Not Far From Aviemore

by Michael Reuel

XIX

  Packless

  Adam was not a great distance from Becky as far as a star traveller is concerned, but for the urgent matter he sought to prevent he feared it might as well be several light years. With all speed possible and with renewed energy he sped over the Ben Macdui summit, preying the image he had seen was not of a hopeless situation and could be prevented.

  Being wise enough to know such visions should not be viewed as an exact science, he nevertheless committed himself to believing the power was within him to save her, refusing to dismiss her peril as an attempt at tormenting him. His hope was that, just as the other dimension was tuned to his worldly atmosphere, it was also tuned to his soul somehow and able to guide him on his next path. If his M Theory speculations were sound there was some reason to suppose this possible, with the transcending of dimensional barriers allowing the soul to be more vibrant and influential upon surroundings. Either he was to accept the doorway as a taunting entity, or else accept that his thoughts and anxieties had impacted on the fabric of that dimension just as a fingerprint might a wall of the physical dimensions. The other doorways had been blank, of course, but he had no history in those realms to imprint upon what they showed.

  Caution on the mountain slopes he had promised Affleck, a promise sincerely made but he now found himself giving little regard to in the light of how events had transpired. It would be a great surprise if any other mountain in the world has been descended at a similar pace and so often as Ben Macdui, only this time he did not run from the terror of the Grey Man, but to something that gave him far more trepidation. The deranged features of the Old Hag had haunted him for many years, but the memory of Becky’s dead body would destroy him if she could not be saved. Such a scenario had been implausible when he had left her, but far away and diverted as he had been it was easy to imagine a great twist of evil had occurred and that the man Stevens had not been detained after all. Indeed he should have considered Becky’s tale more thoroughly and the methods her stalker had drawn upon to fool the authorities before. Some of his London friends were fond of pointing out that assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups and the possibility that he had contributed to putting his dearest friend at risk caused him all kinds of agony.

  Time would teach him that, far from being paranoid, the truth was more complex than any of them had envisaged, but would time prove rewarding to their endeavours to ward off tragedy?

  Committing the sin of rushing from the Ben Macdui summit – inadvisable in the day let alone at night and in snow – could have resulted in a fall to his death, but the determination to save a loved one can give us precision in acts our everyday selves wouldn’t dream of attempting, and so Adam made it to the less treacherous slopes without incident.

  Time can fly by unchecked when hypnotised by urgency and uncompromising focus and there followed a frantic search that he later found it difficult to estimate the length of. That the direction he took was made decisively proved crucial to the outcome of the night, while a clear head proved beneficial and his muscles did not trouble him for rest during the search. What felt like half an hour he later realised must have been more like two hours, considering the distances he covered over difficult ground. No doubt the water of the cave lady had more therapeutic qualities than the healing of wounds alone.

  The first route allowed him to achieve two objectives, first ensuring that the body of a young girl was nowhere to be seen on the slopes and also that, farther down the mountainside the footsteps of Alice, though fading, appeared to meet with another’s which he guessed to be Affleck’s. Happy that the footprints came from the direction of the bothy, he believed his task had been a success and that Alice and Affleck had found each other, but he thought no more on what other puzzles the absence of himself and Clyde had caused. With the young life appearing to be safeguarded, all other concerns were inconsequential when weighed against finding Becky, his chief hope being that the image he had seen was the foretelling of something that could yet be prevented.

  On reaching the lower slopes, therefore, Adam did not follow the footprints any further or consider seeking out whom, if anyone, remained in the bothy. Leaving no stone unturned was no longer possible; he knew he had to take a chance on Becky’s location or else the cruel hand of fate had already won. Fate was something he feared, having lived a life that evil forces appeared to have decided for him, but his hope was that the rules of fate are bound to our own world and, with the gift of knowledge from another realm, he could yet break its plans. If death was prophesied then he would rail against it, though he now looked only to save a friend instead of defeating a demon – a friend he would trade his own salvation to protect.

  Fittingly, the focus of his suspicion was the backdrop of the Lairig Ghru pass. As difficult as it was to differentiate one part of the mountain from another at close range, he thought there had been an almost vertical face a distance away and that somewhere in the vicinity of the notorious cairn was the location of her peril. South, away from the footpath and his and Clyde’s earlier tracks then he turned, daring the uneven ground and heading for the midpoint of Ben Macdui’s great bulk. The attempt seemed to make no sense but perfect sense in the context of the night, as he aimed for a destination far from any path where he would not otherwise think to look; wisdom from beyond the world to prevent a tragedy that might otherwise have been impossible. Random though it felt, he was more afraid of arriving too late than of having the wrong destination.

  Ben Macdui’s great spine meant that the area to search was quite a distance, however, which would increase his anxiety the further along the mountain’s body he proceeded. In the attempt, he found that taking the higher ground was better for visibility so decided to climb to the highest slope a person could sensibly walk, feeling he was better positioned to be sure he wasn’t missing any movement upon the ground made clear by what light there was. This decision meant that when he did reach Becky he had an excellent vantage point to see through his pledge of retribution after all, for the vision had indeed shown truth and Becky’s flight had brought her to that infamous pass… but it was already too late.

  Why Becky chose that direction was unclear. A combination of exhaustion and the shock of taking a human life may have meant she was not thinking in any concise fashion, though it might also be said that there was not any obvious direction in which to run at all as far as help was concerned. Additionally there was the revelation at the derelict bothy that must have scrambled her thinking even further, though perhaps she was resorting to the same desperate mission Adam had originally set out on – to head towards the epicentre of Underworld forces in the hope of a knock-on effect that would turn events against her pursuer.

  Excepting that Adam would also head for the pass, there is little to say this gamble of embracing chaos proved to anyone’s benefit, however, and once again all the energy Becky could muster to get there proved in vain considering her footprints were so easy to follow.

  Even in her absence of mind Becky did manage to put some pieces of the jigsaw together all the same. Of all those involved, she had been closest all along when suggesting to the Santa Barbara police that Stevens had at least one helper. Unfortunately this had not been an issue she had given much thought since the initial attempts on the lives of her family, otherwise some ground might have been made on why her pursuer had such flexible capabilities. Had she promoted the role of Stevens’ helper to partner, or accomplice, then she would have been one step further along to realising that all along they had been dealing with twins.

  Whoever Pedro Rodriguez was and what happened to him after escaping the psychiatric hospital we’ll probably never know, for the Stevens brothers left no record of his fate or any of the other foul acts they no doubt committed. For sure there must be some link between the three individuals. Easy as it might be to suppose they were responsible for his death, perhaps it is equally likely they were all in league in whatever unhinged route into adulthood they all took. Whatever the truth, it is clear tha
t his demise occurred at some point and his dental records came in handy when the Stevens, hiding a dual identity and almost certainly their real names, faked their own death.

  Subtle behavioural differences were now clear to Becky. Only one of the Stevens had an obsession for her; the psychotic and, she suspected, more violent of the two. The other had been the brains of the outfit; the strategic manipulator who had hesitated when attacking her because his charge was not to kill but to keep for his brother. As a result, Becky was given a window his twin would not have given and was able to kill him instead.

  Partners in crime, the brothers had made a deal upon failing to secure Becky in their original attempts, that all other endeavours would be dropped once her new location could be ascertained. For years of subservience to a greater mind she was the promised reward, securing his commitment to the numerous crimes and schemes their fluid identities had enabled them to commit more prolifically than they would otherwise have achieved. From the remote homes of lonely people they had killed they plotted robbery, rape and murder, answering to no law or authority, until the whereabouts of the one that got away lured them to the UK and so it was that the obsession and their pledge proved the breaking of their bond. One of the twins was dead, but the other was not about to forsake his thirst for revenge.

  Every step had been taken to make sure she was unable to disappear again. Laying the fake route of a return to the US may have fooled one of them, but the other had at that time been inside her apartment and, from hacking her laptop and email, knew that she had booked a flight to Aberdeen. Following the trail then, with fake calls to hotels in the region, had not proven beyond the cleverer of the two and little by little they zeroed in on her choice of retreat.

  That the brains of the outfit had met his end at a rusty sithe already meant a diminishing of their ability to commit crimes, but the more impulsive half of the brothers was focused only on claiming his prize and, though the odds Becky faced to survive were reduced somewhat, his victory seemed inevitable. Certainly she did not pause for any consolation upon seeing the face of her enemy alive again. Salvation had burned up on re-entry with whatever fortune that had transpired to give her hope of prevailing seeming nothing more than a bad joke. The obsession that plagued her life had been made indestructible and she feared a Stevens waiting upon every mountainside decreed to punish her for a crime committed in a previous life. Only the fragile structure of the disused bothy ensured there was a way out before Stevens II became aware she shared the interior with him, but there was no way of clambering out without being sighted and déjà vu was in the air as the chase resumed.

  Yet again she was made to flee to a game that made rape and murder the punishment for being caught; Stevens had set up the game once already but she had cheated by killing her assailant and so the disc had been reloaded in order for the participants to restart.

  It was against all likelihood that Becky should feel empowered by this development but, in part, this was true. So bizarre was the scenario and so swift the awakening that all rational thought disintegrated; the game of life had seemed cruel but was now unreal and her response could hardly be described as logical. She had already escaped what looked like certain death once and so where was it written that it would reach her a second time? An unnamed determination to live regardless of the odds found her and there was one card up her sleeve, not to mention that Stevens II would himself be lacking focus after being confronted with the death of his brother and an end to their way of strife. Familial dependency is not beyond even the worst of humanity and, although rage would prove a convenient backcloth on which to spill his loss, without a doubt vulnerability would be there in some form or other.

  For Becky, despite the slap in the face of discovering a second Stevens, she was also aware of unlooked-for momentum in influencing the closure of her affliction. The card up her sleeve was not a card but a knife, something saved for a worst case scenario that she had never intended to use as doing so meant being in her pursuer’s clutches. Not the first person ever to plan for a final desperate act, this eventuality takes us all the way back to her London flat and the night she sat up till dawn with that same knife in hand. Various weapons had been available to her then, but the weapon she held poised for an attempt at murder had never left her, small and convenient as it was. Attack had not come that night, but she had kept the knife as a backup to any plans she made, sneaking it through customs even, in case circumstance was unkind.

  Time spent with Adam had almost led to her forgetting it, but the knife remained in her inside pocket. Had she not found the sithe it would have been used already but, as her second doomed-to-failure getaway reached the Lairig Ghru, she knew using it was indeed imminent at last as soon as she realised her chaser had disappeared.

  On turning to see how far off he was, his absence only told her that some ambush was being set. As with that morning, he liked to approach unseen, for this was indeed the same Stevens twin that committed the original attack, bearing the marks Adam had inflicted with his knuckles.

  It was her turn to be hurt now. She expected no such fortune this time, but neither did she think on her own survival, only on causing whatever difficulty she could to his ambitions and making sure he felt a pain he would never forget where he expected bliss.

  As she expected, the attack then came. Breathless as she was, her hearing did not immediately distinguish the sound of falling water ahead; one of the many small streams that ran from the mountain, still weeks from freezing for the winter. As an obstacle the waterfall presented no challenge; a child could easily step over it, but it was the sound of its fall that Stevens, having detoured to higher ground so as to approach the tiring Becky unseen at some hopeless and secluded location, had decided to use as cover for the crunch of his footsteps. Attacking from close proximity, in his experience, meant any screaming could be stifled more quickly.

  Becky felt something was afoot and turned in time to see Stevens II reveal himself, but not in time to attempt any kind of escape. Instead she mimicked a poise that suggested she was about to make a run past, standing him up in order to goad him over the death of his brother.

  ‘So there were two of you after all,’ she managed, despite gasping for air, ‘I bet your parents must be doubly proud.’

  ‘Speaking of parents,’ he replied, ‘maybe I should hunt yours down when I’ve finished with you. Force their car off a cliff or something.’

  ‘But you’re alone now, my bet is your brother was the brains of the operation. He was the criminal mastermind, you the psychotic twin he’d occasionally let off the leash. Am I right or what?’

  It was only a slight flicker that crossed his eyes, but it gave away the mental fragility she wanted exposed. In doing so that same flicker took Becky all the way back to a house party thirteen years previously when she had decided not to sit and talk with him; an infatuated psyche multiplies all vulnerabilities. This was the unhinged half of the two twins alright, the one that imagined he would meet his perfect woman one day, it would be love at first sight and she would worship him. Knowing now his obsessive nature, she could see the danger written all over his features that had meant nothing to her on first meeting. Experience makes us wise, but she would wish to have never had to learn the lesson all the same.

  ‘My brother liked to steal,’ Stevens replied, moving closer, ‘I take more simple pleasures from life. For years I helped him with his crimes, on the deal that when we finally tracked you down that we would drop everything to come find you. In his memory I’ll make sure I take double what I originally intended.’

  ‘But you’re out of your league, legend says you’re not the most evil thing on this mountain.’

  Time for words was at an end, however. Stevens darted forwards before she had finished the sentence, looking to take her off guard and appearing to think nothing on the remark. Becky herself would have been unsure why she chose to allude to such a fact, it being unlikely his rage would be affected by a case of the cree
ps as he commenced, but we can probably be certain that this was the only clue either Stevens twin ever had of the Ben Macdui reputation.

  Becky was not completely unprepared. Proving more resourceful when cornered than she would otherwise had known, a loose rock had already been picked up and held out of sight in preparation for his attack. Aiming for his face, she hurled the object as he lunged forward. If accurate it might have been sufficient enough to knock out all his teeth but, so close to the fulfilment he had dreamt of, Stevens was ready for the counter. He felt the impact, but it only glanced his shoulder, a bruise he would happily have taken hundreds more of before thinking twice. And so the next strike was his, swinging his fist squarely at her, he cared not where on her body it struck, the effect was to unbalance her, giving him an easy target to overpower completely. From there it was easy to take hold of her coat and force her down into the snow. Once the attack was executed, his movements could be described as clumsy, but it was not necessary to be artful from then on – he had her at last. Targeting her coat first, he used all his strength to tear it open, but in doing so he loosened his control upon Becky’s arms and she was able to thrust just enough to make the stabbing motion she had planned.

  Presented with her worst nightmare, she had nevertheless fulfilled her promise to fight to the last minute, burying the knife into Stevens’ flesh. Poor luck alone meant she failed to cause him havoc in the area men most fear havoc to be caused, but the knife did find his groin area before her attacker even noticed she had any last play left.

  Stab wounds are a difficult injury to assess. When hearing reports of knife attacks we are as likely to find a single stab wound responsible for the death of an individual, while sometimes it take a hundred before the victim is killed. A vital organ might be harmed when a blade pierces a body, while the wound might also turn out to be superficial and hardly worth anyone’s attention. Stevens may have been shocked to find a knife in his belly, but felt no debilitating effects on withdrawing it and, with typical violent instinct, immediately turned it into a weapon of his own. His stabbing motion was deeper and higher, aimed just below her chest and, unlike Stevens, Becky felt its sting straightaway, gasping at the chill of the blade and feeling her senses going limp… but he had moved too soon for the kill.

  Wacky as this summation might seem, his actions in stabbing Becky so viciously defied any reasoning. He had wanted her alive and without serious hurt for some time and so the trauma of finding his brother dead did indeed result in a twist to events. Suddenly his pursuit was personal in more than one sense and, reacting to the surprise of being stabbed, he could not resist the impulsive act of returning in kind – more proof that he had never been the brains of the operation.

  What happened next can only be interpreted as a showing of human frailty. Becky was not dead, lying there wounded but still warm and ripe for his pillaging. Instead of shaking off this imperfection to his plans, however, Stevens could take no more disappointment. Faced with the scraps of a feast long anticipated, the villain was shaken by the knowledge that he was a fool, which hurt more deeply than the knife wound and overturned whatever concise thinking prevailed. Years he had dreamt of that moment, having Becky in his grasp and at his will, but he could no longer proceed precisely how his fantasies had played out. So instead of taking what he could, the man turned his back on his catch and walked to the edge of the cairn. Stevens then held his arms aloft and let out a cry, not to the heavens we can be sure, but to some notion that there were other forces in the universe that would hear his insanity, for so it did define whom he was. For no other reason than to be heard, his cry echoed about the Cairngorms, wild and friendless. His eyes might not see doom approach, but his soul knew that it was the last of its kind and the end was in sight.

  Resonating down the Lairig Ghru pass, that cry was carried by the wind and heard in many towns and villages by anyone out of doors; in Aviemore, Newtonmore, Grantown-on-Spey and Braemar people stopped and thought on the strange note in the air and what it might mean. A cry of rage and insanity, that only the pipes of an unbalanced mind could let blow once the drawbridge had opened and that fragile grip on reality exposed. Local folk would often shrug and accept defeat at the hands of the merciless elements almost as if it defined them, but the maker of that sound was ignorant to such a life’s philosophy. Lack of fulfilment had not been contemplated by this man, his nature was to take and treat all as he pleased and his cry to the heavens – or perhaps to Hell – was as genuine as any ever made, even if the same realisation set in upon making that call; that no one was listening, or – if they did – did not care to interfere, being all wise in their commitment to leave the fallen kind be.

  Such an end has parallels in that part of the world. Not two centuries previous the last wolf of the British Isles was hunted to its death in those very mountains. A creature that once had kin, the strength of a pack, driven to lone desperation as a murderous era of the world closed in to bring about its end. A top predator that once called the shots, howled a note it had never made before in plea for some response from the ether as to why it had fought so hard to be greater than other creatures only for the world to shift and a different kind of power to erase it from the land purely because it could.

  It was too late for Stevens to join the scientists in seeking to understand the secrets of the universe, however, and his call for assistance was far less sacred than the wolf that likewise received no reply. A further conclusion that Adam and I agree on – being men – concerns the loins and the likelihood of that man failing due to conditions being unfavourable to be aspiring to the tripod. Surely it is a very plausible assessment that, in such cold and numbing conditions, rape was something that Stevens could only dream of. Even the kind of person who – we expect – might have been schooled in such abuses, found the stirrings his aspirations depended on impossible to concoct after so many hours spent outdoors in a Highland winter. His plans were flawed from the start after all. Power over a victim is the lure of a rapist, but most heterosexual men are familiar with the craving of a female’s body at times when they don’t quite feel at their best. In such circumstances, do men weigh up the odds and reach an informed decision, or do they play along with flirtation just in case when the moment comes they surprise themselves with their virility? Stevens is not the first man to convince himself that all bodily functions will be in peak performance when it matters, only to find there is no spade to dig the garden with.

  For all their plans and plotting, no scenario had counted for the failings of human biology. In the same instinctive manner that Becky knew she was unable to outrun her pursuers, Stevens knew there and then that sexual fulfilment was beyond him, while any other amusements were seriously hampered by his own needless behaviour in delivering his catch a serious wound. Here at last was the cruel circumstance that had ruled the fate of Becky and Adam, showing it had no loyalty to men like Stevens either.

  His howl might have been one of the strangest outcomes of the night, but as it occurred several other important complications arose.

  Firstly, Adam arrived, his scaling of the mountainside at last bringing him in touch with what he had suspected all along, that Stevens had found Becky once again – their position he would have arrived at anyway without the howling, but the cry focused his wits and enabled him to be certain he was not seeing shadows, Secondly, however, his arrival was not as he wished and failed to impact upon any imminent action. It turned out his job was not to destroy Stevens after all for this Becky did herself; life was still hers even though she felt numbness creeping through her veins, but her limbs were not yet so immobile to refuse the advantage of such a monumental dropping of the guard as Stevens’ fall into craziness allowed.

  Like him she was being hunted to extinction, but she was not wild or governed by instincts that belonged to another time and so did not howl or turn to questionable gods. She lay in the snow shivering, from her wound rather than the cold, but held no surprise towards Stevens’ behaviou
r which only served to confirm all she thought of him. Her wound was bad, she could tell. Confusing her senses and leading her to wonder how much more she would see of the world, but rather than think on the mercy that her self-awareness of the end would not be prolonged she decided that one last act could be achieved.

  Above the pathless slopes he stood, not quite vertical or treacherous enough to kill a walker outright (though a fall might have caused injury), but balanced as he was upon the edge, his arms outstretched and his mind neglecting any notion of physical danger to himself, he could hardly have presented her with a better position to be pushed to his doom. A child could have sent him to his end and Becky had already proven herself capable of taking life. Finding she was able to stand, there was no cause for hesitation and, discarding the need for precision, she hurled her entire body weight into his back. After all his pursuit and endeavours he had succeeded in depriving himself of even the slightest groping contest with the woman he had yearned for so long to overpower. Falling headfirst, there was no chance to decrease his momentum by sliding or grappling, as would have been possible had someone slipped from that position and so he fell as cleanly as a skydiver might picture when showcasing his professionalism; and so his cry was extinguished.

  It was only then that Adam was able to reach Becky, the deed he had picturing fulfilling already completed. Stevens was dispatched and he joined her looking down at his body, which lay face down in the snow some thirty feet beneath. The lonely twin was not moving or making any sound – Adam might have been compelled to climb down and make sure he was dead before drawing the night’s events to a close, but he was unaware of Becky’s stab wound until he found himself catching her fall. Numbness was taking over and she could stand no more; to his horror Adam realised she was not merely exhausted. Cradling her with his left arm he felt wetness on his right hand and lifted it to see the blood that was flowing from her middle.

  ‘Can you hear me Becky,’ he asked, desperately, ‘Are you in pain?’ but her response was more worrying than agony, slurring her words as consciousness drifted away.

  ‘Perhaps…’ she managed, ‘the lesser of two evils.’

  ‘I’ll get you safe,’ he tried to reassure her.

  ‘I’m where I… always wanted to be…’ she finished then closed her eyes.

  So very briefly they had been strong together, but there she was dying in his arms. What had been the point in the hope their unlooked for reuniting had brought if the life she deserved to lead was taken anyway?

  Becky’s neck still read a pulse, but Adam knew time was of the essence. She had slipped into unconsciousness, next would be coma and death, perhaps from pneumonia if not from the wound.

  Having run so far determined to save her, giving up was not on his mind, but he might have little choice in such matters. Being a scientist he had a fair knowledge of human anatomy, but not enough to assess Becky’s chances there and then, to judge the time she had left or make any desperate attempt at surgery of some kind. A towel he wrapped around her middle to staunch the flow of blood, but he knew that internal damage had already been done to render her unconscious; she needed a hospital, but they might just have been farther from medical facilities than any other inland location in the British Isles, without phone communication and in visibility that even an air ambulance would probably be unable to attempt.

  Without help and with no idea where Affleck and his vehicle were located, he knew that Becky would die. It was then that the memory came back to him of the dream-like experience he’d had close to the summit of Ben Macdui and the water that, with the help of enchanted hands, had cleansed and healed his wounds.

  Believe the memory was real, he told himself. Becky’s life depended on it. The decision was made; he chose the path back up the mountain rather than the chance of reaching the nearest Highland hospital in time to save Becky. No doubt people would question his actions as insane if he was found to have carried a dying woman all the way up a mountain for no apparent reason, but he did not mull over such details.