Old House of Fear

by Russell Kirk

  “No,” said MacLean, shortly, “sheep. Judge not that ye be not judged. My cousin Colin knows all the shore of all the lonely islands, and on some of the islands there are sheep, and deer. Whatever Colin is or is not, there is no better pilot in all the Outer Isles.”

  Although Colin’s boat was in the harbor, the man himself was not in sight when the schoolmaster and Logan got down to the pier. “He will be drinking somewhere,” the school master said. “But here are some people to interest you: people from Daldour.”

  Seated on the clammy pier, eating bread and butter in the drizzle, were three men in rough island dress and rubber boots – or, rather, two men and a bright-eyed boy. All three had about them a twilight look. Their bodies were lean, their cheeks were hollow, their teeth protruded slightly; a Lowlander might have said that they were not canny.

  They seemed so much alike that, but for differences in age, they might have been triplets. “MacAskivals,” the schoolmaster murmured. “A dying breed. In Daldour, now, most are old bachelors and old maids; they have seen too much of one another, and will not marry. The last of an old song. That big lobster boat by the pier is theirs; the MacAskivals have but a naked beach at Daldour. I will speak the Gaelic to them, for they will speak no English, although this boy knows the English well enough. Among themselves, Mr. Logan, they speak a dialect as strange to me as the Gaelic is to you.”

  Except for the boy’s bright glance, the three MacAskivals had given no sign of recognition as the schoolmaster and Logan approached. Now, as Mr. MacLean spoke to the three in Gaelic, there came very faint shy smiles to all three narrow faces; the two men nodded, and the boy replied in the slow flowing Gaelic. Presently, in a cautious tone, the schoolmaster seemed to say something significant. The boy turned to the elder of the two men, who spoke curtly, and the boy translated for him to the schoolmaster. As he finished speaking, over the boy’s eyes came a kind of glaze, and the two men turned again to munching bread and butter, as if they had forgotten the existence of everyone else.

  “I asked them,” the schoolmaster told Logan, “whether they would take you with them to Daldour, and then to Carnglass. They are in Loch Boisdale for this day only, to buy what few things they do buy, from month to month. They said they would not take you to Carnglass; it is not a good place for a man to go.”

  “Not for fifty pounds?” Logan asked.

  “For no price, I believe. But if money speaks, my cousin Colin is the man for you. And here he comes.” A squat man was sauntering along the pier. “Colin is not overly civil, and he is fond of the drink; but he knows the waters and the coasts.” They turned away from the three silent MacAskivals and walked to meet the fisherman-poacher.

  What is uncommon among the people of the Isles, Colin MacLean seemed surly. He did not acknowledge the schoolmaster’s introduction of Logan. “Colin,” said the schoolmaster, “Mr. Logan asks you to set him ashore in Carnglass. I will leave you to make your bargain.” Logan shook his hand, and the schoolmaster strode up the hill.

  Colin MacLean gave Logan a long hard look from under the brim of his sou’wester. “Carnglass, is it?” The only polish about Colin was his careful English speech, no doubt learned from the British Broadcasting Company, and uttered with a musical Gaelic intonation. Colin MacLean spat upon the pier. “Carnglass: and so Lagg and his keepers would shoot holes in my boat. You may go to hell, Mr. Logan.”

  Logan drew from his billfold ten big colorful notes of the Royal Bank of Scotland: five-pound notes. “This is yours, Mr. MacLean,” he said, “if you’ll set me ashore anywhere in Carnglass. It needn’t be Askival harbor. Is there no other spot where a boat might put in?”

  Colin stared at the notes. “There is a place, Dalcruach, in the east, where at high tide a boat – a small boat – can pass over the reefs, if the sea is calm. All the rest is cliff. But I would not risk my drifter among the rocks. You would need to row over the reefs alone. Here: I have an old dinghy. For twenty pounds more, I would sell it to you. I would bring you as close to Dalcruach as I could, and then you would take the dinghy and fend for yourself, Mr. Logan. Are you a seaman?”

  “I’ve rowed before,” Logan said. “Here’s another twenty pounds for the dinghy.”

  “The swell about Carnglass is a fearful thing,” Colin went on, shaking his heavy head in doubt, “and the reefs are like knives. Now would you sign a paper to say that Colin MacLean would be in no way responsible for the possible drowning of Mr. Hugh Logan?”

  “I would,” Logan answered. “Take me aboard your drifter, and I’ll write it now.”

  Colin tucked the five-pound notes into his pocket. “Midnight, Mr. Logan: come aboard at midnight, and we will make for Carnglass. It is not good to be seen landing in Carnglass; there might be a keeper with a rifle, even at Dalcruach. I will land you at Dalcruach early in the morning, with the tide in flood, the weather permitting. And then I wash my hands of it.”

  That afternoon, Logan borrowed from the hotelkeeper an old knapsack, into which he put some socks and underclothing, a shirt, sandwiches and chocolate, and a thermos of coffee. He would leave his suitcase at the hotel. He put on heavy waterproof boots and an old cap, and wore his oilskin and carried his stick. And he was ready long before midnight.

  Colin MacLean, with two less dour South Uist men who made up his crew, received him solemnly aboard the drifter. They puffed out of Loch Boisdale into the sea, with only two lights showing; and after that, for hours, Logan could perceive nothing but the obscurity of the night sky, clouds shutting out moon and stars. Before dawn, they stopped the engine, and Logan thought he could make out, vaguely, an enormous land-mass to the south. The drifter rolled heavily in a menacing swell; and there came the noise of that swell breaking upon rocks. “I will give you back your money for this dinghy,” said Colin, with a sour grin, “if you have changed your mind.”

  “Let me into the dinghy,” Logan told him, “and I’ll cast off.”

  “The more fool you,” Colin growled. They picked their way over the uneasy little deck to the stern, where the dinghy was in tow. MacLean let down a rope ladder into the little boat; he held an electric torch to light Logan’s descent. “Here,” said Colin, in a last-minute access of charity, “I will make you a present of the torch, Mr. Logan. And here is something else for you.” Colin took a bottle of whiskey from a jacket-pocket and thrust it into Logan’s canvas pack. “You will be wetted in beaching the boat, and the sea is cold. Row straight for the cliff ahead. The tide will carry you over the reef, but you must watch sharp for the needle-rocks. At Dalcruach clachan there is a keeper’s cottage, and perhaps you can dry yourself there.” Under his breath, Colin muttered something like “God help you.”

  Then Logan cast off and took the dinghy’s oars. The drifter receded into the night.

  For a moment, breaking through the pall of cloud, the moon showed him the cliff-head above Dalcruach. What with oars, tide, and a slight breeze, Logan swept in toward Carnglass, the Heap of Gray Stones.

  Chapter 4

  AT LOGAN’S BACK, as he rode the crest of that grim darkling swell, the forlorn hope of sunrise was fighting upward in the sky. By that pallid light, diffused through a gray mist, he saw that he was in perilous waters. Had the breeze been higher, he could have had no hope for making the shore, amateur oarsman that he was. Sweeping round the reefs toward the sheer cliffs just visible in the west, a current tugged in ugly mood at the oars; and he pulled hard against this current, for it would have hurried him against that fearsome wall. Still coming in toward shore, the tide helped him against the current. And now he was among rocks.

  From the white heave of the water, he perceived that he was passing over skerries which would be dry at low tide. What was worse to the eye, here and there stuck up sharp rocks like swords menacing the sky, the “needles” of which Colin had spoken. Had it not been dawn, surely he would have run straight upon one. All about them – they lay too close, and suddenly he was passing some by – were wicked immense swirls and ed
dies, enough to bring a man’s heart into his mouth. And Logan’s heart did come into his mouth.

  Once only, in all his life before, had he been so frightened; and that had been in a place very different, though equally eerie – a broken tomb in Okinawa, where he had crouched with two other cut-off soldiers while the Japanese scouts shuffled and whispered in the dark all about. This fearsome coast was worse than the tomb had been, for here he was utterly alone, in a hostile element. The mind-picture of the Okinawan tomb, hurrying through his brain in this horrid wet moment, vanished when the dinghy swung toward one of the smaller needles as if drawn by a magnet. Logan thrust the tip of an oar hard against the rock, and the boat slipped past. A wild scraping sound and a trembling assailed him then: the dinghy hesitated, in the flood of the tide, right upon a reef barely submerged. Yet her bottom held; and next she was off that rasping bed and hurtling on toward the dim line of the beach.

  Logan was nearly powerless. What a fool he had been! This one crowded hour of glorious life he would have exchanged, gladly, for a lifetime of servitude in the law-office. Yet there seemed to be sand dead ahead; and if he could pull hard enough against the weakened current, he might yet get ashore.

  In the growing light, the island of Carnglass loomed like one tremendous barrier of naked and sheer precipice, except for a kind of fissure or den which was his goal, vague beyond the whitecaps. The needles were gone now; the swell was full and heavy, as if the skerries were past; and he could make out the waves flinging themselves upon a dark beach, fighting high toward some grass and stunted trees, and then retreating to the terror of the abyss. Two minutes more, and the dinghy was tossed by those waves right upon the sand.

  Leaping out, Logan tugged with all his remaining strength at a line attached to the bow, to draw the boat as high upon the shore as he might, the water swirling about his waist. Back came the surf, flinging the dinghy higher yet, and blinding and drenching Logan, almost taking his feet from under him. Yet, persisting, he dragged the little boat over the sand with a power he had not known was in him; and when he thought she might be safe, he reached over the gunwale, grasped the heavy chunk of rusted iron that was her anchor, and flung it into the oozing sand. More he could not do; if the waves swept her out again, that was beyond his power to remedy. He staggered from the boat toward the tide-line and the grass beyond. When the sand grew firm under his feet, he fell nerveless to the beach, a spent man. And there he lay perhaps five or ten minutes, like a stranded jellyfish.

  It was done. The thing was done. He was ashore in Carnglass, and a whole man, though shivering and shaking with the reaction from his fright among the needles. Perhaps the game, after all, might be worth the candle.

  As some strength returned to him, his first thought was for the dinghy, in which his knapsack lay. Her anchor having held, the little boat rested askew upon the sand; he must have come in at the very flood of the tide, for already the combers broke further out, and the dinghy’s bows were altogether out of the water. Reeling to the boat’s side, Logan hauled out the knapsack and then plodded up the beach to the place where the heather and the gorse began to grow. He was in a kind of cove or pocket between thousand-foot cliffs, a triangle of land sloping steeply upward toward a third range of cliff at the back; and upon the face of that rearward cliff, not so beetling as its sea-neighbors, he thought he could make out the faint line of an ancient path.

  Something more welcome, however, now huddled close before him: a line of low rubble walls, the work of man. These were primitive cottages, no doubt the clachan of Dalcruach. They were larochs, roofless ruins, deserted these many years.

  All but one. Toward the end of the row of forlorn dwellings, a single thatched roof remained, kept secure against the Hebridean gales by a wide-meshed net spread over the rough thatch and anchored by big stones lashed to the net-ends. The hut had no chimney, but only a hole in the middle of the thatch; it had no windows, and a single door; this must be the “black house” of the Isles, one of those Viking-age cottages still inhabited, squat, thick-walled, snug, out of the childhood of the race. People dwelt in them still, Logan had been told, here and there in Uist and Barra. And this one might be the cottage of the keeper or gillie that Colin MacLean had mentioned. Incautious in his weariness, Logan limped to the heavy door and pounded. No one answered: the hut seemed to be as empty as its roofless neighbors. And then Logan observed that the door had been secured by a padlock and hasp, but the hasp had been tipped away from the doorframe, the screws hanging impotent in their holes. Lifting the latch, Logan entered.

  Yes, it was a black house. Lacking proper fireplace or chimney, the peat smoke had eddied round the single room for centuries, perhaps, turning stone walls and beams and thatch to ebony. But it was dry, and it was furnished. There were a table and shelves, and a chair or two, and a heap of dry peats by the rough hearth below the gap in the thatch. And in a corner stood that rare object, the old-fashioned cotter’s closet-bed, built of boards up to the roof to keep off the draughts, with only a wide hole for the occupant to crawl in upon his mattress, and a curtain over that aperture. Logan pulled back the curtain. There was no one inside, but there were decent blankets upon the bed. Feeling like Goldilocks in the house of the Three Bears, Logan flung down his pack.

  Some dry bits of driftwood lay by the peats. Logan tested the cigarlighter he had kept in an inner pocket of his jacket, to see if it would work; it still would. Making a little heap of kindling upon the hearth, he banked peats about it, and lit a fire; in three or four minutes, some of the brown and springy squares of peat had begun to smoulder, and Logan piled more peat upon them to keep the fire going while he slept. Only then did he throw off his drenched clothes, laying them upon a chair near the fire, and drag himself naked into the venerable bed, rolling deep into its blankets. Swiftly Logan sank into unconsciousness.

  The sea-water having affected his watch, Logan could not tell what time it was, precisely, when at length he woke; but surely it was well into the afternoon. Some vigor had returned to his body. The slow-burning peats still glowed upon the hearth; the house was warm, and thick with the sweet smoke; daylight – the sun must be free of the clouds for a time – came through the smoke-gap in the thatch. There was no sound but the unending wash of the sea upon the beach, deadened here by the thickness of the walls of rubble. His clothes, still very damp but wearable, lay faintly steaming on the chair by the fire. This was the loneliest spot Logan ever had known.

  Having dressed, Logan turned out the contents of his knapsack, which had not suffered badly from the sea. A pair of binoculars he had bought before leaving America was intact, and he had his shaving-things, and the ordnancemap and old Balmullo’s pamphlet, and what mattered most to him, the thermos of coffee, Colin’s bottle of whiskey, and the big parcel of sandwiches from the hotel. Of those sandwiches, he promptly ate all but a reserve of two. Pouring the coffee into a pan he found upon the shelves, he set it to warm by the peats. Life was liveable again. And opening the door with the broken hasp, Logan went out into the Carnglass afternoon.

  The ghostly clachan of Dalcruach lay silent in a cul-desac formed by the sea, the two sea-cliffs, and the inland cliff. Just now the sun was peeping through the gray blanket above. Everywhere water was running: little torrents foamed from the lip of the cliffs, and springs sent tiny streams down to the rocky bay, through gorse and heather and bracken. Between cliffs and tide, this bit of lowland must have been cultivated intensively for centuries, but now a towering forest of green bracken, high as Logan’s head, came right down to the backs of the ruined cottages. Except for some gulls, the only animate thing which Logan could see was a shape high up the face of the landward cliff: a goat, or perhaps a deer. Primroses already flowered upon the cliff-face. Upon these scanty and isolated acres, a little village of MacAskivals had subsisted from time out of mind. But they were gone, and Logan stood in this wet green desolation as if he were the last man on earth.

  He went down to the dinghy. The receding tide had l
eft her high enough, but soon the sea would return; so he took off shoes and stockings and tried to drag her to a more sheltered place by a shelf of rock that ran up from the skerries into the silver sands of the beach. But though he bailed her out, she was too heavy for him; only the tide could budge her. Her oars he carried back to the black house. And now he would make his way across the island to the Old House, before evening came. The sun had withdrawn again, but surely he could find his way up the cliff, despite the mists, and so across brae and valley and hill to the Old House and Lady MacAskival. Already he had been nearly six days on the way.

  Sitting on a boulder by the door of the black house, he examined the ordnance-survey map of Carnglass, Daldour, and the waters round about. Carnglass really was a peculiar island. A ring of tremendous cliffs seemed to guard her from the sea at all points, except here at Dalcruach and at Askival harbor, a larger opening at the opposite extremity of Carnglass, away to the southwest. To judge by the contour-lines, these sea-cliffs also had an inner face, standing some five hundred feet high above a kind of central valley or moor. Halfway between Dalcruach and the Old House by Askival harbor, this valley was interrupted by a tall, sharp hill, ridges from which extended across the valley to the cliffs on either side of the island, a sort of watershed.

  As the gull flies, it could not be more than three miles from Dalcruach to the Old House. But there was the hard climb of the landward cliff behind Dalcruach; then the valley or moor would be boggy; and the ridge in the middle of the island must be surmounted; and between that ridge and the Old House were some markings which Logan took to indicate a bad bog. The trip would require some hours, and he had best set off. The dotted line of a minor path, on the map, suggested that some track ran across the island, but surely nothing like a road. Then Logan took up his thorn stick and began the ascent of the landward cliff.