Dēda

A Scottish Road Trip

One of the fun things about working in film production is finding sites that fit the location in the story that you will be filming. If you can find something that works for the film, you can often justify location filming as opposed to building elaborate sets for the same purpose. My current assignment was finding the 'right' setting for a film set in medieval times. I needed a castle and some forest and lake areas not too remote, but not something that everybody would immediately recognize and would thus cost a fortune to rent for the run of the production.

I decided that the best way to find what I needed was to explore Scotland with Tim, my ward. After all, he was out of school for the summer and there were just the two of us. It would be the perfect getaway and business trip combined.

We flew into Glasgow from the States and, setting out by auto, first visited all the well-known spots. Tim was fascinated with our lodgings. They ranged from thatch-covered inns to converted brownstones as we explored Edinburgh, Stirling, St Andrews, and the region around the Firth of Forth before heading into the 'Highlands'.

Setting out from St. Andrews one fine morning, we headed north along highway A9 until we reached Dalwhinnie at the northeastern end of Loch Ericht. In addition to the village, there was supposed to be an imposing castle along its shore. I was intrigued. We didn't really expect to meet the laird of the manor, but we could, at least, claim that we had visited his castle. Besides, this might work for the film that was in the planning stages back home.

It was a beautiful day, one of those rare, clear days that the Scots call 'a magic day'… sunshine, blue skies, no wind. Along the shores of the loch, open fields with the purple blooms of heather bordered patches of dark green forested land. The clear waters beaconed. So we stopped, intending to enjoy a brief outing on the loch, before pushing onward. Inquiries soon enabled us to rent a small boat with a trolling motor. We were told to avoid the area near some caves on the north shore… dangerous sunken rocks we were told… but no other instructions were forthcoming.

Once out on the loch, we simply let the currents take us where they would. It was a warm day. Tim shed his shirt and sat in the prow of the boat in just his cut-offs and tennis shoes. Sitting in the stern, I marveled at the display of healthy young teenager there before me. Was this the little boy who had come to me from an orphanage only five years ago? Yes, it was, but he was now more beautiful than ever.

Tim was now about 5ft. 9in [1.73 m] tall. At 150 lbs. [68 kg], he was a slim but well-muscled teen. His shock of unruly, reddish brown hair neatly framed his light skin. I couldn't help but think of the sparkle and excitement that he had added to my life.

By now, the sun was high in the sky. We took turns applying sun screen to our exposed body parts. His arms and legs and his chest now had a fine dusting of hair which made his skin feel like brushed velvet as I ran my hands over those places that he could not reach.

He giggled. I guess that my touch tickled. He might be a teen, but still loved being caressed by his dad. I felt like taking him in my arms and holding him like I had done when he was just a little boy.

We drifted aimlessly for a while. "Dad, it's nice and peaceful! Can't we stay here forever?" he joked. "Be careful what you ask for!" I thought.

"You'd like that, would you?" I asked.

"No, not really, but it surely is nice here on the water."

He was right, but the peace was about to be rudely shattered.

We were quite some ways out from the 'forbidden' caves when he spotted something floating toward us. It had seemed to come from out of the cave. As the object floated closer we made a horrifying discovery!

It was the naked body of a young boy about ten or eleven, floating face up as though asleep, his blond hair a halo around his head. A thin trail of blood from where his throat had been cut gave lie to the idea that he had died of an accident. Tim gazed at the scene and turned to me with horror, "Dad! He's been murdered!"

"It certainly looks like it," I admitted, striving hard to keep my head.

Lifting the dead boy gently into the boat, we turned back toward the village, the trolling motor seemingly inadequate for its task.

Grounding our vessel on the pebbly beach, I told my son, "Tim, go find the constable and bring him. I saw a sign over an office on the village's high street when we were here earlier. I'll try to find the boatman." He took off at a run, but I was unable to find anyone at all. The whole town appeared deserted, so I decided to join him at the constable's office.

I entered the office just in time to hear Tim exclaim, "You mean you already know about the body? You know about the murdered child?"

"Yes," responded the constable, his face expressionless.

"Aren't you going to do something?" asked an incredulous Tim.

"No." Having said that, the officer reached into his desk drawer, removed a strange pistol and shot Tim in the chest.

As it turned out, it was a tranquilizer dart. Tim looked down at the spot where the dart had hit him and then slowly crumpled to the floor. Before I could even move, I was darted as well.

When at last I struggled back to consciousness, I was lying on a canvass pallet in a stone walled room. The room was dark, the only light from a barred window in the door. Some kind of cell I realized. I saw a second pallet a short distance away and on it lay my son, still out. Suddenly I realized we were both naked and chained to the stone wall of the room by manacles around our ankles.

My chain was long enough that I thought I could reach Tim, so I carefully tried to stand but my legs were not yet ready to carry my weight. I fell flat on the stone floor. Slowly, I rolled over on my side out of breath and let the swimming images once more resolve themselves before I tried crawling to him.

Just as I almost reached him, he started to come out of it. At first, he thrashed around and whimpered. Clearly, he was completely disoriented. I reached out to him and managed to pull him into my arms. As I tried to sooth him, I said "It's all right Tim! I'm here!" He clung to me shaking with fright.

"Dad! What happened? Where are we?" he gasped and sputtered.

"I don't know, son. We must have done something to arouse the local people's ire. It must have something to do with finding that body. I imagine that we were not supposed to have seen that."

"That poor kid," he bawled. "Murdered! And we found the body! Oh Dad, what's going to happen to us? Will they cut our throats, too?"

I thought to myself, "The body that we saw was of a child about ten years old and Tim is several years older, so that might save him." Then I said to my son "I don't think so. We'll just have to be brave and see what happens." However, to myself I was thinking "Easier said than done."

"Dad, I'm scared!"

"So am I, son! So am I!" He lay in my arms and gradually stopped shaking. After a while, we both dozed, shaking off the rest of whatever they had used on us.

A short time later, the cell door rattled open and a naked teenaged boy entered and placed two bowls of something on the floor where we could reach them. From the collar around his neck, I realized that he was a slave. His face was expressionless as he looked at me and then silently withdrew. He had left us porridge of some sort, not much taste, but at least it was filling. I hadn't realized how hungry we both were.

After eating, we lay together quietly trying to comfort each other. The light from the door faded and it looked like we would be here for the night.

After a restless night in the cell, Tim and I were both startled awake by sharp creeks and rattles as the door to our cell was unlocked. The same naked slave that had brought us porridge the night before entered and again set down two more bowls of the same gray mixture. "Eat this now. The Master will be wanting to see you soon," said the slave. "I'm Sean, the master's boy."

Sean, who looked to be about the same age as Tim, stood roughly 5'10" [1.75 m] and probably weighed about 160 lbs. [72 kg]. He was one of those lean youths whose slim, muscled bodies would never know much in the way of fat. However, it was Sean's auburn hair and freckled body that marked him as being typical of many of the Scottish people of the local area.

"What master? Why are we being held here?" I demanded in a stern tone of voice.

"He will tell you what you need to know," answered Sean. "Now, eat!"

With that he left us standing there with the porridge as he exited our cell. Hungry and not knowing what the day would bring, we ate the porridge in silence.

It was not long before Sean returned. This time he was carrying iron manacles that could have been centuries old. "Put these on your wrists and snap them shut," he commanded.

"I'm not going to do anything of the kind!" I raged back at him. Then suddenly I thought that my whole left side was on fire. I had not seen that the kid had a small cattle prod in his left hand and wasn't afraid to use it. It was harsh but effective. There was nothing to be gained by resisting. Silently, I slipped the manacles around each wrist and snapped the locks shut. Tim, who had been watching all of this in wide-eyed horror, hurriedly did the same.

Sean then released our ankle chains from our crude beds and fastened them between our legs so that we could walk, but not run. Then he said, "I'm going to go out the door of your cell. Follow me out and stand to the left of the door." Silently we followed him into the hall of what was fast becoming our prison.

Once in the hall, Sean marched us in front of him down its gray stone length to a circular stair well. Motioning us with the cattle prod, we slowly went up two levels to what appeared to be the main level of a castle that appeared to have been updated late in the 19th century.

The lower part of the walls of the hallway before us were paneled in a dark wood. Portraits of what must have been ancestors of the castle's current or former owners hung in gilt frames at regular intervals on the beige plaster above the wood. I noticed that one of the portraits was of an officer in the Scots Guards and that he was wearing the Victoria Cross on his uniform. "At least the people who once lived here were not all bad" I thought to myself.

We continued down the hall to a large door with linen-fold carvings on its dark surface. Sean stopped us before the door and knocked on its polished surface. "Enter." was the command from somewhere within the room behind the door.

The slave motioned us to go in ahead of him. We were surprised to find ourselves in a medical examination room that in contrast to the almost medieval décor of the hall was antiseptically clean and white. Besides the medical examination table that stood to one side of the room, there was a wash basin and towel rack in one corner. In the other corner, there was a folding screen that, from the small noises coming from behind it, concealed someone working there. What appeared to be a supply cabinet, a clothes tree, a basket for medical waste, and a couple of straight metal chairs completed the sparse furnishings.

Sean ordered Tim and me to stop in the middle of the room. Overhead there were ropes suspended from the ceiling that ended in a spacer bar with hooks embedded in it. He lowered one set of the ropes and motioned for me to raise my hands over my head. Still carrying his cattle prod, he efficiently guarded me with one hand while he attached my manacles to one of the hooks on the spacer bar with his other hand. Then he took up the slack in the ropes until I was barely able to touch the floor with my feet. Moments later, he had Tim secured in the same manner.

Suspended there, we didn't have long to wait for 'The Master' to finish whatever he was doing behind the screen. There was a rustle as a chair was pushed back from what must have been a small desk behind the screen and a man about my age appeared. Like Sean he was freckled and his hair was basically auburn in color although it contained a lot of blonde hairs of the kind that pass for gray among people with red hair as they age. His emotionless eyes were a deep blue behind his wire-rimmed glasses. Bushy eyebrows and a large almost walrus-like moustache gave his face a wild, hairy cast. However, his clean, starched white lab coat provided him with an official look. The man came over to where Tim and I were dangling naked from the ceiling and said, "So, we have here John and Tim Rowan. You seem to have arrived at Loch Ericht at a bad time for both you and us. It would have been better had you had remained at Dalwhinnie at the northeastern end of the loch and stayed away from things that you were not supposed to see."

"When is anyone supposed to see murder?" I countered.

There was another sudden burst of pain as Sean touched the cattle prod to my left buttock.

"Speak only when the Master asks you a question," the young slave commanded.

"Sean, does have a way of making a point. However, neither you nor your son are of any real interest to me. My research only deals with prepubescent children and, even then, only ones with a rare blood condition. If children with this blood condition go into puberty, it sets off an internal reaction in their blood chemistry that will ultimately kill them through a painful and agonizing illness. So you see, I really have done them a favor by ending their young lives once their usefulness to my research is over," explained the 'doctor.'

"This morning, there was an unfortunate accident with the lorry that was transporting a body for disposal when it went off the road and into the loch. In the course of the lorry being partially submerged, the body floated free and onto the loch. Before we could retrieve the body, you and your son happened upon it. In addition, if you had bothered to look more closely, you would have seen that the body that you discovered had had its throat cut post mortem. I drained the blood for further study." he added.

Turning to Tim, his eyes surveyed the naked suspended boy's body. Then he took Tim's penis in his latex-gloved hand and examined it as though it were a fresh cut of meat from the local market. He rolled it between his fingers feeling it for size and girth. From where I hung, I could see that Tim's eyes were wide enough to pop out of his head. Not since he had gotten out of diapers had anyone touched him there except during a rare medical examination. The master then took each of his balls one by one between his thumb and forefinger and rolled them around feeling them like they he was a boy testing his marbles before a game.

I honestly thought that Tim might actually go into shock from the trauma of being felt up by a total stranger. At that moment, if I could have gotten free, I would have strangled the SOB.

"While you were unconscious, I tested your blood, neither of you carry the gene that I am researching. Too bad, your son would be an interesting subject for study." The 'doctor' advised with a sigh in his emotionless voice.

He then turned to me and ran his hand over my naked butt and down my leg. "I think that we can drop the two of you back into society in such a way that you can do us no harm and thus avoid having to explain your untimely deaths," he added. With that, he produced a hypodermic syringe and, for the second time in 24-hours, I was given an injection that quickly caused me to lose consciousness.

I awoke the next morning still naked but in a clean white bed in a small room in a typical Scottish inn. A naked Tim was asleep on the other bed beside me. The room had white walls that appeared to be whitewashed with chintz curtains at the small diamond-paned windows. I could see our luggage in one corner of the room. Slowly, I got out of bed and staggered to the dresser. Looking in the mirror, I realized that I looked like Hell as I studied my reflection looking back at me. I felt like I had had a hard night drinking or carousing. However, there were no cuts or bruises nor anything else that would signify that I had spent anything but a quiet evening at a small inn in a quaint Scottish village just off the A9 road from Perth to Inverness. My abduction and meeting with 'The Master' at the castle was still a vivid memory, but I had nothing to prove that it had ever happened.

I slowly turned and walked back over to the bed where my son was just beginning to stir. "Tim, are you alright?" I anxiously asked him.

"Yes, Dad, but my head hurts. Where are we? How did we get here?" he asked quizzically.

"This seems to be an inn in one of the local villages. My guess is that we are back in Dalwhinnie at the northeastern end of the loch. It's the only real town around Loch Ericht. I imagine that this is that crazy doctor's way of getting rid of us and still let us live. After all, who would believe our story and the local authorities are evidently in on whatever he's doing. By now he has had plenty of time to get rid of any incriminating evidence so there would be nothing to be gained by contacting the provincial authorities. Get dressed, let's get some breakfast, and get the Hell out of here while we can."

Little more than an hour later, I pulled the car out of the inn's car park and turned north. As I hit the accelerator, I turned to a solemn-faced Tim sitting beside me in the passenger seat on my left: "In the future, I think that we need to avoid Loch Ericht."

"Yes, Dad. I don't ever want to get involved with anything like that again." Tim softly answered.

Then we rode in silence as we quickly put miles between us and whatever was happening at Loch Ericht.

The End