Short Skates: Highlands
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VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | SSV | XIII | SSVI | XIV | SSVII | XV | SSVIII | XVI | XVII
This instalment contains depictions of trauma.
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He’s out there again, in the wet, chill early spring of the Cairngorms. Always cold up there, even in summer.
Running down the hillside, he’s struck with a sense of déjà vu – this feels like a memory that hasn’t happened yet. For a moment, he feels himself grow taller, older; it’s as though he’s looking in a mirror and he sees the man he is yet to be. Before he can get a clear look, though, the vision fades. He is once again little Callan, twelve years old, on an adventure.
“Hurry up, Cal!” says a voice in the distance. It’s the voice of a boy on his way to becoming a man, his voice halfway between the yip of a wean and the low baritone he’s growing into. Just like his father, their father, with his gruff, stern voice.
It’s the voice of his brother, Euan.
“Comin’!” Callan replies, rushing down the hillside.
Euan is holding an Airfix model, a Halifax bomber he assembled himself over a weekend after Christmas. It’s his proudest possession, and he guards it with his life. He holds it up to the sky, streaking it across the light white clouds.
“Can a’ haud it?” Callan says. “Please, Euan.”
“Naw!” Euan says. “Ye’d only go an’ break it, ye clumsy devil.”
“A’ wouldnae.”
“Ye would.”
Callan sulks.
“Mam an’ Da got ye the Lancaster fer Christmas,” Euan says, snidely. “And ye’ve no’ even began tae put it together.”
“I’m feart o’ doin’ it wrang,” Callan says.
“Ye cannae go through life feart, Callan,” Euan says. He holds the model plane up to the sky once more. “Tha’s why a’ wannae be a pilot wi’ the RAF. Give them Germans a good grallochin’.”
“The Germans ent fighting wi’ us anymair, ye eejit,” Callan snaps. He folds his arms in triumph, rare is the occasion he gets to prove his older brother wrong. “Da says so. It’s the Russians noo. Ye watch too many o’ them films.”
“Germans, Russians. They’ve all got planes, ent they?”
The both of them look out over the hillside, the rolling, snow-covered mountain-tops and the clouds flowing around them.
“It’d be braw,” Euan says, dreamily, as he stares up at the sky. “Goin’ so fast, flyin’ like a bird. Cuttin’ through the air. Aye, it’s the pilot’s life for me.”
Euan is the older of the pair at fifteen, but he’s always been more of a dreamer. People have always said Callan was precociously down-to-earth for his age. Always concerned with fine details over abstractions.
“Whit dae ye wanty be?” Euan asks, suddenly. “When yer aw grown-up, a’ mean?”
Callan frowns, his bright blue, watery eyes turned down and his shoulder-length, sandy blond hair blowing in the Highland wind.
“A’ dinna ken,” he says. “A’d like tae work on the railways, maybe. Or as a ‘lectrician. Da says there’s lots o’ money in bein’ an electrician.”
“Electrician?” Euan scoffs. “Callan, yer twelve year aud. The best future ye can see fer yerself is workin’ as an electrician?”
“Da says it’s good tae learn a trade.”
“Christ. Ye ought tae have loftier ambitions than tha’.”
“I don’t wanty be a pilot,” Callan says. “‘Sides, what if ye dinna get in?”
“I’ll get in, awright,” Euan says, haughtily.
“Yoor funeral,” Callan retorts.
Euan scowls at his brother, shaking his head.
“I hope ye do some’n canny wi’ yoor life,” he says.
“Right back at ye,” Callan replies.
Euan slaps both his knees. It’s one of the many mannerisms of his father’s he’s begun imitating in his journey to being a man himself.
“Right then,” he says. “Better be headin’ back. Mam an’ Da will be wantin’ us fer supper.”
Euan walks ahead of his brother, heading down the side of the hill.
And that’s when Callan feels it.
It’s that feeling of déjà vu again, but it’s worse this time. There’s a foreboding to proceedings. He feels like all this has happened before, but he can’t remember what happens next.
Instinctively, he runs after his brother. But his legs feel like they’re made of lead, and he can’t close the distance.
It’s happening again, oh, God. It’s happening again.
There’s a man on the hillside, now. He wasn’t there before. Or was he? Callan can’t remember.
“Awright, pal?” Euan calls out.
The man is very tall, with eyes of pure sapphire, dressed in a black coat lined with red. His sandy blond hair is down to his lower back, and he wears riding-boots. Beside him is a large Friesan horse, with a dark mane and furry hooves.
“Hello, there,” the man says. His accent is unmistakably Highland Scottish, aristocratic and musical, almost Scandinavian.
“We’re no’ trespassin’,” Euan says. “This is public land.”
The tall man laughs.
“I don’t own any land,” he says. “I’m a hunter.”
“Euan…” Callan whispers.
“Wrang time o’ year fer tha’, pal,” Euan says. “Nae rabbits or hares oot here ‘til later in the spring.”
“I’m not on the hunt for rabbits,” the tall man says.
And Callan knows what’s coming next. And he can’t stop it. Because it has happened before, and it’s happening now, but he’s watching it happen all over again, in another century, another time, another place—
There’s three of them now, they come in sheafs of bright, golden light, and they’re all different shapes, indistinct, and their eyes flash green, blue and hazel.
Their mouths are all set with bright red, shining, crystal teeth.
And Euan realises far too late – he always realises far too late – and he’s turning to Callan.
“Run, Cal!” he screams, his voice the whistling shriek of an adolescent boy. “Run!”
And they’re on him.
*
They found him all covered in blood, some distance away, about two days later. He was cold, shivering, on the verge of death from dehydration and hypothermia.
He saw what happened to his brother, every detail of it. But he’s never told anyone exactly what he saw. He knows exactly what state the constabulary found Euan in. But what his mind keeps returning to is Euan’s smashed Halifax bomber, scattered bits of plastic on the hillside. He sees that image now every time he closes his eyes.
The strings tried to warn him. They exist outside time and space, connecting moments through the root system. And every night, he seems to travel back and see it happen again, clear as day, an echo in psychic space. His brother never stops telling him to run, every night.
He’s been running, all right. Running and running, since that day in 1964. But the difference is, he’s not running away.
He didn’t find one of them until 1976. He was 23, then. Found her weak-spot, the seed of her wickedness, then smashed her to pieces with a cast-iron pan. She screamed as she died, but he felt nothing for her. Not pity, not hatred. Just cold, methodical, efficient indifference. He collected the red crystals from off the bed in the hotel room, took them to a friend of his in London.
He made her into a sword. A sword that would make vampires fear the name Callan Crucefix.
He’s so old, now. He’s lost his life to this. Spent so many years tracking these bloodsucking, man-eating parasites. Making them feel every inch of the agony they make their victims feel. He should have been an electrician, a railwayman, a tradesman. Instead, he’s on a never-ending mission of revenge.
It doesn’t bother him. When it does, he just reminds himself, like a personal mantra: Euan Crucefix never got to be a pilot. He never got to fly like a bird over the Highlands. Never got to marry, or have kids. He died, murdered by creatures that didn’t care how scared he was. Because they wanted his flesh and blood to prolong their lives.
So, Callan Crucefix doesn’t get any of those things either. He doesn’t get a quiet life. He lives in a world where God is either asleep at the wheel, or indifferent to the cries of babes.
He’s done something canny with his life.
He hasn’t found Euan’s killer, yet. The tall, fair-haired man in the black coat, with his black horse. But he’s going to. It’s all coming to an end soon.
Beware an old man in a line of work where men rarely grow old.
Armageddon’s a-comin’.
Another time, another place…
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ARC FOUR: BLOOD MOON
I | II | III | SSI | IV | V | SSII | SSIII | VI | VII | SSIV
VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | SSV | XIII | SSVI | XIV | SSVII | XV | SSVIII | XVI | XVII