Billy was sick.
He had taken two mouthfuls of the trout, skin, gills, bones and slick, cold entrails. They all heard the slush-crackle as he chewed, jaws working in a crazy stammer. He swallowed, eyes closing tight, mouth twisted in utter revulsion. The gulping sound he made turned Danny's stomach and for an instant he thought he would vomit the sausages he'd eaten for breakfast.
Billy beat him to it. He swallowed a second time and then his mouth opened and all of it came back up again in a projectile gush which propelled the glutinous mass out onto the grass.
The man laughed again, this time a fast, almost girlish giggle of sound as if he found the whole display completely hilarious and that laugh was just as chilling to Danny as the very fact that he had made Billy eat the slimy fish or jammed the gun against his friend's head. The whole day had flipped, in the space of a few seconds, into a surreal and terrifying kind of nightmare.
The man's next move surprised them all. He reached forward and took Billy by the hair and hauled him to his feet. Billy yelled in pain and fright. Danny took an instinctive step forward and the man speared him with a fathomless look, froze him to the spot.
"Don't mister," Billy yelped. "Ah, that's sore. Please. Let me g....."
He was up on his toes now, head back and eyes screwed up, both hands raised above his head, wanting to take the fingers out of his hair, afraid to touch them. He arched upwards trying to slacken the grip and take the dragging pain out of his scalp.
"Leave him alone," Corky bawled, body bent forward, needing to do something. "Get off him."
The man ignored him. Instead, he let Billy get both feet flat on the turf and pushed him, still gripping his hair in his left hand, making his head nod rapidly with the force of the sudden shove. Billy almost fell forward, got his balance, and the man walked him along the track. He raised the gun and pointed it at straight Danny's belly. The hollow black figure of infinity, the horizontal ebony eight at the gaping ends of the barrels loomed suddenly vicious. Danny's sphincter puckered into a tight little nub and he still felt everything might just let go. One squeeze on either trigger and that black mouth would roar and it would blow a plate-sized hole from front to back and kill him in a flash of light and noise.
"Come on, boy," the man said, very gently, almost sadly. "Let's all go down together."
Danny turned, his legs almost unable to bear his weight and led the way, all the time aware of the gun. The skin on his back puckered in dreadful expectation. His heart thudded with such sudden pressure that twin pains pulsed in his temples and his vision swam.
"You three," the man said, his voice louder, raising his face to Corky and the others on the higher track. "At the double."
Danny thought of Billy. That's what he had said after he'd crushed the dragonfly larva and thrown the bloated frog back into the crater.
Come on you lot. At the double.
That nowseemed like a long time ago. Now Billy was on his tip-toes, face contorted in pain. The tableau on the slope froze for an instant of dreadful indecision, then began to move again. Corky said nothing more.
They came down the hill, just ahead of Danny and they all went down together.
There was no sound but the burbling water and the thud of their footfalls on the short turf where the highland cattle and the black-faced sheep had cropped the grass to a short matte. But for that half-wild hill cow, and its half-baked cowpat, they could have been down stream and gone.
Behind him, Danny heard Billy grunt in pain or exertion, but he was too numbed to look round. He had seen the madness in the man's eyes. The fervour had reached out and touched him. The eyes were as black as the barrels of the twelve-bore shotgun, but their black was deeper, like holes in the world, as if there was a space behind them that went on forever and never stopped. It was only the rapid-fire blinking, as if they were burning with their own black intensity, that briefly cut off the pull of their awesome gravity.
Twitchy...
It had come to Danny as it had come to Billy, that epiphany, the sudden and apocalyptic recognition.
We know he's a tall man, big John Fallon had said as he stood in front of the class with Sister Julia standing beside him, each in different versions of black and white uniform. She had looked up at him, half his size, a third his weight. They had all looked at him. Maybe as tall as me, the big sergeant had told them and they'd listened. He's got black hair and he blinks as if he's got something wrong with his eyes.
John Fallon had been right. This man was big. God he was huge.
Twitchy Eyes
Billy Harrison had looked up from where he was threading the thong through the fish gills and the man had filled his entire vision. Now he filled his whole consciousness, his entire world. The hand gripping his hair held tighter, keeping his head pulled back, and the pain screwed into his scalp, making his eyes water.
Danny Gillan felt the skin on his back pucker and ripple all the way down his spine,. His whole consciousness was filled with the knowledge of the barrels upon him. One slip. One small tug of the finger, a squeeze, a stroke, and the gun would cut him in half. He could feel a whimper, a little animal sound that was born of pure fear, try to ripple up from his throat and push its way out of his mouth and he was afraid that if he made a sound the man
- twitchy eyes -
would react just the way a cat does, jerk at the least sound and then...oh then...
Behind him Billy grunted.
No Billy! Danny silently pleaded.
Billy made a deeper animal sound. The man still had him by the hair. Without turning, Danny knew Billy's head was still hauled back in that merciless grip, his face white and open and slack. Ahead of him he could see Corky's shoulders, all tensed up, the way they got when he was angry. Danny could not remember Corky ever being really scared. He wasn't big, but he was strong enough and he had a profound depth of resources within him. He'd taken his licks, taken his beatings. He'd been turned over right royally on occasion by a couple of real experts and come bouncing back when the wounds healed and the bruises faded or so he let everybody know. Now he knew Corky was scared and angry all at the same time. He could read that in his tight posture.
Don't do anything stupid...please. Danny heard the small and whimpering voice inside his head and he was too stunned and afraid to feel ashamed at the tremor in it.
Ahead of Corky, Doug was walking fast, head slowly swinging from side to side although he was trying to hide the motion.
Don't do it.
They were just coming to the edge of the bend where the stream took a dog-leg to the left beside the small cascade into the gravel pool. Here, another small tributary fed in through a narrow defile. Tom approached first, walking with his head down and his arms not swinging as they normally would. His shoulders were moving up and down and he might have been crying. Danny was more worried about Doug. He was thin and rangy, with long, stick-like legs, but he was also fast. Whenever they ran from trouble, from big John Fallon whenever a lucky - or unlucky - slingshot might crack the bowl of a street-light; from the big boys down on the Rough Drain when they decided it was their territory, when Doug ran from trouble there was never a chance of him getting caught. He could cover the ground like a startled deer. He was all limbs and angles, knuckles and knees when he walked, but when he ran, all of those angles smoothed and merged into a fluid grace, an effortless glide that was as sure-footed as it was fleet. Danny saw his head swing slowly as he reached the corner. Up that runnel, he could be hidden from view for four, maybe five seconds. That might be enough to get him most of the way up, even on the slope, to get to the rocks at the far end and the trees beyond. It was just a small and narrow gully and there would be some cover.
"Don't."
Danny clearly heard Corky's urgent whisper, over the sound of their footsteps and Billy's panicked grunts. Doug's head pulled back, just a fraction. Behind Billy, the man with the gun made a sound, maybe as if he was clearing his throat. Tom went past the mouth of the gully.
Corky had read the signs in Doug, as clearly as Danny had done. Doug's head swing again. His eyes glanced up the runnel, gauging the distance, knowing his own speed.
No! Danny's mental plea came at exactly the same time as Corky's urgent hiss.
Doug might have been fast, but it was uphill all the way, over boulders and rocks, and a slick patch where the water flowed over a flat, smooth ledge of rock strata that was covered in slick algae. He might have been fast, but he only had seconds, and fast wasn't fast enough. He could run, but he couldn't outrun a gunshot. Danny knew that, with good reason. Down at the Whale's Back, the big spit of tidal sand at low tide on the Firth out from the gunbarrel sewer pipe beside Ardmhor Rock at Arden, Danny has seen what shotguns could do. His Uncle Mick has taken him down there on cold winter mornings to get the duck as they hit in, flying in rapid wedges, wings pumping hard, flickering on the surface. Uncle Mick would wait until they were level and then he'd haul up on his feet. The chevrons of duck would see the motion and then veer away, croaking alarm. They were fast, wings whistling as they scooped air, necks outstretched. Mick always took them on the back, once they were past, doing maybe fifty, maybe sixty. He said it was best to take them under the feathers rather than head-on, which might just wound the birds. The gun would roar like a thunderclap and the report would go reverberating in a harsh and strangely hollow ripple of noise across the flat of the tidal sand and up there in the sky the feathers would fly and the birds would tumble through the air, over and over and over until they hit the ground in hard thumps, ripped through by the lead shot.
Doug was fast, but not as fast as a fleeting widgeon, or a big sheldrake. He couldn't do fifty or sixty on the flat, never mind uphill, over rocks, over slick stones, over the moss at the top. The gully was a funnel. Anybody firing up there, with the spread pattern a twelve-bore had, would hit anything. For forty yards there was no cover at all.
No! Corky hissed. No! Danny's mind bleated, already seeing Doug getting halfway to the trees before the twin barrels and their black infinity swung up the runnel (and a small and shameful part of him wanted Doug to suddenly swivel and take off like a mountain hare because that would take the glare of those barrels off his back) and the trigger pull back and the barrels spit thunder.
Corky reached and touched Doug. Danny's heart nearly stopped dead. Something like a giant hand gripped all the muscles in his belly and squeezed hard. Corky reached and touched Doug and Doug jerked as if he'd been stung. Any moment Danny expected to heard the apocalyptic roar.
Nothing happened. Doug's high, tight shoulders sagged to slackness and defeat. He continued walking, on past the mouth of the gully, following Tom's short, fearful steps, splashing across the inch-deep trickle of tributary water. In five strides he was past the chance of escape, and away from the certainty of retribution. Corky nodded, an involuntary motion that spoke eloquently of his relief and in that motion Danny read that Corky could not try anything either. His friend's back was still rigid with anger and tension and fear, but Corky was not going to dive into the bushes, or pick up a smooth rock and try to take this stranger's eye out. He had gauged all the chances and come up with a zero. At least for now.
In that glassy moment, the exquisite conjunction of reality and unreality, each of them were wholly and completely alive as they had never been before. A powerful survival instinct had kicked into them all, raising them up to heights of perception where every motion, every sound, was imbued with amazing clarity.
Corky had read Doug's posture too. Everything seemed to go in slow motion. The somnolent murmur of the water deepened to a low rumble. The lone cuckoo way down there in the trees hummed its diphthong, stretched-out and hollow, the sound trailing on and on as it faded to eventual silence. The dragonflies, twin pairs, striking in black and gold, came gliding over the water. On the side of the valley, a small stone, dislodged from the steep gravel rolled down to a ledge and then fell off, tumbling in the air to land with a bass thud of sound in the pile of soft shale close to the bank.
Corky's thoughts were flicker-fast, sharp as glass, clear as ice. Not now. He has thought. Not now. As if he could beam the words at Doug.
"You three, at the double." He had sounded like a soldier, like the sergeant down at the drill hall where his Da had hiked the grenades. The gun was gun jammed against Billy's neck, just under the jawline where his blue-black Indian hair curled thick and they had seen the man's stance and the sunlight had frozen on a summer's day.
Crazy, Corky thought. Anybody who would put a shotgun up against a boy's neck had to be loony-tunes. Anybody who would force him to eat a dead trout, straight out of the stream, with the blood and guts hanging out, they had to be non-compost-mentis as Billy would say. It stood to reason. A farmer might rant and rave a little, convinced you were worrying the sheep or stealing eggs. He might put the toe of his boot up your backside, the way big John Fallon might do if he caught you swiping stuff out of Woolworth's down on River Street. That was an accepted level of violence, the quid pro quo. A boy could take that, come and go, roll with it and blink back smarting tears before anybody noticed.
This was different. The whole texture of the day had cracked and splintered and then frozen over. The man had laughed that odd sound and his eyes had blinked in the sunlight and Corky had known. Anybody who stuck the barrels under Billy's chin would be crazy enough to shoot, because the very fact of it could get you thrown in Drumbain for a stretch.
Not now.
Corky had done his own calculation, his brain suddenly up there in the high levels of clarity where cold clear winds blew. He could see the big picture, the lines of contact, interconnecting them all in a lacy weave; Tom to Danny, Doug to Billy, to the crazy man with the blinking eyes
TwitchyEyes
and to Corky himself. If there was a time to move, it was not now. The wrong move would get that gun talking, sure as hell it would. There might be another chance.
And then again there might not, a nasty little voice whispered. He shied away from it, though it seemed to echo persistently...then again...then again
There might be another chance, once they'd all gone down together to the camp. Maybe they would go further, down into the trees.
Make it the camp, Corky prayed. Stop there. Up here in the valley, they were still in the open, with only scrubby hawthorns and hazels clustered in the rocks and some thick ferns that came up to shoulder height or even higher, further up the slopes, but here it was mostly open to the sun. It was far up from the town, but there was something about it being open that instead of making him feel more vulnerable, seemed to convey a thin coating of protective cover.
Out in the open, you could be seen.
Down beyond the camp, there the trees began, there was dark and shadow under the spreading pines and the broad beech and oak trees. Nobody could see what was done down there. If he
Twitchy Eyes
took them down there beyond the line of the trees where even the water of the stream was deep and dark at the spate-carved pot-holes then he would do whatever he wanted.
They would die.
A shiver ran up and down Corky's back, hard enough to make him feel as if his Sloppy Joe shirt was visibly rippling and he tried to force the feeling away. He could not let them, Billy and Danny see he was scared. He could not let them know how scared, because if they knew, they'd panic and that would make him panic and if he did that he'd have no say at all, no choice and no chance
The big man with the gun was an all out shrieking screwball. Corky had seen it in the stuttering blink and the odd, head-cocked posture and the way he'd said, quite softly, that they'd all go down together. Corky did not want that man to see the ripple that he felt must be visibly writhing under the fabric for he'd know how scared he was and that would be a bad thing. You never let a dog see the fear. Not a Mad Dog.
Because then it would react. Then it would attack.
Say a prayer Danny Boy, an oddly cool third voice said, almost languidly, over the cold sparkle of his thoughts. Now's the time to collect on the Hail Mary's and Glory-Be's round the fireplace.
A mental image came unbidden, of Danny going up with a slip to the window in the confessional like a punter collecting on a line from Harvey Bracknell's betting shop, trading it in for some saving grace. A little shivery giggle tried to bubble up inside him, like a pocket of poisonous gas in the bog. He swallowed it down hard, in case it rolled up to the surface and burst out. He didn't want to hear the sound he might make. It might sound a little high and shaky. A little hysterical and maybe mad.
Billy could see Corky only when his head happened to chance in that direction. The pain in his scalp, where the man had his hair in a vicious grasp felt like fire, like a bad Chinese rope burn that went from one ear to the other. Tears had already sparked then spilled and were cold on his cheek and his thoughts too were high and sparking. He was floating in a bubble of fright and pain and he could hear the blood pound in his ears with the same double beat rhythm of an old Zodiac engine with its big-ends gone.
The man was muttering something under his breath, but Billy couldn't make out the words. The taste of fish slime and blood, the texture of the fresh skin and hard gill-case, that had been awful, but not as shuddering awful as the plummet of pure fear when the gunbarrel had nudged cold under his chin. He had wanted to be a hero, all his life, as far as he could remember, knowing he had the stuff, had the guts to brave the worst. In the films, in all the war movies, he'd seen men shot and killed. They died like they did in the westerns, bravely, with honour, no fuss and with very little blood.
Now he knew. In an instant of clarity when his mind had come suddenly fully awake from the daydream that was his normal state of mentation, and now when it was as clear as glass, he realised it had all been a lie.
No hero no hero no hero.
His father had been nobody and in another ice-sparkle of clarity Billy Harrison knew that he had known that all the time. It had been an unwanted knowledge, lurking out there in the shadows, to be kept at arm's length. He had wanted a father maybe, needed one perhaps, and the one he wanted was not like Corky's Da, rolling drunk on Friday nights, blagging the pigeon club money for booze. Not like Danny's Dad either, ramrod straight behind the family in their Sunday best and a look of disdain for the boys smoking stolen cigarettes at the corner of the street. His father would have been a hero, should have been, like his mother said he was.
It was a lie. All of it. The films lied. Men didn't smile bravely when they were shot, and fall into comfortable positions and look tragically valiant. He had felt the barrels under his jawline and suddenly the real truth fell upon him like an enormous weight. The gun could blow his head clean off his shoulders in a splatter of blood and slime. It would leave him like the fish, shivering and headless and dead for ever.
Behind him the man spoke again, a muted, almost breathless mutter that was incomprehensible. The voice was low and rumbling, not the high and scary titter of a laugh.
Dumb fry it sounded like.
Up ahead, Tom Tannahill was walking, head down on the track, keeping his body curved in as if by making himself even smaller, he could become invisible. He felt suddenly exhausted as if the fright had drained everything out of him. His legs were shaking so badly there was a real danger that they'd give way or that he'd lose his step and the man with the gun would think he was trying to run away and....He did not want to think of that.
It was enough just to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other and keep walking. He felt light-headed and trickles of sweat were beading just under his hairline to spill down his temples. Every couple of seconds, a flush of heat swept through him, as if he was blushing madly, but it was worse than that because when that happened, there was a roaring noise in his head and the sounds of their footsteps faded away while little white sparkles appeared to dance in the corner of his vision.
Tom took a breath and heard it flutter as his chest hitched, the way it did after he'd been crying for a long time and that sensation made him think of Maureen and how he'd cried then, for days at a time, trying to get to grips with that appalling, incomprehensible loss.
Billy whimpered, just a shiver of inarticulate sound and Tom felt his lungs hitch again. His bladder wanted to let go. The pressure built up suddenly, fierce and urgent and he clamped his hand down on his crotch, pressing hard until the feeling subsided from a burning pain to a warm pulse. A deadly weight of hopelessness dragged down on him and he wished Corky would do something, anything, to get them out of this.
The man with the gun said something, a mutter of sound, barely audible, and Tom almost stopped, fearing an order had been issued and he'd missed it, but even more fearful right at that moment to make any mistake at all. Some instinct made him keep moving and he walked, legs boneless and trembling, sweat dripping down the sides of his face and the nagging pressure to piss rising to a twisting burn. He screwed up his eyes, the way Billy had done when the man grabbed his hair and forced himself to concentrate. He did not want to piss himself.
The thought of that, of the damp, hot stain spreading on his jeans, was unendurable.
"Convoy."
The sudden sound startled Tom so badly he almost slipped off the track and down the shallowing bank. Doug reached to help and the motion twisted him over on his ankle with a twisting snap of pain that flared like a match and made him gasp through gritted teeth. The pain flashed high and then faded. Doug bit back tears and limped after Tom. There was no sound at all from the others, not even a whimper from Billy. Their senses were wound up to a pitch of tension. All of them listening for what would come next.
The man did not repeat himself. Not then.
Convoy? It had sounded like that even to Danny who was nearest to him except for Billy held captive at arm's length. Did he mean we were all in line?
They all went down together in their convoy, past the slope of the turn at the white quartz rocks framing the head of the pool where Billy had first jumped into the water to clean the red silt off his jeans and stained the water in streaks of blood red. The water was cool and dark and clear now, the surface dimpled with the small swirls of turbulence. A brilliant blue damselfly wove silently over the moving surface, a silent line of coruscating light. They filed past the turn to where the canyon of the valley widened to the swathe of green where the tent stood, a little lop-sided, close to the shade of the rowan trees. A thin, blue line of smoke rose perpendicular from the embers of the morning's fire where the thick pine log was still smouldering lazily. Further down, a highland cow, russet and hairy but with a spread of horns like cattle on any western ranch turned slowly and watched with impassive black eyes while its calf nosed in at the udders. Eventually the animals moved off into the high ferns at the edge of a clearing, barging through the undergrowth with a crackling sound that reminded Danny of the noise down in the dark of the trees when they'd sat round the campfire talking about old Mole Hopkirk and the flies. Had that been a cow? In the dark, he had sensed eyes watching them, but that could have been imagination. Could have been.
But the doom-doom-DOOM sound that had woken him out of sleep, that had been no cow. He knew that for certain now. The man with the gun had been watching them from the cover and the shade while they had laughed and had fought. He'd probably heard Corky's tale about the rats under the bank, the Racine rats that came out and ate lonesome travellers beside the water. In the hypernatural clarity of the moment, Danny understood now about the footprint in the shingle and the booming sound coming up from the hollow bank downstream. The man had been announcing his presence, trying to scare them. He had been telling them he was here.
And now he was here.
They walked into the clearing and the man's footsteps boomed suddenly loud behind them and Danny knew that was his imagination. Everything about the moment was magnified, from the crackling blunder of the cow and calf to the shimmering streak of the damselfly and the smell of the pine smoke.
"Yeah tho' I walk through the valley of the shadow of death."
The voice spoke out, clear and boomingly succinct, a deep contrast to the snicker of the laugh up at the high pool.
"I will fear no evil."
Billy's foot slipped on a dried ball of sheep dung and he almost fell forward. The stranger's had pulled him back with a strong twist and another yelp escaped the boy. Pain flared in his scalp and tears sparked again in his eyes. If the man had let him go just at that moment he would have fallen forward right on to his face.
"Nearly there Convoy." This time the voice was almost a growl. Corky assumed he was talking to them. "Can you hear me?"
Corky nodded, risking a turn towards the man, letting him know he had heard and understood, but the stranger was turned away, his head cocked to the side, as if in conversation with someone else.
"You listening Conboy?"
Not convoy. Corky heard it clearly. Conboy.
"He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul."
Danny heard the words and recognised them too, from long repetition. For some reason his heart sank even further, it felt as if it shrivelled inside him.