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"That must be McGregor," Finn shouted in reply, looking all around the wild landscape at the solitary figure by the jeep. A playful grin stretched across his face. "He looks just as cheerful as this lovely Scottish weather!"
“Shhh!” Amelia said. “Your voice will carry on the wind. He might hear you.”
Footsteps above clunked down the plane stairs as a small number of passengers left the plane behind. They huddled in the rain and ran off to a small building across the tarmac runway, which Finn assumed was about as close to an airport as that part of the world could get.
“Maybe we should get back on the plane?” Finn joked.
Amelia elbowed him gently as the man now approached the stoic, his expression as craggy as the cliffs and jagged hills that dotted the landscape.
"Mr. McGregor, I presume?" Amelia asked.
The man nodded curtly. "It's a dreich night the nicht. Get in and I'll take ye tae Huldrahoose. We have to get moving."
Finn shook his hand, and the man's grip was like iron, despite being more broad than tall. They nodded at each other, and then the three figures stepped to the green jeep, and they all got in.
“Is it always this sunny?" Finn asked as McGregor started the engine, and they drove off the runway in the rain.
“Aye, lad,” he said. “This is the way, oot here.”
Finn looked at Amelia, and their eyes met in the back of the jeep. He was struggling with this particular dialect of English, but Amelia shook her head as if to say "don't you dare make a joke about it".
Instead, they sat in the rear of that jeep, battered by the elements as the rain and wind fingered their way all around the vehicle. Through water-covered windows, the landscape of Huldra Island appeared almost ethereal, like an alien world with large jutting rocks rising out of the deep green and yellow grasslands stretching for as far as the eye could see.
The drive was nothing short of a journey through a maze of curling, wet roads, cliffs that seemed to drop into oblivion, and a sky that had transitioned from angry gray to an unsettling black in the darkening early evening. The island seemed to be constructed mostly of a peculiar black stone, which Finn found both intriguing and unsettling.
"What's that black rock I see everywhere?" Finn said, trying to slice through the tension. "Volcanic?"
“Aye,” MacGregor said at the wheel. "The island, she's ancient, laddie. Born out of the seabed. She rose up out of an eruption. You'll see the rock used in some of the hooses around here. Ye, ken?"
Finn nodded with a smile and then leaned into Amelia. “Why does he think my name is Ken?”
Amelia let out a loud laugh. “Finn. Ken means know in some parts of Scotland. Ye ken?”
Now Finn laughed.
McGregor didn't so much as twitch a smile. "There's nothing funny about what's happening around the island and Huldra House."
Finn glanced at Amelia, who gave him a subtle shake of her head.
"What makes you say that?" Amelia probed.
"It's the old curse, lassie," McGregor stated, as if that explained everything.
"You're going to need to unpack that a bit," Finn said, raising an eyebrow.
McGregor sighed. "Old stories talk about a gateway to the realm of the Huldufolk—hidden people. They live in another world below our island. When they're displeased or someone ventures too close to their world, they send out a banshee, a wraith. Anyone who sees it is doomed. Deed."
Finn nodded. "Is this a two-for-one deal? A murder investigationanda ghost story? Amelia, why didn't you say we'd be having so? I would have brought my Ouija board."
Amelia gave him a disapproving look. "I'd respect McGregor's words more seriously if I were you."
"I'm sorry, McGregor, I'm only joking. Do people really believe that stuff here?" Finn quipped.
“I live on the mainland a lot of the year, coming back and forward,” the man grimaced, the jeep shuddering on an uneven piece of trail. "But I've seen enough around here tae know that there's something bad on Huldra island, and if you know what's good for ye, you'll stay out of its way."
Arching around a large grassy hill, suddenly Huldra House came into sight. It was made of black and red stone. Finn had never seen anything quite like it, and he knew immediately that much of the house had been constructed from the same black volcanic rocks that populated the landscape.
As they approached in the jeep, the vehicle's windscreen wipers shrieking back and forward against the wet glass, no one said a thing. A silence hung in the air of that cavity in the storm, that interior where the wild winds had not yet penetrated.
