A Novel
Nothing in this forest is taken.
Everything is given.
He knew what it would cost. He said yes anyway.
Miles Chapman comes to the Cairngorms four days before the solstice, to a stone cottage called Reception, because he has told his wife he needs to think and this is the most unreachable place he could book. He is fifty, separated but not divorced, and a man who has spent thirty years watching his own life through glass. No signal. No wifi. A caretaker, Maddy, who has held the post longer than anyone in Aviemore will tell him.
In a cupboard behind the water tank: a shortwave radio, still tuned. A mechanical voice reading numbers into a frequency that should be empty.
The numbers know his birthday. Then they know a phone number he deleted four years ago. Then they know the date his wife found out.
He is a systems analyst; he does what he was built to do. He logs, he decodes, he maps. And while he is working, the town keeps its distance, and the roads close in weather that is nearly weather, and every route back to the life he came here to repair shuts quietly and courteously behind him — until the only warm room in the Highlands is hers.
Nothing takes him. That is the part he will never be able to explain. He is given the truth in full, in a dead woman's handwriting, weeks before it matters. He is offered a car with the engine running. He is left alone for a day and a half with an open road, clear weather and nobody watching.
Reception is a novel about the difference between being trapped and being welcomed, and about a man who could not tell them apart until he had already said yes.
For readers of Andrew Michael Hurley, Michelle Paver, and Francine Toon
Britain's largest national park: 4,528 square kilometres of granite plateau, Caledonian pine and heather moor, shaped by glaciers and largely unaltered since. In deep winter the light lasts six hours. The mountain has its own resident: Am Fear Liath Mòr, the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui, first reported by the climber Norman Collie after an ascent in 1891 — a presence on the plateau, never quite seen, that makes experienced men run.
In Scottish tradition the glaistig is not a monster but a woman: a mortal put under enchantment and bound to a household, half-goat beneath a long green dress, propitiated with milk poured into a hollowed stone — the clach na glaistig. She is attached to the place, not born of it. Which raises the question the lore does not answer: if she was made, who made her, and out of whom?
1 February. Là Fhèill Brìghde. The quickening, the first stirring of the year, the feast of thresholds. On its eve a figure of Bride is dressed and laid in a bed by the hearth and the ashes are smoothed flat; in the morning the household reads the ash for her mark. And if the morning of the first dawns bright and fine, that is not a blessing — it means the Cailleach, the winter hag, is out gathering firewood, and intends to make the cold last.
Shortwave broadcasts logged since the First World War. A mechanical voice. A sequence of numbers, an interval signal — often, disturbingly, a nursery tune. The transmissions stop and start without pattern; the agencies neither confirm nor deny. In 1956 a former RAF signals operator came to a cottage in the Cairngorms and did not leave. He brought his trade with him. The station is his, and it is only the most recent of the instruments this place has used.
Hiis: a sacred grove. Maausk: the reconstructed native faith of Estonia, assembled in the modern era from folklore, fragments and longing. In 1978 a second-generation Estonian woman from Bradford — a daughter of the post-war displaced, who had never seen the country she was practising — came north and began carving marks into Scottish stone that no Scottish stone should carry. She is still there. She is still carving.
A genre defined by landscape, ritual and the slow recognition that the rational world has edges. Its ordinary shape is a stranger destroyed by a community's beliefs. This is not that book. Here the community is one woman, the belief is true, and nothing whatsoever happens to the stranger that he does not agree to.
The drive from Aviemore took longer than the listing had suggested. The road narrowed as it climbed, birch and Scots pine pressing in until the sky became a grey strip overhead, and Miles Chapman found himself hunching forward over the wheel as though that would help him see further into the failing light.
He almost missed the turn. A gap in the trees, a track of compressed gravel that curved away into darkness, a wooden sign so weathered he could only make out the word he had already expected: Reception. It had seemed an apt name when he'd booked it — a small, useful joke about disconnection. Now, arriving with a phone that had begun refusing his own passcode, it seemed like something else entirely.
The cottage emerged from the trees. Walls of grey granite, a low roof, two small windows that looked back at him without expression. The kind of building that had absorbed a century of Cairngorm rain and simply continued. Maddy Kesküla stood by the door as she'd said she would be — arms folded, watching his car come up the track without moving or waving, her expression unreadable in the dusk.
He cut the engine. The silence was immediate and complete.
Continue reading when the novel is published.
TRANSMISSION — 6.634 MHz — 03:17 UTC
"She warned him.
She warns all of them.
It costs her something every time."
The first person over the threshold after midnight decides the year's luck. Sign up for notice of publication, and occasional transmissions: Cairngorm dispatches, notes on the folklore, and the fragments that didn't survive the revision.