2. Sealg
Calum reached the Land Rover first, panting from the thrill of defying his parents. He climbed into the driver seat as a child might tackle a climbing frame. Alastair followed, carrying with him a bundle of something wrapped in a blanket, which he casually tossed onto the back seat. Only two years older than Calum, Alastair was as tall as a full-grown man and swung himself in without effort.
“You got it?” asked Calum.
“Of course I fucking got it. What do you think that is in the back seat?”
Calum looked at the bundle in the back. The blanket had slipped off, exposing gun-metal as dark as a shadow against the back-seat fabric.
“Fuck. Keys! Where does he keep them?” Alastair scanned the interior of the Rover. He pulled down the sun-visor. Nothing. He reached into the glove compartment, digging through the assortment of objects he found there. A spanner, a lighter, map, and finally car keys, which he held up and jingled playfully. “Fuck, aye,” Alastair said, grinning. He slid the keys into the ignition and stopped. Then he turned to Calum who recognized the wide-eyed look. Like a cat about to pounce.
As much as Calum had managed to avoid the extremes of their parent’s wrath his brother was adept at invoking, he suspected his reputation as the good brother would not be enough to protect him from the consequences of this night-time jaunt they had planned. Leaving the house and taking the Rover without permission would earn them both a hiding—but taking the Browning was beyond forbidden. There was no precedence for such a transgression.
It wasn’t too late to turn back. Dad was in the living room digesting dinner and drinking lager, oblivious to the whereabouts of his sons. They could restore the shotgun to its place on the top of the rack in the shed and return to their shared bedroom without their parents suspecting a thing.
“He loves that shotgun,” Calum noted. The Browning B-80 was Dad’s favorite amongst his guns and—Calum suspected—his favorite amongst his children. He had spent the previous evening polishing the walnut stock with hard wax oil until the mottled wood grain gleamed.
Experienced hunters by they time they reached their teens, the boys were no stranger to guns. Alastair in particular delighted in shooting rabbits and regularly re-stocked the freezer with venison. Taking one of the other half dozen shotguns or rifles in the shed without permission would have been considered a misdemeanor at most. But not the Browning. Dad would take that personally. A point Calum thought to raise with his brother before it occurred to him that offending their father was rather the point.
Alastair didn’t say a word as he turned the key in the ignition. The engine turned over and the cabin rumbled. This would surely rouse their father who could hear a car engine from half a mile down the mountain. Alastair put the vehicle into reverse and turned around in the driveway a little too fast, knocking over his mother’s plant pots which shattered and spread dirt over the driveway. Facing the gate, Alastair put the vehicle into first, stopping short of engaging the clutch. The gate to the farmhouse was closed. No lock, just a latch built from the same cast iron as the gate itself and as solidly constructed. There was no time to get out of the Rover, open the gate, and return to the Rover for a quick getaway. Not before his father was there to grab both of them by the scruff of the neck. Calum saw only two options. They could stop and face the music, perhaps using a last-minute change of heart as a bargaining chip to reduce their collective punishment. The second option would be more dramatic and almost too ridiculous to consider. Even before Calum had thought it through he knew that to Alastair, who invariably chose the path of greatest chaos, there was only one option.
“No”, Calum said, meekly.
“I’m doing it.”
Alastair engaged the clutch and floored the accelerator as the farmhouse door swung open to the silhouette of their father. Dirt and gravel kicked up from the back wheels. Alastair turned the vehicle away from the gate as they accelerated, aiming for the fence—much to Calum’s relief as the sturdy gate was cemented into the ground. Calum braced himself against the dash as the Rover’s grill collided with the fence, sending a starburst of sparks into the air. The Rover pulled away from the farmhouse, their father standing in the doorway, back-lit and casting a long shadow over the crushed fence and ruined flower beds.
Alastair, watching the rear view mirror, gestured a raised middle finger behind him just as soon as he felt they were far enough away for his father not to see it.
“Did you see those sparks?” asked Alastair. Calum, barely able to assemble words into a sentence after all the excitement, agreed with a vigorous nod. “Just like the A-team,” Alastair continued, “No. Dukes of Hazard. Hey, do you think we could get some air-time in this thing?”
Calum giggled. The Land Rover felt as anchored to the ground as the granite boulders that littered the slopes of Ranoch. Implausible as it seemed, the imagery of them jumping a gulch while being pursued by a cavalcade of cop cars had them both in hysterics.
The Rover reached a fork in the gravel track. One branch turned into single lane tarmac and would take them into the village. The other carried on snaking upwards into the mountain. Alastair braked and put the Rover in neutral.
“Have we got any food?” asked Alastair. They had just eaten dinner, but it would be a long night ahead of them.
“Think so,” Calum said, “Dad always keeps biscuits in the Rover.” He fished around in the door bin and pulled out a long cylinder of Rich Tea biscuits, about half of which had been eaten.
“Is that all?”
“Afraid so,” Calum confirmed, mournfully.
“Let’s go into town and get a chippy for later,” Alastair said, putting the Rover into gear.
“We can’t do that. Somebody might see you.”
“See me doing what? Buying chips?”
“Driving without a license.”
Alastair cursed. On the mountainside, nobody cared about him driving—it was common for the children of the handful of families still living on Ranoch to be regularly driving in their teens. Even the local police would turn a blind eye beyond the farmhouse where there were few roads, and even fewer cars. But on council roads about town, a boy of barely sixteen driving a Range Rover would be challenged. Reluctantly, Alastair turned the wheel in the opposite direction. Calum wasn’t sure if Alastair wanted to avoid being arrested or simply didn’t want to risk missing out on the evening he planned for all of three hours—pretty much the extent of the boy’s ability to think ahead. Alastair banged the steering wheel with two fists. “Fuckin’ hell. I can drive better than half the old farts in the village,” he protested.
Calum had observed his brother’s mood could change quickly like that. From cheerful to angry and bitter, like flipping a coin. If Calum didn’t do anything, Alastair might be stuck in that bad mood for the rest of the night, and that would not bode well for either of them. Alastair wasn’t always so volatile. Before he started clashing with Dad, the boys were close and often the only source of entertainment was each other. They spent many days playing silly games on the mountain which invariably resulted them coming home mucky from head to toe. That was before the fights; shouting matches with Dad that resulted in Alastair being confined to his room, often after a belting that left angry streaks criss-crossing his buttocks. He claimed it didn’t hurt that much, but Calum saw something change in his brother with every application of the belt. He became sullen, less joyful, with a tendency for random cruelty. Lately he had taken to giving Calum a “knuckling”—a knuckle forcefully dug between Calum’s ribs with a twist to maximize discomfort. He did it with such regularity that he often hit a bruise from the previous knuckling.
“There is beer in the boot,” Calum offered. He had helped his mother carry an entire pack of beer from the village shop to the Rover that day. Twelve tall cans of strong lager, of the brand their father like to drink while watching television. The pack was heavy, and the fridge was full, so it remained in boot—and would still be there.
“Seriously?” Alastair’s tone lightened.
“Aye,” Calum confirmed.
“Fuck aye, little brother!” Alastair floored the accelerator and tore the Rover up the mountain, kicking up fresh gravel behind them.
Alastair followed the gravel track uphill, in what seemed like a route scribbled on paper by a toddler. Never a straight line, sometimes the track crossed a stream, only to cross back to the other side a few yards later, then deviate around an outcrop of rock, briefly pointing away and not towards the summit where they were heading. Dad explained to them as young boys that the route was not planned, rather it was worn in by successive generations of vehicles seeking to minimize the incline.
What little second-hand sunlight they had when setting out soon diminished, leaving only the Rover’s headlights to illuminate the track—so overgrown to the point it that it became hard to distinguish from the heather and grass that surrounded it. The boys talked as they drove. Mostly it was Alastair lamenting about the new girl in his class, Catriona with black hair, who had taken to teasing him about his name. Alastair Alastair, Alistair MacAlastair, she would chant, much to the delight of the other kids in class, who gleefully joined in. Kids that would previously have been too afraid of Alastair to tease him like that were now saying it directly to his face, and he could do nothing about it because hitting a girl was shameful. To make matters worse, he liked Catriona, who he described as a stoater while also telling Calum she wasn’t that pretty. When it came to girls, Alastair rarely made any sense to Calum and had learned it was best not to point out such contradictions.
Calum slowed the Rover to a crawl. Leaning over the steering wheel, he admitted that he had probably lost the track ten minutes ago. They had been heading for a plateau around two thirds of the way to the summit where there was a car-park of sorts and a few decaying picnic tables placed there for hikers and day-trippers. It had served as the starting point for the Sealg for many years, but it didn’t look like they would reach it without back-tracking and Alastair was not one for back-tracking.
“Where are we?” Calum asked.
“No fuckin’ clue. But this is a good spot. Those old farts don’t know everything.” Alastair parked and left the Rover. He returned with two cans of lager, handing one to Calum. “Drink up bro. It puts hair on your balls.” The brother’s drank and ate the biscuits. Alastair drank with gusto, while Calum sipped. Calum didn’t much care for the bitter drink and would have chosen a Cola given the chance. Alastair finished his lager with a satisfied ahhh. “Is it time?”
Calum checked his watch. Well past sun-down. “It’s time,” he confirmed.
“Let’s do it.” Alastair jumped out the Rover. Calum followed, leaving behind half a can of lager. Alastair surveyed the contents of the boot and reached for another can of lager. “One for the road,” he said, depositing the can in an army-surplus ruck-pack then adding another lager for good measure. “What else?”
“Torch.” Calum said.
“Aye. Torch. You numpty. It’s dark.” Alastair fished out the camping torch, switched it on and banged the red plastic housing. The torch was the kind with a handle and a big square battery that could last several hours on a single charge. Calum was concerned it might not be fully charged, but it seemed pointless to raise that concern to Alastair who was clearly committed to the enterprise and would in all likelihood do it in the dark if he had to. “Here, you carry these,” Alastair said, handing Calum the backpack and torch.
Alastair retrieved the Browning from the back-seat and stuffed the blanket and loose shells into Calum’s rucksack. They set out facing the summit, Ranoch village at their back.
Alastair walked with the business end of the Browning resting on his shoulder, while Calum held a little back, keeping the torch leveled on the terrain ahead. Alastair talked as they walked, mostly about Catriona and how annoying she was, while Calum focused on his flashlight duties. Behind them, the Rover grew smaller and dimmer, finally merging with the night sky. With the Rover out of view it felt as though they were adrift in an ocean of heather. Unsure of what lay ahead, the boys continued their march up the bank of the mountain in silence.
The brothers reached an outcrop of exposed granite, its feldspar flecks caught the torchlight like tiny Christmas lights. “Break time,” Alastair said, setting the Browning down next to the rock. He pulled out a lager from Calum’s rucksack, offering it first to his brother, who declined with a hand gesture, before cracking it open and taking a gulp himself.
“What if we don’t find anything?” Calum asked.
Alastair swallowed a mouthful of lager and hesitated before speaking. “If we don’t find anything, then—” he left his response hanging, building suspense in Calum who suspected his brother had started the sentence before knowing how he would complete it. “—then we join the French Foreign Legion,” Alastair said with a sense of satisfaction. It was an in-joke. Calum had told Alastair about the French Foreign Legion, which Calum himself had learned about from a novel. “Mon Dieu, Pepe le Pew,” Alastair said. They both laughed at Alastair’s cartoonish French accent. The joke confirmed that Calum’s suspicions that his brother’s plan was as reckless as it seemed and without consideration for the consequences.
The boys reclined against the rocks, while Alastair drank. Ranoch village was visible in the distance as a yellowish bloom of light from a smattering of street-lamps and windows. The emerging full-moon lifted the landscape just enough to make out the topology of the mountain slope which somehow seemed disconnected from the tiny village as though Ranoch mountain and Ranoch village were separate ethereal realms and not a single land mass.
“Pretty,” Calum remarked.
Alastair laughed. “Aye, its pretty. But we are not tourists. Our mission is a sacred one, entrusted to us by our fore-fathers.” Alastair mimicked his Father’s pompous tone, expecting to elicit a laugh from his younger brother. Calum didn’t respond to his brother’s jape. He had heard a noise from a little further up the mountain and had turned his head to listen for it. “What is it?” asked Alastair.
Calum held up a hand to silence his brother. There it was again. The noise he had heard moments ago, repeated. Unmistakably it was a growl produced by an animal. “Get the Browning,” Calum said, coldly.
Alastair grabbed the Browning propped up against the rocks. They walked slowly in the direction of the noise, while Calum scanned the foreground with a beam of focused torchlight.
Alastair hadn’t yet heard the noise for himself. “Is it a brollachan?” he asked.
“Do they growl?”
Alastair admitted he didn’t think so, but held the shotgun in front of him all the same. The brothers walked steadily forward, intent and silent, approaching the source of the growls which had grown louder and—in the brother’s minds—angrier. They traced the sound to a mound of dirt, not so far away. Alastair raised the browning to eye height, carefully lining up the sight-bead with the mound as they stalked. The growls stopped before they reached the mound. Concerned they had been spotted, the brother’s froze in their tracks. Then a pair of piercing eyes suspended in a stout face erupted from behind the mound. Alastair pulled the Browning trigger which clicked impotently. Calum yelped, nearly dropping the torch.
“Badger!” Calum said, noting the round body and sturdy legs of the creature bolting up the mountain out of reach of the torchlight.
“Fuckin’ badger,” Alastair said, lowered the Browning. He looked to his bother, sheepishly. “Forgot the shells.”
“You would have got him.”
“Damn right I would have got him. Blown him to Smithereens.”
“What was it growling at?”
“I don’t know, bro. Do I look like David Attenborough?”
They walked the remaining few feet to the mound of dirt which had clearly been excavated from an adjacent pit. There, something or perhaps several somethings moved beneath the soil.
Alastair set the Browning down, knelt in front of the pit, and began brushing lose dirt away from the surface while Calum stood over him holding the torch. Calum couldn’t help but admire his brother’s nerve; he doubted he would have the guts to dig in a hole without knowing what manner of creatures were down there.
Alastair swept a final layer of dirt aside, revealing fingers. Human fingers. Slender and pale, they were moving, clawing at the earth, part of a hand apparently trying to dig its owner free.
Alastair scrambled to his feet.
“Holy fuckin’ shit. It is a brollachan. Has to be. Jesus, fuck.” He grabbed Calum and spun him around to retrieve a handful of shells from the rucksack. Alastair’s hand shook as he loaded the shotgun, at one point dropping a shell which almost ended up in the pit. He leveled the fully loaded shotgun at the pit, looking down at the hand clawing at the dirt. Another hand appeared near the first, peaking through the surface, moving in the same way. The brothers stood watching the coordinated motion of the hands.
“It’s like it is swimming,” Calum remarked.
“Aye. Swimming in dirt.”
“Is that how they all come out?”
“Dad never said. I think this is the first time anyone caught a brollachan before it hatched.”
“Are you going to shoot?”
Alastair lowered the gun. “No point.” He explained to Calum that when a rabbit went to ground there was no getting it. Shotgun pellets would shred the rabbit, but wouldn’t go far in dirt. The brollachan may as well be wearing a suit of armor while it was stuck in the ground.
“Should we dig it out?” Calum asked.
“No, dummy. It will bite us.”
“Right.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We wait until it digs itself out. Then we shoot it.” Alastair spoke with an air of certainty Calum had never observed in his brother before. For once he didn’t seem to be winging it.
The boys retreated to vantage point a little further up the hill where they watched the hands swimming in the filth and the mud, leaving a slow-motion wake of dirt. Gradually forearms were revealed. Pale skinned and caked in dirt, the arms writhed as they shoveled the peaty earth at a greater rate that the hands could alone. Later, the top of a head was exposed, topped with a tangled mass of matted hair.
The boys watched intently, fascinated by the progress of the creature being birthed by the mountain in front of them.
“Have you ever seen one. You know. Close up?” Calum asked.
Alastair admitted he had not. Of the three hunts he had been on, he had only ever seen a brollachan wrapped in tarpaulin, bundled and tied in the back of a truck. Dad was always been quite vague as to the appearance of the brollachan, but he had once asked his Uncle Joey who described his kill—a particularly vicious specimen—as having frog eyes, a mouthful of fangs and an forked tongue like an adder. Alastair related the story to Calum. “That’s why you have to get them early,” he explained, “changelings could become anyone and you would never know they were a brollachan. But when they hatch they are like monsters.”
Calum had heard this explanation before. It was family lore. His family, his uncles, and the neighbors on Ranoch. Homesteaders, game-keepers, and others living on the mountain who could trace their family back to the local area for generations. They defended the good Christian people against the brollachans—creatures that devoured children and would take on the appearance of the villagers to spread wickedness should they escape the mountain. He had read similar tales in the second-hand novels he liked to read in his bedroom. Different monsters, different good-guys, but not all that different to the tale of the Christians versus the brollachans he had grown up with. So similar, that he had started to doubt brollachans were real at all.
The Sealg was real enough—he knew that much. His uncles came round when the moon was full. They ate, they drank, they prayed, then they piled into trucks with their shotguns in high spirits and left. On hunt nights Calum would hear distant gunfire muffled and echoed in the night air. Dad would return in the small hours with a story of his or Uncle Joey’s bravery defending the mountain against the changelings. Calum had never seen any evidence of brollachan and concluded they were hunting ptarmigan which would appear in the freezer the next day. He never raised his suspicions with Alastair and at that moment was glad he did not. A brollachan hatching in front of his eyes was all the proof he needed.
In the pit, the brollachan had squirmed and excavated enough dirt to expose a head, caked in mud and tangled hair, hiding its features from Calum’s probing torchlight. Alastair moved to the edge of the pit, kneeling as close as he dare. Dangerously close to falling in it seemed to Calum.
“Careful,” warned Calum.
“Get the beer,” Alastair said, ignoring Calum’s concern.
Calum placed the torch on the ground so that it still illuminated the pit and bounded downhill to retrieve the beer. He didn’t quite understand Alastair’s need for the drink, or is father’s for that matter, but he had learned not to dally when his father requested a beer and extended the same privilege to his brother. Back at the pit, he handed the half can of lager to his brother. Alastair didn’t drink from the can. He poured the lager over the creatures face, washing away some of the grime. Then, in what appeared to Calum an act of immense bravery, Alastair began wiping at the remaining dirt and moving strands of hair away from its face. The face revealed from the beer cleansing was not monstrous. Its feature were soft, delicate, unmistakably feminine.
“It’s a girl,” Calum said. The creature raised an arm which was entirely free at that point. For a moment, Calum feared it would grab his brother by the throat and throttle him, but its hand merely rose to shade its eyes from the torch Calum had trained on its face.
“It’s not a girl. It’s a brollachan.”
“But why does it look like a girl,” Calum protested, “where’s the frog eyes and fangs?”
“It’s a brollachan.” Alastair’s tone was somber and resolute, telling Calum not to press his doubts any further. Alastair went back for the Browning. After checking a round was chambered he returned to the pit where he stood over the creature, barrels aimed squarely at the creature’s head. “You’re only a man on Ranoch after you bag your first brollachan,” Alastair said, sounding for all the world like their father. Alastair said again, “You’re only a man on Ranoch after you bag your first brollachan.” Calum heard him perfectly the first time around.
Calum wasn’t at all certain the creature was a brollachan. If it didn’t have frog eyes and fangs how could they be sure? But then he knew that a real person would have suffocated under all the dirt. If it wasn’t a person, what else could it be but a brollachan? The frustrating circular reasoning froze him to the spot, unable to act, desperate for new information that might allow him to break out of the cycle.
Through gritted teeth Alastair said, “You are only a man. On Ranoch. After you bag your first… brollachan.” The face in the pit looked up at Alastair as he spoke. The creature’s expression was without malice or any emotion that Calum could discern. It had stopped digging itself out of the earth and was gazing up at Alastair as though waiting for something. Alastair met its gaze down the barrel of the Browning.
Calum looked on, unable to see the face in the pit as anything other than a young woman. “Alastair. No. Don’t do it,” he pleaded.
After what felt like an eternity to Calum, his brother sighed, breaking eye contact with the face in the pit and lowering the gun. “Fuck you, Dad,” he said. Alastair placed the gun on the ground before climbing into the pit where he began excavating dirt around the creature’s limbs with his hands. He worked with the zeal of a life guard pulling an incapacitated swimmer from of the ocean. Calum joined his brother ripping tangled roots and hurling clods of dirt out of the pit. Soon the torso was exposed and the girl-creature was revealed to be more girl that creature. With the weight of dirt removed from her upper body, the girl was more able to contribute to digging and was soon wriggling free while the boys worked around her. Once she pulled her legs free, the girl climbed out of the pit after the boys, partially aided by Alastair who extended a hand and pulled her over the threshold of the pit.
Out of the pit, there was nothing to suggested she was anything other than a flesh and blood girl, naked, filthy, and shivering in the cold night air. Calum ran to get the blanket from the rucksack which he draped over the girl’s shoulders for warmth and to cover her nakedness.
“Let’s get her to the Rover,” said Alastair.
Calum agreed. He didn’t have any other suggestion to offer. The night had become a rescue mission, and getting the girl to safety suited him much better than a hunt.
With Calum back on torch duty, the boys made their way back down the mountainside. Alastair with his arm around the girl holding blanket in place, guided her over the rough train. With the Rover in view, Alastair handed Calum the keys and suggested he go get the engine started and turn on the heating.
Calum bounded down the mountain in the direction of the Rover which he found where he expected it to be. Climbing in the driver side, he turned the ignition and switched on the heater. Soon warmth radiated from somewhere behind the dash. When Alastair arrived with the girl, he opened the passenger side door and guided her in, before joining her on the oversized passenger seat of the Series III.
“Drive safe little brother. Catriona has had a rough night,” Alastair said.
“Catriona?”
“That’s her name. She’s from Ireland.”
Catriona turned to Calum and spoke, with a gentle Irish accent. “That’s right. I grew up in Belfast.”
Calum was taken aback by the strange coincidence she had the same name as Alastair’s girl-enemy at school, but concluded that was the least odd thing about her presence that night and said nothing about it.
Calum adjusted the driver seat for his smaller frame and turned the Rover around, choosing to focus on the driving rather than dwell on the strange events of that night. Soon enough he located the track they had lost earlier.
As Calum drove, peering over the steering wheel, his brother talked with Catriona about many things: his love of western movies, his aptitude for sports and distaste for mathematics, but never how she had come to be buried in the peat. It seemed a strange omission to Calum who considered asking her himself, but the pair were engaged such an intense conversation as to never allow Calum the opportunity. By the time the farmhouse was in sight, Alastair and Catriona were laughing and giggling like firm friends.
At the farmhouse the gate was open and the house lights were all on. Calum guided the Rover up the driveway over the tire-marks they had made earlier. They parked a short distance from the front-door.
Calum jumped out while Alastair helped Catriona down from the Rover and lead her to the door, where their parent’s stood like sentinels guiding the entryway.
“This is Catriona,” Alastair said.
To Calum’s surprise his parents welcomed them in without another word from him or his brother. It was like he wasn’t there—his father, smiling broadly, put an arm around Alastair while Catriona was ushered away by their mother.