Short Fiction/Free Read/Paranormal/Fantasy/Romance
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It’s Christmas in the Scottish Highlands but Andy, an employee of the Glenmuir Estate, is far from festive. What is the connection between him and Nicky Glennister, the young laird of Glenmuir, and what of the strange creature that legend says roams the land?
Excerpt:
Nicky Glennister frowned at his mother’s nurse.
“Are you sure? We’d so hoped that…Christmas….”
The nurse pressed her lips into a small, sad smile. “I think that might be overly optimistic, Mr. Glennister. I’m sorry.”
“But it’s only a few weeks. D’you not—”
He looked over at the bed in which Alison lay; the rhythmic beeps and soft whooshes of the machines that now did most of her living for her hardly made the silence more comforting.
“She’s not in any pain,” the nurse said and touched his arm, as if that small mercy might be enough.
Nicky remembered his manners and smiled.
“Of course. Um…thank you.”
The nurse nodded, gathered her things, and left.
He stood there for a long while after she’d gone. This room had been a nursery once. Some forty-odd years ago, when he and his sister had been small, it had been decorated in white and yellow. Painted ducks on the walls, in a frieze that ended just beside the tall panelled shutters. The window seats were still upholstered in the same fabric—greyed not with age—the little sprigs of cornflowers, or whatever they were supposed to be, just discernable in the less threadbare patches.
They’d sat by these windows, and Mummy had read them stories from an old leather-bound book, full of strange worlds and ancient things. He remembered the tale of the Glenmuir glaistig, the creature half-woman and half-deer, with her tumbling green hair and unearthly grey skin. Like the Green Lady of other myths, whose robe concealed her goat’s legs, the glaistig their book described had the touch of the fairies on her. When he grew older, Nicky read in other volumes that her legend was all that remained of a deer goddess that had once been worshipped by the Highland people. It made sense; he knew there had always been deer at Glenmuir, just as there would always be Glennisters.
The glaistig was supposed to be a protectress of the people, a beneficent watcher, though her favour had the fickleness of the fae about it. The boys of the village, the story said, poured milk into the well of a hollow stone for her to drink, and the glaistig thanked them with her kindness. But, one cold morning—heading, as it was now—towards the solstice and the darkest teeth of winter, a young man had thought to warm the milk. He’d meant it as a gesture of friendship, a comfort in the damp chill, but he’d over-heated the offering, and the glaistig burned her mouth. She flung down the ladle in disgust, cursed the whole place and, with a single strike of her hoof, brought plague on the village.
Nicky remembered that story because, after hearing it, he’d screamed every time he saw a deer.
