Root

by A. Sparrow

  George wasn’t kidding. I quickly made the acquaintance of a middle-aged auto mechanic named Craig who was heading north after his pint and could take me part of the way. The drinking age was eighteen, believe it or not, but I made do with a Pepsi.

  So things were going well. We were bounding along in his panel truck when, less than an hour later, we stopped for petrol in a place called Perth.

  “There’s a pub with beds around the corner,” said Craig. “If you want to give it a shot.”

  What he said confused me. Was he kicking me out of his truck? Had I offended him somehow?”

  “But I thought you were going further north?”

  “Aye, but the road forks here. I’m leavin’ the A9 and goin’ on to Braemar.”

  “Is Braemar any closer to Inverness than Perth?”

  “Well, technically yes, but then you’ve got the Cairn Gorms in between.”

  His brogue was a little thicker than George’s so I had no idea what he had just said. What the heck was a ‘Cairn Gorm’?

  “Can I go on with you … to Braemar?”

  “Sure, but you can’t easily get to—“

  “Please? I really don’t want to spend the night here. I want to keep on moving.”

  Craig sighed. “Suit yourself.”

  ***

  It was half past eleven when we reached Braemar. Craig dropped me off at an inn with a restaurant that was still open for business.

  “Now I know it’s tourist season, but you might get lucky, seeing that it’s midweek. Jilly might have a room vacant.”

  Jilly had no rooms, but she did make me a mug of hot cocoa. She suggested I try a bed and breakfast down the road and offered to call ahead, but I was still in no mood to settle in for the night. I had to keep moving. I had slept enough on that damned train. I was too close to Inverness to stop now.

  So I headed down the road and prayed that some late-returning tourists might be heading to Inverness. Whether they would be crazy to stop at this hour and pick up a hitcher as bedraggled as me was another question, but I was beyond all rationality by that point.

  I moseyed around the town a bit, which seemed to cater mostly to tourists and hikers. The information center had a bin with free maps of the Highlands. I unfolded one against a mischievous breeze and saw at a glance what Craig was trying to warn me about.

  Braemar looked a good distance further north than Perth and a good deal closer to Inverness, but it had taken me off the main road and plopped a good sized mountain range—the Cairn Gorms—in my way.

  There was a road just past Braemar, a long and winding way called the A939—‘The Old Military Road’—that cut across the range. But there was another route, a foot path, that slashed directly towards Inverness, hitting the A9 at a town called Aviemore.

  This alternative route was called the Lairig Ghru, which was an old cattle droving route, according to a blurb on the tourist map. I looked around for a scale but couldn’t find one.

  Aviemore didn’t look so far on the map and the mountains in the pictures didn’t look so tall. I figured, if a cow could hike it, why couldn’t I? So I found the trailhead at the edge of a parking lot. The night was clear, the stars sharp and the path was broad and obvious, lit by a hefty slice of moon. I felt strong and alert. I saw no reason why I couldn’t walk all night.

  A vision of Karla’s doorstep drew me up that path, into the darkness and the Cairn Gorms.

  Chapter 37: Hypothermia

  All those stars blew me away. I never imagined you could see so many at one time with the naked eye. Coastal Florida had this ever-present fuzzy orange glow that reached up every horizon from the thousands of street lights and strip malls and obliterated almost everything celestial except for the moon and Venus.

  But here, there was even a swath of smudged light that could only be the Milky Way. A name that had been abstract and cartoonish suddenly made sense. It really was milky-looking and it looked like a path through the sky. Strange, how the ancients were probably more in touch with the universe than most of us in this so-called ‘space age.’

  I even thought at one point that I saw a meteor, but it seemed too bright to be real and was gone too quickly to etch an impression on my senses.

  I plunged headlong up a wide, graveled lane. The moonlight made the pale stone and dirt glow, contrasting nicely with the darker vegetation flanking it, almost as if my way forward was lit by faerie footlights.

  Even when the occasional patch of forest snuffed the glow, the path was so straight and the way so obvious, I could have almost walked it with my eyes closed.

  I could easily imagine a herd of cattle being led this way. The grade was easy, the footing firm and well-drained. I had hiked a lot worse paths.

  I had probably gone a couple miles before it began to narrow. But I maintained a brisk and steady pace, even as the path began to steepen.

  I could hear a decent-sized creek gurgling in a gully to my left. The sound soothed me. Since I was a kid, I had always been drawn to water. I still loved messing around in streams. I wish I could have seen it in daylight. From the sheer sound of them, those cascades had to be gorgeous.

  Every twenty minutes I chewed up a mile. The path diverged from the stream for a time, but plunged into a little valley after topping a rise and then veered right, following the flank of another stream.

  My private light show was slowly curtailed by the hills rearing up before me and a slant of blackness creeping in slowly like a stage curtain from the west.

  In the darker areas under tree I blundered off the trail a couple of times, but the shrubs acted like bumpers in guiding back to the main path. If it stayed like this the rest of the way, I had it made. I wondered if the lights of Inverness might be visible from the top of the pass. That possibility excited me and pulled me onward.

  Karla. Not the prettiest name.

  I couldn’t even remember exactly what she looked like anymore. It had been so long and our contacts had been so few and brief. But as I climbed that trail, flashes of remembrance came to me through the darkness.

  Asymmetric bangs shielding intense eyes, one scarred but that one flaw in their beauty rendering them all the more spectacular. The pixie-like and otherworldly proportions of her cheeks and chin.

  Could it be that face never existed on this side of life? Might she sport a different visage in Inverness? People did weave flesh in Root, did they not? Bern and Lille had both altered their looks and Luther/Arthur’s face was in a perpetual state of flux. But if Karla had modified her face, why would she have retained those scars?

  I paused to unzip my pack, grateful now for the biscuits and plums that George’s wife Iona had made me take along, as well as a bottle of sweet well water filled from their tap.

  It was dead silent out here except for the wind. For the first time, perhaps in my life, I heard not a single internal combustion engine.

  I looked behind me at the lights of Braemar, surprised by how far I had come already, how high I had climbed. My progress encouraged me, but I also couldn’t help wondering if it would have been smarter to take George’s advice and spend the night in town, even if it had to be in another nest of cardboard. It was terribly lonely up here.

  The wind came in squalls that whipped across stands of stunted firs, whipping the bejeezus out of them. I zipped up my hoodie all the way. Despite my exertions, that air was nippy.

  That wedge of cloud coming out of the west had consumed a good quarter of the sky. It and the moon were on a collision course. I stepped up my pace. It would suck to have the moonlight disappear. The only light source I carried with me was my Timex Indiglo watch and that wasn’t going to be much help.

  Hour after hour I climbed, expecting to have reached the top of something every time a surmounted a height, only to find the trail climbing ever onward. The land rose in giant steps, steepening and then leveling and then brought to the base of the steepest pitch yet.

  As I hauled myself this rockier stretch, all trace of for
est disappeared other than a few groves tucked into the hollows like islands. The rest of the land was carpeted in heather and stone. With no more trees to intervene, the wind was free to molest me.

  I topped a ridge to be greeted by a blast of hurricane force wind and hunkered down a boulder to catch my breath. The path, much narrower now, descended. It remained an obvious strip worn through the heather, but I was getting nervous about the proximity of that cloud bank to the moon. I had a ridge between me and Braemar now and not a hint of civilization apart from a distant pair of headlights across the moor.

  The trail relaxed again and began to rise and I could see the first inklings of the pass that would take me over the height of the land. It was a massive notch between two mountains, their shoulder forming a perfect parabolic curve, like a giant thumb pressed into clay.

  The way ahead was clear now. I simply had to follow the path of least resistance, the lowest lay of this land through the pass. The slope now was severe and unrelenting. The only way forward was up.

  So far I had come and yet I had the sense that I had much farther to go. Somehow, it didn’t feel like I was getting any closer to Karla. I had this vague sense that coming up this path had only led me farther away. Only topping that rise would ease the anxiety eating at me.

  I found a plodding pace I could maintain without having to stop every ten steps. And then, like a dimmer switch the glow washing the landscape faded as the moon dove under the cloud front. The clouds, not satisfied with this sacrifice, consumed the stars one by one. Darkness socked me in and my pace slowed as I took care with each step, feeling the uneven footing for a solid purchase.

  I stopped for a drink at a spring, guided to it by its trickling. There could have been ice cubes in that water it was so numbingly cold. A light mist began to fall—just enough to bead up and dampen the surface of my hoodie. The chill penetrated whenever I lingered too long. I had to keep moving to stay warm.

  Far above I was heartened to see a faint light that I hadn’t noticed before. It flickered like a fire. It meant there were people about, but it was just a far off pinpoint. Nevertheless, it rallied my spirits and gave me something to home in on in my climb. Maybe I’d find some amiable backpackers sipping hot broth around a campfire.

  The mists had just been a prelude to a steady drizzle punctuated with bouts of harder rain. My hoodie absorbed it like a sponge. Shivers shuddered through me. I could not reach the source of that light soon enough, and yet as I climbed, it did not seem to be getting any closer. Were it not for that light, I might have given up and turned back to Braemar in defeat. But that light gave me just enough hope to continue on.

  The squalls came on and off. The clouds above ripped open long enough to send the occasional moon and starlight to show me how far I had drifted off the trail. I came to hulking, multi-armed mass of blackness at one point, freaked out by its shape only to find it was a sign post at a branching in the trails. I traced the engraved letters with my fingers to discover words that meant nothing to me.

  The first set of names—it was hard to read—something something Bothy—meant nothing to me. But the second—Lairig Gru—was the drover’s path indicated on that tourist map. So that was the way I went.

  The path rose immediately and would not stop rising. For the first time since I started, I couldn’t maintain a continuous pace but had to stop every hundred strides or so to catch my breath and ease the burn in my legs. But whenever I stopped for very long, a shivering kicked in that could only be eased by continued exertion. But as the rain came down harder, I began to shiver even as I climbed. I knew that was a bad sign, but I kept on keeping on.

  Somehow, that light I had spotted didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Only my position relative to it seemed to change. I was swinging around it and rising above it. And then it began to recede behind me. Apparently, the light was tucked in some valley I was climbing above.

  I wasn’t about to climb back down and cede all the high ground I had gained. Maybe that was stupid and stubborn, but I didn’t care. I wanted to get to Aviemore as soon as possible and I knew that the Lairig Ghru would get me there. I probably wasn’t thinking straight by that point.

  I started getting sleepy. Weird, how those patches of scrub in the lee of the boulders suddenly looked so comfortable. They might as well have been memory foam mattresses.

  My thoughts took their sweet time forming up and translating into actions. Every step took focus and effort. It was like being on high-powered sedatives. Some little piece of rationality trapped under all that fog started to panic. I had matches somewhere deep in my pack. It seemed prudent to try and build a fire out of the wind. But what would burn in all this slop? I kept slogging ahead.

  Between the squalls, the clouds sometimes parted and the starlight betrayed the shape of the land around me. I was in the bottom of a sloping bowl. There was really no choice of path anymore. The way forward became obvious and inevitable. I had to pass through that U-shaped valley. There was little sign yet that it would level off. For all I knew it would keep rising into the heavens.

  The clouds always moved back in and sealed up the rifts, squelching all light. They resumed spitting their sleet at me, as if I had insulted them by daring to walk to Aviemore. What did they have against me? I was just passing through. I meant no disrespect.

  And then the shivering kicked in big time. I’m not talking about a little shudder you could send away by zipping up your jacket a little tighter. I’m talking about a full body tremor that rippled like an earthquake of the flesh. Heat-robbing moisture had passed through every seam and layer of my clothing.

  That was when the little piece of rationality sealed deep in my brain realized the magnitude of the mistake I had made. I was never going to make it to Aviemore, never mind Inverness. I was going to die on this mountain tonight and it scared me. I had never felt loneliness so deep. With such a death, what would become of my soul?

  Chapter 38: Faeries and Ogres

  My feet stopped obeying me. I wanted them to rise and swing and plant but they refused. I just stood there, sleet slapping at my cheeks, until there was nothing else to be done but sit down and make myself comfortable.

  I settled into a patch of soggy grass, and I as I sat there, the chill transformed itself into a mild burning, as if I had rubbed Ben-Gay all over my body. I told myself that the rain splatting my face had turned warm although frozen specks continued to sting my cheek.

  My panic had subsided. I was sure everything was going to be okay. I just had to wait out the storm till morning. I suppose I should have pulled one of the plastic bags out of my pack and fashioned a poncho, but I let the precipitation have its way with me.

  I slid off the stone I had been perched on and hunched into a ball, unable to sustain any posture. As I stared into the darkness, a yellowish glow suffused the landscape, and it seemed to come from nowhere in particular. It was if my eyes had spontaneously acquired the ability to pick up light intrinsic to the stone and heather.

  And then down the trail, a string of lights came around a rise and made its way towards me, bobbing and swaying as if borne by legged creatures. Hikers with head lamps? But the lights were dim and they flickered like flames.

  I smiled, cozy in my newfound warmth and looked forward to the parade. As they threaded through the boulders I could see I was way in my estimates of scale. The things approaching were Barbie-sized, their lights not much brighter than burning matchsticks. Little people, on foot or riding in carts pulled by goats. A faerie caravan.

  Those in the vanguard wore armor of tree bark and nut shells. Jagged crystals gleamed at the end of hollow reed pikes twice their height. Glowing orbs dangled from twists of vine. Grim-faced, they lowered their pikes as they passed me, worried I might attack. But I just smiled and waved as they went by.

  Families rode in wagons made of gourds and wicker. Elders and cute, little faces huddled under blankets against the sleet, marveling at my gigantic form. Haggard parents walked alongsid
e the goats in blinders and saddles, leading them by tethers or guiding their reins from benches.

  Something clattered in the dark of the boulder fields behind me. A band of squat and shaggy bipeds hopped between boulders, converging on the faerie’s path. One of them, some kind of imp I would guess, saw me look. It came over to investigate, its face bearded like a Yorkie dog’s but bearing a monkey’s inquisitive eyes. It carried a club fashioned from a knotted branch and studded with blackberry thorns.

  It studied me from behind a cairn, pressing gnarled fingers to its lips as if telling me to keep silent. I never intended to heed its warning, but I couldn’t move and I couldn’t. I just lay there, paralyzed, unable to do more than watch.

  The imp came up to me and grinned.

  “On the way out, are you?” it said, in a raspy whisper.

  I struggled to respond, barely able to manipulate my lips and tongue, and somehow managed to find and form words. “Out? What do you mean?”

  “Die in peace,” it told me. “And mind your own business.” It hopped off into the darkness, rejoining the rest of its band.

  My arms flailed and my legs kicked out. I rose to my feet, teetering, and called out to the faeries.

  “Imps! It’s an ambush! Watch out!”

  Something stung the back of my knee. It felt like sharp, little teeth clamping down. I swatted but found nothing there.

  The faeries whirled into action, taking refuge behind their wagons, the children protecting the goats with pikes, while the adults male and female sending off flights of pencil-long arrows from bows half again their height.

  The caravan crept along past me, taking with it its glow and the imps retreated back into the darkness. I collapsed back into the heather.

  What was this? An illusion? A hypothermic hallucination? Or was it a window into yet another ante-afterworld visible only to those humans who skirted the fringes of death, like Root but having no connection to suicide?