Every Christmas season I make it a tradition to delve into an anthology of vintage ghost stories. This year's choice was Scottish Ghost Stories edited by Rosemary Gray. Imagine my surprise when I discovered, nestled amid the witches and wraiths a rather different sort of weird tale. One that immediately recalled themes very familiar to sword-and-sorcery enthusiasts.

The Picts, that still enigmatic pre-Celtic people who inhabited Scotland, were a favorite subject of Robert E. Howard. The Picts were a constant throughout the ever-changing landscape of the Hyborian Age and the earlier era of Atlantis, Valusia, and Acheron. Even more of the 'eternal barbarian' than the Cimmerians, Howard's Picts eventually swept across the Hyborian kingdoms in a marauding tide that ushered in the end of that epoch. Much later we find the Picts lingering on in Roman Britain, under the stern leadership of their mighty king Bran Mak Morn before Howard allows them to shuffle into the mist of history and the advance of younger cultures.

Howard was a history buff and certainly versed in what was then known about the Picts when he wrote his tales. He was certainly influenced by Welsh author Arthur Machen when he devised the degenerate, inhuman Little People in tales like 'Worms of the Earth'. Machen, in his turn, was familiar with the lore of mysterious, reclusive bogles that populate the folklore of the British Isles. Not merely the fairy traditions of mystical elves who inhabit their own faerie realm into which mere mortals trespass at their peril, but also with creatures such as brownies and hobgoblins, diminutive entities with strange and capricious ways who lurk at the very fringes of civilization.

Scottish folklore in particular is populated with such beings. In addition to the aforementioned brownies there are the red caps, murderous dwarfs who haunt abandoned fortresses and employ human blood to dye their hats. The vindictive booka, who are not trifled with lightly. The more benevolent and helpful guragach. The badachan sabhaill, which could sometimes be convinced to help around the farm. The legends and myths of Scotland teem with all manner of little people, often described as hairy and brown, with reclusive ways and quick tempers – sometimes lethally quick. While some of these tales are no doubt the result of influence from Ireland and Irish traditions, it is also likely that some of these stories originated from accounts of the Picts as those ancient people were displaced by the Britons and Gaels. Receding before the newcomers, the Picts would have found their last strongholds in the most wild and inaccessible places, lingering on in defiance of the Scots for perhaps hundreds of years before either being absorbed into the new culture through intermarriage or dwindling away completely as their own numbers declined.

Which brings us back to Scottish Ghost Stories and one particular tale, 'No Man's Land' by John Buchan.

John Buchan was a Scottish politician and author who was born in 1875. Today he is best known for his novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, but, like so many writers who emerged from the Victorian era, he wasn't above dabbling into the realm of ghost stories. Except, in the case of 'No Man's Land', what he produced isn't quite a ghost story. The past certainly haunts the remote wilderness in which it takes place, a landscape of bleak moors and gray mountains, but the phantoms involved are a good deal more substantial than mere specters.

The narrator of the story is an Oxford professor specializing in 'Northern Antiquities'. From the onset, he expresses a fascination for his Scottish roots and the early history of Caledonia. A vacation to the rural remoteness miles beyond the town of Allermuir brings him to a land rife with sinister legends and strange occurrences. Sheep go missing or are found curiously slaughtered in the fields. A farmhouse sits abandoned after its occupant was mysteriously murdered one night. There are even periodic instances of women going missing, sometimes under seemingly impossible circumstances.

At first dismissive of such bogey-stories, the narrator has his interest piqued when his host, a shepherd, exhibits curious shards of flint he's removed from some of his dead animals. These prove to be arrowheads, at once recognizable to the scholar as being in the Pictish style but of recent manufacture. Considering his host both too honest and to unlearned to attempt such a fraud, the narrator begins to reconsider all the strange occurrences and formulate a daring theory.

Setting out to find evidence to support his speculation, the narrator investigates the Scarts of the Muneraw, an ill-reputed set of hills whose name translates from old Gaelic as 'Place of the Little People'. Here, through the veil of mist that hangs heavy over the heights, he fancies he sees dwarfish figures, but these vanish back into the fog before he catches more than a glimpse. Striving to track down these beings, the narrator lingers too long and finds himself making his return journey after nightfall.

Night, however, turns hunter into hunted, and it isn't long before the narrator is waylaid in the darkness. Bound and carried off, he awakens to find himself in a cave. By the crude light of a campfire he discovers his captors to be short, hairy men. He's found the proof he was seeking, his theory about Pictish survival is true. However, it appears these troglodytes aren't going to give him the chance to tell anyone about them as they glower at him with enmity. Desperate to communicate, he tries speaking old Gaelic, which to his delight is known by one of the Pictish elders. Establishing somewhat of a rapport, the narrator learns that these Picts have been hidden away in the hills for hundreds of years, isolated from the outside world beyond the occasional rustling of livestock and the odd ambush of a lone traveler. To prevent their clan from falling prey to the degeneracy of inbreeding, they abduct Scottish wives on occasion, though they quickly grow ill and die under the primitive conditions of living beneath the Scarts of the Muneraw.

Gaining the trust of the Picts, the narrator makes the most of his liberty and finds a passage leading out from the caves. Seizing his chance, he escapes and after eluding his pursuers, makes his way back to civilization, feverish from his ordeal. After convalescence, he returns to Oxford, seeking to put distance between himself and the lands haunted by the Picts. Time, however, softens the horror he feels and the magnitude of his discovery wears on him. Without proof, however, all he has is an easily dismissed tale. So once more he boards a train to Scotland and sets out to brave the Scarts of the Muneraw.

‘No Man's Land' is an interesting tale and a surprising find in a collection of more traditional ghost stories. It struck me as what might happen if one of M. R. James's rather bookish protagonists was thrust into Robert E. Howard's 'People of the Dark'. A rather intriguing result, and certainly a marked contrast.

Exiled to the blazing wastes of Arizona for communing with ghastly Lovecraftian abominations, C L Werner strives to infect others with the grotesque images that infest his mind. He is the author of over thirty novels and novellas in settings ranging from Warhammer, Age of Sigmar, and Warhammer 40,000 to the Iron Kingdoms, Mantica, Beyond the Gates of Antares, and Wild West Exodus. He has also written 'The Get of Garm', an official story featuring Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane which appeared as a serialized prose story in Marvel's Conan: Serpent War. Most recently he added the Marvel Universe to his chronicle of misdeeds with the prose novel The Sword of Surtur from Aconyte Books. His novella “Himalayan Horror” was featured in the Cryptid Clash series from 18th Wall Productions. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies, among them Rage of the Behemoth, Sharkpunk, Kaiju Rising, A Grimoire of Eldritch Investigations Volume I, Edge of Sundown , Shakespeare vs Cthulhu, City of the Gods, Mech: Age of Steel, Marching Time, and several issues of Tales from the Magician's Skull.