Ringleye

By Charles Palmer-Cook

Scotland and Ireland both have an abundance of breathtaking scenery and a multitude of authentic history. I grew to adulthood within this mystical wonderous landscape soused with myths and legends of strange creatures that haunted these almost long forgotten locations.
Some stories have credence whilst others fire the imagination. I enjoyed writing this story, it reminded me of a childhood filled with adventure and wonder growing up in a loving farming community in absolute freedom. These mystical places still exist, my childhood friends and I had them as our playground. I hope my tale of adventure and Celtic myth will fire your imagination, for in this modern world we need escapism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781728381787

Charles Palmer-Cook

Of Scottish/Irish descent. Born in Ayrshire and reared and nurtured in Celtic history including myths and legends. Married to Patricia [my rock] with four children and five grandchildren. Love reading the Classics and writing and fond of Classical music, favourite composer Mozart. Enjoy all ball games and horse racing. I’ve had a lifetime association with horses, including 9 years served in the Household Cavalry. Keen interest in all aspects of paranormal having experienced a close encounter and spiritual phenomena, I firmly believe that we are not alone in the cosmos.

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© 2022 Charles Palmer-Cook. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/11/2022

ISBN: 978-1-7283-8179-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-8178-7 (e)

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                           Up the airy mountains,

                           Down the rushy glens,

                           We daren’t go a-hunting,

                           For fear of little men.

                           Wee folk, good folk,

                           Trooping all together,

                           Green jacket, red cap

                           And white owl’s feather.

                           Down along the rocky shore,

                           Some make their home.

                           They live on crispy pancakes,

                           Of yellow tide foam.

                           Some in the reeds

                           Of dark mountain lake,

                           With frogs for their watchdogs,

                           All night awake.

Introduction

Long, long ago, at the time when Nature wove her mysterious incantations and spells and humanity’s mammalian ancestors had yet to craw from their earthen lairs, a creature spawned now lost in the mists of time—a changeling of upright posture with unparalleled cunning and intelligence that adapted feverishly to the great, savage struggle in the ancient Antediluvian maelstrom. Moulded by boiling lava flows and forged by death-dealing comets, this hardened enquirer developed over the eons into a more specialised entity.

Migrating between land and the great Tethys Ocean these small creatures flourished whilst other, less equipped life forms perished. Time and the elements had infused their metabolisms with such hardy genes that not even successive ice ages or scorching, arid deserts could affect them. They simply adapted, like the birds, turtles, and crocodiles. The sea was their mentor, their provider, their wet nurse. Whenever the cosmos threatened, they always returned to her bosom and suckled, awaiting a more placid time.

In the fullness of time, Earth wearied of her stellar battle and ventured to colonise her scarred continents with differing climates and other new and unique life forms. It was then that her favoured sons and daughters emerged from their watery world to take full advantage of the vast new world overflowing with natural resources. There they quickly adjusted to this new and wondrous environment and filled the vacuum left by the dinosaurs. Amongst the great reptiles’ scattered bones, the Ringleye set about building a realm on the sacred isle of Arran. New forms of brutal and ferocious predators still abounded, always a threat, but the Ringleye’s subterranean behaviour guaranteed sanctuary from privation. Here, situated on the shore of the ocean, they flourished, gathering knowledge of their world. With that expanding reasoning, they planned for a secure and prosperous future.

Millenia passed through drought, ice ages, continental plate shifts, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes, and still all went well in this new and wondrous world, a Garden of Eden seemingly forged and moulded especially for the Ringleye. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, a new life form began to flourish, a pestilence to the land, more threatening than any slavering Jurassic monster or deadly asteroid and more dangerous than the beast—the Nessie—that swam the straits of the Minch.

At first these obscure, landlocked apes were just another curio to the Ringleye, a subspecies of the large, hairy, gorilla-like flint-tool makers that dwelled in the caves around distant shorelines, but these new and dangerous overaggressive hominids soon caught their attention. These hunter-gatherers, the Cro-Magnons, had intelligence akin to their own, and to their dismay the Ringleye could only watch helplessly as these cunning bipeds raped and pillaged the virgin wastes over time, subjugating every creature they encountered, including their own slower, heavy-browed cousins, the Neanderthals. No life form could escape the marching tide as the human pestilence swept unstoppable across the land. Eventually the man-beasts came to dominate the entire planet.

Back then, the Ringleye tried to stop the feared and omnipresent humans using all means possible, but they were outnumbered and the humans too cunning and ruthless. In the blink of an eye, the unwitting changelings found that they had to step aside in the wake of the marauding ape. Once more, they were on the retreat, forced back into the sea. They were compelled yet again to adapt, to become creatures of the night, avoiding contact with the Cro-Magnons at all costs lest they be found out and hunted to extinction like the heavy-browed Neanderthals.

For a time, they were safe, scattered throughout the vast oceans, using darkness to maintain their fragile existence. They watched as the humans progressed whilst their own numbers dwindled. An uneasy peace reigned, and thankfully, so long as man stayed on the land and away from the oceans, there was little chance of encounter. However, human expansion demanded more energy and more resources, and they began to explore the Isle of Arran, this haven on which the Ringleye depended on so dearly. Again, a policy of greed and extermination drove this invasion of the sea. Anything deemed profitable was taken. All manner of fish, seals, dolphins, and even the mighty whales were slaughtered. The coastal regions became a dumping ground for industrial waste, poisonous concoctions spreading and infesting the food chain. The chemicals rendered the Ringleye infertile, and extinction snapped at the heels of these creatures that had endured for hundreds of millions of years. The cruel irony was that these rampant, pillaging modern humans were totally unaware of the Ringleye’s existence, except maybe as a festering, instinctive thought from a darker bygone age when people believed in kelpies, bogles, and trolls.

Fast forward and grind through the toxic industrial revolution into the beginning of the nuclear age. Follow the magnificent, rugged coastline of Ayrshire, Scotland, to the archaic ruins of Culzean Castle. There, confined, restricted, and buried deep beneath its dungeons, facing annihilation, the few remaining members of the Ringleye tribe prepared to take a last, desperate measure for survival. They would abandon this, their ancestral home, and leave in search of long-lost forebears, a missing, almost-forgotten tribe like themselves that had vanished into ancient folklore. If found, this potential gene pool could be their salvation from oblivion, and maybe, just maybe, they could find another paradise, another safe haven far from mankind.

Professor Sprake, also known to the Ringleye as the bearded one or the Sprake, was an immediate danger—a cunning, unscrupulous scientist who would stop at nothing to secure a specimen. He had uncovered evidence of their secret existence and now led the chase for their capture, pursuing them relentlessly using every technological means possible to ensnare them. This crazed academic knew that exposing the Ringleye, a new and unknown intelligent species, would restore his credibility within an already sceptical scientific community and crush the cynical media who dubbed him the paranoid palaeontologist. A man possessed, some would call him. Others called him a man with a magnificent obsession, a fantasist chasing fairies and kelpies. Yet as time passed, their eventual discovery grew ever certain, and all of humankind’s scientific technology was geared towards hunting these small, shy spirits of the night.

Could it be that this demented human would be the one to hammer the final nail in the coffin of the oldest living intelligent creatures on the planet? Ringleye, witnesses to the death of the dinosaurs, spectators of the primeval world, and now witness to a new and terrifying modern one, were trapped within a planet of apes with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

New Year’s Eve was a restless, shifting, witching night, bleak and barren, raw and cold, the last hurrah of the old spent year grudgingly bequeathing its last to the approaching new. Hellish Atlantic storms had lashed the Lowlands for a month of moons with blizzards of snow and bitter Arctic winds, transforming the tarns into a glacial desert.

In a lull in the tempest, black, churning clouds scudded across a full moon, casting giant manta-like shapes on the restless, heaving ocean and conjuring up dark, demonic forces that tore and savaged the shoreline of Ayrshire with barbaric fury. In that brief miniscule pause between waves, a tiny bipedal creature no taller than a two-year-old child emerged dragging a heavy casket. The creature was almost like a gargoyle but more serpent-like. Hesitating, it swung the casket onto its shoulders and then, staggering slightly, began wading through the hissing brine onto the foreshore. There it dodged the tumbleweeds of tide foam and stumbled through the shredded mounds of kelp and flotsam before scrambling for the cover of much larger rocks.

For a moment the glistening, sequined entity hesitated, betrayed by the pale moonlight that cast a strangely humanlike shadow out across the hard, brittle sand. Swaying, overcome with vertigo, it carefully lowered the cumbersome box. Then, gripped by an uncontrollable seizure, it collapsed on all fours. Grasping the barnacled rock with a clawed, reptilian hand, it doubled over and began snorting loudly, spewing seawater from its fanged mouth and flaring nostrils as its sophisticated lungs took over for the gills now pulsating at either side of its neck and struggled to filter life-saving oxygen from the invasive, freezing air.

Frozen like a marble statue and sparkling with frost, this male beast crouched, enduring the bitter cold hidden by dense, impenetrable shadow. Only its serpent-like eyes betrayed a presence. Glowing with supernatural intensity, these twin orbs scanned the entire, thundering shoreline in all spectrums, infrared through ultraviolet. Caught here alone in the blackness of the night between two phases, between two differing worlds, he was now at his most vulnerable.

Anxiously he waited for his large, complex heart to pump lukewarm blood through weary muscles and sinew. His journey from the caves of the Ringer Rouke far out in the Firth of Clyde had been long and arduous, leaving him numb and shattered. Adding to this discomfort, his skin, already stretched and too tight to move comfortably, was splitting and shedding. It was an ancestral reptilian trait, but thankfully it only occurred twice yearly.

Suddenly in that defenceless moment, a bluster of oystercatchers rose and scattered in clamorous flight away along the foreshore, disappearing into the darkness, disturbed not by Cowrie’s fit of coughing but by a lone, hungry dog fox scavenging amongst the tidal pools. Unconcerned, Cowrie patiently waited and watched this cunning adversary whilst his hoarse, rapid breathing subsided into long, slow, vaporous exhales and the frosting that coated his head and shoulders began to melt.

The bright moonlight revealed the true colour of this magnificent creature. His burgundy mane the shape of a cobra’s hood and the singular, cream-coloured race that ran from forehead to shoulders gave him the appearance of a bipedal frilled lizard, a truly majestic example of his species. Green and violet stripes covered his hard, muscular physique; magnified by the shimmering moonlight, this whole grandiose shading faded to a deep gold on his smooth abdomen. He was long of leg with oversized feet and webbed toes, which meant he could swim almost as fast as he could run, but it was the large, glowing eyes that he and his kind possessed that gave his mythical species their name. Their eyes glowed with such intensity that they struck terror in those unfortunate enough to be caught by their hypnotic stares.

Superstitious humans knew this ghastly gaze as the fabled grue o’ the eye, making these tiny, poisonous creatures phantoms of fear and loathing, and although the humans had progressed and become modern, stories of bogles and kelpies and trolls were still endemic in the human psyche.

Attuned now to the chilled air, Cowrie systematically scrutinised his immediate surroundings. Every nook and cranny of the inky blackness came under examination. The night was the Ringleye’s mentor and shield. An acute bat-like sense of hearing made the Ringleye elusive ghosts—spirits of the night. Any creature venturing within these tide-washed shores was analysed and processed long before they came near. Cowrie suspected that their most feared enemy, the bearded one, used every technological means to hunt them down even now, on a cold, dark, nefarious night such as this.

Warily, Cowrie staggered to his feet and, swaying slightly, tossed the awkward casket back over his shoulder. Lurching forward, he crossed the slushy foreshore and moved quickly through the coarse sea grass, breaking free of Neptune’s shackles. His attention was now firmly fixed on the distant escarpment as he looked for danger. There, silhouetted against the watchful moon, Castle Culzean loomed dark and foreboding.

This granite massif, once a bastion of joy and relief to Ringleye returning from the sea, had now become a citadel of fear. The whole property had been taken over by the National Trust, and security guards and cameras had been installed. A hideous abomination now stalked the dark corridors as well; this harbinger of death, this nightmare, was Jeykll, a hybrid cat—part Scottish fold, part lynx—that had developed a taste for Ringleye flesh.

A shiver ran through Cowrie’s frame as he entered the castle’s black shadow, which spread out like a trapdoor spider’s web across the foreshore as if waiting to snare the next hapless soul who stumbled in. Hellish memories of the feline raptor preyed on his mind, magnified a thousandfold under the cloak of Culzean’s shadow. He was plagued by a vision of that hellish night years ago when he was out hunting in the nearby forest on a windy September night with his brother Nimsh. Even now he could recall the aura of that portentous evening—the swaying, rustling tree canopy and creaking bark, the alarm call of the black grouse. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to that warning cry, it was a harbinger of the coming ghastly occurrence. Having bagged a brace of woodcock and pheasant, they had stolen their way home through secret passageways, Nimsh pacing him up front, confident they would come to no harm. But Jeykll had been monitoring them and lay in ambush. Such was her ability to hide and camouflage that with the wind in her favour, she was able to crouch unseen and undetected.

As they had approached her hiding spot, the cat had pounced, all claws and snarling. Grabbing poor Nimsh in her slavering jaws, she had fled leaping and bounding down the path. So sudden was the attack that there had been little time to react. Cowrie had raced after, sword drawn, but there had been little he could do. The cat was fast and agile like a leopard hurrying to secure its quarry, but Jeykll had found this prize a handful. Nimsh hadn’t been ready to give up his life so easily and had fought and struggled, slowing her pace and allowing Cowrie time to catch up. Cowrie still remembered the terror and desperation of that death struggle as he’d overcome his mortal fear of the predator and, launching into the heightened state of ferocious spirit known as ringlreev—an inherent protective fury for blood when life was threatened—had attacked, hacking and slashing wildly, desperately, trying to pull Nimsh from those bone-crushing jaws.

Time and again the cat had lashed out, sending Cowrie reeling. Time and again he had attacked, brushing aside Jeykll’s bloodied claws, until he had glimpsed an opening in her defences and stabbed with a lightning thrust, gouging out her left eye.

With an agonising scream, she had dropped Nimsh and pounced on Cowrie, claws extended and slavering jaws gaping. The force of the impact had sent him careering backwards, tumbling and sprawling into dense brambles. Fortunately, the sharp, thorny briars halted Jeykll dead in her tracks. She had shot backwards, spitting and screeching with a face full of thorns.

Trapped and hooked on whiplike briars, he had only been able to watch as the beast had grabbed Nimsh and taken off once more down the track, his brother’s piteous cries echoing in the vortex of the howling wind. She had dragged his bloodied, lacerated frame somewhere out there along the Croy shore, where his tortured screams had mingled with the cries of a thousand seagulls, a macabre symphony of horror, pain, and dying fading to bone-crunching finality.

What remnants of Nimsh’s body they had been able to find were buried with honours by the tribe, but unfortunately the cat had hidden a favoured part of its bloody meal within the castle, where it had been found by security and handed to the Sprake.

The physical scars of that bloody encounter had long since healed, but the fear and recurrent nightmares that still haunted his dreams would take much longer to fade. As such, his waking hours were filled with thoughts of revenge on that black, soulless fiend.

Rising slowly, Cowrie stumbled forward at a weary pace. Tiredness wracked his whole bruised and battered body. He had endured two days in the freezing, hellish waters of the Firth of Clyde, but he had a mission to