Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘No a bad view,’ said Malcolm.

‘How about we go to the lochs?’ said Donald, pointing ahead to where patches of water glittered in the middle distance.

Hugh felt a small thrill. Coming up this hill hadn’t been forbidden when he’d been smaller, but going to the lochs definitely had been. He reckoned he’d now outgrown that injunction. Certainly it hadn’t been repeated half an hour earlier when he’d told his mother where he was going. It hadn’t been lifted, either, but he reckoned he was in the clear.

‘Fine,’ he said.

On they went. Like the summit, the lochs were more difficult to get to than they looked. As they walked across the rock, the surfaces planed by the glaciers of the ice ages turned out to be deeply scoured by the same process, with unexpected cracks and dips that the boys had to scramble down and up or leap across. Then the heather and peat and bog began again.

Another half-hour and the boys stood beside the first of the lochs. Less than a hundred metres at its widest, it lay still and black under the dark blue sky, banked by metre-high overhangs of heather-covered peat and here and there a tiny shingle beach.

The silence rang in Hugh’s ears.

‘Quiet,’ he remarked, to break it.

‘Wonder if there’s a monster in it,’ said Malcolm.

‘I doubt there’s a fish,’ said Hugh.

‘Or maybe a crashed plane,’ said Donald.

Hugh and Malcolm triangulated him with scornful looks.

‘That’s what we thought when we were wee,’ said Hugh. ‘We used to have a crashed fighter jet in every lochan.’

Donald shrugged.

‘Planes went down here,’ he said, as if repeating a well-established historical fact rather than a rumour passed from cohort to cohort of primary-school kids.

‘So why would they still be here?’ Hugh asked. ‘There would have been searches.’

‘It was all secret,’ said Donald. ‘It was the Cold War.’

‘Oh, the Cold War?’ Hugh scoffed. ‘It was the Second World War I was told. And that was about the wee loch above the school. There was supposed to be a Messerschmitt under the water. With the dead German pilot’s skeleton still in it. When the sun was right, you could see the Iron Cross hanging in front of his collarbone. That’s what Lachie MacIver told me, when he was ten and I was five.’

They all laughed, even Donald.

‘It was the Cold War,’ Donald repeated, in a stubborn tone. ‘There was a MiG shot down over the sea that crashed in the hills around here. The RAF didn’t want to let on. That’s why there weren’t any searches.’

‘There must have been searches,’ said Hugh. ‘Or people might have found it by accident.’

‘Och, if a plane crashed in a loch, the authorities didn’t bother with that,’ said Donald. ‘They knew nobody would ever find it.’

Hugh stared at him. There was something baffling about his pal’s insistence. He remembered how this sort of story wasn’t the only one they’d all believed, in wee school. A few years ago he and his little sister had become convinced that there was some bogeyman – no, an actual flesh-and-blood man – living in the roof spaces behind the attic’s thin partitions, and that he occasionally hid in the big shed at the back of the house. They had somehow believed that enough to terrify themselves now and again, yet most of the time didn’t think or worry about this unseen presence at all. At no time had they ever given the practicalities of the matter a moment’s thought.

Donald was thinking no more rationally than they had been. To ask him why and how the authorities could be so blithely sure that this scandalously, secretly shot-down MiG would not be discovered, let alone how the crash wouldn’t have been noticed by any of the locals, would be as pointless as it would have been for someone to ask Hugh or his sister Shonagh how the man in the attic got his food or went to the toilet or got in and out of the house unobserved.

But thinking about this reminded Hugh of the people he’d seen who weren’t there, and of Voxy. He didn’t want to think about that. He could feel his face heat up, and he turned away abruptly.

‘Let’s get a move on,’ he said.

They made their way around the side of the loch and were then lured by the glitter of the next, a few hundred yards of heather away. Again the lie of the ground was deceptive. About halfway to the next loch they found themselves standing on the lip of a small gully. It was about two metres deep and three across, its scree-covered floor rising on either hand to be lost amid the heather after a few metres each way. The far side of it looked like peat overhung with heather. They could easily have walked around it.

Hugh, with some impulse of bravado to compensate for his earlier moment of embarrassment, sat down at the edge, rolled, and dreeped. His feet landed with a thud on the scree and he took a step backwards.

Then another step, as he took in what he was seeing. The side of the gully right in front of him wasn’t what he had expected. Just beneath the heather at the lip was a flat slab of rock, and under that slab was a dark opening about a metre wide and a metre and a half high. Two upended slabs of rock propped the sides, from the scree floor to the rock above. The rest of the bank was like the other side, hard black peat. Hugh had the impression that it was recently exposed, perhaps by a sudden slippage or even a flood.

He glanced up at Malcolm and Donald, who stood looking down at him.

‘Hi, guys,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve found something.’

He could hear his own voice boom a little, echoing, he guessed, in the hollow. He took another step back, squatted, and skited a pebble into the dark hole. Far away, something rattled.

‘There’s a cave here,’ he said.

The other two, for whatever reason – perhaps suspecting a prank on his part – didn’t drop down the way he had, but went around to the end of the little gully and walked in, crunching and slithering down the slope of scree.

‘Well, by Jove,’ said Malcolm.

‘That’s not a cave,’ said Donald. ‘That’s dug out. It’s like yon Neolithic place in Orkney.’

‘Dug out in peat?’ Hugh said. ‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Skara Brae wasn’t dug out either,’ said Malcolm. ‘It was made of stone and got covered in sand.’

‘Maybe this got buried in the peat, not dug out,’ Hugh mused.

‘How long would the peat take to build up six feet?’ Malcolm wondered.

‘Longer than your bodach thinks the world has existed,’ said Hugh.

They scuffled for a moment.

‘Quit it,’ said Donald. ‘Anybody got a torch?’

Hugh had: a nifty little high-power multi-LED one. He dug it out of his trouser pocket and flicked it on. Ducking down, he led the way into the opening. Even with the torch on, he couldn’t see a thing.

‘Turn it off,’ Donald advised. ‘Let our eyes adjust.’

They crouched for a minute or so in the entrance with their eyes shut. The air smelled of peat dust, dry bracken and ash.

‘Right,’ said Hugh, opening his eyes. He could now see dimly in the light from the entrance – what little of it got past their bodies. He switched the torch on again.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘It goes way back.’ His voice echoed.

Donald and Malcolm crowded behind him, peering over his shoulders.

‘Man,’ said Donald.

Hugh flicked the beam around as he took a few steps forward. The ground – peat, with some ash, he guessed – felt springy underfoot. The bones of mice and rabbits lay here and there, fragile and brown. The walls were of close-fitting slabs, their bases sunk into the ground, supporting a ceiling of the same. He brushed his fingertips across a join above his head and could hardly feel a gap. Though the sides of the slabs weren’t exactly straight, or evidently worked, they fitted almost to the millimetre. Without thinking, he ran his thumb across his fingertips, and felt grit.