Jaeger's Howe

by David Wishart

Ally was back in the clearing. It was night, there were the black shapes of trees all around, and a fire was burning in front of him. He bent down towards the twigs lying at his feet, knowing that he would never reach them. As he always did at that moment in the dream the man with the plaited beard and ice-blue eyes stepped out of the shadows. Ally stretched his hand down as far as it would go towards the twigs, his eyes on the man’s face. The man neither moved nor spoke, but only watched him dispassionately, as if he was looking at the struggles of an insect in a killing-jar. Ally tried again to bend and pick up the twigs, but the muscles in his back and arms were locked tight. Then a muscle in his back spasmed. He screamed, and woke. Ally Fraser is having the same dream, night after night. When his health begins to break down, he is sent to help on an archaeological dig. There, as past and present blend, he finds that the dream is bound up with the events which led to the burning of the site over a thousand years before. A novella-length book for young adults, or for anyone who enjoyed the Alan Garner novels of the 1960s – with an added edge.

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 17, 2012

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Historical crime writer David Wishart was born in Arbroath, Scotland. He studied Classics - Latin and Greek - at Edinburgh University and after graduation taught for four years in a secondary school.

He then retrained as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language and worked abroad for eleven years, in Kuwait, Greece and Saudi Arabia. He returned to Scotland in 1990 and now lives with his family in Carnoustie, mixing writing with teaching EFL and study skills at Dundee University.