The Exiled

by William Meikle

  “D.I. Simpson?” he asked through clenched teeth. He knew the answer before the constable spoke.

  “She didn’t make it, sir. We found her out back and…” The officer’s voice tailed off and the color drained from his cheeks. Grainger knew that look only too well. Whatever happened to Simpson had been bad—and most probably bloody.

  He remembered little of the next half-hour. The ambulance arrived and they pumped him up with enough happy juice to make things swim before getting him off the floor and onto a gurney—even then the pain shouted loud through the drugs, threatening to send him back to the dark.

  He only saw one other thing, just as he and Alan were being loaded into the back of the ambulance. There was another ambulance in the driveway. The person being loaded into the back of that one didn’t need medical help. A shroud was draped over the body but it wasn’t enough to hide the fact that the head was strangely flattened, the blood blossoming like flowers on the cloth only serving to accentuate the distortion. D.I. Simpson was done talking.

  A crow cawed. Grainger looked up as the black bird flew past overhead.

  Finally the drugs kicked into overdrive.

  Darkness filled his eyes, and he went elsewhere.

  10

  Alan remembered nothing between going into the farmhouse and waking up in the back of an ambulance with his older brother alongside him in the other gurney. Even three days later there was no memory, just a black hole he couldn’t penetrate.

  He was hoping that John might be able to fill in the blanks, but the shoulder surgery had been extensive and the older man hadn’t made it all the way back to full consciousness yet.

  And he’s not going to be happy when he does.

  They’d kept Alan in for observation that first night, and his only news came from what he saw on the television—but that was enough. D.I. Simpson was dead, and if their quarry had indeed been Galloway, then he had got away after injuring the Grainger brothers. No trace of the missing children had been found in the farmhouse, although searches were also made of the outhouses and surrounding area.

  Questions were being asked—about John mainly, and why he was on scene, without a warrant or backup in the middle of the night with a reporter in tow. There had been no official news yet, but Alan guessed that John’s career was in the balance—at the very least he wouldn’t be let anywhere near the case when he was well enough to leave the hospital.

  As for Alan, he’d had a strip torn off him by George Dunlop, and was once again relegated to the fringes on the newspaper. Not that any of it seemed to matter very much—something big had happened at the farm, that much he was sure of, and only John had a chance of providing the answers he was looking for.

  For almost three days, when he wasn’t at work, Alan sat in John’s room, sleeping in fits and starts upright in the chair, watching his brother and probing at the black hole in his own memory, a hole that refused to give up its secrets.

  John finally woke in the afternoon of the fourth day. He smiled when he saw Alan, then winced in pain when he tried to sit up.

  “Take it easy, big man,” Alan said. “They saved the arm, but you won’t be using it much for a while.”

  John prodded at the thick bandaging around his chest and left shoulder, wincing again at fresh pain where he touched.

  “I didn’t dream it, did I?” he said quietly. “Simpson’s dead?”

  Alan nodded.

  “And you’re the only one that knows what happened. It’s going to get busy for you for a while, now that you’re awake. Do you want me to hold off telling anybody for a bit?”

  John pushed himself into a sitting position with his good hand and legs, and all the color left his cheeks as the pain hit hard. He pushed away Alan’s attempted ministrations.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t try to mother me.”

  Alan laughed.

  “That’s my line, remember?”

  John had played big brother and sole parent for more years than Alan cared to remember. After Mum died they only had each other, and John took his responsibilities seriously—too seriously for Alan’s liking on some occasions.

  John laughed, then grimaced.

  “No jokes please—I’m wearing clean underwear.”

  “I’ll get a doctor,” Alan said, and turned to leave, but John called him back.

  “Give me twenty minutes. You and I need to get our story straight first.”

  Alan laughed bitterly.

  “My side is easy. I went in. It was dark. Somebody smacked me on the head. I woke up in the morning. The end.”

  John looked him in the eye.

  “That’s it? That’s all you remember?”

  “Yep. I was hoping you could fill in the blanks?”

  “Maybe,” John said. “But it’s nothing I’m going to be able to tell to anybody but you—it got a bit weird back there.”

  “Weird how?” Alan asked, and knew immediately that this was something to do with the vision—the sea cliffs, the stone buildings and the black birds.

  Do I really want to know?

  “We don’t have time to get into it now,” John said. “Let’s keep it simple. You’ve told them your side already?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then my side is nearly as simple. You phoned me with a tip-off, I took D.I. Simpson and went to check it out. I sent Simpson round the back, I went in the front—and got jumped.”

  “There’s more to it than that though, isn’t there?” Alan said.

  John nodded.

  “But as I said—nothing they’ll believe. It’s going to be just you and me against the world on this one, wee brother.”

  Alan took John’s free hand and held it tight.

  “It’s never been anything else.”

  * * *

  He’d been right about it getting busy.

  Twenty minutes after Alan told the nurses that John was awake, and after a doctor had arrived to make sure he was fit to be questioned, John’s superiors arrived—D.C.I. Cranston, and the superintendent, faces like thunder. Alan watched from the corridor. He couldn’t hear a word of it, but he saw that the calmer John kept, the more irate the other two men became. Cranston in particular seemed to have worked himself into a frothing, red-faced rage.

  The visit lasted half an hour, and by the end of it the D.C.I. was almost apoplectic. As they left, the superintendent opened the door before turning back for a last word, and Alan finally heard some of the conversation—only snatches, but enough to make out the gist. Early retirement, pension, stay away—it was pretty clear what was going on.

  So he was surprised to go back into John’s room and find his brother sitting up and almost smiling.

  “You’re out?” Alan asked.

  “Yes—kicked in the nuts and told to bugger off to my pipe and slippers by the fireplace. I told them where they could stick their job. You don’t know how often I’ve wanted to tell that bloody bureaucrat to stuff it.”

  “So what now—I mean, after you get out of here?” Alan knew the answer to that one already.

  “We go after Galloway. He killed Simpson, and he did for those four wee lassies. I’m going to get him.”

  “The girls are dead?” Alan said, the import of John’s words taking their time to sink in.

  John nodded.

  “I saw them. I couldn’t tell the super—he’d think me daft—but I let him know that I believe them all to be dead. He asked for my proof. I couldn’t give him any… but I can tell you. First things first, though—is there any chance you could smuggle me in a smoke?”

  Alan had come prepared for that one. He closed the blinds to the outside corridor, opened the small window and passed John his lighter and a pack of smokes. John lit up and coughed his way through three puffs before he could keep smoke down.

  “I don’t know where to start,” he said, flicking ash into a water cup by the bedside.

  Alan played a hunch.

  “How about starting with the sea cli
ffs and the black bird?”

  He’d never seen John look quite so confused in his life, and both of them laughed almost simultaneously.

  “It seems I’m not the only one with a story to tell. You’re remembering what happened in the farm?”

  “No… I’ll have to back up a bit…”

  Alan told John about his visit to the bird sanctuary, and the vision he’d had there, and John confirmed that he too had a vision of the same place, before even getting Alan’s message about Galloway.

  “What does it mean?” Alan asked.

  “Let me tell you what I saw, and we’ll discuss it,” John said, lighting a second cigarette from the butt of the first and wafting the smoke away with his good hand.

  Alan sat, stunned as the older brother told his story.

  “So, wee brother,” John said as he got to the end. “What do you think? Am I ready for the loony bin?”

  “If you are, I’m going in with you—I don’t understand the half of it, but I believe you. What I don’t know is what we do now. We can’t tell anybody…”

  “…or else we really will be sent away. I know. Besides, I’m going to be stuck in here for a while yet. I think our first step is what you do best—hit some books, do some research. We can’t be the first that this kind of thing has happened to, can we?”

  “I bloody well hope not,” Alan replied.

  Alan left half an hour later after a nurse came in, gave John hell for smoking, and confiscated his lighter and what was left in the pack. Both men were smiling as they parted.

  * * *

  Alan went back to the office.

  He needed something to focus on, and John’s idea about research gave him the perfect opportunity. He spent the next few days deep in esoterica both online and among the shelves of specialist bookstores in the old town. Sporadic checks to make sure John was still progressing towards being well, interspersed with a couple of stolen hours of relaxation in some of the town’s bars meant that he was relatively inured against any news on the big story. When he finally caught up, it was only to find that the police were no further forward—Galloway hadn’t been found, and there was still no news of the missing kids. Having heard—and believed—John’s story, Alan was just thankful that no more kids had been abducted.

  His research, however, seemed to be getting nowhere. There was plenty of myth and folklore regarding both swans and other realms, but nothing he could find that connected the two. He was on his way out of the last bookstore of the day, about to buy a pamphlet from the sixties entitled Faerie Folk in Border Legend, when he spotted a small stack of five books tucked away behind a pile of magazines on the counter. It was the cover that caught his eye first—a gigantic black swan, wings pulled forward in a hood, crouching over a map of Scotland. The title was in a bold lurid font—THE CYGNUS DECEPTION—and the author’s name, Brian Ferguson, in smaller print at the bottom. Later he would wonder whether there was more than just an element of random chance involved in his finding it, but for now he was almost too astonished to consider the implications.

  The shopkeeper saw him looking at the books, and looked embarrassed.

  “I’m selling those for a friend,” he said. “Auld Brian went on and on at me, and I finally gave in and put them on the shelf. Been there for two years now and only sold a single copy. It’s his bugbear, I’m afraid—he’s been banging on about it for decades. I said to him—’If it matters so much to you, why don’t you write a book?’ and the daft auld bugger went and did. It’s terrible self-published nonsense—a real publisher wouldn’t touch it; all conspiracy theories here and wee magic fairies there and the worst type of New Age mumbo jumbo claptrap.”

  “I’ll take two,” Alan said, and had paid and left the shop before the shopkeeper got over the shock.

  * * *

  He went back to his flat, brewed up a pot of coffee, and went straight to the book. He almost gave up after the first paragraph, for it looked to be setting the whole thing up as either an anti-English or anti-immigration rant.

  “There is a corruption at the heart of our wee country—a rot that set in many centuries ago and one we have allowed to fester ever since. We gave them a foothold, and they have taken root, delving into our hearts and minds, sowing seeds of discord and the blackest of evil.”

  Alan persevered. His reporter’s nose was telling him he was finally onto something, and he’d learned to trust that instinct.

  After a long, rambling preamble that hinted at an enemy at the heart of everything but took great pains not to give any hint of what the enemy might be, the author finally got to some meat. Chapter one had a simple stark heading—THE LOST GIRLS.

  * * *

  “Stories of people being taken away with the faeries are as old as Scotland itself, and anecdotal evidence can be found wherever, and whenever, you choose to look. I personally have read—in the Latin—Roman scrolls that tell of dark times when whole villages were taken, and there is the famous legend of the Lost Legion, vanished into our misty history with scarcely a murmur. The Hebrides in particular has always been sorely plagued—the remote locations and islands proving to be ideal hunting grounds for those From Beyond.

  “Of course we are meant to believe that these are all just the silly superstitions of more primitive, less enlightened peoples, that the new light of rationality and science has swept away all such childish things.

  “Some of us know better.

  “As I was researching the history of faerie abductions—and Thomas the Rhymer in particular—I came, by accident, on the first mention I can find of the Swan. Even then it was most oblique, merely a reference in a church record in Melrose to a girl child being taken by ye Cobbe.

  “That first time, I thought nothing of it. But as my interests grew and my research took me further afield, I began to discern a pattern. Girls—young girls—were being taken, and in every case until the start of the sixteenth century the abduction is attributed to the Cobbe.

  “Then something happened. It is well known that the Scots king dabbled in many esoteric areas and, having heard of the Cobbe, he was determined that it should stand before him and give an account of itself. A ritual was held—a summoning if you like. I have seen a document in Innerpeffray Library that contains a full telling of the tale, but I cannot reproduce it here—to do so would be dangerous in the extreme. Suffice to say the abductions stopped—for a time.

  “I found the trail again in the early seventeenth century, where I discovered evidence that a Swan cult operated on the shores of Loch Leven. Children from as far afield as Inverness went missing over a span of several years, their passing marked only by the presence of dismembered wings of swans left at the sites. It is also around this time that the cover-up started, and the secret society that had been gestating for some time finally fledged into full being…”

  * * *

  It was at that point in the manuscript that Alan started to skim. The author detailed his evidence of both the Swan cult and the secret society—a lineage that supposedly stretched down to recent history. Alan found the resulting argument to be deeply flawed; the research was sketchy at best, and full of Von Daniken-esque leaps of logic, using one badly thought-out conclusion to shore up the next. By the end of part one, Ferguson had accumulated a whole mountain of supposed facts that would fall apart if you so much as looked at any one bit of it too closely. He’d also roped in the usual suspects—the Priory of Sion, the Templars, the St. Clairs and Rosslyn Chapel all got more than a passing mention—as did, of course, the Scottish Rite Masons. There was a lot about them, all of which seemed to work the author up into a frenzy of speculation concerning rampant use of child pornography and pedophilia in the upper reaches of the Scottish class system. It seemed that the Swan had been forgotten, but Ferguson was just getting started.

  Alan nearly missed it—he was only a couple of paragraphs away from giving up when he came across a small section between parts one and two that made him stop and read it twice to be sure
it actually said what he thought it said.

  * * *

  “My time spent in the old library near Crieff yielded one more item of note. It was buried deep under sheaves of musty legal documents, as if someone had intentionally put it where it could not be stumbled across easily. At first I took it for a hoax, for it detailed a rather ridiculous ritual, concocted by someone with a clear sense of the absurd. But the intended result was something I could not overlook so easily. I transcribed the ritual in my notebook, and set about procuring the necessaries.

  “Two weeks later I was ready; I assembled the accoutrements and—feeling ridiculous the whole time—worked my way through the ritual. I was not too surprised when it came to naught. I stood there, feeling rather silly, for all of an hour before returning to bed, cursing myself for a fool.

  “And as I stepped up onto the bed, it happened. I was no longer in my tidy little room. Instead I stood upon a rocky cliff top, buffeted by wind and sea spray, looking over a verdant landscape stretching up to high stone turrets above me. Something came up the cliff, something black and huge and immediately terrifying. I screamed—and blinked—and was back in my bedroom.

  “I do not expect you to believe a word of this. I have only the evidence of my own eyes and the feeling of solidity I had while there. And know this—I have been back, several times, and returned to tell the tale.

  “I know what the Black Swan is, and why the secret has to remain hidden.”

  11

  Grainger looked at the book Alan handed him, read the cover, and laughed.