These Demented Lands

by Alan Warner

  The moment she appeared on that skyline she was a threat to me and my cause; he only has three nights.

  I ducked into the car and saw the droney pulse of the limo lights being dipped on and off. I began to flash my lights to the pilot. I turned round and saw the headlights of the van at the top of the runway, the blood-red caps fitted over both lamps marking where Macbeth had parked. The aircraft came over the so-called bay, where the sunken wreckage of Alpha Whisky lay in ninety feet of water seven hundred yards from the runway’s end – apart from the wings that, in the impact, had been catapulted forward onto the machair by the plantation where the wreckage of Hotel Charlie had come down; all of it scavenged by local farms, initially for its macabre value, then finally incorporated into the walls of sheds and outhouses.

  I saw the underwings of the nightflight (a Cessna 172) loom a hundred feet above then back over the Sound. As I always did with any night circuit of the field, I closely watched, winding down the window and trying to imagine it was that mythical night when two men died ten years before; the night that had come to spread out and fill my whole life with the events of those few minutes in the darkness.

  I watched the landing lights lazily cross the Oyster Skerries beacon then the underwing revealed itself as he banked down-leg-final. His approach was a little high and hot: the limo swung round in a wide arc, its dipped headlights lighting up the interior of the Volvo. The limo accelerated up the runway after the lights of the aircraft which had touched down.

  I motored up the side of the runway, mildly respectful of aviation regulations. When I came adjacent to the aircraft at the apron its propeller had stopped. I slowed to witness the usual farce: Brotherhood forcing glasses of bubbly on the two new couples (the men still in kilts). Chef Macbeth was loading suitcases into the back of the limo, ‘The Love Mobile’ Brotherhood would be calling it.

  I revved in first gear through the gateway and reverse-parked the Volvo in the garage. I turned off the engine and tossed the keys in the glove compartment.

  The vehicle ticked and tinkled secretly. I breathed out then stepped from the Volvo. The engine of the aircraft started up and I stood, hidden in the shadows, then strolled down to the gate with my hands in my pockets.

  Brotherhood had taken the limo to the far end of the runway so the pilot had a clear perspective of where the grass strip ended. The aircraft throttled up and moved forward, its slipstream flattening out the longer grass behind it, so the sickly, pale blades seemed to create a faint phosphorescence in the plane’s wake.

  The aircraft bumped and swung out onto the airstrip, taxied way up to the threshold where it turned, pointing back down; it sat still, revved up to check engines and started the run.

  My eyes focused and the nose seemed to lift, then it was off the ground. It passed about seventy feet up. The limo, with its lights dipped, came speeding down from the other threshold followed by the two blood-red eyes of the van. Brotherhood would be inside the limo, one of the new brides squealing as he drove straight for the newly risen aircraft.

  The landing lights continued the climb-out over the Oyster Skerries. I turned and walked across the turning area towards the front door; illuminated by the bright limo lights, my shadow was sharp and clear then it swivelled and shrank on the mossy gravel. The tyres grushed past me and the white limo moved on to pull up outside the front door; then the sick, blood-red light from Chef Macbeth’s wee van flooded the area, the colour seeming to run down the sides of the dirty-white staff caravans.

  I stood still in the darkness, pretending to wait for Chef Macbeth. There was laughter as the limo door swung open, the young couples stepped out, the women holding a glass each, the men with both glasses and the bubbly bottles; they moved inside the foyer.

  Beyond the caravan’s calor-gas canisters I became aware of a feral movement out where the extension of rooms ending in 23 lay: arm in arm, circling among the pine plantation, were at least two honeymoon couples, strolling before using the sliding patio doors to their rooms. I had a speeding impulse to exterminate their composure in some way but since I heard Macbeth kill the engine on the van and the chassis judder to stillness, I stepped quickly forward, almost shivering at the thought of being invited into his caravan.

  I passed the open boot and walked in the front door. Brotherhood was signing off with the pilot on the radio, the new couples were halfway up the spiral staircase; I scrutinised the wives’ legs as they carefully circled. Brotherhood gave me a corrosive glance which meant, Get the luggage, while he quickly filled out the details of the aircraft’s arrival and departure in the Airfield Log Book. He removed his cashmere overcoat and tossed it on the chair then selected four registration cards. Without a word I moved through the fire doors and marched up the long darkness of the corridor towards my room. The economy sensors detected my presence and the roof fluorescents came on, illuminating each section then switching off behind me so that – to Brotherhood, standing at the fire doors in the foyer, watching my departure, realising a battle had begun – I would appear to recede into infinite rectangles of clean, blue-tinged light.

  I passed 15 without a side glance, put my key in 16 (the room the decayed pilot of Alpha Whisky had used); opened the door, clicked on the light and as I stepped inside, the corridor returned to pitch darkness. The door closed behind me and I crossed to the portable CD player, wound the Fourth Piano Concerto cassette to the Andante Con Moto to see if I could bleed a little more mystery from the pompous rubbish: all the rest of it sounded like fox-hunting music. I stooped to put on the telly and rewind the summer footage using the remote. I put the bedroom light off, lay on the bed and pressed PLAY.

  The pale grey light from the images pattered around the room.

  The camera had been switched on at the surface. Water flowed from the lens: the image was a man on the deck of a small boat passing a diving torch towards the camera, it was our very own toiler of the deep, Shan on board the hotel summer ferry The Charon.

  The camera turned, not intentionally, showing low mist on the summer-lush slopes of 96-Metre Hill; I could pick out the very larch beside which the girl had materialised earlier in the day.

  The camera submerged into the waters of the so-called bay at the end of the runway; blue silty water degenerating into a grey gloom. Bubbles and silt fluttered and stirred in front of the lens, silver against the submarine thickening and thinning of the light below. I took the remote and FF the descent until the Sound-bottom loomed up; moved over the heavily laden silt banks of the seabed . . . demersal fish lurked and darted everywhere.

  I pressed PAUSE and rewound the portable CD to the start of the Andante then lay down again with the remote . . . PLAY . . . ahead, something loomed . . . slowly emerging from the grey-blue world came the upright dimensions of intelligent creation: the fin of the aircraft; sitting upright, the long wingless fuselage. Looking as all human creations sunk in water look . . . eerie, dreamlike and forlorn. Swishing the torchlight through the grey water, barnacles and encrustations adhered down the aluminium fuselage like a rash.

  The camera moved along the wingless aircraft to the wider cabin, to the window on the side door. The view angled round as a hand came into frame; tried to pull open the door but it took three rapid, hard jerks before sheets of muck fell away and through a cloud of silt the door swung open. The diver jammed in the torch with its yellowing light. Everything went out of focus then came back in on a large horned lobster moving around inside the cockpit. All the windshield is out. The fuel plunger is out but that could have happened on impact. The radio and part of the control panel appear to be out but it’s fallen in, behind the panel . . . those once-ordered instruments . . . it’s the image of everything that’s hostile to us.

  The camera backed out, then it must have been switched off. It cut to the blunted front of the aircraft: engine torn, laying metres away, but the propeller missing. I pressed REW . overshot; FF , PLAY : the engine mounting came up close and, while in focus, PAUSE : the prop bolt seemed to
have been sheared.

  Thoughts:

  Prop disintegrated on impact, wreckage not recoverable.

  Prop damaged in the water.

  Though impractical in outhouse construction, prop scavanged from machair crash site by unknown party.

  There was another cut in the footage then it came on again. A torch had been placed inside the cockpit. The camera started high on the tailplane and I could distinguish the registration marking ending A W beneath the black fuzz of sea-growth. The shot moved along the side of the plane, an off-camera arm opened the cockpit door with the golden torch lighting it from within. Very artistic.

  The film cut to a shot of the forward landing wheel, torn off, slivers of silt tracers attached to the tyre leaned side to side in the current, the fuselage in the distance and, above all this, the cathedral gloom of light rays down to that tomb world of inner space.

  He must have got out through the bust windshield . . .

  A loud hammering began on my door making me leap forwards then freeze. I hurled my legs down on the carpet, stood and switched off the Rondo Vivace. I was furious with myself because as I stepped towards the door I was terrified. He has reduced me to this. I paused, turned and put the video on PAUSE . The door thundered again. I stepped to it and tugged.

  ‘Play it loud though I’m trying to sleep but – deal – I get to choose the music,’ she held out a reflective disc that caught and threw about the fluorescent strip on the corridor ceiling above her. I realised it was a CD. She was wearing a big man’s shirt and her legs were bare. She’d washed her hair and its shape had changed. I’d only seen her before in the darkness, at a distance. Now a longing I thought I’d conquered years before slapped into me, as if it were a sheet blown on a vast beach.

  ‘It’s Beethoven. I loathe it but it’s the only cassette in the place apart from the one Brotherhood plays up in the lounge; know what that’s called?’

  She looked at me. Later she would claim her eyes were dark blue but that night she knocked on my door my notes indicate they were darkest black (Brotherhood would always scoff, insist they were dark green).

  I said, ‘The Emotion Collection’. I’m not sure if the CD works; there aren’t any CDs, unless he’s some hidden upstairs with all his Bob Dylan records,’ I didn’t know whether to retreat back into the room and try the CD; I was afraid she would leave. She shifted herself to look beyond me.

  ‘Hey, you’ve a video.’

  ‘He gave me it for my work.’

  ‘What films’ve you got?’

  ‘Ah, I don’t have any.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘None, I’ve no films.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a sunken aircraft.’

  ‘A sunk aircraft. You know how to get your kicks, Ludwig, you really do.’

  ‘Do you want to watch it?’ I shrugged, then was glad to find myself laughing.

  ‘That’s your job isn’t it? You investigate why planes crash.’

  ‘I’m a civil servant,’ I shrugged, ‘How do you know?’

  She tapped her forefinger against the side of her nose. The fingernail had ruins of nail varnish on it. She sighed and said, ‘No much else going on is there,’ and stepped in the room. She sat on the bed which wasn’t made (I refused Mrs Heapie access to the room and the young woman was the first person to enter it) pressing down the end of the mattress.

  I picked up the remote control and felt a bit foolish, as I rewound the footage, saw the camera scuttle surfacewards back up the anchor rope.

  I let the tape run forwards. She watched without saying anything. I stared at the screen. When I stepped awkwardly in front of her to the CD machine she moved her head slightly to look past my leg. The CD spun wildly when I inserted and it began to play.

  ‘Oh great,’ she said and sang the chorus bit. ‘Where is this plane? It’s pretty amazing I guess.’

  ‘It’s here, at the end of the airstrip off from the ruined chapel. The guy that was in it died.’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘He bashed into another plane when they were flying round the airfield at night when you shouldn’t be doing that. There are no landing lights on this strip. They were both experienced pilots; should have known. They’d had dinner up in the Observation Lounge: some wine, glass of brandy, girlfriends to impress, so they dared each other. The aircraft in the lead, it came down on the field you crossed today, this one came down in the water. They never found the body, gave up the search then; weirdly, months later, they found the guy way up the hillside, you passed it as well, the spot they found his body.’

  ‘Had he fallen out the sky there?’

  ‘No, that would be impossible, he’d died of exposure. It was winter weather like this when they crashed; somehow he got out the wreckage and swam ashore. He must’ve been terribly concussed or disorientated. He could have walked right here. This was his hotel room; he could have walked it in ten minutes, but he climbed right up the open hillside and must’ve died up there. He crossed three barbed-wire fences. He must have thought he was on the other side of the Sound or something, God knows. I’ve lain for ten years trying to work it out; it’s tragic to get out of a mess like that,’ I pointed to the screen, ‘And die of the cold up a hill.’

  She humped her shoulders, ‘This was his room?’ She looked round at me.

  I nodded, ‘Want to see a picture of him?’

  ‘A picture of him; what, after he’d swum ashore and gone up there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean a photo of his rotted body?’

  ‘I have the police photos if you’re interested, you being bored and all.’

  She shifted on the bed a little; then, in a new, clearer, challenging voice, ‘Show me.’

  I opened the drawer, took out the envelope, polished by hands, dropped it on the bed beside her. She slid them out and I was pleased to see the worst one was on the top, the shirt undone showing the dark drop inside, through the ribcage. She slid it out and put it to the back then flipped through the others.

  ‘Hoody crows,’ I smiled.

  She nodded then suddenly held up the skull-faced black eyes and pointed to the man kneeling beside, hair longer: Brotherhood . . . She gave a grimace.

  ‘Pilot lay there five months, some hill-walkers found him. Brotherhood was over on holiday before he came back to run this place.’

  ‘Tell you what I think. Put the CD on again. My plane comes down in the night-darkness, aye?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I scramble out the plane and in the sheer pitch blacknesses I manage to swim ashore.’

  ‘You’re the expert.’

  She folded up her very smooth forehead at me. ‘News travels fast on this island.’

  I hunched my shoulders.

  ‘When I get ashore – and it’s hard to know what way to swim in the dark towards shore unless you spot some kind of light, headlights on the road maybe – then, why did he cross the road?’

  I smiled at her.

  ‘Now, I’ve seen those flashing lights out on the rocks there and I’m sure he saw them too, if they’d been built ten year ago?’

  ‘They had yes.’

  ‘So he’d gumption enough to use them to swim in. He knew exact where he was. Now this is where it gets interesting. If you come ashore in that darkness, and I’ve done it; it crosses your mind you’re back from the dead. Ever read Pincher Martin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You feel an excitement. I’d come ashore with some daft wee child. It’d crossed my mind if she wasn’t with me I’d be free. Free to vanish. It’s an incredible feeling. Your man had come back from the dead. His plane had crashed into another and fallen to the sea. When he got on the stones of the shore he wanted to use that power. That choice to be dead, to be ghost, escape off the island somehow, start a new life; so in first flush he takes wide strides up the hillsides . . .’

  ‘Within twenty minutes of the planes crashing they started searching the hi
llsides with torches . . .!’ I said, excitedly.

  ‘Right, right, so he’s hiding up there, still trying to make that decision to step over to the other side. To get vanished. He has family, people he’s convinced himself he loved. He flies, so he has money, so he’s a bastard, yes?’

  ‘Well . . . not everyone . . .’

  ‘You can fly a plane, eh? You must if you investigate . . .’

  ‘Ah. I don’t actually. I can’t fly, I’m more on the engineering side. Brotherhood flies.’

  ‘Point made. So this guy has house, car, wife, family, a lover, all the usual crap; playing little boys in aeroplanes. But up there he faces the first real decision of his life. Choose himself for the first time or . . . he can see the torches now, all he needs to do is walk down to the hotel. He’s shivering now. It’s bitter, bitter up there, he sees the light calling him back to the world but it’s one of lies. Lies.’

  I said, whisperedly, ‘He chose himself but it was death.’

  ‘Aye, so. How about a bit of telly?’

  I leaned in with the remote but as I flicked from station to station each was a flurry of white dots.

  The girl said, ‘Oh, noo! Don’t believe it, it’s out again!’

  ‘Aerial is always going in this weather.’

  ‘Aye. Met the guys who fix it, a team of them were on the wee ferry that sunk, what a crew, chuck them in a barrel of tits and they’d come out sucking their thumbs.’

  I said, ‘Ah, that pilot, from the hillside where he rotted, that one’s buried in the graveyard over by the river mouth.’

  ‘Oh. Right. What’s his name?’

  ‘Carlton. William Carlton.’

  ‘Right. Any chance of borrowing your ghetto-blaster there. My Walkman got cabbaged in my wee capsizing.’

  ‘If you do me a favour in return,’ I said, and I saw her head keep deliberately still but she’d seen the one-inch-open patio door where the crisp corner-curled net curtain was hanging back.

  ‘What?’