booksnew/source/darkvalley-source/C1.txt

<h2>1.</h2>

<p> July 27.. . </p> 
<p> "His ghost hangs around here," John Corcoran said. "I heard it was seen, plenty of times. They say it creeps about in the mist coming off the river. This place gives me the willies."<p> 
<p> "Me too," Doug Nicol said. "I was told he calls out to other kids. He wants to drag them down there." Doug  twisted his face into a snarl and held one hand up in front of his face, fingers clawed but drooping. "Like the monster from the black lagoon."</p> 
<p> Everybody looked at Doug who was leaning against the trunk of the old elm tree that sprawled across the grass, an old giant that had given up the fight against a winter gale and had dug great gouges in the turf in its dead fall. Doug was running the blade of his knife under the bark, twisting it hard to break off chunks of powdery wood. He nodded as he spoke, showing his big, prominent teeth. The sun was shining through his equally prominent ears, tinting them red. "He hates being down there on his own."</p> 
<p> "That's rubbish," Billy Harrison snorted. He blew out a grey plume of smoke and then let two tendrils curl down from his nose. This was a trick he had spent a lot of idle time mastering in the summer and it made him look like a big shot. Most of the time the smoke rose up and went into his eyes and everybody laughed while Billy spent the next while blinking back sudden tears. This time it worked just fine and Billy raised himself up to kick his heel against the bare root of the toppled elm. </p>  
<p> "If he wanted company, he'd drag them up to the graveyard, wouldn't he?" Billy looked round, challengingly. There was a moment's silence while they all thought about it. </p> 
   <p> "No," John Corcoran contradicted and if it had been one of the others, maybe there could have been a bit of pushing and shoving because Billy was quick off the mark when it came to taking offence. "It would be his ghost. They always go back to where they died, trying to get back into the body. I read that once, so it's true. They don't know they're dead for a long time, years even,  and that's why they haunt the places where they died."</p> 
<p> Danny Gillan shivered and said nothing. He was sitting up on the sprawled trunk, his feet almost level with Billy's head.  Billy nodded agreeably and blew two smoke rings in quick succession, making his jaw work like a fish to get the effect. The rings rolled in the air and played hoops with a rootlet before breaking up. "Maybe that's it, Corky, just maybe," he conceded. "I bet you wouldn't come down here at night."</p> 
<p> "Not when the mist comes off the river." Tom Tannahill agreed vehemently. "You never know what's in there. It creeps like it's alive."</p> 
<p><em> "Gives </em> you the creeps," Billy said and laughed at his pun. </p> 
  <p> Over at Drumbeck Hill, a mile, more like two from where the boys were idling, beyond the double hump of the looming rock and the castle ramparts that rose above the flat mud of the estuary firth, a puff of smoke came billowing out from the crater where the quarry  had dug a great scar into the side of the hill. Eight seconds later the booming rumble of the explosion came rolling over the town and across the black, fast water of the river. </p> 
<p> Danny Gillan shivered again and though none of the other boys noticed, his eyes had taken on that flat look of someone whose attention is far away. </p> 
<p> "Just like when they were looking for the body," Corky said, running with his story. He was goopd at that. "Remember? I thought they were firing cannons from the castle to raise him up. I read that too. They  fired cannons over the water when they got a man lost overboard. In Treasure Island. The noise brought bodies up to the top." </p>
<p> "Like, wake them up, you mean?" Doug asked. Corky shrugged. </p> 
<p> "It wasn't the quarry," Danny said quietly, not looking at any of them. His back was turned and he was facing across the river towards the rising plume of smoke and rock-dust. Over the distance came the heavy rumbling thunder of falling stones as the payload slid down the crater. Danny's eyes were now focused closer however, fixed on the quayside on the other bank of the river where the low tide had left a man-high slick of greasy algae and where the seagulls wheeled and squalled over something rotten among the mud and old tyres beside the mouldering ribs of some long-dead boat. </p>
<p> "It was a bomb. The one they found up in the reservoir up by Overbuck House." </p> 
<p> "What a cracker," Doug nodded, remembering. "Smashed nearly all the windows up in Corrie Street, and a big boulder from the dam came right through McFarlane's barn roof like a <em> meetcherite </em>  comet or something. You should have seen the hole it made." Doug was grinning, showing most of his big rabbit teeth. </p> 
<p> "They blew it up all wrong," Billy said. The bomb was an old story, from way back in spring and that was ancient history. A lot had happened since that spring. "I heard a flock of Barrie's sheep got such a fright they went crazy and took a header off the cliff on the Langmuir Crags. </p> 
<p> "An' I heard...." Billy told another rumour they'd all heard a dozen times since the spring, but never tired of repeating. </p> 
<p> "But Paulie came up, didn't he?" Tom Tannahill asked. "Just like that book Corky was telling us about. Must have wondered what was happening up there." </p> 
<p> "Yeah." Doug laughed and held his hands up on either side of his mouth. "Hey, who's making all the noise," he said, in a voice that wasn't quite ghostly enough. </p> 
<p> Danny Gillan shivered again and not from the cold. The sun was high, beaming through the thick umbrella of leaves on the limes and elms that had weathered the winter gales and the air was thick with pollen and the sleepy high-summer buzzing of bees. He lowered his eyes from the skeleton of the dead boat and looked down into the black turbulence of the river. The sun reflected bright from the rippling water, spearing right back into Danny's eyes and in that instant the other boys' voices faded away and he was back in the springtime, on the far side of the river, on a day cold and sharp enough to make your eyes water and scrape the inside of your nose. There had been no leaves on the trees then, only buds sill tight-wrapped on stark branches and the big fallen elm showed redwood circles on the truncated ends where the council's parks department workers had chainsawed the massive branches that had fallen across Keelyard Road. </p> 
<p> "Who's making all the noise?" Doug mimicked a dead boy and Danny saw it unreel again in his mind. Who's making the noise? <em>Who? </em></p> 
<p> He'd been there when Paul Degman went down into the water, tumbling with the current. Danny was glad he hadn't seen Paulie Degman's eyes, for that would have made the nightmares so much worse, but still, he swam  and rolled in his dreams, drawn under the surface by a desperately strong hand clutching for rescue, clawing for life.  He'd been almost there, almost at that very spot on that very day. </p> 
<p><em>  It could have been me! </em>  The thought reverberated again and again, a boy's sudden comprehension of sudden, permanent end. </p> 
<p> Paulie Degman was thirteen, just the same age as Danny and while they came from different parts of town - Danny lived up on Corrieside where the municipal housing scheme petered out against the cleft of the gully and gave on to farmland - they knew each other. Paulie was a down-town boy, who lived in one of the gaunt old tenements that backed on to the river. This had been his playground, the alleys and closes of the quayside, the cobbles and old capstans where boats had tied up when the quay had bustled, back in history. He'd played here all his life and it had killed him, while Danny had come playing here one rare spring day and he'd stayed alive. </p> 
<p> Danny remembered the scream. Some other kid had been playing there too, heaving rocks at the gulls they'd tempted down with old crusts from Christie's bakery.  The sound had cut into his consciousness and frozen him in the act of hefting the stone he was aiming at a beer bottle bobbing along on the current. Over the space of the months since spring - and everything that had happened in the town since then - Danny was never sure why that sound had frozen him to the quick. There had been some quality to the cry, some urgency that had snaked into his nerves and set the hairs prickling under his woollen tammy-hat. He'd turned quickly and the high screech, so like the fighting gulls, had been joined by the frantic cry of a woman, somewhere high up in the sandstone tenement close to Barley Cobble.  The stone had dropped from his hand and bounced glassily on the kerbstone at the edge of the harbour. </p> 
<p><em>  "Jesus Christ get back...." </em>  Shouts, hoarse and urgent and somehow riven with shock. </p> 
<p><em>  "Oh mister it's Paulie he's in..." </em> panic in the voice of a small boy, closer now as Danny Gillan followed the strange and terrible magnetism in the air. </p> 
<p> A clatter of feet,  seggs and hob-nails staccato against the cobbles. </p> 
<p><em>  "Oh sweet mother of god it's my..." </em> a woman's prayer in a voice that said she didn't yet believe. </p> 
<p> Big John Fallon the sergeant running the length of the quayside, leaping over a jumbled pile of bricks from the old boatshed that had collapsed in the frost of winter.  He was stripping his tunic as he ran, hat flying off to roll  alongside him for a few seconds. His white shirt flapping where it pulled out of his blue serge trousers. </p> 
<p> Paulie Degman had fallen into the river and he'd gone down in the fast black current and his boots had got snagged  on something. </p> 
    <p><em>  And that was the worst of it, </em> Danny Gillan knew. Paulie hadn't collapsed and banged his head. He hadn't been hit by a big red bus going hell for leather round the corner from the old bridge to slam him against a wall and kill him stone dead in the blink of an eye. He'd gone down in the water and he'd got stuck and he must have fought and cried and hauled for breath and all the black silt had gone down his throat and he must have coughed out all of his air. Of all the million ways to go, all the hundreds of thousands of ways for boys to die, that was just about the  worst, with only one exception young Danny Gillan could think of.  You could fall off the big fan-shaped cliff up on Langmuir like Neil Kennedy's big brother who fractured his skull or you could take a header from the overhang under the castle ramparts down onto the flat basalt slope of eagle rock. You could climb one of the high tension pylons that strode  over the hill from the power station to Barloan harbour and get fried to a cinder, so they said, to a crisp. You could slip on a rope swing and twist your neck in the noose and be gone before you knew it. You could even die in your sleep like they said in the prayers,  <em> if  I should die before I wake. I pray the Lord... </em></p>
<p> But drowning... </p> 
<p> Paulie had gone down in the river and he'd drowned. In a couple of minutes, Danny, casually walking towards Barley Cobble, targeting the bobbing bottle, would have got to where the boys had been chucking stones and he'd have joined in the fun, making it a team effort, enjoying the company and the contest, the way it always is with boys. He'd have seen Paulie heave his rock, one of the shards from the brick-shed, hurl arm over shoulder, seen him slip on the slick algae at the edge, take a tumble, arms outstretched, a yelp of surprise blurting before he plunged in like one of the big spring-run salmon going up the weir. </p> 
<p><em> Except Paulie was going down... </em></p>  
<p> Danny had seen big John Fallon come thundering down, scattering the pigeons feeding on the spilt grain from the distillery wagon. They had gone clapping into the air in a flutter of panic while  Danny's heart had been fluttering inside him and the very air had been charged with a dread tension. </p> 
<p> "Out of my way," the policeman had roared. <em> Owramawae!</em> Like some charging clan chief, the words crammed together but as eloquent as any cry and somehow crystal clear. A cart of firewood went tumbling as his boot caught it. John  leapt over a cringing dog, reached the quayside and launched himself into the air. Everything about the moment was fixed in Danny Gillan's mind. He could see again the arc of the big sergeant's dive, perfect in every way. Arms straight out, shirt tail flapping. Two rowing boats were anchored just out from the side, a two-man span from the wall. The tide was in, and running high though the downward current was still fierce from the melt rains, but there was still a six-foot drop to the water. The policeman went between the boats with hardly a splash - and if he'd hit either one he'd have broken his neck for certain. He went straight under and disappeared. Black ripples shivered outwards and the boats rocked on the surface. </p> 
<p> The boy saw all this from  the other side of the loading stair where the old grain barges used to park in days gone by.  Forty yards ahead a crowd had gathered, atoms drawn together by the magnetism of death. Two men came down in a boat, rowing hard to cut across the current, backs bent with strain on the downpush.  The screaming woman had reached the bottom of the tenement and she was running down the uneven cobbles, one shoe on and one off.  Another splash, this one huge and there was a second man in the water. John Fallon had disappeared under the surface. Danny knew him. The policeman sometimes came round the school if there was ever an accident, or maybe a spate of shoplifting at Woolworth's, the kind of thing which always peaked before Christmas (and wasn't it an amazing thing that mothers always lost the knack of arithmetic when they unwrapped presents pocket money could never have bought?) Fallon was a decent enough big fellow. His son Jackie was only a few years younger than Danny and the two boys sometimes knocked around together. </p> 
<p> A clock inside Danny's head was ticking off the seconds. </p> 
<p> Another man jumped in red haired and red faced. It was Paulie Degman's uncle Peter who drove the cleansing wagon that hosed down the drains and sucked up the crap inside them. </p> 
<p><em> Come up, come up.  The words came of a sudden, with their own beat, like a metronome. It was for the boy and for the policeman both. </em></p> 
<p> The water erupted. John Fallon came splashing up, hauling for breath, his face smeared with thick river-bottom clay. He gasped once, twice,  and then went porpoising down again. A siren came hee-hawing  along River Street and its tone changed as it came fast as it could down the narrow scrape of Rope Vennell. Above it, up close to the shadowed back of the old tenement building, on the roof of the outhouses behind Cairn House,  something flashed and glinted, a piece of metal or a shard of broken glass, catching the low light of the sun.  It sent a white needle of light into Danny's eye and he screwed his eyes tight for an instant against the sudden glare.  When he opened them again, the light was gone.  Danny stopped and held onto the railing at the only part of the quayside where the council had fixed a safety barrier. Something made him turn away from the scene and look down into the water where sun glinted on the tumbling surface. The red wall of the distillery vented steam in a shriek of heat and a cloud passed over the sun. Down in the depths, something white moved. Danny's heart kicked like a mule and his throat clicked in a dry spasm. Something down in the depths  of the water rolled over. </p> 
<p> It could have been anything. It really could have been anything, a bundle of leaves, a piece of old rag, a discarded newspaper. Anything. </p> 
<p> But for weeks after that, for months after that, in the dark of night as spring turned into summer and brought with it its own strange and terrifying days, Danny Gillan  saw the bloodless face of Paulie Degman as he tried to claw his way to the surface. </p> 
<p><em> "He came up, didn't he?" </em></p> 
<p> Danny's daydream  imploded and he came reeling back to this present. </p> 
<p> "It could have been the bomb. What a blast. Like that Jap place." Doug's face was animated. </p> 
<p> "Hirohito," Billy said. </p> 
<p> "Naw, couldn't have been," little Tom Tannahill disagreed, shaking his head. "That was the atom bomb. It would have knocked the whole town flat. It was one of the five-hunner pounders. They say if it had hit the shipyard the whole place would have gone up like a rocket." </p> 
<p> "Probably meant for the dummy village," Corky said. "That's where most of the bombs went." </p> 
<p> Danny forced his mind away from the river and thoughts of the drowning of Paulie Degman. In a way he  too was drowning. In their own way, all of them were, in this town on this strange and heavy summer. Mention of the Dummy Village had helped knock his mind off the dismal track. </p> 
<p> "They say it's still standing," he told them. "Like a ghost town." </p> 
<p> "Nah. Must have been blown to bits during the war," Billy said. "It was like the dambusters up there on the moor." </p> 
<p> The war was twenty years gone and done but it was still close enough for each of them to remember the backlash. <em>Eat that and be grateful, you couldn't get it during the war. </em> Austerity of a sort lived on for a while longer.</p> 
<p> "Has anybody ever been there?" Danny asked. </p> 
<p> "My brother said he and a couple of fellas went up to have a look," Corky said. "But the place is guarded. Commandos or somebody. You can't get in, and if you do they can shoot you. It's the law. They've got the right." </p> 
<p> Corky looked at them all, with a grin on his face. "But Phil's a lying toad. He couldn't find his arse with both hands in broad daylight." </p> 
<p> Billy Harrison had just taken a deep draw on his cigarette. All of the smoke came out in a rush with his first bellow of laughter and then he went into a helpless fit of coughing. The others fell about laughing and even Danny laughed so hard he lost his balance fell off the tree trunk to land with a thump on the short grass. </p> 
<p><em> That's how it all began.... </em></p>