Free The Exiled by William Meikle

selling those for a friend,” he said. “Auld Brian went on and on at me, and I finally gave in and put them on the shelf. Been there for two years now and only sold a single copy. It’s his bugbear, I’m afraid—he’s been banging on about it for decades. I said to him—’If it matters so much to you, why don’t you write a book?’ and the daft auld bugger went and did. It’s terrible self-published nonsense—a real publisher wouldn’t touch it; all conspiracy theories here and wee magic fairies there and the worst type of New Age mumbo jumbo claptrap.”
    “I’ll take two,” Alan said, and had paid and left the shop before the shopkeeper got over the shock.
    * * *
    He went back to his flat, brewed up a pot of coffee, and went straight to the book. He almost gave up after the first paragraph, for it looked to be setting the whole thing up as either an anti-English or anti-immigration rant.
    “There is a corruption at the heart of our wee country—a rot that set in many centuries ago and one we have allowed to fester ever since. We gave them a foothold, and they have taken root, delving into our hearts and minds, sowing seeds of discord and the blackest of evil.”
    Alan persevered. His reporter’s nose was telling him he was finally onto something, and he’d learned to trust that instinct.
    After a long, rambling preamble that hinted at an enemy at the heart of everything but took great pains not to give any hint of what the enemy might be, the author finally got to some meat. Chapter one had a simple stark heading—THE LOST GIRLS.
    * * *
    “Stories of people being taken away with the faeries are as old as Scotland itself, and anecdotal evidence can be found wherever, and whenever, you choose to look. I personally have read—in the Latin—Roman scrolls that tell of dark times when whole villages were taken, and there is the famous legend of the Lost Legion, vanished into our misty history with scarcely a murmur. The Hebrides in particular has always been sorely plagued—the remote locations and islands proving to be ideal hunting grounds for those From Beyond.
    “Of course we are meant to believe that these are all just the silly superstitions of more primitive, less enlightened peoples, that the new light of rationality and science has swept away all such childish things.
    “Some of us know better.
    “As I was researching the history of faerie abductions—and Thomas the Rhymer in particular—I came, by accident, on the first mention I can find of the Swan. Even then it was most oblique, merely a reference in a church record in Melrose to a girl child being taken by ye Cobbe.
    “That first time, I thought nothing of it. But as my interests grew and my research took me further afield, I began to discern a pattern. Girls—young girls—were being taken, and in every case until the start of the sixteenth century the abduction is attributed to the Cobbe.
    “Then something happened. It is well known that the Scots king dabbled in many esoteric areas and, having heard of the Cobbe, he was determined that it should stand before him and give an account of itself. A ritual was held—a summoning if you like. I have seen a document in Innerpeffray Library that contains a full telling of the tale, but I cannot reproduce it here—to do so would be dangerous in the extreme. Suffice to say the abductions stopped—for a time.
    “I found the trail again in the early seventeenth century, where I discovered evidence that a Swan cult operated on the shores of Loch Leven. Children from as far afield as Inverness went missing over a span of several years, their passing marked only by the presence of dismembered wings of swans left at the sites. It is also around this time that the cover-up started, and the secret society that had been gestating for some time finally fledged into full being…”
    * * *
    It was at that point in the manuscript that Alan started to skim. The author detailed his evidence of both