Young Danny Cullen was sitting on the ground just outside the gate when Jack and Ralph Slater got to the forge. His face was ash-grey and he was puffing continuously on an unaccustomed cigarette. Fergus Milby was talking to a man in a tweed jacket and a loud tie who was wearing a bright yellow hard had that made both policeman think of Votek Visotsky's head rolling along the bloodied tiles on the floor of the car accessory store.
"It's the bodies," Fergus told him. "Me and Danny found them. Just wee babies, and the smell would kill you." The words came tumbling out. He did not look quite so ashen as his apprentice, but you could tell he'd had a shock.
Jack took it a step at a time, he got the men's names first of all and then he asked what he'd seen and where.
"Up there," Fergus pointed. "They're in the chimney. Four of them at least. It gave young Danny a right turn. Nearly pitched him off."
Jack looked up and his heart sank. High places. There couldn't be anywhere higher than that in the whole town.
"Shit," he said, not quite under his breath. "How the hell do we get up there?"
"Oh, it's all right. We've got ladders up the side." He pointed out through the gate and Jack took a few steps outside to see where he was indicating. The spindly aluminium steps hugged the bricks all the way to the top, narrowing ever closer in diminishing parallax of distance.
"Oh great," he muttered. "Bloody terrific. You'll have to come up with us."
The man nodded. Jack took off his coat and slung it in the back seat of the car. Fergus Milby have him a webbing belt harness, showed Jack how to clip on the safety catch and explained that it would move up along with him, but would lock if he dropped. Jack remembered it all from his teenage days, the last time he had climbed with a rope. A jittery nerve danced behind his knees and for a second he felt physically sick.
"Don't worry," the other man tried to reassure him. "That cable can hold three tons. You'll be safe as houses."
Fergus went on up the ladder, taking light, easy and confident steps. Jack stood at the bottom, took several deep breaths and began to follow him, keeping his eyes fixed on the brickwork inches in front of his eyes, not daring to look elsewhere. About forty steps up, he was sweating so badly his shirt was soaked and beads of salt water were dripping into his eyes. Despite that he slowly climbed upwards, unable to force his hand off the rung and wipe his eyes, risking only the quick movement needed to grasp the next one up. At just over a hundred feet, though as far as Jack was concerned it could have been two miles, all noise below faded away to a faint hum. There was a slight wind and the metal treads, chilled by the breeze were cold on his hands. Beneath him he could hear Ralph Slater's laboured breathing. At that moment, Jack knew that even if he decided to quit, he couldn't get back down beyond the scene-of-crimes man. There was nothing for it but to continue upwards towards the top of the chimney.
Finally, without any warning, the brickwork in front of his eyes disappeared and a fresh cold breeze blew into Jack's eyes, causing them to spark with tears. He blinked them back, still gripping tight to the rungs of the ladder. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the river snake away to the north, a silver band between the grey banks and for a second the world zoomed in and out of focus while he rose the crest of a rush of vertigo.
"No bother," Fergus Milby said. He had unclipped his safety line and was standing, with incredible casualness, halfway round the chimney. "Come on up."
Jack heaved himself onto the top edge. For a second his hand refused to relinquish its grip on the rung, and it took a great effort of will to make it move. Finally he reached and grasped the edge of the bricks, feeling the tips of his fingers try to dig right into the hard surface. With infinite care and with enormous, gut-wrenching trepidation, he eased himself on to the top and sat, holding on with both hands, one leg inside the chimney, the other out, each heel jammed against the sides for extra purchase.
Then the smell hit him and took his mind off the appalling height.
"That's the first one we found," Fergus said. He hunkered down beside the little tatter of cloth and pulled a piece back. The baby's parchment-like face seemed to be screwed up against the cold. Jack knew it was just dessication. The fluids had leached out of the body and the wind had done the rest.
He risked a sideways turn and looked down the shaft. The afternoon sunlight only illuminated about ten feet then faded to blackness. It looked like a huge well. On the opposite side, he could see a piece of metal which had been bent down then pulled up again to form what looked like a butcher's hook. Something larger than the two bundles was suspended from one of the spikes. Even from where he sat, Jack could see the matted hair and the outline of a chin. A grey hand hung down there just in the twilight between daylight and shadow. Below it, he was not sure, but he thought he could make out a leg.
Ralph clambered up beside him and patted him on the shoulder.
"What a view, eh?"
Jack nearly fell off.
"Bloody hell, Ralph. Take it easy," he bawled.
"Okay, chief," Ralph replied cheerily. "You'll have us both off if you don't relax."
Jack did not reply. He merely pointed at the thing hanging down from the spike.
"Oh dear Lord," Ralph said softly, but with great feeling. "How in hell did they get up here?"
Jack sat motionless, looking at the body on the far side and the smaller one close by, hanging next to a small thing that looked like a shrivelled skinned rabbit, but which he knew was not. The sickening dread of falling had been replaced by an entirely different emotion. For a while he forgot that he was perched nearly two hundred feet above the town on the huge chimney stack.
Five pitiful bodies. Three babies and a young boy and a teenage girl.
High places. Lorna Breck had been right. Michael O'Day with his mad eyes and his stuttering voice and shaking hands had not been wrong. This was one of the high places. This is where it had brought them. As he sat there on high, with the wind now blowing across his face, Jack Fallon stopped thinking of who. There was no face to be put on this killer, no prints, no previous convictions, at least none that were on any police computer. Whatever had scaled this tower with no ladders, hauling the dead and bleeding bodies of these babies and children, could not, surely, have been human.
Jack slowly eased himself round on the flat. Across the roof of the forge was the green open space on this side of the river where the three housing blocks stood shoulder to shoulder. Latta Court had been the first. Little Timmy Doyle had gone missing from there. Whatever had scaled the wall of the flat, climbing up from the ground or down from the darkened roof, had brought the little baby down from that height and come scrambling up here with its victim to impale it on an old lightning spike. Out beyond the flats, where the river took its turn past the tidal basin and swung into the saltwater estuary, the bulk of Castlebank Distillery loomed close to the rock where the castle sat. Carol Howard had gone up in the lift shaft, dragged up by something that had made her screams echo up to her workmates outside in the corridor, terrible screams that had made women burst into tears and grown men shiver. Just beyond it hunched the Castle Rock, where Annie Eastwood had walked the parapet and dived to spread herself on the butcher's blocks of the basalt rocks below.
Just across the river, beside the railways bridge, the old warehouses huddled, derelict and shabby. Jack could see the square opening on the gable wall where the hoist had still worked when he and his pals had stolen pigeons. The jig still jutted out, though the pulley rope had long since rotted to tatters. Lorna Breck had seen it, the night Neil Kennedy had gone missing. She'd seen something come down from the dark and snatch him up like a rag. In that nightmare vision, she watched the thing scuttle in a black blur towards the opening in the wall. Jack tried to visualise the scene at night. Had it clambered across the railway bridge? Swung on the electricity gantries? It had brought them here, the five of them.
Something jarred at his memory. He closed his eyes to concentrate, and it came right to him. The three boys who had gone missing from the parts store were not here. He did a quick count. Five bodies. Three babies, a child with matted and dirty red hair peeling in strips from a dented skull, a girl hanging from a spike that had impaled her under the jaw and come out at the temple.
Jack rhymed them off in his head. Carol Howard, Neil Kennedy, Timmy Doyle. Little Kelly Campbell. All present and correct, battered bloodied, torn, but all here. And one other. One more little scrap, dangling down into the maw of the chimney, spiked through its skinny little chest so that it was hunched and contorted.
There hadn't been another child. Nobody had reported one missing, and in the last two weeks, every mother whose boy was five minutes late in coming home from school or who dawdled on the way back from the corner shop was on the phone to the station, half hysterical with worry. A fourth baby meant another huge problem among all the rest of the troubles which crowded in on him like melancholy mourners at a funeral.
As he sat and stared at the suspended shapes, Jack suddenly got a picture of Julie, lying among the shards of glass in the shop window, blood pooling out underneath her, eyes glazing over, moveless, lifeless. He saw in his mind's eye the spike of glass she'd landed on, driven through her back, through her heart and out in the centre of her chest, just under her breastbone. She'd been impaled, just like these dead and mouldering children.
No pain, Lorna had said, and of a sudden, Jack Fallon believed her completely. She'd seen it, seen it through him when she'd taken his hand in hers.
And what would she say now? Had these babies felt no pain?
He thought not. Little Timmy Doyle, wrenched form his pram so violently that the leather straps had snapped. Tiny Kelly Campbell, snatched from her mother's arms by something that had come down a wall and hit her so hard it had smashed the bones of her face. And she'd fought for her child, fought with the desperate ferocity and courage of a mother against something so powerful it had killed her with a blow. Neil Kennedy, whose blood had been found in congealing puddles, slowly soaking into the dry wooden beams of the old warehouse. It had come down and taken him like a spider does with a fly on the web. It had plucked him from the stairs and climbed. Had the boy felt no pain? And Carol Howard, screaming in the lift, her shrieks of anguish and terror diminishing as she was hauled up the shaft while her blood had sprayed over the cables. Pain and devastating terror were what she had felt. There was no doubt in his mind.
And there was also no doubt, right in that instant of clarity, that he would find it. No matter what it was, man, beast or goblin or whatever, he would catch it and he would stop it. He would catch it as an offering to these babies, these children, who were hung up like sacrifices in the well of the old forge chimney.
Then it came to him in a flash, the mental picture he'd formed when she'd described where the thing went. Looking down into a well, with the fires below. This was the place, this was the well. Down there, even in the gloomy winter-afternoon daylight, he could see the flares of the forge glowing red through the windows. No wonder she didn't recognise this place. At night, looking down, it would be like a vision of hell.
Fergus Miller went back down the ladder for a length of rope and some bags. It took him half an hour to get back, and the light was beginning to fade quickly. Ralph took as many pictures as he could, crouching on the lip of the chimney with a casual ease that alarmed Jack.
"I don't understand it, Chief," he admitted. "How the hell did they get up here?"
It climbs. The words seemed to echo in Jack's mind, repeating themselves over and over again.
"And why here? What's the point?"
It feeds. That's what Michael O'Day had said. It had brought these bodies up here and hung them up, like tidbits in a hellish larder. The little form lying on the flat had been savaged. Something had ripped it from the neck, and below the jagged gash, there was little left but strips of torn flesh. The other one, a very cursory appraisal had shown him, had been gutted. Strips of skin peeled back from a gaping space where the belly had been.
Jack did not want to tell Ralph any of what he was thinking. He regretted telling Cowie about O'Day. That had been a tactical error, because it had taken him long enough, too long, to begin to come round to believing that what he was hunting was not human, but something conjured up, however it had been done, however preposterous it sounded, on the night that Marta Herkik had held the seance in Cairn House. Cowie had gaped at him as if he was mad. Even a reasonable man would have shied away from the notion.
Now Jack's problem was in deciding what to do about it. His choices were limited to one.
Fergus Milby popped his head over the edge. "They had to get this rope from the post office," he said, slightly out of breath. "The engineers use them for pulling cables through the pipes," he explained. He clambered onto the lip, unslung a big haversack and started pulling a plastic bag out. For the next half an hour, the three men wrapped the bodies, the babies first, into the bags and lowered them down the side of the chimney. Jack watched as the black trussed shapes diminished from view to the waiting people who milled like ants at the base, beside the winking blue lights. Finally, with some effort, they freed the body of Carol Howard. It was a hideous task. Both Jack and Ralph had to work to free the head from the spike, twisting it this way and that until they could draw with limp weight upwards. The smell was thick and poisonous. Finally the metal hook drew out with a wet, scraping sound and they laid the girl down on the bricks. One of her legs was gone. A ragged mess of blood, gristle and bone shards lay in the crater where the girl's hip had once been.
The two of them quickly wrapped her in a plastic sheet, tied the ends and looped the sling of rope around her. They dropped her over the edge. It took a long time for her to reach the ground.
The journey from the top of the chimney stack was less nerve wracking than the ascent. The hot anger twisted inside Jack and cauterised his fear of heights. He'd seen murder victims aplenty. He'd been there on the moors when they'd dug up the bodies of drug dealers, and he'd been to many a low-life tenement in the city to find a glare-eyed corpse in a pool of blood and vomit or trussed like a chicken in a bath. The anger had come on him then, many a time, but not the way he felt it as he slowly lowered himself, rung by rung down the spindly ladder on the great forge chimney while the winter wind snatched at his jacket and the watery light began to fade from the sky. The pitiful bodies, hung like carcasses in a butcher's shop, torn and mutilated, had brought up emotions he'd been holding down for a long time. For the first time he felt a strange mixture of pity and admiration for Lorna Breck. There was no doubt now that she was seeing these things. For some reason he could not quite understand, she was tuned, like a radio, to the thing that was taking children up to the high places to spike them on the old lightning forks. They had died from this, and she was living with it.
He was half-way down the chimney when a thought from the far past came back to him, way back in the sixties when he was just a small boy in short trousers, catching sticklebacks in the mill-burn that drained out of the water meadow into the river, or spearing flatfish down on the salt flats in the estuary.
Twitchy eyes. That's what they'd called him, the crazy man who had killed the boy in the back room of Cairn House all those years ago. He'd abducted a girl in Eastmains, raped her and left her for dead up beyond Corrieside where there was a tree-filled glen, now long since cleared to make way for the encroaching housing schemes. The memory brought a strange twist of apprehension in Jack that had been long dormant. Then, in that hot summer, every child was scared of the man with the twitchy eyes whose crudely drawn image had stared, like a character in an old murder movie, from the posters in every school. He'd taken another small boy out on Westerhill where the trees tangle down the hill towards the shoreline and he'd smashed his head with a half-brick and kept on hitting him, so the story went, until nobody could recognise him as human. All summer there were organised picnics and play schemes, something the town had never had before. Mothers banded themselves into child-watching teams. Many kids were kept in and around their homes until the schools went back.
Then it had simply stopped. Police found an old couple dead and fly-blown in a croft house up on Blackwod Hill on the far end of town. They'd been shot at close range with a twelve bore shotgun and left to rot in the tiny front room. That was the last of the killings in that year. The tracker dogs had scoured the moors up as far as Langmuir Crag, but the killer was long gone. He never killed again, as far as anybody knew. Later on, when Jack had been in his teams, his father had told him he thought the man had probably wandered up into the tarns of the moor where there were floating bogs which went down forever. Maybe he'd fallen into one of them, or maybe he'd gone up into the hills and blown his own head off. The killings had stopped, but Jack Fallon remembered the strange feeling of threat he'd felt when any stranger looked at him in the street. He remembered the wrench of anxiety as he scanned the stranger's face to ascertain whether this one had twitchy-eyes. Whether this was the one who would reach out and grab him and hit him with a half-brick until nobody could tell if he was human.
He remembered it and his anger grew. There were enough dangers for children. There were trees to fall out of, things for kids to swallow and stick in their throat. There were pans of boiling soup to scald them and fires to burn them. There were cars to run out of control and smash them through shop windows to impale them on knives of glass. These were the hazards, these and many more.
But it was different when someone, or some-thing was out there, deliberately stalking children, snatching them away from their mothers and their homes and carrying them off to impale them in dreadful ignominy in a dirty chimney tower. He thought of the families whose lives had been ruined, the mothers and the fathers and the brothers and sisters, a whole chain of anguish and choking misery and he felt the heat of the anger boil inside him. By the time his feet touched the ground, he was almost speechless with rage at this affront. He didn't even supervise the loading of the trussed plastic parcels into the wagon. He left that to the squad of men who had arrived. He got straight into his car and drove away, hands gripping the wheel in strangle-grips.
Lorna Breck called from behind the door when he rapped the knocker. When she heard his name, she opened it almost immediately and when she looked up at him, she gave him a tired smile and held out her hand. He took it and she led him through to the kitchen.
"You're worn out," she said.
"No," he replied with some irony. "I'm as fresh as a daisy."
She let go his hand, but kept smiling. Her wide grey eyes looked him up and down appraisingly.
"You've had that same shirt on since the last time I saw you, and your trousers are covered in dust. You need a shave and a shower," She wrinkled her nose as she spoke, and he felt uncomfortable under her scrutiny.
"And you have something important to tell me."
"I do," he agreed. "And I will if you make me a coffee, hot and strong, but first I want to ask you something."
"Of course I will," she said, crossing to thumb the switch on the kettle. "As long as you don't mind instant." Jack shrugged.
"Tell me. The other night when you were describing the place it goes, could you tell me again."
Lorna's face sagged. She came forward and leaned her hands on the back of the chair on the other side of the table.
"You've found them, haven't you?"
"Yes. By sheer luck, if you can call it that. They could have been there for years."
"In the tunnel, or the well?"
"In a chimney. One of the two on the other side of the river."
"Damn!" she hissed. "Damnation. I didn't think. Yes. That's it. I can see it now. But who would have thought?"
"I know. I couldn't think either. You gave me a clue once, when you told me about the Kennedy boy. I remembered it from my childhood. If you'd grown up here, you would have known where it was."
"It's all unfamiliar to me."
"I know. It's not easy," Jack siad. "You were also right about the bikes. It took three boys last night. I should have called you, but it was very late."
"You should have called anyway. What happened to the boys?"
"They broke into a hardware store down near the allotments at Rough Drain. It must have been there, or come in after them. One of them got away."
"The one who hurt it?"
"Yes. He put a drill in its eye. He told me it wasn't human."
"But you know that," Lorna said intensely.
"I'm finally beginning to believe it."
"So what are you going to do now?"
"I don't have a clue. But I think I'll need your help."