Interlude:
"Hector Kelso agreed with John Fallon." Angus McNicol said. "Our man had put the blood on the doorposts to ward off the angel of death, and that made him some kind of psycho. We knew that already, but Kelso disagreed with the shrink who still thought he'd put the gun barrel in his mouth. Hector said the killer thought he was possessed, and none of us on the investigation disagreed with that. He'd a devil in him.
"Old Jean McFall, she'd been a gutsy old lady. Kelso showed how she clambered through the attic and where he'd tried to shoot her through the lath and plaster of the ceiling. That must have been a nightmare chase and it took guts to stop and write in her diary. It wasn't until next day that we found what she'd written and that gave us better description of him, and maybe a name.
Angus McNicol's eyes were focussed far back in the past and the tape turned slowly, picking up his gruff voice and not missing the crackling emotion behind the words as he recalled the savage butchery at Blackwood Farm.
"Remember that song? A nice wee lass, a fine wee lass, is bonny wee Jeannie McColl? I saw the photographs on the mantelpiece and it could have been written for her. She'd been a looker in her day, fine bones, a lovely smile. When we found her against the wall she hardly even looked human.
"We found the back of her blouse on a piece of metal up there. He dragged her inside and down the stairs again, put her on the table and put it into her. He broke her arms, high up, close to the shoulder, and he tore all the ligaments and cartilage on her elbows. Doctor Bell and Hector Kelso agreed that he just spread-eagled her and put his weight down. But that didn't kill her. Looking at the bruising and the internal damage, Bell thought she probably didn't die until at least the next day. Can you imagine it? The team called him the Angel, but he was the devil incarnate, believe you me."
"He raped her, and then he used the logging axe to cut off Ian McColl's head and he stuck it on the dung heap. Whatever Bryce thought, this wasn't a man with any remorse. He waited for the flies to come."
We checked every lead, but the name we had never meant a thing. We must have pulled out the files on everybody called Leslie Joyce. Birth, army lists, even church congregations, hospital patients, and there were quite a few Les Joyces who got a visit. We even tried the Joyce Lesley's too, just to try to get a hook on this nutcase, but after Blackwood Farm, the man just disappeared and Bryce was crowing that he'd been right all along.
"But I never thought that bastard committed suicide. Not then and not ever. Maybe whatever was frying inside his brains finally burst and he fell down dead and if that's what happened, then it was an end he never deserved. But it was better for me and for all of us to think of him dead than to believe he would turn up again and see it start all over.
"We waited a long time, right through until the following year, past the next summer. The Angel, the one you lot called Twitchy Eyes, he simply vanished. Really I hoped he'd gone up onto the moor and got stuck in a bog and took days to die while the crows picked out his eyes."
"No matter what, the killer disappeared and the killings stopped. Nobody ever knew why."
Interruption:
I could tell that Angus McNicol had spent a lot of time thinking about the killer. A lot of it had come back to me since I saw those eyes on the street, those flat and empty eyes that showed no spark and no recognition. There was a lot I'd buried down in the depths along with plenty more unwanted baggage from way back then. They say if you remember the sixties you weren't there, and that's the biggest crock of crap anybody ever made up. We were there. We were kids, but we knew, like Mick Jagger told us, this could be the last time, and it was, of course, because the world was changing and everything was blasting apart.
Up in a valley barely four miles from Blackwood Farm where a twitchy-eyed killer mutilated the farmer and his wife and sat until the flies ate their eyes out, a boy several months short of fourteen told his friends a truth about themselves.
Everything was changing, some of it for the better and a lot for the worse.
When The Who were the wild men of Rock n' Roll, Roger Daltry sang that he hoped he died before he got old, and of course, he didn't follow through. He just got rich. There were a few that summer who had the life taken from them and they weren't singing about it. It was a summer like none other. It would be another year at least before Jimmy Hendrix made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when he played Purple Haze, and my mother had looked at him as if he was old Twitchy himself, acting the way mothers do when it comes to music, as if it could steal their children away and bury them in a cellar and damn their souls forever. Clapton and Bruce and Baker were about to put sounds together the way we'd never heard them before, but the flower power hadn't touched this little pocket of the world. We did not have a love-in, it was not groovy.
There were five boys just on the wrong side of innocence up there in the valley that day when.....
August 3. Morning:
The man stepped out from the bushes and cast a shadow across the water of the stream.
It had been a fitful night in the aftermath of John Corcoran's soliloquy. The long silence after he finished speaking and stood with his head down and his shoulders jerking, stretched on and on while the flames of the fire dopplered down in a slow diminish from yellow to red and then to glowing embers that pulsed with a life of their own in the merest breath of warm night air. Corky stood there, staring into the flicker of light and Tom hovered beside him, a hand still to the shoulder, just a couple of silhouettes from Danny Gillan's viewpoint. Over to the side, Doug sniffed again a couple of times and Danny couldn't tell whether he was crying or not. Billy had his head in his hands, eyes fixed on the fire, like a big Apache, for once silent.
After a while, after what seemed a long time, Corky turned round and went to the tent. He came out with that old army blanket his old man had swiped from the territorials hall when he and Deek Galt, Pony's old man, had heisted a box of grenades for poaching the salmon up at the Witches Pots on the Corrie River where a generation later some folk would go hunting something else and burn the whole forest down to charred stumps.
"I'm going to sleep out here," he said, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders and lowering himself to the grass about six feet away from the fire. Everybody stood there, shaken, with the red of the fire on their faces, making them look wild and bleak and somehow feral, like young warriors, like young braves.
"Me too," Billy finally said in a soft voice that was unlike him. He and Tom crossed to the tent and got their own blankets. After a while, Danny and Doug did the same. The tent stood dark and empty while they all hunkered around the fire, huddled around their thoughts while the flames faded and slowed and turned the logs to mere glowing embers. Up on the moor a poor curlew bleated soulfully and the dented moon rose over the high sides to shine down into the open valley.
Some time in the night, Billy cried out and then subsided into a snuffled sob. The noise woke them all, but none of them could tell whether Billy was awake or asleep. Sometime in the night, Danny Gillan thought he heard footsteps downstream and woke up with a start, breathing quickly, nerves suddenly tight and alert. The fire had sunk down now to barely a glimmer which gave off some heat but not much. As he fetched some thick pine logs from the pile he and Tom had collected, he scanned the darkness down in the valley where the trees crowded blackly, holding their inky shadows. He could sense eyes upon him and he shivered in the cold night air. A trickle of apprehension rippled down his spine and he hurried back to the circle of the campfire where the others were dark huddled shapes on the ground. The logs quickly caught fire and sent the heat blazing out, but the cold trickle inside Danny took a long time to diminish.
In the morning, when he awoke, he was still tense and his hands were clenched into fists. His fingernails had dug red crescents into the skin of his palms.
Tom and Doug used the last of the sausages in the old pan, frying them up in their own sparking fat while the tin of beans with its saw-blade top angling up in a jagged halo sat at the edge of the fire, bubbling away in the heat. Billy took a while to rouse but as soon as the sausages, burned almost black, were on the plate, the smell brought him round as if he'd been slapped. Tom handed him his breakfast. Billy nodded his thanks, keeping his eyes down. Normally he'd be full of talk and blether in the mornings while everybody else was yawning and scratching and just trying to find their bearings, but now he was silent and for the moment there wasn't much to say.
They ate quickly and licked the plates clean. Danny said they'd have to set some more snares for rabbits and catch some trout in the stream if they planned to stay much longer. Doug had the notion he could find a pheasant's nest down in the trees and get some eggs, but at this late stage in the summer that idea was voted down with some derision. Most of the eggs would be hatched and the others would be addled with half formed chicks. Doug then remembered Mole Hopkirk clambering down from the railway arches with the pigeon's egg burst in his mouth, and the rousing derision when he'd puked it all up. It got a laugh, feeble in the light of what had happened to ol' Mole, and in the aftershock of the fight. They were all talking now, all except Billy who seemed still cocooned inside the happenings of the night before. When Dan went down to the stream to use the fine sand to wash the plates clean, Corky followed.
"You stick with Billy, right?" he said. "He'll be okay in a while."
"You reckon? He was pretty cheezed off last night. We all were."
"Yeah," Corky conceded, somehow sadly. "It had to be said though Dan. They'd have been at each others throats in a minute and then we'd all have been hooking and jabbing. That's the way it goes. Billy's a bit crazy these days. You know that. Not bad, just cracked."
Danny nodded down at the water where the rippling water broke his reflection into wavering patches of shadow. Up by the fire, Billy was trying to pick up some music on his radio, but all he got now was static. Tom and Doug were already half-way up the side of the valley heading for the heights where they'd left the bombs from the Dummy Village.
"He's always been a bit flaky, but now he can be pretty mean with it. I don't think he can help it, and what Doug said didn't help, did it? Jeez. It's like it's been building up though and I had to say it last night because if Billy explodes..."
"We'll all be covered in blood and guts and shite," Danny finished for him, wanting to keep it light now after the dismay of the night before. What Corky had said had got under his own skin, making him realise even more strongly than before, the limits of his own world and the constraints upon himself. The Bad Fire, his own nightmare. Hell and damnation in the fire. Corky had known without saying until last night, when it all came out. Corky had Crazy Phil on his back all of the time and would have his old man back out of Drumbain Jail soon and Corky would have to handle the regular knock on the head or the belt buckle. But was that really worse than the constant and inexorable weight of pressure and the never-ending litany of prayer and piety? Danny Gillan wanted out from under just as much as Corky needed to escape.
"Too true. And guts and hot air." Corky said and he laughed aloud, jerking Danny back to the moment. "Blood, guts and gallons of lard. The size of him, he'd cover the whole campsite."
They used the thick fishing line to make more snares which Danny set in the runs he'd found by the bushes further up the valley where they'd already seen some rabbits when they arrived. The line, Danny assured him, was better than the fencing wire because the rabbits wouldn't see it. When they'd finished, Corky went up the track to join Doug and Tom. The sun was rising fast and the heat was gaining on the day, bringing out the bees and damsels and the big dragonflies whirring in squadrons over the pools. Down in the trees, pigeons murmured sleepily and the slow water muttered, like conversations almost fathomed.
Billy and Danny went upstream to catch trout in the shallow pools and under the rocks where the water tumbled. Up on the plateau, close to where the natural dam had backed up the steam to form the long twist of Lonesome Lake, the others were whooping excitedly, the cares of the night forgotten, or at least banished under the heat of the sun.
"Bombs awaaaay." Tom's high voice came wavering down. There was silence, then more whoops and gales of laughter. Danny couldn't help but smile.
"You think they'll explode?"
"Hope so," Billy said. He'd his head down, hair trailing the burbling surface of the clear water, both hands jammed under a flat stone, eyes fixed with concentration. "Big one in here." He twisted, pushed further. Danny could see his shoulders working as he tried to get a hold of the trout. Finally he slowly withdrew his hand from under the rock, keeping his balance, brought out a thick spotted fish that twisted and torqued powerfully in his big hands.
"Beauty," he said through gritted teeth. "Bet that's nearly a pound." He held it tight in his left and hooked a forefinger into the trout's mouth while it bucked for freedom, pulled on the upper jaw until he mouth gaped and the head drew right back. There was a watery squelch and then a small crack. The fish shivered and then flopped to limp stillness, its neck broken. Danny watched dispassionately. They'd been catching trout since they were no size at all. It was different with fish. It was normal.
Behind and above them, in the narrow chasm leading off the main valley, Doug and Corky were balancing the bombs on the branches of a twisted hawthorn tree that leaned out over the side of the drop. They were using some of the hay-baling twine from the roll that served as guy ropes for the old tent, and despite the straining effort, they'd managed to pull one branch right back until it touched the ground. Tom had snagged the twine around the tree's own root and he plucked it, making it sing like a deep guitar string.
"Try it now," Doug said. Tom got his old army knife with the spike for taking things out of horses hooves, opened the sharp blade. Gingerly he hacked at the hairy string, covering his eyes in case it whipped back and blinded him. The blade bit through before he expected it to and the branch uncoiled with a whiplash crack. The bomb went straight up in the air, maybe ten feet or more. Tom went sprawling back.
"Bombs away," he yelled, scrabbling for balance before he tumbled over the edge.
"Watch out," Corky bawled. Doug shrieked with laughter. The bomb went straight up and came straight back down again, tail first, but already beginning its turn. It hit the very spot where Tom had been only a second before, landing with an earth-shuddering thump on its side and then it toppled over the edge as the one had done the previous night to slide down the shale slope and come grinding to a silent halt.
They all burst out laughing together.
Danny and Billy, stripped to the waist and with their sloppy-joe sweat-shirts tied by the arms around their waists, had taken six fish in the first hundred yards, none of the rest as big as the one Billy had tickled from under the stone and now they were threading twine through the gills to carry them back to the camp.
"Did you know?" Billy had asked and Danny hadn't bothered, hadn't needed to ask what he was talking about. He'd been waiting for the question, uncomfortable in its proximity and unsure of what he would say when it came.
"Yeah," he finally said. "I knew. Stood to reason, didn't it? Doesn't matter though. None of us is bothered about it. We don't care."
"I never thought about it. Honest to God."
"We knew that, Billy."
"But my Ma's been lying to me all these years."
"Everybody's mother lies. She just wants you to feel good."
"But I don't feel good. She said he was a hero."
"And he could have been. Might have been. Who the hell knows? Look at Corky's old man, he's no hero, that's for sure. Nor mine. Corky was right. It's not worth fighting about. We've all got troubles."
"Yeah, but Jeez, I never thought. How stupid can you get? I could have belted Doug last night. I could have really gubbed him. I still could, you know? Because of what he said."
Danny saw Billy's shoulders twitch again, this time with the internal pressure of a held-back punch and he was immediately reminded of Corky's analogy. He did look as if he could explode. The twitch was like a small seismic shiver, but the body language so eloquent. In his mind, Billy was lashing out to land a fist on Doug's nose. Dany was glad it was still held in tight, glad it hadn't come to it. What Corky had done, what he had said had touched them all. He'd stopped it.
Billy bent to threading the string through the gills. Up on the hill, another cheer went up into the still air followed by yet another gaggle of laughter. Danny thought it would be a good idea if they dumped the fish down at the camp and went up the hill to join in. Once they got Billy laughing again, it would be okay (until the next time). He was just about to turn and suggest this to Billy when across the stream, where the hazel bushes crowded together, a trickle of gravel went hissing down the slope. Danny looked up.
And the man stepped out from the bushes.
Danny jerked back in surprise, his breath drawn in quickly in a hiss. Billy hadn't noticed. He was still crouched down, concentrating on the task of inserting the thick, fibrous twine inside the gill and out through the gaping, bloodied mouth.
The man stood there silently on the far side of the stream. He was tall, very tall and his hair was black as Billy's, though uncut and greasy. His eyebrows shadowed his eyes and he stood stock still in a long shabby coat that came down below his knees and looked too warm for the summer's day. He was wearing a pair of scuffed black boots laced up to the top with pieces of twine. One of the soles was peeling away from the upper.
"Bill," Danny whispered.
"Shouldn't have said it anyway," Billy muttered tightly still replaying the scene. "He was just having a go at me."
Danny nudged him and for a moment Billy just continued his self-bound conversation. Finally Danny reached and clamped his hand round the other boy's meaty wrist.
"What?" Billy said, turning his head. He saw Danny's eyes, fixed and unblinking, staring across the tumbling water. He slowly turned, caught a glimpse of the figure standing on the far bank. His head jerked up and his own eyes widened. His whole body started back in surprise.
The man stood there for a long moment, still as rock. Behind him the little shiver of shale trickled down the steep slope, possibly where his coat had brushed the dry surface. It sounded like a slow breath. In Danny's hand, one of the fish bucked, even though he'd been sure the blow on the head had killed it dead. It shuddered and then went limp. The man stared at them, though they couldn't see his eyes under the beetling brows. His face was craggy and angular, and his hair, thick and dark, hung down lank and turned up at his collar. It was spiked near the crown, as if he'd cut it himself and on either side of his mouth, deep furrows formed black, angry brackets.
The moment of contact stretched on. Neither of the boys knew what to do. Up on the hill they could hear the excited yelling of the others, but they couldn't call out to them while the man was staring at them. Was he a farmer? A gamekeeper?
Both of them knew he was neither. He was ragged and dirty and unwashed and unshaven. His work trousers were torn at the knee and covered in dark stains. His mouth was curved downwards. Danny touched Billy's arm again and moved backwards, still crouched on the grass by the bank. The fish on his string slithered towards him with the movement, its eye blinkless and dead, mouth agape. Billy scrambled back with him.
"Who is he?" he whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
"Don't know."
The sunlight on the moving water sent spangled reflections onto the steep slope behind the silent figure and dappled shimmering light on his threadbare coat. It flashed into his eyes and he blinked several times, very rapidly. He turned away from the light, quite slowly, as if it hurt his eyes, until his face was in profile, then he jerked once and seemed to galvanise into motion. He took a heavy step forward, crunching on the gravel and small stones by the side of the stream, took another step which put his foot right into the water with a loud splash. There were enough stones to allow him to step across and stay dry at this time of the year when it hadn't rained for more than three weeks and the water was low, but he ignored them. The dark brows had come down again to shutter the eyes, but they knew he was staring right at them, so intently he did not even seem to notice his boots were under water.
Danny and Billy cringed backwards. They got to their feet, hearts suddenly thumping. Behind and above, Tom and the others were hooting with laughter again.
"Mister we..." Billy started. "we're just catching some fish for our dinner. Honest."
Neither of them knew who the man was, or what power, civil or official he might wield but Billy was already working on mitigation.
"Fish."
The word came out in a soft hiss of breath, almost dreamily. "Fishes."
The man crossed the stream and came up the bank, mounting to the flat in two or three big strides. When he reached the turf where they'd been threading the trout he stood up straight, towering over them.
"I will make you fishers of men," he whispered, his voice slightly hoarse, as if he'd been shouting. The boys drew back a step, standing closer together now. The whispering voice made no sense, though Danny had heard the words before. The man was still staring at them, his face completely impassive, as if there was no emotion in him, as if he was looking both at them and right through them.
"What do you want?" Danny asked and both he and Billy heard the apprehensive little tremble in his voice. The man was just standing there and that was scary enough. They'd been chased by gamekeepers and bawled at by irate farmers and that was the way of things with boys. But this big scarecrow of a man had just whispered, not raised his voice, and that was somehow very unnerving.
"They said, Lord, here is a boy with a few fishes." The whispering became a grating rumble, coming up from deep inside the stranger. "A few fishes."
He took several steps forward, alarmingly quickly. Danny and Billy flinched yet again. The man reached and picked up the biggest of the fish, the one Billy had been trying to loop on to the string. He held it up to them. The still-wet scales threw back the light in iridescent sparkles. Without hesitation the man brought the limp trout up to his face, opened his mouth and bit down on its head.
Danny's heart seemed to drop like a stone.
"Jeez," Billy gasped, backing into the smaller boy and almost knocking him sideways. Danny had to grab his arm, to keep from falling.
The teeth came down on the head and they both heard it crunch wetly, almost with the sound of a boiled egg being cut open with a blunt knife. The fish flapped twice, the way the other trout had done, showing it was still, even if barely, alive. Danny could not believe his eyes. His throat clenched and he felt as if he was going to vomit. Close by, he heard the sound of Billy gulping for air.
The teeth clenched tight and they stood fascinated, mesmerised, unable to draw their eyes away. The head crunched and the man's head pulled back. A piece of flesh flipped out from between the teeth and then the rest of trout pulled away. They could see that the wide, grey head had been bitten clean through to just behind the eye. Black blood welled from the small braincase. Dark blood trickled down on the man's clenched teeth. He swung his head, in an animal motion, the way a dog does, and chewed hard. The sound of the fish head crunching, an innocuous little sound in itself, was suddenly appalling in the still air of the day. It was nothing and yet it was immense, of great importance; of earth shuddering consequence. Of a sudden, both of them, standing elbow to elbow, with the sun hot on their shoulders, felt completely and terrifyingly defenceless.
The man stared into them from the shadows under his brows and he chewed slowly and deliberately, letting them hear every disgusting, sickening sound. Then he swallowed and the lot went down his throat with not a shiver or a tremor.
Danny tried to turn to run but for some reason he was frozen to the spot, Billy was jammed up against him and he could smell his sweat, feel the peculiar shiver in the face of this craziness.
The man stepped forward and held the torn trout out. "Take this and eat it," he said to Billy, pinioning him with black eyes, now visible this close. He cocked his head to the side, a strangely dog-like gesture. "He took it and gave it to his disciples." Danny had also heard those words before, heard them many a time, read out in the nightly family prayers around the empty grate of the fire. Words form the bible, from the new testament. This is the word of the Lord.
For a moment he heard his own father's voice transposed on the raggedy man's low rumble.
Billy was backing away. The man stepped forward, jabbing the bloodied end of the fish at the taller boy. "Take this and eat it," he repeated. The eyes were completely devoid of colour, like holes under the shelves of the brows. Billy whimpered.
"I don't like..." he started to say.
"Eat. Eat." The voice rumbled. The torn end, showing the curve where the eye had been ripped from the socket, rubbed against Billy's lips. He gagged, shaking his head in disgust.
"Come on Billy," Danny said, voice rising. He grabbed his friend by the arm and pulled him backwards. "Let's go."
Danny hauled hard enough to spin Billy round. The big boy turned, eyes wide in fright. A slick of blood and fish slime coated his mouth like a smeared, viscid lipstick and his normally sallow skin had turned fish-belly pale. Danny felt his heart flip helplessly like the jerking twitch of the dying fish. The sense of danger simply inflated inside him. He pulled again. Billy blinked once, twice.
"Come on!" Danny urged, pulling him. Billy seemed to lurch out of a dream. His muscles seemed to unlock. He jerked and then he was moving. Danny leapt down the slope to the next downstream level with Billy in front of him. All the while he could sense the man reaching for him, a big gnarled hand with fingers outspread to grab him by the skin of the neck. He could imagine the man's breath. He thought he could hear his big boots pounding after them.
Billy was moving, only a couple of feet ahead, his blue and white tee-shirt flapping like an apache breechcloth. His big, meaty arms were swinging and Danny could hear the panicked tremble in his breathing. His own breath was coming fast; short, gasped pants for air and it felt as if his heart had raised itself up about six inches to block his windpipe. The track beside the stream narrowed between two large boulders at the turn where Billy had caught the big one and they both went through the gap like startled rabbits. Off in the bushes a blackbird went clattering away in a scold of alarm. They smashed through, where before they had gingerly angled avoiding scratches from thistles, now crunching and crushing the hogweed and wild rhubarb. Billy was like a tank, heedless of any obstruction.
They came out of the shadow at the bend and into the sunlight. The other boys were high up on the edge, further up the gully of the tributary, oblivious for the moment to the drama down below. Billy ran as fast as he could, tasting the blood and raw slime from the fish, suddenly more afraid than ever before. It had happened so fast and it was so inexplicable it was truly terrifying. The fact that the man had bitten into the living head of the fish had been scary enough, wrong enough to be dreadfully shocking, but then he had forced the thing at Billy's mouth and if a man would do that, he had to be crazy for sure. He had just stared at them and then spoken in a harsh, creepy whisper. His eyes had blinked under the brows and Billy had thought.
Billy had thought there was something...
Billy thought
Twitchy Eyes.
He had never been quick on the uptake, but as soon as the fish had jammed into his mouth and he had caught the reflection of the light on the man's black eyes, seen the rapid fire blink, like some flickering morse, the image had come smacking into his head and his knees had almost given way.
Oh holy Jesus please-us a childish voice had yelled inside his head and Billy had instantly felt very small and dreadfully vulnerable. Danny had been pulling at him and he'd frozen just for the moment, not able to make his feet work, while the smell of fish was thick in his nose and the back of his throat. And then he and Danny were running, him first, down the track and he knew if they could get to the next corner and down to the camp they'd get away because the man would see the others and he'd know he couldn't get away with anything if there were witnesses and everything would be...
They came scuttering round the corner, angling their bodies to take the bend. They made it past the clump of stinging nettles, past the cluster of dockens waving in no breeze the way dockens do in the summer. A hunting swallow flew right in front of them, jinking at the last moment in a flare of gunmetal blue-black.
Then Billy's foot stepped into a cowpat that wasn't old enough to be caked and dry. The top surface slid across the wet and greasy inside and his foot slipped with it.
It all went wrong just as quickly as that.
He put his foot down, still running at an angle, reaching with his left hand towards the stand of hazel saplings to get enough purchase to swing his weight around and next thing he was up in the air. His foot skidded out from under him and the other foot couldn't come back down quickly enough to regain his balance. He hit the ground with such a thud that his teeth gnashed together with a jar of sudden pain. Another pain jolted up from his backside to the top of his head as all his weight compressed the bones in his back. His breath came out on one loud whooping expulsion.
Danny was only three feet behind. He saw Billy go down, tumble and bounce and then he was flying over Billy's head. Both knees hit against the other boy's shoulder and his own momentum flipped him up and over. He landed with a numbing crash right at the edge of the track where the bank dropped about six feet to a shallow pool. It was only the fact that his torn jeans snagged a protruding hazel root that prevented him from plunging forward head first onto the rocks below.
Up above, on the rim, startled voices came rolling down.
"Hey, what's up? You OK?" Danny vaguely heard the drumming of feet as Corky and the rest came haring down the hardpack sheep track. Billy groaned, grunted, turned himself over, got to his knees. Danny eased himself to his feet, aware that he should be doing something, but momentarily dazed by the shock of the fall.
"Hey Dan!" Doug bawled.
The man came round the corner just as Danny got to his feet. Billy was still on his knees, facing downstream. He saw Danny's face go slack and his eyes raise themselves upwards, higher than Billy's own. Behind him, something brushed against fabric and then a cold, hard edge pressed against the curve of his jawline.
"Oh Billy," Danny said, but there was no need for explanation. Billy knew it was a gun.
"And again a little while and you shall see me," the man said and there was a hint of shivery laughter, a kind of cold glee in his rumbling voice.
Doug and the others came hurtling round the bottom bend. From up on the rim they had seen both boys tumble, but the track had curved down behind one shoulder of the slope and they had not seen the stranger pushing through the foliage.
They all skidded to a halt when they rounded the crumbling corner of the dog-leg of the valley, Doug first, Corky hard on his heels and Tom only a few feet behind.
Everything stopped dead still.
A lone cuckoo sang out downstream where the forest crowded down to the water, a lazy, somnolent summer sound, almost smoky in the warm air. Two black and gold dragonflies chased each other between the two frozen groups, for a long, extruded moment the only movement in that part of the valley. Three boys stood there in attitudes of sudden stop, hands out, bodies twisted, as if they'd been photographed at the beginning, or the end of a race. All of them were open mouthed, wide eyed.
Danny Gillan was further up the track, half turned, eyes fixed on Billy who was still down on his knees, his black hair in awful contrast to the now pure white of his skin. His own dark eyes looked like pits. The long, shining barrels of the shotgun had him just behind his ear, their gaping mouths a dark and infinite figure of eight laid on its side.
Billy's eyes were blinking fast, blinking almost in time to the tic in the gaunt man's own eyes. Everything was frozen in a tableau except for the eyes and the dragonflies whirring past about their own business, oblivious to the drama.
For a long, stretched moment of time there was no sound at all except the murmuring of the stream and the robber bird down in the trees.
"And so he came amongst them," the ragged man finally said, "and they got down upon their knees."
This time he laughed. It was the first time the other three had seen him, the first time they had heard his voice. John Corcoran felt a deadly cold chill trickle upwards on his spine and he knew instantly they were in the most appalling danger. For that long moment, he was frozen, yet on many levels he was aware of everything, even the far-off cuckoo and the mindless chattering of the stream. He gauged the distance back to the curve around the little knoll of rock on the shoulder, out of the line of fire of those long black barrels. Would the man shoot Billy? For a second he considered running, turning on his heel, thinking the same thought Danny had already considered, that the man would not dare shoot if there were witnesses free to point the finger.
In the man's other hand, he saw the dead trout, saw a trickle ooze down to the ground, wondered where it had come from. Billy's eyes were wide and pleading, not fixed on anything, but jittering left right, up and down, beseeching the very air. He looked as if he expected his own brains to come blasting out onto the grass. Danny was standing, hands shaking now, his whole body aquiver with tension, his back to the rest of them. He looked slight and fragile against the tall stranger whose shadow blocked the path.
"Oh shit, Corky," Doug said in a tremorous whisper. "He'll kill him."
The man stood stock still, the way he had on the far side of the stream when he'd come across Danny and Billy. Everything was frozen, a tableau of exquisite tension. Corky took in the whole scene, the gun close to Billy's neck, the look of absolute fear on his face, the shadows under the craggy brows on that gaunt face. In that split second he knew he could not run. They had come scampering down the hill and into madness on a summer's day. All the odds, all the distances, all the estimates of speed and flight evaporated. The man with the gun stood there, blinking in the bright light of the sun. There was no flight now, Corky knew with complete and instinctive certainty. The gun would simply blow Billy Harrison's head from his shoulders, and then it would talk to Danny and then....
The man leaned forward and put the dead, ungutted fish against Billy's mouth. The entrails were squeezing out of the hole where the mouth should be, little slithery green strings. The stranger leaned over and whispered something that none of them heard. Billy's belly muscles seemed to shiver. His head moved from side to side, but his mouth opened and his teeth came down on the trout and he bit into the gill covers. Purple blood splashed onto his cheeks.