Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘Just a mo,’ he said.

He shone the torch on his fingers, and saw grey dust. He stooped closer to the side wall, and peered hard at it, angling the torch a little. The surface of the slab was grey, with a sand-grain sparkle. He rubbed his fingertips across it, and touched one with his tongue.

‘Cement,’ he said. ‘Concrete.’

‘So much for your thousands of years,’ Malcolm jeered, after confirming the identification.

‘The Romans had concrete,’ Donald pointed out.

‘And they never got here,’ said Hugh. ‘This is recent, all right.’

They huddled, looking down the cone of light. The passage went on at least another five or six metres, and the torch beam wasn’t reaching the end of it.

‘Go in a bit?’ Hugh asked.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the others doing the same. The bright rectangle of daylight was a reassuring few steps behind them.

‘OK,’ said Malcolm.

‘No so sure about that,’ said Donald.

‘Why not?’ said Hugh.

‘I think we should go back and tell…’ His voice trailed off, as if he’d been about to say ‘a grown-up’ and had been too embarrassed.

‘Nah,’ Hugh said. ‘What is there to tell them, anyway? We’ll just go in a bit and have a look.’

With that he walked forward, leaving the others the choice of following or going back. They followed. After a few steps it became apparent that the passage had a slight downward slope and a curve to the right. About ten metres in, a backward glance revealed that the entrance was no longer visible. Hugh’s neck and knees began to ache with the awkward, stooping walk. He felt chill air on his face, and smelled peat smoke. A moment later he saw a thin glimmer of light ahead.

‘Light at the end of the tunnel,’ said Donald, in the tone of having made a smart remark.

As they walked on, the glimmer took shape as a rectangle like the entrance. It was difficult to be certain what colour the light was, but it seemed to be the blue of a bright sky. The boys reached the end of the tunnel in a couple of minutes. The draught became stronger and colder as they moved forward. Hugh looked out, with Malcolm and Donald peering over his shoulders again. He blinked hard and shaded his eyes – the light was dazzling. The tunnel exit was evidently on the side of the hill, a steeper slope than the one they’d climbed. He saw the village and the sea-loch below, and the hills around, under the broad sky. But the houses looked different: darker, smaller and less regular in shape than the grey cement-block houses and slate roofs of the village he knew. The tide was far, far out, the sea-loch a distant glimmer. And the ground was covered in snow, of that he was certain.

He leaned forward, peering down the slope. A hundred metres below them, a tall figure was striding up the hill. A black shape against the white, with a gleam of eyes under a hood. Hugh recoiled. The other boys took his fright, and all of a sudden all three of them were scurrying back up the passage, the shadows of Donald and Malcolm weird and long in Hugh’s wildly swaying torch-beam. Hugh could hear, above their own hurrying steps and rapid breaths, something or someone in the tunnel behind them.

Almost tumbling over each other, they hurtled out of the tunnel into the little gully and the blaze of sunlight, and scrambled up the far side, hitting the bank at a run and hauling themselves up on the heather. Only then did they glance back. No one else came out of the tunnel. They could hear nothing but their own breath and hammering heartbeats and the cry of a curlew.

They looked at each other and ran – around the end of the gully, with fearful sidelong glances, and across the moor, past the loch, across the bare rock and down the hill. They charged through heather and waded through bog and skipped and leapt over gaps in the outcrop and, on the way down the slope, hurdled erratic boulders. If any of them fell, they were up in a second, racing on.

At length they ducked through the fence of the glebe above Hugh’s house and collapsed in the long grass, gasping, sides aching from the stitch, legs filthy to the knees, shirts ripped, heels of hands scratched, shins bruised.

None of them could have said why they felt safe on this side of the fence, but they did.

Hugh stood up, hands on knees, panting.

‘Did you see it?’ he asked.

‘See what?’ Malcolm asked. Donald, too out of breath to speak, scowled and shook his head.

‘The village,’ said Hugh. ‘Down here, with the snow on it.’

‘Snow?’ Malcolm said, in a disbelieving tone. ‘That wasn’t snow. It was just the brightness.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Donald added, catching his breath. ‘After the dark, it was so bright I could hardly make out anything.’

‘And then,’ Malcolm chipped in, ‘you jumped back and nearly knocked us over and we thought something was wrong, so we ran.’

‘You didn’t see him?’ Hugh asked.

‘See who?’

‘The man coming up the hill.’

‘Now you’re having us on,’ said Donald, sounding uneasy.

Malcolm laughed. ‘That’s like the stories about crashes and dead pilots.’

Donald glowered. ‘It is not!’ he said. ‘It’s like the stories we believed when we were wee.’ He raised his hands, fingers dangling and shoogling. ‘Woo-oo-ooh!’

Malcolm clouted him. Donald kicked. They exchanged a few more blows. Hugh grabbed shoulders.

‘Stop it!’ he yelled.

They both pummelled him for a change, and then everyone backed off. No recriminations. They had outgrown telling on each other, but not outgrown hurting each other.

‘Forget about the man,’ Hugh said. ‘But you saw it, you saw the land all bright at least.’

‘So? It was the sun in my eyes,’ said Donald.

Malcolm nodded along. ‘Yes, that was it, the sun.’

Hugh knew they were lying. They’d seen what he’d seen.

‘Och, that’s what it was,’ he said. ‘And maybe I just saw a shadow, or a sheep.’

‘We were fleeing from a sheep?’ Malcolm asked, his voice squeaking with disbelief.

They all laughed, Hugh too.

‘I’ve got a new game,’ said Donald.

They ran down the last green slope to the back of the house and jumped on their bikes and raced away.

That evening, by way of explaining how he’d got his clothes, shoes and skin in such a state, Hugh told his father about how he’d been exploring a tunnel or cave or passageway up in the hills. He didn’t say anything about what he’d seen.

‘Show me your phone,’ his father said.

Hugh handed it over and his father punched up the GPS tracker app. He slid the phone back across the table.

‘See the place where you turn around?’ he said.

Hugh looked down at the black squiggle of his route on the screen map.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Now flick to… wait a minute.’

His father tapped at his own phone. The route line remained but the underlying map had changed, from a satellite pic with tags to a gridded white sheet with contour lines and little symbols. Right at the point where the route line doubled back was a row of tiny red arrowheads.

‘Culvert,’ his father said.

‘What’s it doing up there?’ Hugh asked.

‘The company was going to site a windmill there, a few years ago,’ his father explained. ‘Changed their minds, that’s all, but not before they’d gone ahead and started building a culvert to draw off flash floods.’ He frowned. ‘Speaking of which. One rainstorm and that would have been you.’

‘There was no chance of a rainstorm,’ Hugh said, in a sulkier tone than he’d intended.

‘Don’t give me lip,’ said his father. ‘There’s always a chance, you know that.’

‘The water would just have washed out,’ Hugh persisted.