Bad Trip

This is all my fault. The others? They just wanted to feel like normal young people, for once.

At first, it seemed like enough just to forget about Manila, to leave behind the smoggy, concrete-and-glass metropolis that our parents helped to build. We sorely needed a vacation from our self-contained bubble of Third World privilege.

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All we wanted was to spend a couple of weeks not being defined as a trust fund baby, a recovering junkie, a daddy's girl, a chronic underachiever, and the perennial "broke one." It's as if we believed that our Eurail passes, rudimentary French, and taste for Carlsbergs would somehow make us just like every other carefree fresh graduate who was couchsurfing, backpacking, and youth hosteling their way across the Continent.

But no, that wasn't going to cut it for me. I wanted a clean break from the system itself, to give up our roles in the engines of global commerce that built luxury malls next to shanty towns, and erected traffic-snarled freeways to disguise the squalor below. And that's how I came to know of the Bran mac Cenél.

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It began with a rumor we heard in the living room of an Inverness guesthouse. Somewhere in the Scottish highlands, there was an "intentional community" of nomads who'd gone off the grid, and back to the proverbial land. Hearsay claimed they were self-taught craftsmen, hands-on architects, and DIY agriculturalists, who gave up day jobs and university careers. One Japanese pothead told us how they built shared crannogs—temporary island settlements—in the freshwater lakes of Pertshire, during the summer months. A pair of cute Belarusian sisters insisted that you needed a particular set of coordinates to locate their dwellings. There was even crazy talk that the group somehow lived on a different plane of reality, accessible via the enigmatic cairns—piled stone towers—they built near the mountain peaks.

With the best intentions, I suggested that we seek out the Bran mac Cenél. It took some convincing to get the others to agree. I cajoled them with promises of unique once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunities. I swayed them with the prospect of a bonding experience for the ages. And in the end, the fear of missing out trumped caution and better judgment.

I don't know what I expected to do, really. Initiate ourselves? Learn their ways? Or just marvel about how authentic their lifestyle seemed to be, before heading back into our sheltered existence.

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Of course, this was all moot, because there is no Bran mac Cenél. I started the rumor pseudonymously on a travel message board, one year prior, and everyone else just picked it up from there.

That was how I eventually lured my friends, classmates, and loved ones to their grisly fates in the Scottish highlands. How I severed—quite literally—the deepest connections to my former life.

The search party—a mix of professional rescuers, embassy officials, and local climbers—eventually found the mangled bodies, left to rot at the mercy of the elements. Camouflaged in the bushes, I witnessed them haul away the remnants of my past, a great sacrifice to the cult of the Old Ways.

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Originally published by MicroHorror.com on August 6, 2013