Read Online These Demented Lands by Alan Warner - Free Book Online

pilot’s corpse had been found ten years before.
    That evening on which she appeared was clear and bitter cold. The convoy (some cars with headlights already on) from the vehicle ferry had already moved along the big road on the shoreline towards The Outer Rim.
    I had an unobstructed view of her distant figure moving downhill off the slopes, striding through the gloaming of dying sun that lit the tangled spreads of fallen bracken alternately rust then scarlet in colour; the inverted stalks washed and battered to an earth that would be a hard grid of frost under the coming dark.
    For an instant, above the shoreline, the newcomer’s figure was silhouetted along with the farthest larch-outcrops that are scattered on the bare hills above the hotel and airstrip. The silver-grey light on the water of the so-called bay stoppedsparkling. The sun moved down behind the snow-capped mountains that form the far shores of the Mainland along the fjord-like Sound.
    She came down onto the shoreline close to the chapel ruins and graveyard where the remains of the pilot lay buried. The light was failing badly when she next materialised on the hotel side of the pine plantation that obscured the far end of the runway and its southern threshold, above which the aluminium folded together ten years ago in the darkness. She must have traversed the machair which, in the coming flush we dared call Spring, would blot with pure white daisies: an expanse that would turn pink as a cold cloud passed over and the sensitive under-petals, that looked as if they’d had a little burgundy spilled on them, turned up in resignation. She used the roadbridge to cross the river which was in spate, pulling down tonnes of freezing water from the Interior and spilling them out in the hazed whorls of the sandy seaweed delta below the graveyard. Then I saw something.
    Brotherhood heard my quiet laugh as he stood behind the Observation Lounge bar, drying a glass. He had on his dinner suit and bow-tie. The couple from number 6, sitting by the log fire, looked over in unison. It was so dark in the lounge by then I could only make out the man’s eye sockets and was sure he was wearing a jet-black boilersuit below his neck.
    Brotherhood sauntered to the wide panorama windows and lifted the binoculars from the peeling varnish of the sill to his face. In the middle distance the small, black aircraft-shape silently ascended again above the dark pines then swooped with a wobbling, dreamy, stilted manner, like a hallucination:unnatural, not moving like a Real Thing, it came worrying down towards the walking figure until, this time, she chickened out and threw herself forward onto the sheer black of the cold ground. It was Chef Macbeth at the top of the airstrip, hiding at the fringes of the plantation, flying his radio-controlled model before dinners started. Brotherhood and I both laughed as the lithe figure stood up from the spoor of dark ground and moved towards us. The radio-controlled aircraft was over the spruces and gone.
    Out on the Oyster Skerries the shipping lane auto-beacon began its eleven-second semaphore. Polaris, the North Star, flickered weakly above the waters of the Sound, sliding past, silently and ever-wide as some lugubrious Mississippi.
    When the young woman’s boots crunched on the buff gravel chips below, two things happened: weak, buttermilky moon reflected on the shoulder and arm of her black leather jacket and all the televisions suddenly switched back on as the signal came alive from up in the mountains where the aerial is. Brotherhood silenced them, his arm held out like a fascist salute.
    As the girl moved round to the outside lamp by the corner of the building, I leaned back in the best armchair, away from my reflection on the black glass. I drained my whisky, letting the ice cubes rest against my lip, then I set the glass down.
    â€˜Well, well,
well,
real guest!’ Brotherhood tossed the dish towel on the bar-top and moved