dance of graceful arms and twirling around each other, but was it any more so than what Glee had done for Gaga Week?
As the lights of each of the women interwove among the ancient stones, the hairs on the back of Kurt's neck rose and it wasn't from the cold. When had the beating of his heart began to sound like the beating of drums? Out of the darkness came a song foreign and old sounding, but yet somehow distantly familiar calling out to some part of ourselves buried deep within us but paved over by modern civilization. In that moment it was easy to imagine women linked throughout time coming to this place to perform these rites generation after generation paying homage to something timeless and unchangeable… and powerful.
Kurt was held spellbound as the rays of the rising sun lit the early morning mist and bathed the women and stone in growing warmth. And then suddenly it was over. The women held their torches up to the center stone in final tribute. Kurt snapped out of the spell when the women switched off their lights and gathered up their coats, chattering and laughing among one another. Kurt's heart still pounded in his chest.
A little belatedly, he realized that he too needed to return to Mrs. Baird's house before his father woke and found him missing. Now that the women were gone from sight, Kurt decided secrecy wasn't necessary and he scrambled up the hill and into the stone circle. He planned to leave in the direction of the women and follow the trail back, but he was hit by the memory of his mother that was so abrupt he inhaled sharply. And there it was… her perfume! It was the strongest sense-memory he had of her as a little boy's memory blurred like an aging photograph, not quite able to recall the exact features of her face or color of her hair. Even her voice, singing to him lost its tone. But her perfume, that remained fixed in his mind along with the memory of standing at her dresser, doing up her hair, putting on her makeup, and dabbing on her favorite perfume. At five years old, he had gotten into the dresser drawer and opened the bottle and spilt it all over everything in that drawer. It soaked into the wood where its scent still lingered.
He turned in the direction where the scent was the strongest and found himself staring at the center stone. Down at its base was a clump of little blue flowers. Drawn to it, Kurt knelt down and fingered the delicate petals. Overwhelming sorrow engulfed him and the flowers blurred with unshed tears in his eyes. He missed her so much! Like a hollow space in his soul. As much as he loved his dad and he knew that he loved Kurt back… as much as they had learned how to connect to each other, slowly and sometimes painfully… there was still a love that Kurt was missing and left him feeling so utterly alone. It left him gasping and rubbing at the ache in his chest. He wanted that so badly that he yearned for it with every fiber of his being. It was like a buzzing in his head. Kneeling there before those flowers and unyielding stone propelled Kurt back to that sad, lonely eight-year-old boy placing flowers at his mother's grave-stone and wanting nothing more than to sit down there and never leave, consumed in his grief. But the strong hand of his father reached down to him, silently telling him that he could not. He had to get up, keep moving, keep living. There was someone who still loved him, whose hand would always be there for him. Little Kurt put his hand in his father's and let him draw him up.
As Kurt made himself rise now, his hand instinctively reached out but this time it touched rough-smooth stone. The buzz that had been a faint hum in the back of his mind grew louder as if coming from the stone itself, just as the world fell away.