Really Weird Removals.com (17 page)

“Hi, Mum,” smiles Sorley.

Mum? She’s Lady McTire?

“Hi, everyone! Alistair, it’s lovely to see you again.”

“Margaret!” They hug.

“And you must be Alistair’s niece and nephew. It’s a pleasure. Ooooh, and look at this wee guy…” she strokes Finlay’s head. Finlay gurgles. He likes it. 

“Lady McTire…”

“Call me Margaret. All aboard now, Sorley will drive the truck inside, and then we’re off.”

The
Lady Margaret
is fantastic. It has a huge garage in the back for the black truck, but in the front it’s just like a yacht. Margaret takes us to the cabin, while Camilla perches herself on the bow.

“Have a seat, everybody,” offers Margaret, sitting at the controls.

She’s actually the
captain
! Cool.

“Won’t take long. Time to have lunch,” she says.

“Hungry, anyone?” calls Mairi, putting her head into the cabin.

“Yes!” Valentina jumps up. We follow Mairi into a lovely carpeted room with two comfy sofas and a low table. Sorley and Mairi take out a hamper full of goodies: sandwiches, crisps and juice for everyone.

We sit, eating companionably. Finlay nuzzles at my hand. I whisper to him for a wee while, until he falls asleep. We can see Argyll in the distance, coming closer and closer.

When we reach the coast, we all pile up in the truck again, including Lady McTire. After a short drive, we get to an ancient mossy brick wall, and stop in front of a huge wrought-iron gate. On top of the gate, I recognise the coat of arms of the Royal Kingdom of Scotland with its two unicorns – we studied it in school last year. Beside it, there’s another shield, with a dragon holding an elaborate C: it must be the McTire coat of arms.

Sorley presses a button beside the steering wheel, and the gate opens slowly. 

“Welcome to Loch Glas,” he says. We drive into the McTire estate, and into another world. Nothing, nothing in a million years could have ever prepared me for what I saw there.

We make our way towards McTire House, driving the truck through well kept fields. We spot deer grazing on the grass, pheasants waddling around and a fox, alert in the distance. Valentina and I are speechless at the grandeur of it all.

McTire House is called a house, but it looks more like a castle. It's a huge building of blonde sandstone with an imposing entrance of stone steps and columns at each side. Lord McTire is standing on top of the steps, in front of the great wooden door.

He's tall – nearly as tall as Uncle Alistair – he has 
grey hair and very blue piercing eyes, all creased at the sides like someone who smiles a lot. He's wearing a woollen jumper and a kilt woven in blue, green and white, with a sporran tied around his waist. He's also very muddy. There's mud all over him, actually, even his hair.

“Welcome back, everybody… Alistair… Oh! A puppy!” he gasps, as he sees Finlay. “Is he not asleep? How did you manage to get him here?”

“I didn't shoot him with the tranquilliser, wasn't sure of the dose…” says Sorley.

“You made the right call. Too risky. But how is he so calm?”

“Luca, here. He's a sea-whisperer, Dad.”

Lord McTire stares at me.

“Are you? That's a rare talent, son. Not many have it, nowadays. Make good use of it.” I nod. Lord McTire turns to Alistair. “You must be very proud of this nephew of yours.”

“Oh, I am.” He beams.

“So much to catch up on, Alistair. We'll chat later. We need to see to the zeuglodon, before he…”

“She!” Valentina and I say in unison.

“…before
she
wakes up and gets scared.”

Sorley and Mairi open the back of the truck and slide the trolley down. The zeuglodon is still deeply asleep, thankfully.

“She's beautiful!” says Lord McTire.

“That's what I said,” chirps Valentina, and Lord McTire gives her a smile.

“Come on,” he says, and leads us to the back of the house… and that's the first surprise: McTire House is
sitting right on Loch Glas. It's as if the loch is its back garden, with only a few yards between the building and the water. It's stunning.

Sorley, Mairi and Uncle Alistair lift the sea serpent and place her gently on the edge of the water.

“Look Finlay, there she is! Your mum!” cries Valentina.

“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYY” goes Finlay, and struggles to get free. I let him go, and he propels himself to his mother. He looks so happy. He curls himself against her, nuzzling her face.

“Are you going to wake her up?” I ask.

“No need,” says Sorley. “She'll wake in…” he looks at his watch, “…I'd say no more than twenty minutes, and go straight into the water. They'll be safe here.” He pats the zeuglodon's back.

“Well, welcome to Loch Glas!” says Lord McTire. “Camilla, it's good to see you again!” Camilla twirls. “So, Luca and Valentina! I've heard a lot about you from Mairi and Sorley.”

We're both a bit awestruck by Lord McTire, even Valentina, who's not easily impressed.

“Are you following in your uncle's footsteps, children?”

“Hope not,” says Alistair. It's a joke, but his face is serious. What does he mean? I'd love to follow in his footsteps. He gets so down on himself sometimes.

We make our way into McTire House. It's so grand, you could get lost in it. Lord McTire leads us to a sitting room with a tall ceiling and a huge fireplace, where Lady Margaret, wearing a beautiful cobalt-blue dress, is already waiting for us. 

“Laura is bringing the tea. Come and sit down. What happened to you, Hamish? You're covered in mud! Don't tell me. It was the puppies again.”

“Afraid so.”

“Puppies? Can we see them?” asks Valentina. Sorley and Mairi look at each other.

“You certainly can!” They all laugh.

“What's funny about the puppies?”

“You'll see,” says Mairi with a smile.

An old lady with a flowery apron comes in with a huge tray of scones, chocolate cake, shortbread and tablet, and a teapot with a stripy tea cosy. Then she goes, and comes back again with another tray, this time laden with crockery and cutlery.

“Thank you,” says Margaret, and starts laying out the feast. I can see Valentina sitting on her hands, impatient to start.

“So how's Duncan? I haven't seen him since he was a wee boy…” asks Lord McTire.

“He's good. Writing.”

“I hope things are better between you, these days…”

“Improving. He lets me take his children with me, so that's something. And I'm trying to sort out… what I need to sort out.”

“I understand. Does Duncan know about the RWR? I mean, what the RWR really is?”

“No, he doesn't know.”

“So what you're doing is a secret,” says Margaret, looking me straight in the eye.

“Hopefully not forever. We want to tell them. Soon. As soon as we're sure they'll understand…” I say. 

“As soon as I've made it up to him,” intervenes Uncle Alistair, looking down into his cup.

“Of course they'll understand. You'll have to tell them everything, it's the only way to help them accept all this…If they don't have the Sight, they can't even begin to imagine what you can See…”

“Can you See, Margaret?” asks Valentina.

“No, darling. Our children found a way to show me, though.”

She gets up, and takes a book from the library behind us. It's huge, and bound in leather.

Valentina cleans her hands – they're a bit jammy – and we open the book. It's full of drawings, some in black and white, some painted, some coloured in with crayons. The ones at the beginning of the book are clumsy and simple, clearly made by a small child, but the pictures get more and more beautiful, more and more skilled, as the artist grows up.

“Sorley has been drawing in this book since he was a wee boy, and he's still doing it now.”

There is a portrait of the mermaids, painted in watercolour. Sorley is such a good artist. I'm speechless.

“And this is from his trip to the South Pole, three years ago…”

Oh my goodness. A polar bear. With a human face.

A Yeti!

“I knew it!” cheers Valentina. “I have a magazine about Yetis. Nobody believes in them, but I do, and I was right!”

We keep turning the pages, marvelling at what we see. Some of the creatures are familiar, some I never 
knew existed: winged horses, glowing fish from the depth of the oceans, spirits and fairies and ghosts. Each has a name written carefully in black ink in the right-hand corner. I couldn't recognise half of them: Shony and Tangie, Luideag and Gruagachs, Fachan and Doonie and Crodh Mara… I hope I'm going to see them all, though some look pretty scary. Valentina is open-mouthed: I can see she's thinking the same thing.

“Right,” says Lord McTire, breaking the spell. “If everybody has finished their tea, let's go and explore.”

He leads the way down the stony steps.

“Loch Glas is a sanctuary for supernatural creatures,” he explains. “We rescue them from all over Scotland and shelter them here. If you don't have the Sight, the place will just look full of exotic animal species and a few… interesting human beings. But if you can See… well, you'll be amazed. Valentina, you wanted to meet the puppies?”

“Yes please!”

“Let's go.”

We walk around to the back of the house, right to the shore of Loch Glas. The zeuglodon and Finlay are not on there anymore. She must have woken and swum off with her little one.

“Good luck…” I say under my breath.

Lord McTire starts rummaging in his sporran, and takes out a sort of whistle, similar to the one that Alistair used to call the mermaids. He blows in it and, like the mermaid whistle, no sound comes out.

Valentina keeps looking left and right, impatiently. 

Suddenly, I feel something nudging the back of my leg. A dog? I turn around. There's something sniffing me. A sort of… lizard, the size of a small dog. It's blue, and it's got wings.

“Oh, here are the puppies!” squeals Camilla.

There are two of them… three… five! And they're all sniffing us. Sorley and Mairi are greeting them affectionately. Valentina is enraptured.

“Dragons!” she cries out.

“That's right. Baby dragons,” says Sorley, who has taken one in his arms.

They nuzzle us for a while, then they start flapping their wings, laboriously. They're plump little creatures, and their wings are only small. When they try to fly it's incredibly cute.

One by one, they manage to lift themselves off the ground, Camilla twirling in among them.

“They're still learning,” explains Mairi.

They're all over us, flapping their wings as hard as they can, climbing on our heads, our shoulders. One perches on Valentina's head.

“Mind they don't bite you, their teeth are pretty sharp,” Lord McTire admonishes us.

Oh.

“They're very good natured, though. Most of the time.”

Just as well!

In a few minutes, we're covered in mud and dragon saliva. Now I know why Lord McTire was so dirty, when we arrived.

“Come on, now, before their mum arrives. She can be rather… protective.” 

Right.

A bit further along the shore Lord McTire rummages in his sporran and takes out two little fabric pouches hanging off strings.

“Tie these on. We're about to see the kelpie,” he says cheerily, and strides forward.

“What?” exclaims Camilla. Can a ghost go pale? Because she has.

“Kelpie!” says Valentina, not interrupting her gait, quickly tying the little pouch around her neck.

“No, we aren't!” Camilla is clearly not moving another float further.

“What's wrong?”

“I can't stand kelpies. They drown children…” It comes back to me that Camilla drowned – that's how she died. She's shaking a little.

“Hey, sweetheart, come here!” Alistair opens his arms to the little ghost-girl, and at the same time, he stops in front of us. Camilla snuggles up against him.

“Whatever you do, Luca, Valentina, don't touch the kelpie,” he whispers urgently, checking that the pouch string is safely around our necks. We nod.

He seems quite… anxious. That's not like him.

With Camilla floating very close to Uncle Alistair, we follow Lord McTire around a curve of the shore to find a figure sitting on a rock. As we get closer, I can tell it's a woman. She has long white hair that's dripping wet. Her eyes are as green as Libby McMillan's from Hag, but they have a glassy, sinister sheen. She looks a bit… crazy, really. I feel the hair at the back of my neck stand up, and take Valentina's hand to make sure she's safe. 

“Hello, Lord McTire. Who have you brought to me?” the woman says. Her voice is deep, and a bit… gurgly. Like she has water, or mud, in her lungs.

“They're not for you, if that's what you mean. How are you, Morag?”

“Hungry,” she says. Her hair is dripping, dripping, making a sinister noise as the water hits the stones. Like something you might hear in a black airless cave. I feel Camilla gasping softly beside me.

“Let's go…” she whispers.

“Nice to meet you, children,” says the kelpie, and extends her hand.

“Don't touch her!” whispers Alistair. We keep our arms glued to our sides.

“Now, now, Morag. I thought we were over this. And anyway, they wouldn't taste nice,” says Lord McTire, showing her the little pouches around our necks.

“Oh, but there are ways…”

A blood-curling wail rises from beside me. It's Camilla, her hair spread around her like a mane, her eyes black and hollow, her arms extended. She looks terrifying, all white floating rags and those empty eyes taking up most of her face.

The kelpie gurgles, a low fearsome noise, and slides into the loch. As she touches the water, her body seems to blur and melt. In a split second, she changes shape, and she's a white mare, her mane dripping like her hair did. She goes under without a noise, just a few silent ripples.

Valentina and I are holding onto each other. As soon as the water closes, we look back at Camilla, 
and she's a little girl again, pale and trembling in Alistair's arms, her black hair down on her shoulders.

“Sorry,” she whispers.

“It's ok, sweetheart.” Uncle Alistair strokes her hair, going right through her.

I realise I'm sweating.

“Come away, now,” says Lord McTire, and leads us past the kelpie's stone. “Not the nicest of creatures, but we have her under control.”

I doubt that, but I don't say anything.

Sorley strolls beside us.

“When I was a wee boy, my mum and dad always made sure we had our pouches around our necks, tied seven times, just to make sure.”

“Why are we not supposed to touch her?” I ask.

“Her skin is adhesive. If you touch her, you'll stick to her skin, and she'll drag you under,” Sorley answers calmly, like it's everyday stuff. Growing up on Loch Glas must have been pretty exciting. Camilla shudders in mid-air, and Valentina is very pale too. I squeeze her arm again.