© Sir Will 2005
Lisa looked around her at the big dimly lit room. The dark bookcases, the pictures that hung from one wall, the heavy velvet curtains pulled tightly shut and all but deadening the sound of the heavy rain which fell outside. How had she got herself into this bizarre situation. Oh how she now wished she had listened to her friends, to her husband, even her children All had told her that it was just stupid to go searching for your ancestors in the middle of winter in Scotland.
Twenty-four hours ago she had been with her family in their small hotel suite on the outskirts of London. They had a nice evening in the West End of London, put the kids to bed and she and her husband of fifteen years had enjoyed one of those all too rare evenings alone. Love making, that quiet, assured, pleasant activity, had developed over the last fifteen years. The raw early emotion and passion of their relationship had long ago begun to ebb. Lisa believed herself to have a happy marriage. Todd and she had been childhood sweethearts and the whole township knew that they would marry as soon as it was seemly. But now, passion for Lisa came in two, non-physical, forms.
First was the passion for romance and excitement. A passion which had found a constant fuel in the cheap novels which she bought at the local Seven-Eleven. She enjoyed the intrigue, the deceit, the powerful love and, yes, the raw passion that always brought the main characters together. She had always wondered, fleetingly, about the true passion, the erotic encounters which went un-mentioned in these stories. The female usually melting into the hero's arms, a deep smouldering kiss, the close embrace - the next chapter!
Second was that passion which had brought her to this forbidding place. It was the passion to learn more about her mixed ancestry. Her parents had both passed away relatively early; the task of sitting down to talk (and write down) those childhood stories about the "Good 'ol Days" had remained undone. Now she was trying to remedy that; to learn more about that Scots, Irish, Afro-American cocktail which had formed her genes and her being.
She had spent hours on the internet, using some of her allowance to explore genealogy web sites to trace her roots, especially the Scots line of her maternal grandmother. They intrigued her, the family was well documented and she had been able to go back three generation and find the birth records in the mid-18th century baptismal records in Mallaig. She had copies and they showed the home to be Glen Alder but where was this place? The place name did not exist. Of course she had found Mallaig, the small port in Western Scotland from where the steamers went to the Western Isles. She had ordered and received a detailed map of the area from Borders but nothing of the name Alder was to be found in this part of Scotland.
She had given up hope.
Then a visit to a local second-hand bookshop had produced the find she was looking for. A slim volume "Ramblings in Western Scotland" had a small fold-out map at the back and there, as plain as anything, was the words "Glen Alder House". There could be no mistake it was there and just off the main road. Perhaps the house had been renamed? Lisa didn't care. She had found what she was looking for and now this working trip for her husband come holiday had provided the opportunity to see for herself.
An early flight from Heathrow, a hire car at the airport, all the maps she had and Lisa was off. She had barely left the outskirts of Glasgow and found the A82 when the sky had turned grey, then black as rain, increasingly heavy, started to fall. She stopped for lunch at a roadside inn and then for coffee and some cake at very small cafe just north of Fort William. She had asked if anybody knew of Glen Alder, but only blank looks and a shrug of weary shoulders had been obtained from the lady behind the counter. It was now getting dark, but she resolved to press on. Could she find the road to Glen Alder before heading into Mallaig for her pre-booked overnight at Mrs Armstrong's B&B. She set off again peering through the windscreen, past the wipers now on full speed.
What was that on the left? A road, well more like a track, but wide, leading off between two high stone walls, built like the gateway to some large house. It was the right area, it was on the right side of the road. Could it be? She pulled the wheel and turned in. The gravel road stretched before her into the darkness, the first 20 yards illuminated by the car headlamps. She could see no house, no buildings, nothing. She drove on. How far, a mile perhaps two and then BANG.
The wheel lurched in her hands, the car veered. She was powerless to stop the slide into the ditch. She remembered hearing the rain and the engine racing and then all was silence. A black silence.
"Miss; are you OK?" She nodded; her hurt head. She heard the rain, but no engine. She looked around. This was not her car. It looked like the inside of a farmer's vehicle, plain and austere. In the pale light she could just make out the shadow of a man. "Are you OK?" The shadow spoke again. She was aware of his dress, camouflage fatigues, a dark woollen ski hat pulled down over his head, his face painted in black paint. The figure moved towards her and reached out to touch her, she recoiled, and then fell back against the side of the vehicle as it started to move.
"We will take you to the house. They will check you over before the boss has a chat with you." The shadow did not wait for answer, but turned to look out through the front windscreen and the two pale beams of light which illuminated the road. She could not ask a question, her brain was still foggy and. in any case and she thought it better to wait until they arrived at wherever they were going.
The journey did not take long and soon she was being led through the imposing doors of a large house. Few lights seemed to be on as she moved into a well lit hallway. Suits of armour stood at the foot of a long wide staircase, large oil paintings - portraits of long dead people - hung from the walls which were panelled in a dark oak.
She followed the shadow to a small room just off the main hallway and was ushered in. "Somebody will be with you in a few minutes" and the shadow was gone. The room was well lit and looked for all the world like a doctors consulting room. A large desk, an examination table, some small chests and a screen were virtually all that was in the room. She looked around the walls - no oil paintings here, just the wood panels and ....... She looked higher. Near the ceiling was a small camera, the little red light seemed to wink at her. What was that doing in a doctor's room? Was somebody watching? Her feeling of unease was cut short as two people entered the room by a side door in the panels. Both female, one was dressed in a crisp nurse's uniform, the other in a simple tweed suit.
"Good Evening" the tweed suit asked breezily, "How's the head?"
"Fine, just a bit sore" Lisa spoke softly, still unsure of her surroundings.
"Lets have a quick look at you, sit over here please and let me examine you" the tweed suit spoke with a level of authority that Lisa was sure came from years of ordering people around. No bedside manner, just cold efficiency. Lisa sat on the chair while she was examined, pencil lights into her eyes, a finger tip examination of her scalp, reflex tests on her knees. the tight bandage around her arm as her blood pressure was taken. All performed in silence except for various figures spoken by the tweed suit and written onto a clip board by the nurse.
"Nothing to worry about; just some mild concussion from hitting your head. You will have a bit of bruise and a headache but that's all. Be fine in a day or so." For the first time the tweed suit smiled at her. An almost reassuring smile that at another time, and in another place, would have put her at ease. Now it just lowered Lisa's sense of anxiety.
"Go with the nurse and she will get you some coffee and the boss will see you and explain." Not waiting for an answer she disappeared through the panel door. Lisa felt the nurse behind her and rose from the chair to follow her out of the room, back down the hall and off into a much larger room near the front door. Lisa looked around, unaware until she heard the click of the door that the nurse had turned on her heels and left her inside the room.
