I'll Take the Low Road

Clara couldn’t for the life of her remember why she’d come to Greyfriars Kirkyard. She’d been excited to tour it when she first arrived in Edinburgh, enraptured by the chance to study history in a city with its eras stacked atop one another like the layers of a cake: stairs slicing through Georgian streets that had been cobbled atop medieval streets, who themselves had dug their foundations through Celtic ruins, with a gothic castle topper looming over them all. 

After drinking her way through town during Fresher’s Week and beginning her studies, she had visited every museum in the city twice, written all her essays at a cafe with a large window overlooking both the Castle and Kirkyard, and even broken up with Toby from Bath on top of Arthur’s Seat. 

By the start of her second year, she moved off campus into a dilapidated, but affordable, flat in the Old Town. It took persuading to get her friends Helen and Tirtha to choose it over the flat with the dishwasher in the New Town, and an agreement to take on the 50 pounds a week difference in rent herself, but the moment she moved in, she knew it was worth it. She chose the room with a window that, if she leaned out, just a bit, she could see the Kirkyard as she listened to bagpipe melodies duel throughout the city. 

She even took a job giving historical walking tours, spending her weeknights telling tourists from as far as Mumbai and Buenos Aires, and even Minnesota, back home, about the loyal Greyfriars Bobby and murderous escapades of Burke and Hare.

It was during her third year that something flipped. The city that had once felt so large and endless, suddenly made Clara feel small and insignificant. Not only did she have to compete with the other half-a-million people living in the city, and the five million tourists wading in and out, but everywhere she went, the ghosts of the million more interesting people who’d called this city home over the past thousand years stood beside her as statues and headstones and faces on the covers of books in shop windows. 

The life she had made for herself, the small space she’d carved out by paying two-hundred--and fifty--pounds a week, meant nothing to the city she loved. She was Edinburgh’s Toby from Bath. She was less than Edinburgh’s Toby from Bath. She would not be found in its histories or its footnotes, and when her studies ended and her visa expired, the city would not notice she’d gone. 

She found a new job making coffee in the student union, wrote her essays in a vegan cafe in New Town, and broke up with Highlands Harry outside an Apple store.

Her one act of pertinacity was to keep the lease on her flat, even after Helen and Tirtha left and had to be replaced via residence hall flyers, and leave her bedside lamp on, at all hours of the day and night. Its light glimmered coral pink through the lampshade. It gleamed through her window, warming the brown-gray rubblestone of her building--her small mark on the city. 

Her heart jumped each time she saw it, on the streets amongst the other Edinburghers, tourists, and ghosts alike. Evidence that she was here. Evidence that she affected the city in some miniscule way. 

She looked for the light now, but couldn’t spot it amongst the darkening buildings to her left. The old Elm by the gate had grown fatter, its heavy green branches blocking it, perhaps. Or perhaps Bryony, one of her new flatmates, had turned it off again. No matter how many times Clara explained to her that the LED bulb couldn’t add more than two or three pence to their electric bill and that Clara would give her the pence directly, if it mattered to her so much, Bryony would still slink into her room and turn the bulb off a couple times a week. 

They hadn’t exactly become the fastest of friends in the few months they lived together. Really, the only thing they seemed to have in common was their suspicion that their third flatmate, Pyotr was either a KGB agent in disguise or the Candlemaker Lane Killer, or, maybe, both, whispering over tea about his microwaved instant coffee each morning, his bacon flavored toothpaste, and the banging in his room at odd hours of the night. 

Still, Clara knew they were just being mean. A cheap connection. 

Clara headed down the steps and slid out the Kirkyard’s heavy iron gate into the city, unusually quiet in the purple gloaming. She’d go home and turn her lamp on and then maybe give Helen and Tirtha a text, to see how they were getting on with their third year modules. She could invite them over for pizza and Halloween movies before the half-term break. 

Clara stuck her tongue out at the statue of Greyfriars Bobby, looking down at the city behind his polished bronze nose. He wasn’t even a real dog. The Victorians made him up, a precious furry companion, loyal through the veil of death; they were working tourists even then. 

It was a mild evening for October, which made the empty streets even more suspicious. At a minimum, the other locals should have been out, taking advantage of the weather by huddling outside of pubs with pints in white-knuckled fists, telling themselves that “not as cold as expected” was close enough to “warm.” 

Something in the pit of Clara’s stomach told her to avoid walking under the George the IVth bridge, the great archway bridging two of the city’s layers. The darkness beneath it was thick and menacing.

Clara kept on. She was just getting in her own head. The papers had spent the dying summer fearmongering about the Candlemaker Lane Killer, the possible perpetrator of the two people found stabbed near the Grassmarket, one week after another, just before the Fringe swept through the city in a hurricane of sophomanic one-man shows. 

The sheer number of flyers alone should have been enough to scare away the killer. 

Clara quickened her pace as she passed the stairs that led up to Victoria street which led, aptly, to the Victorian addition to the city overhead. She tensed as she hurried past the cavern-like entrance, but no killer leapt out of the shadows. 

There really should have been more people around. Clara turned to look behind her, but she could only make out hazy movements of faraway tarryers. Tirtha was right, she needed glasses. 

She stepped beneath the shadow of the bridge, heart thumping doggedly in her chest. Only a few more strides and she’d be within sight of her window again. 

Her place. She’d be on her street, within the gaze of her own ghost, watching the world go by underneath her melon-hued light. 

The scents of damp moss and iron filled her nose. The shadows deepened. 

There was something in them, in the indentation of a boarded up doorway. Clara could feel it, demanding her attention. 

She stumbled on the curb. The thud thud of her heart roaring over the silence of the street. Just a few strides. 

The thing in the shadow pulled at her. 

She forced her head to turn, to face the corner. 

And sighed. 

Just a small pile of wilting carnations, a framed photo sticking up from the back of them. A chill worked down Clara’s spine. 

She stepped closer. 

Her photo. From her first week in the city. Helen had taken it, of Clara standing at the entrance to Edinburgh Castle, her face bright with the rush of exploring the town. Clara had printed it at the school library and put it in a fake gold frame she found on discount at Primark. 

This frame. 

What was her picture doing in fron--

The memory came back to Clara in flashes. 

The glint of a knife. Pyotr’s face. The blood warm and glimmering as it wet her coat. Her window, dark and quiet and far from her reach.

Far from reach. 

She shut her eyes, shaking her head, shaking away the horrible thoughts. 

She’d try again. 

Clara couldn’t for the life of her remember why she’d come to Greyfriars Kirkyard. She’d been excited to tour it when she first arrived in Edinburgh, enraptured by the chance to study history in a city with its eras stacked atop one another like the layers of a cake: stairs slicing