In the winter of 2021, during a frost that bit through their trainers and cheap parkas, a group of ‘concerned citizens’ caught up with a man beneath the arched belly of the old bridge at Balgownie in Aberdeen. They zip-tied his wrists to a bollard that had seem more tourist selfies than horses, and they called him things that belonged to another age. His name was Aiden Macilroy. Accused of witchcraft, of corrupting the young, and of sleeping with spirits that belonged to the wood.
He ran a small clinic out of a draughty prefabricated unit on the edge of Seaton Park, a place where the River Don wound in dark, lazy loops beneath mossy boughs and where joggers took the longer path to avoid the deeper shade after dusk. A faded sign said “Macilroy Therapies,” and inside there were jars of tincture, bundles of drying herbs, a fold-down couch, and a notice telling patients to pay by bank transfer. He wore a patched Barbour and gardening gloves, he smelled of soil and fresh green leaves, and he had the kind of hands that tinkered and fixed broken things.
Local people came to him when a specialist had put them on a months’ long waiting list, or because their GP had shrugged, or because an internet forum recommended him. Some paid with cash, some with favours, a few with promises that always felt like bargains struck in a language he only partly understood. He mixed plant extracts and whispered lines from older tongues; he laid hands where the scanner and the referral letter failed. Those he healed left with precise instructions and an unsettled gratitude. Those who paid more deeply left changed.
He had never spoken of the woman to anyone before, of the woman who first found him in the dark heart of Seaton Wood. He had never told his social worked, or any of his patients, or the council worker who took away the bags of rubbish he collected from the riverbank. Who would have believed his anyway, the odd man with dirt under his nails.
She found him on a late June evening when the city was still in that sticky pause between sun and sleep. He had been following deer tracks through bracken and beer cans, his torch low to avoid startling wildlife and the occasional groups of students who used the park as a short-cut. At Brig o’ Balgownie the air shimmered as if with heat that had no place in a Scottish midsummer. The world tilted, yawned, like a squeaky door nudged by the hand of an unseen protagonist.
She appeared in a clearing where blackberry and gorse made a ragged fringe, wrapped in a coat that looked, somehow, like dark clouds. Her hair fell like a black wave, catching the moon, her skin was the careful, creamy pallor of someone who never had to count days. She wore court shoes with the scuffed look of someone who walked long miles on secret streets. The smell that came with her was violets and engine oil, something at once ancient and entirely modern.
“You’re brave,” she said, and the voice was water in a gutter, patient and capable of chewing stone. “Or arrogant.”
“I don’t think I’m either,” he replied. “I‘m lost. You have me at a loss.”
She smiled, and the light fell out of the clearing. “Come further in.”
That’s when Aiden’s life diverged. He had lived on the margins, but she pulled him beyond them into places mapped in other languages. She didn’t introduce herself at first, but she called herself royal by the way she moved; her laughter rearranged the night air into beautiful music. She had courtiers who looked like night-blooming trees, pale as birch and wearing antlered hats if fox fur. Sometimes she led him down tiny, cobbled streets off the Castlegate that disappeared as soon as they had scampered out into the next street, through doorways no one else noticed, doors between the rivers and the cathedral, doors where pigeons disturbed thick dust as they passed. Other times she simply slid into his clinic at dusk, smelling of the sea that met the Don at Donmouth, her coat damp with spray, and a perfume sharp and green like seaweed.
Their intimacy was ritualised, intimate in the way that binds and consumes. What he thought of as love was also a contract, which she did not draw in ink, but wove across skin, across seasons. She taught him ways to harvest foxglove in the cemetery behind St Nicholas, always at the full moon, how to steep bladderwrack from Fittie with a spoonful of hen’s blood if the patient’s fever was stubborn. She taught him to read the faces in bowls of river ice, to know which reflection was only grief and which was the shape of a thing that would take a life.
“Never speak my name,” she said once, as if the words were a hinge that would open the wrong door. “You belong to me now. I will keep you without rust, so long as you do not break the terms.”
He agreed, always, because her touch delivered a kind of mercy. After their nights he seemed younger, as if the lines the city had pressed into him smoothed like water worn stone.
But people notice and fear that which they do not understand. The woman who came to him after a miscarriage returned with a child whose laugh held an odd consonant that made neighbours frown. A soldier, hollow-eyed from Afghanistan, left with no memory of the gun that had once bored a hollow in his chest. And children began to hum songs that sounded older than the church hymns their parents chose not to sing.
Rumour moved faster than the river and social media faster still. in WhatsApp groups and on local forums they tagged his clinic in blurry photos, they compared notes about treatments, and someone filmed him leaving the backdoor with a pale woman whose hair was raven black. The local paper printed a feature, and readers commented from home with their suspicions like small, sharp stones. He didn’t like the attention one bit, but it paid for the winter coal and the low-maintenance phone he carried for appointments.
When Covid-19 spread through the city in late summer, the wheels of fear turned. Children missed school, shopkeepers sterilised door handles they had ignored for years, and the bell at St Clement’s seemed to toll with a hungry, repetitive impatience. The parish newsletter printed an editorial that suggested complacent sin; a columnist wrote that Aberdeen had begun to look like a town with one foot in a myth and the other in a hospital queue.
Someone decided blame was useful, the way a discovered body suggests a target for a town’s pain. The mayor, some councillors, a man whose son had not woken from a fever, they came with torches of a different sort: camera-phones, CCTV stills, the kind of legal paper that becomes an accusation when enough fingers press ink. They gathered signatures, they demanded a hearing at townhall, in that civic room where planning decisions were made and parking fines contested.
They dragged him out into the grey morning, their breath fogging the air. He didn’t run. The cameras were hungry, a hundred lenses recording him in a low-resolution public liturgy. He was a modern heretic: hoodie open, Barbour scuffed at the elbows, wrists marked where they had cuffed him with zip-ties at the market. They asked him for confessions about pacts and abominations; they wanted a story arc tidy enough for a headline.
He told them the truth. “She rules beneath the stones of the city,” he said. His lips were split and raw from the roughing up at his arrest. “She taught me the old power, before the cathedral, before the town, Before the bridge.”
They laughed at first, then they jeered louder. “A witch,” someone called, and the word landed like a flatness, because the modern world still loves an old malediction. “A predator,” another said. “A fraud,” the man with the paper cried.
“No,” he said, and when he said it he sounded more tired than he had any right to be. “Not a witch. A bridegroom.”
They beat him in the back alleys where the gates creak. They kicked him in the stomach with his wrists tied behind his back for a video to shame him, because shame travels fast and eats reputation like a hungry dog. He laughed, sometimes, through the pain, a sound that made hardened women in the crowd look away. He kept saying the same thing.
“She walks under the roots of Seaton, she dances with her ladies in the burial cairns behind King’s College, her eyes shimmer like the moon reflected in the black water of the Don. I have lain with her beneath the altar of your church.”
The magistrates could not burn him in the modern court of law, so they found other ways. They arraigned him for fraud, for practicing medicine without registration, for indecent assault in the broadest terms. But the street wanted theatre, and some men had a different plan. Late one night, two dark transit vans moved through the city with a rolled and tied tarpaulin like a conspiracy of crows. They took him to Donmouth sands, where the river loosens into the sea and the wind has the blunt honesty of a drunk.
They built a pyre, not a church-ordered stake, but a pile of wet pallets and old fence posts, and they nailed old car parts to it, to weigh it down with modern iron. At the corners of this structure, they hung a ring of old dairy bells, cast-offs from a rural life that had been cast off in favour of urban comfort, because even when none remember its purpose, ritual survives in crude forms.
They meant to light him at dawn, and as the weak sun rose above the horizon it exposed fibrous whitewashed clouds, cold and thin. Dozens of people came, live streams began, and uniformed police watched from a rope line, with cameras rolling to prove they had prevented anyone from coming too close. Someone struck a match.
The flames caught on damp timber and coughed. Smoke rose, not the black of a dry bonfire, but the purple-sour of an altar burning for the wrong god. For a moment it seemed they had made what they wanted: a public expiation. Then the air turned different; even the gulls fell quiet. The fire, as if offended by the smallness of the intent, shrieked in a tone that was not human.
Aiden did not scream. He sang. It was not a hymn. It was not a chant that the council could ticket for noise. It was a low, wordless sound that had no phone frequency and could not be clipped into a social feed. People who had set up their cameras later swore that the audio was gone for a minute, a hole, where their devices recorded only the hiss of the sea and a scent of roses that made them cover their faces.
A woman stood on the far bank, by the old ribs of the bridge, tall and pale. She looked like a figure from an old postcard, only sharper, as if the city had suddenly focused on the wrong layer of reality. Some said she wept, tears clean as distilled water running down a face too smooth for crying. Others swore the lights in her eyes lit as if somebody had struck a match beneath them, and the sea leaned toward that light in a way that felt obscene and intimate.
When the fire died, his body was gone. Where embers pooled and steam lifted from river sand, only a wet shadow remained, black as an oil spill. The pavement bore the shape of a man for a while, and then the council cleaners came, expunging the stain as they do stains that show up on a modern city’s itinerary. They scraped the sand, they laid down fresh pebbles, they put a discreet bollard where the crowd had knelt, and they issued a statement that the city regretted any distress caused by the events and that no one was missing.
But people remember in other ways. Video clips had been dumped and re-captioned, uploaded and taken down, and the snippets that survived carried the wrong kind of truth. Children in the housing blocks hummed the low tune he had sung. A nurse wrote in her online diary that a patient who had been in a coma woke and said only, “She wept,” before slipping back to sleep. A priest at St Machar’s found a ring of blackthorn on his altar and removed it at dawn without knowing how it had got there.
They tried to bury the tale with statements and apologies, with charges pressed and then dropped, with a council-sanctioned memorial that spoke of “a tragic incident.” But the stones remember. The CCTV remembers. The underfoot remembers, the quiet, small languages that map the city beneath the tourist brochures and the parking restrictions.
On winter mornings, if you walk the path beneath St Nicholas, you can still find a sprig of foxglove that will not wither no matter how many hands pluck it. In the days after the pyre there were reports of single blue tears on the cheeks of newborns, and in the nights when fog hangs over the Don like a reluctant curtain, people say that a woman in a dark coat can be seen walking the riverbank, her feet leaving no print.
Aiden Macilroy was never found. A shadow in a CCTV frame persisted for weeks over footage where no human figure appears. The city archives redacted files, then released statements that read like legal fiction. Those who had loved him quietly mourned, those who had feared him whispered confessions in the dark, and no priest wrote the full truth into any book.
He had said once, through cracked lips and an old man’s mirth, “She will keep me as long as I keep the bargain.” He had laughed, because bargains always have small print. But language bends. Words worn thin by transmission become something else. People who had been healed came back months later with a new light in their faces and a quiet in their mouths that suggested knowledge. Those with blood on their hands were left with something missing, a thread of memory gone, and sometimes the city found a carved thing near the ford behind King’s College: a child’s toy or an ornament.
They built a plaque near the bridge that spoke of vigilance, of community resilience. It was the sort of plaque the council likes, with logos and small print. People touched it out of habit. Tourists paused, read the QR code, and moved on. The real story was painted on the smooth, stones, in the way the river rearranged its black water around a memory.
Years later, a woman walked into a clinic on the edge of town, carrying a small, wrapped parcel. The receptionist felt that the woman was familiar but was never able to identify her. She left the parcel on the counter and walked away without a word. Inside was a single bell, a dairy bell, its surface dulled by age. The bell chimed when held, a small, thin note that made you imagine yourself alone, of a heather covered hillside.
They say the bell chimes still, if you stand by the Don at dawn and let the mist gather and the gulls forget how to cry. The stones remember. And sometimes, when the light is wrong and the river runs like old ink, you may swear you see the outline of a man walking, where no one walks, his hands full of healing and bargains, and the woman beside him, moving like the mist.
They tried to make an end of the story, with police files and legal endings and tidy civic denials. The city cannot stop a story once it has the right kind of hunger. It rolls, it mutates, and like the old tales, it waits beneath paving slabs and parking meters, patient as peat.
from Modern Myths by N.B.Kimber
