Interlude:
"We called him Gideon," the old soldier said.
The name gave me a shiver. It somehow fit. He was remembering and so was I. It had taken me a while to track him down, an old trooper from one of the old Highland regiments. I had an advantage now over Angus McNicol, for by this time I'd listened over and over to his gruff voice on the tapes, and I'd looked through a bunch of papers I'd managed to turn up along with the ones he gave me. Old Jean McColl's wild poppy petal was still pressed between the pages of her diary, a distant memory captured. The pages of Doc Bell's pathology reports on Jean and Little Lucy Saunders and the others, those pages were yellow now with age. The words on them, however were still stark and somehow still deadly. The catalogue of ruin carried out at the hands of a true madman, was appalling. Forgive me if I don't list them here. You don't want to know.
I spent some time taking notes and asking questions, because I had to know. I was driven along. There were clues I knew, clues I hadn't thought about in a long time, but now, in hindsight, they stood out like beacons. Those tattoos, for instance. Lesley Joyce. Old man McColl had read them wrong first time. Jean had seen them on the day she died and that's why she'd underlined them in her frantic message. Poor doomed woman had been trying to tell them.
Lesley and Joyce. Probably old girlfriends from way before the madness.
And Sergeant Conboy, the name the man kept muttering, twitching his head every time he called it out. Another clue. McNicol had thought the man was army and I put two and two together. A newspaperman can talk to anybody. For the price of a few beers, most folk will talk their heads off. I knew it had to be a soldier, somebody who had served abroad. It took a while to find the old army lists and some time longer to search them all. There were four Sergeant Conboys way back in the fifties, and I travelled a bit to find some of the men who had served with them.
Finally I found the man I wanted to talk to.
"Gideon. He always had his nose stuck in the bible and he was always quoting tracts. The name just stuck. I'm telling you, he was one scary nutter. He thought the locals were animals, less than beasts. We were with the Gordons, but most of us were on national service, just two-year men. It was two years I could have done without."
Albert McAulay was a barrel of a man with a full head of iron-grey hair cut in an old fashioned crew-cut, the kind you see on German colonels in old war movies. He drank pints of Guinness slowly and steadily, sitting in the corner of the Horseshoe Bar up in the city. At first he was a bit hazy, saying he couldn't remember that much, but it was clear he just hadn't thought about it for a long time, or maybe didn't want to. When he did start talking, once he got into gear, he couldn't stop.
"I real lunatic. I remember that Vietnam stuff, you know, that My-Lai carry-on where the Yanks shot up a village? When that happened I thought it must be more common than you'd think. A lot of bad things happen in wars.
"Gideon, he went really crazy some time in the second year, when we were jungle-bashing in Malaya. We were somewhere in south Selangor, on patrol, hunting the CT's, what we called the communist terrorists, and you never knew who was who. They all looked the same and they all spoke the same. Some of our boys called them the Dung Fly people, because that's what they said all the time. It meant something like "we're friends" or "don't shoot". Nobody knew what. Or cared. It was hot and sticky and we were scared shitless most of the time. You couldn't see a yard in front of your face until you got to a clearing and then you had to watch for grenades or crossfire. It was murder."
Albert wiped his florid face and took a deep pull on his beer.
"Non tare roger. That's what the signals man said on the radio. Nothing to report. And sometimes there was something to report. We were to deny food and comfort to the enemy. We rounded up villagers and put them in trucks and took them fifty miles down the road. That was to drive the bandits deep into the jungle, but that was bad for us who had to go in and get them, us and the Iban scouts who could scent a trail like dogs. They were nothing much more than animals.
"So one time we came across this place, deep in at Ipoh, a village at the bottom of a steep valley. Me and Sergeant Conboy and crazy old Gideon, we took the right flank, and all of a sudden, there was gunfire and the shit was hitting the fan and everybody was yelling. Smoke from a couple of flares, and a lot of confusion. The village was pretty big - pigs and kids an running about, screaming like banshees. Gideon he came out from the side and let rip. Me and Conboy saw him. He just raked a whole group of kids and I remember the grin on is face. Conboy pulled him back, trying to shout over all the noise and despite that, yon mental bastard turns round and grins.
"Heathens," he says and I heard it clear as day. "Worse than animals."
"He just turned back with his gun. Two women were running for cover and he shot them both, laughing all the while. Just then, two of the locals came out with parangs, big machetes, and came running for us. There were shots behind them and we thought it had to be bandits, so we opened fire and put the men down. By this time the bible thumper had vanished and we were in the middle of it. It wasn't until later that we found him round the back of a burning hut with a girl. He'd been giving her one, just a little kid of ten or eleven, and he had cut her. Swear on a stack of bibles, he had cut her little tits off and slit her mouth from ear to ear. She was still moving."
Albert drank deep, remembering now.
"I'm telling you, it gave me the shivers. I was still fired up, still all going from the excitement, and it didn't shock me the way it normally would, but I still had the shivers. Conboy pulled him away. God, he nearly hit him with his rifle, and the big fellow, he just turned round, grinning, as if he'd just told a good joke.
"After that, we had to keep an eye on him, until we got back to the platoon base. Nobody said anything, but Conboy had been called back to operations and Major Cantley told him to take Gideon with him, just to get him out. In those days, out in the jungle, what happened was left there. Things didn't leak out the way they would now. Official secrets and all that. Anyway, Conboy's in the truck and they head off an that's the last anybody hears of them for three weeks. They sent search parties out, but it was needle in a haystack stuff over there. We heard the RAF, lost a flight of five transports just forty miles from HQ, and one of them were ever seen again. That jungle was thick, man.
"The Suffolks in the south, they got word. Some tribesmen came out and said two or three of their boys had been killed by a soldier. They checked it out and sure enough, they found your man and Conboy in the truck. It had gone off the road and rolled down to the edge of a river and Conboy, he was as dead as a dodo. He'd been shot in the head and his brains were all gone. The Suffolks told us there was nothing left of him. The flies and the ants there are pretty fierce and they keep themselves busy. Gideon, if he was crazy before, he was really gone now. He'd kept himself alive by catching the little fish and eels in the water that came right up to his waist in the rains and he'd blown a couple of the natives to kingdom come when they came to investigate. I remember the brass were pretty suspicious, because Conboy's head injury looked like a close-up shot, but by that time an investigation would have been a waste of time. Gideon was round the twist. Completely barmy.
"After that he was shipped home, mad as a fuckin' hatter. Last I heard, he was in Chessington, where they take all the army head injuries. After that, I dunno. Maybe it was Broadmoor or some other loony bin.
August 4. Midnight:
"None of your damned business, Conboy. You just sit there watching, that's all you have to do. Flies in your eyes."
The voice boomed out from the hollow. The stranger was just a black shadow, hunkered down now in front of the stag's head. The flies were silent in the ark. A breeze of wind in the cooling night air carried the scent of carrion past the man and over to the line of boys looped together beside the low wall of rock. It was greasy and foul, the stench of corruption.
"They crossed over too, dirty heathens. Dirty. Dung Fly! You can see them. Shouldn't have tried to stop me neither, should you? Non Tare Roger. Got another eye to see with now."
He had been talking for a while now, over in the dark where his shape was just a shadow in the rest of the shadows. His voice rose and fell. One minute he would quote a passage from the bible, and the next he'd be talking to his imaginary listener. None of it made any sense.
None of the tethered boys risked talking. Over in the tent, Billy's whimpering had slowed down and stopped. Corky's efforts on the wire had ceased for the moment. He was leaning back as far as the noose would let him, with the side of his head against a tussock. Doug was still sitting with his head resting in his hands. He was breathing shallowly.
After a while the man's hoarse babbling died away and there was silence for a while, broken only by the night noises and the tumbling water of the stream at the falls where now only three heron feathers stood. After more of while, the man's shape appeared quite suddenly, his face caught by the moonlight as he walked silently from the hollow. He was quite naked, like a primitive warrior, his broad frame glistening with sweat despite the cool of the night. He stood looking at them for a moment, as if considering what to do, or maybe just checking that they were still there and that the wore would hold them until morning, then went back inside the tent. The moon slipped down beyond the west side of the valley, casting their glade into deep darkness that was alleviated only by the silver light in the sky and the dying embers of the fire.
Danny dreamed.
He was falling. He was tumbling over and over with the fire searing and burning across his back while his skin shrivelled and melted.
"Defied me thrice. Thrice!" It was the voice of the twitchy eyed stranger, yet at the same time, impossibly, it was his father's voice, echoing down from on high, forbidding and reproving. "Forty days and forty nights did they fall to the exterior darkness where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth."
Up where the moonlight rippled on the surface, he could hear the boom of the cannons on the ramparts of the old castle, fired to bring the bodies to the surface. Dead Paulie Degman's face swam in front of him.
"Yeah, we are in the valley of death, Danny, and yeah, we fear evil. Prepare ye the way. Make good the path, for he comes when you do not expect him and he will cut..."
No! Danny tried to scream. It was all wrong. In his ears, the beat of his heart was like a drum and he struggled for breath, panicked, flailed to get away from Paulie. The dead boy's eyes were pale in the dark, pale and blind and the lips were flapping in the flow of the river water.
"Defied me thrice, defied me thrice," another voice was rasping out and Danny closed his ears to it, because if he defied thrice something would happen and that would mean it was.....
He woke with a start and a scream half blurted on dried lips. The wire was pulling right into his neck and he gasped aloud, hauling for a painful breath. He had slipped down and his back was scraping on the old twigs and thorns that had fallen from the hawthorn tree, setting his swollen bruises aflame.
"You OK Danny?" Tom asked softly.
For a moment Danny was unfocussed, disoriented. The moon was gone and the fire nearly dead. He realised he was still alive and not drowning and not falling and that ghostly Paulie had only been in his dream. He turned round quickly, rasping his neck and back in the process, to check Corky, still able to see his wasted face floating in front of him, grinning sadly.
"I think so," he whispered back, very shakily.
"He took Billy out. I saw him. Billy needed the bathroom and he let him out. They went down to the stream and he washed him down with water." Tom's voice was thin and shivery. The night had gone cold. "What's he going to do to us?"
"I dunno," Danny said. Even at this stage, after all that had happened, it was still hard to believe that the man would really kill them. All the evidence to the contrary was there. He had shot at Danny and would have killed Corky as he had done to Mole Degman and the others, but even then the flare of hope and disbelief was in them. They were just boys.
"What's Corky doing?"
"He's asleep I think."
"Can he get through the wire?"
Danny shook his head, sending a negative vibration to Tom. "Nobody can."
Tom squirmed, a little shudder that Danny picked up by return. "What's the matter?"
"I need....I have to have a pee."
"Well go."
"I can't," Tom said. "Not here."
"Sure you can, Danny whispered. "our hands aren't tied."
"But I can't here. There's nowhere for it to go. I'll be in it. Sitting in it."
"That's the least of your worries," Danny whispered tightly. He didn't understand what Tom's problem was.
"No. I can't," Tom insisted. His voice was rising above a whisper.
"Why the hell not?"
There was a silence. Tom gulped hard. Both of his hands were forced down on his crotch again, the way he'd been when they had all come down the valley at gunpoint.
"It's Maureen," Tom said and this time his voice did crack again into a half sob. "My wee sister." Danny nodded, remembering the thin little girl with thin arms and skin like quartz underlain with dull, cloudy bruises. Tom pushed his hand into his crotch, like a toddler holding in the need. He let out a little moan.
"When she...." he started. "I mean. I was there."
Danny didn't have to say anything. Everybody knew Tom had been there. His old man had been working up at Lochend on the new road, digging drains with the team of navvies and Tom's mother, a small, spare woman with the same pale freckles Tom had and the same washed out curly hair, she'd had to go out to the shops. Tom had been left in with Maureen and that was something he never minded at all, because she was his kid sister and she was sick and she liked him to read stories to her. Danny had been with him when he'd swiped the book from the library in the winter, stolen it so he wouldn't have to give it back, and he remembered it had been Billy Goats Gruff, the one about the troll under the bridge. He recalled Tom getting badly upset when somebody mentioned little Lucy Saunders under the bridge at Ladyburn Stream near the outlet at the Rough Drain.
"I was there, just me on my own," Tom said. "Mo, our Maureen, she was pretty sick. She'd been up in the night, but my mum had to go down town to get something. I think it was the cough mixture for Mo because the thing she had, it made her cough all the time and she had a sore throat."
Tom raised one hand to wipe away a tear. "I was in with her, playing with my dinky toys on the floor and she asked me to read the story again. Remember that book I nicked? She loved that one. She always said it made her go all squirmy and every time I read it, she squealed like she was scared but she wasn't really. She loves the bit where the thing says: 'Who's trip tap tapping on my bridge.' "
Danny picked up the slip of tenses. She loves. Little Mo had died before Christmas. Danny had experience of death, the whole town had by now, but it was all second hand and at a distance, even counting Paulie down by the river. He had not lost anybody he loved. Not like a sister or anything.
"And I said OK, I'll read a bit. I never minded, 'cos she really liked it and it made her laugh. She was all right, and that's why my Ma went out. She had to get things and it wasn't her fault she wasn't there. But I didn't know what to do." Tom choked up a little and Danny sat silent. Tom sniffed and started again.
"I was reading and she was all scrunched up in the pillows, and I was just getting to the good bit when she said she had to go to the bathroom. It was dead quiet the way she said it and I said hold on a minute and I'll just finish this bit and she looked up at me. She had these big dark bits under her eyes, like a panda, you know, like somebody had skelped her a couple of good ones. She said it was film-star's make up and she was going to be like Audrey Hepburn when she grew up, except she said Audie Hebum 'cause she couldn't speak right with her front teeth out and I said it would be Audie Murphy and she never knew what I was talking about. Only she wasn't going to grow up, was she?"
Danny heard the bitterness of loss and bleak hopelessness in Tom's voice.
"So I said, wait until I've finished the page and she looked up at me and said: 'I have to go to the bathroom, can you help me Tommy?'"
"It was just like that. She was kind of smiling and kind of frowning, like she was thinking hard and her eyes were open and I got up to get the pot from the corner. She could only use the pot because she was too sore to get to the bathroom, you know? I went to get the pot and she was still staring like that. I never even knew. Honest to god Danny, I never knew. I thought maybe if I hadn't finished the end of the page, maybe I could have....."
The tears were catching the last of the dying fireglow.
"I lifted her up, and she had wet the bed. She was lying in her own pee. I could smell it and I never even knew then. She was still staring at me, that funny way, dead still and I was trying to lift her up. There was a puddle underneath her and it made a noise and I never even knew. Oh shit Danny. She said she needed to go, but she'd already done it and she was lying in it. My wee sister. Maureen."
Now Danny realised why Tom hadn't wanted to hear about little Lucy Saunders. She had died under the bridge, in the muck in the hollow of the concrete chamber, in a puddle of her own piss. The story had gone round the school like a brush-fire, the first killing, so far as was known at the time, at the hands of this twitchy-eyed killer who was now in the dark of the tent with Billy Harrison.
"I couldn't do anything," Tom was saying. "I never knew."
He began to sob softly. Hand still pressed in hard. "And I can't do it here. I don't want to sit in it. Not here. I don't want to die in my own piss."
"Jees, Tom, I never knew that's what happened." Doug's voice was low, coming from his shadow on the far side. They hadn't realised he was awake. "You should have said."
"I couldn't say. Nobody should die in their own pee, nobody, especially a wee kid like Maureen. I told my Ma I would die to bring her back. She was screaming blue murder and she hit me, but there was nothing I could do. I would have died to bring her back, you know. Honest I would. I can still hear her talking. Every night when I go to bed, I can hear her asking for that story and then I can hear her telling me she needs to go to the bathroom. And now I can't do it. Not here."
"That's okay Tommy," Doug whispered. They heard him fumble in his pocket and then, a few moments later, the snick of something tearing. Danny smelled a peculiar odour on the air. Doug fumbled some more, then reached out. Something thin and floppy dangled from his hand.
"Piss into this," he said. Danny stretched to see. Doug's teeth were glinting in the light. In his hand, Phil Corcoran's second condom dangled. Tom looked at it for several seconds before he realised what it was. He slowly reached his free hand and took it, unzipped his jeans. They all watched, though in the dark there was nothing to see. They heard a hiss of water spurting. The condom expanded very quickly and they smelled its odd scent mixed with the hot smell of urine. After about a minute, Tom let out a long sigh. He lifted the ballooning rubber by the neck. It wobbled a little. Very quickly he tied the neck to seal it, reached out beyond the little hollow and put it on the ground. It rolled several feet until it got half-way to the tent. There it hit something sharp and burst without a sound except for the sudden gurgle of water which drained into the dry grass.
"Thanks Doug."
"Don't mention it," Doug said. "I wasn't going to use it anyway. It's too bloody big."
He was silent for a while and all three of them sat still while they listened to the night noises, the rustlings and the occasional distant cry of a wild bird far off in the gloom of the trees. Finally Doug spoke up again.
"You think he's all right? Billy, I mean."
They knew who he meant. "I think so," Danny said, more in hope than in any certainty. They had listened to Billy's heartbreaking sobs for a long time after his squeals of pain had diminished. The man, Twitchy Eyes, he didn't seem to notice the noise, or if he did, it didn't bother him. Billy had been snuffling when the man had come out to hunker by the skulls and speak to a man who wasn't there.
"I never meant this to happen to him," Doug said. "I wished I never said he should have his neck wrung. I was just pissed off, know what I mean?"
They all knew what he meant. It had been a dreadful, brittle and dangerous moment.
"Christ a'mighty, I should never have told him about his old man. But he was always having a go at me. All the time. But honest to God, I never wanted this to happen to him. I mean, it was just because I was angry when he said that about Terry. That was a really rotten thing to say."
"Yeah. And you were rotten to him," Tom said. "But it's finished. It doesn't matter."
"I'd take it back if I could. No kidding. I don't want Billy to get hurt again. Not from that dirty bastard. If I could take it back I really would. It doesn't matter about Terry. He's my brother, isn't he? What difference does it make? Nothing! I still love the little creep, no matter what. And my Mum and Dad, they'll be okay, won't they? In Toronto?"
Danny and Tom could hear Doug was laying it out like a grid, wishing it to happen.
"Maybe they'll stop arguing all the time. It scares me sometimes. It used to be okay, but now it's not. I always knew there was something wrong, but it's not Terry's fault. He's a great kid. He always gives me a kiss every night when he goes to bed. Every night. I don't mind telling you that."
He went silent for a while, then spoke again. "Corky was right. We have to stick together while we can. It doesn't matter, does it? All the things that happen and we can't do anything about it? They don't matter. Corky was right sure enough. See the way he looked in that bastard's eyes? I never saw anything like that in my life. If I get the chance, I want to be as brave as that.
"And when I get home, I'm going to hug my mum. Don't mind telling you that. I'm going to give her a hug and tell her I love her and my old man both."
Tom sniffed in sympathy. Danny sat very silently, aware of pangs of loss inside him that he could not explain at all, even to himself. Hugging and loving.
The earth turned and the night got darker and colder, though it was still summer. Sometime in the night, Corky woke up from his exhausted slumber and started working on the wire again, making that awful grinding noise with his teeth on the metal. Tom cried out in his sleep, just a wordless whimper that startled them all awake. Billy was silent the whole time through the long night.
Danny fell in and out of sleep, trying to keep awake, hoping against hope that Corky would make it through the wire. He was deadly afraid of what the morning would bring and in his mind, Corky's words kept getting mixed up with Mick Jagger's strutting rasp.
This could be the last time....maybe...maybe...maybe...I don't know.
Again, sometime later, Danny dreamed of his father and heard him read from the prayer book and he imagined himself crawling through pools of scalding custard while his father talked about the bad fire that would go on forever. He saw John Corcoran's wasted face, one eye glaring at him and the other a red ruin. The wire was tight on Corky's neck and when he opened his mouth to speak, his teeth were all chipped and broken.
"I tried, Danny-boy. I tried, honest to god. But there's no way out, even if you can talk posh."
Somewhere in the shadows, a deep and echoing voice rumbled out: "Defied me thrice. Defied me thrice."
And Danny knew he was waiting in the dark in the Garden of Gethsemane in an agony of fearful expectation of a dreadful thing about to happen.
"Denied." He insisted. "It's not defied, it's denied."
As soon as he said it a cold sensation of doom flowed into him. Before the cock crows twice...it was written in the testament. It couldn't be thrice, because that would mean the cock would crow and it would be.....