booksnew/source/Bane/Bane10.txt

CHAPTER TEN
‘Meet Professor Sannholm,’ Jimmy Allison said, introducing me to
a small, fair-haired man with owlish, round—framed spectacles.
‘Arthur, meet Nick Ryan.’
We shook hands. The professor was wiry and had a strong, firm
grip. His hands were rough and calloused, surprising working
man’s hands, on a lean body with an academic face.
‘Arthur’s been working on his dig,’ Jimmy said. We were in the
lounge of the Chandler on the evening after I’d taken Barbara and
Paddy on their picnic. It was still warm and sultry. The lager was
cool and welcome, and the professor was no slouch when it came to
downing half a pint in one swallow.
‘Thirsty work,’ he said, ‘but very rewarding. It’s been a good
summer. I’ll be reluctant to get back to university, but what we’ve
found on your rock should keep us going for a full term, thanks to
J immy.’
‘Arthur’s found another wall,’ Jimmy said.
‘Not quite a wall. A ring. A concentric ring,’ said the professor.
‘Really quite amazing, really. It was Jim here who first led me to
suspect the Roman fortification which we dug up some years back.
Lovely work. A real solid wall.
‘What puzzled us then, and still puzzles us now, is that they seem
to have built it for nothing. There were no fortifications inside the
wall, but there were some minor Roman artefacts outside. They
must have just built it and packed up and left. In fact, their wall
wasn’t theirs at all. They just built up on top of an even earlier
dyke. We think it’s from a much earlier time than bronze age. It’s
got a typical paleolithic layer construction of old red sandstone.
Quite fascinating actually.’ g
The professor was off and running on what was obviously his
passion.
‘And what’s this other wall?’ I asked.
‘Well, it’s hardly that, really. More an upraised ditch, as a matter
of fact. It’s concentric with the first wall, parallel to the dyke, but at
least sixty yards away. If it’s an earlier development, then it must
indeed be old. I think we could be thinking in terms of about five to
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six thousand years ago. Much older than Stonehenge. In fact, if I’m
correct, this will be one of the earliest fortifications on record?
‘I would have thought that the rock was fortification enough,’ I
said.
‘Well, you would think so. But the dyke goes around the rock in
a semi—circle. I’m assuming that it was a sort of stockade, maybe to
keep cattle in and thieves out. Like a walled garden. We still
haven’t found anything on the rock itself. Maybe it was too
exposed for actual habitation. Perhaps it was a last-ditch retreat in
case the first defences were breached. We don’t know yet, but the
finding out is sure to be fascinating.’
Professor Sannholm — he soon insisted that I call him Arthur —
took a second mouthful of his pint when he stopped for breath. His
prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down on his thin neck as
he swallowed gustily, and when he put the glass down there was
nothing left but a trail of foam slowly sliding to the bottom of the
glass.
He smacked his lips. ‘Lovely stuff, that.’
I ordered another two and a whisky and beer chaser for Jimmy.
The barman was prompt and as soon as the drinks arrived Arthur
lifted his to his lips and sunk another huge mouthful.
‘Sweating like a horse, after a day’s honest toil,’ he said when he
came up for air. ‘Now, where was I?’
‘Up to your armpits in mud, no doubt,’ Jimmy said, winking at
me over his glass.
‘Ah, no, as a matter of fact, it’s all pretty good clay, mixed in
with shingle. Polished river-bottom stuff, you know. Probably that
part of the peninsula was under water just after the ice age. The
land’s been rising ever since, you know, since the ice retreated and
all that weight was taken off.
‘Anyway, the inside dyke is much smaller than the Roman wall.
Just a series of small humps joined together and overgrown with
moss and what have you. If you go just past the hedgerow you’ll see
where we’ve been digging.
‘I wasn’t convinced that it was a wall until we did a survey of the
whole line. It was too parallel. Too much of a coincidence. Possibly
the iirst stockade was too small when the population expanded, o
and they had to build again much further out to give them more
space.’
I suddenly thought of old Kitty MacBeth and her tale. Her story
didn’t allow for an expanding population at all.
‘So after the survey, I organised a dig, just to see what was there.
Over the last few weeks we’ve taken off the top soil, and we found
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the shingle, which made us pretty certain that it was indeed man-
made. You don’t get shingle so near the surface there. It’s mostly
clay under a thick humus, then a good sandwich of sand for a few
feet, probably from when the peninsula was first formed, and then
a layer of river stones before bedrock.
‘The presence of shingle meant that it had been churned up a
long time ago, but not as long as it had been since it was laid down
initially. There wasn’t anybody about here at that time, not unless
they could have lived under two thousand feet of ice, that is.’
‘Shingle doesn’t sound like normal wall-building material,’
Jimmy said.
‘Yes, you’re right of course,’ Arthur said, brightly. He turned to
me with a smile: ‘If I could only persuade Jimmy to come and work
with me I could get him a bursary, you know. He knows more
about archaeology than my graduates, I’ll swear.’
‘Is there anything you don’t know'?’ I asked Jimmy. ‘You’re a
one-man book of knowledge?
‘I’ve just had more time than you to read the best books,’ Jimmy
said. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t enjoy it if I was paid for it. Hobbies are
for fun.’
‘What about your organ playing?’
‘Oh, that’s business. The church can afford it,’ Jimmy said,
chuckling. ‘If I get a better offer I’ll play the Apollo.’
‘I’m sure you would, you old rogue.’
Arthur was winding up for his next lecture, gulping his lager.
‘But today we found the definite proof. We’d dug down about six
feet with nary a sign of anything but the conglomerate of shingle
and clay, and then we hit the jackpot. It’s tremendously exciting.’
‘Well, tell us what you’ve brought up this time,’ Jimmy ordered
impatiently.
‘Bones,’ I said.
Arthur spluttered in mid-swallow, almost spraying the bar with
lager. He turned to me, amazed. ‘How the devil did you know what
I was going to say?’
‘Just a lucky guess,’ I told him. Jimmy was looking at me with a
strange expression. Arthur just stared.
‘Well, you’re perfectly right. That’s just what we did find. And A
the remarkable thing about it is that it’s unlike any other burial site
I’ve ever worked on.’
‘It’s a burial site, then?’ Jimmy asked.
‘We’re pretty certain it is, but as I say, it’s like nothing else
before. This one is an upright grave. The body was bound with
reed ropes and buried standing up. It’s in a remarkably good state
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of preservation. Almost every bone is intact and in its proper
place, probably because of the dry cementing quality of the clay. In
fact, there are still some remnants of clothing which will give us a
fair idea, I’m sure, of what our friends were wearing all those years
ago.’
Arthur stopped in his headlong rush and took his inevitable gulp
of lager.
‘But the strangest thing is that not only was our neolithic chappie
buried standing up, but his head was not where it should have
been. It was there, all right, but not attached to the neck.
‘It was carefully placed on his feet, facing forwards. Don’t ask
me why, but it was obviously a decapitation before interment.
Never seen anything like it before in my life. Wonderful.’
There was the inevitable pause. Arthur was wildly excited, and I
could tell that Jimmy was interested. ·
I watched the two of them, and I felt a shiver. A cold wind played
up and down my spine. It was a warm and sultry evening in our
indian summer, and for me alone it was suddenly overcast as a
great dark cloud came creeping up the iirth and settled right over
me, casting a pall of gloom.
Jimmy and Arthur started talking, but I was miles away. Their
voices seemed to recede into the background. Instead, I was
hearing old Catriona O’Mac Connor MacBeatha, old Kitty
MacBeth, gripping my hand and telling me about the four walls.
‘A wall of water, wall of stone, a wall of wood and a wall of
bone}
And when Arthur had been about to tell me what he’d found
under the ground on his archaeological dig at Ardhmor, I had
known, without any uncertainty, what it was.
Arthur had found and breached the fourth wall.
‘The MacC0nn0rs and the MacBeatha have always had a watcher
0n the sh0re, t0 ensure that at least 0ne wall remains until they came
back wh0 can kill the Cu Saeng for ever in this earth and send it
back. ’
The strong voice came back, clear and sharp, right into the
centre of my head.
The tingling in my spine remained. I hadn’t given too much _
thought to what the old woman had told me. It was a legend.
But I was beginning to get a little bit uneasy at the succession of ·
coincidences. Things were a little too pat.
The world was beginning to get a little blurred at the edges. I
wasn’t sure at all what was happening. I wasn’t sure at all that
anything was happening.
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But I sure as hell was beginning to get a bit edgy. I didn’t like that
feeling of unease that was trickling its fingers up and down my
vertebrae.
‘Have another pint, Nick,’ Arthur said, nudging me with his
elbow and bringing me back to the here and now. I accepted and
soon we were back in conversation, but my brain was still giving me
muted alarm signals that I couldn’t quite fathom out.
Suddenly, I had the feeling that I wished Arthur had gone and
dug somebody else’s cemetery. I didn’t care too much for that
thundercloud that was hovering just at the other side of my
consciousness.
Long after Arthur had gone home to his flat in Glasgow’s West
End just off the university campus, and I’d strolled along the tree-
lined street to Jimmy’s house where I’d seen my old friend quietly
ensconced in his living room, I had some time to think things over.
Something was going on that I couldn’t figure out, something that
was making me uneasy. I couldn’t write worth a damn. I couldn’t
even order my thoughts properly, which was not true to character.
Yet when I’d taken Barbara and Paddy for a picnic on Loch
Lomondside, only twelve miles away as the crow flies, the ideas
kept bubbling up like a hot mineral spring. Out there in the fresh
air and sunshine, I could feel the creativity I knew I had, welling up
and overflowing. When we came back over the black hill and along
the Kilcreggan Road to Arden, they all leached away like soil on a
hillside under a steady drizzle. I didn’t even notice it, taken up as I
was with Barbara’s conversation. It was only when I got back to my
house and sat down to order up all those ideas that I found they’d
disappeared again.
There were a few more things I thought about as I strolled along
in the dim twilight. I was in a state of puzzlement, unsure, unsteady
and certainly unready.
Certainly, I was unready for what happened next.
I wakjed round a corner into the main street, the continuation of
Kilcreggan Road through Westbay, and came almost smack into
Badger Blackwood. Even then I still had to think and stop myself
from calling him that to his face, although Colin wouldn’t have the i
sense of self to mind. .
Colin pulled himself up short just before he crashed into me and
knocked me to the ground. He was breathing fast and heavy,
obviously with exertion. An inch or two taller than me, but a bit
heavier, Colin would have been a heartbreaker with the ladies, but
for his childhood accident. Even the two lines of white that had
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grown in along the deep lacerations that had raked his scalp almost
from brow to nape would not have seriously detracted from his
face. He had a wide forehead and black eyebrows and deep dark
eyes that would have set hearts a-flutter. But there was nothing in
the eyes. They were all but empty; stupid, docile eyes. The boy had
been a devil-may—care, quick-witted adventurer. The man that he
had become was a baby.
At first he didn’t recognise me. He just stood there, panting and
trying to mumble some apology or whatever, not certain which
way to go around me.
‘Hello Colin,’ I said, raising a hand up to his shoulder. His chest
was heaving.
Recognition dawned, if dully. ‘N-N-Nicky. It’s them!’ he wailed
loudly, and jerked his hand behind him. I could see some figures
coming along the street at a fast walk.
‘Who?’ I asked, trying to calm him down. ‘What’s the matter‘?’
‘Th-them. People,’ he stammered.
‘Hey you,’ a voice came out of the gloom between the street
lamps. I still couldn’t make out the faces.
‘Come here, you big daft bastard,’ came the voice. Harsh and
vicious, and full of drink.
Colin tried to push past me, but I stopped him.
‘It’s all right, Colin. Everything’s OK.’
‘You stupid big fucker. I’m going to kick the shit out of you,’
yelled the voice, closer. Colin’s chest started to heave again in a fit
of panic. ‘You hear me? I’m going to batter your thick brain in.’
I looked over Colin’s shoulder and saw four people just coming
into the light. I could have guessed. Billy Ruine and his brother
Tommy, along with two young layabouts from the Milligs. They
were in their early twenties, a mean little bunch with the kind of
low—life spite that seems to always be prevalent in small groups in
small towns.
The four figures loomed closer.
‘Well, well. Look who it is,’ Billy Ruine said. ‘Fuckin’ local
hero, eh?’
I stepped around Colin, who iiattened himself up against the
wall, trying to make himself disappear into it.
‘What’s the problem, Billy?’ I asked, trying to sound calm and I
reasonable.
‘No problem for me,’ Billy said. He was a lean, mean little guy,
maybe a couple of inches smaller than I, built like string and wire,
with a narrow face and a wide mouth with a gap where he’d lost a
tooth. The last time I’d seen him he was holding his nose and
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promising revenge after I’d straight-armed him. ‘Big problem for
you, and your thick—as—shit pal,’ he said, and one of the other guys
hovering behind him sniggered.
‘I don’t think we need any of this. Why don’t you go and pick on
somebody else?’
‘Because that stupid bastard got right up my nose. And you get
right up my nose. All right?’
I turned to Colin who was still backed against the wall, his face a
picture of fright and bewilderment. ‘Let’s go home, Colin.’
I had just started to move when I felt a hand on my sleeve. I spun
round quickly and dug my elbow under Billy Ruine’s ribs and there
was a fleeting satisfaction in the bellow of air that whooshed out. It
was a lucky hit, but there was no point in hanging around to see if
my luck would hold. The odds were against it.
The three others gathered around Billy who was still trying to
suck air back in again, so Colin and I took advantage and ran down
- the alley. From behind us I could hear yelling voices. Almost at the
end of the alley, and heading towards the turn that would take us
down to Elm Street, I heard that Billy had got his voice back.
‘Get the bastards. I’ll kill them. I’ll fuckin’ murder them,’ he
shrieked. Right in my ear I heard Colin whimper in terror.
Then from nowhere something hard came out of the night and
hit me smack on the back of my head and everything went straight
into slow motion.
There was a shock of pain and I started to pitch forward towards
the wall just ahead of us. I remember a sudden instant wave of
nausea as my knees gave way from under me. There was a sound of
clanging in my ears and the other sounds, the thudding of our feet
and the shrieks of the enraged Billy, faded away along with
everything else — I took a long dive into darkness.
In the dark, faces loomed up at me coming out of the shadow and
ilickering in a grey light then fading out again. Processions of them.
I saw:
Andy Gillon lying in the mud under the fallen tree on his farm.
His eyes were locked into mine, but they were white and wide
and dead. The tree gave a great lurch off his body and everything
that was inside him spilled out into the marsh, blue and green and
red and purple, twisted and torn ropes that writhed like snakes and
made a horrible slithering, sucking noise. They coiled and looped I
with a life of their own. Too much, too many. Gillon’s eyes opened
wider and wider; huge eyes with nothing in them, staring straight
into mine and I couldn’t turn away. The glistening slimy ropes
slithered around him like slimy bonds and there was a smell like
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vomit. They piled up and around, binding his upstretchedtarms
and coiling around his silently screaming mouth, and then they
started to pull him into the mud. I could see his hands opening and
closing like talons as they disappeared into the marsh and he was
gone, leaving nothing but bubbles that oozed to the surface and
burst sickeningly.
I turned and I saw Edward Henson — who I recognised although
I’m not sure I had ever seen him before — walking down the farm
lane, with no hands at the ends of his shredded arms. He looked at
me and his eyes were white, and black blood spurted from the rags
he had instead of elbows and wrists. He walked towards the mound
and the ground opened in front of him and a thing of bone and skin
crawled out. It had no head. And all the time, I could hear the deep
breathing from behind me, a rasp of dry leaves.
Grandfather said: ‘You’ve been a bad boy Nicky. A bad boy.’
He towered over me and his eyes were white and the smell of his
breath was foul. He raised his walking stick high and brought it
down on the back of my head and made the world spin with my
pain.
‘Give me back the stick you made,’ he roared and the wind took
him and his voice and blew him into the darkness of Ardhmor.
Barbara screamed a long scream and I saw fire and a huge bird
with a beak like a dagger, and then Colin and I were standing
holding her hand on the bank of the stream when the big strange
man in the fur cloak stuck the butt of his spear into the soft earth
and disappeared.
‘Come back,’ Colin yelled. ‘Come back}
‘. . . Come back to us, have you?’ Kitty MacBeth said, and for a
horrible moment I was still in the depth of a dream.
Light was in my eyes, causing needles of pain that orbited on the
inside of my skull and set off bombs way at the back where the
sickness bubbled. I tried to sit up and the nausea started to foam.
‘No, just lie back and rest,’ she said, and put a cool, surprisingly
soft hand on my forehead. Her face was a blur.
‘You’re all right. You’re in your own home,’ she said. ‘You’ve
had a sore bang on your head.’
‘What happened? How did I get . . .?’ Y
‘Wait until you’ve had a drink,’ Kitty said. ‘I think you’ll
probably live. I put a compress on your head. The bleeding
stopped a while ago, but you’ve been concussed, I shouldn’t
wonder, and you’ve got a bruise the size of a cushie—doo egg.’
‘Billy Ruine. He was after Colin,’ I said, and braved the needles
to sit up. I was in my own bed in my own room, which swayed just a
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little as I moved.
‘Where’s Colin? What the hell happened?’ Recent memory was
still in a fuzzy world.
She made me drink a large glass of cold water which made me
feel slightly better than hellish, but not a lot.
‘I sent him home last night after we put you to bed. He’s all right,
poor soul,’ Kitty said.
‘He says somebody threw a rock at you. Lucky you’re not dead.
Could have knocked your brains out, and then where would we
be?’
‘I remember Ruine and his mates chasing us, then something hit
me. But how did I get here? And how did you get here?’
‘From what he tells me, he picked you up and carried you.
Somebody came out of one of the houses when they heard the
racket and chased the others off. I met Colin just at the end of the
street, still with you slung over his back. I had to stop him, for I feel
he would have kept on going until morning.’
‘And what were you doing out here at that time of night?’
‘That must be one of those coincidences,’ Kitty said. ‘I was out
looking for my cat. Maybe I shouldn’t have, for the walk up from
the point has taken it out of me. But look, I’ve thrown the crutch
away and put on a smaller splint. I think the old leg is knitting
together well. I’ll soon be out and about like a spring lamb again.’
At the side of the bed were two walking sticks cut from branches,
like the one I had made for my grandfather.
‘Should you really be walking about yet?’
‘Probably not as far as I did tonight, but the exercise is good for
me, and I have to get myself in shape again. There’s work to be
done, and I need to be walking to do it.’
She looked at me with that wild, piercing stare. ‘What was all the
trouble about anyway?’
‘Oh, Billy Ruine’s been giving Colin a bad time for a while now.
I just tried to get him away. Something hit me, and then I woke up.’
I didn’t mention the dreams.
‘Well, you’ve been thrashing about and shouting at the top of
your voice as if all the devils of hell were after you.’
‘Maybe they were. Concussion’s a bugger. My head feels as if it’s s
been pulped.’
‘You’ll heal. You’d better. I need you,’ the old woman said
matter of factly. ‘We all do.’
I phoned Barbara in the morning, just to let her know what
happened, and probably looking for a bit of sympathy too, but
there was no reply. I was hoping she might come down and
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minister to me while I bravely suffered. I had to make do with Kitty
who hobbled all the way from the point about mid morning and
shushed away my concern for her healing leg.
She forced me to drink something that tasted like liquid bramble
jam with cinnamon which, despite being a witch’s brew, was the
nicest experience of the day so far. Whatever it did, it also brought
back my appetite, and within the hour I was on my second plate of
Scotch broth. Despite the sticks, Kitty worked quietly and
efficiently with an economy of movement, although she favoured
the damaged leg. She didn’t say much either. I’d only met her once
before, really, that day down at the point when she’d told me all
those strange things, so I didn’t know that much about her either.
When she saw I’d finished the soup, she took the plate away, and
somehow made it downstairs, which I shouldn’t have allowed.
Then she came slowly back up again. There was a pause after six
slow steps, then she must have eased herself over the seventh,
because there was no creak. When she came into the room she
looked at me and said: ‘You wanted me to miss it. So I did.’
I had no reply to that. Kitty sat on the bed for a minute then she
asked me if I’d thought about what she’d told me down at her
shack. I told her I’d thought some, but it was all a bit mixed up and
fantastic so far.
‘You’ll be thinking more about it, then when you’re ready, I
want you down to my place, so I can tell you some more,’ she said.
‘I found my cat. It was on your front doorstep when I got back}
‘Must have followed you,’ I said.
‘I don’t think so. Some of it was on the doorstep. Some on the
grass and some on the pathway. It’s been torn to pieces.’
I was about to say something. Some platitude or whatever you
say to somebody who’s just found their pet ripped to bits, but Kitty
didn’t let me.
‘Before you say it’s a coincidence, it’s a message,’ she said.
‘From who? I mean whom?’
‘Ah, you don’t listen, do you? It was torn apart by some animal
and left where we would see it. That’s what happens you know.
Anger and hate and violence is coming. You have to be protectedf
I sat forward quickly before I remembered about the pain
involved in sudden movements. Whatever Kitty’s brew had con- I
tained, it certainly helped dull the pain. A
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I remember what you
told me the other day. About Ardhmor. But what’s that got to do
with your cat?’
‘The cat’s nothing. I don’t keep familiars. It was just a stray that
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wandered in last year and stayed the winter. I looked after it and it
kept me company, that’s all. But now it’s dead, and in your garden.
And I’m in your house. It can’t get out because of the walls, but it
sends out its hate and infects.’
‘Who does‘?’
‘Cu Saeng. The sleeper. It made the dogs kill the cat to let me
know it wants you. It wants revenge.’
‘For what?’
‘For what was done to it. For the binding. And for what you did.’
‘What the hell did I do?’
‘You stopped it?’
‘When? And how?’
Kitty sat at the edge of the bed and stared at me.
‘You’ve a lot to learn, you know. And little time to learn it in.
Listen to me, and I’ll tell you something}
I leaned back against the pillow and Kitty told me about 1961.
She told me how the summer had started warm and sultry and how
Hugh Henson — father of the boy I’d dreamed about- had ended
up under his plough with his hands cut off. And there was the dog
iight down at the Milligs when the terriers had gone mad and
ripped one of the men to death. And there were fights and
accidents and a suicide. There was the herd of cows that had gone
off the top of the cliff and Langcraig. There was a bad summer
where everything seemed to go wrong.
‘And then it stopped. You stopped it with the girl and the boy. It
stopped on the night we took you from the jaws of that rock, and it
has been gone ever since.’
‘But I don’t remember a thing about that.’ .
‘Maybe you don’t. But Cu Saeng does. That’s what I’ve been
trying to tell you.’
‘Look, Kitty, I feel as if I’m caught up in one of these farces. I
haven’t a clue what’s going on. I remember the legend you told me,
but it’s all Greek to me. This Cu Saeng. This spirit. What is it
supposed to be, anyway?’
. ‘Cu Saeng. The ravener. It is a hunger, a hate. That’s what it is,
and all your computers and radios and televisions won’t change
that. I told you how they raised it, and how they bound it with the .
walls.
‘But I have to tell you now that the walls are wearing down. The I
Cu Saeng gets stronger and its force reaches out. It reaches for you.
It will twist and turn everything against you. Watch}
Kitty smiled, but it was no smile at all. ‘Already you’ve taken a
blow. And so have I. That is the start.’
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‘Those walls you were talking about,’ I said. ‘The water, stone
and wood and bone . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘One of them’s down.’
‘What?’ Almost a gasp. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I was speaking to the professor who’s doing a dig there. You
were right. They did find bones where you said they had been
buried. And there was no head.’
Kitty’s eyes blazed blue.
‘Fools. Damned fools. And damned more than they know.’ She
put her head in her hands and rocked backwards and forwards.
Then she stopped rocking and looked up. ‘That’s what’s made it
stronger. It reaches out.
‘You had better get better, and soon,’ she said. ‘I think you are
going to need all of your strength.’
Over and over, parts of what Kitty said came back to me, chipping
away at my natural scepticism. The more I thought about it, the
more I came to believe that something was definitely wrong.
Cu Saeng. The Ravener. The Sleeper.
I wasn’t convinced. But I knew the old woman was convinced,
and despite local rumour she seemed pretty steady on her feet, no
matter how strange her tale.
But some spirit? Some age—old monster trapped by cave men? I
don’t think I was quite ready for that yet. I’ve covered stories in
South America where healers claim they have taken tumours out
with their bare hands. I couldn’t disprove it, so I can’t say they
don’t. On Haiti I was shown a horrible something that a contact
swore was a zombie. I couldn’t say, one way or the other. I believe
there could be a sasquatch or a yeti or whatever, and I don’t laugh
too loud at people who believe in the Bermuda Triangle although I
don’t subscribe myself.
But a monster spirit? Here in Arden? In the modern electronic
eighties?
I would need more to go on before I put my money on it.
I thought about the dreams that were still scaring me out of
sleep. I thought about Andy Gillon and what he said to me as he g
spilled his life out in front of my eyes.
I recalled with a shudder that horrific thing that I had imagined,
the one that looked at first like my grandfather.
And I thought of that night down on the rock when the wind was
blowing the rain hard into my face and the bramble and dog—rose
thorns had gripped and clung.
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I seriously considered the possibility that good old Nick Ryan
was quickly and quietly cracking up altogether.
Then I spent a couple of days reading through the wealth of
Jimmy Allison’s work on his history of Arden. That did me a whole
lot of good.
On Thursday morning I woke up out of a dreamless sleep.
Sometime in the night a whole lot of the information I had churned
around in the past couple of days had settled itself into some sort of
order.
I decided I wasn’t cracking up. I wasn’t exactly sure I knew what
was happening. But I knew there was something awfully bad going
on around here. And I knew that for some reason I was part of it.
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