He staggered grotesquely against the wind, one hand holding his hat on, blinking the water out of his eyes and blundering off the path into the heather, but finally he reached the outcropping. It was lower than he remembered and could give no shelter. Perhaps the side to the sea downhill? He leaned against the rock as he descended; it was steep, and the rain-wet stones were treacherous underfoot.
Below was another level of the outcropping, and between the two a cleft barely wide enough for a man. He lowered himself into it, his feet ankle-deep in the water rushing down it like a drain. It was too shallow to give him any shelter from the wind without stooping almost double, and he slipped and came down on hands and knees.
He could see further without the rain blowing in his eyes; the cleft deepened ahead, the sides almost leaning together like a roof. Once under that, he was out of the rain, back against one side, squatting with his feet in the sluice boiling down the floor, a solid sheet of rain a few inches from his face. Percy settled himself to wait out the fury of the squall; at this rate it couldn’t be long.
The cleft seemed to go farther down; he’d see as soon as the rain let up.
By the time the curtain of rain split into separate streams and trickles, his cramped position had become uncomfortable, and he rose with relief, careless of the drops still coming through the slot above. The cleft did go on, the sides nearly meeting more than once, and then he came to a bend. An interesting place, he never would have discovered it without the storm; he’d passed right by it a minute before.
The turn brought unexpected spaciousness; the cleft opened out, and he was standing on a ledge like a porch looking out at the sea and sky. The hidden way traversed the whole outcropping.
The rain had stopped, the sun was breaking through ragged clouds. Lunch time, Percy decided, and found a half-dry spot. Using his mac as a cushion, he sat with his legs dangling over and ate one of his sandwiches. Curious stone down there on the slope—then his practiced eye picked out an almost hidden line leading up toward his seat. That stone had been put there, perhaps as a marker, and that was a trail connecting with this cleft.
Suddenly excited, he stuffed the sandwich wrappings back into his bag, put on his mac again, and started to descend. The rocks below the ledge made a steep, narrow stair, just possibly by design. The way was overgrown, but Percy, who had cut his teeth on The Old Straight Track and followed out the tributaries of the Icknield Way and Berkshire Ridgeway, felt sure it was a trail. Close up, the stone gave proof; in spite of the lichen on its face he could pick out the “cup and ring” labyrinth laboriously pecked out before history began.
It was even steeper below the stone, and the trail switched back across the slope. Another fifty yards, and Percy had to stop where a slide had taken a nearly vertical bite. As far as he could go today. He’d have to bring a rope tomorrow.
In the bar at the back of the inn after dinner, Harold asked Angus Donnan about the place he’d found. Angus’s usually expressive eyes were still. “I really don’t know of any path like that, Mr. Percy.”
“Perhaps I haven’t described where I found it clearly—”
“Oh no sir. I recognize the place.”
Percy wondered if Angus knew more than he was telling, especially when Angus said something in Gaelic to the two islanders he was serving at the other end of the bar, and both glanced sidewise at Percy. One of them answered, repeating a phrase Angus had used. Percy repeated it to himself so as not to forget it while he finished his whisky. Bealach—that meant “pass” or “gap”—but the rest?
In his room Percy opened his MacAlpine. Even with his new-found understanding of the vagaries of Gaelic orthography, it took Percy ten minutes, and then he wasn’t sure. But that was what it sounded like. Sinister. Baelach a’ du Mairbh—Pass of the Dead.
Perhaps tomorrow Angus Donnan would be more forthcoming.
As he drifted toward sleep the words came into his mind unbidden:
But I hae dream’d a dreary dream
Beyond the isle o’ Skye,
I saw a dead man win a fight
And I thought that man was I.
It had been a Percy who gave Douglas his mortal wound at Otterburn, which made the old ballad special to him.
He burrowed deeper into his bed.
It was steep, but that wasn’t why he was afraid. He couldn’t stop, he would have to follow the path out to the end. He knew the waves were close; he could hear them even if he couldn’t see them. The sun was shining, why was it so dark? He had to stop. If he went on—
At the corner of his eyes he saw something moving, but when he turned that way it was gone. Then on the other side, something thin and beckoning, but looked at directly, it also vanished. It was so dark now the sun seemed a pale and diminished wafer, only a little brighter than the surrounding miasma.
And always his mind screamed to halt, but his feet kept finding their way down.
Percy woke to a bright morning, bright enough for him to shake off the mood of the dream with scarcely a thought. What could he expect, going to sleep with that stanza running through his head?
While he dressed he looked out the bedroom window. There were still mists here and there, but vanishing in the benign fury of the sun.
He breakfasted with gusto; by the time he finished his eggs and bacon and broiled tomatoes and scones the room was empty except for Angus Donnan sitting over at the table by the wall doing his accounts. Percy had been waiting for this moment.
Folding his napkin neatly, he rose from the table and walked over.
Angus looked up. “Yes, Mr. Percy?”
“I want to know about the Bealach a’ du Mairbh,” he said quietly.
Angus glanced about the room, then gestured to the other chair. Finally. “I’m glad you asked. I’ve been telling myself you deserved to know, but I didn’t know how to start.” He stared down at the table for a moment. “You wouldn’t say I was a superstitious man, would you?”
“No,” said Harry.
“And neither are the rest of us. We think about Value Added Tax and the price of beef and mutton, not about seal-maidens or glaistigs or the Nuckelavee—you know about the Nuckelavee?”
Percy grinned. “Enough to know I don’t want to hear a description of it so soon after breakfast.”
Angus grinned fleetingly in return. “You know about the Nuckelavee. Anyway, we leave such things to the summer ladies from the mainland, with their tartans and their folklore societies. You’re interested in the old things too, but not the same way; you’re tactful, even though you’re a sasunnach. So I want you to know everyone takes the Pass of the Dead seriously.”
“What’s down there?”
“Nobody knows.”
“But how can that be?”
“Nobody goes down there, or rather the few who did never came back.”
“You’re joking!”
“I’m not, Harry Percy. It’s been called Bealach a’ du Mairbh as far back as there is memory. Two brothers—MacNeils they were—went down some years after Culloden and were never seen again. A young lad daft for gathering birds’ eggs thought he’d try early in Victoria’s reign. An incomer like yourself—a man named Johnson—went down right after the Hitler War, 1947. And after that there was the slide and no one has tried it since.”
“Aren’t there explanations, stories about the place?”
“To be sure, but moonshine, made-up stories. It’s a mystery.”
“Not even anything about why it’s named the Pass of the Dead?”