The Exiled

by William Meikle

  There was no reply.

  “Let’s try again,” he said. “We’ve got to keep trying.”

  They both closed their eyes, and Alan tried to wish himself back to help his brother.

  Nothing happened—the room stayed resolutely solid.

  “Simon!” Sandy shouted, and closed her eyes. “Concentrate on the balcony—the table of food.”

  Alan tried to visualize the fortress, the tall thin man and the view over the plain to the cliff tops—but his mind kept circling back to John, grappling with Galloway. His brother’s plight was too big in his mind to allow much of anything else to get in. No matter how he tried, the room stayed solid, the only smell the taint of bleach and dry dust.

  “Shit. There must be another way,” he said, reaching for the Scotch again. Sandy took the bottle from him and put it on the table.

  “That’s not going to help,” she said. “We need clear heads.”

  Alan was about to argue, but there was something in her eyes that told him that might not be the best idea.

  “So what can we do?” he said. “If we’re so fucking special, why are we stuck here?”

  “I’m as lost as you are. We’re the only three that I know of with the power,” she said. “And I don’t know why we have it.”

  Alan remembered something Simon had said before they parted.

  “In exile—that’s what Simon said. There are some of his folk here. They’ll surely have a way to get back?”

  Sandy shook her head.

  “If there are, I’ve never seen one. They’ll be in hiding, keeping a low profile lest they get discovered. We might never find them.”

  She turned away, lost in thought, and while her back was turned Alan took another swig from the whisky.

  “Finding people that don’t want to be found is kind of what I do,” he said. “And I will find them. I’m not leaving John over there.”

  Sandy walked over and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “He might be dead already—or it might be better for him if he is? You saw what Galloway was becoming…”

  Alan brushed her off.

  “I won’t hear any of that shite. I’m getting him back. Right now.”

  Alan made for the door and had his hand on the doorknob before she called him back.

  “You’re wanted for murder,” she said. “And you’re not exactly dressed for the city. You’re going to need my help.”

  * * *

  The clapped-out car was still in the farmyard, but Sandy had a better idea—she led Alan to a black SUV that was parked round the back out of sight.

  “Tinted windows,” she said, tapping the windshield. “Perfect for keeping you out of sight until we come up with a new plan.”

  Alan looked back to the farmhouse.

  “It feels like I’m abandoning him,” he said.

  “I think he’d prefer you to actually be doing something, rather than sitting on that sofa in there drinking too much Scotch?”

  He couldn’t argue with that. He transferred their luggage from the other car, taking extra care with the laptop—he had a feeling he was going to need it soon—and got in the passenger seat.

  “So where are we headed?”

  “I’ve got a flat in Glasgow—we’ll regroup there. You can keep your head down, and I’ll do any legwork that’s needed. I’ve got some ideas where to start, but that can wait until we’re safely back in town.”

  John was surprised to look at the clock and see that it was early in the morning, the sun only just coming up. He remembered that it had been daylight on the other side when they crossed over, despite it being night at the farm.

  “There’s a time differential, isn’t there?”

  She started up the car and drove out of the farmyard.

  “It’s a different length of day altogether—about twenty hours over there. And since you spent a full day and more there, you’ll probably have a bit of jet-lag.”

  “Narnia-lag. That’s all I need,” he replied.

  He wanted to pound the dashboard in frustration. For all he knew his brother was dead already—either that or beaten and suffering. The fact that he could do nothing to help gnawed away at him like toothache.

  Sandy took a pack of smokes from the glove compartment. She lit up and the sickly smell of menthol quickly filled the car

  “You offered John a story for a smoke,” he said as they turned onto the main road—it was quiet with no traffic apart from them. “Tell me.”

  “You can have a short version—the full story will have to wait—in ten minutes we’ll hit the rush hour traffic into town and I’ll have to concentrate.”

  She sucked a long drag of smoke, and thought before starting.

  “I told you about my crossover on Salisbury Plain—my next one was several months later. I was up on Benbecula on training, doing night guard duty—just me, a long sandy beach, and the stars and seagulls for company. Or so I thought.

  “I was having a fly smoke when the light seemed to change. I looked up… and a pink moon looked back at me. For a second I thought someone might have slipped some waccy-baccy into my smokes. Then someone spoke to me.

  “’Who the hell are you?’

  “I was standing in a high place, on a ledge looking out over a plain to cliffs beyond—you know the spot yourself now. And it was Simon who spoke—that was our first meeting.”

  She stopped to take more puffs from her cigarette before going on.

  “That first time, Simon was as bemused as I was—no one, to his knowledge, had ever crossed over without using the thin spot in the ruins, or without the Cobbe knowing about it. As for me, I was mainly wondering how the hell to get back before I got another bollocking from the lieutenant.

  “Simon made me promise to keep going back—I think he wanted to study me, to see if he could do my trick himself. Then he showed me how to focus my concentration—just a couple of yoga techniques, enough for me to blink, and be back at my post on Benbecula.

  “Since then I’ve been back and forward a couple of dozen times. Simon’s had me doing small errands for him over here—a visit to Innerpeffray, a trip to Orkney, nothing sinister. Then, a couple of days back—when Galloway started to take the girls over—Simon asked me to keep an eye on the thin spot on Loch Leven. That’s how our paths crossed—I was up on the hill above you at the sanctuary, and I followed you back into town afterward.”

  She stopped.

  “That’s it?” Alan said. “But…”

  “No time for buts,” she replied. “We’ll be in heavy traffic any minute now. It’s nearly eight—turn on the radio and check the news. There might be developments we need to know about.”

  They were the second news item—another child missing, police manhunt is continuing, an arrest is imminent—happy-clappy stuff that Alan recognized as mostly meaningless filler to cover the fact that they were no closer to catching the perpetrator. The only new fact—and it wasn’t anything he needed to know—was that the fifth victim had been taken inside a store in Princes Street while trying on a new dress.

  “There’s going to be a sixth,” Alan said softly. “And soon.”

  “I know,” Sandy replied. “But there’s no way we can second-guess Galloway on that. We can’t watch every young girl in the country.”

  Alan punched the dashboard.

  “We shouldn’t have left the farm—the way might open at any time.”

  “I don’t think so,” Sandy replied. “It felt…shut. There’s no other way to describe it.”

  “And you’re the expert now, are you?”

  She slammed on the brakes and brought them to a halt at the roadside.

  “I’m the nearest thing you’ve fucking got. Now do you want help or do you want to whine some more? I could let you off here if you like?”

  Alan saw, too late, that she was under stress just as much as he was. There was definitely a longer story waiting to be told—but it would indeed have to wait.

  “I’m sorr
y,” he said softly. “I just want to find John again. I’ll take all the help I can get.”

  She drove away from the roadside.

  “That’s better,” she said. “And better still, coffee and breakfast are only twenty minutes away.”

  It took forty minutes in the end—most of it negotiated through particularly heavy rush hour traffic heading into Glasgow. Sandy pulled off in the East End, taking residential roads through streets Alan didn’t know and bringing them to a halt in a small car park opposite a row of three-story sandstone townhouses.

  “Home sweet home,” Sandy said. “Come on—there’s nobody about—at least nobody that would shop you to the police—let’s get you inside.”

  They made an incongruous couple—him all in leather, her in the combat fatigues—as they went across the road into a stairwell and up to the second-floor landing. They almost made it without being seen, but just as Sandy turned her key in the lock the door of the apartment opposite opened and an elderly lady peered out. She looked Alan up and down.

  “A party, was it? Fancy dress or bondage?” she asked.

  “A bit of both, Sarah,” Sandy replied. “I’ll be keeping this one for a bit—don’t tell Tony, he’ll want extra rent.”

  The elderly woman looked Alan up and down again.

  “You can drop him off with me when you’ve finished with him,” she said, and did something disgusting with her false teeth. “I like a bit of rough.”

  It was all Alan could do to keep a straight face as Sandy bundled him inside.

  * * *

  Sandy’s apartment was larger than his own back in Edinburgh, and was filled to bursting point with old furniture, tall bookshelves and antiques from across the spectrum of Scottish history. On another day he could cheerfully have whittled away hours in browsing. But the entrance into the confined space—and the lack of menthol smoke to cover the smell—meant that he was now all too aware of the reek festering inside his leathers.

  “I need a change of clothes,” he said.

  “And a shower,” she replied. “First on the left. You can use the towels behind the door. I’ll get some coffee on.”

  He did as he was told. The leathers were a lot more difficult to get off than to put on, and the shower room too small for much maneuvering, but he got there in the end and luxuriated in the simple pleasure of a hot wash. He closed his eyes and turned his face up to the water—and was immediately hit with the memory of Galloway running headlong into John, his brother’s face wracked with pain as he took the hit.

  After that he couldn’t take any pleasure in the shower. He washed briskly, and dressed from what he’d brought in his bag. His overnight wash kit was still there too, so he was able to brush his teeth and have a perfunctory shave. He stuffed the leathers into his bag and took it back out into the lobby, leaving it there beneath a rack of coats.

  “Coffee’s ready,” Sandy shouted.

  He followed the sound through to a well-appointed kitchen. She sat at a breakfast bar in front of a laptop, and slid a mug of coffee across to him as he walked in.

  “I’m on Wi-Fi here if you want to go online,” she said. “Network is Cobbe, password is blackbird. I’ll be out in ten and then we can talk.”

  Alan retrieved his laptop bag and got set up, putting in his headphones to drown out the sound and resultant mental images of Sandy taking a shower. He made a cursory check of the news but didn’t learn anything new, then turned his mind to how they might track down Simon’s people—the exiles as he’d come to think of them.

  Trouble was, he couldn’t think where to begin—John’s predicament was still too big in his mind, crowding out everything else, and he couldn’t bring any focus to the task. It took Sandy to show him where to start.

  She returned from her shower dressed in jeans and a sweater and looked ten years younger than before. She made some more coffee and placed another mug in front of Alan as—not for the first time—he swore in frustration at his lack of progress.

  “That good, eh?” Sandy said as she sat at her own machine.

  “I’m getting nowhere. We know these exiles are here—or at least, Simon says they are. But can we trust him? There’s something off about this whole thing—I can’t put my finger on it yet, but trust me, I’m a reporter, and my instincts are telling me there’s more to this than Simon is letting on.”

  Sandy lit another of the menthol cigarettes and sipped coffee while bringing up a page on her screen. “I wasn’t going to show you this until I dug a bit further to make sure it’s authentic,” she said, turning her laptop so they could both see it. “But I think I’ve got a lead.”

  She was in a browser session, and the heading on the site read “The Masonic Conspiracy—the ringleaders.”

  “It’s buried deep in Ferguson’s site,” she said, taking the mouse and scrolling down. “It came to me in the car—what if the auld nutter was nearly right? The text is more of the usual shite he was always spouting—but I found an interesting picture.”

  The screen scrolled up until there was a picture full in the frame.

  Two men stood outside a stone lodge. The heading read “The elusive Baird brothers before a meeting at their house in Tummel Bridge.”

  They weren’t smiling at the camera, indeed it did not seem they even knew the camera was there, for the picture had obviously been taken with a zoom lens at its longest setting. But even despite the slight graininess and lack of focus the resemblance was obvious.

  They could have been Simon’s brothers.

  23

  Once again Grainger woke out of darkness into pain and confusion, but this time there was no ambulance, no morphine to ease the transition. He lay on something hard and cold. It took him a second to realize he was bound to the stone altar in the main body of the ruined building. He looked up to blue sky through the broken rafters that were all that remained of the roof. It hurt to turn his head, as if his neck and shoulders were bruised and battered, but by straining to his right he could look straight down the aisle and out through the main door to the flat ground on the cliff top beyond.

  Galloway—or whatever you called the thing he was becoming—stood there, arms raised, holding something up to the open beak of the Cobbe as it loomed over him. Grainger struggled to focus but blood and sweat stung in his eyes, and he couldn’t brush them away—he was bound far too tightly.

  It was only when he turned to his left that he found the main source of the pain—his left arm was gone, torn out from the shoulder. The swollen, puffy flesh around the wound was stitched in thick black thread—the same crude needlework he’d seen on the dead girls. He thrashed and tugged but there was no give in the bonds as he turned back to shout at Galloway.

  “Bastard!”

  His vision cleared long enough for him to make out what the man was doing—he offered a sacrifice to the Cobbe—a long left arm, red and still dripping.

  Grainger screamed and pulled at his bonds. A fresh pain flared at the new wound, cold light burning like fire through his brain, scorching all further thought as oblivion called.

  He dove into it gratefully.

  24

  Alan was surprised to be startled awake out of a deep sleep. They were in the SUV, on a single-track road along a steep-sided valley with mist rolling down from the heights through purple heather and gray, lichen-covered rocks.

  “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere in North Perthshire—about ten miles from the lodge. Welcome back—you’ve been out for a while.”

  The last thing Alan remembered was leaving the outskirts of Glasgow. They made a trip to a hunting and camping supplies store that took a bit longer than they anticipated, but in the end they’d got what Sandy wanted. He’d helped her pack the goods in the back of the SUV and they’d set off through more Glasgow suburbs. She smoked, he drank coffee, and they talked about Ferguson, and the exiles, then… then nothing. He must have just nodded off, almost midsentence as the last few days finally caught up with him. His he
ad felt as cloudy as the hilltops.

  “You’ve been out over two hours,” Sandy said and smiled. “There’s still some coffee in the Thermos and some biscuits in the bag. I’ll join you.”

  She pulled over in a small lay-by perched on an outcrop above a foaming waterfall. There was no other traffic and the rolling mist gave the whole scene an otherworldly air that only served to remind Alan of his brother, stuck elsewhere.

  “What’s the plan then?” he said as he poured coffee. “Just walk up to the door and tell them who we are?”

  “Or we could have a quiet look around the place first? Get the lay of the land before charging in?”

  Alan shook his head.

  “There’s no time to be subtle about this. John needs me—every minute I waste is a minute he doesn’t have. Besides, I’m a reporter—it’s my job to ask direct questions. Straight at it and don’t spare the horses.”

  Sandy lit another of the sickly menthol cigarettes and followed the smoke down with coffee before replying.

  “You shouldn’t get your hopes too high. Remember, we’re chasing something we found on Ferguson’s site—you talked to him, you know that less than half the stuff he came out with had any basis in reality.”

  Alan finished off his coffee before replying.

  “You saw them—they’re Simon’s folk all right; no doubt about it. Who else looks like that outside of a sci-fi convention? The only question is whether they’re going to be on our side—or that of the Cobbe?”

  “Okay then, if that’s what you want to do. Let’s go ask them,” Sandy replied. She tipped the remains of her coffee out the driver’s side window and they drove off into thickening mist.

  * * *

  They reached the estate entrance some fifteen minutes later, drawing up in front of an imposing pair of twin stone columns with a built-in cast-iron gateway that looked more like a portcullis. A ten-foot-tall wall stretched away along the road on either side of it. The gate seemed to be firmly closed, and there was no sign of activity on the other side.