mirror of
https://gitlab.silvrtree.co.uk/martind2000/booksnew.git
synced 2025-01-12 13:05:08 +00:00
397 lines
22 KiB
HTML
397 lines
22 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
|
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
|
|
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
|
|
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
|
|
<head>
|
|
<meta name="generator" content=
|
|
"HTML Tidy for Windows (vers 14 February 2006), see www.w3.org" />
|
|
<title>Chapter 28</title>
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="imperaWeb.css" />
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" type=
|
|
"application/vnd.adobe-page-template+xml" href=
|
|
"page-template.xpgt" />
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
<div id="text">
|
|
<div class="section" id="xhtmldocuments">
|
|
<h2>28</h2>
|
|
<p>Young Danny Cullen was sitting on the ground just outside the
|
|
gate when Jack and Ralph Slater got to the forge. His face was
|
|
ash-grey and he was puffing continuously on an unaccustomed
|
|
cigarette. Fergus Milby was talking to a man in a tweed jacket and
|
|
a loud tie who was wearing a bright yellow hard had that made both
|
|
policeman think of Votek Visotsky's head rolling along the bloodied
|
|
tiles on the floor of the car accessory store.</p>
|
|
<p>"It's the bodies," Fergus told him. "Me and Danny found them.
|
|
Just wee babies, and the smell would kill you." The words came
|
|
tumbling out. He did not look quite so ashen as his apprentice, but
|
|
you could tell he'd had a shock.</p>
|
|
<p>Jack took it a step at a time, he got the men's names first of
|
|
all and then he asked what he'd seen and where.</p>
|
|
<p>"Up there," Fergus pointed. "They're in the chimney. Four of
|
|
them at least. It gave young Danny a right turn. Nearly pitched him
|
|
off."</p>
|
|
<p>Jack looked up and his heart sank. <em>High places</em>. There
|
|
couldn't be anywhere higher than that in the whole town.</p>
|
|
<p>"Shit," he said, not quite under his breath. "How the hell do we
|
|
get up there?"</p>
|
|
<p>"Oh, it's all right. We've got ladders up the side." He pointed
|
|
out through the gate and Jack took a few steps outside to see where
|
|
he was indicating. The spindly aluminium steps hugged the bricks
|
|
all the way to the top, narrowing ever closer in diminishing
|
|
parallax of distance.</p>
|
|
<p>"Oh great," he muttered. "Bloody terrific. You'll have to come
|
|
up with us."</p>
|
|
<p>The man nodded. Jack took off his coat and slung it in the back
|
|
seat of the car. Fergus Milby have him a webbing belt harness,
|
|
showed Jack how to clip on the safety catch and explained that it
|
|
would move up along with him, but would lock if he dropped. Jack
|
|
remembered it all from his teenage days, the last time he had
|
|
climbed with a rope. A jittery nerve danced behind his knees and
|
|
for a second he felt physically sick.</p>
|
|
<p>"Don't worry," the other man tried to reassure him. "That cable
|
|
can hold three tons. You'll be safe as houses."</p>
|
|
<p>Fergus went on up the ladder, taking light, easy and confident
|
|
steps. Jack stood at the bottom, took several deep breaths and
|
|
began to follow him, keeping his eyes fixed on the brickwork inches
|
|
in front of his eyes, not daring to look elsewhere. About forty
|
|
steps up, he was sweating so badly his shirt was soaked and beads
|
|
of salt water were dripping into his eyes. Despite that he slowly
|
|
climbed upwards, unable to force his hand off the rung and wipe his
|
|
eyes, risking only the quick movement needed to grasp the next one
|
|
up. At just over a hundred feet, though as far as Jack was
|
|
concerned it could have been two miles, all noise below faded away
|
|
to a faint hum. There was a slight wind and the metal treads,
|
|
chilled by the breeze were cold on his hands. Beneath him he could
|
|
hear Ralph Slater's laboured breathing. At that moment, Jack knew
|
|
that even if he decided to quit, he couldn't get back down beyond
|
|
the scene-of-crimes man. There was nothing for it but to continue
|
|
upwards towards the top of the chimney.</p>
|
|
<p>Finally, without any warning, the brickwork in front of his eyes
|
|
disappeared and a fresh cold breeze blew into Jack's eyes, causing
|
|
them to spark with tears. He blinked them back, still gripping
|
|
tight to the rungs of the ladder. Out of the corner of his eye, he
|
|
could see the river snake away to the north, a silver band between
|
|
the grey banks and for a second the world zoomed in and out of
|
|
focus while he rose the crest of a rush of vertigo.</p>
|
|
<p>"No bother," Fergus Milby said. He had unclipped his safety line
|
|
and was standing, with incredible casualness, halfway round the
|
|
chimney. "Come on up."</p>
|
|
<p>Jack heaved himself onto the top edge. For a second his hand
|
|
refused to relinquish its grip on the rung, and it took a great
|
|
effort of will to make it move. Finally he reached and grasped the
|
|
edge of the bricks, feeling the tips of his fingers try to dig
|
|
right into the hard surface. With infinite care and with enormous,
|
|
gut-wrenching trepidation, he eased himself on to the top and sat,
|
|
holding on with both hands, one leg inside the chimney, the other
|
|
out, each heel jammed against the sides for extra purchase.</p>
|
|
<p>Then the smell hit him and took his mind off the appalling
|
|
height.</p>
|
|
<p>"That's the first one we found," Fergus said. He hunkered down
|
|
beside the little tatter of cloth and pulled a piece back. The
|
|
baby's parchment-like face seemed to be screwed up against the
|
|
cold. Jack knew it was just dessication. The fluids had leached out
|
|
of the body and the wind had done the rest.</p>
|
|
<p>He risked a sideways turn and looked down the shaft. The
|
|
afternoon sunlight only illuminated about ten feet then faded to
|
|
blackness. It looked like a huge well. On the opposite side, he
|
|
could see a piece of metal which had been bent down then pulled up
|
|
again to form what looked like a butcher's hook. Something larger
|
|
than the two bundles was suspended from one of the spikes. Even
|
|
from where he sat, Jack could see the matted hair and the outline
|
|
of a chin. A grey hand hung down there just in the twilight between
|
|
daylight and shadow. Below it, he was not sure, but he thought he
|
|
could make out a leg.</p>
|
|
<p>Ralph clambered up beside him and patted him on the
|
|
shoulder.</p>
|
|
<p>"What a view, eh?"</p>
|
|
<p>Jack nearly fell off.</p>
|
|
<p>"Bloody hell, Ralph. Take it easy," he bawled.</p>
|
|
<p>"Okay, chief," Ralph replied cheerily. "You'll have us both off
|
|
if you don't relax."</p>
|
|
<p>Jack did not reply. He merely pointed at the thing hanging down
|
|
from the spike.</p>
|
|
<p>"Oh dear Lord," Ralph said softly, but with great feeling. "How
|
|
in hell did they get up here?"</p>
|
|
<p>Jack sat motionless, looking at the body on the far side and the
|
|
smaller one close by, hanging next to a small thing that looked
|
|
like a shrivelled skinned rabbit, but which he knew was not. The
|
|
sickening dread of falling had been replaced by an entirely
|
|
different emotion. For a while he forgot that he was perched nearly
|
|
two hundred feet above the town on the huge chimney stack.</p>
|
|
<p>Five pitiful bodies. Three babies and a young boy and a teenage
|
|
girl.</p>
|
|
<p><em>High places</em>. Lorna Breck had been right. Michael O'Day
|
|
with his mad eyes and his stuttering voice and shaking hands had
|
|
not been wrong. This was one of the high places. This is where it
|
|
had brought them. As he sat there on high, with the wind now
|
|
blowing across his face, Jack Fallon stopped thinking of
|
|
<em>who.</em> There was no face to be put on this killer, no
|
|
prints, no previous convictions, at least none that were on any
|
|
police computer. Whatever had scaled this tower with no ladders,
|
|
hauling the dead and bleeding bodies of these babies and children,
|
|
could not, surely, have been human.</p>
|
|
<p>Jack slowly eased himself round on the flat. Across the roof of
|
|
the forge was the green open space on this side of the river where
|
|
the three housing blocks stood shoulder to shoulder. Latta Court
|
|
had been the first. Little Timmy Doyle had gone missing from there.
|
|
Whatever had scaled the wall of the flat, climbing up from the
|
|
ground or down from the darkened roof, had brought the little baby
|
|
down from that height and come scrambling up here with its victim
|
|
to impale it on an old lightning spike. Out beyond the flats, where
|
|
the river took its turn past the tidal basin and swung into the
|
|
saltwater estuary, the bulk of Castlebank Distillery loomed close
|
|
to the rock where the castle sat. Carol Howard had gone up in the
|
|
lift shaft, dragged up by something that had made her screams echo
|
|
up to her workmates outside in the corridor, terrible screams that
|
|
had made women burst into tears and grown men shiver. Just beyond
|
|
it hunched the Castle Rock, where Annie Eastwood had walked the
|
|
parapet and dived to spread herself on the butcher's blocks of the
|
|
basalt rocks below.</p>
|
|
<p>Just across the river, beside the railways bridge, the old
|
|
warehouses huddled, derelict and shabby. Jack could see the square
|
|
opening on the gable wall where the hoist had still worked when he
|
|
and his pals had stolen pigeons. The jig still jutted out, though
|
|
the pulley rope had long since rotted to tatters. Lorna Breck had
|
|
seen it, the night Neil Kennedy had gone missing. She'd seen
|
|
something come down from the dark and snatch him up like a rag. In
|
|
that nightmare vision, she watched the thing scuttle in a black
|
|
blur towards the opening in the wall. Jack tried to visualise the
|
|
scene at night. Had it clambered across the railway bridge? Swung
|
|
on the electricity gantries? It had brought them here, the five of
|
|
them.</p>
|
|
<p>Something jarred at his memory. He closed his eyes to
|
|
concentrate, and it came right to him. The three boys who had gone
|
|
missing from the parts store were not here. He did a quick count.
|
|
Five bodies. Three babies, a child with matted and dirty red hair
|
|
peeling in strips from a dented skull, a girl hanging from a spike
|
|
that had impaled her under the jaw and come out at the temple.</p>
|
|
<p>Jack rhymed them off in his head. Carol Howard, Neil Kennedy,
|
|
Timmy Doyle. Little Kelly Campbell. All present and correct,
|
|
battered bloodied, torn, but all here. And one other. One more
|
|
little scrap, dangling down into the maw of the chimney, spiked
|
|
through its skinny little chest so that it was hunched and
|
|
contorted.</p>
|
|
<p>There hadn't been another child. Nobody had reported one
|
|
missing, and in the last two weeks, every mother whose boy was five
|
|
minutes late in coming home from school or who dawdled on the way
|
|
back from the corner shop was on the phone to the station, half
|
|
hysterical with worry. A fourth baby meant another huge problem
|
|
among all the rest of the troubles which crowded in on him like
|
|
melancholy mourners at a funeral.</p>
|
|
<p>As he sat and stared at the suspended shapes, Jack suddenly got
|
|
a picture of Julie, lying among the shards of glass in the shop
|
|
window, blood pooling out underneath her, eyes glazing over,
|
|
moveless, lifeless. He saw in his mind's eye the spike of glass
|
|
she'd landed on, driven through her back, through her heart and out
|
|
in the centre of her chest, just under her breastbone. She'd been
|
|
impaled, just like these dead and mouldering children.</p>
|
|
<p>No pain, Lorna had said, and of a sudden, Jack Fallon believed
|
|
her completely. She'd seen it, seen it through him when she'd taken
|
|
his hand in hers.</p>
|
|
<p>And what would she say now? Had these babies felt no pain?</p>
|
|
<p>He thought not. Little Timmy Doyle, wrenched form his pram so
|
|
violently that the leather straps had snapped. Tiny Kelly Campbell,
|
|
snatched from her mother's arms by something that had come down a
|
|
wall and hit her so hard it had smashed the bones of her face. And
|
|
she'd fought for her child, fought with the desperate ferocity and
|
|
courage of a mother against something so powerful it had killed her
|
|
with a blow. Neil Kennedy, whose blood had been found in congealing
|
|
puddles, slowly soaking into the dry wooden beams of the old
|
|
warehouse. It had come down and taken him like a spider does with a
|
|
fly on the web. It had plucked him from the stairs and
|
|
<em>climbed.</em> Had the boy felt <em>no pain</em>? And Carol
|
|
Howard, screaming in the lift, her shrieks of anguish and terror
|
|
diminishing as she was hauled up the shaft while her blood had
|
|
sprayed over the cables. Pain and devastating terror were what she
|
|
had felt. There was no doubt in his mind.</p>
|
|
<p>And there was also no doubt, right in that instant of clarity,
|
|
that he would find it. No matter what it was, man, beast or goblin
|
|
or whatever, he would catch it and he would stop it. He would catch
|
|
it as an offering to these babies, these children, who were hung up
|
|
like sacrifices in the well of the old forge chimney.</p>
|
|
<p>Then it came to him in a flash, the mental picture he'd formed
|
|
when she'd described where the thing went. Looking down into a
|
|
well, with the fires below. This was the place, this was the well.
|
|
Down there, even in the gloomy winter-afternoon daylight, he could
|
|
see the flares of the forge glowing red through the windows. No
|
|
wonder she didn't recognise this place. At night, looking down, it
|
|
would be like a vision of hell.</p>
|
|
<p>Fergus Miller went back down the ladder for a length of rope and
|
|
some bags. It took him half an hour to get back, and the light was
|
|
beginning to fade quickly. Ralph took as many pictures as he could,
|
|
crouching on the lip of the chimney with a casual ease that alarmed
|
|
Jack.</p>
|
|
<p>"I don't understand it, Chief," he admitted. "How the hell did
|
|
they get up here?"</p>
|
|
<p><em>It climbs</em>. The words seemed to echo in Jack's mind,
|
|
repeating themselves over and over again.</p>
|
|
<p>"And why here? What's the point?"</p>
|
|
<p><em>It feeds.</em> That's what Michael O'Day had said. It had
|
|
brought these bodies up here and hung them up, like tidbits in a
|
|
hellish larder. The little form lying on the flat had been savaged.
|
|
Something had ripped it from the neck, and below the jagged gash,
|
|
there was little left but strips of torn flesh. The other one, a
|
|
very cursory appraisal had shown him, had been gutted. Strips of
|
|
skin peeled back from a gaping space where the belly had been.</p>
|
|
<p>Jack did not want to tell Ralph any of what he was thinking. He
|
|
regretted telling Cowie about O'Day. That had been a tactical
|
|
error, because it had taken him long enough, too long, to begin to
|
|
come round to believing that what he was hunting was not human, but
|
|
something conjured up, however it had been done, however
|
|
preposterous it sounded, on the night that Marta Herkik had held
|
|
the seance in Cairn House. Cowie had gaped at him as if he was mad.
|
|
Even a reasonable man would have shied away from the notion.</p>
|
|
<p>Now Jack's problem was in deciding what to do about it. His
|
|
choices were limited to one.</p>
|
|
<p>Fergus Milby popped his head over the edge. "They had to get
|
|
this rope from the post office," he said, slightly out of breath.
|
|
"The engineers use them for pulling cables through the pipes," he
|
|
explained. He clambered onto the lip, unslung a big haversack and
|
|
started pulling a plastic bag out. For the next half an hour, the
|
|
three men wrapped the bodies, the babies first, into the bags and
|
|
lowered them down the side of the chimney. Jack watched as the
|
|
black trussed shapes diminished from view to the waiting people who
|
|
milled like ants at the base, beside the winking blue lights.
|
|
Finally, with some effort, they freed the body of Carol Howard. It
|
|
was a hideous task. Both Jack and Ralph had to work to free the
|
|
head from the spike, twisting it this way and that until they could
|
|
draw with limp weight upwards. The smell was thick and poisonous.
|
|
Finally the metal hook drew out with a wet, scraping sound and they
|
|
laid the girl down on the bricks. One of her legs was gone. A
|
|
ragged mess of blood, gristle and bone shards lay in the crater
|
|
where the girl's hip had once been.</p>
|
|
<p>The two of them quickly wrapped her in a plastic sheet, tied the
|
|
ends and looped the sling of rope around her. They dropped her over
|
|
the edge. It took a long time for her to reach the ground.</p>
|
|
<p>The journey from the top of the chimney stack was less nerve
|
|
wracking than the ascent. The hot anger twisted inside Jack and
|
|
cauterised his fear of heights. He'd seen murder victims aplenty.
|
|
He'd been there on the moors when they'd dug up the bodies of drug
|
|
dealers, and he'd been to many a low-life tenement in the city to
|
|
find a glare-eyed corpse in a pool of blood and vomit or trussed
|
|
like a chicken in a bath. The anger had come on him then, many a
|
|
time, but not the way he felt it as he slowly lowered himself, rung
|
|
by rung down the spindly ladder on the great forge chimney while
|
|
the winter wind snatched at his jacket and the watery light began
|
|
to fade from the sky. The pitiful bodies, hung like carcasses in a
|
|
butcher's shop, torn and mutilated, had brought up emotions he'd
|
|
been holding down for a long time. For the first time he felt a
|
|
strange mixture of pity and admiration for Lorna Breck. There was
|
|
no doubt now that she was seeing these things. For some reason he
|
|
could not quite understand, she was tuned, like a radio, to the
|
|
thing that was taking children up to the high places to spike them
|
|
on the old lightning forks. They had died from this, and she was
|
|
living with it.</p>
|
|
<p>He was half-way down the chimney when a thought from the far
|
|
past came back to him, way back in the sixties when he was just a
|
|
small boy in short trousers, catching sticklebacks in the mill-burn
|
|
that drained out of the water meadow into the river, or spearing
|
|
flatfish down on the salt flats in the estuary.</p>
|
|
<p><em>Twitchy eyes</em>. That's what they'd called him, the crazy
|
|
man who had killed the boy in the back room of Cairn House all
|
|
those years ago. He'd abducted a girl in Eastmains, raped her and
|
|
left her for dead up beyond Corrieside where there was a
|
|
tree-filled glen, now long since cleared to make way for the
|
|
encroaching housing schemes. The memory brought a strange twist of
|
|
apprehension in Jack that had been long dormant. Then, in that hot
|
|
summer, every child was scared of the man with the twitchy eyes
|
|
whose crudely drawn image had stared, like a character in an old
|
|
murder movie, from the posters in every school. He'd taken another
|
|
small boy out on Westerhill where the trees tangle down the hill
|
|
towards the shoreline and he'd smashed his head with a half-brick
|
|
and kept on hitting him, so the story went, until nobody could
|
|
recognise him as human. All summer there were organised picnics and
|
|
play schemes, something the town had never had before. Mothers
|
|
banded themselves into child-watching teams. Many kids were kept in
|
|
and around their homes until the schools went back.</p>
|
|
<p>Then it had simply stopped. Police found an old couple dead and
|
|
fly-blown in a croft house up on Blackwod Hill on the far end of
|
|
town. They'd been shot at close range with a twelve bore shotgun
|
|
and left to rot in the tiny front room. That was the last of the
|
|
killings in that year. The tracker dogs had scoured the moors up as
|
|
far as Langmuir Crag, but the killer was long gone. He never killed
|
|
again, as far as anybody knew. Later on, when Jack had been in his
|
|
teams, his father had told him he thought the man had probably
|
|
wandered up into the tarns of the moor where there were floating
|
|
bogs which went down forever. Maybe he'd fallen into one of them,
|
|
or maybe he'd gone up into the hills and blown his own head off.
|
|
The killings had stopped, but Jack Fallon remembered the strange
|
|
feeling of threat he'd felt when any stranger looked at him in the
|
|
street. He remembered the wrench of anxiety as he scanned the
|
|
stranger's face to ascertain whether this one had
|
|
<em>twitchy-eyes</em>. Whether this was the one who would reach out
|
|
and grab him and hit him with a half-brick until nobody could tell
|
|
if he was human.</p>
|
|
<p>He remembered it and his anger grew. There were enough dangers
|
|
for children. There were trees to fall out of, things for kids to
|
|
swallow and stick in their throat. There were pans of boiling soup
|
|
to scald them and fires to burn them. There were cars to run out of
|
|
control and smash them through shop windows to impale them on
|
|
knives of glass. These were the hazards, these and many more.</p>
|
|
<p>But it was different when someone, or some-thing was out there,
|
|
deliberately stalking children, snatching them away from their
|
|
mothers and their homes and carrying them off to impale them in
|
|
dreadful ignominy in a dirty chimney tower. He thought of the
|
|
families whose lives had been ruined, the mothers and the fathers
|
|
and the brothers and sisters, a whole chain of anguish and choking
|
|
misery and he felt the heat of the anger boil inside him. By the
|
|
time his feet touched the ground, he was almost speechless with
|
|
rage at this <em>affront.</em> He didn't even supervise the loading
|
|
of the trussed plastic parcels into the wagon. He left that to the
|
|
squad of men who had arrived. He got straight into his car and
|
|
drove away, hands gripping the wheel in strangle-grips.</p>
|
|
<p>Lorna Breck called from behind the door when he rapped the
|
|
knocker. When she heard his name, she opened it almost immediately
|
|
and when she looked up at him, she gave him a tired smile and held
|
|
out her hand. He took it and she led him through to the
|
|
kitchen.</p>
|
|
<p>"You're worn out," she said.</p>
|
|
<p>"No," he replied with some irony. "I'm as fresh as a daisy."</p>
|
|
<p>She let go his hand, but kept smiling. Her wide grey eyes looked
|
|
him up and down appraisingly.</p>
|
|
<p>"You've had that same shirt on since the last time I saw you,
|
|
and your trousers are covered in dust. You need a shave and a
|
|
shower," She wrinkled her nose as she spoke, and he felt
|
|
uncomfortable under her scrutiny.</p>
|
|
<p>"And you have something important to tell me."</p>
|
|
<p>"I do," he agreed. "And I will if you make me a coffee, hot and
|
|
strong, but first I want to ask you something."</p>
|
|
<p>"Of course I will," she said, crossing to thumb the switch on
|
|
the kettle. "As long as you don't mind instant." Jack shrugged.</p>
|
|
<p>"Tell me. The other night when you were describing the place it
|
|
goes, could you tell me again."</p>
|
|
<p>Lorna's face sagged. She came forward and leaned her hands on
|
|
the back of the chair on the other side of the table.</p>
|
|
<p>"You've found them, haven't you?"</p>
|
|
<p>"Yes. By sheer luck, if you can call it that. They could have
|
|
been there for years."</p>
|
|
<p>"In the tunnel, or the well?"</p>
|
|
<p>"In a chimney. One of the two on the other side of the
|
|
river."</p>
|
|
<p>"Damn!" she hissed. "Damnation. I didn't think. Yes. That's it.
|
|
I can see it now. But who would have thought?"</p>
|
|
<p>"I know. I couldn't think either. You gave me a clue once, when
|
|
you told me about the Kennedy boy. I remembered it from my
|
|
childhood. If you'd grown up here, you would have known where it
|
|
was."</p>
|
|
<p>"It's all unfamiliar to me."</p>
|
|
<p>"I know. It's not easy," Jack siad. "You were also right about
|
|
the bikes. It took three boys last night. I should have called you,
|
|
but it was very late."</p>
|
|
<p>"You should have called anyway. What happened to the boys?"</p>
|
|
<p>"They broke into a hardware store down near the allotments at
|
|
Rough Drain. It must have been there, or come in after them. One of
|
|
them got away."</p>
|
|
<p>"The one who hurt it?"</p>
|
|
<p>"Yes. He put a drill in its eye. He told me it wasn't
|
|
human."</p>
|
|
<p>"But you know that," Lorna said intensely.</p>
|
|
<p>"I'm finally beginning to believe it."</p>
|
|
<p>"So what are you going to do now?"</p>
|
|
<p>"I don't have a clue. But I think I'll need your help."</p>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|