Intrusion

6. The Bright Land

There was a place. Hugh was fairly sure it existed and wasn’t one of his visions. The other lads, Malcolm and Donald, had seen it too. The reason he couldn’t be entirely sure was that the lads were Leosich themselves, and they could have had the second sight too, for all he knew, and spoken of it no more than he did. But he was almost sure there was more to it than that, even to this day: that the glimpse his pals had shared, and denied, was of some far reality. Hugh’s guesses as to the nature of its reality varied on a sliding scale of scepticism and self-mockery: an objective phenomenon, a space-time anomaly, a land under the hill, a fairy land, Tir Nan Og…

They’d all been about twelve years old at the time: old enough for big school, the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway. Old enough to look with a sort of affectionate pity at wee school, Valtos Primary, when they came back to Uig for the summer holidays. Seeing the parish again after a couple of terms in the town was unsettling. The black houses and the white, the sheep-fanks and bothans, the corrugated-iron sheds, the dry-stone walls another inch deeper in the grass, the ruins and the new build, the rusting cars and tractors in the middle of fields, all seemed primitive and petty, almost shameful to be associated with, something you’d outgrown like childhood toys. Only the windmills and the wooden houses looked modern.

The boys and girls whose parents were natives or settlers had work to do on the crofts or in the shops. The girl children of the wind-farmers had help to give their mothers around the house. The boys didn’t (unlike the girls, who had home management in their curriculum). They mooched. They hung around the turbines and got in the way of the workers. Goggled and gloved, gaming, they squandered sunny days indoors until their mothers yearned to chase them out of the house with sticks.

Then a morning came when Hugh looked out of his bedroom window to see a sky whose blue was so deep and dark that he could have been looking at it through Polaroid sunglasses. He couldn’t imagine staying inside. He pinged Malcolm the minister’s son and Donald the rigger’s boy. About half an hour later they met in the back yard of the house where Hugh lived. The house was a mile and a half away from the wee school that overlooked the bay. It stood on the slope of a hill, the highest house in a village that, like most villages in Lewis, consisted of a cluster of half a dozen old houses, a few new ones and sites for several more, all scattered around the landscape for hundreds of metres. The road ran below it, over a culvert where a stream from a small freshwater loch at one side of the hill flowed into the sea-loch around whose shore the village was spread. Minnows swam in that burn, preyed on by an eel, long and old and black, that lurked under the culvert.

The three boys scuffed pebbles in the yard and debated the shore or the loch or the glen farther up the road, but the deep blue of the sky turned their eyes to the hills above the village, and up to the hills they went. Within the old manse’s glebe the ground was mossy and the grass long. Beyond the fence above it – the barbed wire was tufted with sheep’s wool – the lads were wading through heather, tough and springy, that scratched at their ankles and tugged at their trousers. Old ash from past muir-burnings puffed up around their feet, making them cough, and blackening their trainers within minutes. Black-faced sheep and months-old lambs gave them the yellow slot-eyed stare, chewing impassively, or panicked for no clear reason and bounded away, then forgot why they were running and stopped to graze again.

The hill was not very high, but it was higher than it looked. As soon as the boys had toiled up one slope, another would loom ahead, usually with a bog to cross before they got there. The slopes themselves were strewn with erratic boulders, some big enough to have their own overhang and cave-like declivity beneath. After about twenty minutes of climbing, the boys reached the summit, a broad plateau of rocky outcrops crusted with lichens, some of them grey-green and others orange like splashes of earth-moving-machinery paint.

Hugh stood with the others and looked around. He knew that he was near the junction of two almost peninsular promontories of the long island: the one that stretched ahead of him across moor and lochs and hills to the distant headland of Aird, and the one behind and to his right, where the sea he could glimpse beyond the little long loch in the glen – the Atlantic that broke on the bay that the wee school overlooked, and whose sand was just visible from where he stood – was the same sea as lapped the village shore, via a few zigzag miles of beaches, cliffs and headlands hidden behind the hills immediately in view. Turning farther around to his left, his gaze swept that inlet and the hills and glens to the western horizon. From this height it was suddenly obvious that the land wasn’t made of peat with rocks sticking out, but of rock with an uneven and broken overlay of peat like frayed hessian sacking over rubble. Clear too were the drove roads along the sides of the glens and across the moors, relict pathways along which cattle had once been driven and that now even sheep did not frequent. On almost every hilltop the blades of the great windmills spun like slow clockwork. The wind seldom ceased on Lewis, but today it was little more than a warm breeze.

‘No a bad view,’ said Malcolm.

‘How about we go to the lochs?’ said Donald, pointing ahead to where patches of water glittered in the middle distance.

Hugh felt a small thrill. Coming up this hill hadn’t been forbidden when he’d been smaller, but going to the lochs definitely had been. He reckoned he’d now outgrown that injunction. Certainly it hadn’t been repeated half an hour earlier when he’d told his mother where he was going. It hadn’t been lifted, either, but he reckoned he was in the clear.

‘Fine,’ he said.

On they went. Like the summit, the lochs were more difficult to get to than they looked. As they walked across the rock, the surfaces planed by the glaciers of the ice ages turned out to be deeply scoured by the same process, with unexpected cracks and dips that the boys had to scramble down and up or leap across. Then the heather and peat and bog began again.

Another half-hour and the boys stood beside the first of the lochs. Less than a hundred metres at its widest, it lay still and black under the dark blue sky, banked by metre-high overhangs of heather-covered peat and here and there a tiny shingle beach.

The silence rang in Hugh’s ears.

‘Quiet,’ he remarked, to break it.

‘Wonder if there’s a monster in it,’ said Malcolm.

‘I doubt there’s a fish,’ said Hugh.

‘Or maybe a crashed plane,’ said Donald.

Hugh and Malcolm triangulated him with scornful looks.

‘That’s what we thought when we were wee,’ said Hugh. ‘We used to have a crashed fighter jet in every lochan.’

Donald shrugged.

‘Planes went down here,’ he said, as if repeating a well-established historical fact rather than a rumour passed from cohort to cohort of primary-school kids.

‘So why would they still be here?’ Hugh asked. ‘There would have been searches.’

‘It was all secret,’ said Donald. ‘It was the Cold War.’

‘Oh, the Cold War?’ Hugh scoffed. ‘It was the Second World War I was told. And that was about the wee loch above the school. There was supposed to be a Messerschmitt under the water. With the dead German pilot’s skeleton still in it. When the sun was right, you could see the Iron Cross hanging in front of his collarbone. That’s what Lachie MacIver told me, when he was ten and I was five.’

They all laughed, even Donald.

‘It was the Cold War,’ Donald repeated, in a stubborn tone. ‘There was a MiG shot down over the sea that crashed in the hills around here. The RAF didn’t want to let on. That’s why there weren’t any searches.’

‘There must have been searches,’ said Hugh. ‘Or people might have found it by accident.’

‘Och, if a plane crashed in a loch, the authorities didn’t bother with that,’ said Donald. ‘They knew nobody would ever find it.’

Hugh stared at him. There was something baffling about his pal’s insistence. He remembered how this sort of story wasn’t the only one they’d all believed, in wee school. A few years ago he and his little sister had become convinced that there was some bogeyman – no, an actual flesh-and-blood man – living in the roof spaces behind the attic’s thin partitions, and that he occasionally hid in the big shed at the back of the house. They had somehow believed that enough to terrify themselves now and again, yet most of the time didn’t think or worry about this unseen presence at all. At no time had they ever given the practicalities of the matter a moment’s thought.

Donald was thinking no more rationally than they had been. To ask him why and how the authorities could be so blithely sure that this scandalously, secretly shot-down MiG would not be discovered, let alone how the crash wouldn’t have been noticed by any of the locals, would be as pointless as it would have been for someone to ask Hugh or his sister Shonagh how the man in the attic got his food or went to the toilet or got in and out of the house unobserved.

But thinking about this reminded Hugh of the people he’d seen who weren’t there, and of Voxy. He didn’t want to think about that. He could feel his face heat up, and he turned away abruptly.

‘Let’s get a move on,’ he said.

They made their way around the side of the loch and were then lured by the glitter of the next, a few hundred yards of heather away. Again the lie of the ground was deceptive. About halfway to the next loch they found themselves standing on the lip of a small gully. It was about two metres deep and three across, its scree-covered floor rising on either hand to be lost amid the heather after a few metres each way. The far side of it looked like peat overhung with heather. They could easily have walked around it.

Hugh, with some impulse of bravado to compensate for his earlier moment of embarrassment, sat down at the edge, rolled, and dreeped. His feet landed with a thud on the scree and he took a step backwards.

Then another step, as he took in what he was seeing. The side of the gully right in front of him wasn’t what he had expected. Just beneath the heather at the lip was a flat slab of rock, and under that slab was a dark opening about a metre wide and a metre and a half high. Two upended slabs of rock propped the sides, from the scree floor to the rock above. The rest of the bank was like the other side, hard black peat. Hugh had the impression that it was recently exposed, perhaps by a sudden slippage or even a flood.

He glanced up at Malcolm and Donald, who stood looking down at him.

‘Hi, guys,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve found something.’

He could hear his own voice boom a little, echoing, he guessed, in the hollow. He took another step back, squatted, and skited a pebble into the dark hole. Far away, something rattled.

‘There’s a cave here,’ he said.

The other two, for whatever reason – perhaps suspecting a prank on his part – didn’t drop down the way he had, but went around to the end of the little gully and walked in, crunching and slithering down the slope of scree.

‘Well, by Jove,’ said Malcolm.

‘That’s not a cave,’ said Donald. ‘That’s dug out. It’s like yon Neolithic place in Orkney.’

‘Dug out in peat?’ Hugh said. ‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Skara Brae wasn’t dug out either,’ said Malcolm. ‘It was made of stone and got covered in sand.’

‘Maybe this got buried in the peat, not dug out,’ Hugh mused.

‘How long would the peat take to build up six feet?’ Malcolm wondered.

‘Longer than your bodach thinks the world has existed,’ said Hugh.

They scuffled for a moment.

‘Quit it,’ said Donald. ‘Anybody got a torch?’

Hugh had: a nifty little high-power multi-LED one. He dug it out of his trouser pocket and flicked it on. Ducking down, he led the way into the opening. Even with the torch on, he couldn’t see a thing.

‘Turn it off,’ Donald advised. ‘Let our eyes adjust.’

They crouched for a minute or so in the entrance with their eyes shut. The air smelled of peat dust, dry bracken and ash.

‘Right,’ said Hugh, opening his eyes. He could now see dimly in the light from the entrance – what little of it got past their bodies. He switched the torch on again.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘It goes way back.’ His voice echoed.

Donald and Malcolm crowded behind him, peering over his shoulders.

‘Man,’ said Donald.

Hugh flicked the beam around as he took a few steps forward. The ground – peat, with some ash, he guessed – felt springy underfoot. The bones of mice and rabbits lay here and there, fragile and brown. The walls were of close-fitting slabs, their bases sunk into the ground, supporting a ceiling of the same. He brushed his fingertips across a join above his head and could hardly feel a gap. Though the sides of the slabs weren’t exactly straight, or evidently worked, they fitted almost to the millimetre. Without thinking, he ran his thumb across his fingertips, and felt grit.

‘Just a mo,’ he said.

He shone the torch on his fingers, and saw grey dust. He stooped closer to the side wall, and peered hard at it, angling the torch a little. The surface of the slab was grey, with a sand-grain sparkle. He rubbed his fingertips across it, and touched one with his tongue.

‘Cement,’ he said. ‘Concrete.’

‘So much for your thousands of years,’ Malcolm jeered, after confirming the identification.

‘The Romans had concrete,’ Donald pointed out.

‘And they never got here,’ said Hugh. ‘This is recent, all right.’

They huddled, looking down the cone of light. The passage went on at least another five or six metres, and the torch beam wasn’t reaching the end of it.

‘Go in a bit?’ Hugh asked.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the others doing the same. The bright rectangle of daylight was a reassuring few steps behind them.

‘OK,’ said Malcolm.

‘No so sure about that,’ said Donald.

‘Why not?’ said Hugh.

‘I think we should go back and tell…’ His voice trailed off, as if he’d been about to say ‘a grown-up’ and had been too embarrassed.

‘Nah,’ Hugh said. ‘What is there to tell them, anyway? We’ll just go in a bit and have a look.’

With that he walked forward, leaving the others the choice of following or going back. They followed. After a few steps it became apparent that the passage had a slight downward slope and a curve to the right. About ten metres in, a backward glance revealed that the entrance was no longer visible. Hugh’s neck and knees began to ache with the awkward, stooping walk. He felt chill air on his face, and smelled peat smoke. A moment later he saw a thin glimmer of light ahead.

‘Light at the end of the tunnel,’ said Donald, in the tone of having made a smart remark.

As they walked on, the glimmer took shape as a rectangle like the entrance. It was difficult to be certain what colour the light was, but it seemed to be the blue of a bright sky. The boys reached the end of the tunnel in a couple of minutes. The draught became stronger and colder as they moved forward. Hugh looked out, with Malcolm and Donald peering over his shoulders again. He blinked hard and shaded his eyes – the light was dazzling. The tunnel exit was evidently on the side of the hill, a steeper slope than the one they’d climbed. He saw the village and the sea-loch below, and the hills around, under the broad sky. But the houses looked different: darker, smaller and less regular in shape than the grey cement-block houses and slate roofs of the village he knew. The tide was far, far out, the sea-loch a distant glimmer. And the ground was covered in snow, of that he was certain.

He leaned forward, peering down the slope. A hundred metres below them, a tall figure was striding up the hill. A black shape against the white, with a gleam of eyes under a hood. Hugh recoiled. The other boys took his fright, and all of a sudden all three of them were scurrying back up the passage, the shadows of Donald and Malcolm weird and long in Hugh’s wildly swaying torch-beam. Hugh could hear, above their own hurrying steps and rapid breaths, something or someone in the tunnel behind them.

Almost tumbling over each other, they hurtled out of the tunnel into the little gully and the blaze of sunlight, and scrambled up the far side, hitting the bank at a run and hauling themselves up on the heather. Only then did they glance back. No one else came out of the tunnel. They could hear nothing but their own breath and hammering heartbeats and the cry of a curlew.

They looked at each other and ran – around the end of the gully, with fearful sidelong glances, and across the moor, past the loch, across the bare rock and down the hill. They charged through heather and waded through bog and skipped and leapt over gaps in the outcrop and, on the way down the slope, hurdled erratic boulders. If any of them fell, they were up in a second, racing on.

At length they ducked through the fence of the glebe above Hugh’s house and collapsed in the long grass, gasping, sides aching from the stitch, legs filthy to the knees, shirts ripped, heels of hands scratched, shins bruised.

None of them could have said why they felt safe on this side of the fence, but they did.

Hugh stood up, hands on knees, panting.

‘Did you see it?’ he asked.

‘See what?’ Malcolm asked. Donald, too out of breath to speak, scowled and shook his head.

‘The village,’ said Hugh. ‘Down here, with the snow on it.’

‘Snow?’ Malcolm said, in a disbelieving tone. ‘That wasn’t snow. It was just the brightness.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Donald added, catching his breath. ‘After the dark, it was so bright I could hardly make out anything.’

‘And then,’ Malcolm chipped in, ‘you jumped back and nearly knocked us over and we thought something was wrong, so we ran.’

‘You didn’t see him?’ Hugh asked.

‘See who?’

‘The man coming up the hill.’

‘Now you’re having us on,’ said Donald, sounding uneasy.

Malcolm laughed. ‘That’s like the stories about crashes and dead pilots.’

Donald glowered. ‘It is not!’ he said. ‘It’s like the stories we believed when we were wee.’ He raised his hands, fingers dangling and shoogling. ‘Woo-oo-ooh!’

Malcolm clouted him. Donald kicked. They exchanged a few more blows. Hugh grabbed shoulders.

‘Stop it!’ he yelled.

They both pummelled him for a change, and then everyone backed off. No recriminations. They had outgrown telling on each other, but not outgrown hurting each other.

‘Forget about the man,’ Hugh said. ‘But you saw it, you saw the land all bright at least.’

‘So? It was the sun in my eyes,’ said Donald.

Malcolm nodded along. ‘Yes, that was it, the sun.’

Hugh knew they were lying. They’d seen what he’d seen.

‘Och, that’s what it was,’ he said. ‘And maybe I just saw a shadow, or a sheep.’

‘We were fleeing from a sheep?’ Malcolm asked, his voice squeaking with disbelief.

They all laughed, Hugh too.

‘I’ve got a new game,’ said Donald.

They ran down the last green slope to the back of the house and jumped on their bikes and raced away.

That evening, by way of explaining how he’d got his clothes, shoes and skin in such a state, Hugh told his father about how he’d been exploring a tunnel or cave or passageway up in the hills. He didn’t say anything about what he’d seen.

‘Show me your phone,’ his father said.

Hugh handed it over and his father punched up the GPS tracker app. He slid the phone back across the table.

‘See the place where you turn around?’ he said.

Hugh looked down at the black squiggle of his route on the screen map.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Now flick to… wait a minute.’

His father tapped at his own phone. The route line remained but the underlying map had changed, from a satellite pic with tags to a gridded white sheet with contour lines and little symbols. Right at the point where the route line doubled back was a row of tiny red arrowheads.

‘Culvert,’ his father said.

‘What’s it doing up there?’ Hugh asked.

‘The company was going to site a windmill there, a few years ago,’ his father explained. ‘Changed their minds, that’s all, but not before they’d gone ahead and started building a culvert to draw off flash floods.’ He frowned. ‘Speaking of which. One rainstorm and that would have been you.’

‘There was no chance of a rainstorm,’ Hugh said, in a sulkier tone than he’d intended.

‘Don’t give me lip,’ said his father. ‘There’s always a chance, you know that.’

‘The water would just have washed out,’ Hugh persisted.

‘No, it wouldn’t,’ his father said. He stabbed a finger at Hugh’s phone, magnifying the map. ‘The culvert wasn’t finished, see? It doesn’t have a lower opening. It’s probably flooded at the bottom already. So you stay out of culverts in future, got it?’

‘OK, OK,’ said Hugh.

‘Promise.’

‘Yes, Dad, all right.’

‘Now help your mother with the washing and then go to your room.’

He didn’t sound angry, or anxious, and Hugh left with some relief that he wasn’t in as much trouble as he could have been.

He didn’t go up that hill again.