These Demented Lands by Alan Warner Read Free Book Online Page A

bracken spreads of tan, ‘I’ve
seen
it girl, I’ve seen it . . . SEEN! I’ve . . . I have touched it,’ he whispered. ‘Wreckage part of alien spaceship.’
    â€˜Right.’ I goes.
    â€˜Brotherhood let me.’
    â€˜Aye?’
    â€˜Aye. AYE, of course aye. I saw what it did. Oh man, Oh MAN, you can not understand, you cannot comprehend it, everything you believed turning to powder in your hands, in these hands. IT.’
    I nodded and made to be walking on up the glen. He walked after me.
    â€˜Brotherhood let me. Brotherhood
likes
me. Mr Brotherhood to you. It was him gave me my horns here. I was withhim in the Land Rover. We’d dugged a big pit and that stag just fell in the hole. Couldnt get the big devil out so Brotherhood flung a noose round his neck, tied it onto the Land Rover and, well, y’know, just drove off. Man, you shoulda seen that porker’s eyes bulge, his neck snapped and he bounced up. Hardy thing was still alive, so Mr Brotherhood ties a rope up to a tree then stretches that stag out with the Land Rover in second gear; puts on the gas and rrrrrip, spine and a balloon of intestines, the head tears off. I was happy with that but Brotherhood kept tethering up bits of the beast, gralloching a leg out the socket then leaping out the Land Rover, striding back and hooking up to the ribcage or whatever, tearing the thing to pieces, blood up his arms, fat bluebottles oozing over everything. I tell you there’s no rules binds that man to the earth.’
    I’d been looking at the ground.
    â€˜Sure there’s nothing else you want sharpened? I’ve done lady nail-files before; yon wee metal ones yous carry as weapons.’
    â€˜Don’t have one.’
    â€˜Hell, there was a boy came stumbling out the bushes back there with bow and arrows, wanted them sharpened when he saw what I was; man, I’m such a dab hand with that wheel I could sharpen your pencil if you had one.’ He walked back to his bike and started dismantling the gear, kicked it off its stand and accelerated up behind so’s I stepped aside into the grass.
    He braked beside me and pointed straight up the mountain to the behind of me. ‘You’d be the quickest trotting over yon and falling down onto the foothills behind; keep a mile thisside of the river and move west, it’ll take you right into The Drome.’
    As I climbed I kept the turning to watch the little bike move down the glen, Knifegrinder not tilting into the corners but taking them weirdly upright, so slow he seemed as to have stopped on the corners but no, he was moving on forwarders then suddenly really sped up on a fast bit of straight.
    I moved into the lashing of mist among the scattered rocks, level sections of tuft grass broadened out then hoiched up onto another flanker. Peewee nests were a-clutter; mummy birds swooped down yelling at me and another did the old hop-along pretending to have a broken wing to lure me away from the nest – tenderly I stepped over the near-invisible tawn circles with the tiny yellow and brown eggs.
    Higher near ridge-crest, the rondel trees of the valley floor clustered closer into mushy clumps of black with bumpy edges. The whole island seemed to slip down through me like a disc, spread out round, saw otherside from up there, distant mountains lifting up as if explosions of steam, cloud pillars like spring blossom, the mountain range I was named after on the opposite side of the Sound that lay with a wet sun along in dazzling shimmers, up to where the water turned angry black – wide wide ocean that goes forever ‘cept maybe for a Pincher Martin rock jutted out the teeth of ocean bed. I stood looking out into that sea that surrounded us.
    Weeks later up in the Observation Lounge it was the thought of our entrapment by water that got me talking about The Rudder Feeling. I was sat with the short skirt on,the tops of my thighs