Read The Paradise War for Free Online

was sound asleep.
    I watched him for a few moments, thinking to myself: Simon Rawnson, what have you gotten us mixed up in?

4
A T THE D OOR
TO THE W EST
     
    I heard the deep, throaty rumble of a juggernaut and woke to find Simon snoring softly in the seat beside me. The sun was rising beyond the eastern hills, and the early morning traffic was beginning to hum along the road next to us. The clock in the dash read 6:42 a.m. I prodded Simon. “Hey, wake up. We’ve overslept.”
     
    “Huh?” He stirred at once. “Bugger!”
    “It’s cold in here. Let’s have some heat.”
    He sat up and switched on the ignition. “Why didn’t you wake me?”
    “I just did.”
    “We’ll be too late now.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, checked the rearview mirror, and then pulled out swiftly onto the road.
    “What do you mean? The sun isn’t even up yet. It’s only a few more miles. We’ll get there in plenty of time.”
    “I wanted to be there before sunrise,” Simon told me flatly. “Not after.”
    “What difference does that make?”
    Simon gave me a derisive look. “And you a Celtic scholar.” His tone suggested I should be able to read his mind.
    “The time-between-times—is that what you’re talking about?” I was not aware that Simon knew any ancient Celtic lore. “Is that why we’ve busted our buns to get here so fast?”
    He didn’t answer. I took his silence as affirmation and continued. “Look, if that’s why you’ve been dragging us all over the country, forget it. The time-between-times—that’s just a folk superstition, more poetic device than anything else. It doesn’t exist.”
    “Just like aurochs don’t exist?”
    “Aurochs don’t exist!” And neither do Green Men, I might have added, but saved my breath. There was no need to bring that up at this hour of the morning. “It’s just screwball journalism.”
    “That’s what we’re here to determine, isn’t it?” Simon smiled deviously and turned his attention to the road. We were already in the country again, heading east on the A96 out of Inverness. The last sign I saw indicated that Nairn was only a dozen miles ahead.
    I rummaged around on the floor of the car for the atlas, found it where I’d dropped it the night before, and turned to the proper page. The farm we were looking for was not on the map, but the nearest village was—a mere flyspeck of a hamlet called Craigiemore on a thin squiggle of yellow road which ran through what was optimistically called Darnaway Forest. Probably all that was left of this alleged forest was a hillside or two of rotting stumps and a roadside picnic area.
    “I don’t see Carnwood Farm on here,” I said after giving the map a good once-over. Simon expressed his appreciation for this information with a grunt. Motivated by his encouragement, I continued, “Anyway, it’s seven miles to the B9007 from Nairn. And from there to the farm is probably another two or three miles, minimum.”
    Simon thanked me for my orienteering update with another eloquent grunt and put the accelerator nearer the floor. The hazy, hill-bound countryside fled past in a blur. It was already plenty blurry to begin with. A thickish mist hugged the ground, obscuring all detail beyond a thousand yards or so, and turning the rising sun into a ghostly, blood-red disk.
    Scotland is a strange place. I failed to see the attraction so many otherwise sane people professed for this bleak, wind-bitten scrag of dirt and rock. What wasn’t moors was lochs, and one as damp as the other. And cold. Give me the Costa Del Sol anytime. Better yet, give me the French Riviera and take everything else. The way I figured it, if one could not grow a decent wine grape within shouting distance of the beach, the hell with it.
    Simon stirred me from my reverie with an impromptu recitation, as startling as it was spontaneous. Without taking his eyes from the road, he said:
“I am the singer at the dawn of the age,
and I stand at