Sometimes when three men go hiking they don't come back. Most other times they do come back. Then there are those times that they try to come back but it would be better for everyone if they didn't.
"Auld Ghàidhealtachd" the old wizened crone spat the word and pointed to the path less taken. The crone was dark and sat hunched next to the road, leaning on a tall crooked staff.
"She says that is the way to the viewpoint" the backpacker in the red pack said to the other two. He was a grizzly bear of a man, with a huge brown beard and watery eyes.
"càrn air a thoirmeasg" she glowered and interrupted, shaking her finger against the path she had pointed to. Her rheumy eyes glared in frustration.
"Thank you." the red backpacker bear said and then gave the old woman some coins. She accepted them but continued to mutter contemptously.
"You sure she said to go this way? She sounded like she was saying it was not okay, David." the backpacker with the blue backpack said to the red bear guy, David.
"Yeah she said this is the old path to the sights." David said confidently.
As the three backpackers headed up the path the old woman was raising her hoarse voice behind them:
"gheibh thu bàs" she said behind them. "gheibh thu bas!"
"David I think she is warning us." the guy with the green pack added.
"Mike, Shawn, don't worry. She is just an old woman. She said this is the way, the rest is nonsense." David assured them.
"Are you sure?" Mike with the blue backpack asked nervously.
"What did she say, exactly?" Shawn asked when David said nothing.
"She is hard to understand, but we are looking for the place she said was up here. Let's just go. The path is old and worn, what danger could there possibly be?" David chuckled.
They passed a sign that said Loch Killin, where someone had tied a yellow scarf around the post of the sign. It fluttered harmlessly in the slight breeze.
"I guess she was just some old lady. Maybe she is crazy?" Shawn forced a bit of a laugh but nobody felt like he was right. Even David had an uneasy feeling.
"She was creepy. Let's not let it spoil this." David suggested.
"Yeah, I can't wait to see the view from the village up here. Take a few selfies." Mike fished a smoke from his pocket and tried to light it. He ended up dropping it after the wind blew out his flame twice. "Damn, dropped my smoke."
"Where?" Shawn had seen it hit the ground and roll and vanish.
"Must have rolled between those rocks." Mike looked and saw a crack in the rocks.
"Hey guys, up here!" David called to them from the bluff up ahead on the path. They followed the gradually curved path and reached the edge.
"Is this it?" Shawn sounded impressed. There was quite a view.
"No, up there!" David had his back to the top of the cliff and was seeing the village of Loch Killin atop the hill. It was a steep climb.
The three backpackers continued to hike up the rest of the way until they reached the village. It was a place of old huts and silence.
"There is nobody here." Mike observed. The place looked old.
"This village is abandoned a long time." Shawn noticed.
"Let's go over there, look down to the valley down there." David was excited and paid no attention to the decaying hovels.
They circled the edge of the village to see the elevated lake. It was down in the valley a short distance from the village and between two ridges that shadowed the waters into an inky umbra. Its unchallenged depths chilled the breeze that arose from it to greet the three men.
"How deep you think it is?" Shawn wondered.
"Some of the water down there is prehistoric. It is very deep. There are caves under these hills full of underground rivers." David told them.
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"How do you know?" Mike asked him.
"Those are common features of these highland lochs." David proclaimed. "This one is probably just like the rest."
"Makes sense." Shawn agreed.
"It isn't on the map." Mike had his phone out. "And we have no signal out here."
"You have no signal. Hold on." Shawn grinned and pulled his own phone out. He frowned. "Yeah, guess there is no signal out here."
"No wonder nobody lives here." David offered an explanation for the empty village.
"What is that white thing down there?" Mike had stepped away from the others, peering at a white lump in the shallow part of the lake where it formed a shore. Then he noticed another one nearby, and another one further still. He walked to the path and started following it towards the lake. As he walked he kept seeing more and more of the large white lumps, roughly the size of a sheep or something.
Then he was close enough that he saw the rest of them around the curve of the hill. The opposite hillside was littered with them. He looked at the one closest to him as it lay halfway in the water. It was a dead sheep.
He got closer, all the way to the edge of the lake and stared at it. Its remains were bloated and festering. The skull of the animal was nearly bare and hung stiffly from the corpse with empty sockets that seemed to be staring at him. A fly landed on Mike's cheek for just one second and then flew away.
"Dead sheep." Mike told Shawn and David as they descended the same path tot he lake shore. They too looked around at the scattered flock that lay dead all over the hillside and some of them in the lake itself.
"You guys. The village is empty and the sheep are all dead and rotten." Shawn stated the obvious facts about their surroundings. Somehow putting the two together made the peril they now faced seem more evident.
"What do you suppose happened?" Mike had an idea, some kind of disease probably.
"Could be the plague. Some kind of plague or disease." Shawn seemed to be the most agitated by the macabre debris.
"There is no plague. C'mon this is stupid. The sheep were left after the village emptied out and something killed them and ate them." David objected.
"Why did the village empty out, though?" Mike demanded. David sounded like he was in denial. "Where are the villagers?"
He started back towards Loch Killin Village and soon was looking into the hovels. He stopped and stared with something fearlike but almost angry at his two companions.
"They are dead too." Mike said flatly.
Shawn looked into one of the hovels on impulse and then staggered back outside. He fell to his knees and started to vomit up the breakfast they had eaten where they parked earlier that morning, at a nice little restaurant in Killingdorf.
"Uh. Okay you guys. We can go back down and report this. It isn't a big deal." David, the big grizzly bear backpacker sounded small and timorous.
"Not a big deal?! The whole village is dead!" Mike disclaimed.
"Okay but we need to get out of here and return either way." David tried to sound calm, but his effort was upsetting Mike. Shawn was still kneeling and had sweat and tears on his face from throwing up.
"Well what are we waiting for? Let's get the hell out of here." Shawn climbed to his feet and didn't wait. He started briskly walking back the way they had come.
The three backpackers hiked back down the trail and stopped at some distance just before the sign for the village where a yellow scarf fluttered like a taper.
Mike stopped and picked up a cigarette off the ground and lit it on the first try. He said: "I found that smoke I lost."
Shawn was drinking some water and said: "We have to get out of these hills."
David just watched the two of them and said nothing. He was thinking about the woman they had met on there way here. She had known of the danger and she had tried to warn them. Why hadn't she reported any of this? Her language was old and crude sounding and he wondered if she had tried and nobody had listened. He hadn't listened to her.
They kept hiking and by evening they could see the lights of Killingdorf. They had not planned to hike all the way back down that same day and all of them were tired. Killingdorf was still miles away. There was a unanimous consensus to pitch a camp and finish the journey back in the morning.
The next morning Mike was sick. Part of his face was like raw meat and he was coughing up blood.
"We are going to go get help. You are very sick." David said to him. He had a bandage on his rotten face that Shawn had put there and he had such a fever that they left him at camp and started back without him.
The two remaining backpackers reached Killingdorf at mid-morning. By then, Shawn was sick also. His lips were bloody and raw and so were his fingertips. One of his eyelids was all puffy and yellow already.
They went to the constable and told him about Loch Killin. If Shawn didn't look so awful they might not have believed them.
"Nobody has lived in Loch Killin in over a hundred years. It is like you hiked back in time to the old country. There is no Loch Killin. Nobody ever even goes up there, it is all closed off, the trail dynamited." the constable told them. He didn't believe them but he couldn't deny what he was looking at either.
Shawn suddenly threw up blood all over the floor.
"They all died up there." he added as he stepped away from the two men. "Of a horrible plague, some unknown disease."
Shawn collapsed and even David was flinching away from his sick companion. They had left Mike all alone and no help was coming.
"We need to get him to a hospital." David told the constable.
"Thirty miles from here." he replied. "Take him to the cot in the cell back there."
David reluctantly touched Shawn and helped him up. As he put his friend on the cot the bars closed behind him.
"Sorry boys. Can't risk letting you wander around Killingdorf with whatever sickness you are carrying." he told them. Then he left them there and called the main constabulary.
The legend of Loch Killin was that three men had come to the village and within three days all the people and all the sheep were dead from it. All except one old hag that lived outside the village. She had reported the outbreak and the place was sealed off, the trail wiped out with explosives. A hundred years ago.
The constable got off the phone and looked out the window. The people were all crowded around a fallen body. A man was laying on the ground, barely breathing, his skin bloody and horrible. Two men tried to help him up but couldn't get him to stand.
"Dear God...it is happening here..." the constable breathed in fear.
And so it was.