DARK GHOSTS RISING

Perhaps you share with me, a love of all things Gothic.  Ghost stories, horror novels and comic books, dark and menacing a la Peter Straub, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, James Herbert, Clive Barker--et al.  Maybe, like me, you feel delight when dusting off a copy of “Creepy Tales” or joy when watching “Nosferatu” wreak havoc in monochrome.

If this appeals to you, then you, as I did, must travel to Sutherland, Scotland, especially the north-west corridor which runs from Ullapool to Durness.   A desolate and demented land, bleak with mystery and foreboding.

How I came to be walking a very lonely stretch of road between Scourie and Kinlochbervie on a dramatically dark and starless night is a long story, which should, perhaps, begin with Fancesca Moon.

Francesca, soft, adroit, high-cheekboned, with a tight thin smile angled delicately into the beautiful smooth and classic architecture of her face.  She is a confident and strong woman, like the voice of an Edinburgh advocate, and determined, like a greyhound running down the Powderhall hare, magical and elegant, and star struck canines.  But, she is also a poisonous and slithering, deadly snake when crossed.  Ready to crucify, to carry the colours, to burn the enemy at the stake.

My crime?  I had, innocently flirted with a girl I had known from the faculty of engineering at the University of Glasgow.  Devla, slender and deliciously attractive and green, slid into my arms at a New Year’s Eve ceilidh.  She had smiled at me, wide and wonderful, white bright teeth - a twinkle dancing between our eyes.  Old friends.  Civil engineering chemistry.  Body language oozing mutual magnetic fields.  Though nothing, nothing more.

Our understandings, moi et Ms. Moon, of this very innocent encounter, differed.  So much so that Francesca went ballistic.  Orbito magnifico!  I am dumbfounded.  We collide - head on - lights blazing, like unsuspecting cars.  Afterward she slept on revenge, with my best friend Ray sharing the warmth of her nest.

Urgent decisions are made.  Equations in the great scheme of things are sorted out.  I leave.  The pump inside my chest cracking.  Fragmenting into a million, weeping splinters of emotion.  I would, I resolved, go backpacking, for a couple of weeks at least.  Strike out on my own!  Survivalist.  Go north, from my east coast base in search of a far northern soul, my world strategically packed in my Karrimor Trail rucksack, one man tent precariously strapped to the masthead perched in space behind me.  Shelter from the emotional storm, raging in my head.

Walking away from it all.  Francesca, the treacherous Ray, Devla.  Seeking new frontiers.  Creating distance between me and them.  Crossing bridges with their magnificent angles, sparkling structures and designs.  Reaching out across relentless misery.  Light.  Space.  Torsion.

Sutherland.  Above me the stars, a stark glow, are colluding with the gently falling darkness.  The cosmos - sprawling hyper - folds around me.  The initially soft drizzle blows, increasingly hard, into my face.  A furtively creeping crosswind rises, as night wraps its uneasy shadows across the brokered landscape.  From somewhere above me rushing water, gurgling hurriedly down from the unseen mountains, is somehow refreshingly reassuring.  The sweeping, crashing sound of the sea, I know, is not too distant.

I check my watch, a Rotary, holding the torch aloft at exactly the correct degree of angle for inspection.  Time.  Haunting, enshrined by humankind into a kind of artificial, though nagging, reality.  Demented, like the landscape.  Arbitrary division of all existence into turgid blocks of ever-diminishing life - space.  The distant fanfare for the common soul, and we are all common souls in the end.