Reminiscence:
For a long time, as we trudged up the moor, beyond the burning grass and heather which trailed white smoke into the now still air, nobody said a word. Nobody could. We breasted the hill and headed down the slope towards the distant Barwoods which formed the first barrier between the moor and the high farmland. Over the east, the sun had now risen well up beyond Langmuir Crags, soaring bright into a clear blue sky. Behind us, as we could see, every time we turned around (and none of us could resist doing that) the pall of smoke had risen up in a huge column that flattened out at the top. We had seen clouds like that before, in newsreels in the old Regal Cinema.
We had gone down into the valley five days before, and we had come out again, and life would never be the same again, not for any of us. Every now and again, one would turn back to look at the rising pillar of smoke, the black and transient marker of what had happened, but mostly we looked over our shoulders just in case the raggedy, bloodied and somehow unstoppable monster with was clambering up the moor after us, waving that butcher's knife and repeating his own mad mantra.
Dung fly...dung fly....
We were all hurt and we were all bruised, both inside and out. Whatever Twitchy Eyes had done he had reached inside each of us in one way and another and left his mark on our souls. Jesus, we were only thirteen years old.
Nobody said a word for a long time and that's how it stayed. We never, despite what happened after that, we never spoke about it to anybody else. Not ever. During that hot, crazy summer and the strangely bitter, unstable aftermath of the autumn which followed, we lived in the shadow of the man with the twitchy eyes. A few mothers in our town lived in this shadow too, and sisters and brothers and devastated families, but we had seen him. We had heard the sound of his voice, felt his touch.
We had looked into those eyes.
Back down the hill after those five days, carrying less in our hands than we had taken there, and weighed by so much more in our souls. We couldn't go home, not right away, so we stayed, huddled together for comfort in the heat of the afternoon, down in the damp shade of Rough Drain, waiting until the old bus came back with the rest of the scouts, and mostly waiting until we could face another human being who was not one of us. Nobody knew.
Strange, isn't it? Nobody knew. Nobody suspected. Boys get away with murder, near enough. You come in with the knees torn out of your jeans and your furious Ma wants to know where she'll get the money for another pair, never mind torn skin. She asks what you've been doing and you tell her you fell and that's fine. You could have fallen off a cliff, but all she can see are holes in the jeans.
You get a scrape or a cut and you say you fell. A bloody nose? Fell. Mothers just don't look and most times they don't ask, and fathers don't notice at all unless it concerns other business. You get a scrape or bruise every other day. A torn shirt or ragged denims can hide a multitude of sins and plenty of damage. They can hide what Billy needed to hide. They can cover forever the flaring then dying splashes of a shotgun blast. A kick from a madman's boot.
Scrapes and cuts are a boys lot. Nobody really cares that much. Nobody sees. Boys hide it all, because that's the way boys are, and mostly that's the way men are too. We came back with the scouts and we took our knocks for damaged clothes and we hid our damaged souls.
The killings that had begun in the spring with the slaying of daft Mole Hopkirk, who would never, despite his stated ambition, have become The Greatest Cat Burglar in the History of Crime, those killings stopped. Some people, it seems, had their own theories as to why.
Little Lucy Saunders was long buried, laid to rest in a dry coffin, cleaned of the mud and her own mess. Don Whalen's mother spent two years in Barlane mental hospital, racked by the image of her son's gaping face and its covering of flies. Jeff McGuire, who found Mole's mutilated body, he was in and out of Barlane like a yo-yo, a strange and affected youth with an odd, distant look in his eyes.
Up at Blackwood Farm, where the cock had crowed, master of all it surveyed for two weeks one far-off summer, they cleared up the pieces that had been Ian McColl and his tiny, brave wife.
The killings stopped. After a while, the town tried to get back to normal, still looking over its collective shoulder, the way we had done on the strange, numbed trail down from the high moor that we'd climbed to get out from under, to find the Dummy Village of legend. Just in case. Just in case.
Nobody could really believe he was gone, but we knew. We knew why, and we never told a soul because we couldn't. Simple as that. There were five boys whose lives had been altered, infected by the touch of the man with the twitchy eyes. We tried to put it away, tuck it into a dark corner, but if you're reading this, you'll know that things that lurk in dark corners come out, and they always go for the throat. We could not tell anyone what had happened to Billy Harrison. We could all remember the deathliness in his voice when he stood there beside the crumpled tent.
Kill him!
We couldn't tell, not then. It's hard enough even now, after all this time.
Doug Nicol's father came home in the autumn, and a fortnight later, they had emptied the house along Braeside Street and gone off to Toronto. The last I saw of Doug, he was standing, blinking tears from his eyes, holding on to little Terry's hand, sniffing hard so that his big teeth showed. The sun was turning his ears pink. My throat was dry. He reached out and touched me on the shoulder and I put a hand on his and I still remember that touch. I always will.
I remembered him, remember still, how he had turned to the rest of us, when we could all have got away clean, while the man was still grunting like an animal in the tent, and I can recall the words he said in that deadly low whisper.
We have to help him.
Skin-and bone, thirteen years old, and he would have laid down his life for his friend. Greater love has nobody, than that.
I remember Doug Nicol when he stretched out, choked by the wire, to get his foot to the bag, nearly killing himself for us all. He had run forward to snatch the shells away before the madman could load the shotgun. Then he had strode forward, raising that smooth stone up, to slam it down again. Doug Nicol. I never saw him again after he left town, never heard from him again, but I'll never forget him as long as I live. I hope he is happy. I really hope to God he is.
Billy Harrison's mother, who'd doted on her boy and filled his head with heroic tales of derring-do, myths of a hero father who did not exist, she met another sailor, not an American one, and moved to Portsmouth, met yet another, came back up north again and stayed, dragging Billy with her. They settled in Kirkland, a few miles along the Creggan Road and she took to drink and died sometime in the late seventies. Billy was never the same after that week in the valley. God, none of us were, for sure. Many years ago, I saw him coming out of a bar, in another place, another city, with another guy who was tall and black haired, taller than Billy himself, and for a moment, my heart just stopped. Billy had a dog chain around his neck and the other man held the free end. Years after that, I hadn't heard but I found out later, he got a five year stretch after a police raid on a child porn ring. There was talk that some of the videos weren't just sex, but nothing of that was ever proved in court. Billy went down to Drumbain Jail. He hanged himself in his cell.
I only found this out after I'd come back myself, for my own personal reasons, and by then I'd seen what sparked all this off again, uncovering the memories I'd tried to bury down deep. I later discovered, from the records of the inquiry, that he'd hung himself with a tightening loop-noose made from baling twine from the prison farm's harvester.
I remember Billy Harrison on the ground, while the man hauled at him, trying to get the gun, a prostrate shape, flopped and flapping. I remember his heartrending cries of desperate terror in the dark of the night. I recall his triumphant return from the Dummy Village far up on that bleak moor with the ram's skull paraded on top of his stave, like a Roman standard. I remember the wet patch spreading on his jeans as he climbed up the hill. I can still see the dreadful lost and barren look in his eyes down in the valley when he realised he had been singled out as the first special victim.
Whatever drove him on after all that, the man with the twitchy eyes was behind it, and for that alone, I hope he is burning in the everlasting fire. Billy Harrison was maybe a crazy kid, big in the mouth, tough in the talk, but he was never a bad one, just a bit troubled. Whatever else the man with the Twitchy Eyes had done, he'd touched Billy Harrison and passed on some of the infection of his own appalling sickness.
A year after Billy Harrison died, I met Tom Tannahill, by sheer coincidence. He was still small, still thin, and his curly hair was getting thinner still, but he was wiry and there was a toughness about him that was quiet and strong and it was good. He had been working in a hospital in Rwanda, right in the middle of the madness, all that killing. He had led a party of kids out, through the bush, through the wilds, past the marauding bands of bandits with machine guns and Kalashikovs and machetes, got them out to Zaire and to safety. He'd adopted one of them, a little girl, barely three years old, a girl he called Maureen. When he told me that, he looked me in the eye and something passed between us and that was enough. The next month he went back to Rwanda, where thousands were dying every day, and he was never heard of again.
Tom. Tiny Tom with his high voice and his shaking hands.
I remember him in the night, trying not to piss his pants because he did not want to die in his own mess. Jesus. He was thirteen, same age as me. I remember him swiping that book from the library so he could read a story to the little sister who was dying. Billy Goats Gruff. I recall, like it was yesterday, how he swung the gun by the barrel and I can still hear the thunder as the shot missed him by barely an inch. I remember him turning, despite his terror, at the top of the ledge, to reach down and help Billy up. Fixed in my memory is the picture of him facing up to the Twitchy Eyed madman, raising the gun in his hands, trying to protect the rest of us.
Greater love hath no man than this.
And John Corcoran. Corky to his friends.
His old man, Paddy Corcoran, came out of jail even more crooked and a whole lot meaner and within a year he was back in for a two-year stretch for an assault on Corky's mother. One prophesy came true. Corky's shoulder was dislocated again and the court heard that had happened when he squared up to Paddy Corcoran, a big, blundering man with fists like hams who had thrown him around the room the way a terrier throws a rat. Corky told me about it later, grinning that slow, hard way of his, telling me it was worth it, because he'd got out from under. His mother was in hospital for a little while and when she got out, she left Paddy and abandoned Phil who was just as much out of control. She and Corky and his aunt moved to a house up on Cargill Farm Road, only a couple along from the bungalow where big John Fallon lived with his son and daughter.
Corky stayed on at school for an extra year to get the maths qualification he needed to become an engineer. He'd given up on the idea of making movies, though he was the natural, the one with all the imagination. When I walk by the canal at Barloan Harbour, I can still hear the doom-doom-doom echo up from the tunnels dug by those Racine rats. Corky never got make movies, but he hauled himself out from under. And he was never going to be scared of anybody ever again.
The words up and over somehow repeat themselves and maybe they're more appropriate. Corky got up and over. Big John, the police sergeant, gave him a solid recommendation to the shipyard at Barloan Harbour and he started his apprenticeship. He hauled himself up by the bootstraps, slogging away at night classes, determined to make something of himself. He got a good engineering degree, and he never bothered to learn to talk proper, the way the toffs did. Cargill Farm Road wasn't too far away and Corky and I stayed close in our teens. After a while, after the first few months, we never talked about what happened up in the valley, but it was something that held us together, something we had. Something private. We saved it for later.
A couple of years back, before my walk down on River Street, the first I'd taken in this town for a long time, a wheen of years, as we used to say, John Corcoran was the chief engineer on a big gas rig out in the North Sea. You'll recall it went up like a bomb, and remember, I know about bombs.
Corky stayed back, no surprise, getting men onto the lifeboats, waiting until the last minute, until the rest were safe. All of this is documented. It was in the middle of the night and a gale was blowing. The fireball had swept through the turnhouse and the sleeping quarters and Corky had been the one who got them out of there so that only four men, the ones caught in the blast, were killed.
A young Norwegian, one of the cooks, he was coming across the gantry, while behind him, the metal of the walls was buckling and twisting in the heat. The rungs had started to pop out and the boy was slipping, hanging over a hundred foot drop. Corky turned away from the boat and crawled over the framework, risking his own life, grabbed the boy by the collar and dragged him back. Just then a stanchion higher up gave way and the whole side of the rig collapsed, taking John Corcoran and the boy with it, tangled in the safety rope. It slid down the leg and crumpled like a child's toy, dragging both men under the water. The young Norwegian says John Corcoran somehow got his knife out and cut the rope, still under the water, and pushed him to freedom. The lifeboat got to the scene a few minutes later, but it took them too long to shift the twist of metal and free John Corcoran, trapped just under the surface. When they brought him up, he was still alive, but lack of oxygen had caused dreadful and irreparable brain damage.
Those thirty long minutes under the freezing waters of the north sea, they burned out the flash and the fire and the brave determination that was our Corky.
Greater love hath no man than this. That he lay down his life.
I remember those eyes flashing with fear and anger, damned righteous anger, feet spread, knife out, challenging the crazy, twisted killer who was baptising Billy in the pool in Blackwood Stream, preparing him for sacrifice. I remember him looking into that infinity of death and not flinching. I remember the awful grind of his teeth on the wire as he tried to free us all. I can still see his elbow jerking back twice, three times, to put the knife into the twitchy-eyed beast. In my mind I hear his soothing whisper as he pulled the damp tee-shirt away from the searing skin of my back, taking the embedded pellets with it one by one.
John Corcoran. Corky to his friends. He had laid down his life many a time in that one summer.
I saw him, picking up litter on River Street and his eyes looked into mine, through mine, with not a flicker of recognition, and of all the losses, that was the most painful of all. I could feel tears stinging in the back of my eyes and suddenly I could not swallow.
Hey arse-face. How's it hanging? The words stuck to the back of my throat and they still do. I remember those eyes flashing and I think of the dreadful waste of it all. The unfairness.
Some memories don't fade, no matter how you try to diminish them and push them down into tight little boxes with heavy lids. The memories have their own way of breaking free, beasts in the night, struggling to come back, because memories have a life of their own. I can still see the looks on their faces the day the man came clawing is way up the hill after us, roaring like a mad beast, madness in his eyes and murder in his mind.
For many years, I kept the memory right down and let it slumber fitfully, shying away from it, maybe hoping it would fragment and wither for lack of attention. For a while I succeeded, because you're supposed to go on, to grow up, to overcome. But then something would happen, a chance meeting, a record from those days, Red Rooster or My Generation, played on good old Radio Clyde, a cutting from an old newspaper, even an old movie like Deliverance.
Or something like the eyes of John Corcoran who sweeps the streets and doesn't now have the brains he was born with. Something like that would happen and in a second, in the twitch of an eye, I would be a thirteen-year-old boy again, with a faded sloppy-joe and torn jeans and scuffed canvas shoes. Memories come back.
Angus McNicol, the old policeman, he poured me a couple of whiskies and talked into the recorder, and probably exorcised a few of his own ghosts in the process. He asked me why I was asking all the questions, and while I spun him a yarn, by then I really thought I knew why.
I needed to know who he was, the gaunt man who had come across the stream while we were guddling for trout.
Twitchy Eyes.
On River Street, where the first killing had happened, the murder of Mole Hopkirk in the back room of Old Cairn House, it had all come back, all of it in a rush, a crazy torrent like the one that had scoured the valley on the day the bombs exploded and burst the dam at Lonesome Lake. It came back clear as day, so powerful that I could smell the heather bloom and the sweat and the pine smoke from the fire. I could hear the flies buzzing over in the hollow where Billy had made his altar and the far-off crowing of the cock was still shrill. I could feel the searing burn of the pellets embedded in the swollen skin, the cold of the water, and I could see the parliament of crows judging me from the old swaying wire up in a deserted ghost village. It came back so powerfully I could feel panic rise in my chest and a hand squeeze in my belly and I had to know, to put a name to it. Now I have got a name, or at least I'm sure I do.
It hasn't made a blind bit of difference, knowing that. I know who, but I don't know why. Who the hell knows what madness is? Maybe we all have a little bit of it inside of us.
I know that I saw madness, absolute insanity in a killer's eyes and I lived to tell the tale. Who knows how life would have been if we hadn't gone up there to find the Dummy Village. Or if the twitchy-eyed monster had picked another town to work his evil.
Late at night, or maybe in the dark and cold shallows of the morning when the light is murky, the colour of river water down at the old quayside, I wake up, heart pounding, from a dream, from the dream, the one where I see that grey and rotting hand come crawling like a diseased spider out of a bank of shale. Little trickles of gravel whisper down the steep slope and the fingers flex with a life of their own. The sifting granules are calling out to me.
Dung fly...dung fly...in the dream I understand what that whispering hiss means.
In the dream, my legs won't move and my feet won't climb and I can't move. I am nailed by my own dreadful fear.
On top of the ridge, a lone grey heron stands and fixes me with its staring, yellow eye.
THE END