Free The Outlander by Gil Adamson

searching for something in the bags. Her hands were her eyes. Next to her the mare
     cropped grasses and chewed, a hollow and leisured grinding to her right. Soon she found
     a match and in its flare she glimpsed the forest floor, a strange and wicked-looking
     topography. She saw her own skirts and the horse gawping over at her, its pupils
     contracting, before the match stuttered and it was black again. Since her childhood,
     which had ended not so long ago, she had wondered about the existence of goblins and
     small, biting sprites. Her father had instilled this silliness in his girl, waking her
     sometimes when he came home late and drunk. Over the objections of her grandmother, they
     would go out into the dark garden as the child staggered and half-dreamed, and he would
     seize her and point, insisting some tiny creature hid there, just out of sight, standing
     motionless in the foliage. Incredible behaviour for a man of his nature and training, a
     former Anglican minister, his collar now coiled and tucked away in a sock drawer.
    Had the news of her crime reached him yet? She felt a wincing regret, for
     she knew she could not go home to her father and grandmother, not now. That house was no
     longerher home, and she would not be safe there. Even if she knew
     her way, the least public route home, they would never hide or protect her when she
     arrived.
    The widow took up a pipe, which she had packed with tobacco, and drew the
     embers up and sat back smoking in the gloom. She had taken this pipe from the old
     man’s shrine; it was an expensive and antique object. The bowl was outsized and
     ornate, carved into the shape of a stag’s head whose antlers came off in a hinged
     lid. She drew up a fragrant smoke and sighed it back out.
    FOR TWO DAYS , the widow and her mare climbed steaming
     foothills into mountains whose peaks were seamed with impossible snow. The punishing
     heat faded and the air became pleasantly warm. In the mornings heavy fog poured upward
     from the earth and drifted in ghostly forms through the trees. She stared: This one is a
     shepherd’s pipes, that one a woman’s hand reaching. She watched a gaggle of
     vaporous forms trouble the surface of a little forest slough, and it gave her a curious
     image of what her own mind endured. The voices. Furies born and soon dead with a simple
     breath of sun; but potent while they lasted, and terrible.
    At dusk the first day she came upon a lean-to built of rotted timber and
     set against a mossy rock face. Slung across its open ends was canvas sacking that had
     been eaten at the bottom by mould. She called out but no answer came, and so she
     ventured close and threw back a flap to gaze upon decomposing blankets and a ratlike
     strewing of blackened newspaper. No occupant rose up to greet her, no sign of life
     anywhere. One folded wadge of newspaper in the corner had been underlined in black and
     the lines had bled into oneanother. The widow had not slept in two
     days, and before that never for more than a few hours. Here was a shelter, at dusk, a
     human sign among the trees. And yet she backed away from this burrow as if from a
     compost heap roiling with vermin. She wiped her hands on her own ragged dress. On the
     ground about the hovel she found more refuse. Spoons, an empty wallet, a glove, more
     newspaper, half-buried under pine needles and loam and none very far away from their
     source. Like an archaeologist she unearthed a pitiful human sphere. She deemed it to be
     male, though anyone following her and gazing at her rest spots might think the same of
     her. The widow mounted and went on.
    She rested that dusk and woke later to find all light erased. The night
     was so dark she thought something stood between her eyes and the rest of the world.
     Blindness could not be this complete. Nothing but the sound of wind through trees.
     Somewhere to her left, the breathing horse. And high above, the slow funhouse creaking
     of pine