by A. Sparrow
Lille gasped and her jaw dropped. Bern’s eyes widened.
“W-what’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Before they could answer, a swarm of prickles spreading across my skin told me I was about to fade.
Chapter 40: Bothy
I awoke to flames crackling and dancing before my face. Smoke stung my nostrils. Hushed and worried voices speculated and disagreed. I lay on a pair of spongy pads, wrapped like a mummy in poly towels under two layers of down sleeping bag.
A young man in a rain jacket with a bandanna tied over his head swore into his phone.
“What’s wrong? Can’t you reach them?” A girl with a rope of braided red hair that dangled nearly to her waist looked on with concern.
“No bloody signal whatsoever. Should have went with Vodaphone.”
“Aye, this could’ve been us, you know. Climbing that face. What if we had had an accident?”
I tried to speak, but only grunted. I wasn’t entirely back just yet.
“Sean! He’s conscious!” said the girl, her freckled face leaning close to mine.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a bothy,” said the girl. “We found you face down on the path and brought you back. You’re lucky we made an early start for Ben Macdui.”
“Ben who?” I said, rising.
“Lay back down. You shouldn’t be moving.”
“Hypothermics are susceptible to heart arrhythmias when jostled,” said the guy. “Says it right here in my book.”
“Here, have some of this.” The girl handed me a plastic mug filled with steaming broth.
“We saw you lying there, your body all dark with your hood up. Thought you might be the Greyman, sleeping.”
“It’s true,” said the girl. “I was afraid. I felt this aura. It was so strange. I wanted to run.”
“Greyman?”
“The Am Fear Liath Mòr. Guardian of passes and portals. Folk tale, but I know of some who have felt his presence here. Imagine how relieved we were to roll you over and find you were just another ill-prepared American tourist.”
“Tourist? Hey, listen. I ain’t no tourist. I’m anything but that.”
“Whatever. You need medical help, regardless. Sean’s going to hike to the road in Braemar. I’ll stay with you, in case you run into any problems. I’m CPR certified.”
“But I’m going in the other direction. To Aviemore.”
“Not today, you aren’t.”
My head pounded. I sat up and shrugged off both sleeping bags. I had one microfiber towel wrapped around my waist, another draped over my shoulders like a shawl. I only retained my skivvies. “Where are my clothes?”
The girl nodded to a clothesline set up over the hearth.
“They’re soaked. Might take all day to dry them, clammy as it is.”
“Listen, I need to get to Aviemore.”
“In time,” said Sean. “First thing’s first.”
“No. I need to leave now. I feel fine. I’m not hypothermic anymore. I’m warm.” I didn’t tell them about the pulsing headache that made it feel like my brains were squeezing between the plates of my skull.
“You can’t. You’ve got no dry clothes. If I can only get a signal we could have a mountain rescue team up here to help you. Perhaps a helicopter.”
“Helicopter? Christ! No way can I afford that.”
“It’s okay, this is Britain,” said Sean. “You don’t have to worry about paying. If you need a rescue, you get a rescue. There’s no bill.”
“You don’t understand, I can’t afford to dilly-dally. Someone might die if I don’t get to Aviemore, soon. And I don’t mean me. I wish I could explain, but ….”
The couple looked at each other.
“Maybe he could borrow your extra set of clothes, Sean?”
“This is a bad idea, Sharon.”
“Sean … listen to him. He’s desperate.”
***
They turned me loose and I went back up the trail in my own damp but smoky sneakers but wearing layers of microfiber slacks, a poly flannel shirt, fleece and a parka shell—all of it a size or two too large and rolled up at the cuffs and sleeves.
Sean had been a hard sell, and had almost made me sign a waiver, which made no sense at all. Why would I sue him? Was he a lawyer or something? Sharon, sensing my urgency, dissuaded him, and they let me go, watching me from the door of the bothy.
I felt like crap, but well enough to walk. I kept a murderous pace up for the first mile just to show them how strong I was, before disappearing into the fog in the heights of the Lairig Ghru.
There was sun up there somewhere trying to burn through, glowing through the thin spots. I was well past whatever point I had collapsed the night before. The place was devoid of greenery beyond the ubiquitous lichens. The boulders were larger, the footing less even. I couldn’t imagine a cow passing through here without breaking its leg.
Rime ice, created and broken by the wind, tinkled off the boulders. The sum total made for quite the concert, like some glockenspiel concerto.
At the cusp of the pass, where the land leveled off and began to descend, I began to hear footsteps—or were they hoofsteps?—behind me. For every three steps I took, I heard one clomp behind me. When I stopped, it stopped.
I didn’t stop at all after that. At the risk of fracturing my ankle, I careened between boulders, hopping and darting down the narrow valley aiming for the dark blotch of trees and the ribbon of grey that I hope was the A9, that I could see far below. I had never been so frightened without a tangible reason—just some story passed on in a shelter.
Patches of forest huddled like herds of beleaguered wildebeest amongst the boulder fields and meadows. Another mile and the trail would pierce the first rampart of the greater forest.
The sun was out by the time I reached those trees. I paused by a trailside spring and quenched my thirst. My head still pounded and I had a knot in my gut that Sean and Sharon’s granola bars could not remedy. I pined for the full Scottish breakfast, whatever that was, I saw advertised on a restaurant window in Edinburgh.
The trees were a bit sketchy looking at first—all stunted and twisted in the trunk, and encrusted with scabby lichen, but they soon lengthened into ordinary looking firs and pines. The boulders sank beneath topsoil, making for easy going on the wide trail.
I passed groups of hikers going the other way. I just nodded and smiled, torn whether to warn them of the fell creatures and weird doings that lay in wait for them on the heights. They probably would just think I was crazy. I didn’t look so trustworthy in my scraggly beard and baggy clothes.
I breathed easy now and the miles whizzed by over packed sand and gravel. I passed miraculous tarns and fairytale estates without much more than a glance. I could hear the traffic now on a highway that could be nothing other than the A9, according to my map. My heart bonged in anticipation of reaching the main road to Inverness.
I passed by some park buildings, went straight into a village I was relieved to discover was Aviemore, and took a table at the first restaurant I found.
“Coffee … and a full Scottish Breakfast, please,” I said to the waitress.
***
It was filling, to say the least. It came with two eggs, fried mushrooms, a black thing that looked like a hockey puck and tasted like liver, some kind of fried mashed potato concoction, a sausage, a hunk of smoked pork and a soggy tomato. Not quite what I expected, but it hit the spot and corrected any calorie or protein deficiency I might have acquired since Rome.
I made some friends, too. Most importantly, with a grizzled old guy with fly-away sideburns who happened to be driving a weather-beaten truck loaded with splits of apple wood. He was headed for Inverness, and was happy to give me a ride, and I didn’t even have to help unload as the folks on the other end would take care of that.
The bumper sagged and almost dragged over the bumps. I winced when the scraped, imagining the sparks that were flying, and fully expecti
ng the exhaust to go clanking off. Even in the lowest gear, we were lucky to hit 10 mph up the steeper grades. We were lucky to keep rolling.
“Trekker, are ye?” he finally asked after a good half hour of talking about himself and the weather.
“Yep.”
“I’ve done some trekking in my time. Marrakesh. Mauritania. Even Katmandu, though that was with a gal who left me in the lurch. I’d rather not think about that one. Did Burma and Bhutan by motorcycle with a couple of chums. That was a memorable one. I was in my twenties. Hard to believe, is it? I was once young like you?”
“I believe it.”
“Life is a flash in the pan. Blink and a whole decade goes by, I’m telling you. Keep those eyes open. See as much as you can, while you can. Go wherever you can, as soon as you can. Trekking is the only way to avoid being cheated by life. It’s a shame … most of the folk around here never been out of Scotland, if you can believe it.”
“I believe it. It’s the same way in Florida.”
“Florida, huh? Where else have you been, boy?”
“Well … I’ve been mainly doing Europe,” I said. “Mainly.”
“I’ve been some places no northerner ever gets to go. Some places you wouldn’t recognize the name.”
“Same here,” I said. “I’ve been places hardly anyone ever gets to see, northerner or not.”
“Like where?”
I looked him in the eye. “Have you ever wanted to kill yourself?” I asked because I wanted to see if we had Root in common or not, but he took it the wrong way.
“What? Why would you say such a thing? What’s wrong with you?”
I thought he might pull over and kick me out of his cab, but he kept rolling along, it’s just that the conversation stopped, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I appreciated the spell of peace and quiet.
We topped a rise. A city became visible in the distance. “Is that … Inverness?”
That got him started again. “Certainly is … and that moor you see on your right? That’s Culloden field where the Jacobites met their downfall. You’ve heard of the Jacobites, haven’t you? Bonnie Prince Charlie?”
So I let him tell me all about it, although my eyes and heart were focused on that city by the fjord that was beginning to reveal itself in bits and snatches in the near distance.
We picked up speed going downhill. That meek little bird called hope began to call again from its cage.
Chapter 41: No. 6 Ardconnel Terrace
His name was Cullen or Colin or something like that, and he was a biker. He proved hard to ditch, expressing extreme reluctance to just drop me off on the curb without any arrangements for further contact. I had no phone number to satisfy him, so I promised to meet him in a pub for dinner later that day, though I had no intentions of following through. Maybe that was cold of me. He was just some lonely guy in full mid-life crisis who thought he had found a sympathetic ear, but my own obsessions and priorities called louder.
Through a series of bus maps and passersby I located Ardconnel Terrace on the fringes of the town center, where the residential neighborhoods began to blend with the industrial zone. A zig and a zag, a dash across a busy street and I was there.
It turned out to be a narrow, curving lane, packed cheek by jowl with townhouses, scarcely an alley between them. The other side was bounded by a pit of a fenced and gated private garden that descended down the side of a wooded gully.
Each home was poorly marked, as if the post men had every unit and number consigned to memory. I deduced fairly quickly which home was number six and took a position between a black-painted shed and a row of dumpsters across the street.
I studied the continuous wall of stone and brick, trying to deduce something about the status of their residents. They seemed well kept—nothing crumbling, no peeling paint. Those who lived here were not exactly poor but I couldn’t call them well to do. Toys left on the little stoops and nooks suggested that a fair number of young families lived here. This was not the monstrous lair I had imagined for Edmund and his brood.
Not much happened over the first hour. A few passersby made their way down the walk, but I heard nothing and saw no action from the dwellings themselves. Not surprising, it was a work day after all, and these were working class abodes.
I tried summoning the courage to go up to the door and knock, but I couldn’t get myself to budge. I suppose it made sense to be patient. Karla had a reason for not wanting to be found and I needed to know more about why that was before barging into her life. I hadn’t come all this way to toss away what might be my only opportunity.
My dirty face, greasy, scraggly hair and clown clothes would not make the best impression, to say the least, on whoever it was who opened that door, particularly not the kind of dad who associated cleanliness with godliness.
A police car surprised me when I wasn’t paying attention to the road. I thought for sure the gig was up; that someone had phoned in a report of some lurker, but I lucked out. It kept on motoring down the lane.
And then the door opened. I hunkered down behind a dumpster with an open lid, peeking through the gap between the hinges. A man in a grey tweed suit stepped out. He had piercing eyes and a full and blocky beard with a white skunk strip running down the middle of his chin. There was this hawk-like and feral nineteenth century look about him that reminded me of a PBS show about the abolitionist John Brown, the guy who had tried to lead a slave rebellion before the Civil War.
He dropped a letter in his mail slot and turned to look up and down the street, almost as if he could smell my presence. Even from across the street I could the web of red blotching spreading from his nose, and the weepy, inflamed eyes that were sure signs of an alcoholic.
Instead of going back in, he came down the stoop and strolled up the walk to the bigger street around the corner. He had a weird, lurching gait, more a hitch than a limp, and his hands trembled when he paused. He looked my way more than once. I thought for sure he had spotted me, but he kept on walking, out of sight.
I was huffing like a demon by that point, tingles spreading down my arms, my heart barely contained. Edmund was gone. There was nothing between me and Karla now but a knock on the door.
I scurried out from behind the dumpster, as wary as a rat, trotted up the landing and rapped my knuckles on the red-painted wood. My synapses buzzed with nervous energy as I waited, my head swiveling every which way.
But no one answered. I tried again, and when again there was no response, I retreated off the stoop and started down the walk in the opposite direction that Karla’s dad had taken. There was nothing to be done but maybe getting a cup of coffee and trying again later. I wondered if there was a pub nearby where someone might be able to tell me a little about the Raeths.
I had to keep tugging up my pants as I walked because I didn’t have a belt. I must have looked pretty ridiculous. My own clothes were stuffed in the bottom of my pack, sopping wet. I turned the corner at the end of the lane and looked around for a laundromat. It sure would be nice to have my own clothes clean and dry.
A young woman came my way down the sidewalk, clutching a bag of groceries in both arms. Her clothes were so quaint and conservative, like some villager from Eastern Europe. A plain, dark dress stretched all the way down to her scuffed brown flats. She wore a flowered blouse, buttoned up tight to the hollow of her neck, cuffs fringed with simple lace, baggy sweater that flowed and swung with each step.
I stopped and waited for her to approach, gripped by a paralysis of fascination. A large kerchief restrained shoulder-length hair, wavy and black as coal. A loop of hair swung, screening her face. She stared at the ground, not glancing up, not acknowledging my presence any more than she would a trash bin.
After all my disappointments, this moment seemed impossible. Could it really be?
“K-karla?” I said, her name catching in my throat.
Chapter 42: Rejection
Her eyes went wide as hen’s eggs and she almost dropped her bag
of groceries all over the pavement. That scar. That chin. This was Karla, alright. Except for the smarter outfits and perkier hairdos, the version I knew in Root was unadulterated from the truth. If I had grinned any wider, I would have lost my jaw.
“No!” she said, as if she were hissing a curse at me.
“What? No hug? You’re not even gonna say hi? What’s wrong?”
Her eyes narrowed back down into slits as narrow as coin slots. “You shouldn’t have come here! I told you not to.” She glanced behind and flinched as if she expected to be whipped. “How did you find me?”
“I had a little help from your Grandpa.”
“Grandp—Luther?”
“His real name’s Arthur, actually. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
Her chest heaved. Her face twisted in anguish.
“Are you … okay?”
“No, I am not okay! I cannot be seen talking to you. Go! Go away!”
“How about later? Can we meet … later?”
“No, we cannot. We can never meet. Never again. Not ever.”
I felt things collapsing inside me. “I don’t understand.”
“You are a curse, James. You have trapped me here. I could not go back to Root.” Tears gushed down her cheeks. “And now you have only made it worse … by coming … letting me see you here. You should never have come!”
“Karla, please! I don’t understand. Why are you acting this way?”
“Get it through your skull!” she shouted. “I cannot be seen with you. My father … he has friends in the Order who live nearby. Now go! Go away! Before someone sees us.”
“Now, wait a minute. I didn’t come all this way just to turn around. Please … can we just talk … just for a minute?”
Her eyes flitted in every direction. Her anguish had turned to frustration. If this had been Root her glare would have turned me into cinders. She fished in her purse for a key. “Come,” she said. “Follow me. We can talk. But only for a minute. Then you promise you will go.”