Just after the bodyless head of Votek Visotsky had been painfully kicked by Jim Deakin, Fergus Milby and Danny Cullen were nearing the top of the towering chimney next to the old forge just across the river from the old railway warehouses.
The twin stacks, a feature of the town's skyline, had been the subject of acrimonious letters in the Gazette for years. In the sixties, when the forge had shut down the primary furnace, it had planned to dismantle the big stack which stood shoulder to shoulder with its twin, great shotgun barrels of brick aiming for the heavens. The outcry had been considerable. The Levenax Society had protested in lengthy denunciation of the vandalism to the industrial history of the town. It would destroy a landmark, they thundered. There was no concern for the tons of hot fumes that had spilled from the great stacks for years, not only polluting the atmosphere and covering the town in thick flaky sulphurous ash whenever the wind blew the wrong way, but also befouling the clean white bedsheets on drying greens all across town and as far as Barloan Harbour eight miles up the firth. There was also little said, landmark-wise, about the demolition of the tenements in Wee Donegal and the subsequent building of the gaunt and towering housing blocks, or the blast of smoke and steam from the vents in the distillery with their greasy overlay of malting barley.
The opposing faction who agreed with the demolition said it was an ugly old brick thing, an eyesore remnant of the sweated labour of the industrial revolution which made the Levenford look like a dirty old mill town. The sooner it was gone, they countered, the better. At the end of the day, the town fathers, whose gift for planning was such that they would to blight the whole town and the surrounding area within the decade, decided to keep the stacks for their historic value. The forge owner, William Thomson, a second cousin of the desk sergeant in Levenford Police Station, shrugged his shoulders, happy enough that he would not have to pay a fortune to have the stack removed brick by brick. Explosive demolition was out of the question because of the close proximity of the other chimney which was still venting charcoal fumes from the secondary furnace. Ten years after that, Thomson had sold out, just before the bottom dropped out of the foundry industry. The business had kept going for another twenty years or so, hammering out great girders and beams for the rig yard and the diminishing building industry.
In the last couple of weeks, there had been some concern over the state of the north chimney. In the winter gales, a crumbling half-brick had come sailing down and punctured a neat hole not only through the corrugated iron shed which served as a shithouse for the dozen or so foundrymen, but had punched its way right through the vitreous china pan, sending shards of jagged porcelain scattering like shrapnel in every direction. In the third trap along, old Bernie Maguire, who operated the charcoal hopper, was doing a crossword, hunkered over like a dying junkie, dungarees at his knees. Bernie should have been back at the hopper ten minutes before, but, being prone to constipation, he was trying, with some effort to work out more than just the difficult crossword clues. The fact that his trousers were puddled around his ankles saved him from serious injury from the kniving porcelain flack. When the brick hit, travelling at enormous speed after a fall of nearly two hundred feet, it exploded like cannon-shot. Shards of china blasted out under the spaces of the door and the side walls. It tore Bernie's trousers to shreds and punched neat pin-holes through the thin cabin sides of the neighbouring traps. One small sliver sliced through a vein on Bernie's skinny calf and the resultant fine spray of blood was fifteen minutes in the staunching. The other men had come running out at the deafening noise and hauled the door open to find Bernie lying in a heap across the newspaper, pencil still in hand, the air pink from his spraying blood. They also discovered, to their disgust, that the falling brick had done the old fellow one favour. It had miraculously cured his constipation.
Two weeks later, another brick had come down, though it had blasted itself to powder, forming a quite spectacular sunburst pattern in Pompeiian red on the concrete a few feet away from the chimney. The manager of the English conglomerate which had taken over the forge finally got authority to bring in the steeplejacks to find out whether the stack needed a repair, or whether its time had finally come.
It had taken Fergus Milby and his apprentice Danny Cullen a week to get the ladders close to the top. It was dangerous, arduous and quite exhausting work, but the two-man team were the only steeplejacks in Levenford or any of the nearby towns. There was always work for them somewhere, and in the current jobs climate, the danger was worth it. To the untrained eye, the ladders looked flimsy, a delicate spidertrack up the side of the brick cylinder. In fact the light aluminium frames which locked one to the other, could easily take the weight of six men. The major difficulty lay in the tedious task of raising one length to fit it in place, using the wire bands which travelled the girth of the chimney. It would have been less exhausting and less dangerous, to hire a crane for the job, but it would have taken twice as long and three times the cost to erect one of the spindly jack-up jobs.
The original builders had placed metal slots between the bricks, which made the job easier, but still, it took them eight days to get up to the top. Some time on the Thursday afternoon, while Superintendent Cowie was haranguing Jack Fallon in his office, attempting to browbeat him with dire but meaningless threats, they were putting the last section in place. Danny Cullen, eager to be first to the top, hooked his rope into one of the stanchions, making sure his safety harness was still attached with its anti-slip grip to the guide. He eased himself onto the flat surface, eight brick-widths thick because of the tapering of the construction, and carefully raised himself to his feet, sliding the guide over the edge with practised proficiency. He used the contraction hooks to hold the ladder in place, twisting the handles on the threads to bring the aluminium spars hard against the brickwork. Fergus Milby had told him there were two kinds of steeplejack, the slow or the dead, or as Fergus himself had put it, the careful ones or the stupid splattered bastards on the deck. Danny didn't want to join the ranks of the splattered. He stood up, avoiding a space where a brick had worked free and fallen off, and looked across the town from the top of the chimney. The view was quite spectacular. He could see the top of the blocks of Latta Court and its neighbours. Across on the other side of town, the great square red hulk of the distillery belched its perpetual plume of steam, like a slumbering volcano.
Up here there was almost dead silence, apart from the mewling of a seagull passing below, a grey kite far down, a bird seen from the wrong angle. Sound travels, but for some reason, it does not easily travel upwards. There was no sound of traffic, except for the very muted, toytown clatter of a train heading out from the station. Little model cars were silently crossing the old bridge in twos and threes, followed by a dinky little bus. Almost directly below, just out in the river, the boats looked neat and clean, like yachts at a classy marina, though Danny knew these boats were all paint-peeled and slimed with dirt and bird crap, half of them unpainted and the others only half-painted by weekend watermen. The distance gave a cleanliness and neatness to everything. He strolled casually around the edge, a twenty-year-old boy gifted with a sense of balance and a natural affinity for heights. He looked down and saw Fergy Milby climb slowly towards him, unconsciously adjusting his safety clip with every two steps. His flat cap was on backwards, to keep the peak away from the steps of the ladder. Fergus was a careful mover who had instilled the slow-motion moon-mountain climb into his apprentice. Danny stepped to the side. Steeplejacks did not give each other a hand. There were too many ways to lose your balance that way. The tradesman had regaled his assistant, ever since he had started three years before, with tales of men who'd taken a tumble down a chimney, or gone sailing off to convert themselves into the ranks of the splattered. Fergus was graphic if nothing else.
"Not bad, Danny-boy," he said when he got to the top and sat, feet dangling over the drop. It was Fergus's joke on the younger man's Irish catholic heritage. The steeplejack wasn't of the faith himself, but unlike many of his persuasion in the town, to whom religion meant little more than the colour of jersey a football team wore, it didn't matter a damn to him. He didn't watch football anyway.
He opened his tobacco tin and rolled himself a customary crumpled cigarette, tamped the end on the nearest brick, lit up and drew in a deep breath.
"Haven't been up here since I was your age," he said, gazing out over the toytown panorama.
"You helped build it then?" Danny asked, grinning at his own joke.
"Watch it," the boss said gruffly, although he was used to the boy's comments. They worked well together, and in fact, the best compliment the steeplejack could make was that he felt safe with Danny Cullen. "You want to become a splatteree?" he shot back.
The younger man sauntered around the rim of the chimney as if it were a wide path through a park. He automatically raised his feet to avoid the copper straps which snaked up over the sides and crossed the flat, each of them corresponding to the points of the compass. He was looking north, towards the mountains looming over Loch Corran in the distance, when something jarred him as being out of place. He turned back to Fergus who was contentedly puffing on his cigarette.
"What's happened to the conductors," he asked.
"Eh, what's that?" Fergus asked, turning round with a casual, yet careful movement. He'd twisted his cap round so the peak shadowed his eyes.
"The lightning spikes, they're gone."
Fergus followed the curve of the chimney. On the top flat, it was eight feet across the inner edges, and about three times that in circumference. The copper ribbons were stappled to the bricks with lead fold-over flaps. They travelled to the inner edge where the four-pronged steel aerials should have been, a precaution against bolts of lightning striking the inner surface and possibly travelling down to the furnaces below. From where Fergus was sitting, he could see the furthest one had been twisted right down inside the funnel of the chimney.
"I'll be damned," he said, getting to his feet. "There's something stuck there."
"And here," Danny boy said. "What is it?"
He got to his knees and looked down the black hole. Something was snagged on the spike which had been bent right down inside the shaft and then curled back up on itself. It looked like a bundle of rags, dirty and withered.
"Probably blown up and snagged in the gales," he said. He reached down and hauled at the tattered bundle. It was stuck on the upcurved hooks of metal. He worried at it, holding on to the far edge of the chimney for leverage. The material ripped and the thing came free with a muted tearing sound. He drew it upwards and as he did, a foetid smell of rot came wafting up the funnel.
"Jesus, that stinks!" he said, face screwed up with disgust. He could feel the stench clog thickly in the back of his throat. He heaved the tattered mess up and onto the flat. A piece of dirty, mouldering cloth flapped back in the light breeze and a small brown round thing lolled out and clonked against the bricks.
"What in the name of.." he said, then let out a long breath of relief.
"It's a doll," he said. "For a moment I thought it was a kid. By god it smells to high heaven."
"How the hell did it get up here?" Fergus asked. "We must have ben the first folk up this height in twenty year."
"I don't know. Must have been up here for ages." He turned round and shoved the bundle towards Fergus. Just below him, another tangled mass hung from the spike nearest him, this one not much bigger. He stretched his hand down and worried at the cloth until it came free and drew this one out of the hole. If anything this one smelt worse.
As he laid it down, something flopped stiffly onto the brickwork. It was dark and stick-like. It looked like a monkey's paw.
"It's another one," Danny said. Fergus could hear his gullet work to try to keep the stench out of his throat. The apprentice was poking at a small torn hood. "I think somebody's been playing a..."
He never finished his sentence. Fergus was sitting casually, with one hand behind him and a foot cocked on the edge while the other dangled over the drop. Unexpectedly Danny jerked backwards as if he'd been bitten by an adder. Fergus saw him scramble to his feet with alarming speed, the kind of speed people who work in high places have nightmares about. His boot snicked the inner rim of the chimney. A piece of brick crumbled off and tumbled into the dark well. Danny tilted to the side, suddenly off balance, arms windmilling. One foot was out over the shaft, while the rest of his body was teetering on the edge of the chimney.
Fergus moved faster than he believed possible. Danny began to fall, and a cry of surprise and fright blurted out. His boss whirled, got to one knee and his hand shot out. He grabbed Danny by the belt, inadvertently knocking the wind right out of him with the force of the strike and with a powerful heave, he swung him back from the edge and down onto the flat. Danny's backside hit the hard surface with a solid thud and he yelped again, this time in pain. He twisted to the side, almost went over the edge again, caught himself and then froze.
"Are you off your head?" Fergus bawled. "Bloody idiot, you were nearly a goner there. What in the name of Christ's the matter with you."
"It's that," Danny bleated, pounting into the chimney. The mangy truss of cloth had slipped into the well, but had snagged again on one of the upturned hooks beside an even larger flaking bundle.
"What?"
"It's not a doll," Danny murmured. "It's a baby."
"What are you playing at?" Fergus said. "What would a baby be doing up here."
"But look," Danny insisted. "It's a baby, and it's dead."
Fergus' hands were still shaking from the sudden exertion and the terrible fright he'd got when he thought his apprentice was about to topple into the chimney. He lit another cigarette, with some difficulty, and took another long draw before letting his breath out in a stuttering sigh.
He got to one knee again and came close to where Danny sat, both hands firmly gripped on the brickwork. He followed the young man's eyes and stared at the small dirty pile. He reached a hand forward carefully and drew back a piece of mildewed fabric. Despite the care, the material tore in his hand with a whispering rip.
The small wizened face gazed up at him from blind crumpled sockets. Its lips were stretched back tight and dry, exposing gums which were bare except for two tiny teeth which protruded in the centre of the bottom of the jaw. The skull was shiny and brown and both little ears were like shrivelled autumn leaves. Fergus pulled the cloth back further and the foetid, sickly sweet stench blossomed like the scent of a poisonous flower.
"Dear god," he breathed. With great gentleness, he pulled back the ragged cloth. Just below the neck, the small, fragile ribs were like wires pushing through a thin, tight membrane, and below them, there was a gaping hole. With the movement, something black and slimy dribbled inside the cavity and the stink was suddenly so bad the steeplejack found his own throat try to clamp itself shut.
He pulled himself back in revulsion and sat, staring at the dead face. Danny watched him white faced. Without a word, Fergus reached down and unhooked the other shape and hefted it out onto the surface. It came up easily, like a little pile of rags. He laid it gently down and unwrapped it from a dirty grey shawl. Danny heard his intake of breath.
The dead child had the wizened face of a mummy. He could see, under the parchment-like ochre skin the zig-zag suture lines where the skull-plates joined and in the centre, a deep depression as if it had been struck a vicious blow with a club, but was where the soft membrane of the fontanelle, where the bones had yet to form and knit, had sagged. The baby was so young its bones hadn't even had time to form. Below the little chin there was nothing at all of the throat. The skin puckered and curled on each side of a gaping wound in which Fergus could see the neck-bones push through dried muscle.
He laid the thing down, almost reverently and turned away. His eye had caught the other things hanging from the lightning conductors, an arm's span below the lip of the chimney. He did not want to see any more.
"I'd better go back down and tell somebody," he said numbly.
"I'll come with you," Danny said. He edged away from the mouldering corpses and clipped his safety rig onto the cable which was suspended from the clamp.
"No," Fergus told him. "You'd better stay here. You're in no fit state to climb. Look at you, shaking like a leaf."
"You can't leave me up here," Danny protested, his voice rising. "I'm not staying with these."
"Och, don't be daft," Fergie retorted.
"I don't care," whined. "You're not leaving me up here with dead bodies. No bloody way."
Fergus shrugged. He clipped his own lead onto the braided cable and started making the long climb down. Danny followed so close he almost stepped in his boss's fingers.
Five minutes later they were in the forge manager's office. Almost before Fergy Milby put the phone down, the wail of sirens started up on the other side of the river.