Chapter 2 - Stranger to the Storm.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Annie and Alice and Mackie and the duo of Macbanes arrived in Cùldeireadhaonàite - the utter mouthful of a name belonging to that first sprawled-out village the railway had passed through after exiting Inverallen - in fine style with the pickup now running on the rails - the outside set of little rail wheels on the bracket sort of things on the front and back swung down to engage with the widest set of the three rails that composed each side of the line, from the look of it the inside set would likewise engage with the segment Annie had called 'cape gauge' when Alice had asked about the extra rail, and the pickup then drove under the power of its road wheels being more or less on top of the rails. They found a grim air pervading, numerous heavily-armed locals and vehicles - mostly either very home-made-looking sandrail sort of affairs, but including a few bigger four-wheel-drives and a couple of light trucks and all of them totally lacking anything like a numberplate - bristling with weaponry ranging from 'large' through to 'bloody massive' - swarming what passed for a village street, and a Transit-sized pickup with the loadbed full of worried-looking children just departing.

"Annie, there you are!" declared one of these local worthies - Alice was fairly sure it was the man she'd seen driving a van towards Kylestrome the day she'd woken in Grace's living room - as the five of them piled out. "What's the plan?"

Annie, who was already dragging the tarp off of her pickup's loadbed - she'd shed her heels, replacing them with a set of sturdy work boots, in Duchally - nodded to him.

"Murdo," she said, passing Nick the gun barrel; Mackie collected a box of shells and the two of them split it with Brigid hard on their heels. "I've got a pintle for a Vickers gun in the back here - goddamnit this is the third time in as many months a bloody haggis turns up right on the line, I'm going to have to really give Dad a talking-to about stationing wagons or maybe road-rail utes, kitted to mount a haggis gun, along the… there we go," and she went scrambling into the back of the pickup. "I'm going to play lure, I'll need someone to Charlie for me once I've got this thing mounted," and with that she straightened up with what looked to Alice like a random piece of steel pipe; the end of this slotted into something in the loadbed floor with a click, "I'll back the ute down towards the haggis, draw it along the line so you can get a bead on it from up on Willie Mitchell's croft - you'll have to evacuate the village proper, if the guns don't down it before it's through here we don't want it swinging aside. At that point if it's still going you'll need to swing round and get a crack at it from the bluff below the Beaton's house, once it's chasing me I'm not stopping this ute until the bloody haggis is well and truly dead."

She straightened back up with a large machine gun in her hands - it was immediately apparent that this was not a lightweight piece of kit just from the amount of effort it took Annie to pick it up. It attached to the top of the pole with another ratchetting sound, and Annie immediately began fitting a hose to it just under its barrel.

"Aye, sounds workable but should we no be drawing it away from the tracks if it's no downed by the time it's got this far along?" Murdo said.

"No sense in risking any of the houses Murdo, besides you know how tricky it is getting those things to change what they're after once they've charged. Right! I need a gunner. Hey Alice, you familiar with a Vickers gun?" Annie asked, starting pouring what appeared to be water from a jerrycan into the metal shell round the gun's barrel.

"Not even slightly," Alice said.

"Stop fussing Annie, myself'll be Charlie," declared Mackie Romanov, coming stomping over from where he'd gone to lean against of one of the varied vehicles - a lightweight dune buggy sort of affair with what looked vaguely like a stripped-down tail turret from a second world war bomber attached to the back - after dropping his box of ammo off somewhere. He went scrambling into the back of the pickup as Annie screwed a lid onto the top of the barrel jacket; he scooped a belt of ammo out of the loadbed, loaded it into the machine gun with the ease of long practise, and nearly made Alice jump out of her skin by blasting off a burst in the general direction of the sea - the sound was utterly unlike what Alice had courtesy of numerous films expected, instead sounding very much like a string of extremely loud firecrackers going off in precisely-timed close sequence. "Looking good, let's be getting on with it."

"Hold your horses you great teuchter, I'll need to get this thing turned first, it'll only just break twenty in reverse and we're no going to outrun a charging bloody haggis like that," Annie declared. "Alice, you'd better jump on the Macbanes' bonerattler, being down here could be bloody dangerous in about ten minutes time," and Alice was about to ask where to look when she spotted Ian Macbane standing up in the back of the vehicle next to the one Mackie had been leaning against.

Heading over, she found it was some variant on the short-wheelbase Land Rover theme with no roof, windscreen, or doors and a preposterously massive gun mounted in the loadbed. Nat was just finishing locking the newly-acquired barrel down into said massive gun, Nick was now in the driver's seat, and most of the rest of the Macbane family were crammed in all over, all with the exception of Nick holding large guns.

"Welcome aboard, had fun in Inverness?" Ian asked as Alice scrambled up onto the vehicle - failing to find anywhere else to sit, she ended up on the bonnet with her legs hanging over the dashboard between driver's seat and front passenger seat.

"Uh, hey," she said, then nodded at Nat's giant gun as Nat nodded his satisfaction and started feeding shells into the mechanism. "What's with the, um, anti-aircraft gun?"

"I take it," said Ian, "You've never seen a wild haggis."

"Imagine a cross between the ugliest rhinoceros you've ever seen in your life and a bloody furious bulldozer," said Nick.

"Sandy - you've no met him, that's himself in the spotter heli - reckons this one's the biggest bull he's seen since the one that killed Nicolai and Murdo McMurdo the Elder," Ian said. "We'll have to wait till we've got it on the scales to be sure, but he estimates it at south of twenty tons."

"Big bastard of a one aye dad," said Nat with a frown, and he dragged his giant gun's cocking handle back, causing a mechanical noise roughly as quiet as someone hitting an engine block with a lump hammer. "It'll take a lot of bringing down."

-/-/-/-/-/-

The pickup having been turned, Annie (with Mackie camping out in the back) went reversing off up the tracks towards Inverallen as the other vehicles rolled further into the village, uphill more or less parallel to the railway and up someone's dirt-track driveway.

This brought them to a turning circle in a barnyard with a concerned looking family hanging around and all of them clutching guns, and Murdo McMurdo having spoken to them - they piled into a rusty old car that turned out to be absent its rear numberplate and took off in the direction the haggis hunters had come from - got the vehicles with the heavy guns onboard, including the Macbanes, lined up in the field behind the house and barns, from which there was a beautiful view along the curve of the railway. In the distance, perhaps half a mile away, the derailed train could be seen, as could something very large smashing around in the head of the train and throwing wreckage far up into the air.

"Jesus, Sandy was no joking, what a brute," said Elf, peering through her telescope.

"Can I have a look?" Alice asked. Elf made a surprised grant, then nodded and wordlessly handed over the telescope.

This was a very nautical-looking brass affair near to the length of Alice's arm, and on looking through she quickly discovered it contained a crosshair and some sort of a digital rangefinder, reading out the range to whatever it was pointing at in yards and adjusting itself to focus. It didn't take moments to find the train - this turned out to be empties of the same sort of wagon Kathy McLennan had been hauling from Inverallen that morning. The lead dozen or so wagons were piled up any old which what way, and just as Alice found the leading edge of the wreckage one of the wagons was flipped bodily into the air - it went cartwheeling down into the sea, lifting an enormous splash on impact - and suddenly she knew exactly what the huge skulls on the gable of the Inverallen pub had come from as she found herself looking a bull haggis in the eye.

It was by a good margin the biggest animal she'd ever seen in her life, even counting the elephants in London Zoo.

She could but compare it to an overgrown rhino that'd fallen out the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down - there were an assortment of horns and carbuncles sticking out all over its face, and the whole forwards half of it was a massive slab of knotted muscle, almost cartoonishly bullnecked and brawny in comparison to its hindquarters, save for the equally exaggerated-looking set of what had to be testicles.

It didn't, thankfully, notice her, instead swinging its head into the nearest wagon like some sort of wrecking ball, lifting the vehicle - a full-sized railway wagon - clean off its wheels and flipping it on its side. The monster didn't even act like it'd noticed the blow, instead charging headlong into the centre of the freshly-flipped wagon, slamming it back into the bank - you could just about feel the power of the blow, even far enough apart impact and the sound reaching you were separated by a couple of seconds. Suddenly the guns didn't seem nearly so over-the-top: this, then, was what had destroyed the train she'd been found aboard.

Elf removed the telescope from her hands, caught her expression, and gave her a knowing smile.

From where Annie had in the interim backed her pickup down most of the way to the beast, another string of firecrackers went and Alice realised that Mackie had just opened up on the monster down there with the machine gun in the back of the pickup as a ferocious animal bellow answered.

It sounded for all the world like a really, really big dog trying to say, GRONK.

A burst of smoke lifted from the pickup's exhaust - Annie had to have stepped on the gas.

"Here," Ian said, pressing a very bulky set of headphones into Alice's hands. "Ear defenders - things'll be getting a mite loud around here in a moment. And get down off the dashboard, your head'll be right next to the muzzle blast when Nat fires if you stay up there."

Alice nodded, and abruptly found herself pulled into Elf's lap. She put the ear defenders on, again nearly jumping out of her skin when the moment they were on her Murdo McMurdo's icy-cool calm voice cut in, declaring, "-by turns, spacing two seconds, Donnie leading to the right."

Elf handed the telescope back to Alice, leaned to root round in the back, and came up holding a large gun with a banana-shaped magazine sticking out of the top.

Alice got the scope focused on the pickup and the charging monster, Murdo reciting, "Steady, steady, steady, steady," in her ears.

She could make out a trail of cartridge cases spitting out of Mackie's machine gun - the haggis's face was getting even uglier as bullets impacted it, but they seemed only to be pissing it off even more and more.

Then, the moment there was a vertical retaining wall between them and it Murdo McMurdo said, "Fire," and a percussive thump sounded to her left half a heartbeat before a gaping wound appeared in the monster's shoulder - cartridge cases went skittering across the bonnet from the weapon in Elf's hands, and Alice glanced to the left just in time to see a flash of fire stab out with another bonerattling thump from the big gun on the vehicle to the Macbanes' left - she got her eye back onto the telescope right before the Land-Rover bounced on its suspension as Nat fired his giant gun with a report felt as much as heard, and a shell casing flickered past the front of the telescope before adding another dent to the bonnet. A massive, horrible, wound appeared in the haggis's face - Alice could make out teeth that must have been bigger than her thumb in among the blood and torn flesh - but it only served to make the living avalanche angrier. More shots slammed out from the vehicles to the right of the Macbanes - each huge gun firing two seconds after the last - more wounds opening on the monster below - she lowered the scope again and half a heartbeat later the Land-Rover bounced again with another dull roar, and a second giant cartridge case went whirling overhead, bounced off the bonnet, and vanished over the front.

The haggis dropped to its knees on the tracks almost directly below the croft.

"Cease fire," said Murdo McMurdo. "Macbanes have the kill. Nat, finish it."

The Land-Rover bounced a third time, another giant cartridge case hit the bonnet, and the monster spasmed and went still.

Nick, on his way out of the driver's seat, grabbed a very large petrol-powered hand drill out of a rack on the front right wheelarch - he went down the field at a dead sprint, pulling at the drill's ripcord as he went, jumped off the little short cutting wall, went up the monster's side like it was made out of ladders, and started running the drill into it just about the line of the base of its spine - Murdo McMurdo himself was down there too with a huge chainsaw - this he took to the monster's neck, making haste to behead it.

Their bloody work done, the two of them climbed down from the now headless corpse, turned their tools off, and went to climb back up to the vehicles. Elf nudged Alice, said something, laughed, and lifted one side of Alice's ear defenders.

"I said you can take those off now," she said.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Even dead and full of bullet holes and over a dozen shell craters - two of them big enough Alice would be able to fit her head in there - and with its head cut off, the bull haggis still looked like a monster to Alice, and the brief explanation from Nat concerning all that with the drill and the saw hadn't helped; what kind of animal could have that size and number of holes in it and still be prone to thrashing about or flat-out getting up for another go until it'd been beheaded and had the nerve cluster at the bottom of its spine drilled out?

Up close it was even bigger than it'd looked through the telescope - down at track level giving a hand getting lift straps round the carcass the thing was taller to the shoulder than a big man, even with it laying dead on the ground.

Half an hour after the kill shot, a train arrived from Duchally direction, led by what Annie called the 'big hook' and Alice personally decided to think of as a breakdown crane - a very large rail-based crane, constructed to ride on the narrower section of the tracks - behind this was coupled a standard-gauge flat wagon that was fitted with two sets of offset couplings on one end, allowing it to be coupled to the narrow-gauge crane; when Alice asked, Annie called this thing a 'match wagon'.

From the locomotive - the same mustard-yellow monster driven by Kathy McLennan - back was a mixture of wagons - assorted nondescript box vans, a string of flats with new rails laid along them or pieces of construction machinery parked upon them, an open heaped with sleepers, and three beat-up old coaches that disgorged a small army of burly men in grease stained overalls who immediately flooded down the tracks past the dead haggis and made a beeline for the mess of derailed wagons and damaged track.

The carcass was quickly lifted, using the 'big hook', onto the back of a lump of rust that had at one time been a three-axle truck. It was heavy enough to visibly crouch the vehicle's suspension, and the driver - who everyone was calling Murdo-Alec - who had been surveying a laptop from which cables were strung back into the cab and into some hardware down the back of the seat, nodded firmly.

"Aye," he said, "That's one hell of a bull there, dead on twenty-two tons even after the amount of its chest that's been shot away. That'll be the second biggest since Old Knock. That's one hell of a bull right there, aye."

"Does this happen often?" Alice asked Nick.

Nick nodded.

"Aye," he said. "Normally it's about one or two a week, apart from the rutting season - that's most of December and through into mid February. That time of the year we're lucky to go two days without one turning up." He shook his head. "Thank Christ for heavy guns mounted on all-terrain utes, that'd be all I can say. There's about a dozen people die stopping those beasts every year across Scotland even today - go back a century and a half and they were using horse-drawn muzzle-loading guns for this business, I can't even start to imagine how bad that must've got."

"1872 was the worst year of them all," said Ian. "Five communities were wiped out that year and a dozen more damaged, thousands dead or maimed, we'll most likely never know the true scale of it, the town centres of Fort William, Elgin, and Perth were devastated and four passenger trains were destroyed between Inverness and Perth, two of them with no survivors - that was the year that shamed the government into beginning the network of hunt teams with privately owned guns that exists today. Before then the beasts were left to do as they would for the three days to a week that it took to get the army in with the guns."

"I'm surprised it's not all done from helicopters," Alice said.

"Aye," Ian said. "It's been tried but after one of the big landlords, a man by the name of Sir Adrian Blenheim-Parker-McMudd,"

"...McMudd?" Alice asked.

"Aye, McMudd, himself was trying to use it as a pretext to disarm communities on Orkney to make them possible to evict and there was a series of 'terrible accidents' with helicopters getting 'accidentally' shot down and after a while they were deciding to let sleeping dogs be."

-/-/-/-/-/-

Tuesday night after telling herself off for pretending that the small hand-drawn marks Nick had made using a biro on the bedframe weren't there Alice slept in a way Nick would later call 'the full-on stone-age pillow, knocked her cold the moment her head hit it'; that first real continuous night of sleep without coming crashing awake from a nightmare every twenty minutes was an absolute godsend.

It did, however, leave her waking up at lunchtime, kiboshing her half-formed plan to go out on the boat with the Macbanes that day; by the time Alice was upright and dressed they'd already been at sea for nearly four hours and were, from the radio chatter, working creels at the north end of Eilen Shea - the northenmost of the pair of good-sized uninhabited islands in the mouth of Loch Allen, which had been pointed out to Alice along with its neighbour, the smaller and flatter Eilen na Uilbheast, on Sunday then again on Monday and while Tuesday had bucked the trend she wouldn't be surprised to have them pointed out to her today and from the boat on Thursday too.

In the event having eaten lunch (or for Alice, breakfast) composed of sandwiches and a light salad of fresh greens from the Macbane's vegetable patch, Alice once again found herself taking an amble out of the house with Brigid in search of something to do, and once again this resulted in taking a gander up the road to the Romaov home, where they found Mackie ensconced in a living room full of half-packed luggage (he had a preposterous quantity of crap he intended to take to college with him) and looking a little fraught, and he instantly jumped at the idea of a spree, this time with the destination they arrived at the northernmost end of the Sutherland Railway at Duirnish on Scotland's north coast after Brigid pointed out that it had been one of the random something to do ideas thrown out during their brainstorming session at the pub two evenings before, thus they wound up going to catch the two o'clock northbound train, which Mackie explained wasn't on the usual timetable as the line south out of Inverallen was still blocked despite the track gang working round the clock to get it open, resulting in a mob of passengers (some with livestock) who had taken a makeshift bus service (a funny name for beat-up old lorries) from the far side of the break in the line to the station in Inverallen; the lorries, a line of old army Bedfords of varying ages and states of decay, were waiting to take passengers south as the trio arrived at the station.

They'd been waiting about ten minutes when the train - an oddly missmatched string of four coaches of visibly wildly varying age, each with a little diesel engine clattering away inside of it - drew into the opposite platform, disgorged a swarm of people (some of them with livestock) who immediately went flooding over to line of lorries; the train continued south across the level crossing, sat idling for a minute after it had exited the loop in the track, then backed up into the platform on which the crowd was waiting and everyone went pouring in and after five chaotic minutes of loading Alice found herself sitting right near to the front of the train in environs quite unlike what she was familiar with from back in London.

The seats were simple canvas-covered benches with low backs and enough room for two (or three if they were friendly) people each side of the central aisle, there was wood everywhere, and from their position in the second to front row you could see right out the front of the train as there was nothing between driver's cab and passengers but glass and a knee-high wooden wall, even the door in the middle of it (which was standing wide open) was mostly glass, and everything was light, open, and airy. The whole thing was age-stained, banged-up, and antiquated.

Alice found herself sandwiched between Brigid (who insisted on getting the window seat) and a grinning Mackie; in front of them was a weatherbeaten old codger with a Border collie and a large string bag full of rather bemused ducks, behind them were two middle-aged men with a large crate full of screwtop jam-jars full of an amber-brown liquid and surrounded by the unmistakable scent of strong drink, across the aisle from them taking up three rows of seats was an entire family, parents, six children, another collie dog, and a little old lady who from the distinct familial resemblance to all six kids had to be one parent or the other's mum, someone further back had a scraggly sheep in tow, and they'd hardly sat down and the driver was still discussing something in Gaelic with someone who appeared to be the stationmaster when the old boy with the ducks started a conversation in Gaelic round Alice with one of the men sitting behind her, the only word of which she could make out was 'dram'; their discussion concluded the old boy with the ducks produced a crumpled banknote marked as being worth five shillings and waved it at Alice while saying something that concluded with 'Dougie'.

"Alice doesn't speak any Gaelic," said Brigid, getting a surprised grunt out of the old boy, who repeated himself in English;

"Pass this tae Dougie there behind ye, please lass," he said.

"Oh, sure," and Alice passed the banknote over her shoulder; there was a dry chuckle and one of the jars, which she immediately smelt had to contain whisky, was pressed into her hand.

"Pass that tae Alec there, thanks lass," the man seated behind her said, and she did so; he carried on, "Better nae gie any of that tae yer ducks, Alec, it'll have 'em oot that bag and awa just like that."

"Oh aye?" said the old boy with the ducks; he took the jar's lid off, took a sip, smacked his lips, took a large gulp, gave his dog a sip, and screwed the lid back on with a pleased nod and said, "Aye, that's a bloody fine batch there Dougie, a bloody fine batch," punctuated by the stationmaster, who had headed back making sure doors were closed, blowing his whistle.

"Aye," said the other man seated behind Alice as the signal dropped, the bell in the cab dinged, and the train creaked into motion, "The new still's a wee beauty and Dougie's got the malt and the mix of peats for the smoke just right, you'd hae tae pay a pretty penny tae be getting a better dram than that."

The driver picked up what looked like one half of an old telephone handset complete with the curly cable, which immediately proved itself to be the train's PA as he said, "Will you be giving us a wee tune there then Billy?"

"I dinnae ken," came a shout from further down the coach. "Will you be giving us a wee dram there then Malcolm?" and that got a roar of laughter from seemingly the entire train; the driver chuckled, fished a banknote out of his coat, and passed it back to the men with the jars of moonshine via the old codger with the ducks and Alice; the man seated behind her passed a jar over his shoulder and the requested dram thus travelled back down the train to someone sitting halfway along the coach; there was a few moments of anticipatory silence then a set of bagpipes skirled into life from back there, and after a bit of hooting, hollering, foot-stomping, and clapping everyone (bar Alice and a few small children) in the entire coach suddenly burst into song, subjecting Alice to a sudden unexpected rather ragged but very enthusiastic multi-voiced rendition of 'Flower of Scotland', which ended a couple of miles up the track in a round of applause and hoots of laughter, whereupon someone joined in with a piano accordion for a fast jig of some sort; all in it resulted in a very musical ride north out of Inverallen and across the moors to the next stop in Kylestrome; at Kylestrome a newly-boarded guitarist joined the impromptu music performance and the old boy with the bag of ducks got off and was replaced by a young couple who proceeded to demonstrate that they were very much in love and didn't care what anyone thought about that as the train rattled off across the bridge and past that military base.

The entire ride north passed in a similar vein; the two men with the crate of moonshine were the only members of the rotating cast of crofters, local worthies, chancers, yokels, musicians, and livestock who stuck with the train all the way north to Duirnish, by which time they'd sold about half their whisky, and they alone stayed aboard the train (getting off, walking down to the south end of the train, and getting back on at what would be the front for the return journey) as Alice, Brigid and Mackie came to the conclusion that seeing what sights there were to be seen here was the right plan.

They spent an hour wandering around town and harbour, before taking a very similar ride with a different cast and a different rotating bunch of musicians all the way back to Inverallen; all in all, as they walked down to Inverallen harbour for a pint before heading for home, Alice felt it had indeed been a pleasant way to spend the day.

The only real difference, Brigid later said, between the way Alice slept that night and a log is that logs don't snore. She actually managed to wake up at the right sort of time on Thursday and was thus able to accompany the Macbane siblings in the weekly ritual of shipping the catch.

The morning was spent actually on the boat, removing crab and lobster and crayfish from keepers, most of which were hung from a rickety floating wood-and-plastic frame sort of affair in an inlet on the far side of Inverallen bay from the harbour that Elf said was an old fishfarm cage, and sorting the contents into plastic fishboxes with the occasional crab that had gone limp getting chucked over the side; as each fishbox was deemed full it was loaded into what Elf called the vivier tank - a big tub full of seawater built into the boat's hold. It was all done first with crab, then lobster - which Alice was briefly startled to learn are a beautiful deep blue when alive - and finally a dozen crayfish; these bizarre red-brown spike-covered things a bit like a lobster as big as a big man's forearm with these strange hook sort of affairs instead of claws, which Alice was very surprised to find make the strangest creaking noise almost like a badly-oiled door hinge when you annoy them. They were far from the only boat at it in the bay that morning - Alice counted a dozen other fishing boats of a wild range of sizes, layouts, and colours engaging in just the same task and all of them rushing to be the first back to the pier.

Once the entire catch was aboard and they'd found a place in the queue of boats and tied up at the pier there was a couple of railway box vans each with a little petrol engine clattering away underneath its chassis spotted on the pier, and four men who industriously checked all the crabs were lively overseen by an elderly gentleman with a set of scales; this chap, who apparently didn't speak a word of English, took the entire process of weighing each box of crabs (or individual lobster or crayfish) very seriously, carefully writing a list of weights on a ring-bound notepad; each box was loaded into big tanks of water inside one of the box vans once it had been weighed and checked, and finally on Elf being presented with the completed list of everything they'd handed over they took the Vigra back to her mooring and went on shore and up to the buyer's office - a funny name for one of the houses on the waterfront - to settle up, and Elf came back out with a big grin and a thick wad of paper money, which she sorted into six piles as soon as she was back in the van; one for herself, one for Nick, one for Neil, one for Mackie, one for the boat, and one for the housekeeping.

All that done they ducked into the pub for a late lunch then Alice accompanied Nick, Nat and Brigid into the house next door, the one Alice had seen an old woman with shopping bags exiting, which turned out to be firstly the village shop and secondly run by Mackie's mother - a small and rather weatherbeaten-looking dark-haired woman with a look of sorrow deeply etched into her face by the lines around her eyes - who was when they entered in the middle of a blazing argument down the phone with someone, from the contents of which Alice understood that a shipment of goods for the shop had been sent in the form of single packets rather than boxes of said packets, about which Mackie's mum was quite put out.

With snacks and bottles of small beer in tow they headed back to the van and off back up the hill to the croft, stopping past Mackie's home to drop off his share of the takings.

Alice spent the rest of the day wandering around the croft with Nat and Brigid and being shown assorted dens, trees that were 'good climbers', places the two children felt were good to play in or otherwise noteworthy, and the odd derelict vehicle, while back at the house Nick was actually getting started on packing for college and demonstrating his entire vocabulary of swearing mostly due to the sheer quantity of stuff he and Mackie seemingly intended to take with them, it was almost to the point you had to wonder if the two young men were getting set to move house.

Most of Friday, after the third night in a row without nightmares (by which time Alice was starting to think Nick had not in fact been messing with her and if so just what the hell was this stuff capable of doing) became a sort of expansion of Thursday afternoon with Alice wandering around the village with Brigid, Nat, and Mackie and being shown the sights - places where notable events in the village's history had taken place (such as the rusted-out wreck of the car belonging to the pair of thugs who'd tried to kidnap Annie, which had been pushed off the road down the hillside below) or local places of note (such as the so-called whisky cave, in the cliffs below the western half of the village, containing the village still and the two gentlemen who had been selling moonshine aboard the train on Wednesday) before adjourning to the west end of the Macbane croft to, and this Alice was a little dubious about to begin with, play with guns; it took a while for the enthusiastic trio to persuade Alice to have a go with one of the guns, a short black nasty-looking fully-automatic thing referred to as a Welgun, but she ended up having fun despite the sheer level of noise involved and the simple fact that when all is said and done a sub-machine gun is a vicious bit of machinery.

Once the rest of the clan got home - Nick and Neil and Elf from sea, Ian by road - they all piled into a banged-up old minibus that had been parked between the barns and set out on the road south on their way to the pub gig Elf had mentioned on Monday.

It wasn't a short drive, but the accommodation in the old minibus was a lot more sociable than in Annie's wreck of a pickup; the entire route was on winding badly-maintained single-track roads often jammed into gullies or clinging to cliffs or picking its way through peat bogs, and Alice had to admit that it was all very scenic indeed; the whole ride was spent in a long drawn out and often ludicrous discussion of everything from fishing to random weirdness Ian had seen up the road earlier in the day to the chaotic internal politics of a crofting community.

Ullapool proved to be a small fishing town sprawled along the northern shore of a long sea inlet that Ian called Loch Broom, and the pub in which the gig was to be held was right across the road from the top of the (large, wide) pier. The place was jumping - there were ramshackle old cars and vans parked along both sides of the street, the pier was full of parked vehicles, people everywhere and numerous overexcited small children and sheepdogs running around and getting in scraps - a train of very similar character to the one Alice had ridden up to Duirnish pulled in (the tracks ran along the seafront wall the whole length of the harbour area) as Ian was finding somewhere to park on the pier and started disgorging a swarm of passengers right there into the road in front of the venue, adding to the chaos.

The pub itself was constructed with half the east-facing wall made of doors that could be folded and opened to turn the forecourt into a continuous space with the bar and its inbuilt stage; the staff had hauled most of the tables and benches out to fill one half of the road and fenced it off from the traffic with what Nick said, when Alice asked, was portable livestock fencing, simply to allow entry of some form to the swarms of people who'd shown up for the gig, and before the band even got started on their set the pub was already doing a roaring trade, both in booze and in a variety of drugs half of which Alice had never heard of, and Nick purchased and got as high as a kite on an unnecessarily large spliff. When the band - a three piece, guitarist/singer, piano accordion, and drums - came on they proved to play a wild blend of Celtic folk and rock music, and the singer/guiarist - a charmingly ugly jug-eared chap with a lot of curly hair and a Western Isles accent as thick as two-week-old porridge - proved adept at both of his arts regardless of spending the entire gig lounging in a beat-up old armchair in the middle of the stage and steadily drinking.

As the evening wore on the music got faster and faster, the audience wilder and wilder, and everyone in attendance steadily got drunker and drunker, and in the end it all descended into a pleasantly drunken haze from which Alice first awoke at about four in the morning to find herself laying across one of the bench seats in the Macbane's minibus as Ian decided he'd sobered up enough for a slow and careful drive back to Inverallen, during the first ten miles of which they passed two dozen vehicles that had gone off the road into ditches under the control of people who apparently didn't have that much sense.

She was lulled back to sleep by the motion and the grumble of the engine long before they got back to the shores of Loch Allen, and woke up back in her bed in the Macbane's house a little after eleven o'clock on Saturday morning.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Wandering downstairs in search of water and something to eat and being vaguely surprised she didn't appear to be hung over, Alice found the house empty; she got herself a couple of sandwiches then went to look for any signs of life, finally finding Nick and Brigid finishing putting Nick's van's engine back in outside the middle barn.

"Morning," she said, having paused to shoo a few sheep away.

"Is it still morning?" Brigid asked, coming up from where she'd been carefully tightening some sort of hose connector in there.

Nick, who had been attaching another hose at the other side of the front of the van, glanced at his watch and nodded. "Aye, it's just coming up for twenty past eleven."

"Huh - this isn't taking so long as I thought it would," Brigid said, giving the engine a pat.

"Well in all fairness I'd done most of it Thursday while yourself was wandering around the croft with Alice," said Nick. "Talking of which there's nae much left to do here, just got to finish hooking her oil lines back up, fill her with oil and coolant, then get the battery in. I think there's just enough time to check she's running nicely and there's nae leaks, then get a bite to eat, then I was thinking we might as well take a wee turn down the railway and surprise Annie since they got the line back open this morning, how's that grab you Alice?"

"Sounds good to me," said Alice.

She hung about and watched the dynamic duo finish putting the van's engine back together - like Nick had said, this involved attaching a few more hoses, pouring in oil and radiator coolant, Bridgid crawling around underneath looking for anything that dripped, then firing it up and keeping a sharp eye on the temperature until the engine was nicely warmed up; that done they got more sandwiches and ate them while walking up to the railway station, where an idling southbound freight train was conveniently waiting.

This was on the narrower set of rails, was piloted by a short and portly greying-haired chap in a very dirty orange boiler suit and a much younger, much taller, much thinner, much hairier similarly-dressed chap, consisted of empty flat wagons, and the locomotive at its head - the same type as Alice had seen entering the military base the previous Sunday - was much smaller than the behemoth that headed the ore trains; it looked much more like the sort of a locomotive Alice was used to seeing in London in a vaguely antiquated sort of a way, with a curved roof, a cab at each end, little bonnet sort of affairs sticking out in front of the cabs, and a windscreen formed from three curved segments that gave the whole thing a strangely glum-looking appearance; on closer investigation Alice quickly realised that it was in fact a pair of small single-cabbed locomotives couple together back to back.

Once the northbound train (a passenger working similar to the one Alice had ridden north to Duirnish) had arrived they got on their way, following the same route as they had on the ore train and with identical audible alerts from the controls and shop-talk between driver and secondman, but this time instead of getting off at Duchally they stayed aboard all the way along the south shore of the loch not far from the road they'd driven the previous evening.

The land along Loch Allen's southern shore was far more mountainous than it was on the north shore, with the line cohabiting with a road right on the shoreline for much of the distance, the two parting company only for the couple of tiny villages that were jammed into those few places where the land widened out a little - the tracks turned away from the shore as the land opened out, and soon they were heading almost due south into the rolling hills to the south of the loch, and it was here, in a broad glen a couple of miles from the sea, that they came to the sleepy town of Stronecrubie and with it the home of the Kelly family and the rail yards that formed the heart of the Sutherland Railway.

The rail yards - a sea of tracks, sheds, and odd structures of no purpose Alice could discern - sprawled out over a few hundred acres of land just above and to the east of the town itself - from the train approaching the yards you could see the rooftops of almost the whole town, rows of grey-roofed cottages and a grandly overbuilt church sprawled out along the side of the tracks for perhaps a mile and a half.

The station itself was completely surrounded by rail yards - it took Alice a moment to realise that there was in fact road and pedestrian access to the station forecourt through what was either a short tunnel or a very wide bridge, crossed by a dozen stretches of track and almost invisible from above, from the platforms included. Nick and Alice and Brigid were walking northwards along the platform, back the way that the train had come, when the engine revved up and the train carried on southwards towards Ullapool and beyond it first Gairloch then Lochcarron then Kyle of Lochalsh and, ultimately, the far end of the Sutherland Railway at Mallaig many miles to their south - a moment later another train, this one another passenger working, revved its engines up and clattered past them on its way north, and as the two rattled into the distance all became startlingly quiet, the silence broken only by the distant barking of a collie and the wind.

"Wow," Alice said, now that she could hear herself think. "It's all gone quiet."

Nick burst out laughing.

"Aye," he said.

Here was the northernmost end of the platforms, where they extended into a ramp down to track level - this led onto wide level crossings over the tracks both sides of them - the one towards the tracks on the side towards the town itself was closed off with a gate fastened with a padlock and a chain and marked with a sign reading DANGER. THRU TRACKS. and below that in smaller letters TRAINS APPROACH AT SPEED WITHOUT WARNING. while the one heading east away from the town was totally ungated and unmarked, and just went straight across the yards to the line of buildings the other side; it was this direction that Nick headed, pausing only to peer up the line in both directions.

The yards were an absolute tangle of wildly varied wagons, coaches, and locomotives of every conceivable shape and size and a dizzying array of colours, from three of the mustard-yellow giants of the sort that Alice had got a lift aboard on her first visit to Inverness to more mismatched groups of motorised coaches to the breakdown train she'd seen after the haggis rampage. Maybe three quarters of everything ran on the narrower of the two gauges, and only about a fifth of the track was either standard or dual gauge, with everything else narrow. The crossing led directly in through the open side of a shed - there were a dozen battered old steam locomotives, all but one of them narrow gauge, stabled in there - comically, the solitary standard-gauge example was physically the smallest of the lot - along with a couple of road-rail vehicles (a backhoe and a pickup similar to what Annie's wreck had once been) a rail-adapted minibus and a couple of similarly wretched beat-up old diesels. There were spare parts of varying stages of rustiness littered everywhere, and two men in grubby blue overalls were oiling parts on the least beat-up steamer.

Nick and Brigid led Alice up the walkway of sorts along the western side of the shed - this was easily wide enough to drive a car along - and out the shed's northern end. This faced onto a turntable (dual gauge, of a slightly different arrangement to the rest - instead of three rails there were four with the two widths sharing a common centreline) with a large water tank and coaling stand beyond it - the road turned and crossed the other tracks that emerged from the shed at a funny angle, then turned again to travel due north again once it was clear of the tracks; it climbed sharply uphill for a couple of hundred feet immediately that it was clear of the tracks, arriving at a broad tarmacked forecourt in front of a large, modern-looking, house with a row of half a dozen garages, all backing onto the wooded slopes of the hill east of the town - the view out over rail yards and town was excellent, you could see the entire place laid out below almost like a map. The door of one of the garages was open, with Annie's pickup visible inside and the lower half of Annie, clad in a most un-Annielike boiler suit, visible sticking out of where she was doing something or other that involved a lot of swearing inside the engine bay.

"Morning, Annie," Nick shouted, and there was a loud thump followed by a lot more swearing as Annie straightened up and hit her head on the underside of the pickup's bonnet.

She emerged, splattered with grease and her hand on her head and still swearing the air blue in between greeting the two of them a good morning.

"Morning Nick, bloody hell, ow, fuck, oh, morning Alice, Brigid. Fucking ow! Bloody hell," she said.

"Jesus, caught yourself a right wallop there, you okay?" Nick checked.

"Nothing terminal Nick, fuck, god-dammit I caught myself a proper ringer there, bastard," Annie declared. "Ah, fuck it, that bloody ignition barrel wasn't having it anyway, fuck."

"Having another crack at the electrics aye?" Nick asked. "The offer to sort the bloody ignition circuit out for you still stands,"

"And the reply that I'm going to get the bastard to work properly myself if it's the last thing I do still stands, but thanks anyway," Annie said with a sigh, making an attempt at cleaning the grease off her hands with an old rag. "Anyways, so morning, what brings yourselves over to Stronecrubie today then?"

"Eh, wasn't much doing over in Inverallen so we thought we'd drop past," said Nick.

"It's part of a much-appreciated plot to keep me busy enough not to dwell on having been blown up," Alice added.

"Ah right," Annie said with a nod, and thoughtfully scratched her chin. "Well so I guess we can get a bit of an early lunch and - hey Nick, there's been some problems with the pumps up at the mine, something with the governor on the main pumping engine, it's been surging since some point Thursday night so we've been keeping the mine pumped out with the backup engine over the weekend, chance of coming up and seeing if we can figure out what's up with it? I still haven't got your touch with engines. And Alice, the mine's on high ground up the back of Ben Daor, there's a fantastic view out to the west and southwest from there if you fancy coming along for a look-see. You're welcome to come on up too, Brigid, of course."

"Sure, why not," said Alice with a nod as they turned towards the house.

"Where's everyone else?" Brigid asked as they trooped inside - the welly-infested front porch led onto a wine-red-carpeted hallway lined with paintings and old photographs.

"Oh, Dad's at some sort of tech conference in Bombay," Annie said as Nick was still kicking his boots off. "Something about heavy lift reactors or something, I didn't take much notice. Mum went along to visit Aunt Lizzie and since they're still going to be there next week they took Claire, which is great since it means I get a Claire-free week at home before I head for college."

She headed for the stairs, adding, "You might as well head straight through to the parlour, I'm going to get cleaned up and out of these sodding trousers, I'll be back down in a minute."

"Okay," said Nick, turning through the first door on the left. Alice and Brigid followed him.

It immediately became obvious that Annie had got her taste for things old and storied from her parents; the only fittings in the entire room that looked any newer than Victorian were the lights and a couple of neatly-concealed radiators - even the carpet was visibly an antique. A group of leather-and-wood armchairs surrounding a tasteful tea-table occupied the centre of the room - a laptop and some papers were laying on the tea-table, there was an ancient drinks cabinet chock full of expensive-looking spirits in the corner, and an understated fireplace (complete with fire crackling merrily away in the hearth) formed the sole remaining item you could actually call furniture. As understated as the furniture and decorating was, the contents of the walls were anything but; the whole room was lined, so much so you could barely see the walls, with an eclectic mix of medieval weapons, landscape paintings, old photographs of either railwayania or livestock, and a mix of trophies and what appeared to be award certificates.

"I take it Annie doesn't much like this Claire person - her sister, right?" Alice said.

"Aye and I can't say I blame her," Nick said with a nod. "I mean it's no like Claire can help it, she had her umbelical cord wrapped round her neck in the womb and it pretty much strangled her on the way out and she'll never be all there upstairs and when all is said and done let me tell you she gets downright fucking wearing very quickly, she's constantly full of questions and never seems to bloody understand the answers. It probably doesn't help that Annie's pretty much assigned herself as Claire's chaperone, but then that's our Annie for you, she's capable of turning anything she does into work. Any rate between first Annie being born blind then Claire being brain-damaged - no, literally - there's a reason Annie's parents decided no to risk it having a third bairn."

"Claire's nice," Brigid said, "But she, um, isn't all there," and she tapped her head.

"I see," Alice said, and they lapsed into silence, Nick and Brigid watching Alice and Alice examining the varied things on the walls and mantlepiece, quickly drifting from the photos to the trophies. They were a mix of cups and shields, with varied show names and categories like 'best in show' and 'best ram'.

"Sheep, huh?" she said as she figured it out.

"Aye, Janet - that's Annie's mum - herself breeds pedigree sheep," Nick said. "She's got a lump of fields out the south side of the railway yards, some of the sheds down that end are her barns and she's always entering them into the shows, when all is said and done she's as daft for it as Sir Joe is for the trains."

"So I take it Annie's basically like both her parents," Alice said, and Nick laughed.

"Aye," he said. "It's no a coincidence that those two fell head-over-heels for each other, they don't look it but between the ears they're just the same."

"What, Mum and Dad?" Annie guessed, having entered the room in time to catch the tail end of that - she was now clad in what was either the dress she'd been wearing the day Alice first met her or an outfit identical to it.

"Aye," said Nick, and Annie snorted.

"Aye, they're both just as bad as each other. Any rate there's no point standing on ceremony, come on through to the kitchen and have a bite to eat."

-/-/-/-/-/-

Having eaten sandwiches and drank tea, they walked back down to the rail yards and Annie made a beeline for the signal box, which stood on an elevated brick structure at the south end of the station, and Alice and Nick and Brigid loitered on the platform while she had a word with the signalman; her word concluded, she led them back to the shed her family's driveway ran through and went to get the rail-adapted minibus out.

This thing started quickly and easily - there was a lot of dents and scrapes and other signs of heavy use but little in the way of rust and the interior was scrupulously clean - and they were quickly heading on up the glen south out of Stronecrubie with Annie completely unconcerned about the fact this required them to go backwards - she said that when they adapted it 'the works crew' had put what she called a reverser into the bus's drivetrain so every forwards gear worked in either direction.

The tracks diverged almost directly off of the yards - dual gauge headed one way, narrow gauge only the other, and Annie said that the narrow-only was the main line south while the tracks they were on led up to the mines.

The line climbed steadily uphill, making the little railbus work hard for its living, and curved steadily to the east - five miles out of Stronecrubie and the view from the cab was quickly becoming spectacular as the tracks worked their way along an escarpment, the land falling away from them to the south-southwest, and by the six mile mark Alice could get a glimpse of the Atlantic ocean out beyond miles of rolling hills to their west. At the seven mile mark and still climbing they came out onto a high plateau surrounded on three sides by taller land, with the peak of Ben Daor looming up over its northern side - here the line split, overgrown and rusty narrow-gauge tracks heading towards the lower south side of the plateau while the dual-gauge tracks they were on continued climbing along the north side.

"That's Cnac na Daor, where the old mines were, about a mile and a half over that way," Annie said, craning round to point to their southeast - peering that way Alice could just make out what looked to be the devastated heavily-overgrown remnants of a good-sized open-cast mine. "They went dry and pretty much bankrupted the railway, it got kept creaking along mostly by Murdo McMurdo and Calum Boyd but there wasn't the money to maintain basically anything. Then the year I was eight Dad bought the railway out, and not six weeks later he and Murdo McMurdo, really mostly Murdo McMurdo, found new iron workings on the high plateau to the northeastern side of the glen here - we're onto the newest permanent way that we have, that's why the concrete sleepers, this stretch from where the narrow-only diverges was laid only nine years ago - and the dual gauge was only as far as Stronecrubie when Dad bought the line, we still only had the narrow gauge up here up till four years ago, things have been running so much smoother since we stopped having to run everything through the tippler at Stronecrubie, what a pain in the arse that was. Nowadays the narrow-gauge up here is basically only used for the trains bringing the miners up and down."

The tracks climbed further and further up the side of the glen - there was a nice clear view across the glen to the barren hole in the ground that was the abandoned mine workings - and the view got better and better as they climbed; at the top of the climb as the land opened out to a broad, slightly bowl-shaped, plain spreading north and east, walled on the northern side by the range of mountains on the far side of which was Loch Allen, they passed a sign reading SUMMIT. 1572 FEET, and Alice, pointing, asked "Does that mean what I think it means?"

"Aye," Annie said. "Highest point on the Sutherland Railway, we're a full five hundred feet above what used to be the line's highest point and about seven hundred above the old mine workings, there were a good few jokes thrown around about Dad's capacity for mountaineering when the line here was being surveyed. Now you see why we call this the high plateau. What we're looking at here is one of the geological mysteries of the Allens - this entire plateau is a solid block of meteoric iron nearly eight miles across by we have absolutely no idea how deep and how it got here, that's anyone's guess, buried under a thin crust of the normal Loch Allen breccia. We found it by complete accident too, I don't think there'd ever been a geological survey of it taken, it doesn't even have an actual name, the old folks think of it as just a part of Ben Daor, then the day I nearly got kidnapped Dad decided he wanted a look at the old mine from above and came up here with one of the old mine-workers, Murdo McMurdo, and found some of his ewes in a place on the south side of the escarpment that it'd got washed out, that was a very wet spring, and recognised the rock at the edge of the washed-out patch and given that the land up here and the mineral rights to it came with the railway... We've been hauling out three thousand tons a day five days a week whenever the weather's fit to get trains up here since the year after Dad and Murdo McMurdo found this and if we carry on at the same rate I won't see a dent made in what's in here in my lifetime. It still gives the geologists twitch fits trying to work out how this got here, frankly the size of it, it ought to have bloody well ended the world and it just hasn't been here long enough - all the geologists agree that it got here only about twenty, twenty-five thousand years ago but they really do not agree on how it didn't blow the planet's biosphere to bits in the process."

"Aye, it must have been a hell of a show for the cavemen away down south - there wasn't anyone up here to see it at the time of course, they say that this lump of metal punched through nearly two miles of ice on the way to the mountainside here," said Nick.

"I see," said Alice, placing herself a bet that if - when, she refused to start thinking of it as 'if' - when she got home and checked on the Internet there would not be any gigantic chunks of iron in the ground in this part of her world's Scotland.

The tracks followed the southern edge of the plateau for several more miles, finally arriving at the mine workings proper - there was a set of sidings long enough to fit the ore trains Alice had seen before, two trains of empties were parked in two of the sidings, and there was yellow excavation machinery and giant dumper trucks parked everywhere. There was a rough bulldozed road heading due north to the mine proper roughly a mile away from the railhead: this was nothing more than a dirty great hole in the ground.

"That's... honestly a bit of an eyesore?" said Alice.

"Aye, it's no exactly nice to look at," Annie said with a nod as she drew their conveyance to a halt by a complex of sheds round which most of the machinery was parked. "That's why we started digging at that side of the plateau despite the need for pumping machinery to keep the mine clear of water - this way you can barely see it from below and the ridge up the back there mostly blocks it from the various Munro summits. Anyway the pumps are in that shed," and she pointed at the shed they'd stopped beside, "So if you fancy taking a wee wander about with Brigid or something while Nick and I have a fiddle with that bloody engine,"

"Yeah yeah, I won't get in the way while you're playing with machine parts," Alice said with a snort, shrugging into the massive overcoat Annie had insisted on lending her - she could tell why the moment the railbus's doors opened too, there was a perishing cold edge to the wind up here.

"You can get the view I was talking about from the edge of the bluff there," Annie said, pointing, and Alice nodded.

She and Brigid walked out towards the edge of the plateau, a couple of hundred yards away from the sheds across the other side of the sidings - on arriving the view was every bit as spectacular as Annie had intimated, and they were still standing there drinking it in half an hour later when a satisfied-looking Nick with grease on his hands came and found them to tell them it was time to head back down.

For the return trip, as soon as they passed the SUMMIT sign Annie just put the railbus into neutral and rode the brakes, and they coasted to a halt back in the Stronecrubie yards without her having brought the engine above a tickover for the entire descent.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Next - The arrival in and introductory first week of college heralds events beginning to hot up a little as another busload of strangeness decides to jump up and hit Alice in the ear.