Knockansheen
Part One of a three-part modern fantasy, inspired by Scottish folklore
When I was little, I loved reading the ancient folktales of the Scottish Highlands. This is written in homage to those tales, re-weaving some of the stories in a modern setting. This is the first of three episodes.
April 2017
Like banshees in the raw wind, herring gulls sliced in to snatch life from the fresh-scarred earth. Their voices poured into the silence carved in the currents and eddies of air when the men driving the excavators stopped for a smoke break, the dirty yellow limbs of the machines shuddering into stillness. The top of the low bony hill was already exposed, a head with the scalp stripped away, and the ancient rowan trees that fringed its brow were being hauled to a waiting lorry. Kevin MacGregor, the lorry driver, was leaning on the fence chewing a Toffee Crisp. He didn’t see the crumpled old man standing a few feet away, peering up at the hoarding by the site entrance:
NHS HIGHLAND
OSPADAL SGÌRE INBHIRSTÒRAIDH, CNOC AN T-SÌTHEIN
INVERSTORRY DISTRICT HOSPITAL, KNOCKANSHEEN
Started: March 2017
Estimated completion: June 2020
This site has been 34 days without an incident.Kevin stuffed the Toffee Crisp wrapper into the pocket of his jeans, then jumped as he noticed the old man, who was now at his elbow squinting up at the hill.
“Ah, this is a bad business,” said the old man.
“Why’s that then?” asked Kevin tolerantly.
The bodach shook his head slowly, a tutting, sucking sound accompanying the movement.
“A bad business.” He cast Kevin a sharp glance from glaucous eyes. “Eil a Ghàidhlig agad?”
“Naw, I can’t speak the Gaelic. My granny does, but you know how it is…” Kevin shrugged as he eyed the old man: ancient tweed jacket and cap, too-big trousers, sun-browned face wrinkled as a walnut. “But why’s it bad? We need a hospital closer than Raigmore.”
The old man shook his head again. “Bad, I tell you. Do you know how long those trees have been there?”
“I’m sure they’ve got all the permissions and everything,” said Kevin.
“Do you know why those trees were there?” The old man’s voice had risen an anxious notch.
“Why?” Kevin sounded both puzzled and amused. “Why’s there a why?”
One of the other men whistled and yelled at Kevin to back up his lorry.
“Sorry, got to go,” said Kevin cheerfully, hopping back into the cab. He didn’t see the old man disappear.
September 2021
Mina Finlayson lay back, exhausted and pale. The ceiling light was white as a moon in the maternity ward.
“Get some rest.” Kevin leaned forward and kissed her softly on the forehead. “You’re amazing.”
Mina tried to prop herself up a little to get another glimpse at tiny Ross swaddled in his crib beside the bed. Kevin fluffed up her pillow, then pushed her gently down with another kiss.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “I love you, you know that?”
Mina nodded. “I know. Love you too.” She gave in and drifted into sleep.
“Morning!” The ward sister bustled into Mina’s room and plucked the clipboard from the bottom of the bed. “Normina, isn’t it? How are we feeling today?”
“Mina,” said Mina. She was sitting up in bed, holding the baby to her breast, her posture tense. “I’m OK, I think. But I’m not sure…”
“Can’t get him to latch on?” The nurse whisked round to the side of the bed. “Don’t worry, flower. You’ll get the hang of it soon enough. Here, let me—”
“It’s not that,” said Mina. “It’s… This sounds weird, but are you sure this is my baby?”
“Of course he is, flower.” The nurse glanced at her clipboard again. “Ross, isn’t it?”
Mina nodded. “He just looks.. I don’t know, different.” She looked down at the tiny crumpled face, wizened like an old man’s. The baby’s eyes blinked open as if he knew she was looking at him. Blue eyes, silvery blue like fish scales, except when they caught the light from the window at an oblique angle. Then, Mina thought they had a violet sheen.
“Oh, he’s a wee darling,” said the nurse. She pursed her lips as she looked at the baby. “He’s a wee bit pale, right enough. Is that what you mean about different?”
“Maybe,” said Mina. Her voice was thin with fear. “But I mean, there’s no chance that someone took him to change his nappy or something in the night and put him back in the wrong room, like?”
“Not a chance,” said the nurse. “Apart from anything else, he’s the only newborn on the ward just now.” She unwrapped a corner of the blanket and smoothed out the tag round the baby’s skinny ankle. “Look, here you are. Normina Finlayson, 15/9/21, 7 lb 6 oz. A fine healthy wee boy.”
The nurse tucked the blanket back around the baby’s legs. “I’ll just take your blood pressure now, and we’ll keep an eye on the wee one. But I think you’ll probably be fine to go home this afternoon.”
“Thank you,” said Mina faintly. The baby looked silently up at her with his huge pale eyes.
September 2022
“I don’t know, love,” said Kevin. He scraped the crumbs of Colin the Caterpillar cake into the box for the chickens and dumped the paper plates in the bin. “A lot of kids are slow to talk, aren’t they? Wasn’t Einstein, like, four before he started speaking?”
Mina glanced at the bedroom door. Not a sound. She hoped that meant Ross was asleep, but she was afraid that if she opened the door and looked in the cot, she’d see him lying there staring at the stars on the ceiling, eyes wide open like tiny moons.
“No,” she said. “Something’s not right, Kev. I’m sure Einstein at least said mama or something. He doesn’t even cry like normal kids, you know that.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’ve been doing some googling. What if there’s something wrong with him? Like, actually properly wrong?”
Kevin looked across to where she was picking half-chewed carrot sticks off the floor, and saw the worry in her eyes.
“And even when he does cry it doesn’t sound, like, normal,” Mina went on. “And… oh, Kev…” She crumpled suddenly onto the sofa. “This afternoon…”
They were both thinking about the marks of Ross’ tiny razor-sharp teeth on wee Galadriel MacKay’s rosy cheek. And about how pallid he always looked, the waxy colour of the moon too close to the horizon. And how skinny he was, although he ate twice as much as the other children of his age, and before he was weaned had suckled more than Mina had thought it possible for one woman to produce.
“So you think we should ask the doctor about it?” Kevin hauled the over-stuffed bag out of the bin, and cursed as the flimsy black plastic tore.
“I don’t know, Kev. But yeah, maybe?”
October 2025
The babysitter, sixteen-year-old Katie from down the road, was waiting in the living room with her coat in her lap when they got home. She hadn’t drawn the curtains, and they saw her stand up from the sofa and walk to the door as they got out of the car.
“He’s in bed,” said Katie as Mina and Kevin greeted her.
“Is everything OK, Katie?” asked Mina, the weight of the home settling back onto her. She exchanged a quick glance with Kevin, who nodded and slipped down the hallway to Ross’ room.
Katie took a step towards the door, her gaze flicking back to the bedroom.
“I’m really sorry, but I don’t think I can manage next week after all,” she said, the words coming out all in a rush.
Mina felt a cold dread in her stomach. “Katie, what happened?”
“Nothing. I mean — I just have too much homework and stuff just now. Bye, Ms Finlayson.”
Katie ducked awkwardly out the door and started walking fast towards the council houses down the hill.
Mina shut the door wearily and went into the living room, slumping on the sofa without taking her coat off. Kevin came and sat beside her.
“Another one gone?” he asked.
She nodded. A tear formed in the corner of each eye.
“Looks like he ate the whole pizza and the leftover chicken and all the ice-cream in the freezer,” said Kevin.
“Is he asleep?”
“I think so. But he might just be faking.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Kevin reached for the TV remote, but twisted it in his hands like a tennis racket rather than turning the TV on.
“Maybe I should leave the rigs,” he said. “Find work closer to home.”
“What is there?” Mina’s tone was bleak. She shrugged off her coat. “Anyway, at least we’ve got that meeting with the child psychiatrist next week. Let’s wait and see what they say.”
“He’s a strange wee boy, all right.”
“Our Katie was babysitting there last night, and do you know what she told me?”
Kevin stiffened, but didn’t turn round. He was holding a pack of mince, looking for the sell-by date. The chill of the refrigerated supermarket shelves clung to him, a miasma of meat and plastic. The voices were from across the aisle, by the potatoes.
“He eats like a horse, you know, for all he’s so wee and bony. But Katie came home all in a panic last night, and said when she was giving him his supper, he wanted more, and when she said that was enough, it wasn’t that he went into a tantrum or anything like some kids, I think she might have been able to handle that, she’s got enough wee cousins she’s dealt with, it’s that he sat there glaring at her with those big eyes of his, then you know what he did? He started saying all sorts of horrible things, all in Gaelic — and you know Mina and Kevin don’t speak Gaelic, at least not as far as I know. Katie said she didn’t know half the words, but she knew he was saying nasty things. Then he switched to English and called her a stupid cow and took himself off to bed.”
“Well,” said the second voice, and Kevin recognised it as Maggie MacDonald who ran the Post Office, “did you hear about what he did to old Mrs Greig’s cat?”
Kevin pulled his baseball cap further down and edged the trolley forward, his teeth clenched, then slipped round the end of the aisle and out of earshot.
In the carpark, Kevin dumped the bags of groceries into the boot of the Golf, apart from the bottle of Glenfiddich. He tucked that under the front passenger seat, leaning in to make sure it was out of sight.
“Aye aye, keeping that out of view of the wife?”
Kevin straightened up too fast and banged his head on the door frame. A tiny old man was leaning against the decrepit Ford Transit parked next to him. Heathery moth-eaten tweeds, a face wrinkled like a walnut. Kevin frowned, trying to remember where he’d seen him before.
“None of your business,” he snapped.
“That’s fair enough,” agreed the old man. “But maybe I can help you with some of your business.”
“What are you on about?”
“No need to be rude. Just give me a lift back to Lighthill with you and I’ll tell you some things I think you ought to know.”
“You’ve got your own van there,” said Kevin. He slammed the passenger door shut and started round to the driver’s side.
“Oh, that’s no mine, son. I just borrowed it for a whilie.” The bodach pulled the door of the Golf back open and hopped into the passenger seat like a large sparrow.
“Hey!” Kevin darted back and grabbed the door handle, but it had locked with the old man inside. “What the…” He ran round to the driver’s side and got in the car. “How did you just do that?”
“Never mind. Just take me a wee spin home with you, and give me a wee dram of the uisge beatha, and I’ll tell you about your boy.”
Kevin pulled the handbrake and turned off the engine in the layby outside their estate. His face was white.
“I think you’d better get out now,” he said.
The old man tutted reproachfully. “Come now, do you no think your lady wife would like to hear this?” He took another sip from a battered silver hip flask, which he had already replenished from Kevin’s bottle of Glenfiddich.
“No,” said Kevin. “She’s got enough to deal with.” He pushed on the seatbelt button, but the catch refused to release. Kevin pressed down again and again, but the buckle stayed firmly in place. Kevin swore. The bodach chuckled quietly and drank again from the flask. The smell of the whisky mingled with the odour of the old man’s clothes, the funk of bracken and peat smoke and ancient earth. On the passenger side of the car, a sudden gust of wind scraped long fingers of bramble against the window.
“Get out,” hissed Kevin.
A shadow came over Kevin. Someone was outside the driver’s-side window. Kevin tensed, then gasped in pain as he pulled a muscle in his neck turning around too quickly. Fingers tapped on the window.
“You OK, Kev?”
Mina was peering in the window at him, his old puffer jacket thrown on over her leggings and t-shirt.
There was a loud click as Kevin’s seatbelt unlocked. The old bodach hopped out of the passenger side and was already shaking Mina’s hand gravely before Kevin was halfway out of the car.
“I have something to tell you, Mrs. MacGregor,” he was saying. “Something very important.”
“I’m Finlayson, actually,” Mina was saying. “We’re not married. But call me Mina.”
The old man was shaking his head. “Ach, that’s not so good,” he muttered.
“Don’t talk to Mina like that!” Kevin took a step out of the car, but somehow a pioneering tendril of bramble curled forward and tripped him before he could get to Mina and the old man.
“Trobhadaibh,” said the old man. “I think we’d better talk in the house.”
The silence in the living room was thick as fog. Outside, the crunch of tyres on gravel at the neighbours’ house. From somewhere, fiddle music filtered through the walls.
“All right, old man. Tell me where you live and I’ll give you a lift home,” said Kevin. He stood up. His voice was hoarse.
“Wait,” said Mina. “Kev, wait a minute.” She looked at him with eyes wide in desperate appeal. “I know it sounds doolally. But, well, remember my Nanna? She used to tell stories like that. About the changelings.”
The silence curdled like milk. Kevin rubbed his face with the heels of his hands. Mina looked from Kevin to the old bodach to the frosted glass door that led to the hallway and beyond it, to Ross’ room. Outside the window, a hooded crow cawed.
“How would we know for sure?” she asked the old man.
The old man slurped the last of the sugary tea Mina had made him. “Oh, that’s easy enough,” he said. “Your wee balach has been eating you out of house and home, is that right? Not speaking, not sleeping, scaring the other bairns?”
Mina and Kevin both nodded.
“Does he look like either of you?”
Mina and Kevin looked at each other, Mina’s hazel-brown eyes meeting Kevin’s peat-dark ones. They thought of Ross’ eyes, the way they looked noctilucent blue and then shimmered violet, like the soft iridescent wings of the little butterflies up on the moor.
“That’s just recessive genes,” said Kevin after a moment. “I have a bloody B.Sc. Genetics from Glasgow Uni, you know. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“Ach, well,” said the old man. His eyes were crinkled in a smile, though Mina couldn’t tell whether it was amused or malicious. “If you want to be sure, there’s a way.”
“What?” she whispered.
“First, what’s he doing right now?” The old man set down his mug and sat with his hands on his knees, ready to get up.
“He’s… playing with his Lego,” said Mina. “That’s what he was doing all afternoon. I only ran out for a minute when I saw the car, and that’s what he was doing when we got back.”
“We’ll see,” said the bodach. He patted the breast pocket of his ancient tweed jacket then pulled himself to his feet, his knees popping audibly.
“What do you mean?” asked Kevin, edging closer to Mina as if to protect her.
“Lead me to him,” said the old man. “Quietly now. Don’t let him know we’re there. Just to the door of the room.”
Mina took Kevin’s arm and whispered a plea to just see. The three of them crept into the hall, along the beige carpet to Ross’ room, and stood just outside. The music was louder, and Mina realised it was coming from the bedroom. Fiddle music, wild and enchanted, country dance tunes that set their feet involuntarily tapping.
Noiselessly, the old man poked the door open a fraction. Through the slit, they saw Ross spinning and whirling as he played a child-sized fiddle made from some ancient and silvery wood.
Kevin turned white. Mina gasped, and pushed into the room. Ross stopped abruptly, the last notes of the music fading into the Thomas-the-Tank wallpaper, the violin hanging from his left hand and the bow from his right. His big pale eyes flashed amethyst as he turned and caught the sword-blade of low autumn light from the window.
The old man pulled something from his breast pocket, and Mina just caught a glimpse of silvery bark and robin-red berries before Ross screamed.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this story, let me know with a like, comment or share!
If you liked this story, you might also enjoy:
An Account of a Singular Event in the Parish of Ey
This short story was written for my family’s annual Christmas creative writing spree this year. It attempts to borrow the voice of Martin Martin, a Highland scholar of the late 17th and early 18th century, best known for his Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, Circa 1695
Rowan berry icon from https://creazilla.com/media/clipart/59494/red-rowan, public domain.
You've got a great way of connecting words and layout. The images and story work really well together. It's a really nice touch. I love it. And then there are those sentences that pop, like little red spots on a canvas. Nice read. :)
I really enjoyed this!