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<h2>28</h2>
<p>Young Danny Cullen was sitting on the ground just outside the
gate when Jack and Ralph Slater got to the forge. His face was
ash-grey and he was puffing continuously on an unaccustomed
cigarette. Fergus Milby was talking to a man in a tweed jacket and
a loud tie who was wearing a bright yellow hard had that made both
policeman think of Votek Visotsky's head rolling along the bloodied
tiles on the floor of the car accessory store.</p>
<p>"It's the bodies," Fergus told him. "Me and Danny found them.
Just wee babies, and the smell would kill you." The words came
tumbling out. He did not look quite so ashen as his apprentice, but
you could tell he'd had a shock.</p>
<p>Jack took it a step at a time, he got the men's names first of
all and then he asked what he'd seen and where.</p>
<p>"Up there," Fergus pointed. "They're in the chimney. Four of
them at least. It gave young Danny a right turn. Nearly pitched him
off."</p>
<p>Jack looked up and his heart sank. <em>High places</em>. There
couldn't be anywhere higher than that in the whole town.</p>
<p>"Shit," he said, not quite under his breath. "How the hell do we
get up there?"</p>
<p>"Oh, it's all right. We've got ladders up the side." He pointed
out through the gate and Jack took a few steps outside to see where
he was indicating. The spindly aluminium steps hugged the bricks
all the way to the top, narrowing ever closer in diminishing
parallax of distance.</p>
<p>"Oh great," he muttered. "Bloody terrific. You'll have to come
up with us."</p>
<p>The man nodded. Jack took off his coat and slung it in the back
seat of the car. Fergus Milby have him a webbing belt harness,
showed Jack how to clip on the safety catch and explained that it
would move up along with him, but would lock if he dropped. Jack
remembered it all from his teenage days, the last time he had
climbed with a rope. A jittery nerve danced behind his knees and
for a second he felt physically sick.</p>
<p>"Don't worry," the other man tried to reassure him. "That cable
can hold three tons. You'll be safe as houses."</p>
<p>Fergus went on up the ladder, taking light, easy and confident
steps. Jack stood at the bottom, took several deep breaths and
began to follow him, keeping his eyes fixed on the brickwork inches
in front of his eyes, not daring to look elsewhere. About forty
steps up, he was sweating so badly his shirt was soaked and beads
of salt water were dripping into his eyes. Despite that he slowly
climbed upwards, unable to force his hand off the rung and wipe his
eyes, risking only the quick movement needed to grasp the next one
up. At just over a hundred feet, though as far as Jack was
concerned it could have been two miles, all noise below faded away
to a faint hum. There was a slight wind and the metal treads,
chilled by the breeze were cold on his hands. Beneath him he could
hear Ralph Slater's laboured breathing. At that moment, Jack knew
that even if he decided to quit, he couldn't get back down beyond
the scene-of-crimes man. There was nothing for it but to continue
upwards towards the top of the chimney.</p>
<p>Finally, without any warning, the brickwork in front of his eyes
disappeared and a fresh cold breeze blew into Jack's eyes, causing
them to spark with tears. He blinked them back, still gripping
tight to the rungs of the ladder. Out of the corner of his eye, he
could see the river snake away to the north, a silver band between
the grey banks and for a second the world zoomed in and out of
focus while he rose the crest of a rush of vertigo.</p>
<p>"No bother," Fergus Milby said. He had unclipped his safety line
and was standing, with incredible casualness, halfway round the
chimney. "Come on up."</p>
<p>Jack heaved himself onto the top edge. For a second his hand
refused to relinquish its grip on the rung, and it took a great
effort of will to make it move. Finally he reached and grasped the
edge of the bricks, feeling the tips of his fingers try to dig
right into the hard surface. With infinite care and with enormous,
gut-wrenching trepidation, he eased himself on to the top and sat,
holding on with both hands, one leg inside the chimney, the other
out, each heel jammed against the sides for extra purchase.</p>
<p>Then the smell hit him and took his mind off the appalling
height.</p>
<p>"That's the first one we found," Fergus said. He hunkered down
beside the little tatter of cloth and pulled a piece back. The
baby's parchment-like face seemed to be screwed up against the
cold. Jack knew it was just dessication. The fluids had leached out
of the body and the wind had done the rest.</p>
<p>He risked a sideways turn and looked down the shaft. The
afternoon sunlight only illuminated about ten feet then faded to
blackness. It looked like a huge well. On the opposite side, he
could see a piece of metal which had been bent down then pulled up
again to form what looked like a butcher's hook. Something larger
than the two bundles was suspended from one of the spikes. Even
from where he sat, Jack could see the matted hair and the outline
of a chin. A grey hand hung down there just in the twilight between
daylight and shadow. Below it, he was not sure, but he thought he
could make out a leg.</p>
<p>Ralph clambered up beside him and patted him on the
shoulder.</p>
<p>"What a view, eh?"</p>
<p>Jack nearly fell off.</p>
<p>"Bloody hell, Ralph. Take it easy," he bawled.</p>
<p>"Okay, chief," Ralph replied cheerily. "You'll have us both off
if you don't relax."</p>
<p>Jack did not reply. He merely pointed at the thing hanging down
from the spike.</p>
<p>"Oh dear Lord," Ralph said softly, but with great feeling. "How
in hell did they get up here?"</p>
<p>Jack sat motionless, looking at the body on the far side and the
smaller one close by, hanging next to a small thing that looked
like a shrivelled skinned rabbit, but which he knew was not. The
sickening dread of falling had been replaced by an entirely
different emotion. For a while he forgot that he was perched nearly
two hundred feet above the town on the huge chimney stack.</p>
<p>Five pitiful bodies. Three babies and a young boy and a teenage
girl.</p>
<p><em>High places</em>. Lorna Breck had been right. Michael O'Day
with his mad eyes and his stuttering voice and shaking hands had
not been wrong. This was one of the high places. This is where it
had brought them. As he sat there on high, with the wind now
blowing across his face, Jack Fallon stopped thinking of
<em>who.</em> There was no face to be put on this killer, no
prints, no previous convictions, at least none that were on any
police computer. Whatever had scaled this tower with no ladders,
hauling the dead and bleeding bodies of these babies and children,
could not, surely, have been human.</p>
<p>Jack slowly eased himself round on the flat. Across the roof of
the forge was the green open space on this side of the river where
the three housing blocks stood shoulder to shoulder. Latta Court
had been the first. Little Timmy Doyle had gone missing from there.
Whatever had scaled the wall of the flat, climbing up from the
ground or down from the darkened roof, had brought the little baby
down from that height and come scrambling up here with its victim
to impale it on an old lightning spike. Out beyond the flats, where
the river took its turn past the tidal basin and swung into the
saltwater estuary, the bulk of Castlebank Distillery loomed close
to the rock where the castle sat. Carol Howard had gone up in the
lift shaft, dragged up by something that had made her screams echo
up to her workmates outside in the corridor, terrible screams that
had made women burst into tears and grown men shiver. Just beyond
it hunched the Castle Rock, where Annie Eastwood had walked the
parapet and dived to spread herself on the butcher's blocks of the
basalt rocks below.</p>
<p>Just across the river, beside the railways bridge, the old
warehouses huddled, derelict and shabby. Jack could see the square
opening on the gable wall where the hoist had still worked when he
and his pals had stolen pigeons. The jig still jutted out, though
the pulley rope had long since rotted to tatters. Lorna Breck had
seen it, the night Neil Kennedy had gone missing. She'd seen
something come down from the dark and snatch him up like a rag. In
that nightmare vision, she watched the thing scuttle in a black
blur towards the opening in the wall. Jack tried to visualise the
scene at night. Had it clambered across the railway bridge? Swung
on the electricity gantries? It had brought them here, the five of
them.</p>
<p>Something jarred at his memory. He closed his eyes to
concentrate, and it came right to him. The three boys who had gone
missing from the parts store were not here. He did a quick count.
Five bodies. Three babies, a child with matted and dirty red hair
peeling in strips from a dented skull, a girl hanging from a spike
that had impaled her under the jaw and come out at the temple.</p>
<p>Jack rhymed them off in his head. Carol Howard, Neil Kennedy,
Timmy Doyle. Little Kelly Campbell. All present and correct,
battered bloodied, torn, but all here. And one other. One more
little scrap, dangling down into the maw of the chimney, spiked
through its skinny little chest so that it was hunched and
contorted.</p>
<p>There hadn't been another child. Nobody had reported one
missing, and in the last two weeks, every mother whose boy was five
minutes late in coming home from school or who dawdled on the way
back from the corner shop was on the phone to the station, half
hysterical with worry. A fourth baby meant another huge problem
among all the rest of the troubles which crowded in on him like
melancholy mourners at a funeral.</p>
<p>As he sat and stared at the suspended shapes, Jack suddenly got
a picture of Julie, lying among the shards of glass in the shop
window, blood pooling out underneath her, eyes glazing over,
moveless, lifeless. He saw in his mind's eye the spike of glass
she'd landed on, driven through her back, through her heart and out
in the centre of her chest, just under her breastbone. She'd been
impaled, just like these dead and mouldering children.</p>
<p>No pain, Lorna had said, and of a sudden, Jack Fallon believed
her completely. She'd seen it, seen it through him when she'd taken
his hand in hers.</p>
<p>And what would she say now? Had these babies felt no pain?</p>
<p>He thought not. Little Timmy Doyle, wrenched form his pram so
violently that the leather straps had snapped. Tiny Kelly Campbell,
snatched from her mother's arms by something that had come down a
wall and hit her so hard it had smashed the bones of her face. And
she'd fought for her child, fought with the desperate ferocity and
courage of a mother against something so powerful it had killed her
with a blow. Neil Kennedy, whose blood had been found in congealing
puddles, slowly soaking into the dry wooden beams of the old
warehouse. It had come down and taken him like a spider does with a
fly on the web. It had plucked him from the stairs and
<em>climbed.</em> Had the boy felt <em>no pain</em>? And Carol
Howard, screaming in the lift, her shrieks of anguish and terror
diminishing as she was hauled up the shaft while her blood had
sprayed over the cables. Pain and devastating terror were what she
had felt. There was no doubt in his mind.</p>
<p>And there was also no doubt, right in that instant of clarity,
that he would find it. No matter what it was, man, beast or goblin
or whatever, he would catch it and he would stop it. He would catch
it as an offering to these babies, these children, who were hung up
like sacrifices in the well of the old forge chimney.</p>
<p>Then it came to him in a flash, the mental picture he'd formed
when she'd described where the thing went. Looking down into a
well, with the fires below. This was the place, this was the well.
Down there, even in the gloomy winter-afternoon daylight, he could
see the flares of the forge glowing red through the windows. No
wonder she didn't recognise this place. At night, looking down, it
would be like a vision of hell.</p>
<p>Fergus Miller went back down the ladder for a length of rope and
some bags. It took him half an hour to get back, and the light was
beginning to fade quickly. Ralph took as many pictures as he could,
crouching on the lip of the chimney with a casual ease that alarmed
Jack.</p>
<p>"I don't understand it, Chief," he admitted. "How the hell did
they get up here?"</p>
<p><em>It climbs</em>. The words seemed to echo in Jack's mind,
repeating themselves over and over again.</p>
<p>"And why here? What's the point?"</p>
<p><em>It feeds.</em> That's what Michael O'Day had said. It had
brought these bodies up here and hung them up, like tidbits in a
hellish larder. The little form lying on the flat had been savaged.
Something had ripped it from the neck, and below the jagged gash,
there was little left but strips of torn flesh. The other one, a
very cursory appraisal had shown him, had been gutted. Strips of
skin peeled back from a gaping space where the belly had been.</p>
<p>Jack did not want to tell Ralph any of what he was thinking. He
regretted telling Cowie about O'Day. That had been a tactical
error, because it had taken him long enough, too long, to begin to
come round to believing that what he was hunting was not human, but
something conjured up, however it had been done, however
preposterous it sounded, on the night that Marta Herkik had held
the seance in Cairn House. Cowie had gaped at him as if he was mad.
Even a reasonable man would have shied away from the notion.</p>
<p>Now Jack's problem was in deciding what to do about it. His
choices were limited to one.</p>
<p>Fergus Milby popped his head over the edge. "They had to get
this rope from the post office," he said, slightly out of breath.
"The engineers use them for pulling cables through the pipes," he
explained. He clambered onto the lip, unslung a big haversack and
started pulling a plastic bag out. For the next half an hour, the
three men wrapped the bodies, the babies first, into the bags and
lowered them down the side of the chimney. Jack watched as the
black trussed shapes diminished from view to the waiting people who
milled like ants at the base, beside the winking blue lights.
Finally, with some effort, they freed the body of Carol Howard. It
was a hideous task. Both Jack and Ralph had to work to free the
head from the spike, twisting it this way and that until they could
draw with limp weight upwards. The smell was thick and poisonous.
Finally the metal hook drew out with a wet, scraping sound and they
laid the girl down on the bricks. One of her legs was gone. A
ragged mess of blood, gristle and bone shards lay in the crater
where the girl's hip had once been.</p>
<p>The two of them quickly wrapped her in a plastic sheet, tied the
ends and looped the sling of rope around her. They dropped her over
the edge. It took a long time for her to reach the ground.</p>
<p>The journey from the top of the chimney stack was less nerve
wracking than the ascent. The hot anger twisted inside Jack and
cauterised his fear of heights. He'd seen murder victims aplenty.
He'd been there on the moors when they'd dug up the bodies of drug
dealers, and he'd been to many a low-life tenement in the city to
find a glare-eyed corpse in a pool of blood and vomit or trussed
like a chicken in a bath. The anger had come on him then, many a
time, but not the way he felt it as he slowly lowered himself, rung
by rung down the spindly ladder on the great forge chimney while
the winter wind snatched at his jacket and the watery light began
to fade from the sky. The pitiful bodies, hung like carcasses in a
butcher's shop, torn and mutilated, had brought up emotions he'd
been holding down for a long time. For the first time he felt a
strange mixture of pity and admiration for Lorna Breck. There was
no doubt now that she was seeing these things. For some reason he
could not quite understand, she was tuned, like a radio, to the
thing that was taking children up to the high places to spike them
on the old lightning forks. They had died from this, and she was
living with it.</p>
<p>He was half-way down the chimney when a thought from the far
past came back to him, way back in the sixties when he was just a
small boy in short trousers, catching sticklebacks in the mill-burn
that drained out of the water meadow into the river, or spearing
flatfish down on the salt flats in the estuary.</p>
<p><em>Twitchy eyes</em>. That's what they'd called him, the crazy
man who had killed the boy in the back room of Cairn House all
those years ago. He'd abducted a girl in Eastmains, raped her and
left her for dead up beyond Corrieside where there was a
tree-filled glen, now long since cleared to make way for the
encroaching housing schemes. The memory brought a strange twist of
apprehension in Jack that had been long dormant. Then, in that hot
summer, every child was scared of the man with the twitchy eyes
whose crudely drawn image had stared, like a character in an old
murder movie, from the posters in every school. He'd taken another
small boy out on Westerhill where the trees tangle down the hill
towards the shoreline and he'd smashed his head with a half-brick
and kept on hitting him, so the story went, until nobody could
recognise him as human. All summer there were organised picnics and
play schemes, something the town had never had before. Mothers
banded themselves into child-watching teams. Many kids were kept in
and around their homes until the schools went back.</p>
<p>Then it had simply stopped. Police found an old couple dead and
fly-blown in a croft house up on Blackwod Hill on the far end of
town. They'd been shot at close range with a twelve bore shotgun
and left to rot in the tiny front room. That was the last of the
killings in that year. The tracker dogs had scoured the moors up as
far as Langmuir Crag, but the killer was long gone. He never killed
again, as far as anybody knew. Later on, when Jack had been in his
teams, his father had told him he thought the man had probably
wandered up into the tarns of the moor where there were floating
bogs which went down forever. Maybe he'd fallen into one of them,
or maybe he'd gone up into the hills and blown his own head off.
The killings had stopped, but Jack Fallon remembered the strange
feeling of threat he'd felt when any stranger looked at him in the
street. He remembered the wrench of anxiety as he scanned the
stranger's face to ascertain whether this one had
<em>twitchy-eyes</em>. Whether this was the one who would reach out
and grab him and hit him with a half-brick until nobody could tell
if he was human.</p>
<p>He remembered it and his anger grew. There were enough dangers
for children. There were trees to fall out of, things for kids to
swallow and stick in their throat. There were pans of boiling soup
to scald them and fires to burn them. There were cars to run out of
control and smash them through shop windows to impale them on
knives of glass. These were the hazards, these and many more.</p>
<p>But it was different when someone, or some-thing was out there,
deliberately stalking children, snatching them away from their
mothers and their homes and carrying them off to impale them in
dreadful ignominy in a dirty chimney tower. He thought of the
families whose lives had been ruined, the mothers and the fathers
and the brothers and sisters, a whole chain of anguish and choking
misery and he felt the heat of the anger boil inside him. By the
time his feet touched the ground, he was almost speechless with
rage at this <em>affront.</em> He didn't even supervise the loading
of the trussed plastic parcels into the wagon. He left that to the
squad of men who had arrived. He got straight into his car and
drove away, hands gripping the wheel in strangle-grips.</p>
<p>Lorna Breck called from behind the door when he rapped the
knocker. When she heard his name, she opened it almost immediately
and when she looked up at him, she gave him a tired smile and held
out her hand. He took it and she led him through to the
kitchen.</p>
<p>"You're worn out," she said.</p>
<p>"No," he replied with some irony. "I'm as fresh as a daisy."</p>
<p>She let go his hand, but kept smiling. Her wide grey eyes looked
him up and down appraisingly.</p>
<p>"You've had that same shirt on since the last time I saw you,
and your trousers are covered in dust. You need a shave and a
shower," She wrinkled her nose as she spoke, and he felt
uncomfortable under her scrutiny.</p>
<p>"And you have something important to tell me."</p>
<p>"I do," he agreed. "And I will if you make me a coffee, hot and
strong, but first I want to ask you something."</p>
<p>"Of course I will," she said, crossing to thumb the switch on
the kettle. "As long as you don't mind instant." Jack shrugged.</p>
<p>"Tell me. The other night when you were describing the place it
goes, could you tell me again."</p>
<p>Lorna's face sagged. She came forward and leaned her hands on
the back of the chair on the other side of the table.</p>
<p>"You've found them, haven't you?"</p>
<p>"Yes. By sheer luck, if you can call it that. They could have
been there for years."</p>
<p>"In the tunnel, or the well?"</p>
<p>"In a chimney. One of the two on the other side of the
river."</p>
<p>"Damn!" she hissed. "Damnation. I didn't think. Yes. That's it.
I can see it now. But who would have thought?"</p>
<p>"I know. I couldn't think either. You gave me a clue once, when
you told me about the Kennedy boy. I remembered it from my
childhood. If you'd grown up here, you would have known where it
was."</p>
<p>"It's all unfamiliar to me."</p>
<p>"I know. It's not easy," Jack siad. "You were also right about
the bikes. It took three boys last night. I should have called you,
but it was very late."</p>
<p>"You should have called anyway. What happened to the boys?"</p>
<p>"They broke into a hardware store down near the allotments at
Rough Drain. It must have been there, or come in after them. One of
them got away."</p>
<p>"The one who hurt it?"</p>
<p>"Yes. He put a drill in its eye. He told me it wasn't
human."</p>
<p>"But you know that," Lorna said intensely.</p>
<p>"I'm finally beginning to believe it."</p>
<p>"So what are you going to do now?"</p>
<p>"I don't have a clue. But I think I'll need your help."</p>
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