“Aye!” said the crowd.
“I’m talking about the men who come from Glasgow to harvest our peat and sell the very soil out from beneath our fucking feet!”
“Aye!”
“I’m talking about the bloody fucking tourists who leave their bottled water on our beaches and pollute our seas.”
“Aye!”
As the token American, Ray could see where things were headed and slinked out of Pitcairn’s line of vision.
“Here we go,” Farkas whispered. He had appeared out of the fog.
“I didn’t think you’d be here,” Ray said.
“I’m not.”
“I’m talking about the scholars,” Pitcairn continued. “The intellectuals like old Eric Blair who deem fit to grace us with their presence and treat our Jura like their own private museum, who turn our proud heritage and our way of life into some kind of tourist attraction. Have they forgotten that we actually live here?”
“Yeah!” Ray shouted from the back of the crowd. He was enjoying himself despite the hatemongering now directed fully at him. “Those fucking intellectuals!” he yelled. “Let’s string ’em up!”
Laughter rippled through the men. “Good on you,” someone said behind him. Pitcairn tried to continue, but his audience had turned — not against him necessarily, but the mood had shifted with the sea breeze. “The danger is worse than you think,” he warned them all, but a dozen other conversations had begun. More wagers got placed. People were eager to get the hunt started and then, no doubt, climb into their warm beds. “You ungrateful bastards will wish you listened to me one day.”
“Not today!” someone answered, inciting a good deal of amusement. It sounded a bit like Fuller, but who could tell?
“Shut your gobs one more minute, you fuckers,” he shouted, but it was too late. The bagpipes squawked back to life. Pitcairn stumbled while climbing back down and landed in a heap on the ground. A hunting dog licked at the whisky on his lips and it yelped when he punched it in the face.
The men congealed into parties of five or six. Each group had one torchbearer, who was armed with either a flashlight or a real fiery torch and who was also responsible for carrying the bottles of whisky. Every man kept his voice low now. They peeled off into the darkness. Some headed straight up the inclines of the Paps, others toward the shore or along some unseen paths leading into the fog that seemed to extinguish the torches like so many birthday candles. Only a few people remained. Fuller tended the fire in preparation for what looked like a lavish feast.
“You’re coming with me, Chappie,” Pitcairn said. He stood at a trailhead that Ray hadn’t noticed and shined a flashlight in his eyes. Ray squinted in time to see Sponge and Pete go on ahead and get swallowed whole by the encroaching fog.
“I think I’ll stay here and help Mr. Fuller,” Ray said.
“Oh so you’re now a gourmet chef, are you? I think Mr. Fuller can manage without the benefit of your expertise.”
“But …”
“You go ahead, Mr. Welter,” Fuller said. “I can take care of this. One word of advice: it’s easy to get lost on the moors at midday, not to mention on a night such as this one. Keep an eye on where you’re going.”
“He’s right, Chappie. We wouldn’t want you wandering off, now would we?”
“I don’t have a flashlight.”
“I don’t have a flashlight.”
There was no point in arguing. Resistance was futile. Anyway, Pitcairn wouldn’t dare hurt him, not with Sponge and Pete as witnesses.
“Not to worry. You just stay close to Mr. Pitcairn,” Fuller said. “Bring us back some fresh meat to add to our feast.”
“You heard the man, Chappie, you stay close.” Pitcairn turned and went off into the night. He took four paces before his flashlight blinked out of view.
Ray followed after him, but the bonfire behind him soon evaporated and the darkness hit his body like a sudden fever. He couldn’t see a goddamn thing. “Pitcairn?” No answer. The soles of his sneakers sucked at the muddy ground, and just like that he was lost. Nothing existed except nothingness itself. The entire universe consisted of the absence of light. Panic swelled in Ray’s windpipe like a chunk of unchewed beef. Sweat tickled him from beneath his beard. The fog seemed to distort the sounds of the wind in the bushes. Somewhere there were waves lapping against the stony shore, but he couldn’t tell which direction they came from. He stumbled over unseen rocks and roots and divots, but walked in what he hoped was a straight line. Then he felt the terrain change and found himself on an incline. A hill, maybe the base of one of the Paps. If the peak jutted above the fog, maybe he could gain his bearings from there. Even if the lights in Craighouse and at the ferry port and over on Islay only illuminated small patches of fog, that would be enough to figure out which direction the hotel was in.
The mountain was too steep to climb straight up, so he circled it in progressively higher rings the way the groove of a record album eventually terminates in the middle. His sneakers were worse than useless and his intense intoxication didn’t help. The flask was empty. His ankles twisted back and forth. His progress — if he was making progress at all — was slow and laborious. His eyes had not adjusted to the light because there was so little light for his eyes to adjust to. The worst part was that Pitcairn had done this to him. Getting him lost out here, that had been totally intentional. It had to be. That asshole purposely led him out here into the black night with the purpose of getting him lost. That had been his agenda all along.
Ray climbed, blind, for twenty minutes, maybe more, and the higher he went the better he came to appreciate the reality of his circumstances. The seas would eventually rise again, as Farkas said, and that was thanks in some part to global warming and the thousands of SUVs he had unleashed. Ray had come to Jura in order to escape the consequences of his actions, but that was impossible. For the time being, however, here he was on one of the Paps of Jura, high above the cares of the mundane and overcrowded world.
He had to be nearing the top and so he hiked faster, his treads skidding on the rock surfaces, until a horrible sound reached his ears. It was a disgusting, retching howl that came from above him and echoed between the Paps then returned to its maker. There was something out here with him. The noise came again, closer, but this time it sounded like someone coughing up the boozy contents of his stomach. A halo of light bobbing in the fog guided Ray to the peak of the mountain, where he was actually glad to see Pitcairn. “I want you to take a deep breath, Chappie,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
Ray did so. He stopped and tasted the sea on his tongue. The Scottish night felt so clean, so good and pure; it was unpolluted and sweet in his lungs. “Mr. Pitcairn, I’m so—”
“What you have a hold of there is fresh air. Something you won’t bloody well find in your Chicago.” He pronounced it She-cah-go. “Do you know why I wanted you to come up here with me tonight?”
“To shoot me?”
“That’s a very good guess, but I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to shoot you or not. I wanted you to come with me so that you might understand why it is that I don’t want you filling my Molly’s head with ideas.”
“If you ask me, her head’s already full of ideas,” Ray said. His heartbeat made its presence felt now in his neck. “Nothing you or I do is going to change that.”
“That’s what I’m talking about, Chappie.” Pitcairn spoke quietly. A bird peep-peeped at them from some nearby overgrowth. “I’m not asking you. No one is asking you any such fucking thing. No one has come pleading for your almighty opinion. Understand that. Right now, we are standing on Beinn a’ Chaolais. While you can’t see her at the moment you can believe me when I tell you that to our left is Beinn an Òir and on her other side is Beinn Shiantaidh.”