Neale stopped pushing the barrow and stood still. He did this despite being in the rain, which fell with a belligerence he’d never seen before in the upper valley. It thudded on his hood and clanged against the corrugated iron roofs surrounding the yard. Water sloshed off those roofs into badly maintained gutters and downspouts, or sometimes just splattered down the shed walls. He was on an untarmacked part of the yard, and his wellies and the barrow’s wheel and legs were deep in mud.
The grey curtain of rain hid the landscape beyond the steading’s edges, but he swore that, momentarily, the curtain had parted, and he’d glimpsed something out there that looked wrong.
A voice startled him. “Are ye gonnae stand there till the rain beats a hole in yer heid?”
“Uncle Drew,” Neale protested at the gaunt figure who’d approached from the farmhouse. “Ye’re no well. Ye shouldnae be ootside.”
His uncle ignored that. “What’s the matter? What are ye lookin’ at?”
Neale pointed into the murk. “I saw somethin’ there. Somethin’ weird.”
The man peered that way. “In the overgrown field?”
Neale wondered. Over the drumming rain, had he detected unease in his uncle’s voice?
***
No livestock grazed in the field. Nothing was ever planted in it. Across its sunken expanse, up to the fence separating it from the back road, was a mass of weeds, grasses, and rushes. In the summertime, when Neale came to help his uncle on the farm, and he walked past the field on his way to or from the bus stop, he’d see a speckling of color—yellow dandelions, red dock seeds, purple thistle tops. But their colors were too few, small, and far apart to make the field pretty. Mostly, the growths packing it were dark, festering shades of green and brown.
He asked his uncle about it but received vague answers. “Yon field’s a wildlife habitat. I get paid money tae leave it alone.”
“Paid? By who?”
“By some environmental department in the EU.”
“But Uncle Drew, Scotland isnae in the European Union any mair. There wis a referendum, mind? The English voted tae leave, and we had tae leave too.”
“Well, an environmental department in Britain, then.” His grey, hairy eyebrows were tilting into a frown, and his voice was growing crabbit. Neale knew it was time to drop the subject. But he didn’t think the overgrown field contained wildlife. He’d never seen wild animals moving through it nor heard birdsongs there.
Once, when he asked why the field had been left to its own devices, his uncle merely remarked: “Its soil’s bad.”
Going along the back road, Neale would notice the fence holding back the field’s rampant but rank-looking vegetation. The wooden fenceposts were both lumpen with moss and eaten away by mold. The wire between them was so rusted he could probably break it apart with his hands. It was if a contagion had seeped up from the ground and corrupted the fence. As if there were a badness in the soil underneath, like his uncle had said, but an almost supernatural badness.
***
While they stood there, the curtain parted again and stayed parted for longer. Neale gasped. The bowl of ground occupied by the overgrown field was nearly full of water. A strip of vegetation was visible on the highest parts forming the bowl’s rim, including the part running alongside the back road. But most of the field had vanished, replaced by a small lake.
“How,” marveled the old man, “did that happen? I’ve never seen such a thing afore.” Again, Neale thought he heard unease in his tone. His uncle turned and contemplated the slope rising behind the back road. “Runoff, surely. Frae the hill.”
“Didn’t ye say the hill’s runoff mostly descended its north side? Intae the river?”
“Aye, but…” His uncle pointed above the upper boundary of his farm, to an area of hillside that was brown and grooved, and pimpled by a few remaining tree stumps. “A while back, the Forestry Commission cut doon the big plantation o’ trees that’d stood there for years. That wis bound tae cause mair runoff on this side. Plus, durin’ the operation, the Commission’s vehicles churned up the slope. Their wheels left deep tracks that’ve maybe channeled the rainwater this way.”
“Well,” said Neale, “ye’re now the owner o’ a lake. What’ll ye call it? Loch Drew?”
But his uncle’s eyebrows were rising again, and his brow crinkling, and he realized his attempt at humor wasn’t appreciated.
***
The next morning, Saturday, the weather remained foul. Uncle Drew advised Neale to take the weekend off. “Forecast says it’ll be like this till next week. There’ll be little tae dae here. Ye may as well go back tae the toon. Yer ma will be glad tae see ye.”
As was his habit, he sat in an armchair that was turned towards the kitchen window, though thanks to the gauze of rain there was little to see outside. The nearest hills were discernible only as grey humps. Neale felt like asking what he was looking at…but didn’t ask. That armchair, in that position, was where his aunt had sat for much of the last year of her life. Perhaps he was trying to see what she’d seen. Perhaps he was searching for something not physical, but metaphysical.
Neale protested, “Who’ll dae the chores?”
“I will.” Considering his frailty, how he slumped in the chair looking shapeless and indistinct, his uncle’s voice was surprisingly firm. “I’m no deid yet.”
They argued until Neale gave in. His uncle made a promise: “Don’t worry, I’ll have plenty o’ work fir ye when ye return. Fixin’ the rones an’ rone pipes on them sheds fir a start. Have ye seen them? They’re a disgrace. An’ giein’ their walls a new lick o’ paint. An’ maybe tarmackin’ mair o’ the yard—I’m sick o’ wadin’ in muck when it rains.”
He sighed. It was a long, anguished sound. To Neale it seemed to sum up not just his frustration at his recent illness, and pain at the not long past death of his wife, but bitterness about a whole lifetime that hadn’t worked out the way it was meant.
“Aye,” he said finally. “No matter what ye dae, this place keeps goin’ tae rack an’ ruin.”
Neale made a point of putting silage along the aisles in the cowsheds and leaving bales of hay and straw inside their doors, so that all his uncle needed to do was fork the fodder into the feeding spaces by the pens and throw the bedding in among the animals. Then, unenthusiastically, he packed his bag.
The back road twisted along the bottom of the hill until it came to a junction with a bigger road where the bus stop was located. Water seeped across the road from the hillside, soaking Neale’s shoes and making him wish he’d worn his wellies. At the roadside, the foliage of the overgrown field crowded against the fence with the rotted fenceposts and rusted wire. It was as dense as a hedge and hid from view the water that filled the lower ground behind it.
As he walked, a few times, he thought he heard noises over the ongoing mutter of the rain. These were rustlings in the vegetation to his side. Each time, the rustling had stopped by the time he turned his head, though once he saw the tops of some weeds stirring a yard behind the fence, as if something was pushing past the bottoms of their stalks. Maybe the field was a wildlife refuge as his uncle had said. Maybe the water had forced its inhabitants, whatever they were, up to its edges where they were less able to conceal themselves.
Then, coming around a bend in the road, he sighted something on the tarmac ahead. It lay in a glistening dark-grey heap, and he assumed it was roadkill. Unconsciously, as he neared it, he shifted to the side of the road opposite where it lay—it was beside the overgrown field, so he moved towards the hill. Protrusions from its main mass seemed to correspond to limbs and a head, but other parts sprawled onto the road too, in lumps, strands, tatters, with no similarity to animal form. Meanwhile, its flesh was greasy and gelatinous.
He passed it, as far from it as the road would allow. While he threw reluctant, sideways glances at it, he observed a hole in the adjacent vegetation, made as the animal—a fox or badger, surely—had come out of the overgrown field and through the fence, before getting crushed under somebody’s wheels.
But the carcass didn’t resemble a fox or badger. It looked more like a burst fish or even something mollusk-like. It was as if, decaying here in the rain, the carcass had regressed from being mammalian and gone back through the stages of evolution until it was a primordial, oozing thing… Then he noticed the condition of the vegetation around the hole the dead animal had left in it. Even by the overgrown field’s standards, those weeds and grass were decayed and discolored. They’d turned a putrid yellow. In front of them, the top of a post hung on some sagging fence wire, free of its bottom part because it’d rotted through.
The dead thing was behind him now, but he couldn’t help turning his head to view it one last time. And he wondered if, fleetingly, the form on the road moved. Did it shift a fraction through the hillside runoff washing around it? Neale froze. Then he pivoted so that he was facing the way he’d come. But the grey, gruesome pile of flesh was inanimate again. It couldn’t have moved, he thought. What he’d seen move was the water sweeping over the surrounding tarmac, which’d given the roadkill a semblance of motion.
He resumed walking. To his relief, the road twisted again, and the thing disappeared from sight behind him.
***
That experience on the back road disturbed him. However, while he stood at the bus stop and looked in the direction of his uncle’s farm, the mystery of what was lying on the road gave way to a new mystery.
The rain had thinned, and he could make out the huddle of buildings that was his uncle’s steading. The water of the imposter lake he’d called ‘Loch Drew’ stretched in front of them, filling four-fifths of the overgrown field.
Why, standing there, looking back, did he have a sense of déjà vu?
***
He asked his mother, “How long has Uncle Drew’s farm been in the family?”
She counted on her fingers. “Five generations. It wis yer great-great-great-granda who acquired it.” She added wistfully, “It would a’ been six generations if Drew an’ Vera had had kids an’ there’d been somebody tae take it on frae them.” She suddenly looked alarmed. “Here, he isnae talkin’ aboot leavin’ it tae you, is he?”
“Naw, I wis just wonderin’…”
“Neale, he kens ye’re goin’ tae university next autumn!”
When he finally convinced her Uncle Drew wasn’t trying to interfere in her plans for him, he pressed on with his questions. “How did the family acquire it?”
She protested, “How am I supposed tae ken? That’s ancient history—middle o’ the 19th century.” But she added, “Yer great-uncle Walter said it wis obtained both easily an’ with great difficulty. Easily because it wis cheap, even by the prices of the times. They bought it off the Whitson Estate fir almost nothin’. With great difficulty because… It wis in an awful condition. The tenant farmer who’d been there previously left it in rack an’ ruin.”
“Rack an’ ruin?”
“Walter’s phrase. Ye ought tae speak tae him. He wis always the family historian.” She was silent for a half-minute. Then, perhaps remembering Great Uncle Walter was now in an old folks’ home and so stricken with dementia he hadn’t uttered a word to anyone for years, she tried to describe it herself. “There were tales the tenant farmer had done a runner. Just abandoned it an’ disappeared one day, leavin’ the poor beasts there tae starve in their pens. Oor ancestors had a terrible job makin’ it a viable business again. When they moved in, it wis a hellhole. Tumble doon hooses…” She shuddered. “Rottin’ animal carcasses…”
Neale pondered this, then lifted his still-wet coat off the radiator. “I’m goin’ oot.”
“Already? But son, ye’ve only just arrived.”
“I won’t be long. There’s something I need tae check.”
***
The town’s high street was almost deserted. Most people were a few streets away, gathered near the river to watch police, firefighters, paramedics, and the mountain rescue team evacuate the houses on the riverbanks—in a few cases, where flooding had already occurred, carrying out people and pets or even punting them out in little dinghies. All the rainwater dumped on the upper valley during the past few days had, courtesy of the river, made its way to the lower valley, where it wreaked havoc in the town.
Neale, though, wasn’t interested in this drama. He went to the high street’s little gallery, which was hosting an exhibition of paintings, old and new, of the local hills.
One painting there had caught his eye when he’d visited the exhibition a few weeks ago. Now he wanted to see it again. According to the information panel beside it, the painting was entitled Dernsyke Farm Following a Storm and dated back to 1857. The small, antiquated-looking buildings grouped in the center of the canvas were unfamiliar to Neale save for the biggest one—a square of whitewashed stone two windows high and two windows across that he recognized as Uncle Drew’s farmhouse, though without its more modern extensions. He also recognized the outlines of the hills behind the steading. In the wake of the 1857 storm, the wet hills were grey and blurry, just as they’d looked from his uncle’s kitchen window this morning.
He judged from the positions of the buildings and the hills that the painting had been done somewhere near the junction of the two roads, where the bus stop was today. The artist had viewed the steading across the overgrown field. Originally, this puzzled Neale because in front of the painted steading there wasn’t a field but a small lake.
Rack and ruin, his mother had said. Middle of the 19th century.
Dernsyke Farm Following a Storm. In 1857, with a temporary lake…
Neale decided he needed to get back to Uncle Drew.
***
It was dark when the last bus from the town dropped Neale at the junction. He made his way along the back road, glad he’d brought a torch with him because the night sky was choked with rainclouds and contained neither moonlight nor starlight. The beam roamed the road ahead, glinting as rain fell through it. He felt apprehensive walking on the road, which first he attributed to the strangeness of the lake’s reappearance. But then he realized his apprehension was more immediate. It was about what lay on the tarmac in front of him.
He traversed several of the road’s bends whilst trying to remember which bend he’d seen the roadkill on, but in the darkness, it was impossible to distinguish one part of the road from another. He pointed the beam downwards. Though he didn’t want to see it again, he did want to know where it was so he wouldn’t—the thought made him nauseous—step on it.
Becoming impatient, he twisted around and slashed the torch beam through the darkness beside and behind him. Surely he’d reached it by now? So where was it? Could it really have moved? Still turning, he flashed the torchlight along the decrepit fence and the foliage behind it. The light revealed something—the hole the thing had come out of. Yet, when he examined the adjacent patch of road, there was nothing. Just the hillside runoff flowing over the tarmac.
Maybe Uncle Drew had come this way on the tractor. Maybe he’d seen the roadkill, scooped it up with a shovel, and chucked it over the fence?
Walking further, he discovered another hole in the roadside vegetation. Again, the grass and weeds around the hole were a decayed yellow and the fenceposts on either side had rotted through. Further still, he found a third hole. This time, when he directed the torch towards the road surface, something glistened under the runoff, a patina of slime the water hadn’t yet washed away. He raised the torch, its beam skittered along the road ahead, and the slime continued to glisten in a line… As a trail?
Neale ran, water splashing about his feet. While his arm cranked at his side, the torch beam swung erratically. It sometimes alighted on the fence and showed more holes in the vegetation. He rushed past hole after hole…
He got to the mouth of the farm’s lane and swerved into it. A minute later, he arrived between the high, black walls of Uncle Drew’s outhouses and sheds. He wondered what’d happen to the night lights. There were sensors he should have triggered by now, but the steading hadn’t lit up. Then, briefly, a modicum of light did appear. But it was only because a moving raincloud let a shaft of moonlight poke down from the sky. It made a smear on a flat, greasy surface back the way Neale had come—the surface of the lake covering the overgrown field.
He thought frantically. Uncle Drew had said the field’s soil was ‘bad’. What had he meant? And what happened when it encountered a huge quantity of water? What came out of that alchemy between soil and water?
Something gurgled quietly behind him.
The gurgle was long, low, and suggested pain, as if the lungs and throat producing it were diseased and decayed. He swung around and the torchlight landed on the façade of one of the steading’s oldest outhouses. It exposed a patch of wall that was grossly scabbed and stained. Impossible, he thought. Uncle Drew was talking about repainting the farm buildings, but it hadn’t been that long ago since their last paint job. Where had this mess come from?
Something glistened at the light’s edge, before shifting away, able to negotiate the vertical surface. Neale chased it with the beam, but it moved too fast, and he saw only more of the discolored wall.
The torchlight reached a stone with ‘1860’ carved on it—presumably the year his great-great-great-grandfather had built the outhouse, following the farm’s mysterious collapse into ‘rack and ruin’. The date stone was above a doorway and, seemingly, the sound came from there. Neale forced himself to enter.
He flicked a light switch beside the inside doorframe, but the outhouse remained dark. There was something wet—no, sticky—on the switch’s casing and he snatched his fingers away, afraid of being electrocuted. Then, continuing to rely on the torch, he discovered a black, putrid mass propped against a wall. Astonished, he identified it as the remains of the hay and straw bales he’d left for Uncle Drew. How could they have rotted so quickly?
His fear was overwhelming now. But he managed to shine the torch through the rails of the nearest pen. A shape was humped there, a cow lying on its side.
The cow raised its head and emitted the pained gurgle again. Strange, gloopy strands of something rose with the head too, connecting it with the floor. Glowing in the torchlight, the strands straightened and tightened. Then they pulled part of the head away and fell back, accompanied by pieces of decayed flesh and moldering cowhide. The torch beam poked past shreds of suddenly-uncovered nasal bone at the end of the cow’s snout.
Similar sized humps lay behind the animal, indicating more stricken cows, but Neale couldn’t look any more. He staggered back and the beam wove crazily through the black interior. Briefly, it encountered something—some things—and gleamed on mounds of shapeless, oleaginous matter. The things, whatever they were, slithered away from the light, into the building’s dark recesses.
He raced outside and made for the farmhouse. He tore open its door, charged through, and grasped at the hallway light switch—which also refused to provide any light. Struggling to keep his hand steady, he directed the torch beam ahead. He tried to ignore the things he glimpsed on either side—the rotted fabric of Uncle Drew’s coats and boilersuits, hanging from their hooks, and the blighted rubber of the wellies, parked in pairs underneath.
When the torchlight invaded the kitchen, he saw the silhouette of Uncle Drew’s armchair, still turned towards the window. The top of the man’s head was visible above the headrest.
His voice shook. “Uncle Drew? Uncle Drew?”
He reached the chair and put a hand on one of the man’s shoulders. What he felt, though, was less than a shoulder. It was a cold, soggy lump, and when his hand retreated, he felt threads of slime retreat too, on the ends of his fingers.
His uncle spoke, through a disintegrating mouth. “I tried ma best, Neale,” he gurgled. “I did, I really did… But I couldnae stop it. I couldnae save the farm frae…rack an’ ruin.”
In the darkness beyond, on the floor, there was a new sound as something began to ooze forward.
