Old Toovey was in a right state when I arrived to the Pub, his spittle frothy with the animated pursuit of his tongue attempting to catch his teeth. He had a full golden pint in one hand, seemingly forgotten, and in the other, and empty shot glass, its contents either long spilled or swallowed.
Henry must have have caught my staring, as he waved at the other empty shot glasses arrayed in a nonsensical pattern at Old Toovey’s elbow. Toovey was regaling a few locals and a couple outlanders with some tale, which itself was not out of place, but the fact that his eyes were bulging, and his cheeks flushed a bright red seemed right off.
“What’s all that about?” I asked Henry, as he pulled a pint without me asking. I took the cold glass, and tipped my head in thanks.
“He is taking the piss. I can’t catch enough to make sense of it. But something shook him terrible.” Henry pulled another pint as Charlie walked in behind me, looking for his usual post shearing stout.
“Hey Charlie,” I tossed him as he sidled up to the bar. His shoulders were wet, must have started raining out.
“Hey Ewan, thanks Henry,” Charlie nodded in quick succession. “Toovey, huh?”
“I was just asking,” I said.
“He is worked up about something up on the Queen’s land,” Henry added.
“How many has he had?” Charlie asked the obvious, I hadn’t even thought it yet.
“Just the one whiskey. Something about settling his nerves. The others are props. Won’t let me touch ’em,” Henry lauded. “Gets all red faced and blustery if I even try to take one away. That pint is merely a memory, more of it on the floor than in his gut, that’s for certain.”
I took a long swallow of my first pint, feeling the cool bubbles light up the back of my throat. The first sip was always the best drink, and all the swallows that followed were only attempting to live up to the first’s memory.
“Who are the strangers?” I asked.
Henry leaned in a bit towards us and whispered, “Not quite sure to be honest. Seem police-ish. Might be Scotland Yard? I didn’t bother to ask, and they aren’t bothering to drink.”
“…I am telling you the truth. Why would I lie? I have been working the Queen’s Estate for forty years now! Why would I ever make anything up like that?” Old Toovey’s pitch escalated wildly and then dropped to a near whisper. “I will have to inform the Estate Steward for certain. He has to know…”
I leaned towards Old Toovey with a raised glass, “Hey there, Toovey, going well?”
“It is not going well, Ewan. Not going well at all,” Toovey’s eyes went wide, and he ignored the small crown to his right, taking care to turn towards Charlie, Henry, and myself on the other side. The other gents rolled their eyes and shifted off, but the two outlanders seemed to be conferring with each other quietly. Toovey continued, “There is nothing in all my years that scared me like this, my young fellow, nothing. Not when that stag charged me, or when Mim fell down those stairs, nothing at all. Henry, I need a pint.”
Henry chuckled, “Tooves, you have it in your hand already.”
Toovey looked at his hand and realized he was holding both an empty shot glass and a pint. “Ah, so I do. Then I need another since this one shall be gone in a swallow.”
Toovey hammered the beer down, true to his word and Henry gently slid another over.
“So what happened, Toovey? Come on,” Charlie said. I nodded along in encouragement. The two outlanders seemed to have decided something and headed for the door.
“I was over near Lochnagar, where the snow is already accumulating, so I wanted to clear one of the old paths before it became impassable for the season, I am not sure why I pushed it off all summer, but I had…” Toovey swallowed heavily. “I didn’t even take one of the boys with me, again, not like me, not as strong as I used to be. I pulled up on a felled tree. Big one, not sure why it was over.”
“So far, this seems like a shite story, Toovey,” Charlie quipped with a grin. Henry shook his head.
“I am getting there, give me a minute. I need to set the scene, Ewan understands.” Toovey replied.
I shrugged nonchalantly, not knowing what that meant. Outside, the weather seemed to be getting worse. There was a far off peal of thunder, and the rattle of the windows told tales of the gusts beyond. The TV over the bar was showing something in the news, but it looked like typical Scottish weather, so I left it.
“I had the winch all setup, leaning over this trunk, making sure it was clear to pull, when my eye caught someone walking up on the high moor, had to be on the western side of the loch. There should be no one out here, I thought. I tried to make it out, this shape, moving slowly in the settling fog. I grabbed the spotting scope, and… I…” Toovey’s breath caught in his chest, trying to form the air into words to express his shaking memory.
“Its alright now, Toovey, you are with all of us. Just tell us what happened,” Charlie nudged.
“Damn it all,” Toovey spit, taking another long draught from his glass. “I saw a woman.”
Charlie laughed. “A woman? Oh come off it, Toovey. That’s odd, but does not explain your state.”
“She seemed to be clothed in ferns and moss, and her eyes, my god her eyes.”
“Odd, for certain. Strange, without a doubt. Perhaps a mental patient, escaped and living on the Queen’s land in secret.” I tried.
“No… no… the rocks, they were floating around her as she walked.”
“Come again?” I asked.
“She, ah… she was walking as if walking under the blustering clouds, cold was as nothing to her dressed even as she was. And the rocks she passed lifted from the ground, floating about her as if they were a cloud of butterflies, landing again in different places, some forming cairns, others scattering themselves again in the dirt. I thought at first it was an illusion, some trick of the light, but the boulders came up too, shifting about as if they were bits of cloud themselves, to settle again in new places.”
“Trick of the light alright, or your knackered,” Charlie said.
“I’m not. Swear it. But you see, that is only the beginning. She was at one moment, high up on the moor, me watching through the glass, and the next, I swear, I absolutely swear it, she was standing before me, right there as you are Charlie, as real as anything.”
“You are taking the piss!” Henry exclaimed. “This is a great story.”
“I am not! It is the truth, through and through. She stood before me as close as I am to you, her hair waving about as if she was under water, bits of rock, lichen, and moss floating around her like snowflakes caught on the wind. Her eyes were red, the color of a turned leaf yet to fall, and she was dressed in wisps of cloud falling from her form. Grasses and lichen beneath it all, creating this solid thing. She looked me over as if I was a specimen in a jar. I felt her look through me, and I was measured in a glance. Like I would look over bug before stepping on it.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut. Overhead the rain was getting louder, and the windows were hazed by the sheets of falling rain.
“She, ah, she wasn’t normal-“
“Because she was dressed in moss, Toovey!” Henry said.
“No. That’s not it. She wasn’t a woman. It was if there was a thing wearing a woman like a suit. Like a puppet. This slight wain of a girl, red hair as the dawn, red eyes as the sunset. Dressed like an imitation of our ancestors, but in the things of the land, water, or sky. She was something else, something terrible in disguise.”
“That is quite the story,” Charlie shrugged, his usually jovial nature downright stoic now. His face was written with a grimace halfway between disbelief and deep concern.
“That’s not the scary part,” Toovey admitted. He set his empty pint glass down, trying to work up the courage to tell us something more. “She spoke to me. I heard gravel in her throat and the cry of gulls on the wind. I heard the thunder of a distant storm and the crashing of titanic waves the world has not seen since before the dawn of man. Her voice was in my head, and I heard the half-remembered songs my mother used to sing to me. My ears heard all those things, but in my head, I heard her words. She understood the whole of our modern life in a moment, and spoke to me as such. She told me… told me… such terrible…”
“Almost there, mate. Go ahead,” I encouraged.
“She told me, she was here to bring about the end of our world. We had forgotten her, the one true god. We had forgotten her song, her voice, and her name. She was waiting until she knew we could not save her gift to us, the Earth. She saw it all through my eyes, my ears, my heart in the moment she stood before me. Tatha-na-Cailleach judged all of us. She saw it all in a heartbeat, and she has judged us all the same. She will remake the children, she told me. But for us, this is the end. We ruined it, we ruined it all.”
“Oh you had us for a damn minute,” Henry laughed, breaking the tense air among us. I forced a chuckle, but my heart was not in it.
“She… Oh, my.” Toovey gasped as he looked behind and he fell sideways to the ground.
I jumped to his side, trying to catch him, but he was limp as a fresh noodle and he slid right from my grasp. I managed to keep his head from striking the pavers, but his eyes were open and they told me everything that I needed to know. He was dead.
“Toovey?” Henry asked, leaning over the bar. “Should I call nine-nine-nine, Ewan?”
“I expect you should,” I replied. “But I think his heart gave out. He is already gone.”
Charlie’s hand slapped my shoulder, followed by an urgent whisper. “Look. Look at that.”
I turned, and there was a woman standing at the door, drenched from the rain, dressed in mosses and lichen, as if they formed her as much as the skin at her neck and arms did. She was a sallow white, nearing yellow in color, her hair long and as red as Toovey had witnessed. Over her shoulder, another TV was live as Thames was overtaking London, the great wheel tipping over, black cabs darting away from collapsing buildings. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing either in front of me or on the telly.
The strange woman waved her hand, and the last thing I ever saw was the bar around me leveled to the ground. But as the crushing darkness rushed in, I witnessed everything to be in a moment. Her vision of the world to come. A place not marked by our progress, but instead marked by the human race that should have been. One with the world that birthed it. Whole cities were to be swallowed by the grinding earth, filth to pulled down to the mantle to be reforged into the rock that whence the materials had come. The roads were to be shredded by vines and grasses, all the works of man plucked from existence as easy as I would toss a stone across the surface of the water. God Among Us, dressed in the spring, would dance with the children and raise them as her own. She had done it before, she would do it again. She had danced on the Moors, the Savannah, and in the valleys of the Three Rivers before it turned to sand, and she would dance in the new places with new names, everything on the face of the Earth healed and rewritten.
At the moment’s end, I did not find any of it as sad as I thought I would.
I appreciated her gift before the darkness consumed me.
Blessed be her name, Cailleach, tore across the last gasp of my mind as the crushing pain ceased and my last breath rattled out.