Interlude:
Angus McNicol eased himself back, put the bottle down on the table and unscrewed the top.
"Put some of this in it," he said. "The sun's well past the yardarm now. Coffee'll keep me up all night unless I take it with my medicine." The big old policeman grinned, just a burst of white before it was closed off again in his remembering. He poured two hefty shots of whisky into the half-cups of coffee, put the bottle down, raised a cup and clunked it against the other. He took a manful swallow, savoured it, swallowed, then let out the gruff sigh of someone who's appreciated a drop of scotch for half a century.
"Takes the bad taste out of the mouth as well." Another quick flash of teeth and then his eyes changed and it was obvious he was looking a long way back into the past once more. Once he'd started, he'd been able to talk for a long time.
"I thought it was all dead and buried and gone, you know. Should be, too. Oh, I still recall it sometimes, even now, but I have to tell you now son, it's not the kind of thing I like to dredge up."
He looked over the table, over the rim of the cup and drew his brows together.
"Why the interest now? There's better stories to tell about this town. Not many worse, except that business with John Fallon's boy few years back. He got himself hurt pretty sore when he went after that fellow O'Day. That was the year I quit the force, on doctor's orders. To tell you the truth, I was glad in a way. You don't know you've had enough until it's over and then you realise you never ever want to see another mother's face when you tell her a child's dead and gone."
Dead and Gone. Angus McNicol had used that phrase twice, each in a different context. It should have been all dead and gone. Should have been, but the world's full of what should have been and never was. It should have been gone, but it kept on coming back, like the bad penny; certainly in the bad dreams. I had managed to bury most of it, deliberately so, because it was something I never wanted to remember and dwell on, not as long as I lived, and then once I had kids of my own, it was something I wanted to keep down there under lock and key. You just can't begin to think that history might repeat itself and that one of your own might ever be touched by a madman. Can you?
I'd managed pretty well until I saw those dulled eyes swivel in my direction down on River Street and then pass on with hardly a flicker or blink and some of it all came back in such a rush I felt my belly drop a hundred feet, or so it seemed, and there was the smell of raw fish in the air and the scent of pine smoke and dead meat and a crazy man's sour sweat; in my ears I heard the old, lazy buzzing of busy flies and the murmuring of slow water in a stream and I was instantly back then.
It doesn't take much to trigger those switches. Some things don't stay buried; some things don't stay dead.
Yet I had managed to bury it all for a while, shoved it down there in the depths where it was kept bound and gagged to stop it clawing its way up and eating at me. Then, on the sunny morning on River Street, with the light reflecting from the skylights on the roof of the old boatyard down at Keelyard Road where a bunch of boys had talked of a drowned boy in the river and had first planned to take a trip to the mythical Dummy Village, I looked into the empty depths of a pair of eyes and it all broke free, like some beast in a cellar.
No matter what I did, I could not put this old thing back in a box. It was out and growling and it was pawing and clawing and the only thing for it was to meet it face to face, to go right back to the start and take it from there.
I had to know.
Crazy? Possibly, but I'd seen crazy. I'd looked into its blinking, twitching eyes. I had to know.
I had no real answer for Angus McNicol. I said I was researching a book, and there was a sliver of truth in that. He looked at me over the top of the cup and he took another sip, swallowed, and began to talk again. Who knows, maybe the old policeman had his own ghosts to bury.
"Dead and gone. Too many people over the years, I can tell you," he said. The tape was running again. "But not dead and gone in here." He raised his free hand and tapped the side of his head.
"The one thing Hector Kelso drilled into me when I had transferred over to plain clothes, was to remember everything. Remember everything and keep your own records forever, he always said. He used to stand there and never move a muscle except in his eyes. He never wanted anybody to touch anything, not a thing, until he'd been there and seen the lie of the land. If you did that, you got a picture in your head that had everything in it, even the sounds and the smells. I can still close my eyes and conjure up old Ian McColl's head on that dung-heap and I can remember that it was mostly cow dung, but there was a dead chicken there as well. It's got a different smell. I can still taste the dust in the tack room where old Jean McColl was dragged down the stairs.
"I remember thinking that the man, your Twitchy Eyes, was probably ex-army. We found a place down at the east end of the Rough Drain, the place that's still all overgrown with. It was a bivouac. We knew it was him from the pages of the bible. He'd used them to wipe his backside."
Hector drained his cup and put it down, eyes still focused back.
"We worked round the clock, going through every army record, but at that time, there were thousands of boys and men just out of national service. There were more thousands who'd been in the war and trained to kill and were still young enough to have been this beast. It was a broad field we were ploughing up. We turned up Scots soldiers who'd been to Aden and done some terrible things themselves. There were a few people who'd survived the Jap death railway and a few of them were as crazy as all get out, but there was nothing we could pin on this devil.
"We really wanted to nail him. We went through parish records but we still drew blanks. I was beginning to think he had just come out of nowhere. Maybe he did. Maybe he just did. Maybe he was a devil. Remember the Whalen boy? He was snatched on June sixth, sixty six. All the sixes. Some of us thought that was some kind of ritual thing. Who knows? Maybe it was.
"There was claim and counter-claim over what drove him on, but I thought it was just sheer and utter badness. He was evil. I think it was just depravity. The man had a taste for killing and hurting. If Charlie Saunders had caught him, he'd have ripped him apart with his two hands for what he did to that wee girl of his. Big John Fallon, he was just as worried as anybody about his boy and girl and if he came on this Twitchy Eyes first, there was a good chance it would never get to the High Court.
"But we never did get him. We rounded up a few ex-soldiers and anybody with any record at all for flashing or peeping through bedroom windows or stealing underwear off the washing lines. We had a couple of identity parades and all for nothing. The man came out of nowhere. He always seemed to be one jump ahead. We sweated out the whole summer wondering where it would happen next. It was a while before Johnson McKay came careening down that farm track in his old post van.
"All we had to go on then was a description from the girls he'd tried to pick up the first time and a name from Jean McColl's diary. She said his name was Leslie Joyce, though the spelling changed to the female version, but that was when he was stalking her. There was every chance he'd just made it up, but we had to check that too. We turned up half a dozen of them, spelled whichever way, and four of them had been in the army. One was a woman who'd been a sergeant in the WRAC's. Two were old men and one was in a wheelchair. The fifth was a Free Kirk minister from up by Creggan and I can tell you he got the fright of his life when me and a couple of the CID boys grabbed him in his greenhouse when he was watering his tomatoes. He'd been an army chaplain in the war. He was five foot tall and he'd a withered arm from childhood polio. He couldn't have punched his way out of a wet paper bag. The sixth one had been banged up in Drumbain for five years for a smash and grab. That was the way of it.
"Our killer, he could have been anybody. Anybody at all. But he wasn't any of the people we found called Leslie Joyce. We never got close, though we even did a trawl in the local parish year books to see if anyone of that name had been baptised, but still we got no closer."
August 4....7pm.
"Unless a man be born again, and cleansed of sin." The man's voice was clear and rumbling. He was standing at the edge of the stream, both feet in the water. The gun was five yards away. Billy was standing beside him, his skin pale in the dimming light. Danny wondered if he could reach the gun. Corky wondered the same thing. Tom and Doug watched the scene at the water, each of them wondering what would happen.
It had been a long day since the gun had spoken, since their talk in the shade of the line of low hawthorns that led to the hollow.
"You okay, Dan?" Corky had asked.
He spoke low, but not in a whisper. Danny twisted and that cost him a wrench of pain between his shoulderblades, but if he moved slowly, it wasn't too bad. Occasionally the light breeze would feather across his skin and trail a sensation like pins and needles, but for the most part, the bruises, swollen and risen though they were, stayed numb. The fire had damped well down, but Danny could still remember the awesome burn of it.
"He shot me!" the enormity of that hovered over him and weighed him down. Over and over he saw the world spin and saw the white quartz of the rocks rushing up towards him. His nose ached for the moment, where he had driven it into the shale. It pulsed more fiercely than did the bruises on his back. Another throb of pain beat out from his shoulder, where it had hit the outcropping of mudstone that had probably saved his life by twisting him just a little downstream so that he fell straight into the deepest part of the pool and missed the rocks where the heron feathers stood.
"Thought you were a goner," Corky said again. Beside him, Tom silently agreed. His face still bore the faint imprint of the man's fingers and he had a dark bruise on his jawline. Every now and again he opened his mouth and moved the jaw to the side, as if testing for fractures. It helped take the stiffness out of it.
"Thought I was a goner," Doug said. He drew his fingers down the side of his head, just behind his right ear, rubbing slowly. "I think I still am."
"But you got the cartridge away. Honest to god, Doug, that was brilliant. And it really took a lot of guts an'all."
"Thought I was going to puke my guts," Doug said, and he gave a strangely fearful grin. His big protruding teeth made him look gawky. His sting vest was torn now under his armpit and hung on him like a tattered net.
"But if you hadn't pitched it in the pool, Danny would have got the both barrels for sure. You should have seen him, Danny boy."
Billy said nothing. He was sitting just to the side, closer to the hollow where he'd hung the stag's head on the thorn branches. He was absently massaging the skin of his throat. It was raw and inflamed. He had that faraway, lost look in his eyes that Danny found somehow scary. It reminded him again of the rabbit and the stoat, as if Billy had somehow accepted all of this, as if he knew what would happen and was just dumbly waiting for the inevitable. Tom glanced over at him. He'd panicked for an instant, suddenly more frightened than he'd even been in his life, even more so than when the man had grabbed his face and squeezed.
Billy had been down on the ground, making gagging, hissing sounds in his throat, the kind of sound the heron had made when its neck had been broken and for that instant, Tom had thought he was dead, even though his heels were drumming into the turf. Doug had been down too.
Danny was falling in the air towards the rocks. Corky was running towards the man and Tom was certain the stranger would turn and swing the gun on him. At that range he'd cut him in half and Tom would be left alone. It had all happened so unbelievably fast.
In his mind's eye they were all dead, all except him, up here in the valley with the man with the twitchy eyes. The knowledge froze his insides to slush and for an instant his vision wavered.
Then reality, even colder than the fear, cut through the fear like a shard of ice. Billy had both hands up at his neck and he was breathing raggedly. Tom found his hand reaching for the knife and in a few seconds of bewildering violence as Billy blindly fought him, he had cut the noose and Billy was hauling for breath. All of this unreeled again as they whispered together.
"And Tom," Corky said, recalling it at the same instant. "He cut Billy free. He would have strangled otherwise. Did good there, Tom-Tom."
Danny was amazed at how calm Corky sounded. Even Doug, with his big stupid grin, sounded close to normal. Just a few hours ago, they'd been crying, and dying. Danny knew that Corky was trying to keep them all calm, waiting for the next chance, if they could get a chance. If it came, Danny did not know if he'd be able to move, and that scared him badly, as much as Billy's scary far-distance stare. Doug might have made it downstream if he hadn't twisted his ankle. Corky might have made it up the slope if he hadn't been hurt making his first run. Danny could have got to the top but for the heron flying out of the gully. Tom wasn't fast enough and Billy just couldn't move.
If the chance came, what chance would they have?
Danny shook his head, sending a wave of dull pain across his back, over his shoulder and another wet pulse into his tender nose. He couldn't think like that, no matter how hopeless it seemed. He didn't want to be like Billy, sunk so deep in the swamp of his own fear that he couldn't move. If he worked at it, he could keep the fear battened down, and try to keep at a distance the recollection of the gun barrels raising up towards him.
"Where's the knife?" Corky was asking, this time in a whisper. Tom used his eyes to indicate the curve of root just beside him. The bone handle was barely visible. Very surreptitiously, Corky eased his way towards it, reached even more slowly, and then drew the knife towards him.
"I don't think that'll do any good," Tom said. Corky shrugged. His eyes had that thoughtful look again. No matter what happened, Corky wasn't going to wait for it. Standing straight, he barely came up to the man's chest, but he was still thinking of how to get them out of this.
The man had opened one of the corned beef tin cans, the last they'd swiped from the self-service shop round on Braeside. Corky's stomach was twisting savagely and he could smell the meat on the air. They'd only drunk some water Tom had brought up from the stream in the canteen. None of them wanted to risk attracting attention yet by trying to get some food.
Over by the little ridge, the man sat still. He'd eaten the block of beef, gnawing into it just the way he'd eaten the rabbit, making little snuffling noises. Corky's mouth had watered and he'd actually dribbled. The stranger had ignored them. Occasionally he'd cock his head and then mutter something, always speaking over his left shoulder, to whoever he saw there.
"Unless a man be born again, of water," the man said now that it was late and the sky was beginning to darken. The moon was not yet up and Corky had an idea that it might be full tonight and he thought maybe that was what the man was waiting for.
He had surprised them all when he'd stood up and taken his coat off, letting it slip, almost theatrically, to the grass. He'd turned then, just as dramatically and they all looked in his direction, suddenly scared again. He stood looking at them for some time, as if pondering his next move. Danny felt his heart beat faster. Billy stayed frozen. Finally the man came walking towards them.
"You hear them?" he asked, quite softly. He was standing with his back to the fading light and his eyes looked like holes in his head. He inclined his head towards the hollow. The flies were humming busily. He angled his head and stared down at Billy.
"Listen to them, boy. They're talking to you and me." He crossed to the fire and picked up the rabbit's head by one flopped ear. A trail of flies whirled upwards and headed for the hollow. "Another trophy? You now what to do with it, don't you?" Billy took it without a word, crossed to the hollow where the heron's eye was now a seething mass of insects, and put the head in the nearest fork. They could see him look around, left and right, as if seeking a way of escaping, but he did not seem to have the wherewithal to risk it. He came back to the tent and sat down again. The man reached down and took him by the edge of his tee-shirt. Billy whimpered, a little animal sound, but when the man pulled him upwards, he went with the motion without a word and got to his feet.
"Those voices. You just need ears to hear." Billy gave a little shiver.
The man bent down as he had done before, when he'd walked Billy towards the gaunt skull suspended in the branches.
"Must go down into the valley and through to the other side. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth and then the great truth. You know it boy. You want to walk down the valley with me? Conboy knows the truth, he sees it with his magic eye. Wait 'til you see all the things he can show you. Beelzebub's millions; the Lord's minions."
Billy stood completely motionless but his whole body seemed to be vibrating with tension. His mouth was open and for a moment his breathing stopped completely. The man held him with his eyes. Billy's breath caught and then he was hauling in fast, panting like a panicked animal.
"In the midst of death, they are life. I saw you build the altar. Watched you. I choose you now."
He bent down and put the gun butt first on the turf with the barrels resting on the ridge by the stream bank. He clapped Billy's shoulder. "So now prepare ye the way. Make straight the path. "
Very gently he reached and took the bottom edge of Billy's tee-shirt and raised it up. It was like a parent with a child, Billy dumbly raised his hands and the man slid the shirt up then let it fall silently to the grass. He unbuckled Indian-bead belt, pulled his jeans down. It all had the slow quality of a ritual. Billy stepped out of his baggy underpants leaving them white on the grass. The man put his hand on the boy's back, then slid it over his shoulder, almost tenderly, drawing him close beside him.
Danny felt Tom shiver beside him. His own heart was clattering away inside him, almost out of control. Corky's teeth were grinding, quite audibly. Doug was totally silent.
Billy was led down to the water.
"Unless a man be born again, of water, he may not pass through." The man's deep voice echoed from the far side. Danny recognised the mix of quotations. It was a distortion of all that he had learned from the countless Sundays. The man dropped his hand from Billy's shoulder and took his shirt off and unlaced his own boots. They all watched, fascinated, wondering what would happen next. Only Danny had any idea.
Billy's skin was pale in the dimming light. Beside him the man was almost completely naked. He had a line of dark hair running down between his shoulderblades, and a pair of black tattoos up on the tops of his arms, one on each arm. From where they sat, Corky and Danny could read one name: Lesley. The evening was far from dark, but the sun was down beyond the western rim of the valley and the long shadows of the trees downstream had crept up to the edge of their camp. The quartz rocks at the falls seemed to glow against the grey shade of the far bank.
The man waded into the shallows. He held Billy by the arm and forced him ahead of them. The ripples spread out to the far side shingle. Up on the moor the poor curlew bleated again and some slight breeze drifting between the hawthorn spikes sent a cloud of flies buzzing upwards in a furious little whirlwind. The strange pair in the stream were further out, into deeper water. It was up to Billy's waist, then up to his navel, up to his chest, just in so many steps. The man guided him further.
They heard Billy gasp for breath as the cold of the stream curled around his ribs. They saw him shiver, not in the high-tension way that Tom's body was vibrating, but a deep shudder of cold and fear. His breath was coming in harsh spikes and the man was mumbling something, speaking into his ear. None of the others could hear what was said, not then. Billy stumbled and the water lapped his chin. He got to his feet again, gasping harder, a jittery, panicked sound.
"What's he doing?" Doug asked, out loud. They were all still sitting, almost paralysed with apprehension over beside the wall of rocks where the scrubby roots looped and twisted into the small crevices. They hadn't moved.
In the stream the man waded forward and now the water really was up to Billy's chin, rippling around the stranger's broad back at chest level. He looked like some old water god, something out of the adventures Danny and Corky had read from the book they'd found at Overbuck stables.
"Prepare ye the way," the man said, now speaking aloud. He raised his head and looked up at the darkening sky. Billy's head was just a dark shape on the surface, at the centre of the ring of ripples, the man had his hand on the crown. He leaned forward and pushed Billy's head under the water. Billy panicked. His hands flew upwards and thrashed wildly as he tried to lever himself up for air.
"He's killing him," Tom cried. Corky scrambled to his feet. Both his hands were balled into fists. Danny felt a great urge to jump up and run down to the stream and grab the man's arm, but an even greater urge to keep himself away from the crazy stranger overwhelmed it completely. Doug was jabbering something unintelligible. Down at the steam, Billy was struggling frantically.
"Unless a man be born again, of water," Twitchy Eyes was bellowing. "He shall not cross over."
Billy lunged upwards, spluttering and gasping, his mouth a wide, dark circle. Water sprayed out from his nose. The man simply forced him down again. The four of them were on their feet now, Corky closest to the water. They could see Billy's pale shape under the surface, arms flailing, body heaving, but the man was too strong. He held him there. A big bubble of air rose up and burst on the surface carrying with it the hollow bellow of Billy's terrified cry.
"Leave him alone...you loony bastard!"
Corky's yell echoed back and forth from the sides, repeating his last word over and over in a diminishing sequence.
"He's killing him," Doug wailed.
Corky turned to face them all, eyes blazing. "We have to do something," he raged.
"What?" Doug asked. The gun was over by the downward edge of the pool, beside the ride. They would have to circle the pool to reach it. The man was only five steps away from it.
Danny's hands were trembling with the need to act. He turned away from the stream, just at the same time as Corky did, both of them heading in opposite directions. Danny picked up a smooth stone, turned and threw it with all his strength, right at the man's head. The motion sent a searing, white hot pain across his back as his skin stretched under the torsion of his muscles. The white stone, a piece of stream-rounded quartz flashed across the distance and, like the stick that had killed the heron, would have connected with the back of the man's head if the stranger had not bent down to force Billy further under the water. The stone whirred past, missing him by a mere inch. The man twitched, as if buzzed by a wasp. The stone carried on, smacked against the boulders at the head of the pool where the falls tumbled, smashed into half a dozen fragments with a loud crack. A splinter knocked the nearest heron feather out of its crevice and into the air. The man began to turn. Both of Billy's hands came out of the water, waving desperately.
"Let him go, you big dirty crazy bastard!"
Corky had crossed almost to the edge of the stream yelling at the top of his voice, even louder than before. When the stranger had stopped, Danny's heart felt as if it had stopped as well. He had thrown the stone on impulse, on instinct, the way he had thrown at the bird and with his usual accuracy. But when the man froze and then began to turn, he realised that he had made himself the next target for punishment. Then Corky had butted in, diverting attention once again, and Danny felt a shameful surge of relief once more.
"Come on then," Corky bawled, his voice cracking with the effort. Danny swivelled and saw he had Billy's knife in his hand. The old rusty blade was held out in front of him, knife-fighter style. Corky's legs were spread, and despite the fact he was half the man's size, he looked suddenly ferocious. He looked like a young warrior.
The man finished turning and stopped dead. His eyes swept across Danny, past Doug and Tom, lighted on Corky. The eyes started to blink rapidly. Billy came spluttering up to the surface, coughing and gagging, unaware of what was happening.
"Yeah, you big fuckin' creep," Corky was screaming now. "Come on. Let's see what you've got." His left hand made a come-on gesture, a man-to-man invitation.
The man smiled slowly. He took a step forward then another, pushing a bow wave in front of him. Danny could see the name on the other tattoo now. For some reason it held his eyes. He did not want to see the feral grin on the man's face. Just below the blue lettering, a series of rips had been chewed into the skin, like saw-teeth cuts, the scars still dark and fresh. Tom and Doug shrank back. Billy was stumbling to the other side of the pool, towards the shallows, sending out great splashes of water to the shale bank. The eyes were blinking like dark strobes now.
"What's this, Sergeant Conboy? See this?" he cocked his head, still grinning, still twitching.
Corky held his ground and the man came up the bank. His shorts had slipped, dragged by the weight of water. His penis, unshrivelled by the cold water pushed out to the side, like a dark, thick, club. Coarse hairs ran up to his belly and down his thighs. He looked like a savage giant. He came out of the water, went straight towards Corky who stood his ground until the man was a yard away, then backed off, still holding the knife up. There was no contest. The man reached. Corky swiped with the knife in a low arc and the man's left hand came up and hit him on the side of the head. Corky reeled to the side and the man simply reached again, grabbed his wrist, bent his hand downwards with a violent jab and the knife went tumbling out, spinning in the air, towards the clump of roots where Corky had picked it up in the first place.
He did not hit Corky again. Instead, he turned, still dripping, towards the ridge. Corky was breathing fast and the others on this side of the stream swung their gaze from him to the stranger.
Twitchy Eyes picked up the gun.
Nobody moved. He picked it up, turned, quite purposefully and with none of the dramatic, ritual slowness he'd displayed as he led Billy down to the water. He walked back over the gravel from the low turf ridge, swinging the butt upwards, one hand to the barrel. His fingers locked on the stock. Danny stood there, breathing hard, chin up defiantly. The rest of them were scared speechless.
"And again he defied him," Twitchy Eyes growled. "For a second time."
Denied him. Danny mentally corrected. He was back up in those realms of icy clarity brought on by yet another burst of extreme fear. Not defied it's denied! He almost expected the cockerel down at Blackwood farm to crow again, in some parody of punctuation for the biblical quotation, and if it did, Doug might burst into his red rooster strut just to complete the picture of unearthly craziness.
"Don't," Doug breathed. He was not strutting now. Tom's spastic dry swallow was just a series of throaty clicks. Even Billy was silent now. The man turned his head towards Danny and speared him with those black, jittering eyes.
"Let he who is without sin throw the first stone," he rumbled. "Are you without sin, boy?"
Danny couldn't speak. It was as if his own throat were bunged full of dry paper.
"Are you in a state to meet eternity?"
He stared on for a long, drawn out moment, the eyes screwed up, hardly twitching at all now, then he turned away from them. Tom groaned like someone in pain. The eyes swung back to Corky and transfixed him.
"And again he defied him." The voice was rising now, getting back up to that creepy, dreamy level. "For the second time."
He bent closer. "You afraid boy? You scared?"
Corky said nothing. His teeth were still clenched together and his lips drawn back as if he was holding himself all together with a tremendous effort. His chin was still up.
"You will cross over boy. You will know what waits on the other side. Prepare ye the way."
The gun came up, barrel pointing at the sky then swung down. The man was less than six feet from where Corky stood with his arms held out to the side, like a miniature wrestler who didn't know yet which way to swivel. The man slowly stepped forward and brought the muzzle right up against Corky's cheek.
There was no movement. They all watched that barrel maw as if it was a poisonous snake completely mesmerised. It rose up, a centimetre, an inch. It was directly over Corky's eye. Danny could see the other eye, looking up, unblinking, still somehow defiant. He could not quite believe what was happening.
The man's finger tightened on the trigger. "If thine eye offends me."
NO!
The scream rang inside his head, high and desperate and echoing on and on, but his mouth could not form the word. His lungs couldn't force the air out. He was caught in the ice of freezing terror.
The fingers squeezed. The voice almost wheedled now. "Pluck it out."
Silence fell. The trigger pulled back. The silence stretched out.
A loud metallic snap cracked the silence. The shotgun's hammer pin slammed down onto an empty chamber with a sound that was suddenly deafening.
John Corcoran swayed backwards. Very slowly his legs buckled under him. He slumped to the ground and his eyes rolled up so far only the whites were visible.