May:
"Come on Jeff, it'll be dark by the time we get started." The voice floated up from ground level.
"It'll be the bloody weekend," somebody else chipped in. From the Irish accent, it had to be Neil Kennedy, who lived in Swan Street. Some time far in the future, Neil would go through the nightmare of losing a son in another spate of madness that would hit the town, but for the moment he was sixteen and had only two cares in the world. The second was to get on with the game of football they had going on the flat space next to the river where the old barge-loader shed used to be. Its flat base was now an ideal five-a-side pitch.
Jeff McGuire had punted the ball with an uncoordinated foot and sent it sailing over the low roofs of the outbuildings on the corner of Fish Pend where it had bounced on the slates, landing on the valley of the roof, well out of sight. He who kicked last was obliged to climb for it.
There were some little girls at the far corner, waiting for the end of the shift in the fishmongers where their mothers worked at the filleting slabs. They were playing a kid's skipping game chanting the kind of schoolyard rhymes that seem to have gone out of fashion.
"Hey McGuire get a move on," Neil Kennedy called up again. "Shift your arse. Another goal and we've got them beat."
Them were the River Street team as opposed to the Swan Street crew in the days before the heart was ripped out of the town and replaced by a concrete and steel barracks of a shopping centre. Then, on this particular May afternoon, with President Kennedy dead only a couple of years, Mick Jagger every mother's nightmare and the Beach Boys getting around-round-round in surf city, there were plenty of people still living down by the river and there was always a game going on.
One of the girls giggled. She was holding one end of the rope while her partner spun the other. A whole team of kids, all with pigtails or ponytails had lined up to skip in for a couple of fast beats of the rope before dancing out again on the far side in the elegant rhythm of play. When Neil Kennedy shouted up at the roof telling Jeff McGuire to hurry it up, the rhyme instantly changed.
Missus McGuire sat in the fire....a tiny girl skipped in, agile as a fawn, kept the beat, feet feathering on the ground before skipping out again.
"Okay, give me a minute willya?" The disembodied voice floated down. "Think I'm spiderman?"
The fire was too hot she sat in the pot...the pot was too wide, she sat in the Clyde...and all the wee fishes swam up her backside....
The girls tittered, some of the smaller ones holding their hands up over their mouths at the use of a naughty word..
"Hey Jeff, they're singing songs about your mother," Neil shouted up
Jeff McGuire didn't hear him. He'd just been bending down to pick up the old tattered leather football when a motion to his left caught his eye, a shadow at the window just above the slope of the low roof. He put a hand over his eye to block out the glare of the sun and peered forward.
Some small particles, like grains of sand, rattled against the dusty glass. The shadow changed shape and Jeff saw it for what it was. Flies. There were dozens of them, flying in tight circles or crawling up the window pane. He picked up the ball and threw it over his shoulder. It bounced on the ridge and then down the far slope. Down below somebody shouted. The thud of a boot against leather followed immediately and the game was back on. Jeff took a tentative step forward and then another, raising his hands to the sill. He put his face right up against the glass.
The room was dirty inside, from what he could see through a pane crawling with big bluebottles. Every now and again one of them would go buzzing off and come hurtling back in a kamikaze dive for the light and freedom, rapping with a chitinous click against the flat surface. Jeff eased himself up onto the diagonal waste pipe and got up onto the ledge. He pushed against the frame and it squealed up in protest. Five or six of the big shiny insects bulleted out past his face. One of them brushed his cheek with tickly wings and he drew back. Inside the room a swarm of them, spiralling like a miniature tornado, buzzed and hummed angrily in the hollow emptiness.
Jeff climbed in, curiosity aroused now, the way it happens with boys and empty buildings. They attract each other like magnets, with an irresistible pull of gravity. A bluebottle landed on his forehead and he slapped it off. Apart from the flies the room was empty. Outside somebody shouted something which he vaguely heard. The window creaked and slid slowly down on the sash-groove until it almost closed. Jeff edged along the wall, avoiding the dense insect whirlwind and went through the open door.
The smell hit him half-way down the hall.
"Oh my..." he gagged, unable to finish the sentence. There were flies here in the dark of the passage, hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Most of them were crawling on the walls. Right away Jeff knew that something had died in here. Maybe a pigeon or a jackdaw which had come down the chimney and got trapped. Maybe even a cat. The smell was awesome, almost solid in the dusty air, flat, sweet and oily all at the same time. It was even worse than the throat-clenching stink of the dead sheep up on the moor if you got down-wind.
In that moment, Jeff knew something was wrong, but for some reason he could not turn back. The gravity of curiosity had him now. He took a tentative step along the corridor and the sound of his boot rasping on the shards of broken glass sent shivers up his spine. Something made him turn to look back into the room and in that instant, the cloud of flies coalesced, throwing a shadow against the pale light framed by the window. For a moment the shadow looked like the shape of a man and Jeff's heart kicked in a sudden spasm. He backed away, now gulping for breath through a dry gullet and knocked against the door half way down the hall. It swung open. Jeff stepped through, still half turned.
A black shape roared and came leaping up from the floor.
Jeff squeaked in utter fright. He flinched back, cracked his shoulder against the door jamb. The thing on the floor came bolting towards him. And he raised a hand up to protect his face, thinking that some monster was coming for him. Then it broke up into a cloud of black dots. More flies.
Jeff's heart came down from the back of his throat. He gulped again, still unable to speak, though if that had been possible he would have cursed without repetition for several minutes.
The insects were big and bloated, and where they passed the beam of sunlight coming through the chink on the wooden boards nailed over the window frame, they glittered the green-blue of rare metal. In the swarm they were creepy and scary, but in the sudden relief that they were only insects, only bluebottles, Jeff almost laughed. Flies couldn't hurt him.
Two of them tussled in aerial combat right in front of his eyes and then landed on his shirt. He swatted them away and just at that moment the stench really hit him.
"Oh my god," he mumbled, completing the sentence that he'd started in the other room. His hand flew to his mouth. His eyes watered and his throat spasmed. Jeff turned, ready to go stumbling out of the room when another shape on the floor against the sink snagged his attention.
At first out looked like a pile of rags and sticks jutting out from under the lip of the basin, hidden by the shadows. Despite the sickening stench, Jeff moved forward, brushing flies away with his free hand. They buzzed and hummed, skimming his skin and hair.
The form was crumpled and shapeless. He moved closer, holding his nose pinched tight shut between his fingers. Something stuck out from the bulk and for a long moment it didn't register on him. He turned his head, saw an off-white ridged line that reminded him of something. He drew his eyes along it, close to the floor, saw a gaping hole from which something liquid seeped. In that moment of time Jeff's brain seemed to have gone completely numb. He was tying to think but something inside his head was blocking out all thought. He shifted his gaze down the line of a ragged piece of damp cloth which covered a series of jutting lines.
Below the lines, where the fabric was ridged and folded, something moved. The cloth heaved. He stepped back one step. The thing sticking out from the mass moved too, just above the bent angle. Not a real motion, just a shiver under the skin.
Under the skin
It hit him then and the force of it was like a physical blow. He was staring at a corpse. It was bent almost double, face cheek down against the floor and the mouth agape, lips pulled back behind a line of teeth set in black gums. A trickle of some thick liquid had pooled by the head. An arm was hunched behind the body and a blackened hand was just visible, fingers hooked into claws.
The body was naked from the waist down, belly bloated underneath a desiccated and taut parchment surface and it was slumped in yet another pool of viscid liquid. At the abdomen, just up from the shrivelled crotch, the shirt was moving slowly as if the thing was trying to take a breath.
"Oh," Jeff said very quietly while his brain was yelling frantically at him.
getout getout oh for Christsake it's alive its fuckin' breathing!
He felt his knees sag as he stumbled backwards. The scene suddenly leapt into startling focus. The head was down on the ground and a hank of hair was trailing on the old oak boards, growing right along the blackened puddle. The fingernails nails jutted down like curved talons, half an inch beyond the end of the fingers, like the claws of a monster in a nightmare.
And it was breathing. The belly was moving under the shirt, enough to make the fabric shiver.
A small, pearly white maggot dropped own onto the stretched skin of the abdomen and rolled to the floor where it pulsed weakly in the slimy puddle.
Jeff reached the door and just as he did so, all the flies swarmed together and like a single entity, they alighted on the body. In the blink of an eye it was covered in a blue-black skin and for an instant it looked like a man made up entirely of insects. At the far end, the filaments of hair grew out.
He backed against the door. It shut with a hard slam and all the light was cut off except for two slender needles of daylight piercing the cracks in the boards.
Panic exploded. He grabbed for the handle, fingers scrabbling down the dirty surface. A splinter went digging right up under his nail and he never felt a thing. He was in the dark with the body with its nails still growing and its hair still growing and its belly full of maggots. Behind him the flies buzzed and it sounded like the movement of a heavy body rising from the floor. Jeff's heart almost burst. His hand hit the handle and he hauled. The door opened and he threw himself out of the room.
He crashed against the far wall, made it to the back room and ran for the window. In his panic he hit the frame and it shuddered down the last few inches and slammed itself shut.
Jeff whimpered. A dozen or more flies which had followed through from the dark room came smacking against the glass and the sudden noise was loud in the empty room. Jeff reached for the frame and hit it with both hands. His right fist went through the old glass and a jagged edge raked his skin from wrist to elbow, drawing an immediate line of blood. The terror soared. Behind him the tornado of flies sounded like the scrape of a body dragging itself along the floor. Jeff pushed desperately at the flame. It gave an inch and then slid all the way up. He shoved himself through, all the time expecting to feel a black and wizened hand, armed with long, still growing nails, clasp around his leg. He cracked his knee on the sill as he threw himself out, jabbering incoherently. A swarm of flies followed him onto the low roof. He went stumbling across the slope of the slates, clambered up to the ridge and slid down the other side.
"Hey McGuire," Neil bawled. "What the hell's been keeping you?"
Jeff went sliding down the slant on the shingles, skittered across the guttering and tumbled ten feet to the ground, miraculously landing his feet and rolling with the momentum. The impact left him with a hairline fracture in his heel and a badly bruised knee. The blood from the cut in his arm trickled down onto the cobbles. Otherwise he was fine, at least physically..
Both teams gathered round him where he crouched close to the wall. "Did you hurt yourself?" one of them asked. Jeff's eyes darted left and right. He could see people around him, insubstantial figures in the light of day. In his mind, more clearly than anything, he saw the dripping corpse with the hair growing out along the mess on the floor and the clawed hands with the sickle nails and the shivery motion under the shirt.
"Gha...." Jeff managed. "Gha..."
"Hey, the idiot's gone ga-ga," Neil said, laughing. "Come on McGuire, stop fooling around and get back in goal."
It was two days before Jeff McGuire spoke a full word and by that time Sergeant Angus McNicol from CID had been up to the empty house that backed on to Boat Pend and he'd found the body of Mole Hopkirk. He later formed the opinion that Hopkirk was the lucky one of the two boys. The shock of it all had such an effect on young Jeff McGuire that he was never quite the same again.
Fatal Accident Inquiry into the death of Neil James Hopkirk. (Verbatim extract)
John J. Mack, Crown Office: "So you believe the boy took several days to die."
Dr Colin Bell, Pathologist: "No question of it. At least four days. Five at the outside."
Mack: "He would have been alive, and conscious for all of this time and possibly in considerable pain?"
Bell: "Perhaps conscious for some of the time, although blood loss and shock may possibly have rendered him unconscious for the latter part. Pain? Most certainly he was in very severe pain because of the nature of the injuries, the beating and the bites and the rest"
Mack: "So in your opinion, what happened?"
Bell.: "The attack on this young man was designed and deliberate and savage. It took place over a considerable period of time, I hasten to add. If I may venture an opinion, it is almost certain that death was a merciful release."
Interlude:
"First real bad one I had to deal with," Angus McNicol said. "And that was the start of it, though nobody knew that at the time."
He was sitting in the front room of his house out beyond Castlebank Church and sipping a mellow whisky. His eyes were bright blue and frosted under grizzled eyebrows and his expression said he was way back in his memory.
"I was a sergeant then, just promoted to CID. We had to break the door down. Young McGuire was very disturbed for a long time after that, and to tell you the truth, I think the shock affected the poor lad's head. He was mad as a hatter. John Fallon kicked the door off its hinges and when we got in the smell would have knocked you down for the count of ten. Millions of flies too, not pleasant.
"We found the lad tied up against the sink and I could see what gave the McGuire boy the heebie-jeebies. There was a fungus growing along the puddle, and it looked as if the boy's hair had grown there. The skin of the hands was pulled back and the nails were sticking up. Old Colin Bell, he was police surgeon in those days, said the nails keep growing for a bit after a death, but that was the first time I'd seen it.
"One of the others was sick right away, but I managed to get a handkerchief up quick enough so I didn't make a complete arse of myself. Hate to have destroyed evidence with my own puke, eh?" The old man grinned and took another sip, finishing his drink. He poured another two whiskies and offered the glass over.
"Don't suppose there's any harm in telling you any of this. It's long gone. Hardly anybody remembers it, but it was a bugger of a summer. Strange that somebody like yourself wants to go digging it all over again."
Another sip and he closed his eyes, concentrating. "That poor bugger Hopkirk had been lying there a long time, ever since March, and the flies had made the most of it. His mother damn near died when we told her and she kicked up a stink about wanting to see her boy's body. It was all we could do to stop her. She'd never have lived with the sight. Hell. It was hard enough for me.
"The pages were sheets from a bible. An old bible, according to the book expert we spoke to. Maybe one that had been handed down in a family. Some of the pages had been torn out and the killer had wiped his backside with them. Some of them were crumpled up and stuffed in the boy's mouth. They'd been scrunched into a thick wedge and it was no wonder the lad choked to death. Bell was right. When it came, it was a blessing. That poor boy had walked down into hell.
"Whoever did it had been squatting in the old surgery for a while, but at this time, we didn't know a thing about the man you kids called Twitchy Eyes, but I remember getting a really bad feeling. We'd been looking for Hopkirk for a few weeks by then, five or six as I recall. So we knew then that there had been a killer around a month and a half before. But by then one or two other things had happened.
"There was little Lucy Saunders....