Going to the island my grandmother lives on is like taking a step back two hundred years. They just got electricity last year, not that they quite know what to do with it. Most of the still prefer to use their fireplaces and stay by candlelight at all times. They rise and sleep with the sun and claim that doing anything else is against the laws of nature.
They're the sort of folk that'll cherish you if you're any form of relation and keep their distance from everyone else. Tourism would be utterly non-existent if the ferry didn't circle the island once or twice a day. People seem to feel safer looking at the locals from the sea while they go about their business.
It's certainly safer that way. The village itself barely covers three miles all around the rest of the island is taken up by a mix of dense forest and deep chasms. If local legend is to be believed then they don't end until they hit the sea floor and that's only for the sheer number of skeletons tangled together deep below.
I used to love these stories, love visiting my grandmother and especially loved spending the night in the bird watching tower right at the heart of the woods. Every summer I'd be allowed up there for the night, all by myself as gran was too old to make it up that many stairs.
I don't go there anymore, not since she died. Well, was killed by something that apparently is just a story and couldn't possibly exist in nature no matter what kind if science was involved. There's just no logic to such a creature and yet I saw it when it was seven years old and it killed my grandmother right in front of me.
Well, I say in front... she was at the base of the bird watching tower trying to get me to come down because there was a "bear" loose in the woods... on a small island by the Scottish coast which hasn't seen bears for well over a thousand years. At least they tried to make their cover story vaguely plausible.
Rogue zoo bear is a lot easer to swallow than "it crawled out of a chasm in the year of our Lord 978 and it won't stop trying to eat anyone who stays in the woods for too long". According to the church records, that's exactly what happened and they've been hiding it ever since, trying to make their island as difficult to reach and inhospitable to remain on as possble without making seem like anything more than them judt being a bit eccentric and local.
Whatever it is, I know it'l find a way off the island eventually. Nobody wants to live there and without any young blood, soon the islanders will die off completely and the creature will find their boats. I know it will, I saw it skulking around the outskirts of the village the night before it killed my grandmother.
It's only a matter of time now and the mainland will never be prepared enough.
They're the sort of folk that'll cherish you if you're any form of relation and keep their distance from everyone else. Tourism would be utterly non-existent if the ferry didn't circle the island once or twice a day. People seem to feel safer looking at the locals from the sea while they go about their business.
It's certainly safer that way. The village itself barely covers three miles all around the rest of the island is taken up by a mix of dense forest and deep chasms. If local legend is to be believed then they don't end until they hit the sea floor and that's only for the sheer number of skeletons tangled together deep below.
I used to love these stories, love visiting my grandmother and especially loved spending the night in the bird watching tower right at the heart of the woods. Every summer I'd be allowed up there for the night, all by myself as gran was too old to make it up that many stairs.
I don't go there anymore, not since she died. Well, was killed by something that apparently is just a story and couldn't possibly exist in nature no matter what kind if science was involved. There's just no logic to such a creature and yet I saw it when it was seven years old and it killed my grandmother right in front of me.
Well, I say in front... she was at the base of the bird watching tower trying to get me to come down because there was a "bear" loose in the woods... on a small island by the Scottish coast which hasn't seen bears for well over a thousand years. At least they tried to make their cover story vaguely plausible.
Rogue zoo bear is a lot easer to swallow than "it crawled out of a chasm in the year of our Lord 978 and it won't stop trying to eat anyone who stays in the woods for too long". According to the church records, that's exactly what happened and they've been hiding it ever since, trying to make their island as difficult to reach and inhospitable to remain on as possble without making seem like anything more than them judt being a bit eccentric and local.
Whatever it is, I know it'l find a way off the island eventually. Nobody wants to live there and without any young blood, soon the islanders will die off completely and the creature will find their boats. I know it will, I saw it skulking around the outskirts of the village the night before it killed my grandmother.
It's only a matter of time now and the mainland will never be prepared enough.
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