Castlebank Distillery is one of the few places in Levenford which has night-shift working in winter. The demand for the export scotch whisky blend always soared before Christmas. There were orders to be shunted out and stacked onto the big containers that came and went at all hours heading for the docks in Glasgow for worldwide distribution.
Latta's yard just south along the bank was still noisy with the eerie buzz of the welders and sapphire lightning flashes sparked and flared along the length of the growing pyramid and steel which would be towed out of the estuary and up to the north sea before the summer, all things going to plan.
The distillery is a square set, brick built eyesore of a building which towers over the south of the town, next to the tidal basin on the river. What it lacks in grace and style and visual appeal is more than made up for by the fact that it pays the wages of one in every four families and that alone helps generate most of the other business in the town. For that, the Levenford folk could put up with the stale-towel smell of the maltings and the cloud of steam which rose in a plume day and night. They could put up with the fact that ten percent of the men had a drink problem because when the business involves millions of gallons of high-voltage amber liquid it is impossible to account for every drop. Without the distillery, Levenford could have rolled up its pavements and turned off the lights like many a similar sized town in Scotland had done in previous years.
It wasn't until much later that Elsa Quinn remembered seeing the woman in the corridor when she'd taken a break from the bottling line to get a drink of water from the fountain. She hadn't been paying much attention, mainly due to the fact that she needed the water to swallow the tablets for the headache which had been building up for the past hour. Elsa was prone to migraines and when one of them started screwing its way in behind her eyes, her vision would waver and her tongue would feel thick and numb. She only recalled the woman in a vague way and couldn't put a name to her.
"I wasn't paying much attention," she was to tell Jack Fallon. "I had a splitting headache, but we don't get much time off the bottling lines, because they go too fast. I had to wait until a supervisor stepped in."
The incident she was a witness to happened two hours after Jack had left Lochend Hospital and less than an hour before he'd woken up with a sudden and certain knowledge clanging alarm bells in his head. Then the phone had rung, two calls, one after the other.
Down in Castlebank Distillery the tea-break bell had rung, a harsh jangle of sound that grated on everybody's nerves. In the staff canteen, the plastic chairs were scraped back from tables, cigarettes stubbed out into overflowing ashtrays. The dregs of strong tea were quickly swallowed or left to go cold as the lineworkers made for the exits and back to work. In seconds, the hubbub of noise had faded to the relative silence of the canteen girls clattering cups and saucers and sweeping the floor tiles.
Sixteen-year-old Carol Howard had worked in the building since August when she'd left school with a diploma in typing and cookery. She was a pleasant girl with long dark hair which hung down her back in a tidy and quite elegant plait. She worked on the floor above the bottling plant, in the store-room where the pallets of cardboard whisky cases were laid flat in library-stack lines and where boxes of bottle-tops and labels lined the walls, almost twenty feet high. Normally the store-room workers and the bottling women had staggered work-breaks, but on the night shift the stores department operated on an emergency basis. If a box of labels was needed somewhere, or a fresh carton of tops, Carol would take the call, mark in the request on her terminal, and get one of the men to carry the delivery down to the floor below.
She'd spent the twenty minutes in the canteen with a crowd of girls her own age, three of whom had been in the same class at school. The talk was all of discos and boyfriends and how they all hated the job already, although Carol was quietly pleased about the fact that she'd landed an office job and didn't have to wear the sky-blue overalls which marked the rest of the girls as bottlers. Her nails were never broken, nor her hands scadded from the constant use of the washers and the incessant drip of whisky. The girls on the lines might have been paid more for their manual labour, but to Carol, working in an office give her the edge.
When the bell had jangled, they'd all moved to the corridor, surrounded by the raucous laughter of the older women as they trailed back up to the third floor by the west stairs. Carol stood for a moment at the turn of the stairs, talking to two of the girls, making tentative arrangements for Friday night, when one of the supervisors called down to the two others, telling them to get a move on. One of them shrugged and both of them turned to follow the rest along the upper passage. Carol continued up the stairs and was about to enter the store-room when she realised she'd left her bag slung over the back of her chair in the canteen.
"Damn," she said under her breath, turned, and headed back along the corridor. As she passed the service elevator, she saw the woman leaning against the wall and continued past for several steps, before she turned. There was something about the woman's posture that caught her attention. She seemed to be sagging, as if she'd taken ill. Her face was familiar, but Carol couldn't place it. The girl came back towards the junction. The light on the ceiling beside the broad grey door had gone out. This part of the passageway was in shadow.
"Can I help you?" Carol asked the woman. There was no response. The woman turned her body a little, facing away into the shadow. The girl noticed there was a rip on her tights and scuff marks on what looked like sensible walking shows. There was also a dark smear on the back of the woman's coat, as if she'd leaned against a wall.
"Are you alright?" she persisted, but still there was no response. The woman mumbled something, but it was too soft and low to make out.
The girl took another two steps forward, about to ask again, when the door at the far end of the corridor, round the bend from the elevator, swung open. One of the storemen popped his head out.
"Hey Carol. They need some export labels on line six."
"Right Jim," she called back. "I'll be with you in a minute."
The woman hadn't moved at all. Carol hesitated a moment, torn between concern for the stranger and the need to get down to the canteen for her bag before it disappeared. She also had to get back up and make sure the lines got their labels or she would get the blame for a break in production. She turned away and went down the stairs two at a time. As she did so, all the lights in the corridor went out.
She hurried to the canteen and opened the door. One of the cleaners was sweeping up close to where she'd been sitting at the far end. The woman was just reaching out for the small bag on the chair when Carol got there.
"Oh thanks. I knew I'd left it somewhere," the girl said. A look of disappointment flitted across the cleaner's face. She shrugged and handed the bag over. Carol thanked her again, slung it over her shoulder and walked quickly back to the door, her heels clicking staccato on the tiles. She started to take the stairs again, then remembered the lights had gone out up on the fourth floor. The corridor up there was long and narrow, and at this time of night, there was little activity, Carol was not scared of the dark, but she had a healthy regard for it. Instead of taking the stairs, she walked the ten yards to the service lift, hit the up button and listened to the whine and clank as the carriage lowered iself to the second floor.
There was a metallic thump and the doors accordioned open with a breathless hiss. Carol stepped inside, pressed button four and watched as the wall on the other side of the passageway shrank to a rectangle, a slit, then disappeared. The lift kicked under her feet and rose, rumbling upwards. She opened her bag to make a quick inventory, just to make sure nothing was missing.
Then the lights went out and the lift juddered to a halt so suddenly that Carol lurched off-balance. Her bag dropped to the floor and her knuckle rapped painfully against the side of the cabin, causing her to let out a little high squeal of hurt and surprise. Her voice echoed tinnily on the inside of the cage.
She was alone in the dark.
For a second, the fact of it failed to register as her mind tried to understand what had happened. Then the impact of it swooped in on her. The lift had stopped and the lights had gone out and she was in the dark. There was not a sliver of light. Her eyes widened automatically as apprehension swelled to fright and then soared up to panic.
At the age of three Carol had crawled into the cellar under the house in Whiteford Road and got stuck behind a jammed door in the dark cobwebby darkness. She'd been there for two hours until her mother had finally heard her panicked screams, and the nightmares had gone on for weeks after. Time had eventually healed the trauma. Yet the memory had lain dormant.
Thirteen years and five months after the childhood scare, something in Carol Howard's mind unlocked and the memory woke up and came racing like a black express train out of a tunnel, shrieking all the while.
Her heart did a jittery dance inside her, all out of step and her breathing was suddenly all too fast, backed up as her lungs gasped for more air than they could hold.
The darkness was complete. The lights on the buttons had failed along with the overhead panel. She could hear her own breathing bounced back at her from the bare metal walls of the cage. Inside her ears, the fast pulse was a dizzying throb. Carol stepped forward and her foot snagged on the strap of her bag. She gasped as she tripped forward. For the second time her knuckle hit something solid, sending a shard of pain up to her elbow. She twisted and a long fingernail caught on the head of a rivet and ripped off to the quick. Underfoot something crunched. It sounded as though she'd trampled on a large insect.
Fear swamped her. Carol's mouth opened in an automatic scream but no sound came out. In her mind, she could hear herself screaming, but her ears heard nothing, and that made the terror balloon. She was stuck in the dark and she couldn't call for help.
With no visual point of reference she was completely disorientated. She took one step and something else crackled under her shoe. She lurched to the left and slammed against the wall of the hoist, sending a bolt of pain across her shoulder. The force of it unlocked her breathing and the girl screeched as she had done in the cellar. Her outstretched fingers found the buttons and she stabbed and scrabbled at them, hitting none out of the ten.
Nothing happened.
Carol shrieked as loud as she could, hearing her cry shatter and fragment as it spanged between the walls and roof. She groped until she found the slit between the two sliding doors and hooked her nails in and tried to prise the edges apart. Another nail gave, pulling backwards with a burning twist of pain. The door remained shut.
The girl's scream played itself out, leaving her breathless and panting, both hands planted against the wall. In her mind she saw the women leave at the end of the shift. If the lift was slow in coming, they would just walk down the stairs. She didn't know if anyone could hear her from the outside of the double safety doors. There was no window on to the corridor.
The thought that she could be stuck in the dark all night, all alone in the lift shaft of an empty ten-storey building sent another jolt of panic through her and galvanised her into another fit of hysterical shouting. She battered at the door with the palms of both hands, a rapid urgent timpani which shook the metal cage and sent it clanking against the guide rails. The noise boomed up the shaft. The darkness squeezed at her. It felt tangible and thick. She couldn't see the walls, only feel the doors in front of her. The sides of the cabin could have been yards away, miles away, but in her fright, Carol could sense them close and getting closer, shrinking down to squash her in the dark. Her dread inflated, gripping her stomach, making her heart pound uncontrollably.
Then, miraculously, somebody shouted.
"Anybody in there?" The voice was muted, coming from some distance, or though several layers, but it was enough.
"Oh yes!" Carol squawked, suddenly flooded with gratitude. She still couldn't see a thing. She was still trapped in a metal box eight feet by eight feet, all on her own, but the very fact that somebody knew where she was enough to swamp her with relief.
"Down here. I'm stuck. Please help."
"Where are you?" the thin voice called out.
"I'm in the lift," she yelled.
"Which floor?"
Carol stopped to think. Her heart was still beating fast. She'd come in on the second floor. She'd pressed for four and the lift had risen. How far? She couldn't recall. People had faith in modern lifts. They pressed the button and waited for the bumpy stop and the swish of doors, trusting the machinery. Now it had failed and Carol realised she did not know whether she had gone up one or two floors. Or six.
"I don't know. Just get me out of here," she called out in a jittery voice.
The instant balm was fading fast. It was still dark and it still crowded in on her as if it had weight.
Then up above, there was a thump and a heavy ringing vibration which shivered the floor of the cab and sent it rocking again.
"What?" Carol cried. The floor lurched under her feet and she tripped forward again, arms out groping for the wall.
"....the hell was that?" the unseen man shouted. It sounded as if he was above her.
"What's happening?" Carol yelped.
Another booming vibration resonated down to the cage. It shivered as if it had been struck a heavy blow, and the cables thrummed like deep bass strings. Carol slipped to the floor and landed on her handbag. Something sharp dug into the back of her thigh and her teeth clicked together with a snap.
"Who's in there?" the man called out.
"Me. Carol Howard. Can you get somebody to get me out of here?"
"Alright love, we'll get the serviceman."
She sat in the dark, hoping the engineer would come quickly. There was always one or two men working on the lifts. She didn't know if there was anybody on standby at night. The thought of spending much longer in the narrow dark squeezed her panic tight.
Then right overhead, something hit the top of the cabin. The whole cage jerked and shuddered, rocking Carol on to her back. The sound was like a huge hammer blow. Carol squealed in fright.
"What's going on?" the man called.
Carol didn't reply. Above her, on top of the cage, she could hear movement.
"Must be the engineer," she thought, grateful for the speed of the rescue. She knew there was a trapdoor somewhere on the top of the lift. That's how they'd get her out. She wondered if they would put a ladder down or just reach down and haul her up. She hoped the shaft wouldn't be too dirty or filled with spiders and cobwebs. They made her shudder, but she could bear the sight of them as long as she could get out of the dark.
The lift quivered violently again. Overhead there was a scraping sound on the cabin roof, then a screech of protesting metal.
"Hello?" she called out. "I'm down here."
There was no response.
Something moved. There was another metallic squeal and a thump. A splinter snapped off and clanged to the floor, followed by droplets of dust.
"Can you put the light on?" she asked.
The cables thrummed again and the lift lurched. Close by, she heard a grunt, then all of a sudden, the cage was filled with a foul, choking smell. Carol coughed, shuddering, and then for some reason her panic expanded on a bubble of dread. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck twist and shrivel as the skin puckered. A truly cold sweat soaked out of the pores under her arms and on her back. She felt her bladder give.
Above her, something snuffled like an animal scenting the air and then let out a low growl.
"Who's there?" Carol whimpered. She crawled backwards until her shoulder blades were against the door.
Something came down from the roof.
In the tight claustrophobia of the service lift, she could sense its presence. It forced its way through the hole in the roof, scraping against the metal sides. She could hear the grating sound as it reached against the metal sides. Something metal whirred in the air and tinkled on the floor.
She could see nothing, but her fear-heightened senses could pick out the presence like a biological radar. The putrid stench engulfed her, making her gag.
Something rasped again on the wall. She got a mental picture of a big scaly spider, then without warning she was hauled from the ground.
Just in front of her, whatever it was snarled, so low and menacing she felt the vibrations shiver through her.
Carol tried to scream. She tried to shout and holler, but as before, no sound came out. Something had lifted her with shocking force from the ground and she could not make a sound.
Dimly, far off, she heard the voice: "It's alright love. The engineer's on his way."
The unseen thing wrenched her upwards. Her shoulder hit off the edge of the trapdoor and she heard something crack under the skin. There was no pain, but there was an enormous pressure on her other shoulder. It felt as though it was trapped in a huge vice. Everything had happened so quickly that she didn't even have time to think, to consider what had come down in the dark and snatched her from the floor. The tremendous fear had driven her mind into shock overload. Dimly she was aware of her blouse snagging on a jagged piece of metal, then, even more dimly realised it was not her blouse, but the skin of her left breast. Warm wetness flowed to her waist.
The shape snuffled and grunted, the sound of a bloodhound, or a pig in a trough. It heaved her through the narrow opening with a violent jerk. She felt the skin of her leg peel off right down the outside of her thigh to her ankle. The sensation seemed very far away, as if it could have been happening to someone else.
The girl felt herself dragged upwards, swinging like a rag doll. Whatever held her leaped from one side of the well to the other. Her feet banged against the brickwork, sending off clouds of dust and pieces of loose concrete to rain on the roof of the elevator. For a second the motion stopped. Carol hung suspended in the void, her feet pointing down. She was lifted up slowly and something turned towards her. Two eyes opened and flared a poisonous yellow.
At that moment, Carol plunged through the other side of the shock paralysis. She saw the great eyes glare at her and suddenly she could see and feel and breathe. Enormous pain rampaged through her shoulder where the thing held her in an incredibly powerful grip. Her leg felt as if it was on fire and the side of her breast was a sunburst of agony.
The eyes glared at her with such hunger and hate and malevolence that Carol simply screamed.
Her ear-splitting screech cascaded and resonated all the way down the lift shaft, on and on and on.
Out on the corridor on level four, Peter Cullen shrank back from the door.
"What in the name of Christ was that?" Beside him, a crowd of women in their overalls instinctively reached for each other, moving close together.
The terrified screams came reverberating down the holeshaft, magnified and amplified in the enclosed space.
Outside the door on the fourth floor, everybody heard the sound. It was more than a girl afraid of the dark. The shattering wails came crashing down from above, an incessant torrent of pure terror.
In the lift shaft, the thing moved and flexed. The girl felt the grip on her shoulder abruptly loosen. There was a popping sound as her skin puckered outwards and whatever had been holding her pulled out. Warmth drenched her back in a stream and under the noxious stink that filled the gallery, she could smell her own blood.
Suddenly, she felt herself fall, and just as instantly, she was jerked back. This time, the grip was on one thigh. She felt hard points drive into the thick muscle and a fresh pain detonated in her hip. The darkness swooped alarmingly. One second she was dangling feet down, and the next she was upside down in the shaft. The thing started to climb again, jerking from side to side on the walls of the duct, moving with ferocious speed. Carol's piercing screams followed it up into the dark heights.
Down by the lift door, they heard the ululating, echoing cries diminish. One of the women crossed herself.
"What's going on out here?" somebody barked from along the corridor. The stores supervisor, a stout man with thick bottle-end glasses came waddling briskly towards the group.
"It's wee Carol. She's stuck in the lift," Peter Cullen told him.
"So call for service and get her out, for goodness sake," his boss said impatiently. Despite his officious appearance, George Hill was a kind enough soul.
"But she's not there any more," Peter continued as if he hadn't heard.
"What do you mean?"
"Something happened in there, one of the women said in a tremulous voice. "We heard her screaming. It was awful."
Hill pushed his way through the crowd, leaned forward to put an ear at the line where the door edges met. He banged the flat of his hand on the panel.
"Carol. Are you in there? Are you hurt?"
A faint noise vibrated the door, a distant bang. The lift clanked against the rails.
"I can't hear anything," he said.
"She was in the lift alright," Peter Cullen declared. "We could all hear her. Then there was a lot of noise. I thought it must have been the engineer going down the shaft. Then she started to scream. I think something's happened."
"Right. Get some of the men out here and get these doors open," George Hill snapped.
"Shouldn't we wait for the engineers?"
The portly little man turned towards the storeman and glared at him, magnified eyes widening impossibly.
"I don't care about the damned door. I'll take the responsibility. Just get in there and get that girl out."
Peter Cullen and two of his workmates arrived with packing case crowbar just as the engineer came panting up the stairs. The four men wedged their way through the throng of women and George Hill had to tell the bottling line workers to clear a space. The serviceman used a punch-key to trip the door mechanism and he and another of the men managed to force one side open. The lift well gaped blackly. The engineer directed his flashlight into the void. Hawsers and cables dangled past the open door and disappeared into the murk. He swung himself carefully out, and shone the beam upwards.
"I see it," he announced. "It's between floors. I'll have to go upstairs and in through the top." he turned to George Hill. "Keep everybody away from here. It's a fifty foot drop."
Everybody stood back to let the man get upstairs. About fifteen minutes later, the serviceman was easing himself down to the top of the cabin, five feet below the fifth floor. In the beam of the flashlight, he could see the hatch was missing. There was some damage around the edges of the rectangular hole, but he didn't consider that then. His feet boomed on top of the cage and it swung under his weight, but that was normal. He squatted down then dipped his head in through the opening, angling the light inside.
The box was empty.
He let himself through the hatch and hung by his hands before dropping the few inches to the floor.
The place stank. Later he remembered the smell and described it to the police.
"It was like something had been dead a long time. It was pretty bloody awful. I could feel it at the back of my throat. It made me want to boak."
It was only once he'd cranked the elevator down to the fourth floor, and he stepped out into the corridor that he realised what the other smell had been, the warm and metallic scent that had thickened the air in the shaft. Both his knees were dripping with rapidly congealing blood from where he'd knelt on the top of the lift.
There was no sign at all of Carol Howard.
Somebody called for an ambulance. Somebody else called the police.
Jack Fallon had dozed off. He was tangled under the eiderdown when something snapped him completely awake, his mind suddenly alert.
"Shit," he said.
He put both hands to his head, trying to hold the thought before it faded and fragmented. He'd been dreaming, or half dreaming, and something had come to him. He kept his eyes tight closed and tried to recreate the dream.
It had started quite normally. He'd been down at the quayside, at the stairs on the river end of Rock Lane, watching as they hauled the body of the woman out of the river. It didn't matter that he hadn't actually been there when it happened. He'd seen grey, clay-featured cadavers raised from the water before. It was not unusual for him to flesh out events in his dreams. He'd done that with little Julie, picturing her over and over again in the shop window in nightmares so vivid he could see every minute detail in clear focus, though he hadn't seen his daughter die. The dreams had come on the back of guilt and horror and shock and despair and whatever else lurked inside his head to spawn the black nightmares.
This dream had seemed real. The mist was spiraling off the surface as if it was heated by underwater pipes. Upriver, the rigging of a small boat's mast clanged against crossbeam. Cold water slapped against a hull and up in the clear air, early seagulls wheeled and wheedled. The body was hauled out on two ropes which had been fed underneath. The woman was bent and rigid. One leg was sticking out, granite coloured, grotesque. Jack walked away, thinking about the grey foot without a shoe. He walked into the mist of the lane and came out round on Bankside Road, a geographical impossibility, but exactly the way things happen in dreams. Bankside Road was on the far side of the town centre, beyond the maze of alleys and vennels. Here the old shunting yards were hidden behind the green doors where Neil Kennedy had played. Though the snow had turned to ice on the pavements and crackled underfoot, in the dream, the snow was fresh and unmarked.
Two pairs of footprints led away from the green door.
There was something odd about them, though in the rationality of the illusion, Jack did not question them. The larger set, both left and right narrow like a woman's foot, were different in one respect. The left gave an imprint with wavy lines of a walking shoe. The right was a clear shape of a naked foot.
Alongside them, a small trail of a child's footprints were embedded. The left one bore the tyre-track marks of wellington boots. The right was a child's bare foot, each toe clearly delineated.
He followed the lines, his own feet making no noise. The air was suddenly quiet. The wind had stopped. No seagulls shrieked. It was as if he was in a cocoon of his own consciousness. He walked on.
The prints halted maybe three hundred yards along the curve where Bankside Street joined Artizan Road, close to the old engine works. There was an old building here. The red-brick Victorian railway style construction of the warehouses.
They'd been closed even when Jack was a small boy. He remembered exploring every inch of them with Tom Neeson and Paul Hamilton when he was eight or nine. They'd been littered with broken glass then. The old shutters had been locked and barred, but there was always a way in through a window at the back, or the old cellar at the basement where a coal-hole gave access. They used to climb the stairs then scale up to the rafters where the pigeons had their nests. Tom Neeson's father had been a pigeon fancier and Tom himself had started his own loft with the young birds they'd stolen from the line of dirty shit-ridden scoops along where the ceiling sloped down to the rafters.
In the dream Jack walked inside, still on silent feet. He went along the narrow passage, turned and looked up.
There it was.
Bold letters in the old fashioned fonts.
STEW.
Despite the dust on the glass and the rime and grime of decades, the letters still stood out clear. Seen from inside, that's how they read, although the S was turned backwards.
He'd seen it before, all those years ago, and now it had come back to him.
He took the stairs slowly, one at a time, though the glass did not crackle and crunch under his feet. He scanned the whole lettering from just underneath, mouthing the words right to left, like a child.
West Highland Railway Company.
He stood staring at the antiquated window sign for some time, then turned slowly, retraced his steps, and walked to the rear of the building where the stock-room ran the length of the warehouse. From here, almost the whole of the gable wall was visible. At the far west end, heading towards the river where it curved on its way down to the estuary, there was a gaping rectangular hole in the wall.
The day they'd stolen the pigeons, they'd clambered down the rope which hung from the block-and-tackle pulley. As Jack stood in the echoing silence, the mist billowed in through the space on the wall.
Something moved in the mist, just out of sight, a dark outline obscured and hazy. Jack felt his breath start to back up in his throat.
And he woke up hauling for breath, with the image of the swirling mist still reeling in the front of his mind.