Aftermath
It took Arden a long time to settle down again. The process of healing takes a long time. The scars are raw, but they are healing slowly and painfully.
The council's road workers breached the landslip blockage on the Kilcreggan Road west of town just about the time that Paddy, Colin and I were tumbling out of the cave and into the light. Things started to get better from then on.
The road crew squeezed through the gap they'd cleared and drove into a town that was still in the shuddery grip of the nightmare.
Nobody outside had had any idea of what had been going on. It was as if Arden had slipped out of reality for a spell and suddenly been brought back. I suppose that's true enough.
Then came the emergency teams. Then the newspapers and television crews who buzzed around like flies round a carcass. They must have knocked on every door in the parish, and panned every view that was worth swinging a wide-angle on, and they drank the Chandler dry.
The TV crews drove their units slowly along the house fronts where curtains stayed firmly closed.
They took shots of dead animals and crashed cars, and the rare inhabitant that they managed to find out in the open, slowly walking the pavement, dead-eyed and numbed.
Arden made prime time. The headlines screamed nightmare and madness. Names were named. Gory deeds where charted and in detail. There were later inquiries and official investigations.
Teams of scientists mingled with the swarms of reporters, each only too ready to get their face on TV and their name in print with as many theories as there were dead bodies, and that, in the earned, turned out to be a lot.
When the medical and scientific teams eventually got down to serious business, it was the ergot, that stray fungus spore, that got the blame for the whole sorry mess.
They cited historic cases when the hallucinogenic wheat fungus had caused mass hysteria, of what they said was mass madness. It was convenient enough, realistic enough, to let the brains trust indulge in a mutual back-slap and wrap up the mystery.
Arden, dazed and shambling, knew better than that. Maybe the people didn't know the full story, but they knew it wasn't just the ergot. That can make you see things, and act a bit strange, like LSD, but it doesn't cause a town to turn into a mad killing ground.
The people had lived through bad summers before, and somehow they sensed that something deep and dark and old had woken up and fed and was now gone. By some unspoken intuition, Arden kept its mouth shut about such matters.
Officialdom totted up the bodies and the missing (never to be found again in all but a few cases), and there were fifty two.
At the seminary, twenty priests and students had died on their knees in the chapel, seemingly oblivious to the fire that raged through the building. They never did find a cause for that fire. Old AJ Cronin was one of them, that good old man with a face of fury and a heart bursting with humour. I wish I'd got to know him better. I won't forget, not ever, that without his special gift in that water bottle we would never have made it out of that festering hole. His gift had allowed Paddy to complete the old prophecy that was made a long time before the old priest's God came out of the desert.
Billy Ruine was dead. Donald shot him through the head at a hundred yards, after the old soldier took a shotgun blast in the leg that took a while to heal. We three had found him sitting at the gate, with a tourniquet round his thigh. All he wanted, before any medical help, was a cigarette. There was one left in the pack. I haven't bought another since.
Without the Major's courage, without him at our backs, we'd never have made it.
They found Alan Scott a week later, in his car, or what was left after the blue-bottles had done their work. The only Milligs boy who ever made it to Upper Arden. His wife didn't stay long in town. She cut the price to get rid of the house and fled to god knows where. Some others did too.
Jimmy Allison died of a broken neck. That was put down to an accident, but I don't believe it. I stopped believing in coincidences a while back.
They found Mary Baker blown up like a blimp, and they took Tom Muir away, along with the bits and pieces in his butcher shop. He's still in the mental hospital and will probably never get out. Another couple of folk joined him, because they just didn't make it back from where they'd been flipped over by that thing under the rock.
Farmer McFall hanged himself after they dug out the remains of his son from that mean old boar that Donald shot.
They repaired the bridge on the east side, and then, with the official opening of the by-pass road, traffic flowed through town in ever decreasing numbers. The flood of pressmen trickled away as other catastrophes hit other places, and Arden became a kind of sleepy hollow, which was for the best.
It gave us time to start pulling ourselves together. As I've said, Arden has been around a long time. It's survived before.
Now you, reader, you may think, like so many people, that all of what happened can be put down to the chance mishap of the ergot fungus spores landing in the right place for it to grow. A freak psychedelic trip into hell.
Well, you can think that if you like. Maybe I imagined it all.
But remember, not everybody ate the bread at the festival. I know for a fact that neither Paddy nor Barbara had any. Donald has a wheat intolerance and never eats bread. I didn't have any that day either.
And ergot doesn't have the effect on animals that it has on humans. But bees, pigs, horses, dogs, they all went crazy at the same time. Then there were the gannets that Donald and I saw down at the bay.
Cu Saeng? Well, only a few people know the full story. I wish old Kitty Macbeth was around to tell me the whole story from way back when it started. The daughter of heroes and the Sons of Life, sitting vigil down on the point. She may have been dead, but she was with us all the way. She bequeathed the golden torc to me. It was her gift of life to us, the fulfilment of her years of watching and waiting.
Only a few people know, but the rest of the town have an instinct. They smile and Colin and Paddy and I and treat us with a certain respect. I can't explain why, and I suppose neither can they. It just is what it is. Nobody asks any questions.
I know it was all real. I saw what I saw. We did what we did, and that's that.
As for me, I'm writing now. The block is gone and the words are flowing - or at least they will when I finish this job first, and I have to do that before a new beginning.
Sure, I still get nightmares. I lurch awake, shivering and Barbara soothes my shoulders until the shudders stop, but those nightmares are fading. I'll live with them a while.
Barbara? She's in great shape now. She was in hospital for twelve weeks and spent a long, slow time recovering, and a longer painful time in therapy. But she worked at that with grim determination. She was a bit unsteady on her legs when she came home, but she insisted on climbing her front steps on her own, and the smile of triumph and joy when she reached the tip, lit by the morning sun, is imprinted on my mind forever.
She came out of the coma as near as I can estimate, just about the time her gutsy little heroine of a daughter was battling that thing in the black pit. Barbara spent some time healing at home, under her father's care, and then she just came down to my place to stay with me. She brought Paddy of course. We're a family.
I suppose I was falling in love with her before the crash, and there was no question, once she came home, that the two of us would be together. There's something special that binds us and I think it's more than just the love between man and woman. It's something that was meant and from a long time ago.
We are very happy.
Paddy is set to become the stunner her mother is. She came out of the whole thing better than any of us, and maybe that's because she had more pure power than any of us knew. She has never had nightmares.
Most of the time, she's an ordinary kid, doing ordinary kid stuff.
But there are times when I look at her as she sits quietly and I sense the serenity that is in her heart. She is the distillation of what made the one-and-onlies special.
Oh, and another thing. The golden torc around her neck never comes off. Unless it is cut in two, it never will. Whatever happened down in that hole under Ardmhor Rock, when Paddy and that thing were locked in the final battle of wills, the force of the white light fused the two golden balls together, welding them forever, completing the circle.
And Colin Blackwood. Badger. Some folk still call him that, and he doesn't mind. His hair still has those two white lines, though he has it cropped short now. But his eyes sparkle with bright fire, and he's one of the best people I have ever known.
Colin had a lot of catching up to do. He went down to Strowan's Well still a child and came back from Ardmhor a man. He went down to the rock to face the thing that had robbed him of his growing years and stolen his youth, and he knew what he was going to confront. That speaks for itself.
Now he's all fire and high humour, as sharp as he was in those long ago days when he was the third of us. He devours books and he's gone to college to catch up on stuff he never had the chance to learn. Before our escapade, his horizons reached no further than the parish boundary. Now they are boundless.
You can often find him, when he's not hitting his studies, down at old Kitty's shack, sitting on the step reading a book. He's working quietly on translating the whole of the message on the standing stone and he's promised to write it down for us one day. No-one else knows about that.
He's a good-looking guy and gets sidelong glances in the street, where previously there was only pity. Linda, down in Holly's Bar, seems to have a thing for him and she could do a lot worse. I keep hoping, because I love him a lot.
And then there's me. What can I tell you?
Kitty Macbeth told me I'd have a long life, and while there were a few times I would have reckoned she was dead wrong, maybe she was right after all. The old lady had some real power, and it worked through, long after the thing under the rock killed her, so, barring accidents, I am looking to a long and peaceful time, with the people who mean most to me.
The old woman said I would write, and I am writing all of this just to get the monkey off my back. After I finish, I have no fears. Donald hardly limps when he and I go fishing or bird watching, or drinking up at the Chandler. It took me a while to go back to Holly's bar, but it seems Helen has no memory of that strange incident in her bedroom. Donald has taken over from my grandfather and Jimmy Allison as the older stalwart in my life, and he looks as if he'll last forever.
As you may have gathered, I live in Arden and probably always will, I remember, when I started this, I was driving along the Kilcreggan Road and wondering which way really was home. Now I know. I'm home.
Arden is an old place, and with the ring road, it's a quieter, more secluded spot than before. It has some bad memories, terrible memories, but we'll recover. We'll live to fight another day. The nightmare is over.
So maybe sometimes I do wake up in the dark, hurtled out of a dream that has sent me back to the two times I faced Cu Saeng in his lair. But I can live with that.
And as far as this story is concerned, I can only tell you that it happened.
THE END.