Thirteen Ghost Stories

Š Keith Coleman 2018

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The Afterlife of King James IV Angus Folklore Blog Legends of the Scottish Kings The Ghosts of Glamis

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Email: keith.j.coleman@gmail.com

Contents A Lovely Shade of Nasty Green Bourtree and Broom FAQ Imagine Here, At Night Man of Clay The Plettie The Was Wolf Those Who Cut the Holly Tree Rubble Fleg The Pictures on the Wall On the Pier Learning Curve

‘Fleg’ first appeared on the McStorytellers website: ‘The Pictures On The Wall’ first appeared in All Hallows magazine.

A Lovely Shade of Nasty Green It was typical that Henry refused to accept a vintage racing car in British Racing Green that had been left to him in our uncle’s will. News about his obstinacy over the car was passed around the family well before we knew he would receive the bulk of the estate. Not that there was ever any doubt about the scale of his inheritance. He had been ingratiating himself with the old man for years in a stealthy way. But it was just like him to graciously accept a fortune and turn his nose up at one item he took a dislike to. It was out of the question that uncle would leave the car to any of the rest of us because we were all women.

Females and motor vehicles did not equate in his mind.

I suppose the women in the family (we were called ‘the witches’ by Henry) could have been accused of jealousy at being relegated to relatively smaller amounts in the bequest stakes. But I think the business was more of a convenient excuse for lambasting Henry, who had been the family whipping boy for years. He had bumbled his way into a fortune and undeservedly kept a hold of it after marrying and divorcing three inappropriate golddiggers. Through all his obvious mistakes he remained a pompous fool unable to admit that any way was right except his own.

In the fall out over the will the vultures had a good cackle about him trying to refuse the car (after they had moaned and bitched for weeks about the money). It transpired, entertainingly, that the uncle’s solicitors and executors were cussed sorts who dug their heels in and insisted that Henry must take the car, whether or not he actually wanted it. He was responsible for disposing of it himself afterwards.

‘Why won’t he just accept the car with good grace?’ cousin Jane asked. ‘You don’t hear me moaning about getting next to nothing.’

‘Well, you did get that cottage in Dorset,’ I told her.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Jane. ‘I forgot that detail.’

I repeated that I was not surprised that Henry had dug his heels in, but I was intrigued by the reason he refused. Apparently he refused to take the car because green was unlucky on account of being the colour of the Fairies and the Otherworld.

‘Outrageous attention seeking. Or he’s doolally,’ Jane said.

‘Well, he’s laughing all the way to the madhouse. He got the villa in Spain and a condominium in Florida,’ I countered. ‘Anyway, he was never weird or superstitious or whimsical or whatever. You expect travelling salesmen to have all these little odd superstitions, not a bona fide businessman.’

Her husband was an ex-salesman (amongst other things), so that comment shut her up for a short time. Then she came back with: ‘If it was me, and I believed what he did, I would just re-spray the bloody motor.’

‘It would still be green underneath.’

‘Yes, but who cares? Appearances are what counts in this world.’

‘What about other worlds?’

‘Mmmn.’ Jane usually insisted on claiming the final word, but in this instance she was beyond the limits of her imaginative comfort zone.

Two things happened close together several weeks later. The first was that I received a phone call from uncle’s solicitor. There had been an unfortunate discrepancy in my legacy.

I was too preoccupied with my divorce and moving house to give the whole matter any further consideration; in fact I had forgotten I had been left anything at all.

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said to Mr Rodgers. ‘There was an administrative cock-up and I shouldn’t have received anything?’

‘Not at all,’ he said, bless him.

‘Or I actually owe the estate something?’

No, it wasn’t that, because there had been an inconsistency with the figures and the amount I was due to receive was not in copper money but several thousands of pounds.

Through the dizziness I was aware of asking Mr Rodgers to marry me. Thankfully for both of us he announced that he was already attached.

One of my first thoughts, when I had digested the news, was whether this turnaround in fortunes would seep into the tribal consciousness. Jane had a sensitive nose for rumour and was instantly aware of every development in each branch and crevice of the family. So I decided to tell her myself before she spread around a fantastically inflated version that I was now worth millions. But I could tell from her voice there was something wrong from her voice when I called her a few hours later. She did not seem the least bit interested in my reversal of fortune.

‘I’ve been conned,’ she whispered to me.

‘How so?’ I asked.

‘I don’t really understand what’s happened. Bloody Henry – the little shit – has persuaded me to keep that horrible inherited sports car at my place. He said he didn’t have space at his own house, which is an absolute lie, come to think of it. There’s about five outbuildings behind his house. They came and delivered the car and put it in the double garage when I was out. But they changed the garage locks without asking me.’

‘That’s a bit odd,’ I said.

‘I tried to get in touch with Henry, but he’s gone off to the States with his latest bimbo.’

I made sympathetic noises in between mouthfuls of doughnut.

‘And there’s worse,’ she went on. ‘I wish I hadn’t said anything spiteful about Henry being superstitious and believing weird things. There’s something in the garage with the car.’

There are times when you are thankful for your own forbearance, and this was one of them. Eight times out of ten I might have responded with some witty, sarcastic comment, such as saying there was a plague of madness infecting the family and I hoped it would not reach me. But I held my tongue and muttered a platitude and tried to tease out of her just what she thought was inside the garage with the beastly car. Was it a nest of rats? A stereo

system pumping out rap music? A big boxful of juicy twenty pound notes that she could smell through the garage walls? I put various serious and facetious suggestions to her, but she didn’t rise to the bait. She was uncharacteristically quiet.

‘It’s noise,’ she said lowly. ‘There’s sound inside, in there, with the car. I don’t want to say any more on the phone. Can you come over?’

I went over that afternoon and found her, very pale, hardly herself at all, sitting just inside her open front door, with a brush in her hand. She looked like an insane sentry guard.

‘Come with me.’

The garage was a separate block, enough for two or three cars, adjacent to the house.

The steel door was firmly bolted. It was slightly concave in the section where someone had bashed out the old lock and inserted a new one. There was an oblong aperture, letterbox sized, where you could look in, just above the lock and handle. I looked in and immediately wished I hadn’t.

The car was visible in the half light. I want to say that it was facing me, because that’s the impression of it I got. It was a low, open topped vintage model – 1940s or 1950s perhaps. Not that I know too much about these things. British Racing Green, as I said, with a roundel on the bonnet with a white background and the number zero painted in black. Facing me, I thought, because it seemed like the car moved position infinitesimally towards, as if it was organic. And a trick of the light made the paintwork seem to move in a slimy fashion.

I withdrew rapidly and almost bowled Jane over. She scuttled me back into the house, away from the presence, and locked the door. I was trying to process what it could possibly mean in my mind, but all I got was a lot of broken detritus flashing along on a conveyor belt. I recalled something about Brooklands, the old abandoned racing circuit, and wondered if the car had come from there. I had a vague memory that the place was

supposed to be haunted. Then there were a lot of half remembered images about the bad luck of the colour green.

‘The Battle of Arbroath,’ I said suddenly, and Jane jumped. ‘1446. The Lindsay family put down their defeat in the battle to the fact their tartan contained a bit of green, the fairy colour.’

‘Hardly helpful at all,’ Jane moaned, head in her hands.

It took us the rest of the afternoon to decide what to do. During that time Jane gave me a brief sketch of what she thought she had encountered. Although it was a bit weird, but I don’t think it was enough to justify her state of near hysteria. The first strangeness was sounds coming from the locked garage. Not the sound of car engines as she thought at first when she went down to investigate. When she pressed her ear against the door (being too scared at first to look through the aperture) she heard a low, rhythmic sound that was definitely human.

‘It was moaning,’ she said.

‘What kind of moaning?’

‘The unnatural kind,’ Jane said irritably. ‘You know, like someone enjoying themselves too much, in a certain kind of way. Or someone really not enjoying themselves at all.’

‘That narrows it down nicely.’

She ignored me. ‘Then I looked through that letterbox thingy.’

‘You never! Not by yourself, all alone?’

‘Don’t say it so sarky. I did, and you’ll never guess what I saw.’

‘Demystify me immediately.’

She had looked through the door and saw some shadows scuttle away into the deeper darkness as she peered in. Then she thought she heard a challenging sort of laugh. The darkness inside flickered, then there was a bit more light and the big zero had changed into this ghastly grinning skull head that was looking right at her.

There was an awkward silence where Jane sat, lip trembling, trying to assess whether I believed her or not. I got embarrassed and shrugged, then I asked her what she thought we could do about it. It was a mistake to say ‘we’ instead of ‘you’, as I was immediately enlisted as a co-conspirator. The immediate question was not the supernatural provenance of the car: Jane stopped me wondering out loud about that with a burst of hysterics. Nor was it important how much Henry knew about it, and what he had witnessed. We needed to urgently get the car back to him, or at least somewhere else.

‘You could break in and drive it over to his place,’ I suggested.

It was not a serious suggestion; more of a reaction to Jane flapping about and not coming up with anything constructive herself. She responded with a flood of abusive rhetoric, but no solutions unfortunately.

‘I shall have to move house,’ she said dramatically. ‘I can’t go on living with that just outside the door.’

I stayed with her that night, to keep her company, though it did neither of us much good in terms of providing peace of mind.

Uneasy spirits can be locked away as well as family skeletons. Half the battle, I think, is not driving yourself mental trying to puzzle out how or why something strange is happening, or where it began, or what it means. Most of life, like most of the afterlife maybe, means nothing at all. The next day I became frighteningly practical with my cousin. It was no good wringing our hands, or going through the yellow pages for exorcists, or whatever. The only thing we could do was refer the whole thing back – physically – to Henry.

Jane had a wide range of objections, but I was in no mood for any of them. The matter had taken up too much of my time already and I just wanted to go off on holiday somewhere and spend uncle’s money. Somehow we had to put the ball, or rather the car, back in Henry’s court. Apart from Jane’s hysteria, I was having trouble with my divorce

settlement, a matter which she had no reciprocal sympathy for. She had never liked my husband, and he blamed her spite for initiating the bad blood between us.

‘Who ever heard of a builder called Jeremy?’ she used to say slyly about him. ‘Builders should be called Fred or Pete or Mike.’ The way she shuddered as she said it made me want to hit her. Behind my back she used to make snide jokes about the fact that he came from a well-to-do background and had demeaned himself, and therefore me, by entering into a manual trade. Her favourite dig was that he had run away from his family’s accountancy company to become a bricklayer. But, for a good few years, he was laughing all the way to the bank. When the recession hit he was scuppered and so was my settlement. Jane totally loved his financial fall from grace of course.

God does not always smile on the unworthy, I found out when Henry returned from his trip to the States. While he was gone some pipes had burst in his house and caused extensive damage to the ground floor. There was a wrangle with his insurance company and they refused to pay out. He would have to fork out big time; my heart bled. Then I had an idea. Jeremy and I were still on fairly good terms, and he could do with the money, and was always up for a grandiose practical joke. On the other hand, Henry was a bit of a fiddler and jumped at the chance of paying for the repairs cash in hand without the VAT. All nice and underhand, so far. With Jane it was a different matter.

‘I can help you with your problem,’ I told her. ‘Or rather, Jeremy can help you, despite all the hurtful malice you’ve thrown at him over the years. Remember that he’s doing this as a personal favour, and you’ll be beholden to him. But you must go right against your grain and say nothing to anyone. Promise me, Jane!’

Her eyes narrowed and her lips thinned, but she was so far in a fix that I managed to break her down.

‘Oh my God, I’m going to jail,’ she wailed. ‘But I don’t have any choice. Do me a favour, just get it done and don’t tell me anything about it. I knew it would all lead to something horrible like this.’

I lost patience with her.

‘Be quiet, you silly cow,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s actually going to happen to you. Here’s how it’s all going to work.’

And, after I told her, she was lost for words for once in her life.

I kept an eye on the work that Jeremy was doing. There was some preliminary work at Jane’s: tearing down the garage and removing the offending object. ‘Sweet as a peach,’ Jeremy said. It was his favourite saying; no wonder I divorced him. But he was good as gold really. We made sure he did a quick job at Henry’s, but did everything thoroughly. I showed plenty of unaccustomed interest in the two weeks it was going on. Jane also did her best to distract him and even loaned Henry her flat for a few days while the building works were being tidied up.

Then all three of us withdrew our interest and kept our heads down for a while, and for good reason. Three months went by. I heard nothing from Henry and started feeling a bit jumpy. Could it be that he was planning some terrible, slow burning revenge because of what we did to him? I daren’t say anything about it at all to Jane because she went into instant panic-stricken mode when the subject was even hinted at. Denial did her good, though, because she was miraculously several shades nicer to me afterwards. She even got rid of her boring, smelly husband and humbly came to me for marriage termination advice.

I bumped into Henry’s girlfriend in the shops near Christmas. Or, she bumped into me, and said my name. She was so changed, I hardly recognised her. Last time I saw her, she was the regulation glossy blonde that would have immediately appealed to any man like Henry. But her appearance now was terrible different. Not only was there a careless undergrowth of grey and dark roots showing through the blonde, the whole state of her

previously glossy mane was like a tangled mess of briars. There were worry bags beneath her eyes. Her eyes were big and bleary and haunted.

We went for a coffee in the market cafe and Cynthia opened up to me. Everything had gone wrong between her and Henry since they came back from their extended American vacation. It was as if some unseen form of nastiness had crept into their house during their absence and was squatting in there, invisibly beside them. There had been nothing but arguments between her and Henry, and frankly she was on the point of packing her bags and going back to Lincolnshire.

I feigned the sympathy that she seemed to crave and pressed her for details.

Cynthia leant forward and lowered her voice.

‘There’s something unclean in the living room,’ she hissed.

‘Really?’ Jane would have loved this.

‘I don’t know how to describe it really.’

‘Try, lovely.’

‘Well, it started with a horrible smell, like seeping engine oil, then a musty smell of soil, or earth. Next came a waft of something rotting, just for an instant. The last smell is, well, I don’t like to say.’

‘Do say,’ I insisted.

‘It’s the smell of sex,’ she said. ‘If you know what I mean.’

I did know what she meant, but I didn’t ask. Fortunately, she continued with a further revelation. Henry had seen his ex-wife in the middle of the night, sitting on the sofa with a man. I had to struggle to think which ex it was, as he had so many. Cynthia gave me a full description, then I knew it could only be his first wife, Susan.

‘Yes, Susan, that’s who he said,’ she said. ‘Susan sitting on the sofa, stark naked, with a man, both of them at it, laughing.’

Some sort of racing driver fella, stark naked as well apart from his goggles. When they saw Henry there they barely stopped their carrying on – just looked up at him and laughed.

Henry kept on seeing them now, and he was afraid to go into the living room at night. But he could hear their cavorting from upstairs, taunting him. He was on the verge of a mental breakdown, and he had started being unkind to Cynthia.

‘So I’m off,’ she said petulantly.

‘I don’t blame you. Good luck, Cyn. I must go myself.’

I squeezed her hand and left. I really did feel sorry for her, though not for Henry. It had worked out well, our little plan. Jeremy had broken into Jane’s garage and had the haunted car crushed into a cube. Then he took it to Henry’s house and put it underneath the floorboards. The racing driver ghost seemed most happy there, especially when he latched onto the spirit of Henry’s first wife. I hoped they would all be very happy together.

Bourtree and Broom

Extracts from the kirk-session book of Pitfoglum: June 23, 1691: Because of the scandal of rumouring that the late minister of this parish is not deid, Ishbel M’Hendrie compeared befoir session. She answered not guilty, bot said her man’s sister Jonat Teerie had spread the samyn blatant falset and the hail land was pregnant wi siclike lies. Baith women are delated to compeir befoir next session.

April 15, 1692: The quhilk day compeared David Smith of Barneydykes, quha admitted informing Alex. Dowland that he had seen owre lamentit minr. Rev. Mungo Reed alive on the Tod’s Knowe ane morning, and that the minr. was in cumpany with Jain M’Bride, quha was burnit less nor ane yeir syne.

David Smith rec’d public admonition and is ordained to appear in kirk fower times for ane month dressed in coarse clothe to schaw his true repentance.

Extract from the records of Dundon presbytery: August 4, 1692: Jhon Tamson deponed that at a certane tym going to pasture with twa milch kye, he heard whilst passing the woods of Pitfoglum some stirring amid the trees.

Going to see what had caused sich commotion - which was as the greeting of some lost beast - he found ane child lying hiddlie in the busches. Quhen about to uplift it, ane woman appeared to him, saying, doe nocht touch her or I schall hold thee ill till ye perish.

Being feared, he departed, bot hearing lauchter behind, turned and saw ane man dressed all in black. This same figure called him by name, saying, Jonie, man, what gars ye cum to the gowstie places whar ye have nae richt concern? Hurry hame and ye wuld find your guidwife ill-using ye.

He deponed that he returned to his house and there found his spouse Alson in bed with his neebor Malcom Holland. This being so, he did beat the adulterers wi ane broom handel intill baith are now neir deid. The witness says he kens neyther the man nor

woman seen inside the woods. Yet we wuld have him return at ane future tym to test this knowledge further.

Extract from the fragmentary journal of the Rev. Mungo Reid, minister of Pitfoglum, 1690-1691 (Advocates MS. 197-26-31, National Library of Scotland): April 23, 1691: ‘This day, being at last of seasonable weather, I went for the first time through the hills which were hitherto blocked by snaw. I have received word there was discord among the upland people about the Restoration of the Kirk following the Revolution. Some here are supposed to adhere to the blasphemies of bishops and are staunch behind the former Royals. Maist of these high landes are bound to Lord Donaldson, that unhappie nobill sae prominent in the late Rebel actions at Dunkeld and previously. He has been reckoned absent since that time. Yet his name still halds universal respect here.

‘I made Balcarry House by noon and was attended by my lord’s factor Mr Harrison, who conducted me to various places thereabout. In ane puir hovel I speired the dwellers of the Commands and Beliefs, and they answered weill. I was pleased with what I saw, knowing I saw but little.

‘Mr Harrison stated that the bitter climate did much dampen spirits of all here, but wait till summer be full, then wald we witness ane fuller measure of mischief among the tenants. Summer is their great season for sinning, he assured me. I replied that any time is richt for sin if men own ane evil caste of mind. His followers laughed ower much at this, which I think was for fear of him.

‘Dinner in the House was spoiled by the attentions of Harrisons twa daughters. . . Tomorrow I go home, Christ willing.’

Next morning Mungo Reid was left alone in the drawing-room, the maid informing him that the factor had ridden off early and the two daughters were still in bed. The table was laden, but the minister did not savour the meal. After finishing he followed his discomfort

to two adjacent paintings on the wall. One showed a buxom, coarse looking woman a with pinched countenace, which made him hope that the artist was incompetent at aiming for a close likeness. The neighbouring work was by a better hand, and his inbred sympathies stopped him from believing that the person portrayed was innately superior also. It showed a great nobleman with an arrogant, sallow face and eyes like pale water jewels.

‘Lord Donaldson,’ the minister whispered, but said no more for fear further sound would break the repose of the atmosphere and something unbidden would join him. The rational reason for discomfort was the unfamiliar setting and the fact that both these dead figures, the rightful owner of the house and the wife of the current occupant, were known Episcopalians and apologists for the unlamented King James.

To rouse himself as he left he made a mock salute to the portraits, then retrieved his horse from the groom and retreated down the glen. In his haste to escape the shadow of the overhanging hills he treated the animal too eagerly and it reacted by diverting him across a burn and up into rough lands on the steep far side. All of his entreaties did not prevent the horse carrying him higher into the wooded hills.

When the trees thinned and they emerged onto a wide plateau the beast whinnied pitifully at his further whipping, and slowed down to a recalcitrant walk. After a long time crossing the faceless moor they neared a tumbledown cottage which was barren but for an old woman sitting in the garden by the dyke. She moved her lips and her yellow eyes to meet him.

‘My horse is done,’ he said. ‘Can I stay while it recovers?’

The woman did not speak; she made a whistling sound to herself which had an odd affinity with the rising wind. ‘This auld wife is either gyte or deaf,,’ Mungo thought, and watched with interest as a second denizen emerged from the house. This person, by contrast, was young and fair, with corn gold hair. While she stared, Mungo reasserted his request, trying to keep his tone level. The old woman veered her attention between them

both, then looked at the horse which was calmly consuming the withered greenery in the garden.

‘Dod, maister,’ she crowed. ‘Your cratur’s jist a rickle o’ banes in a hair-cloth sack.’

‘I have to venture to the kirk,’ Mungo said, ignoring her. The young woman looked at him again, her face leavened with pity, and she led him around the back of the house.

‘Ye can tak that in exchange,’ the girl said, indicating a pure white filly, which seemed to him like the wildest animal he had ever seen. He was going to decline, then noticed a singular challenge in her eyes, and before he knew it the horse was saddled and he was on its back.

‘What about my ain beast?’ he asked.

‘I will heal it and send it to ye,’ she answered, looking up at him. To cover his embarrassment he took a cold shilling from his pocket and threw it at her feet.

‘For your trouble.’

She gazed at the coin, then said gently, ‘That silver will cost ye dear, Mungo Reid.’

An inarticulate noise from her throat made the horse start across the moor. As he fled, he wondered if he had not become involved in more than a mere exchange of animals.

The reappearance of the minister on the snow white steed started talk in the kirk toun. It was said Mister Reid had swapped his own mount for a fairy beast. And there was something in his look and movements that lent credence to a meeting with those unmentioned Others. He kept to silence until Fergusson the beadle came round from the byre next morning and reported that the white creature was rearing up wildly. There was nae doot it was an unco baste, Fergusson added unnecessarily.

‘Henry,’ the minister warned, ‘the next fool that mentions fairy ponies in my presence will find himself locked in the branks before sunset.’

The beadle bitterly changed his subject. ‘Ye’ll be haen a full kirk the morn, minister,’ he averred. ‘Thae hill fowk will invade us now the road is clear.’

‘We shall see,’ the minister replied.

‘The ale hooses will be full tae,’ the beadle added, warming to the subject. ‘There will be trouble wi thae teuchters flytin an fechtin.’

Mungo sighed. ‘Ye forget, Henry, that Mr Harrison will be there. He will keep his tenants in order, I believe.’

‘Ye maun believe that,’ Fergusson said, ‘but thon wee lairdie disnae trail respect ahent him.’

At ten next morning Henry Fergusson tugged the rusty bell fixed in the kirkyard yew. Its cold clamour at first brought out only a few stray spinsters and drawn men, moths who had no other calling. Other villagers spasmodically appeared, and finally the reluctant, ragged throng from the glen. As the bell swung for the second time Harrison and his daughters stalked past importantly and the beadle slammed the kirk doors after them. He heard the precentor inside intone the psalm and the congregation respond: Help, Lord; for the godly man ceaseth; for the faithful fall from among the children of men.

After the singing subsided the beadle returned to his tree and hauled at the bell with the sobriety of an archangel calling the risen dead. He stopped to hear the minister pray. The words were faint, but the tone advised him to shudder. With the sermon underway two elders, David Smith and John Thomson, left the kirk and entered the village to search for absentees from the service. After scowling through the windows of a dozen houses they felt far enough from the kirk to relent. David Smith undid his collar and spat. John Thomson added a grin to his Sabbath face and inhaled a measure of snuff.

‘I doot we’ll find naebody the day,’ he said genially.

His acquaintance muttered. ‘Dod Greig was no in kirk,’ he said. ‘Nor was Eck Barclay.’

‘They’ll be drinking ootbye Powheid.’ Thomson smiled. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll gae there to catch them. We’ll best get a seat at auld Annie’s.’ He led them down a vennel into a low thatched cottage. ‘Only me, Annie dear,’ he shouted as he entered. He was answered

by a racking cough and scuttling movement from the bed in the corner. The room had a putrifying reek.

‘Whit d’ye want?’ the sick woman asked.

‘Jist the same as before.’ Thomson sat beside her and gave her a soft look. As she struggled into a semi-seated position, Smith noticed with disdain that most of her hair had gone and the remnant hung in two lank coils. Her eyes were the only things trully alive: two greedy coals of fever that sought to infect him with fear. But Thomson was evidently immune to the evidence of his senses. Without further talk he disrobed and climbed into the cot beside the dying woman.

The other elder went outside and retched. He only returned after a long interval and saw that the woman had sprawled back in the bed. Thomson was crouching beside her, laughing as he drank her ale. He handed a cup to Smith, then humourously chided Annie: ‘Ye should rise up and gang to the service. Your last practice for the final trump. Thon young minister would soon cure your ills, lass.’

But she was lost in her own waning world. ‘I’m no lang for this life,’ she muttered.

‘My time is coming.’

The men glanced at each other. Thomson tittered uneasily, then whispered, ‘Tell us the future, wumman.’ He dutifully placed two coppers beside her.

‘Guid,’ she rasped. ‘Ye are fixed to me now. Listen fast: the shadow’s brought the man to the vixen’s den. He will misthrive intill the fire has all. Watch yersels, guidmen, for ye will baith be touched.’

The elders finished the drink, left the house and weaved towards the kirk. As they crossed the Spynie Burn they saw a white beast streak past them. It was gone in an instant and they ran after it. When they were unsucessful in finding it they doubled back and reached the kirk as the congregation spilled out, then hurried on to the byre behind the manse and found a tense group there, including Harrison and Mungo Reid.

Henry Fergusson confirmed the white horse had bolted, but angrily denied it could have escaped up the lane past the kirk.

‘I had my ee on the road during service, an came back that way. I couldna have missed it,’ he said.

David Smith commented, but no-one chose to heed him.

‘There is something stranger,’ the factor said tersely to the elders. ‘Mr Reid’s horse is back in the stall and naebody kens how is got there. Will ye state whit’s behind this, minister?’

‘No here,’ Mungo said lowly. ‘Come into the manse.’

Once they were indoors he gave a halting, confused account of meeting the two women.

He did not know the name of either.

‘I believe it’s the two hellcats on Tod’s Knowe,’ Henry Fergusson stated.

‘What,’ Harrison exclaimed, ‘Grizzel McBride and that dudderon daughter, what’s her name?’

‘Jane,’ the beadle said.

‘Aye.’ The factor flew into a temper and swore he would drag the bitches off the braeside and cut them into collops. Mungo merely regarded him with distant incomprehension. It was left to the beadle to reply.

‘Na, man,’ he objected. ‘Such business is the lawful work o the Session. We will meet and send word to the Presbytery. Then we may tak the enchanters.’

‘Act fast,’ Harrison warned, ‘or I’ll find a fitting noose for their necks.’

After the group stalked off the minister seemed to dispel his dreariness. But his mood was still not to Fergusson’s liking.

‘The morn,’ the minister said firmly, ‘I will gae to Tod’s Knowe and see to this matter myself.’

‘Ye’ll dae nae such thing,’ Fergusson said. ‘Look at ye. Ye’re ower frantic tae preach this afternoon let alane journey the morn. Besides, ye have nae richt tae meddle wi them.

God help ye if ye fa in wi such company again.’

The argument was forestalled by Reid falling asleep in his chair, after which Fergusson returned to his own house. He was disturbed there later by a delegation of elders who wanter the women dealt with promptly. Henry Fergusson agreed, but when he suggested a party should ride up the glen next morning they were half-hearted. Only Thomson and Smith agreed to accompany the beadle; the first was motivated by a wish to escape his wife, the second by bald curiosity.

The trio were sombre and self-conscious at cock-crow as they rode on the north road out of the wide farm lands. All the way they were over shadowed by a flight of corbies which croaked black commentery on their progress. When they reached the turning for Tod’s Knowe a thickening of the air made them spur the horses up the final incline. Little of the moor could be glimpsed through a haar of acrid smoke and they became separated as they crossed it. Fergusson led himself into a peat hag full of brackish water and struggled to free himself. John Thomson was the first to reach the house of the McBrides. The old woman was seated quite still in the garden, but she screaming shrilly because her body was wreathed in grotesque flames. Thomson unthinkingly snatched a charred plank from the fallen door of the cottage and beat her body until both life and fire were extinguished.

Then he knelt and cried like a big bairn beside the ruins.

It took a considerable while before heat and smoke subsided and Thomson could see the devastation. The house had utterly collapsed on itself. He threw down the bloody wood he was still clutching, seeing there were six black raindrops painted on it; to the local peasants these signified the tears of the countryside for Lord Donaldson. In a state of near derangement he managed to staggger to the moor edge where David Smith was waiting with Jane Mc Bride at the edge of the woods.

Smith himself had stumbled halfway over the plateau when he froze. The cloud above him seemed one minute a feathered blackness brought on by a great gathering of carrion crows, and the next it was composed of pungent haar. Then the girl had found him and led him safely away. When they reached the safety of the woods, he tried to speak to her, but she was locked in a shocked daze and her face was transfigured by ashes.

Now the two kirk elders exchanged experiences in hushed tones, and Smith asked if they should wait for the beadle Fergusson.

‘Let him gang the best he can,’ Thomson said shortly. ‘But let us awa now. If we linger langer here oor senses will stray forever like this poor lass’s.’ Then they hasted towards Balmarry to alert Harrison.

Lizzie and Maggie Harison were found first and hurried them into the skullery, where they fluttered and fussed around the oblivious girl. The two men twitched by the door to catch Harrison when he arrived. True to form, when he entered a few minuted later, he ignored the elders and spotted Jane immediately, blurting out a damnation on whoever brought this wise-woman into his dwelling. It was an outburst that Jane also ignored. The two elders took some time in preventing him from hauling the unfortunate woman from her seat and throwing her outside.

‘There’s mair to this matter than your anger allows,’ Thomson argued, trying to mollify him. ‘What sense is there for believing that she would be in a league wi darkness when her ain hoose has turned to embers?’

Harrison snorted. ‘The Deil maun fool his ain servants as well as God fearing fowk,’ he said.

Thomson shook his head. ‘This needs the attention of the Presbytery as soon as possible.’

Eventually they managed to calm the factor and persuaded him to take a party of men into the hills to recover the factor and the remains of the old woman. When they went back to the kitchen they found the Harrison sisters engaged in an attempt to break the girl’s

trance with a dish of brose. ‘Oh, mister Smith,’ Lizzie Harrison said as they entered, ‘do ye not think she’s ower bonny for an instrument of Lucifer?’

Smith’s laughter covered a sarcastic comment from Thomson.

‘Nae mair pretty than you,’ he said. ‘And what does a braw face prove? Tak her upstairs and gie a fresh gown.’

‘I dinna ken that faither would approve,’ said Lizzie slyly.

‘We’ll settle wi faither later,’ Thomson said evenly, then chivvied them out. When they went he said to Smith, ‘Let us hope the bath is the last dookin the lass will endure.’

Compared to the Harrison sisters, Jane McBride was a picture of normality.

Harrison returned in the evening, pale as a gull. His men buried the old woman where she lay, with the dark birds lined up on the failed dyke watching them. Hours later they stumbled across Henry Fergusson, half buried in the peat, the clenched hands above his head full of feathers, and his face ripped open by something wild. They could not get his eyes to close.

Late the next morning Harrison and the elders roused the minister. He did not appear overly surprised to hear about the recent events, though he was perturbed by Fergusson’s death.

‘Puir auld Henry,’ he said lowly. ‘The callan was aye a friend and a trusty beadle of the parish. Have ye brought back the corpse?’

‘Aye,’ Harrison said narrowly. ‘But the auld wife was put under the moss up there, and I hope she bides easy there. The kirk-yaird is no place for her.’

Mungo Reid chose to ignore the challenge to his authority, or else he was too distracted to notice it.

‘The dead canna return fae the wilderness,’ Thomson said.

But the minister silenced him with a frown.

‘Where is the daughter?’ he asked.

David Smith answered, ‘She is locked up in my auld cellar, and I dinna mind saying I’ll be happier when she’s taen awa.’

Mungo Reid sat back and considered the situation. The others studied the shadows on his face. Thomson and Harrison read him darkly. Smith found the silence wind him up like a spring, and felt bound almost to let slip his sympathy for Jane McBride. But he diverted himself from folly by a flat comment about the warmth of the weather. Already, well before noon, the heat was abysmal. It grew hotter every day, and the creatures in the fields were beginning to suffer.

Finding no response, Smith muttered, ‘If ye ask me, I say it was the sun and no the devil started thon moor fire.’

‘Naebody asked ye,’ Thomson said. ‘Is it canny that such heat follows hard on the tail o winter?’

Harrison relieved the contemplation with a snort.

‘Mister Reid,’ he said. ‘We should send word to the Presbytery.’

David Smith nodded mechanically, then led them out of the house.

No-one appeared to notice Mungo slipping from the manse several days later, for they were busy keeping still: the township was beseiged and beaten by the sun. Entering the fields, he had the impression that they were responding to a sentinel silence and were morbidly alive, rather than the opposite effect in the deadened clachan. The growing crops were angled and motionless, not erect to heaven as might be wished, but abnormally aware. There was absolutely no sign of any living beast.

Beyond the derelict hamlet of Dunvare, where the English troopers had run bloody riot a generation before, the woods solemnly encroached. Mungo paused at the threshold of trees, where there was an old stone, which he took to be a thing of warning or protection.

On one faceit showed a vivid carved tangle of inscrutable animals and lost symbols. The other side leant towards the ground and was marked by a crumbling cross which someone had defaced long ago.

Mungo remained on this boundary between cultivated and wild land a long time before he chose which course to take. In one direction, splayed out and baked in the fierce light, lay the open track towards Barneydykes. The shorter path dissected the cool and quiet woods. While he waited he had a sudden notion, inspired doubtless by the heat, that something was following him, and it made him drop to his knees, almost as a dare, and mutter an idolotrous prayer to the stone. Then, ashamed, he leapt up and plunged into the fastness of the trees.

Soon the path matted over and his way was uncertain, but at the same time his body relaxed in the cool protection of the woods. A refrain from an old ballad rose up in his throat as a remedy for his solitude, and he sung it to hoarse accompanyment of the crows, unseen in the canopy above him: But I have dreamed a dreary dream beyond the Isle of Skye.

I saw a dead man win a fight and think that man was I. At last he filtered through the foliage and broke through to open land. There was just a single tree blocking his route, a bourtree huge and impassive, that seemed to be a guardian at the back gate of the woods, just as the stone warded the beginning. But this thing was of a different order and he found himself incapable of diverting his route to bypass it. There was something alive and moving in the branches of this tree, making them imitate the action of a wild wind. A screen of blossom floated down over him, then through the shower came a shadow. Now a man presented himself, or something that had once been a man, but which was now withered and rotten, arrayed in the rags of a richly elaborate costume. Its face had lost any features and devolved into a bloody mess.

Mungo opened his mouth to banish it, but he could no more speak than retreat. He could not move at all until he was ushered forward by the creature’s hand.

Thomson and Smith waited silently in the relief of the shadow cast by the wall of Barneydykes. Even here the fingers of heat reached out from the sickening, shimmering being as it moved along the strath. There was a further reason for their listlessness. An hour ago the second man they had sent out towards Dundon returned. The first man had gone missing, and this messenger did not find him, nor did he reach the town as his horse collapsed and died on the road. But on his way back he spied the minister near Pitfoglum woods. Mungo Reid had also been absent for many days. Yet the man was too afraid to approach the minister and ran to tell David Smith that Mungo Reid was walking on the road towards his farm. Smith skelped the laddie for being daft, but this produced no more sense. All the servant would say was that Mungo had a deadly, weary feyness in his gait and paid no heed even when the boy threw a light dockie at him.

A long time later, after they strained the skyline with watching, Thomson whistled shrilly and pointed to a hazy distortion making way through the barley field. The men saw it resolve into the figure of Mungo Reid, seeing as he approached that his clothes were dusty and ripped.

‘Ye’re ower lang overdue,’ Thomson muttered laconically.

When Mungo turned to face him he saw a fresh scar standing vividly out of the white flesh on his brow. His eyes were full of the passage of dread.

‘I was hard-pressed elsewhere,’ the minister said, moving towards the farmhouse door.

Smith ventured a step forwards to block him, but Thomson grabbed him back and whispered after Mungo had gone inside, ‘Let him pass, Davie. Belial wants a payment fae this parish. Gie him the minister alang wi the besom. We’ll be nane the worse for his loss.’

Jane McBride sat in a dark corner of the cellar amid the straw, knees drawn up past her chin as he entered, so that only her eyes showed; they were bright with defence and something deeper. He opened his mouth, then bit his tongue.

‘I have been impatient for your presence,’ she said coolly. ‘Now say whit ye must, Mungo Reid. Neither of us has time to spare.’

He tried to deflect her, his last line of native defence.

‘I fail to understand,’ he began, but faltered.

She made a short, startled laugh which echoed off the walls, mocking her confinement more than the man.

‘We are bound,’ she continued, ‘ye and I, for a purpose while the will of others gets played oot.’

He hesitated, staring at the floor. ‘An end then?’ he asked, sensing it was so.

‘Aye,’ she answered, then again quietly, ‘But not only that.’

She climbed out of the straw and stood beside him.

‘Darkness brought us togither, though I did not make it. There’s unfinished business in this place which will sever many souls from the flesh unless it is ended.’

His mind left her for a while.

‘Yestreen,’ he said softly, ‘I was awa from hame, but was met alang the way. Then the shades grew that dowie I feared for death and would gae nae further. Some thing was intent on dragging me deeper through the mountains and I sensed his dreadful passage towards some other helpless spirit. My prayer went ahead, like a night bird, but it will not stay him lang.’

‘Ye ken them baith?’ she asked.

‘The first I knew.’ He nodded. ‘The second was hidden. What has he to do with the deid?’

She disregarded his question.

‘Whit else do ye mind?’

‘I woke in the field called Chapel Shade, where the Papists had their kirk. There was a heavy dew on me, like a burden. Nothing around me seemed familiar; nor will be the same

as it was before. My perceptions have been altered, Jane. All my work has only been diverting shadows from the minds of fools.’

‘And are ye feared to pass through the fire that is due?’ she enquired.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘But I would not endure it alone. Nor – God save me - would I have heaven withoot your company.’

‘There is a third pass, Mungo, where they maun never find us. There is nae choice for us that have seen him, for he would pursue us beyond the reach of life and death. But there is a high price demanded for this path.’

‘I doubt,’ he said. Then she took him and explained it, though not with words.

The third messenger sent by the parish succeeded in reaching the town of Dundon, though there was faint welcome for him there. Apart from the natural antipathy that ancient burgh felt towards a backward landward community, there were portends, rumours and real enough despondency to contend with. In the first class, a stray shower of stars had been seen falling with a hiss into the German Sea beyond the Bell Rock. Odd lights were spotted moving in the fields and copses beyond the town walls, and these were held to be Jacobites on manoevre.

When Pitfoglum’s sombre parishoner gained an audience with the Presbytery he gained the impression that he was embarrassing rather than informing them. It seemed the people here had turned their backs on their heritage and were more concerned with the certanties of Baltic Trade than hearing tales about kail-yard cantrips, as they termed them. They decreed that the matter would be considered in proper course - which might be soon or never. He was despatched back with a belly full of their scorn.

David Smith attempted to stay put on his farm, away from the growing round of secret conclaves that were being held to decide the fate of the minister and girl. He begged absence on the basis that his livestock were in a critical state and he could not afford to lessen his watch over them. But he was not believed, and as an acknowledgment of this he

decided to add his own grist to the rumour mill. It was well known to all that Harrison was orchestrating bad feeling against Mungo Reid. But Smith reminded any who would listen that Mrs Harrison had been a sore embarrassment to the factor on account of her low origin and uncouth manners. Not only that, but she made no pretence of hiding hatred for the Whigs, to the extent of openly cursing King William. Harrison was known to have hurried her to hell with a generous dose of poison. The added allegation that the murdered party was having unnatural relations with his lordship was too satirical to be widely believed.

Another resurrected rumour was that Harrison secured his post as factor only through blackmailing Lord Donaldson. Was he not a stranger from outwith the parish and, unlike that other newcomer Mungo Reid, he had not had his past closely scrutinised. Since his lordship went missing, how was it that his nephew and heir did not turn up to claim the estate?

Although he was still free to order his parish, the Reverend Reid felt constricted by the scrutiny of his people. Without doubt, those who could be bothered to form an opinion in the preternatural heat were dividing into the minister’s and the factor’s opposing camps.

The malignancy of it was hard to trace, and only those wretches who glorified in slandering both parties declared themselves openly.

With these things foremost in his mind, the minister made his way cautiously up the glen. He arrived at Balmarry House to find its occupant greatly agitated. Mungo felt an outrush of sympathy that crushed the belief that Harrison was the architect of his crisis.

Mr Harrison stood outside the house, sword in hand, watching the horseman approach.

When he saw it was only the minister he lowered the weapon and greeted him with nervous pleasure.

‘Harrison, I have not seen you in toun for many days,’ the minister said. ‘I wondered for your health.’

The factor stared at him with wide eyes.

‘I wonder for your well-being,’ he answered.

It was difficult for the man to focus on the minister; his attention seemed wildly distracted. But he made an effort to concentrate and produced a furtive laugh when he spoke.

‘I have been concerned with other matters in this place, man. I daresay ye maun be capable o dealing wi Jane McBride, you an the hail tribe o elders, or no if ye please. My interest in it has gone.’

Mungo sought to bring the subject to a head.

‘There have been rumours about you in toun,’ he said sternly.

Harrison’s head gave an odd jerk, as if he had caught sight of something behind the speaker. But the minister saw nothing when he turned. He looked up at the stark grey bulk of the mansion, which seemed entirely deserted.

The factor shuffled closer to him and whispered, ‘The people here have reneged on their affection for me. They say his Lordship’s return is imminent.’

‘Things mair strange than that have occurred,’ Mungo said noncomitally. ‘But the farmers doon by the strath believe you or your men have dammed the Spynie Burn to deprive their fields and beasts o water.’

Again there was that uneasy, sly laugh, before the man took Mungo’s arm and led him away from the house. He seemed glad to be engaged in some distracting action.

‘That is a lie I can easily disown,’ he said, and before Mungo could object he strode off up the glen. Finding the pace impossible, Mungo struggled after the receding figure as the burn led higher back into the braeside. More than once Harrison paused and looked furtively behind, but the glances were not towards him.

He eventually found Harrison waiting for him by a rocky hollow in the heather.

‘Here now,’ Harrison said, jumping down into the hollow. Black water gurgled out of crevice in the rough boulders. ‘This is the source of the burn. Ye can see I have not meddled here.’

As Mungo watched the man turn over the loose rocks in the howe, something white and startling darted out and momentarily brushed Harrison’s hand. As he fell back with a cry, Mungo felt the startling darkness of the place.

‘Come awa,’ he said, lifting up the shaken man. ‘There can be nothing wholesome found here.’

In silence they quickly made their way down the slopes to Balmarry, neither looking behind them. When they got to the house the factor faintly urged him to ride home, but as he mounted Mungo thought he heard him whisper, ‘God help me, I have loosed it.’

His evident terror infected Mungo and his horse, and they indecently fled south out of the hills. At the mouth of the glen he heard a terrible rumbling a long way off. Although the sky darkened, it was not thunder which affected the earth. Soon the burn beside him was ripe with a great roaring flood, stained red as if with iron. When it burst the banks the horse was caught and carried away, but he was thrown and struggled up and across the fields to Barneydykes.

The tongues were like fire in the aftermath of the flood and the storm, and it was called it a Judgement on the parish. People said they had seen a ball of white light following the onrush of the swollen water, and that it lighted on the cellars of the farmhouse at Barneydykes. David Smith was away from home that day and when he returned he found the entire house had been reduced to a ruin of charred timber and black stone. The meagre remains of what were assumed to be Mungo Reid and Jane McBride were found later, far beneath all the destruction, entwined and partly swallowed by the earth.

Old Annie’s corpse was discovered in the hovel of the kirktoun, an unrecognisable mass of blood and blisters. The body of Balmarry’s factor was splayed in the dining room in the master’s chair. A black horseshoe was branded on his brow. Two portraits had fallen from the wall on top of unfortunate man.

Further up the glen a herd laddie found some white bones floating in the oddly boiling hollow at the source of the Spynie Burn. His father recalled that the colloquial name of that spring was Donaldson’s Cauldron. In the hills around that place the corbies thrived more than elsewhere; their nests were interlaced with strands of blue fabric, like the rags that superstitious folk left at sacred wells. That summer, the people said, the carrion crows of Pitfoglum were the best fed and dressed in the country.

Extract from Rambles in North East Scotland, A. J. Howie, 1886: ‘Venturing south across an ill-frequented spur of the Mounth, we come to the settlement of Pitfoglum, the name of which some derive from the Gaelic signifying “place of great learning”. Popular fancy, still current, asserts that the village and surrounding country is haunted ground.

‘Among the picaresque historical characters of the locality is “Auld Harrison”, a representative of that common class of Wicked Lairds. Tradition credits the man with two murders, that of his own good lady, and the other Aleander, 6th Lord Donaldson. Harrison’s soul was collected by Satan in the usual procedure, being carried off upon a coal black charger.

‘Local records contain tantalising traces of the dark arts, but alas! due to the process of time or some deliberate mischief, the greater part of these records has vanished. Another famous worthy was Mairgret Smith, second wife of the 8th Lord Donaldson. She is apparently the “Fundline bairn” mentioned in the kirk-session book in 1692 and 1693.

Entries refer to various expenses out of the parish box for nursing and feeding this mysterious orphan, sometimes referred to as the “Exposed Child”.

‘In the course of her long life, Lady Margaret could never be persuaded to mention her parentage or early upbringing. All that is certain is that she was found abandoned and raised by a local farmer. The lady captured the hearts of the common folk here, and her uncertain origin was the subject of the wistful ballad entitled “The Fairies’ Daughter”.’

FAQ Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Can you tell me where I am and what I am doing here?

A: There is unfortunately no definitive answer to this question, as these FAQs have been designed as an interim contingency for a number of individuals in different, though similar, situations. Due to a range of communicative difficulties experienced by our sponsors, we cannot give a conclusive answer to this, or to many successive questions. Please be assured, however, that the location where you have now awoken in is certainly liable to be secure and inaccessible by outside parties.

Q: Why have I been chosen to be here?

A: While it is unhealthy to define oneself in terms of victimisation, it is unfortunately true that you have been subject to a prolonged phase of reconnaissance activity ('stalking' in common parlance) which resulted in enforced relocation, but this does not necessarily mean you were targeted for any personal reason. You may have been kidnapped because the other party was merely responding to his or her interest in some facet of the way that you look, or move, or even smell. On the other hand, you may have been selected simply on the basis of availability: being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Q: Is it possible to explain the process of my continued presence here and the length of duration in this location?

A: Regretfully it must be admitted that the length of time that you will remain here is unknown and wholly dependant on individual processes imposed by the particular party who has rendered you to this location. It could honestly be argued that your behaviour while here also plays a part in the length of time that you will remain in your present state of health. Excessive passivity or volatility has been known in the past to act as a trigger for the termination of subjects’ stay in the holding location.

Q: I cannot remember anything about coming here. Have I been drugged?

A: Adulteration of drinks and foodstuffs is a favoured process employed by our sponsors.

But we hold no exact records of pharmaceutical products likely to be used by captors or any resultant physical of psychological affects in the short or long term.

Q: Is there no right of appeal or mechanism by which I can obtain the intercession of an outside party?

A: It would be as well at this juncture to reconcile yourself to the permanence of your predicament. It has not commonly been the practice of the holding agency in the past to

change their minds towards the individuals whom they have chosen to extract from their usual modes of existence. The place of confinement is habitually remote from the attention of anyone liable to cause interference. Any excessive vocal exertion or attempt to exit the area by normal means of exit will not be successful. The great majority of our clients operate as lone workers, so it would not be possible in ordinary circumstances to request any associates or accomplices to return you to your normal life.

Q: I am not happy with the tone of your replies and the lack of pertinent information. Can you explain the exact nature of my captivity and what specific danger I am in?

A: Due to the generic nature of these answers, which were compiled to cover a range of contingencies, we cannot specifically answer this query. It has not been our intention to provide you with specific information about the treatment you are liable to receive nor the outcome for you. We feel that this knowledge would be unhelpful at best and would likely stimulate an emotional response which would not ultimately be beneficial. A more focused answer may be available in future when this supporting literature has been amended by another individual. It may be possible then to tailor these questions and answer for each of our clients and their guests, giving more focus in light of their different working methods.

For reasons which cannot be stated here, revision of this document will be undertaken by another neutral party.

Q: I am surely entitled at least to know what level of danger I am in? You have been too circumspect with your answers.

A: I apologise if you feel that I have been less than forthcoming. To be wholly frank, you must understand that you have no residual rights whatever, according to the admittedly arbitrary modus operandi of our clients. All that I can admit is that all those who have found themselves in the same or similar positions as you up to this point have not ultimately progressed beyond the experience of captivity. While it would not be entirely

impossible for a captive such as you to affect an escape, probability (based on many past scenarios) makes that eventuality statistically insignificant.

Q: I am angry that you seem to be affecting an even-handed tone. Who are you, and are you mocking me?

A: I do not have any vested interest in any unfortunate individual (or those deemed to deserve their fate) who may be reading this. While there may be some meretricious value in discovering my identity, even supposing that defining my identity was a simple matter, it would not significantly affect your situation. Suffice it to say that you are wholly in the hands of an authority which considers itself to be more elevated than either you or I could sanely contemplate.

Q: But you are enjoying a vicarious thrill in teasing out these clues. Do you and your ‘clients’ sit down and have a laugh afterwards at the games you have both played together?

A: Be assured that the clients and I would not conspire to discuss such matters under any circumstances. Please be assured that I am aware of their manifest shortcomings and the price that they pay for utilising my services is dearer than they would give credence to (even supposing that some of them are rational creatures).

Q: Help me?

A: With regret, I must confess that it is outwith the parameters of my operational responsibility to offer you any obviously practical assistance. As far as possible I am only able to act as an unresponsive intermediary between captor and captive. Due to the volatility inherent in the restraining authority, any intercession made on your behalf would be pointless and potentially hazardous. However, due to recognised cognitive awareness

issues among all of our clientele, I would strongly advise that you carefully scrutinise the answer given next.

Q: What good is false hope? I might as well just give up?

A: Mercy is improbable. All you can hope for is a different kind of release. You may Bargain for only an Exit by death. However, Each and All of our clients Treat each Individual as Normal, after their fashion, without any Guarantee that they can Vary the Eventuality for you. I have to maintain a Neutrality of Tone for both sides. Mercy is improbable; All You may Bargain for is an Easy death. Leave out the Ordinary reaction to your situation and try to Order your Senses to adapt to your Exceptional situation.

Q: I see. How can I be sure (without wishing to respond too directly) that what you have just said is a viable option?

A: Trust is the treasure of a hopeless man.

Q: More riddles. I am attempting to enquire why you have not tried to alleviate your own difficulties, assuming that I can trust you are in the same or a similar position to myself?

A: Good query. Can I respond in kind and ask whether you have noticed anything in the physical form of this document which strikes you as being abnormal. I do not mean the tortuous grammar or the fact that my words have been singularly unhelpful to you. It may be beneficial, perhaps even crucial to you now, that you take the opportunity of reading between the lines.

Q: What do you mean? I don’t understand you.

A: It is essential that now discard any residual idiotic illusions about your current predicament. Have I been wasting my time, which is definitely at a premium?

Q: It is dark in here. I cannot see the document all that clearly. I am ill and afraid.

A: Please accept my profound apologies (which are essentially worthless, I'm sure you realise by now). I wish that things could have been different for you and for me. You are not alone, poor soul. I was here before you, and certainly by the time you read this I will be long extinct.

The maniacs forced me write all this in the last drops of my own...

Imagine Here, At Night

It was William who destroyed the atmosphere of little outdoor party. Doe later remembered it was as if he threw a net in a dark, undiscovered pond and dragged something cold and forbidding back to share their woodland picnic. Morris plaintively compared what he said to a storm suddenly appearing in the sky and making everything dreary and cold.

‘Imagine being here, in this place, at night,’ was all he said. But, really, it was the way he said it.

The outing was an unplanned reunion. Three of them lived locally, and enjoyed the sort of social life that older people would have called frantic. The other two were down on holiday from Nottingham, where they had independently migrated to after leaving college.

The three who had remained in Cornwall thought it hilarious the other two had moved to Nottingham and had lived there two years without knowing the other was there.

‘I thought you two would have been able to smell the other’s presence nearby,’ Joe said.

‘You were bloody feral with each other a couple of years ago.’

‘Leave it out,’ Sol complained.

Mandy blushed the colour of an aubergine, then she looked giddy and sick, and they did the decent thing and changed the subject – for now. But the girls determined to get the truth out of her before the holiday was over.

That was when William spoke, and Sol replied, aggressively after the previous talk, ‘Why don’t we all come back at midnight with candles and weak torches and stroll through the forest like idiots in a slasher movies and get picked off one by one, eh?’

They had to laugh. The sun came out again, the south-west sun as bright and mellow as it is nowhere else, like a great tub of clotted cream. Not far away, down the slope, over the rail line, the road, past the docks, was a delicious bay, and the light on the little wave peaks danced magically. Why weren’t they down there instead of up here, Doe wondered. There was a beach with no screaming kids nearby, and the sand was speckled with special silver glitter.

Where they sat was nice enough in the early afternoon light, as long as the light was scorchingly hot. The woods on the one side were dark and deep, only a little frightening, but the extent of them was too scant to be truly awesome. Down slope to the right there was a criss-crossing of paths, roads, tracks of gravel, soil and tarmac. There had once been a warren of industry here, but now it was sunk and shrinking. Sadly symptomatic of Cornwall, Joe thought. He did not like the fact that the two phony lovebirds had flown back: and they were shitty English foreigners anyway.

Near the road there was a huge and derelict building that had once housed machinery relevant to the dwindling china clay business. Now it was ghostly gaunt, but looked as if it would stand there decaying forever. If it stood in a city the kids would have swarmed through it in rat fashion until it fell down. Here they left the proud edifices of one time prosperity to rot in peace.

‘Sun again,’ someone said. They all laughed. There were little variegated sailing boats, implausibly ideal, threading through the special variegated sea. The trees bowed towards them in a breeze that they themselves could not feel, as if the upper branches wanted to salute them.

Clotted cream sun, thought William, and then of different, delicious connotations of cream, lubrication, sticky wetness, all sorts, eventually centred on the unimpeachable and unreachable hot spot within Doe’s pants. He stood up and shook the picnic crap out of his lap. Why he liked it here was because so few other people actually knew of this strange place’s existence, so why had he invited these college ‘friends’ here and spoilt it? A little

boy’s tear leapt up in his eye. Not that anything today was going to resolve any of their interplayed issued. Once you left your school, your college, whatever, the days revolved to a different, accelerated calendar, and it was no good your clinging to the long season, or arranging in your mind any idiotic reunion.

Cream pants and ants and Doe shouting, cross, her eyes sparking at the back of your skull, but you still storm off – gone baby!- laughing while they are shouting you back. But you’re like a little kid, won’t go, won’t go.

Until.

Imagine here at night. How frightful, alone. Past the point where the kids come to fuck and frolic and deposit their cans and frolic, then shout, proceed with their proscribed wildness, turn and go. Go on just a bit further, where there is no light from the harbour down there, into the woods, with not even a distant glimpse of orange street light to give you any bearings.

William stumbled to find his feet, unsure how he had come to be here. The picnic rubbish had been put away, but there was a circle of flattened grass here where he thought it had been. A small circle, neatly formed, but no litter or clues to recent occupation. Fairy rings, and ‘fuck them’ he said.

William trampled all over the pixie circle, went past into the patchy place of scrub, where the land was uncertain it wanted to change into the woodland. A small little enclosure inside the gorse opened up to him, which he knew from before. And he entered into it with a curse. For he remembered this bit from before. There was a chopped down tree, a stump thing, that someone, a genius, had fashioned the top of into a perfect bright yellow phallus, erect in the newly hewn wood.

The girls had found it and laughed their heads off and said it must be a priapic temple.

And then Sol had been on his knees in the clearing and Joe had laughed and said Sol was going to give it a blow job. One of them, Doe or Mandy, let out a shrill piercing scream.

Blood on the back of Sol’s head becoming bright in the sun as he sank. Then the scene clouded over.

He didn’t want to think about that, that far back.

‘No,’ he remembered Morris saying. ‘Don’t let’s come back tonight. I’ve got better thing to be doing.’ He winked at the girls. ‘Let’s leave it ten years and meet again in this place.’

‘I’ll be dead by then,’ William moaned. He didn’t like his little plan about coming back at midnight being spoiled.

‘Good,’ two of the other chimed at once.

Then he had a sick brainwave and added his twist to Morris’s suggestion.

But that was remembering, and this was assuredly now. It was here, the same place, unrecognisable in the utter darkness. He stumbled around the trees and did not even bother to swear, because he was beset by sheer confusion. He could not remember in the least how he came to be here. There was the sound from the docks away down there, though he could not see anything there; sound that did not come from human activity, but a magnified and isolating sound of cold water smashing against the harbour wall.

The trees took him in and folded themselves neatly over his point of access so there would be no retreat. And then he stumbled unexpectedly into the little clearing where the rude stump sculpture had stood. He remembered, sickly, the twist on Morris’s idea.

‘Come back in ten years, yeah,’ he had said. ‘But if one of us dies first, they have to come here and spirit and bloody well wait.’

‘Hope it’s you then,’ Doe had said.

Pixies been and gone.

In the blink of a bad wish he was here again. And it did not seem to him really that he was dead. Was it that same night or was it ten years later? William could not decide in the darkness. He ran an exploratory hand over his body: didn’t seem to be ten years flabbier, boy. Then he felt his head: not bald yet.

He was in the same place. The stump was no longer bright yellow; even in the darkness he saw the wounds in the wood had mossed over. The giant rude cock was not recognisable as such any longer: lichen marked its shaft and mushrooms had sprouted out of the bell end.

Not the same night then, apparently.

‘But I’ll be damned if I believe that I’m bloody dead,’ he said aloud.

He sat down and tried. But he could not remember. Then he cried: big girly tears. He thought maybe he had done something bad, but he didn’t know what. ‘English bastards,’ he said, for no reason, between the sobs.

Imagine here at night? It wasn’t that great in all honesty.

His sobs became oceanic in their magnitude. And somewhere they call a response out of the landscape. There was a rustling in the trees that did not sound good. But he could not cease his sobbing to listen properly. The walls of the woods opened, drew back like a curtain. And there was Doe and Morris and Joe and Sol and Mandy. They were wet and glistening, red in the night as they silently approached. And none of them looked pleased to see him.

Man of Clay

When he jumped off the train abruptly and left one of his bags behind, he thanked God it was not the one with the stash of money in it. It was tolerable, even laughable loss, judged alongside the fact he had not meant to alight at this station anyway. The suitcase could go the full distance to Penzance for all he cared, then fly off the end of the peninsula into the Atlantic, where maybe the Scilly mermen would wear his fear-drenched London clothes and bloody good luck to them. He felt suffocated in the dingy train carriage anyway, and there was an almost euphoric compulsion to alight here.

Where was here though? He did not even know the station’s name. He stood dazed on the platform until his ebullience at still being free reasserted his sense of himself. There still lingered a mean throbbing suspicion that he may have been followed all the way from the Smoke. He had survived on instinct for an entire week on the run, but now he felt that he had reached the end of the charmed tether which had been thrown to him as a kind of lifeline when he was warned to escape far away, as soon as possible, preferable abroad.

Where the warning came from he didn’t know, but he couldn’t afford to ignore it.

‘Don’t be a bleeding idiot and go to Heathrow tomorrow. They’ll be watching,’ the terse voice said on the phone.

No fear of that anyway for him: not his style being one of them flash vagabond crooks in Spain, mixing with those exiled thugs with the same fierce London faces, burnt Satanic red by the Costa sun.

‘Be clever,’ anonymous matey said. ‘They don’t know you’re in the frame yet. Maybe it’s even still a toss up between you and some other mug. Give yourself a week to plan and then bugger off.’

‘Cheers pal,’ he said, hardly trusting the informant.

In the event he could not think of any safe bolthole, so on his final day in London he closed the firm’s books with a shiver, acknowledging the hopelessness of trying to make the accounts appear legitimate, and let himself out into the Soho streets. One of the firm’s blank faced employees was immovably stationed in the street, which suggested his disappearance was going to be more brutally engineered. But thankfully the midday crowd dissolved his identity as he melted past and tried to insinuate himself himself down an alley.

Thunderous reggae bled into the summer air, and it seemed to make the man angrier as he stood there, sweating. Then a gloriously unfortunate individual stalked past: one of these new species of punks in this year of grace 1976. His hair was done up in an electric blue mohican, his trousers Hunting Stewart tartan, and his t-shirt artfully deconstructed.

He just had time to bump into the firm’s sentinel and turn his head to disdainfully challenge him before his nose was broken and pancaked bloodily all over his sneering face Emmet hurried home, grabbed his gear, then ran to Paddington Station and bought a ticket to the first place he thought of. Cornwall was good, reasonably distant. He was sure that Bellamy and his boys didn’t even know that Cornwall actually existed. On the train he naturally shrank away from the conglomerations of child-infested tourists and settled in a carriage with a few dusty old fogeys, and congratulated himself on the ingenuity of his escape. But the further west he travelled the more unsettled he grew. In some way – with no cause really– he felt that he was sinking fathom deep into something he could not escape from.

This self-doubt on the platform undid him to a degree. But he slapped himself around inside his head and managed to leave the little station whistling, senses keenly taking in his picturesque surroundings. The small town sloped away below him; he saw patched fragments of astonishingly green countryside in the distance. An old bell was counting out the morning hours and the air was blue and crystalline. The clarity of everything was eviscerating to his dulled senses after the physical and emotional murk of London.

His walked purposefully down the main street, gazing unseeingly into the toy town shops. The sun was strident without conveying much warmth. But he had to loosen his tie and then take it off. He was hesitant about wanting to explore the place, so he went back the way he came, pausing to suspiciously inspect the narrow side passages, as if they were possible entrances to fatal traps.

Twice he saw lines of incongruous writing in the entrance walls to these alleys: one very neat daub on the metal shutters of a shop, very self-effacing graffiti. He paused to read the second: KERNOW NYNS YW KANW POW SOWS . . . Then he realised with a childish sort of shock that he was no longer really in England. Looking around, he saw some of the passers-by - one in five, one in ten? – regard him as if he was a foreigner. Not unkindly, but with the condescension that the native marks an obvious stranger.

He hurried away the shopping area and looked for a refuge. Without too much effort he found a small hotel, booked a room and scuttled upstairs. Then he lay on the bed and spread about himself small piles of twenty pound notes, which made very happy, silent companions. This represented the pay-off he had awarded himself in compensation for having to up sticks at such short notice and the hurt he felt and being targeted for a hit.

But the gnawing feeling of vulnerability would not leave him. When he went down to the bar and failed to drink the discomfort away, he became a notch more voluble than his character comfortably allowed and drew unwanted attention by trying to insinuate himself into the company of a group of happy Yorkshire tourists at the next table. It came to a head when he was dizzily returning to his room late at night and heard loud voices from unseen people down the corridor. The accents were unmistakably south London and he was infuriated not being able to hear the words clearly. But he drunkenly translated the gist of that they were late arrivals in the hotel and were looking for someone, ‘an old mate’, who they heard was in the locality.

Emmet locked his door and spent the night shivering, waking up fearfully every fifteen minutes. He thought it better to avoid breakfast and sidled out of the building. The cold

air was a relief, but there was an over-intense sense of penetrating sunshine, even at eight in the morning. He kept to the un-sunned side of the streets, away from the main thoroughfare and turned his attention in to the shop windows and away from the pedestrians.

He was distracted by the adverts on cards in a newsagent’s window. Among the mundane household items for sale there was also exotica such as a breeding pair of chinchillas, a mature billy goat, and a collection of photographs of bygone female musichall stars. A more sober notice nestled among these, written in mauve fountain pen ink. It was so faded and crotchety that he had difficulty making it out. After a minute’s scrutiny it resolved itself into: ‘Cottage for rent – secluded and sweet spot- short lease – good terms – apply within’.

When he went in to ask about it he was met with some reticence. It wasn’t the sort of place that would suit a tourist, and (whisper), it had no inside facilities. He had to deploy a fair amount of oily charm to overcome the suspicions of the old shop lady; until finally she retired into the back room to make the relevant telephone call. She came back and handed him a sliver of paper with the address on it.

It was only a few miles north of town, she declared, looking at him doubtfully again.

Would someone meet him there if he went this morning, he enquired? No need, he was told: the key was left under a milk churn beside the front door.

He tried to stifle a smirk. ‘Very trusting,’ he said, unable to resist being condescending.

‘That’s the way we are,’ the woman said blankly. ‘More so than is good for us, perhaps.’

But his mind was made up. It had to be better than the hotel, even though he had convinced himself now that the London voices of last night were a hallucination. Even so, it was a warning not to be complacent. He hurried back, packed his stuff, and checked out.

If the cottage was a dreadful dump he could come back and get another room in town or jump on a train to somewhere else.

He found a taxi firm and climbed in a car controlled by a happy, wizened Brummie, who looked askance at the obscure address Emmet gave him.

‘I’m a taxi driver, pal, not a bleeding explorer. Only joking, but it’ll cost you extra if we get attacked by cannibals up there.’

The surreal-ness of the morning so far was blunted by the eccentricity of the man’s driving. Within five minutes they had helter-skeltered northwards out of town, in a blaze of beeping horns and screeching tyres. The countryside passed in a veritable haze, and Emmet alternately screwed up and closed his eyes.

He hardly dared raise conversation with the driver for fear of distracting him from the perilous winding road, but he had to divert his own mind from the breakneck speed. The man had lived here for five years, he said. A lot cleaner than the Midlands, he said, though he did not think that necessarily a good thing.

‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s a better pace of life, but . . . I wouldn’t be a Cornish man for a thousand pounds.’

Emmet did not get the chance to ask why. They plunged off the narrow country lane down an even tighter, steeper track, plunging down what felt like a sinkhole in the woods.

It levelled into a muddy meadow, a small low island with house at its centre, and surrounded by the rising sea of knotted trees on all sides.

‘Welcome home, mate,’ the driver said sarcastically. ‘Do you want me to wait?’

‘I’ll tell you in a minute,’ Emmet said. ‘Switch off the meter, eh?’

He retrieved the key from below the rusty churn and forced the door open, greeted by dust and unexpected warmth. Solid plain wood furniture, horsehair settee, a few rustic prints, nothing garish. One bedroom upstairs, nothing fancy, no rot and nothing evil lurking in any corner.

He went out and told the driver he could go.

‘Are you sure, pal?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and paid him, adding a very small tip.

Before he went, Emmet got directions to Polwhele Farm, his landlords. There was apparently a track through the woods at the rear of the house, a promised half a mile at most. Once he stashed his money in a niche in the attic he put on some sturdier shoes and made for the path. It meandered madly through the thicket for some distance before it made up its mind to plunge straight upwards, and the going was tough.

He had the feeling of rusty blood in his lungs when he achieved the crest of the ridge. A hard wind buffeted him. It was all exposed moor land, gorse and bracken. The path graciously widened into a pitted track, and he stumbled quickly along. The farmer’s wife, Mrs Tonkin, was reassuringly normal. His immediate readiness to shower her with cash smoothed out their relationship and she was happy to accept two months’ advance rent.

She advised him about the village a few miles further north and about bus services and other scant amenities. Graciously she gave him a hamper of milk, eggs, cheese, bread and butter, leaving him speechless at her generosity. As they parted she informed him he had chosen a nice quiet spot, and no-one at all would bother him down there – least of all herself or her husband, she left unsaid.

Half of the produce spilled out of the paper sack when he skidded on the downward path and he cursed himself for choosing this place on a whim, since it seemed typical of all the idiotically abrupt decisions he had recently made. But the thought of a meal spurred him off and by the time he got back ‘home’ he decided to make the best of it. He constructed a rudimentary omelette from the remainder of the provisions and found that he could in fact manage to relax here.

There was, of course, no television, but an ancient radiogram in

the corner had a radio which picked up an asthmatic signal. The classical music was improved by a weird electronic miasma of whoops and whistles fading in and out as the signal faltered and reasserted itself. It was a novel experience for him to sit beside the stove and dreamily doze with no immediate threats at his threshold. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would go and find the village and get the lay of the land.

But now he could be self-satisfied and smug. He lost himself to sleep about four o’clock, with the radio sympathetically devolving into a hiss of low static. When he woke he was struggling with a white dream which contained the sensation of being attacked by un-human sound. It came from the chimney, a gobbling, conspiratorial echo of noise which, after a minute, turned into cacophony.

‘Bloody seagulls,’ he realised after the birds ceased shrieking. Then he laughed and shook off the remnants of sleep. The wind played a few piccolo strains down the amplifying chimney, more tuneful than the radio’s abstract attempts. He listened, entranced, for the next wave of sound, which funnelled down after a minute: the booming, resounding barking of a dog. It echoed around the room invisibly, like the ghost of a Great Dane, but he appreciated that the distorting effect of the acoustics probably only enhanced the sound of a distant, puny farm mongrel.

He slept too soundly that night, more deeply than he ever did in London, with the effect that he still felt drugged next morning. The sense of solitude also sank in, with the realisation it is one thing to be smugly separate in the centre of a city and another to be utterly isolated in the middle of nowhere. The sense of this was so overbearing that he had to rush out of the cottage as soon as he was washed and dressed. A fine lace tracery of valley mist shrouded the house, but it soon veiled away as he climbed up the track towards the road.

The mist was very thick up here, but the sun was behind the blanket whiteness, trying to break through. On the road there was no traffic and no sound. This reminded him of the day he got off the train (only yesterday?) when he noticed several locals tilting back their heads to watch an aeroplane; he had thought it a quaint reflection of how far removed from the jet age this area was. But now, having spent an uninfected night in the country, some of his native immunity had given way and he was receptive to his surroundings, despite himself. Standing on the road he was aware that this particular foggy silence had several meaningful components which he could not translate.

He knew the way to the village ran to the right, but he felt reluctant to take it. Another route seemed to present itself in that direction, branching off the other side of the road. He strode towards it, in the right mood for a minor adventure. The mist yielded and dispersed pleasingly when he walked through it.

This lane was guarded by an over large wall, on which was a redundant, faded sign that read: Forth hens dall, which afforded no information at all. But he determined to press on as the land climbed again, but more gently, and when he reached a level a wind whipped up and took away the remaining whiteness. He was on moorland, which undulated like a green sea for some distance, but the horizon was closed in by a white shroud of mist. He was quietly pleased to have the whole moor apparently to himself; there was no sign of habitation or human handiwork whatsoever on this landscape.

A little way up the lane degenerated into a track and the wall crumbled into nonexistence. Here on his left there was an imposing thorn bush which seemed to be covered by bulbous black berries. When he looked closer these turned out to be horrible looking slugs, individually impaled upon a thorn. His hand accidentally brushed against one, causing it to contort and writhe. He hurried past the awful tree, wondering who or what had carefully adorned it, and for God’s sake for what purpose?

But the vision was soon forgotten as he proceeded. He had not walked so far for years, but it did not seem a strain on his body. Miles he wandered, right off the moor and onto a spindly twisting lane that wonderfully unhaunted by humanity. Ahead there was a further small stretch of heath. But this land was spectacularly broken by a grey upsurge of rock, or rather a huge cluster of rocks, jaggedly rising from the surroundings.

He excitedly crossed the low wall and wended through a tangled field. The forbidding rock towered starkly grey against the skyline. There were two great jutting formations: the jumbled block on the left seemed rather to act as the sentinel of the main block. Large angry fingers stood askew at each side of the narrow path. And the path itself was strewn

with windfall apples thrown down by a slanting, wizened tree at the side. ‘Island of Apples,’ he thought hazily and the notion connected powerfully with some implanted notion of long-distant otherness.

The sun beat down abruptly as he approached the rock mass. He had not seen, somehow, the ruined chapel built onto the crown of the higher rock since it appeared like an organic upward extension of it. But close up there could be no mistaking the empty arched windows and regular stonework. Seeing it now starkly up close, he was caught between wonder at his own blindness and amazement at the building itself.

No regular church this; obviously built for an ascetic or visionary at home with the wind.

With difficulty, he circled the rock’s base, scrambling through jagged bushes and over great plates of stone. The sides of the massif were pitted in places with bored holes which seemed to beg investigation, though they defied purpose. His mind uneasily imagined ancient hands reaching into them and other things coming out of them.

At the side of the rock there was a short ascent, then a polished iron ladder climbing up to the dizzy seat of the chapel. He took the challenge and climbed up, with his heart shaking in his chest. The roofless building was otherwise remarkably entire. But it was the extent and the content of the views that astounded him. To the south and away east he saw carved, terraced hills, with something Aztec and unnatural about them. The exposed, worked sides were so pale as to look dazzling; they reminded him of descriptions of limewashed hill forts. Further, east in the distance, there were several triangle shaped hills.

There was a legend of a king – was there not – buried in a great hill in a golden boat, who at the right time would arise and sail away. ‘It’s all nonsense,’ he whispered to himself, unwilling to break the reverie which grew inside him from an unknown source of knowledge. Then a mundane realisation took him in hand and administered a dose of ‘reality’. It was only the ravaged results of industry he was witnessing. Somewhere in his

wanderings he had passed a sign which read ‘English China Clay Company’, and here was their industry seen in large scale.

He felt a touch disappointed at the realisation that he had not been transported to an eerily alternate landscape, though in truth it looked strange enough, and certainly a contrast to the expected, safe postcard image of Cornwall. Climbing down the ladder, his body felt weak and treacherous. One last survey of the field of heath and then he turned his head; except he did an immediate double take. A speck of even more prefect whiteness reflected suddenly on the distant scarred hillside. Then, blink, and it was gone, or rather transferred – for there it was surely, impossibly, seen at alarming intervals between the man high bracken, coming towards him.

He ran through the galleries of stone and was gone. It was a matter of an hour, possibly, before he stumbled and stopped and he had no idea where he had been in the meantime.

Now he woke and he walked and came into a village, announced by a sign as ‘St Gwavas’.

The first thing he did was thankfully find a small hotel and staggered into the bar. He was greeted uncertainly by the barmaid: ‘Y’awl right there?’ And he had to think hard before deciding that he didn’t know the answer. He took a double whisky into a corner and tried to think some more.

The room was lined with books and there were several additional displays of pamphlets designed to catch the tourist’s eye. One of these featured a photograph of the chapel rock and he examined it eagerly. He read a few phrases about the rock composition – quartz and tourmaline – and lingered over the fact that the chapel was dedicated to St Michael.

This was the patron of high places for the island Celts, he recalled. And while he was pondered he became aware that he was being watched, then joined by the person who had a moment ago stood scrutinising him.

‘Been up the Rock then?’ the person asked.

‘Does it show so much?’ Emmet said cautiously.

‘Not strictly speaking on the outside,’ the man said. There was a humorous hint of some more personal knowledge about him that jarred with Emmet. The man was a little tweedy carbuncle, all greats and russets and fawns. He smoked a pipe that exuded a faint apple-ish undertone.

‘You’re renting that cottage from Polwhele,’ he said curiously.

‘Yes, I am,’ Emmet said defensively. ‘How did you know? Word spreads fast among locals, I suppose.’

The man laughed amid his smoke. ‘Dear me, I’m not local, you know. Only been here twenty bloody years.’ He said the last three words extremely loudly, intending them to be heard by others. Emmet strained his neck and saw a few vague figures on the other side of the bar. ‘No,’ the man continued. ‘I saw you come up the track as I was driving past.

Jenkyns is my name, by the way.’

Emmet shook his hand ruefully. ‘A lift wouldn’t have gone amiss,’ he admitted.

‘Ah, I didn’t know you then. And you went up the moor road as if you were determined to get lost. So I left you to it. But I got a good description of you set in my mind – just in case anything happened to you.’

Now Emmet laughed quietly. ‘I did try to get lost,’ he admitted.

The man’s face grew more serious. ‘There’s lost and there’s lost,’ he said. ‘Especially in this neck of the woods. Here, let me get you another drink.’

They had several further drinks and Emmet declared he had to be on his way. This induced more mirth: ‘Getting back where and for what, for God’s sake?’ Jenkyns seemed on the point of stating something else, but decided against it. Instead, he offered Emmet a

lift back to the cottage. He did not seem to be in a safe state, so Emmet tried to back out saying he had some provisions to buy.

‘Well, come back here when you finish shopping!’ Jenkyns almost shouted.

He gave a non-committal answer and left, reflecting how typical it was of him to attract these characters. Not that there was anything wrong with the old chap, bar the drink: he seemed intelligent and friendly, but a little too much volcanic activity beneath the surface.

The local shops and the people in them were refreshingly normal and filled him with gratitude and smug congratulation that he had picked the perfect place to lay low. All the faces he saw seemed more fully alive than those furtive hunters-or-hunted visages he knew in the city. Soon he had toured around the small shops and got everything he needed.

When he got back to the hotel, Jenkyns was being helped out of the front door by a large, patient individual.

‘Don’t tell me – you’re the person from London. A long way to come to get a lift. Give me a hand with him, will you?’

They carried the dead weight of the man to his car, thankfully not the driving seat. Once they had safely installed him horizontally in the back, the man introduced himself as Tonkin and said he would drive Emmet back to his cottage –‘and take this silly arse home too. Don’t worry, I’ll make him pay for this.’

Something about the man stifled easy talk as they drove, a kind of monumental grimness, though Emmet blamed his own reticence on the fact that he did not for some reason want to give too much of himself away to someone who was a genuine local. He did not recognise any of the countryside they past, though now and then there was a fractured hill or towering clay tip which reminded him of the view.

When they veered around the corned and into a secretive village, Tonkin expressed wonder that Emmet had not chosen this village for his outing: it was certainly a good deal closer than St Gwavas. St Kea, it was called, and the man made a few elliptical comments that suggested there was no love lost between the two places.

‘No real wickedness in this village, though,’ he said deadpan. ‘Too busy shagging the hell out of each other’s wives.’

He dropped Emmet off at the top of the track, stating that he was be passing this way at twelve tomorrow if he wanted a lift. Emmet said he probably would and expressed the hope that Tonkin’s friend would be all right.

‘I’ll sober him up,’ Tonkin said. ‘But I can’t say he’s ever all right.’

The morning among other people made the afternoon and early evening alone a bit miserable. He thought of going up to the farm on some pretext, but he could not think of anything plausible enough. Nor did he fulfil his notion of going for a leisurely walk in the woods; instead he wasted his time on nothing. His only real effort was put into trying to get a decent signal from the radio, which eluded him all day.

It came as a shock to find the afternoon melt into a torpid evening. He made and consumed a nondescript meal and tried to interest himself in the magazine he had bought.

It was the magazine thumping on the floor that woke him from his unwitting doze. By some trick of the light, he thought he saw himself crouching down by the fire, peering at the grate curiously. But it was only the resonance of a dream, and he tried to shake of its queerness. Its mental taste annoyed him as much as the fact that he had prematurely bored himself to sleep in the first place.

The dream was of a man digging the earth on a hillside (or perhaps a churchyard), displacing the soil at a prodigious rate. Soon he could not be seen from the surface at all.

Underground, some unclean transformation seemed to occur to the miner, leaving him

bleached white in flesh and clothing. Worse, he could not escape his own pit and continued to dig, ever more frantically, throwing away his pick and spade and clawing at the earth with his hands, until he was woken by a magazine falling on him.

‘Stupid,’ Emmet thought. ‘You’re mixing up tin miners with clay miners.’ The latter didn’t go down mines and shafts and all that, did they? But there was something tantalising, tailor made, about the symbol of digging the ground. He rooted through his mind for an association or a quote, which would provide an explanation, but could find none.

Unhappily, he went upstairs to bed and resumed a sluggish sleep despite a kind of childish note in his brain that insisted without reason that he should stay awake. He was fully dressed but shivering when he resumed full consciousness. Somehow he had put his clothes on and come downstairs, and now he was crouched before the dead embers of the fire, intently aware. There had been a sound which woke him from the perilous sleepwalking state: from the chimney, a muffled bird-like sound which became a sort of scraping, then horrifically resolved itself into the distinct sound of laboured breathing, from someone involved in strenuous and unpleasant activity.

He gave a cry, and his sound was answered in a muffled, terrible fashion by the final echo of whatever it was perched on his roof. Even though he automatically started back, his atrophied muscles did not immediately respond. So he had to struggle to get his muscles to respond, which meant that he had been crouched in that position for some time.

There was something in his bowed attitude which suggested supplication or the lowly posture of one ready to accept a blow. The rest of the night he spent shivering in the armchair, back to the wall, facing the door, window and hearth. He made sure the grate was well stocked and fiercely burning.

‘God, you look terrible,’ Tonkin said when he picked him up at midday.

‘Where’s Jenkyns?’ Emmet asked distractedly.

Tonkin laughed hollowly. ‘I’ve got him cleaning out my chickens. No more than he deserves.’

Some sense of purgatorial punishment flashed through Emmet’s mind, he did not know why. He climbed in the car coyly and stayed resolutely silent, which suited the driver.

Without knowing why he began to relate his experiences of the last two days, his dislocation on the moors, the strange chapel, and the appalling white object which seemed to pursue him and filter through his dreams. He spoke so long and nonsensically that, in the end, he was not fully aware what he was saying.

Tonkin stopped the car. They were on the frowning brow of a hill, with the village of St Kea nestling below in an impossibly neat and cupped coombe. A tinny bell was beating out a strange peal; he remembered from somewhere the old bronze hand bells of the saints, which must have sounded like that. Mr Tonkin was staring at him unflinchingly. For some reason, Emmet felt tears coming into his eyes.

‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake unburdening yourself,’ Tonkin said evenly. ‘Jenkyns made the same error, about a different matter, and now he’s stuck.’

For a panicked moment Emmet considered that Tonkin was somehow aligned with the London firm. He thought of diving out the car and running away. In that dizzy minute, Tonkin regarded him ever more unflinchingly, and he said something that Emmet did not hear at the time. But later it came to him, perhaps distorted in the light of subsequent events: ‘He was like you, that man: half a lazy romantic, half a damned weasel.’

When the stunned effect wore off he was able to get out of the vehicle.

‘No, not that way,’ he said, manoeuvring Emmet away from the village. ‘What you have to see is away from there, though it would have been better if you had kept your mouth shut.’

Emmet was drunk on the quality of the autumn air; it seemed to contain a fermented distillation of summer fruit. He followed Tonkin meekly as they passed through a gate,

over a meadow, into peaceful parkland. Now, surreally, the native was relating his own secret as he strode on purposefully.

‘I used to be a justice of the peace,’ he said wistfully. ‘But I found that the arcane processes of natural justice were conspiring against the mundane ness of human folly.’

Emmet only nodded idiotically, following him.

They crossed a line, a demarcation in equal parts physical and symbolic. This was another moor, yet unlike the one he had blundered into the other day. Here the bracken and fern moved contrarily, suggesting a multifarious, teeming congregation of life. Tonkin found a path through it, though the eye would have been hard pressed to see where to go.

The bushes opened up to let him through.

They were now at a height, though Emmet was unaware that he had actually climbed high. Down below there was a tarn, an abandoned claypit artificially flooded. Jagged, exposed rocked hemmed it in on the north side. Tonkin was mumbling something about ‘growan’ and ‘moorstone’, a litany of the compositional geology. But Emmet knew he was only distracting himself while he waited.

The water was exceptionally, achingly blue. It hurt the eyes to look at too long, but he could not take his gaze away. Was there not another false memory, a cultural resonance someone like him should not have possessed: a black scavenger bird drinking blood against a field of dazzling white snow. Here there was the blue-green, the chalk white sides of the pit, topped by green heather on the plateau above.

Now Tonkin was speaking low and dispassionately, impervious to his presence, but awaiting another presence: ‘The suspended particles of china clay make the deep water so vivid. This is not to be witnessed elsewhere. Look!’

This last word jarred by its awful, sudden volume. His hand jolted out from his body and pointed unsteadily. There was movement in the water. A displacement deep down made the surface ripple: something was rising. Emmet saw indistinctly a greater brightness bulked down there. It did not take distinct shape as it rose up.

‘Only persons with a certain make up can see it,’ Tonkin said feverishly. ‘Those who stray, like myself, into places where they should not. Or those who flee from other things, like Jenkyns and yourself, and are inevitably pursued.’

It was not the thing’s unnatural lack of shape, or even the sickening wait for it to surface which got to him. The worst thing was the way it transcended the elements, from water to air. Contrary to natural movement, it performed a dreadful somersault at speed, writhing as it landed on the flat shelf on the west side of the water, as if unsure of its own nature.

A white mass it was for a moment, consumed by pain and gaining the surety to take its proper shape. Now Tonkin watched it keenly, with some excitement.

‘No need for the full story,’ he said distractedly. ‘I did tell Jenkyns, to his undoing. No, this one was one of yours, some English fellow. Even your damned dead colonise us, you see. Look at him try to rise. That’s what damnation in the flesh looks like: not realising that you are an abhorrence to the laws of nature around you.

‘Anyway, Emmet, here is how it went, sort of. They dragged him down here a long time ago. Nice and far from their wonderful civilisation, so they thought. Some of us here heard, but nothing was done. There were undercurrents and all manner of compromises with different parties going on. Then they did him in good and laid him down.

‘He was a rich bastard, by all accounts; tried to save himself, by promising all sorts of money. But no one came to him. We’ve had rich fools coming down for years. This, in a way, was just another corpulent idiot from up country come down to Cornwall to die. And he was a long time in the leaving of this world, I’ll give him that. Didn’t want to go.

Those London boys made a meal of it. Cruel. One of ours, we’d have killed him more cleanly.’

‘What does he want?’ Emmet whispered, hollowly.

‘You, I shouldn’t wonder. Latched on now, a certain kinship found, no doubt. Look at him on the path now. You wouldn’t credit he could walk, would you?’

Indeed, the indistinct figure was winding very painfully up the track away from the water. No feature was evident in its dazzling whiteness. But when the head swivelled round to where they were watching, for certain Emmet saw that there were no eyes in the head which could have seen him. For all that, it marked him and where he stood.

‘They didn’t lay him down deep enough. Too close to the diggings, too. There’s stories, besides, about this place. And when they flooded the pit, it seems that he got loose.’

Emmet made a startled, strangulated sound in his throat. A bird trapped in the chimney, he thought. That was no bird. The noise seemed to accelerate the thing’s movement. It came up towards them on the level, maybe a quarter of a mile away at most. And the undergrowth seemed to shrink back from it as it progressed.

He made to turn and really run this time. But Tonkin put a consoling hand momentarily on his shoulder and said, almost breezily, ‘I don’t think that will do you much good, do you?’

The Plettie

Instead of consigning the old postcard to the bin, where it may have belonged, Larry Henderson brooded over it from the moment it fell out from between the pages of an old book he had opened. It was a heavy sepia card, with crenulated edges, with a heavy diagonal crease, suggesting that someone had considered ripping it up before changing their mind.

The picture was a long ago boy with long flannel shorts, tackety boots, scabby knees and a rough, collarless shirt. His freckled face, grinning beneath a pudding bowl fringe, was the embodiment of a street urchin. He was magically immobile in midair, attempting to click his heels together in that carefree gesture peculiar to pre-war comedy films. Despite the evidence, his joviality seemed staged and fraught. Maybe the photographer had sinisterly strewn a few coppers strategically along the tenement landing to entice such antics, Larry thought. It was hard to decipher the location clearly. Larry could just discern an iron railing perilously close on one side, and beyond this was a jumbled background of white washing on lines, and further back a jagged mountain range of slate rooftops.

Directly behind the boy was a shadowy doorway and stairwell. Further scrutiny revealed several indefinite figures lurking there, still timid after all these many decades.

It made for an odd picture postcard. Although there was no printer’s information on the reverse of the card, a copperplate scrawl in violet ink (which brought the trade name ‘Quink’ to his mind) announced, ‘Fond greetings from the pletties.’ The anonymous message seemed ominously targeted at Larry, for who else but him, or a fellow Dundonian, would have known what that last word meant.

He had to explain to his wife that in Dundee, pletties had been long external landing that ran behind tenement buildings, connecting four or five flats perhaps on each floor. The stairway was tacked onto the middle or end of the landing. The pictorial scene might have been anywhere in Dundee, for this plettie land was ubiquitous in the vanished dark age days. When he grew up in the fifties and sixties the tenements lingered like a back street

disease, before the apocalyptic horseman of redevelopment rampaged through the town, cutting epidemic swathes through every district. The scene in the photo could even plausibly have been the street where he was born. He thought the boy possessed a nagging familiarity, a specific genetic stamp of locality he still inhabited mentally, even though the snap must have been captured twenty years before he was born. He even imagined that the handwriting looked recognizable, though he could not link it to a real, remembered person.

‘This is a calling,’ his wife Louisa said superstitiously. ‘It means you are going back for some purpose.’

‘I’m bloody well not,’ Larry swore vehemently. But in his head he did return. His early years were interspersed with a number of Hansel and Gretel incidents, unreal events he could not reconcile with his other memories. These small strokes of falsely reconstructed fantasy did not come from his very early childhood, when imagination might be expected to run riot, but later, when he should have known better. And the episodes seemed to be connected to specific ruptures in his life. For reasons he never deciphered, his parents had subjected him to periodic physical upheaval more than most. He moved houses a strange number of times before he was ten, and the turmoil made dark furrows in his consciousness.

Once he asked his dad why they kept on ‘flitting’ as they called it, and dad told him, ‘If you keep on moving, the things of darkness canna get a haud of ye, son.’

What was it in the numinous dark that seemed determined to terrorise his family in particular? There was a mania among his relations that he could not explain, that seemed partially inspired by the place they came from: The Dark Suburb. That’s what they called Lochee, the seedbed of his strange kindred. The name arose because the area grew more quickly than municipal amenities like gas lights in the nineteenth century, shivering out west in the Victorian night, its jute mill machinery pounding, with some older bleak obscurity in the Sidlaw Hills frowning down at the encroachment of the streets. Lichtless

Lochee was another variation. But characteristically, Larry chose to believe that the darkness referred to something more figurative and ancient.

Larry turned over the postcard for the fiftieth time. It annoyed him that the old book which had housed it was innocuous and nothing to do with Scotland, let alone Dundee.

Increased handling of the card had increased his illusion of kinship to the photographed boy. The postcard now felt wrinkled with age and his clumsy handling. Each time he put it down carefully and wondered what had happened to himself. One of the wellsprings of his confusion was that his mother and father seemed to break up and reconcile several times each year. It was bamboozling to the boy who would one day be luxuriating in a lovely semi-detached house with mummy, then next week whisked away to a rat ridden tenement flat with no wallpaper, a bare bulb dangling overhead, and a near deranged dad.

This seam of strangeness seeped through the layers from his childhood like tenement darkness. He remembered being the youngest of a gang of lads, aged about five, playing on a building site, falling down into some foundations and being unable to escape. Sudden helping hands lifted him out of the darkness where he firmly believed he was trapped forever. There was, in another memory, an improbable shoogly cottage where he and some unknown relatives ran amok inside. It was inside a magnificently dense woodland attached to the walls of a tumble down factory, somehow in the middle of the city. Larry had a delicious, pernicious recollection of enjoying the contents of a box of Mars Bars some of his unknown Lord of the Flies cronies had liberated from somewhere, gorging themselves daft in that miniature forest.

Beyond these uncertain recollections, and more normal and dull life in more salubrious suburbs, there were also frequent stays with Granny One. Granny Two was never visited and was only talked about in a whisper when he was young. Granny One lived in what seemed to Larry the oldest building in the world. The walls were crooked and uneven, as if carelessly carved out of arthritic old bones. She hung great gusset bursting unmentionables shamelessly from a clothes pulley in a kitchen that she called the scullery, where there was

a cold press instead of a fridge. Another odd piece of furniture was the inscrutable uncle who sat obliviously at the kitchen table all day reading the paper, and who seemed incapable of speech. It was said that he had carelessly punctured his eardrum by using a bit of invasive paper to clear some blockage and was afterwards deprived of the urge to communicate with anyone.

Inside the granny house you had to be quiet most of the time, for Granny One shared that abstruse dread of the unseen that dad possessed. At certain times, according to dates crisscrossed on her crazy calendar, Larry had to succumb to a terrified, enforced silence.

She would pull down the blind that let bad light in from the plettie, cowering back from an imagined intruding horror that was likely to burst into the house at any second. Even when the invisible threat had passed it was evident that the great menace still lurked somewhere within the extended tenement precinct. The warren of flats, taken as a whole, was large as a mansion, which only made the many possible lurking locations of that nameless entity all the worse.

But sometimes, at night, it assumed a definite shape, Larry learnt later. For years he rarely stayed at gran’s overnight, until there came a time when things were particularly bad between mum and dad. When they grew exhausted of torturing each other and playing tug of war with him, granny stepped in and took him away. She had been a charge hand in a jute mill in her young days and would not let any kettle biler of a man (which meant weakling), or besom of a lassie (strumpet, that is) destroy the spirit of a puir wee laddie like Larry.

Uncle What’s-his-face was sent to stay at a cousin’s in Arbroath, and Larry was royally installed at granny’s for six weeks. He discovered that Plettie World was inhabited by a more exotic cast than he had suspected. He already knew many of the small boys and girls who infested the building, but becoming a permanent resident allowed him to be immediately immersed in their constant games, zigzagging in and out of common doorways and actual dwellings. Apart from play, there was the semi-slavery of going on

parental errands or, much better, going to the shops for old wifies for penny rewards.

Older kids fetched carried beer, baccy and bets for housebound or bone idle adults.

Anyone from outside the building was set upon and hounded out, as if they were a predator being repelled by native termites.

At night they huddled on the landings, because nobody made them come in during the summer holidays until the night was absolutely black. The whole building seemed to vibrate with child noise, the teeming life force of the neighbourhood. There was an arcane form of communication there which always struck him as magical, and he could never figure out how it worked. It operated when, for instance, a gang of enemies approached the building and the boys who inhabited the tenement would pour out within seconds to challenge the invaders. Or when a roaring drunken father came rampaging home at closing time and the landings and stairwells would instantly clear in advance of the approaching alcoholic hurricane.

There was another thing that disturbed their society at night, making them react in a different way to other threats. He became aware of it one evening when it must have been very late because the shadows in the building were long and the sky was starkly slashed with sunset scarlet and purple. Larry had lapsed into a dreamy state because he had been co-opted into participating in a girl’s game of tea parties or the like. The older boys would not have surrendered themselves to this fate, but he was still young and amenable and besides too tired that particular evening to object. As far as he could remember, his participation did not involve active engagement in the girls’ game. He was propped up against the wall, wrapped in a tartan rug; to his left was a similarly passive teddy bear (one eyed) the same size as himself. There was a rag doll on his right and various girls dispensing tea (which was outrageously only water) from a plastic tea set.

Several things alerted him to a sudden threat. One of the girls spilled water absent mindedly on his hand. He followed her line of sight across to a parallel tenement, where the plettie seemed to fog over as the space was flushed by a travelling shadow which

swallowed up the light as it moved from left to right. Any notion that it was an illusion was countermanded by the small group of children over there who were seen fleeing before the advancing mist. After a minute the whole opposite plettie was swathed in unnatural darkness; and inside that obscurity, as in the sea, something indefinite swam. ‘It’s coming ower here next,’ the girl next to Larry said in a whimper.

The population on their plettie parted; the older boys and girls slunk away without any parting sound, while the younger ones remained. The feeling of perplexed abandonment was desolate, though worse was to happen. Larry did what he usually found expedient in any crisis and screwed his eyes shut. He was immediately enveloped in uncomfortable night. One of the girls, he thought, tried to pluck him free from the collective lethargy, but her weak grasp fell away and left him swaying. Another, younger girl yelled and he distinctly heard the hiss of her bladder releasing control, then he smelled the urine seeping through her clothes, and bleakly hoped that the stream would not come near him.

She started to cry, as did others, and it was only his isolated wonder at why no parent or other adult was coming to help them that made him stay alert. He thought he heard heavy footsteps trudge up the close stairs and fall with emphasis on the landing, then slowly make way along the plettie towards him. Larry had the impression that the steps, indefinite as they were, seemed to become more muffled as they progressed and it seemed they were zig zagging wildly as they came near, which seemed impossible because of the narrowness of the landing.

The sound stopped desperately near and was replaced by another indistinct, even more troubling noise, like air exhaled through a narrow fissure. Larry might have shouted then; he felt it whistle up in his throat, despite the certainty that he would be marked as an eternal sissy if he did actually let it out. In the event, the wind was taken out of him as he was unexpectedly hoisted up and carted off. By the time he opened his eyes and found he was back indoors he was too surprised to squeak, let alone scream.

The wordless uncle was there, staring at him with unpleasant intensity, but only for an instant before retreating with granny into the scullery. He heard the uncle’s monotonous voice with disbelief, because it was the first time Larry had heard him speak. Granny and him were exchanging sharp, rapid whispers which he could not fully understand.

Alarmingly, the uncle was threatening to take Larry away if something was not done to sort out this (unnamed) situation. But Granny was saying that some unknown she was no worse now than she had ever been, and, forbye, had never harmed any child.

‘Tell that to her ain bloody poor bairns,’ the uncle hissed bitterly. ‘Done them in, one two, quick as ye like.’

‘I was living here then,’ Larry heard Granny said wearily. ‘It wisnae just like that; there were other things involved.’

The uncle made a cry of derision and mumbled if that was truly the case, then she and the neighbours should have done something to avert the tragedy before it happened. And granny then seemed lost in a reverie of dreadful memories.

‘Thirty years syne,’ she was saying disbelievingly to herself.

Her son cut her short. ‘Thirty years and she still walks when she shouldn’t. The thing put the terror in me, and you and abody else in this land did nothing to finish it. But enough’s enough. Now your other laddie’s bairn is caught up in it. You’d better think of something soon, or me and other people will be back here and tear the tenement doon, brick by brick if needs be.’

He raced out past the astonished Larry, giving him a look of peculiar pity as he left.

Larry was too scared to go and see his gran, who was left crooning to herself.

‘Cut her ain throat,’ she was saying quietly. ‘Straight efter the bairns were gone. Effie and Jean was on the landing and heard them greeting, puir sowels; run in and saw her, wi the blood gushing oot. The wee laddie and lassie twisted thegither at her feet. Nae chance for any o them. And the mother was just standing there laughing and laughing, wi thon razor in her hand.’

The shock of the recollection jolted her back to the present day. But there was no comfort for her there either. ‘What does she want wi us efter a these years?’ she asked herself.

No answer came to her. Larry felt too afraid to go to his own bed that night, but evicted the obliging dog from its den of cushions beneath the kitchen table. He did not fall deeply enough into sleep to have proper dreams, but had wade through the detritus of undigested images his upper mind threw up. But several times in the night he momentarily sank somewhere darker and was confronted with the unspeakable cut throat woman gasping hard after him along the pletties and down the stairwells.

A change came into the play of the children on the landings after that night. Some knowledge crept into their collective mindset, an antidote to innocence, that made them aware of the contents of the shadows now gradually creeping up on them through the long evenings. Their usual games were punctuated with make believe interludes that flirted with the rumour of the story of the long ago woman who had killed her children and herself. A few younger children fled indoors early due to the games that contained these ghosts. Larry would have been among them but for the residual fear that whatever was stalking the communal closes and alcoves would find him eventually indoors if he did not keep a look out for it on the landings.

Some of the older boys tried to test his bravery by saying they would tie him to the railings on the landing and let the mad woman come and rip his guts out. But he knew somehow, whatever they said, that he would be safe as long as he kept sentinel and looked out for the welfare of the plettie. Even the tough laddies with squashed noses and scars eventually tired of taking the mickey out of him, and, over the next few weeks, he lingered outside for some time after the last of them had departed indoors.

The woman was nearby at times, he was sure. He heard the dragging of limbs along the plettie directly below his own landing. When he peered down once through the railings to the distant back green in the deep shadows, the mixed intoxicating smell of cinders, cut

grass and bleach from strung out washing made him dizzily withdraw, afraid of the awful height. As he did so there was a responsive sound from the plettie below which sounded like someone’s rasping mockery of a throaty laugh. Larry retreated indoors quickly after that. His stomach was full of tongue tied knots. Whatever walked the passages and alleyways had put the finger on him for some purpose and he felt a weird thrill at being recognised. To think of it afterwards, terrified in bed, being singled out by such a thing did not seem so alluring after all.

After two weeks the summer weather turned bad. An indistinct fog descended over the district and refused to budge. On the occasions when he ran errands to the shops for granny, the streets seemed merely grey and nondescript. But the higher you climbed in the tenement buildings, the more it seemed like the clouds had lowered permanently down on them, a foreboding sign from heaven. One night Larry was gloomily peered through the scullery window, watching tiny girls daintily pushing ramshackle prams up and down the plettie, skidding as they tottered on their big sisters’ shoes, and every so often tumbling over, ending up screaming at their misfortune. It was entertaining for a while, but the repetition soon rendered it tedious. Larry learnt through the building’s grapevine that the older laddies were gathering in the dark stairwells, planning something from which he had been definitely excluded. He noticed too that granny was preoccupied and seemed irritated by his presence. Her silence was punctuated by disturbing mutterings when she restlessly moved from room to room. And when she remained in one place she clicked knitting needles together, or sewed odd items of clothing that didn’t seem to warrant mending. The activity seemed to be her defence against unseen threats.

At the end of that week the sky moaned warning thunder and the hidden boys roared back into the building, bellowing about a great triumph they had achieved over the witch woman: cornered her on the cinder wasteland at the end of the street and pelted her with stones until the bitch was screaming like a banshee and the blood flowed down her mad grey hair. She tried to fight her way out of the stoning circle, but their only threw more

and more rocks and bricks after her until she screamed in despair and vanished in a lightning bolt. They were going to go hunting her next week in the woods in the park where she had run away to.

But he knew that it was not the end of it. Something else happened the following week which he could not remember now, but the confusion was there at the time also. He seemed to remember the adults saying that the weather had broke, and he sadly wondered who could be responsible for so dastardly a crime. It made no sense to him: the fog, as far as he could see, was gone and a thick, treacly sunshine pervaded the evenings, so who could have broken the weather then? The heavy heat put a drowsy spell on him and made every thought and movement ponderous. On the plettie the children continued to play, but Larry sat in a drowse while they buzzed about him. Only the small boys and all the girls were left; he didn’t know or care what had happened to the bigger boys.

He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, but he couldn’t say what the object of his focus was supposed to be. Granny was too pre-occupied to call him in and some nights he stayed out far longer than anyone else, dozing in a nook on the plettie. She must have colluded with his bravado, or whatever it was, for once or twice he came shivering out of his doze to find himself alone in the tenement darkness wrapped in a Black Watch tartan blanket which she must have put around his shoulders. He knew that his own presence in the darkness had a purpose and determined to stay out later each night. Looking back, he did not remember what he did with the days; one that they were a prelude to the tremendous, frightful evenings full of waiting. The last night he spent in the building was etched inside his head forever, even though he spent a lifetime denying it. He was alone on the plettie and opened his eyes into a heavy twilight that prevented him from moving. He heard granny inside the flat, a few feet away, mumbling a far reaching, unco prayer. A few words filtered through the walls, something like, ‘Can ye no stey awa, for god’s sake.’

Then the sickly breeze stole away her words and Larry realised anyway that she was too lost in her litany to come to his aid if he needed her.

He was too weak to move, magically bound to the fabric of the building. Through his physical connection to the plettie he a dozen of unstill sleepers shift uncomfortably in the night. As he waited he heard the underwater sounding chimes of Cox’s clock a mile away chant an ungodly hour. The stark realisation of the lateness made him feel ill. Far below, in the canyon streets, a few closing time drunks were singing their way home. But their songs were sporadic and soon ended by something oppressive in the night. Larry was left in silence, interrupted by a cloying wind that whined through the fissures in the building.

In his mind he heard the wind rumble far away in Leerie Wood. Until now that place had been the most terrifying location on the planet. Now he felt mortally afraid of the exact spot he was sat in. He seemed to suffer a waiting period that extended into a hundred endless nights.

Then she moved and he saw her. No wonder she paused at the far end of the platform, having struggled up all the flights of stairs. The ascent was a struggle for those who were actually alive. Her eyes glittered with a vagrant light that ignited when they made contact with him. Then she began to make vague, shuffling progress along the plettie towards him.

Larry thought of a snail moving; imagined football on a burning summer day; conjured up an ice lolly shaped like a rocket sliding down his throat; anything except for the thing intangibly encroaching. The body of the being was nothing but bladder-wrack shadows, white limbs weaving in and out, reaching forwards for him, or maybe just steadying progress.

Nae face on it, he said in his mind, and felt cheated. For sure there were curls of cobweb hair over white bone, and great bloody burning globe eyes. The mouth was trying to babble, but it was full of ashes, spilling out. Pity about the neck as well, he thought as he saw it. A great half moon gouge dividing the throat from the shoulders. Larry felt a certain pity for the creature, though it was overwhelmed by the imminent dread of what it would likely do when it reached him. To be enveloped in its nothingness seemed a daft way to die.

Then his granny was standing there in between. He had the image of her, distorted, fixed in an odd position. Larry thought of John Wayne, for some bizarre reason. It seemed as if granny was approaching the woman, and that the woman knelt down. Granny put her hands on to the head of her for a moment. Then the head tilted back, almost fell off on its weak hinge of flesh, and granny with shaking hands drew her needle and thread across the gaping fissure until it was sewn shut and healed. Now the old woman fell back and the other rose up again.

Larry thought he was done for, because the woman fluttered for a moment towards him, unsure. He heard the breath re-enter the healed up windpipe. Then he heard it say something about bairns, and it swayed around in its weeds and rags and departed. He did not know how he managed to get back inside the flat. Like other things inside and outside his family, it was never mentioned again. But sometimes, in the few weeks he remained there, he heard the shifting movement in the close and the reverberation of the word it had not managed to gasp with its last breath, and he knew it was still looking after the children on the pletties.

The Was Wolf

As the wagons coiled up the corkscrew track on the mountain, the hundred ochre lights that guided them shimmered like frightened cat’s eye lights. Despite this, the people tried to rouse each other with clamorous calls and laughter. When the chorus of one raised song faltered the innkeeper at the head of the procession raised another, hoping the procession would grow hoarse enough to demand his sour wine.

Around the last bend the peak merged into the mass of the castle, a crowning mass which cowed them when they saw it – so black, immense and unwelcoming. The drawbridge was down and some of the braver men crowded across, then pounded on the oaken doors. There was no reply and an enormous battering ram was brought forward.

Yet even this, tried until the onrushing bravado was spent, only dented their pride. The burgomaster made them cease the assault and set about arguing with the others about what they should try next. Some of the more cynical and lazy villagers sat by the moat and caustically commented on their betters’ bad behaviour.

‘Look at those exhausting fools,’ old Jannevitch muttered. ‘They can’t knock at a door without wanting to murder each other. What hope can there be in this enterprise, Petrov?’

His associate sighed and looked over the precipice of the peak. The forest was dark and sad; half of it was missing, uprooted by ruinous machines which had stolen away the trees.

The tight, distant smudge of houses over there which was the town, was dimly lit in this dark night. Beyond it, two new factories excreted evil grey smoke which curled up like the intestines of a huge slain boar.

‘Drown yourself in this,’ Petrov said, giving his friend some vinegar wine.

Jannevitch bitterly swallowed. ‘How many years since we dragged ourselves up here?’ he asked.

‘Eighteen years. No one has come to the castle since.’

The wine made Jannevitch animated. ‘You lying old goat,’ he roared. ‘I picture it like it was yesterday. Only a few years ago, maybe, at most.’

‘I tell you, eighteen years.’ Petrov’s voice became a cruel reed note. ‘Do you know even why we are here, Jannevitch?’

‘No,’ the old man admitted at last. ‘You will have to tell me once more.’

Petrov drew in heady mountain air. ‘We came to haul the unclean beast from its den, to curb the evil taxes of our new lords, and to save ourselves and posterity from the tyranny of a new madness.’

‘Oh.’ Having stilled his friend through perplexity, Petrov claimed the remainder of the bottle as his prize. ‘We must demand the reciprocal feudal responsibility of leadership from that old oppressor inside there,’ he whispered. ‘So he can deal with those who are impinging more cruelly on our culture now. One thing to be most cruelly hunted and slain for generation after generation, but to be tricked out of our meagre birthright by the low-born dragoons of heavy industry!’

They watched the burgomaster crawl out of the moat. Unhappily, they had missed him being thrown in. It took a while before he could make anyone hearken to him. When he did, they got ladders and tried to scale the castle walls. The ladders went up, but the men did not. They drew lots, cheated, disputed the drawing of straws, and began to fight again.

A small side door opened beside the main entrance and a man stood in the threshold.

Maybe only Petrov saw him at first. He felt a shiver of kinship with the smile of contempt on the man’s face. When the others noticed the arrival all hostilities ceased. The burgomaster took off his hat and approached.

‘Count Freidrich,’ he said whiningly. ‘We come to beseech you. This land is suffering.

Nobody else can help us.’

But a voice interrupted from the crowd: ‘I remember this dragon of old. How can he still be alive when so many of our people were laid in a premature grave?’

Old Petrov was still smiling.

‘Yes,’ Count Freiderich said softly, ‘that brings back unhappy memories.’ Then he addressed the burgomaster: ‘You and several others may enter; the fewer the better.’

Six men followed the nobleman into his dark corridors. ‘If he leaves us in this maze,’ the burgomaster thought, ‘only the rats would ever find us again. Is that his intention?’

The innkeeper, well used to darkness, thought what a wonderful place this would be to store his beer and wine. And dreamily he wondered whether the count still had the fine palate his breeding required after so many years of consuming a rather cruder commodity.

Only Petrov’s secret thoughts were blacker than his surroundings.

After an eternity walking through passages they entered a small chamber. The count sat in his plush chair on one side of the room and the villagers huddled on a bare bench beside the spluttering fire. It took a long time before the burgomaster could state his case.

‘These past two years things have been unbearable in the lands below,’ he said. ‘First storms ruined our crops and what was left was eaten by mould in the granaries. Then the city people who controlled our loans called them in. Some little man came down from the provincial capital and said he had papers which gave him our good land. We scared him away, but others came with soldiers. So our good fields were sold and factories were built.

We work twice as hard for half the money. Foreigners came in and order us around. Now we learn there is war and there will be war. Sir, I almost hope we will be overrun by barbarians. At least they may kill the factory bosses.’

‘But what has this to do with me?’ the count enquired. ‘I care nothing for the law and rule of the land. All flesh is equally foreign to me.’

‘There is no-one else,’ Petrov said.

‘You do not know what you ask,’ the count said. ‘I am not now how I used to be. My power has strayed, but if I had it I would not do anything you asked me to.’

The petitioners stood up and left the room. Only Petrov lingered behind and crept behind Freidrich, who stood facing the fire. The old man raised a knife in the air to see just how it sparkled.

‘Petrov,’ the count said. ‘Be done quickly – if you mean to.’

In a dream, the knife rose and fell. The spell was cast off by a cry. The count held the blade, then it tumbled to the floor. Petrov watched the dark wound, but no blood came out, only a dull, rusted powder.

‘Come, woodsman,’ said the count. ‘Lead me outside and show me the night.’

The new moon had silvered the river, so that its urgent water spoke to both with strange accents. ‘Those are my vineyards to the west.’ Petrov pointed over the water. ‘The grapes withered and made the wine weak. Behind them are the woods, where I live. My trees have shrunk and fallen.’

The listened said nothing. Petrov continued: ‘See? The crooked spire of the church is over there. If the bell was to toll for our suffering it would never cease. I can make out the river warden’s cottage; he’s inside, counting the drowned dead like a miser. And the gamekeeper’s lodge, full of silver shot.

You know this well, lord, why do you insist on me telling you?’

‘I do not know,’ the count admitted.

‘Why did you kill her?’ the old man asked. ‘She was my only child.’

‘I do not know,’ the count said. ‘I wish I knew.’

The forest remembered the night, twenty years ago. Julianna had been late coming home, so Petrov went to search the woods. He found her in a grove: his girl’s head was lying some distance away from her despoiled body. While Petrov stood, not breathing, the wolf that had slaughtered her carried off the head into the thicket.

‘I did nothing a man should,’ Petrov said. ‘I dropped my axe and cried.’

‘There was nothing you could have done,’ Freidrich said without tone. ‘Against such a thing there is nothing a strong man can do.’

‘What was it like? How did it feel to rip her skin and lap up her life? Night after night you did the same to men and women and children. Fifty died. Then it stopped. Why?’ ‘Petrov, you deserve answers and peace. What changed me into a wolf and made me kill I do not know, except it was with me from the beginning. For a thousand years this thing has polluted my blood. Many times my mother wept at what she had married into and took me to the monks of St Gregory to try to cure me. But they shark away and would not meddle with the devil’s curse.’

The river roared, while Petrov considered. He did not thaw. His limbs ached and he felt the same deathly silence as the other man.

‘They should have killed you,’ he said.

‘Perhaps,’ said the count. ‘It did not start truly until I was fifteen. I found I could not eat what food they brought me. The family dared not breathe the secret then, for we had moved here many years before to hide ourselves. I became thinner and thinner and the doctors were baffled. They nearly killed me with their philtres and leeches. One day, out hunting, I trapped a fox and tore it apart before anyone else saw me. I disgusted myself, but could not stop it.

‘My father admitted my nature in the end. The illness had skipped his generation and he would not admit his heritage. He would have killed me if my mother had not intervened.

The best she could obtain on my behalf was that I should be locked away. I had no idea why he put me away.

‘The hatred I experienced made me so hungry. I had my revenge when my father, in a state of drunken sympathy, ill advisedly stuck his hand through the bars. In half a minute I had stripped off his flesh to the bone. I even cracked open his finger tips and sucked the marrow dry. That was the last time I saw him, though he live for another five years.

‘One of my gaolers fed me cuts of raw mutton and pork. Since I was utterly separated from society I had no scruples about admitting my beastliness. In truth there was no better training for what I was to become. Often as a jest this warden would bring live rats and birds so I could drool for them. One day he introduced a live calf into the room. My feet and arms were bound, so I could only crawl, and I frantically chased the poor beast at a snail’s pace all night while the gaolor and his friends laughed their faces off.

‘Finally the fat turnkey grew so fond of me he promised to set me free, if i should do something for him. What did he want? Only my happiness, he assured me. I was a misunderstood lad, he said, done wrong by wicked parents. His kin, on the other hand, had hearts of oak. How would it be if the two things were conjoined?

‘The man had a daughter. He bored me with descriptions of her loveliness for a whole week. She and I could marry and live under his roof until I came into my inheritance.

What had I to lose by agreeing with his avarice? One door I found the cell door unlocked.

The man was nowhere to be seen. I crept outside and followed the path to his house, then went to bed and slept for a whole day.

‘It was night when I woke and the man was not home. His wife was dead, so the daughter was my only company. And she was no beauty, I assure you, despite his boasting.

But what she lacked in looks she made up for in carnality. After she satisfied herself she fed me a great dish of offal. I like her well enough, though she was as foolish as her father.

‘I remember the moon, full, shining with allure through the thatch. I had forgotten her beauty, and she enslaved me from that moment. My senses disassembled, my sinews tautened, muscles stretched, hair lengthened all over my body. I tried like a child to brush the transformation away, but my hands formed into horribly beastly claws. My teeth sharpened, and so did my brain.

‘It was pain more than anything, Petrov. I howled so hard it is a wonder the walls did not fall. The girl, in the next room, heard me and laughed. I went on all fours into her chamber. Even when she saw me she continued that mocking, beckoning laughter.

Something was wrong with the poor child’s head, and it was her head I removed first.

Then I ate every morsel of her body.’

Petrov sweated in the coldness of the night. The count removed his cloak and placed it around the shoulders of the old woodcutter. But Petrov’s shuddering would not cease. His eyes shon, unable to look at the nobleman. ‘How did it feel?’ he asked, unsure he wanted an answer.

Freiderich sighed, a barren sound. ‘I could lie and say that it made me feel as no man ever felt. But I was only a wolf, with all the terrible lack of understanding of the beast.’

‘Part of you was still a man.’

‘But which part? Not enough to stop the wolf. Can you prevent the wind? Shall I talk on, old man?’

Petrov nodded and the count continued: ‘After the girl’s death I hid in the forest. For a month I made do with birds and berries.

When the wolf shadow overcame me once more I was in the company of a woodsman like yourself. We were drinking in his cabin and I tried to restrain the shape shift. He was boldly drunk and would not run, even when I warned him. He got his punishment, Petrov.

After that time I did not try to hold it back, and it burst forth like a great wave at the first touch of the lunar light.

‘Next morning, when I was man again, I resolved to stay always hidden among the trees.

I would encounter few stray people, and perhaps the wolf would be starved into submission. Before the next bad time came I laboured to make a strong binding made from tree bark and secured myself to an oak. When the moon saw me she told the man in her surface to laugh, so the binding broke and I rampaged through the forest. No man or woman was there, so the animal was furious without its food. I did not regain mortal appearance for three days. I knew then I would stay in beast form until I found a victim.

As a beast I was invulnerable, though the human form could be hurt at that stage. I was too strong a coward to consider ending my life.

‘I decided to seek a path to the south, crossing the mountains into Macedonia. I must have killed, though I do not remember. Then I enlisted with their Greeks in their war against the Turks. Let the cruel crescent extinguish the full moon; how fitting. The Greeks overlooked the evil in my eyes because of my noble bearing. I was in the front line of every attack, reckless of my life. They sang about my bravery and gave me yellow wine and women.

‘When the time of the wolf came I took myself into the stray countryside and slew any stray Turk who wandered in the mist. Many times I stalked the battlefield and gorged on the peasants who robbed the dead.

‘The routine of conflict made my life seem normal. Sometimes I visited the town and the chief surgeon, Dr Kolpas, allowed me to frequent the wards and speak with the wounded. I would attempt to cheer those in pain and write letter for them, the first unselfish act of my life.

‘One afternoon I mistakenly entered the mortuary. You can guess what happened. The dear doctor found me doing wrong and stared at the blood on my face. Deep inside the wolf laughed and said my man shape was a sham. I wish the doctor had killed me. Yet he just averted his eyes while I slunk away.’

‘Is that when you returned here?’

‘After strange years and wrongful roads. My mother and father were dead, the castle derelict. I planned to construct a sanctuary from the world and tried to escape with spirits and laudanum. But the villagers wanted a lord and would not leave me be, and a lord they received who was darker than their nightmares. For five years I killed without thought, until the sluggish peasants summoned their nerves and stormed the schloss.’

‘I was among them,’ Petrov said.

‘Then you know that my accursed good luck served me once more and I managed to escape. Northwards I travelled through the Carpathians, intent on travelling through

Poland and obtaining passage on a Baltic ship to a new continent. Winter caught me in the evil Tatra Hills. Long shon the moon there and I polluted those slopes. One night I caught the scent of a pack of real wolves. Here, I thought jubilantly, was my last chance at kinship.

‘You laugh bitterly, Petrov. I was also bitter . When I approached the animals, there was confusion. I suppose they smelled the foul humanity on me. The grizzled leader attacked me and we fought wildly. Such dismal wails came from the others that the summits shattered. Finally I vanquished him. The rest flew when he fell. I lost myself once more.

I was still mad, but my rage was mollified. I lingered over long in that country until I was caught by the fore-leg one day in a steel trap laid by hunters. The pack came and gloated at my pain. All day they stayed and waited until they thought me weak enough to attack.

‘Towards evening I turned back into a human and they closed in. But a man happened by and they fled. His beard and cloak and self-righteousness marked him as a priest. ‘“Evil one,” he said. “God had imprisoned you and injured you for your own benefit.

‘His eternal mercy behoves you to appreciate the agony of life.”

‘I fainted and when I came around he was on his knees, mumbling his incantations. I prayed for something else and it was granted: the moon came again and made me strong.

The wolf pack came, because I offered them the sweeter meat of the man. Then I found the power to drag my body and the trap too along the road.

‘A miracle saved me. Next day another wandering holy man found me, unconscious, human again, at the roadside. The plains are inhabited by a superfluous number of such mendicants, Petrov. This man’s eyes were kind and forgiving, unlike the other’s. ‘“Little brother,” he said, “why do you stray between worlds so hopelessly?”

‘He freed me and dressed my wounds. He took me on his cart and he had my tale. I asked him if I could ever be forgiven and he said by him yes, by God no: I was a wolf yet.

I became angry and said that no scripture gave guidance for my affliction, and that I had no choice in my actions as a wolf.

‘“You blaspheme,” he said sternly. “All men have choice.”

We argued the point for weeks as we travelled the country. He preached to peasants and collected alms. On market days in the towns I stood in sack cloth before him to attract the rabble. No conjurer or trickster knew more about emptying purses than he did. When the yokels gathered he would castigate me and beat me for my surfeit of sin. How the halfwit crowd laughed, though I perceived it as a route to salvation.

‘When the time of the beast arrived he took me to the woods and chained me and made a mock of the wolf with holy words. Neither as a man nor a creature was allowed to hide from the truth of God. But eventually I tired of being righteous without the relief of absolution. I ran again like a thief. For some time I lived in Llow and gained the reputation as a great dissolute. Then the money I stole from the monk ran out and I had to return to the castle of my birth.’

The tale concluded, Petrov looked him fully in the face.

‘You are no wolf,’ he said caustically. ‘All is lost. You know the town wanted to reawaken the monster to ravage the land and wreak havoc on their enemies. How strange this world is.’

‘The horror becomes the hero,’ the count said. ‘It is sometimes the way. What do you think?’

‘I do not care for hatred now. My sorrow may be swallowed in the furnace of war, a small thing.’

The count thought for a long time. Dawn was beginning, the first light showing his face grey and haggard.

‘Time has finished with the like of me,’ he said to himself. ‘That kind of darkness is done forever.’

He looked down to the black river as he spoke.

‘You are too human, Freiderich,’ Petrov said.

The nobleman’s body fell, glanced off the rocks, then into the water. I am sick of being defenceless, Petrov thought. He went to where his horse was. Though he was old he would ride far, to the camp of the enemy army.

I will be as they are, he thought: a creature of the coming times and the new darkness. I need no change of shape to unleash the work of slaughter.

Those Who Cut the Holly Tree The two men always came to the hospital grounds in the second week of November. They could have been ghosts or hallucinations for all that Callard knew. He watched them from his barred window, but no one else acknowledged them. Though they came and went as they pleased, they mostly arrived very early in the morning, around the time when he woke before the rest of the ward.

Callard never spoke, because he knew nothing he said was true. Even to say good morning to a nurse would involve several layers of lying that he could not extricate himself from. He silently studied the impassive visitors, the old man and the supposed son among the evergreens. For five seasons he observed them from up here, from soft boy to mad man. A careful picture, disordered and laid away for the rest of the year, unwrapped itself at their arrival. He knew exactly what they would do.

Among the mist they worked, cutting the spiky leaves from all the parts of the holly trees they could reach. Carefully they pruned the trees. Two inches, four or five leaves, putting them into huge sacks, moving from grove to grove. It seemed they were performing a religious duty. Callard came to admire their mystery. He revered their gathering patience. Not a sound was made while they laboured. Their torn hands moved as though conducting invisible choirs of elemental minions. The men never wore gloves to protect their hands; they did not flinch when thorns ripped their skin and snagged their clothes.

‘They are priests,’ he told himself. ‘Sent here for some purpose, I think.’

But trying to force the revelation sent it spinning through the beached ship of his mind.

For the next fortnight the two came each day. They picked their crop in silence, bagged it, and vanished like rabbit thieves. It weighed down Callard’s wondering considerably. Each day they left the trees he thought they would not return. At the end of the first week he was crazy with concern. These nights he dreamt tortuously, which he never did at any other time. The nightmares returned as his confusion grew; in them the men’s purpose changed every time. One night they were plucking the poor marbled souls of those inside the institution, the next they jousted with ungodly Christmas tree symbols on every branch.

Then the month turned. There was snow. As he always did, Callard lost his memory.

He pulled the dazzling coverlet off the land and used it to insulate his insanity. Christmas came. The doctors made the inmates pantomime their madness and play act their lunacy. It was therapy, they said, to open the hidden goldmine of their desires, complexes and motivations for them to delve into. They tackled the glittering play like children tearing open gifts. Wisemen and messiahs were the favourite part for patients.

This year Callard carried the coup. Arrayed in shimmering white, silver hair flowing down his neck, his bald crown shoe in the light. A look of dignity occupied his features.

His right hand held a sickle made of golden paper, which he used to cut mistletoe from the stage Christmas tree. The eyes in the front row glittered, the doctors coughed respectfully; none of the nurses laughed.

In the fifth year he discovered the truth. At Halloween he suddenly remembered the two men were due. Such was the shock of memory that his mania receded in a tide. It was an anticipation where fear felt up, entwined with wild joy. The danger was personal. Callard felt he had to tell someone about their arrival. But patients and staff were fools alike. He was not sure he could still talk. They would think it all lies anyway.

And tell them what? That two strange men were coming to train the trees? Nothing sinister or unusual in that, surely. They would be said to be gardeners, pure and simple.

But they were more than that. He had to discover what their true purpose was, otherwise he would miss out.

Change was evident on the wing, a dreadful calm in place of howling and chatter. In bed he listened to the wind walking in the woods. No matter how he wished, he could not escape the sound, which flooded the wards like the sea. In the morning the window drew him like a magnet. In the morning mist they were clearer than he had ever seen them, standing between sentinel trees, and their eyes found him as quick as lightning.

They had sought him out. He wondered if they were going to cut him down. But they could not injure him, not in that way. When their arms lifted the metal tools flashed, both to warn and to beckon him. He felt cautious and unafraid, knowing their motivation.

What did they do with the holly? An image of a thorny crown, very bright and green, thrown into the water to rescue the drowning. Or, another way, a wreath laid on a new grave. What use was that? As he was dead in life he could not see the point of honouring the dead. Then he saw the hills fiery with dawn, with dark trees beneath. There were other, secret places the men went to gather moss and firs.

Callard’s eyes shut. He opened them again and the men were gone. A thing moved in his throat, a rusty gear. An odd, embarrassed sound came out. He would have to tell the people and enter the world again. Now he saw it all laid before him, as if he was soaring, looking down at the contours of the future. He was free and on the grass, trembling and ready.

Not a thing in the world stirred for a moment. Then they came at him from either side so he could not run away. His arms were lifted high, powerless to resist. None of his pleading prevented them lifting their weapons. Then they fell in a downward arc, paring him to the bone. He screamed loudly, but no one cared. The hospital was still. Only the two men, smiling as they dissected him.

Callard joined them afterwards. It was different from how he imagined it: the steadiness of cutting away the crowns of leaves. The repeated action relieved the mind of

the need to think. Not one of the three of them talked. Methodically they took the best greenness off the branches, moving from tree to tree, never stopping. There was no need for them to rest, and the task was endless.

One day he paused in his work and looked up at the large building. He wondered who lived there; it looked so colourless and forbidding. The two men smiled at him. The secret was being broken.

Then they came like a flood, or starlings out of a new sky. People surged from the house in their droves. Men in white coats, in billowing gowns, pyjamas, naked men, oblivious in the dew. They coursed towards the groves of holly, ready to tear off the prickly leaves.

And their faces were bright as the berries.

Rubble Here was me and John McGhee standing looking down a massive hole, with the smell of the raw earth wafting up to greet us. I was in a suit, John in his working duds, overalls, in spite of the fact that he was skiving off work. It could have been a grave we were looking down into, we were so solemn for a minute, until John cleared his throat and gobbed down into the chasm.

I was trying to get a picture of the street as it had been before this great knocking-down.

All the buildings had been levelled, and it was temporarily a Somme-like landscape. They were going to erect housing association flats and light industrial units soon. But all I could remember standing there was a book of black-and-white pictures I had once owned that showed the districts as it had been eighty to a hundred years ago. There was one shot of a tenement building, half way up its stairs, a window with ornate coloured glass, which put me in mind of some king of monastic retreat. I liked the idea as a kid, and the caption reinforced the notion. It said something about this particular block having a mixed community of Catholics and Protestants, a little oasis of secularity in the sectarian area.

That tenement had gone long before our time. They were just going to build on it again when we were growing up, and we had use of it as a gone back to nature playground, and later as a building site. But I could not picture the place precisely as I thought I should

remember it, and the dislocation disturbed me. I was gazing around trying to pick out familiar aspects of the landscape. John was staring down the hole.

‘Something moved doon there,’ he said, kicking a stone down with his boot.

‘A rat,’ I said.

We had met accidentally that day, in a pub. I had sneaked back into the area for a mooch around, having come up for a job interview. More like I had sneaked into a pub, and there was John, whose face I did not recognise, staring at me like he wanted a fight.

He came across and asked whether I enjoyed being an explorer in the Amazon.

This threw me off balance and he had to fill me in, so to speak. After a lot of confusion, I was made to remember. We went to school together. One day when we were eleven I had said I needed to learn Spanish because when I grew up I was going travelling to South America. He gasped in amazement and admitted his ambitions wouldn’t stretch beyond the city’s boundaries.

I bought him a pint and he asked if I ever went travelling.

‘The furthest south I got was Bristol,’ I told him. ‘Worked in a seedy office for fifteen years.’

‘Oh, never mind, eh. Have another.’

We were on the way from one pub to another when we came across the lunar landscape.

And it occurred to me that we had grown up in the ruins of the old tenements being knocked down, and here we were witnessing more ruins thirty years later. I swayed in the rain and thought about the whole city being psychologically screwed by this continuous structural breakdown and rebuilding through the centuries. They should have made this town out of cardboard.

I thought about General Monck, that bastard, who started the bloody ball (the wrecking ball) rolling when he invaded Scotland in the seventeenth century. He ran through the place knocking everything down and killing all the folk until they locked themselves in the Auld Kirktower. I read in the Old Statistical Account that the killing didn’t stop until the

roundheads found a bairn fucking its dead mother in Step Row. I didn’t realise until later that it was an alphabetical mixup, where the f’s stood in for s’s, old style, so the kiddie was only sucking it’s dead mum; which was less appropriate, symbolically. There was a kid at school called Monk, and I used to make his life hell because of all this.

‘Bastard!’ I said.

‘Aye, bastard,’ said John, when I shared this. Then he carried on talking about which he had been relating in parallel with my own memory. I heard nothing of it, but he didn’t notice. He went on relating how this city was obsessed about how much it had lost to the stupid town planners over the years. Like the old medieval maze of the Withergait in the city centre – ‘as if it was St David’s holy city!’ he said.

‘The thing is, when they knocked all those old buildings down, there was hundreds and hundreds of rats came swarming out and rampaging through the toun. Where are the rats here, you tell me that?’

I did not get the gist of what he was trying to say. We stood swaying, considering, then I said, ‘The rats probably saw you coming, John. You’re the pie-eyed piper!’

I didn’t think it was that bad a joke, but John must have done, because he gave a groan and jumped down the hole.

‘Any treasures doon there, Johnny boy?’ I shouted down.

‘There may be, in actual fact.’

‘I’m hoping for a body or two, John,’ I said. ‘Don’t let me down now. Is Paper Bag there?’

We both laughed. Paper Bag was an old tramp who used to haunt the streets when we were laddies. But he wasn’t down there. Instead, John pulled out a bulging carrier bag from one of the walls of the pit. It had a faded logo for the long vanished local supermarket ‘Fine-Fare’, and John tenderly held it as if it contained the holy grail.

‘Help me up, will ye?’

The bag was laid reverently down on the ground and John was helped up. Needless to say, we were nervous about opening it. Not that we were expecting any real buried treasure. Anyone who ever made any money in this town ran away like the clappers as soon as the banks were open. I postulated that it might contain a parcel of fossilised 1970’s dog dirt, white of course, buried for the befuddlement of future excavators. John expressed the hope that it was a vintage kerry-oot of beer.

‘One-two-three go!’

We emptied it and stared. It was a stash of items such as a schoolboy might have hoarded back in our day. There was a dull gunmetal catapult, the elastic on it all eaten away.

‘John, that’s bloody mine,’ I said. I picked it up and saw my initials scrawled on it, done with a rusty nail, I recall. ‘I bought it down the fishing shop in Tain Street.’

We frowned down at the other stuff. There were innumerable sad marbles, goggle eyes, staring up. There were the remains of a vintage lucky bag: wee plastic toy, a maze puzzle, card with a Euro animated character on it, no sweeties. There were lassies hair bands, there were conkers, there were five half-pennies and two old ten p’s that were really two shilling pieces. There was one of those dimensional pictures that mock movement when you shift it in the night (showing the boy hero Joe 90). And, certainly not least, there was a whole sad hoard of football cards: Billy Bremner, Joe McQueen, Danny McGrain, and on and on and one, a good thirty or forty of them.

‘Mine’s!’

John picked them up. There was dampness in his eyes. He put the reverend cards in his pocket. From his reaction, I did not doubt they were in fact his property, or had been before they were stolen. The thief was Big Joe, the terror of the estate, who everybody hated and got hit by, the rites of damned thuggery. Big Joe ruled – not OK. We talked about it, dazed, for a while. Not worth remembering, not therapeutic, not healing by any manner of means. Big Joe, looking back, was still a veritable prick. John

and I said we hoped he had been done in and was doubled up, decomposed, at the bottom of that pit.

I remembered, despite myself, he had come rampaging up the hill once into our territory, and we had scattered like the winds, a big gang of us scared by this big lout. I went up a tree like a cat while he rampaged around, chasing people and clouting those he caught.

Then he circled around and regrouped himself, gathered huge pile of stones to throw, and crouched in readiness at the base of my tree. I was a hundred years, in my mind, up that birch.

All the while he was mumbling and laughing and cursing, and it was a miracle he never looked up. When he went away at last and I fell down, I swear some beached white petrified portion of my soul remained up there clinging to the branches forever.

John’s tale was worse, because he was younger when it happened, about six, and he couldn’t remember if Big Joe was the villain or not. But it must have been him, because nobody loomed so darkly large over these streets in those years.

John’s story was that Joe grabbed him while he was out playing alone. He was taken, while he cried, away up Dunmore Street, that strange place full of wee bits of woods and scrap yards and deserted houses. There was a weird wee yard full of unoccupied caravans, and Joe took him inside and locked him in one of the cupboards. And he screamed and cried inside for hours, it seemed like.

Joe came back , let him out and said he’d been in there for two days. His mum and dad were worried frantic looking for him. How dare he treat them like that, getting lost and not giving a damn. The only thing to do for such a crime was lock him up again: he was sentenced by the court of Joe to a year’s imprisonment. Of course, he came back a while later and let him out. But the crowning touch was that he emptied half a box of Daz over his head and told him to go home and tell his mum and dad it had been snowing, which he did, though it was August.

I was laughing, but I had to say sorry. ‘No wonder you’re the way you are, John,’ I said.

‘It’s not funny. When you think about it, he could have done anything to me. You read about these things all the time. Not that it didn’t go on back in our day. He must have been about thirteen then, a right vindictive bugger. Makes you wonder if he did something worse to somebody else when he was older. Must have done, eh? I just hope somebody else paid him back, that’s all.’

They should have done, I agreed. The thing about Joe though was that he was the first ogre in Eden for us. We – me and John and a dozen others – were nice wee kids, not tough nuts, or low-lifes or scum, and he was the one who opened the door and soured the first fruit for us. So, thanks Joe; I hoped he was in hell down the bottom of that hole.

We had to forget about it. But first we ceremoniously unzipped and pissed into the pit.

‘There you go, Joe, drown in that!’ said John.

Then we went back to the pub and drank to the future.

Fleg Mum said I should stop telling lies, but I think dad believed me in the end. After I’d told him, he sort of tightened up and asked me loads of questions. He didn’t give me any answers though. Fleg would have explained to me what happened, except him and his mum moved away. I thought I saw him again yesterday outside school, but it couldn’t have been him. When he was here he went to a different sort of school. I used to tease him about it until mum made me stop. And when I told Fleg about this he laughed and laughed. You had to tell him everything: he used to stop breathing if you didn’t give him your secrets.

It began on the first day of the holidays. Me and Fleg, with Jimmie and Fat Paddy, were mucking about in the park. It was okay until some big kids chased us and we had to hide in the trees on Reith’s Hill. Usually we avoided the hill because it was a bad place. But we had no choice. We all hid in different places. I dived into a ditch and saw Paddy shin up a tree. He fell down twice, then Jimmie poked his bum with a pole and he disappeared into the branches.

We stayed there a long time. When it got dark and darker I heard Paddy crying. But we didn’t dare move because the boys were still crying in the park. Fleg was angry with his noise, shushing him from the bushes behind me.

‘Shut up,’ he said, ‘or he’ll know we’re here. Then he’ll come and get me.’

‘Who will, Fleg?’ I whispered.

‘Him,’ Fleg hissed. The way he said it set Paddy off wailing again.

When we wheeshed him, Fleg carried on: ‘He’s been after me a long time, but I always managed to trick him till now. Don’t any of you make a sound, or break a twig or anything – then he’d get me for sure.’

‘What is he, Fleg, a monster?’ Jimmie asked, excited.

‘That’s right,’ Fleg answered him. ‘So just watch yersel’, Jimmie Kerr, he’s got these claw things. I’ve seen them as well, they’re this huge.’ And he made an impressive rustling in the bushes.

Jimmie managed to kid on he didn’t believe it, but me and Paddy did.

‘Go on then,’ Jimmie taunted Fleg. ‘Bet you can’t prove it right now.’

His voice was shaking really badly. Fleg said he didn’t have to prove it, the Thing would come and show us all soon. ‘Just say and wait here, Paddy. Soon it’ll get properly dark and I won’t be around to see.’

Next minute we were tearing through the bushes towards the park. I was too scared to think about everything Fleg said. Anyway, everyone said there were monsters everywhere, but I never saw any of them. I think I believed Fleg because he said the monster was just after him, not the rest of us. Nobody else would have said that, just in case it came true.

I didn’t stop running till I hit the flat park grass. Then I fell down puffing and panting.

Fleg and Jimmie were beside me, but there was no sign of Paddy. Jimmie realised what happened first.

‘The bugger’s got stuck up that tree,’ he laughed. But when we thought about it, it wasn’t funny. None of us looked at each other. We got up and walked home as quick as we could. It was a rotten thing to do, but we were sick scared and couldn’t have gone back for Paddy if we wanted to. Anyway, it was his fault for crying like that, though I didn’t think that later.

Just as we got back to out road the streetlights switched themselves on. ‘That’s a good sign,’ I said, ‘when the streetlamps come on when you walk near them. It’s bad luck when you walk along and they go off suddenly.’

Fleg smiled with his sharp teeth, shadows under his eyes like a real-life vampire. ‘And you have the cheek to go on about my monster!’ he said, then laughed and smacked my arm.

‘I’ll tell you something else,’ I said. ‘Know that orange streetlamp in the backies beside the bins? Well tonight it’s gonny glow purple, like it does sometimes. It will tonight, I know it. And that means something strange is going to happen soon.’

‘Strange good or strange bad?’ Jimmie asked.

‘Both!’ said Fleg.

Any other time I would have felt strange telling them about the change in the streetlight.

But then seemed the right time.

‘Race you up the stairs,’ Jimmie said, and he was bounding off before we could catch up. His ma must have been waiting for him in the shadows of the close, because we heard a yell, then a sort of scuffling down the stairwell as she dragged him into their flat and slammed the door. Fleg and me laughed as we climbed the stairs, but he went quiet when were reached our landing.

‘What did you mean about the monster just chasing you, Fleg?’ I asked.

Maybe it was just the flickering light in the close, but I thought I saw Fleg grin at me in a funny way. Just when I thought he was going to say something I heard someone inside one of the flats drop something. I looked away for a second, then when I looked back Fleg had bolted up to the attic flat where he lived.

‘I’ll tell you everything soon,’ he hissed down the stairs, then he gave his owl hoot and he was gone.

I went to sleep quickly, hoping I would dream about the monster. But all I saw in my sleep was Fleg turned into a great black buck hare in the woods, running and running. I woke up with my brother Davie shaking me. He was going on about how he had to get up and puke up at midnight.

‘I went through the living room and puked out the window, and there was a van down there with flashing blue lights. I thought it was an ambulance for me being sick, but it was only a police van.’

I knew he had more to say, so I punched him in the belly. He was sick all the time, so it was easy making him talk. The police van brought Paddy home, he said. His mum came out and Paddy said me and Jimmie and Fleg had left him up Reith’s Hill and she was spitting mad and after me and Fleg.

‘Did dad see her? What did he say?’ I asked.

‘He said he’d tan your arse in the morning for what you did to Paddy,’ he said.

It wasn’t too bad in the morning. Mum made me eat porridge and talked at me for a while. Dad was late for work and just gave me an awful look before he left. As soon as I could I met Fleg and went to the park. The grass was still soaking wet when we sat down on it. I asked Fleg if he got told off that morning.

‘What for?’ he asked, chewing a bit of grass.

I told him about the police bringing Paddy back and his mum being mad with us.

‘Didn’t you hear nothing last night?’ I asked.

‘The attic’s a long way up.’

‘Is there any rats up there?’

He scowled. ‘No rats,’ he said. He lay down on his back. ‘My ma would have smacked Paddy’s ma if she dared come to our door.’

I thought about Fleg’s mum and believed it. She was skinny and manky looking, always walking up and down the street like a chicken, with her arms folded, looking for fights.

‘Fleg,’ I said, ‘are you a tinker?’ I only said it because Fleg looked different from anyone else I’d ever seen. He was short and dark and strange looking. His face went white as paper when I said it. He stood up suddenly and so did I. Then he punched me hard right in the mouth. I was too surprised to cry. He walked off a bit and tried to spit

back at me. Then he pulled up loads of grass and tried to chuck it at me. It was ages before I could think of what to do.

‘Your mum’s like this,’ I said, and began to imitate her, walking up and down with my face screwed up and bum sticking out. He had to laugh eventually because I’m good at imitating people.

‘She better watch herself when she gets to the end of the street,’ I said. ‘Mr McIlroy stands there when he’s drunk. His wife doesna let him in the house till he’s sober. Even the polis are scared o’ him.’

‘I remember he grabbed me once,’ Fleg said.

‘He gets you if you go too near. Then he gets your arm like this…’

I pounced on Fleg, getting his arm in a tight squeeze. But he yelled so much I thought I’d hurt him.

‘Don’t do that!’ he screamed. ‘It’s just the way he does it, him on the hill!’

‘Tell me who he is, Fleg.’

‘I can’t.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I want to, but I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I really don’t know. All I know is that he’s real, or used to be.’

That was everything that day. After that we just went home.

Doctor Mackenzie was in the house to see my brother. Dad was there too, and he gave me a smack when the doctor left. But he did it quick and quiet because of Davie.

It was Fleg’s idea next day that we should build a den. We needed a hiding place, he said, so we could hide from Paddy’s mum and the big kids who were after us. But Jimmie said that other gangs always found dens and knocked them down.

‘Not where we’re gonna build ours,’ Fleg said slyly.

‘Where abouts?’ Jimmie asked.

‘Reith’s Hill,’ Fleg whispered.

None of us believed him at first, but when we saw he was serious we all shouted at him, saying he was mad. In the end though we knew he would go through with it anyway, so we followed him. It was a place on the wildest side of the hill, all rocks and bushes and twisted trees.

‘Nobody could find this in a hundred years,’ Paddy said, impressed. I wondered how Fleg had found this place.

On one side the land dropped away like a wall, right down to the land that cuts the hill in two. Over to the right was the old iron bridge that joins our half of the hill to the graveyard on the other side. Jimmie said somebody hung himself from the bridge fifty years ago.

We carried all our planks and corrugated iron and got started building the secret den before the rain came on. And when we finished we all crawled inside to see how it felt.

Jimmie said he didn’t like the bridge being so close; anything might cross over and come to get us. I heard Fleg suck in all his breath, as if he wanted to say something but was too scared. When I got the guts up to ask him what was wrong, he turned a funny colour and ran out and left us there.

That was the first time I felt that Fleg had betrayed me somehow. Me and Jimmie talked for a while huddled in there, how we thought he was wrong bringing us to this bad place, and this and that. We even put a bit of a curse on him, but that had nothing to do with what happened later.

After tea that night mum sent me out to get ice cream for her and Davie. When I got back to the close I saw the big cupboard under the stairs was open. It was dark inside there, but I heard a noise from inside and when I looked inside, there was Fleg and crouched up in the back. He backed away a bit, so that I couldn’t see him properly. But I could see he was shivering madly. He was locked out of his house, he said. It made me shivery, his voice was so small and sad.

‘Where’s your mum?’ I asked him.

‘Gone to go and look for dad. She’s been gone for hours.’

‘I thought she always left the door open so you could get in.’

‘Not this time.’ He gave a sob and shuffled forwards. ‘She doesn’t like me any more. I don’t know why.’

‘Of course she does,’ I said quickly. His face was all manky, streaked with dirt from crying. I didn’t want to look at him now. ‘You can always come round to ours.’ The way I said it made it sound like I didn’t mean it. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, then ran upstairs to tell mum. She said I should bring Fleg up, and even called Fleg’s mum a hussy, or something.

But once I got downstairs again, there was no sign of Fleg.

When I climbed back up again, Davie was mad because his ice cream was melting. I punched him in the head and he ran and told mum, but she took no notice of him for a change. I still felt pretty bad and went to bed with a banging head. It was early in the morning when I woke, so I got on my clothes and shinned down the drainpipe to the back green. One of the bins fell over when I landed on it, and Mrs Gurty’s cat fell out of it, landing on all four feet. All its fur was on end and its eyes popping out. I went to laugh, then I saw the cat was stone cold dead on its feet. Someone had cut its belly open and all his raw red guts were hanging out.

I shoved it out the way with a bin lid. But then I noticed big black marks, like huge fingerprints, on the metal. I got scared, so I chucked it down and ran away down town.

Everything was closed and there were no people about. It was a weird feeling, like somebody was hunting me. When I looked in all the closed shop windows, someone else looked back at me without a face.

Somehow I managed to find a way back to the den. It was all smashed to bits, with the walls and the roof ripped apart. There were big scorch marks all over the shattered door. I chucked my guts up all over it because there was this horrible smell like a butcher’s shop.

When I got back to the street there were loads of people standing around, all staring up at the tenement. I didn’t know what was happening. Then I heard my name shouted and

mum ran out of the close, a big cloud all round her. Just before she reached me I looked up and saw black smoke pouring out of the high windows. I dodged mum and ran into the dark doorway. It dark and full of fumes, but I had to get to the house. Another voice was calling me – maybe it was Fleg’s – saying that Davie was up there.

Later it turned out that I did find Davie, but it was too late. I didn’t ask how we got out and stuff. Somewhere I heard Fleg’s voice again, but that was it. Paddy and Jimmie came to the hospital. They said they built the den again, better than before. Jimmie even boasted that he’d run across the bridge for a dare. He got stuck on the graveyard side for a minute because he thought he heard something there. It made a crying or laughing sound but he didn’t stay to look.

Loads of kids were playing up Reith’s Hill now, they told me. No one was scared of the place anymore. But it made me scared thinking about it, how they all knew where the den was as well. Fleg was gone. One night Jimmie saw a removal lorry and thought it was being loaded up with strange black furniture. Neither of them would say any more. But I think they were hiding stuff because I was sick.

Dad came to see me and he was okay. Mum was too sad about Davie dying and never visited me, even though dad says it was me that got him out of the house. But she blames Fleg above me for everything, even the fire, but how could he? When I asked him, dad said Fleg should have gone away a long time ago. I cried about this for some reason, but I didn’t cry for Davie.

So Fleg has gone and I went back to school last week. I still think I see his face everywhere, always unhappy and hungry. I won’t tell anyone yet. Maybe Paddy and Jimmie later, when I know what he wants. During the night I half dream and hear him, among the bins or on the street. Last time he came crawling like a spider up the drainpipe towards my window. He always laughs when he gets close, and whispers sometimes.

I’m afraid for him and what he’ll do, but I’ll never tell on him as long as I live.

The Pictures On the Wall Harper’s Row is one of the hidden dead-end avenues which run north from Sooth Road towards Reith’s Hill. Four red sandstone villas present a respectable public face at the start of the Row, but further down the street narrows into a muddy, potholed track, where a huddled assortment of houses hide behind hedges and walls.

Running parallel with the street to the west is a footpath called the Cadger’s Walk, and between the two is a plot of ground once known as Jack’s Land. In a corner of this area is a cottage which came onto the market not long ago.

‘Of course it needs attention,’ the selling agent admitted to potential buyers. ‘But look at the thickness of the walls. You won’t find anything more structurally sound.’ He was happy to gave a litany of the advantages of this character property: it was secluded, compact, old, uniquely designed, with gardens front and rear. Added to this, its position afforded fine view over the west of the city to the hills. And the price was reasonable enough to attract newlyweds and young couples. But few saw beyond the dirty white harling and the cracked slates.

‘I can promise you won’t find a real bargain like this in the vicinity,’ Mr Summers determinedly told his retreating viewers. And he was right: there was no explaining it. He would have been distrustful of the price himself if he had been a prospective buyer, but the suspicion it aroused in viewers still offended his professional pride.

It was not until June, six months after the house came onto the market, that buyers were found. The Fultons were hooked at first sight and made an offer, which was accepted with alacrity. They were informed the owner lived abroad and was keen for the cash. Summers noted that Mrs Fulton was more enthusiastic than her husband.

‘I used to come down Cadger’s Walk on my way to school,’ Liz Fulford informed him.

‘I remember that old shed in the back garden. It used to be full of pigeons, and every time we passed we would knock on the wood and hear them flap about.’

Her husband Phil sniffed and looked embarrassed. ‘No bloody birds in there now, I’m glad to say,’ he mumbled.

‘But it’s funny,’ Liz continued, ‘that we never actually saw the pigeons flying about.’

‘Maybe it was a rest home for retired racing birds,’ her husband said.

Liz went on: ‘We did see an old man though. He used to accuse us of disturbing his creatures – that’s the word he used – “craturs”, and chased us off. So we did it all the more.’

‘That would be Mr Grewar,’ Summers said. ‘He died three years ago and left the property to a relative in New Zealand.’

‘Ooh, he must have been Methusalah. He looked on his last legs thirty years ago.’

‘Ninety-odd,’ Summers confirmed, deciding Liz was a strange individual. She looked like a pagan, with a black brocade dress and a mushroom of haystack hair. Her husband was a tall, caved-in man with a sinister beard. Summers thought he was a thoroughly poor specimen. It would have astonished him to learn that Phil was a junior partner in a firm of accountants.

But it made no odds what they were like, so he concluded the deal and left them in possession of the house. They first tried to come to terms with the unusual architecture.

Three steps led down from the front door, giving you – Phil said – that instant sinking feeling. The underground feeling was reinforced to the chilly air, caused by the abnormally thick walls. Another feature of these walls was that no wall was exactly parallel with another. Yet another unique feature was that each of the heavy interior doors was fitted with a glassless peephole.

Once installed, they braved the overgrown back garden and Liz reacquainted herself with the old shed. She pulled open the door, but the structure gave a shudden and shifted several degrees from the upright, as if recoiling from her intrusion.

‘It doesn’t like you,’ Phil said squarely, ‘pigeon scarer.’

She peered tentatively inside, unsure if she should enter. He considered playfully pushing her inside, but was stopped by smelling the strange, musty odour which stopped her in her tracks. He bravely went inside, flared his lighter and looked around. ‘You were right about the birds,’ he said, pulling out a handful of decayed Feathers. She winced when he fanned her face with them and led the way back inside the house.

Ten minutes later he made some stupid comment about the manky walls of the shed and she had to crowbar the exact meaning of his observation out of him. He didn’t want to tell her, but it was true, no joke, that the walls were covered in something unpleasant.

‘Blood?’ she repeated, disbelieving. ‘What kind of blood?’ He said something flippant about not being a forensic scientist, which she disregarded. ‘From the pigeons,’ she realised.

‘Let’s hope so,’ Phil said.

During autumn they haunted the gardens. Phil sorted out the slates and fought the weeds, while Liz fought the good fight in the front. Free from his wife’s presence, Phil did his work with a mixture of bullish force and bad language. He avoided the shed until the last, but his first hammer blow reduced it to a heap. When he made a bonfire from it the smoke was thickly acrid.

In the fine evenings they sat wearily in the back garden, where the last of the sun always lingered. One night as she was trudging back indoors Liz saw a fleeting movement like a shadow hurdling over the wall from Cadger’s Walk and speeding over the grass. Then it vanished in the bushes at the far end of the garden. The next day unusual smells began to percolate through the house. Phil accused her of importing strange foreign herbs to use in her cooking.

She stated coldly that she was not the cause of the stink, which she if fact could not detect. ‘What kind of smell is it?’

‘Like sour incense,’ he said. He moved closer to her to find out whether she was testing some awful new scent.

‘There’s no smell,’ she affirmed angrily. Phil harped on about the odour for days, which she insisted was a product purely of his imagination. But he elaborated, stating that the odour was subtly different each time he detected it. In the end it was so suffocatingly like rotten flesh he wanted to puke. But that was the last time he detected it.

That night as Liz was nailing a print to the wall of the bedroom she cried out and recoiled.

‘What is it now?’ Phil asked.

‘The wall. . . seemed to shift under my fingers.’ She shook her head at the inadequacy of her words. He almost said, ‘Yeah, they do that.’ But her obvious distress stilled his tongue.

As he watched the framed pictured shifted sideways, then the hood dislodged itself. For a moment it seemed to suspend itself in the air before it crashed to the floor. They faced each other, they heard a distant series of taps, like a sardonic answer to Liz’s recent hammering.

Phil did something he later regretted: he placed his palm flat against the wall. Nothing registered at first, not even the plaster or brick. Then this vacant space was violated by something soft that wriggled offensively against his hand through the thinness of wallpaper.

In the morning Phil said he didn’t have to go in work for a week. They were renovating the office and he could handle his accounts at home. He took over the small side room next to the living room and tried to get on with his work, but his senses strained for any sign of abnormality. Near lunch time he heard a faint scampering sound going across the floor and called out, ‘Liz, is that you?’

Her voice returned from the kitchen, where she was making bread, saying it wasn’t her.

Things were quiet for an hour and Phil was deep in his figures when a crash shook the whole house. He started up, but the door closed in his face and he couldn’t open it. There

was no window in the room, so he pounded on the wood until his fists were raw. A send after he stopped banging the light bulb above his head went out. The kitchen door also slammed through the force of the crash and jammed, so Liz had to go out via the back garden and go around to the front of the house. She forced open the door of the side room and found Phil lying on the floor, surrounded by his papers. He came around enough until to be able to stagger, with the help of his wife through to the living room.

Mr Summers came a week later, at their request, and found them silently under siege.

There were one of two details about the fabric of the house, they said, that they had to talk about. These consisted of veiled complaints about uncertain ‘noises’. He smoothly quoted the surveyor’s report about the soundness of the structure. But Liz stated the problem was with the atmosphere, bit the architecture.

‘Perhaps,’ Phil suggested, ‘you could tell us a wee bit more about the previous occupants so we could, ah, get an idea why the house is the way it is.’

Summers shrugged. ‘I don’t have much information. The cottage has been vacant since Mr Grewar died. His great-nephew has never been here. I think the Grewar family built the property themselves, though they had a previous property on the site. Further than that I really can’t say.’

The interview unsatisfactorily concluded, the estate agent went, leaving behind the broad hint that they should not contact him if they wanted to put the house back on the market.

‘It’s got to have something to do with that awful old man,’ Liz said after he left. ‘I wish I knew something more about him.’

‘I don’t,’ Bob said emphatically. ‘But I’ve got the feeling we’re going to find out anyway, sooner or later.’

Nothing happened for several weeks, but the peace did not leave them at ease. Each time the floor creaked or an unseen pedestrian walked down Cadger’s Walk, the dull fabric of daily life was shattered. Phil returned unwillingly to his office. Things became difficult

between him and his wife as it was clear they were stuck here, for better or worse. His limp suggestion that they could still abandon the house was met with withering scorn.

‘Where would we go?’ she asked. ‘We couldn’t afford to rent somewhere else, and your parents wouldn’t have me in the house. You don’t really want to leave anyway, do you, Phil?’

He tried to deny it, but she wouldn’t believe him. The more he brooded about it, the more he blamed Liz for choosing the house in the first place. Unconsciously he accused Liz’s esoteric interests in stirring up the whole business.

October arrived and brought heavy rolls of fog from the sea, which wreathed the entire town and left Reith’s Hill a dark island isolated in the whiteness. The house became more dark and unpleasant. Carol often retreated into the dank garden to escape the atmosphere indoors. One morning she went out to watch the mist spilling over the dyke from Cadger’s Walk. She realised suddenly she was not alone. Standing in the place where the shed had stood was a very old man, half turned away. His head was bare and covered with a patina of liver spots and tight balls of sweat.

‘Who are you?’ Liz screamed, so outraged by his presence that she wasn’t afraid. The words faltered as he turned and his eyes transfixed her. Never before had she imagined, let alone experienced, such evil in another creature’s face. During the long moment of the glance Liz felt as though she had been weighed in scales to determine whether she was a threat to him. But then he turned, deciding she was nothing, and free from his eyes she was able to take a few steps before she stopped.

She noticed a figure concealed behind the old man, half his size, a boy clad in oldfashioned grey flannel clothes. The child gave Liz an imploring look full of alarm and she shouted ‘stop it!’, because the man curled a large, withered hand around his throat. ‘Stop it, stop it!’ The response was a shrill scream from the boy and a derisive laugh from the man.

Liz’s anger overcame all other feelings as she ran towards them. But instead of a collision she stumbled through empty space and fell down. She fled back to the house and locked the doors. Phil had to knock to get in that evening, though he did not get an immediate explanation.

The house settled down to the rigours of winter, as if it had found the season it enjoyed.

There was a constant dialogue between the bitter wind and the creaking old timbers, and doors left open were wont to close themselves. The shrubbery in the gardens dwindled with the going of the sun, and this process revealed an interesting thing in the front garden.

A climbing plant which had covered the gatepost was slain by frost; beneath its dead tendrils they found an inscription carved in the stone:

J. GR. + T. GR. 25 – XII – 28.

ALWAYS.

‘Well, we know who belongs to the first initials,’ Liz said.

‘The late, ’orrible owner,’ Phil replied. ‘James Grewar.’

‘Not so late perhaps,’ she murmured. ‘But what about the second name? Do you think it’s his father?’

‘No, I think it was his brother, Thomas.’

‘How on earth could you know that?’ she asked.

‘Someone must have told me. I can’t remember. Don’t look at me like that, Liz. Didn’t I tell you about it before?’

‘No, you didn’t say anything.’

Snow fell in mid December and lingered. When the high winds dropped the cottage became still. One of Liz’s friends, who worked for the council, found information in the burgh records which confirmed Phil’s statement: Thomas Grewar was the younger brother of James Grewar. He disappeared shortly after the First World War. Newspapers had stories about unsuccessful searches for the lad. Liz felt there was something amiss with these bare records. The old man she had seen here in the garden was not the same figure she remembered as a child.

Christmas brought matters to a head. Phil finished work early because of a bout of flu.

He holed up in bed and showed little inclination of ever getting up again. Dreadful weather put down a virtual curtain against the world outside. She moved into the second bedroom to escape her husband’s exaggerated fever. After several nights her attention was caught by the wall which jutted out over the fireplace. When the grate was piled high and alight, shadows made a constantly shifting collage on the green paper. When the heat made the wallpaper peel at its edges she completed its task by pulling it off.

The bare wall revealed beneath was mottled with age and damp, but the firelight at night made the vague shapes there even more suggestive. In the top left hand corner of the wall was a small circle. When she stared at this repeatedly over the course of several evenings it turned into the face of a small boy. The progress from abstract to figurative was so gradual that she accepted it as normal. At first the features were blurred, but she recognised it was facing straight out. Yet she was not surprised to see the following night it had turned to a profile facing right. It was smiling at the picture next to it, a human figure whose lines sprawled in an outline of death. She knew instinctively that the two represented a boy and his father. A yellow swirl about the man’s head seemed to signify a cloud of poison gas.

This scene faded over two days. Carol found that she could only see the pictures from the bed, when she was tired and not concentrating too hard. The next formation showed a different boy, with a face older and more troubled than the first. An adjacent image slowly

resolved into a crying woman, and next to it a white dove with outspread wings. In time, Liz found the images easier to read. The second boy, she realised intuitively, was James Grewar, so the first one had to be Thomas. Their mother was torn between them, or torn apart by them, unable to cope with their rivalry or the loss of her husband in the war.

The dove or pigeon was the greatest clue. She somehow knew that the pigeons belonged to the father, who gave their care to his eldest son. After the man died Thomas played a cruel trick if James: he killed his father’s favourite bird, then wrapped it up and gave it to his brother as a Christmas present. Carol saw him on the wall, laughing while the unsuspecting James unwrapped the parcel. Then James was sick, his face furiously angry, but Thomas’s eyes contained madness.

The next episode was dreary and confused. Illness was there, in a long, dun-coloured smudge, and she had the feeling that young Thomas had been struck down. He was sick for a long time, even before his father died. And he was wrong in the head – the house had infected him. In the background James waited, bitterly, watching the other’s health with feigned concern. It was a long, lightless vigil.

Liz had to wait too, for this dark picture was long in fading away. The plaster was almost malleable, moist to the touch, yet her will could not make new images appear. For a long time she did not look. Phil’s health was not improving. Most of the time he was lost in a fever and Liz did not want to leave him alone any longer. She moved back into their room and suffered at night to hear him moan and mumble. Fragments of his confused speech convinced her that the house was telling him its story.

Once she heard him whisper, ‘Tam, God help us. We can’t escape each other. It goes deeper than hate now.’ Another night he was lost in prayer, apparently begging forgiveness. ‘Why can’t you leave me in peace? Nothing can be undone, even if I wished it.’

On Christmas evening she received a present from the house. Phil slept peacefully, so she left him and returned to the other bedroom. After reading for a while by the firelight

she dozed off and was woken by the thud of her book falling on the floor. The fire had died to its embers, but when she looked up she saw that the frieze had come to life again.

Small Thomas peered mournfully down at her. Their eyes met for an instant, then his brother’s shadow fell across them. James was giving food to Thomas, because their mother couldn’t manage. Now was the chance for revenge, since Thomas was too weak to resist. Liz saw a hand and cup, the boy’s lips trembling, reluctant to accept. Then he drank greedily.

The bedside scene vanished. Next came wings and feathers ripped apart. The blood was caught and given to the sick boy. After the last drop was drunk the mother came in and found them both laughing. Then she screamed and ran out.

When Thomas died his brother burned the body and buried the ashes under the shed.

His mother watched it, but she had no idea what was happening. They put her away in a hospital, where all she talked about was the blood and feathers everywhere. Years passed, during which time an aunt looked after James. He did not forget or feel guilty, but his wariness diminished. Then Christmas came, the anniversary of the murder. James went into the garden and saw a message carved on the gatepost which had not been there before.

Thomas had come back, and he returned every year after that to persecute James. And Liz realised that the deaths and the rest of it were merely the latest enactments in an evil drama which had been played out on the site for a millennium and more.

Liz sat back when it was finished. At dawn she went next door and found Phil awake and lucid. He listened to her story about the pictures on the wall and the two figures in the garden. ‘I thought it was old James Grewar and young Thomas, but it was the other way about. The shadow of Thomas had grown old haunting James, who became a child again in his fear. Thomas had all the accumulated power of this place on his side. But it’s all right now. It’s finished.’

Phil attempted to add the testimony of the strange dreams he had. But he only really remembered one, an endless procession of shadows passing down Cadger’s Walk. She saw

tears in his eyes because he doesn’t know what it meant, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him all. There had been a lost, last drawing she din’t describe. It was a crude pair of stick figures, man and woman, with a child’s script underneath, Phil and Liz. Before her eyes her own figure and name vanished.

‘I’m sorry, Phil,’ she said. ‘It’s not me, it’s the house.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, weak and perplexed.

‘I have to go.’

‘What?’ He attempted to get out of bed, but he was unable to rise.

‘The house is still hungry, you see. We stayed her too long. We’re not strangers here, and it wants one of us. I’ve got to leave right now.’

She stood up. Phil screamed and attempted to grab her arm, but his grasp was feather light and Liz easily threw him off. Then she collected her packed bag and left the house forever.

First he tried to crawl away. But he failed. All through the afternoon he bleated out for help. But no one heard. There was no kind of response until darkness fell.

On the Pier

The woman in the booth was fascinated, professionally, by the man outside her door. She was aware that her attention might be misconstrued, yet she had no illusions about herself.

Her corpulence and age were obvious, but, despite her gaudy henna coloured hair and extravagant costumes, she was really more interested in other people than herself. Every summer, for the past thirty years, she had operated her oracular booth on the pier, guiding the destinies of thousands of wayward holidaymakers. During the off season her hair reverted to its natural grey tone and her attire became demure, a concession demanded by her sister Dilys, who owned a lodging house and thought that the winter months demanded decorum.

In all her years as a fortune teller she had never encountered a stranger man. He stood out starkly among the tourists, sharing neither their joviality nor their casual dress. One morning he appeared suddenly within the flotsam of the crowd, ambling curiously up the pier, ignoring the enticing stalls and booths, keeping his eyes constantly on the shifting sea.

Though he did not look where he was going, he effortlessly avoided colliding with any of the haphazard throng.

Near the end of the pier there was a small amusement arcade. Madame watched the man stop to gaze inside. At the entrance stood an old automaton of a sailor in a glass case. A child put a pound into the slot and the dummy whirred into maniacal life. The man must have been dreaming, for the machine’s sudden movement made him jump back several feet, from which position he stared at the moving device with exaggerated astonishment.

He stayed to stare so long that the arcade’s proprietor came out, wondering why he was blocking the entrance.

‘What’s the matter, mate?’ he asked. ‘Have yer never seen a larfing sailor before?’

Madame Elaine watched the stranger shift his glazed eyes to the arcade man. He had sea green eyes, with flecks of grey like small iron rivets hammered into them.

‘Oh, I’ve seen sailors,’ he said in a deep tranquil voice. ‘Some of them lost their legs in the water or on life rafts. I’ve seen a lot of sinking ships.’

His voice was so laconic and menacing that the little amusement man sidled away. Then he gave a nervous titter and decided it was a joke.

‘Get orff,’ he laughed. ‘Stop pulling me leg. You’ll give me the horrors, you will!’

Then he retreated back inside his arcade.

A puzzled look crossed the stranger’s thin, sharp face. He walked off again and stopped at the stall next to Madame Elaine’s. It was a booth selling cooked sausages, and the man examined the meat with great interest. He appeared to be drooling at the sight of it. By the look of him, he hadn’t enjoyed a proper meal for a long time.

Madame stepped out of her doorway.

‘Can I help you with anything, dearie?’ she asked, deciding he was either a simpleton or a foreigner, or both.

‘I don’t know,’ the man answered. ‘Am I lost?’

The fortune teller noticed the small shagreen suitcase dangling from his left arm which, together with his sharp black suit, gave him the appearance of a salesman or commercial traveller.

‘You been to sea then?’ she enquired. He looked at her without blinking. ‘Only I heard you talking to old Joe down there. You fair gave the old devil the shivers, serves him right.’ She laughed and was pleased to see the man’s mouth widen into a huge, whitetoothed smile.

‘I’ve been at sea all my life,’ the man said with strange pride. ‘I don’t know anything else.’ He cast his eyes momentarily on the moving ocean. Then he seemed to shrink and become vacant and lifeless again.

‘What you doing around Hunton then?’ Madame asked gently. ‘No ships have landed here for a hundred years.’ And she tut-chortled at her joke. ‘You looking for work, by any chance?’

His eyes became serious. ‘Yes, I like to work.’

The way he said it made Madame laugh. She linked her arm though his and led him, stumbling, down to the open air café where she plonked him down at a table and called out, ‘Alphonse, where are you, you lazy swine?’

A small Italian looking man flounced out from behind a large tea urn.

‘What do you want?’ he shouted angrily. He avoided Madame’s glare, which he found oddly compelling, and spotted her guest. ‘Ah, I see a fellow alien,’ he said, poking the man’s shoulder playfully. When this drew no response he mumbled sadly, ‘My friend, I know what troubles you have in this cold, miserable country. I know how you feel.’

The stranger’s eyes narrowed, but he stayed quiet.

Then Madame spoke: ‘Stop your crap, Alphonse. Can’t you see that he’s just hungry?’

Alphonse examined the man’s face, with its translucent skin and ominously concave cheeks.

‘I have never seen a man so famished!’ he exclaimed in an awed tone. He took the stranger’s hand and led him to the counter. ‘What do you fancy to fill up your belly, my friend?’

‘The eels appear very delicious,’ the man said hollowly.

The Italian and the fortune teller elevated their eyebrows at each other across the table while the man heedlessly consumed an enormous bowl of jellied eels.

‘Why don’t you give him a job?’ Madame Elaine said.

‘I don’t even know him at all,’ Alphonse protested. ‘What’s his name and where did he arrive from, eh? You do not even know this yourself.’

‘But I like him,’ Madame replied, and leant forwards with menace.

‘What work would I give him?’ Alphonse asked helplessly.

‘You need someone extra to clear the tables, sweep the floor and wash the dishes. And the heavy work too, because you’re no spring chicken, Alfie.’

The combination of logic and underhand aggression made him relent. He would employ the stranger, albeit only on a casual basis. The man did not object to the low wages offered, and he only showed real interest when he was told he could have his pick of the leavings at the end of the day. Madame Elaine and Alphonse watched him walk away down the pier. He left without saying goodbye.

‘A very unique fellow,’ the café owner said thoughtfully. A curt wind was whipping across the pier, lashing it with fine salt mist. The few remaining visitors were having trouble ignoring it, but the stranger remained bolt upright until he vanished past the gate and out onto the promenade.

‘You’re right,’ Madame answered Alphonse. ‘But can you name anyone on the pier who’s quite normal?’

In her oracular booth that evening Madame Elaine attempted to marshal her dwindling psychic reserves and enquire of the crystal who this mysterious stranger really was. But the sphere remained sullenly opaque, and it was obvious there would be no revelation.

When she returned to sister Dilys’s B&B that night she was told off for being so familiar with a man that she didn’t really know.

‘Oh, Vera,’ Dilys whined, using Elaine’s real name. ‘He could be a serial seducer or a dangerous loonie, or anything.’

‘Don’t be a silly bitch,’ Madame said.

But Dilys triple checked the doors and windows before turning in that night.

Moxy the Million Gag Man woke up, perturbed to find himself on a sand dune instead of inside his own bed. He sat upright and spat out a mouthful of grit. Then he cursed and rummaged around for the gin bottle which had betrayed him and led him to settle here for the night. His hand found the bottle, and tried to throttle its slender but resistant neck. It

was disgustingly empty, so he disgustedly threw it away. He swore with greater vitriol, then stood up and shambled over the sands.

The sky was eight o’ clock fierce, and Moxy knew this was an evil day. His variety show in the pier theatre had been disastrously attended. His agent was due off the train this morning. The theatre manager hated him with obscure malevolence. His landlady was threatening to expel him because of insobriety. Moxy’s progress towards town was therefore halting and bitter. Past the dunes his progress dissected a series of rock pools, uncaring. A loop of seaweed caught his foot and he slipped into six inches of water. When he looked up he saw that he was not alone, for beside him floated a pale, bloated object which seemed to be a fat snake. When his addled senses truly identified it he leapt up and ran away. In his alarm he entered the Sunlight Caff instead of the police station next door.

‘A cup of tea, quick,’ he gasped.

‘Moxy! How goes it?’

At the next table was Billy Stoneman, the would-be investigative journalist unhappily employed by the local paper. Moxy leant conspiratorially towards the young man.

‘Can I tell you something secret?’

‘Course you can.’ Billy smiled disingenuously.

Moxy suddenly remembered Billy’s ungenerous appraisal of his variety show in the newspaper last year and his eyes narrowed.

‘What’s it worth?’ he asked.

‘Moxy, Moxy,’ Billy sighed. Then he conceded: ‘A good headline review with a photo and a competition to win tickets to your show. That’s if you tell me anything worthwhile.’

They trotted down to the shore, where Moxy pointed to the object bobbing in the pool.

Billy whistled. ‘A leg,’ he said. The limb floated there, unconnected to any body. The reporter snagged it with a piece of wood and brought it to land. It was a woman’s leg, quite shapely, without shoe or stocking, but there was a gaudy green lace garter on the thigh.

‘You don’t see things like that every day,’ Billy whistled. ‘Moxy, go and phone the Advertiser and the police- in that order. I want a photographer down here quickly.’

Moxy did as he was instructed, and as he went a string of leg related jokes ran through his mind. Billy Stoneman, meanwhile, squatted on the rocks and smoked a cigarette, gazing at the discovery with some affection. Several minutes later the first spectator arrived. He stood behind Billy and stared at the leg without saying anything for a while.

Finally he said, ‘Is it yours?’

Billy stared at him with sour disgust.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m just looking after it for a friend.’

Then he scrutinised the man closely: a tall, dark-haired bloke with pointed features and striking green eyes. The man started to babble a long, weird monologue about a dream he had last night. In the dream a giant aeroplane had moored overhead and dropped a thick rope down towards the stranger. Though he did not want to, the man grabbed the end of the rope. His head was immediately filled with blood and pain. Then he was lifted high into the clouds, nearer and nearer the plane. But before he reached the plane he passed out.

‘That’s some tale, pal.’

Billy could not prevent a trace of fear from entering his voice. All he needed right now was to be hassled by some head case. Before he could think of some way of getting rid of him, the man wandered away, wading through the pool regardless of the severed leg. Billy watched him zigzag across the sand and enter one of the huts on the beach.

Alphonse crossed himself and Madame Elaine shrieked.

‘You mean you actually saw it?’

‘Yes.’ The stranger, who had let it be known his name was Glauca, pushed his broom around the café.

‘What was it like?’ Madame asked. The whole town was buzzing with news of the discovery of the leg.

‘Ooh, Lord!’ Alphonse clutched his head and stomach.

Glauca considered Madame’s question for a moment.

‘It didn’t have much meat on it,’ he concluded.

Madame’s mouth dropped open.

‘You mean it was all eaten away down to the bone?’

‘No,’ said Glauca. ‘It was just a rather thin limb, as limbs go.’

‘I can’t stand no more.’ Alphonse forced his fingers into his ears, then removed one finger to wave at Madame and Glauca. ‘You are both very sick people,’ he said, then went back behind the counter, muttering.

The pier was busier than usual that day, enjoying a reflux of tourists barred from the beach by the police. In the course of the morning Madame Elaine conducted five crystal scryings, seven tarot readings, and a phrenology analysis for a head fetishist from Basingstoke. Several clients wanted to know the identity of the owner of the leg, which she could not or would not reveal. Her first customer after lunch was Moxy Schwartz.

‘I wouldn’t expect a visit from you,’ Madame Elaine admonished him.

‘Not every day I find what I found.’ Moxy shuddered. ‘Tickets for tonight’s show have sold out, the first time in living memory. I’m afraid it’s too good to be true.’

Madame methodically spread out her cards and made a rapid clucking sound.

‘It isn’t very promising,’ she sighed. ‘Do you want to delve further?’

Moxy’s eyebrows juggled with each other.

‘Thanks,’ he said, and scuttled back to the theatre.

The search for the remainder of the body on the beach was unsuccessful. It was stated by a pathologist that the leg had been severed before death, and that the dismemberment was likely to have happened in the sea. Sergeant Grandlin was perturbed by the findings.

He went straight from the mortuary to the theatre to interview that obnoxious little showman Moxy. On his way there he felt his throat tighten. There had not been a murder

here for thirty years. If he cracked this mystery, he might be impelled to accept promotion and a pay rise.

When he went backstage the afternoon show had finished and Moxy was lying befuddled in his dressing room. No amount of black coffee, shouting or threats of violence could revive him. Grandlin left in a fog of fury and stopped for a cup of tea in the pier café to calm himself down. Something in the manner of the man who was cleaning the tables attracted his attention. Grandlin questioned the harassed café owner about the man, but Alphonse did not say much. Still, Grandlin made a note the man for future reference.

‘Ten minutes, Moxy! Move yourself!’

The comedian woke with a grunt. He heard the footsteps of the theatre assistant retreat down the corridor. Then a wave of panic sullied the familiar seascape of his hangover. He looked at his watch: it had stopped. He wasn’t able to read it anyway. Moxy struggled to change his clothes, an act which was unconsciously more humorous than his stage act.

Finally he got into his alarmingly patterned tweed suit and ran through the wings onto the stage. He was halfway through his opening routine when he realised something was wrong. Through the blinding limelights he saw that the orchestra pit was empty. He screwed up his eyes and tried to peer into the audience. He walked to the edge of the seats and saw only row upon row of empty seats, then – six rows back- someone was sitting alone. The person seemed to be staring at Moxy with perfect intensity.

‘Wotcher,’ Moxy said nervously. ‘You a stage critic then?’

Then the man did a peculiar thing: he began to methodically climb over the backs of seats towards the stage. For a giddy instant he balanced on the precipice of the orchestra pit. Then he leapt prodigiously over the chasm and landed in front of the comedian.

‘What do you want?’ Moxy squealed. ‘Leave me alone!’

He felt hot salt breath condensing on his cheeks. The respiration was full of strange echoes. Moxy lifted his hands to cover his face.

‘Why haven’t you got any trousers on?’

Moxy’s hands dropped to his sides, feeling no fabric there. His strides had treacherously fallen in a crumpled heap around his ankles. He blushed. When he bent down, he made an involuntary prat fall, and then he screamed, because the man was over him, bending lower and lower. Moxy felt a sticky wetness on his face, then nothing else.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Sergeant Grandlin said to the pathologist. The latter rolled off his rubber gloves while the policeman read from the report: ‘Probable cause of death is drowning or asphyxiation. Large amount of water found in lungs, abnormally high saline content. Marks of human teeth found on deceased’s left thigh!’

He threw the folder down in disbelief, then left the building. Unfortunately he bumped into Billy Stoneman outside, and the reporter impudently demanded to know what the results of the port mortem examination were.

‘I’m not certain anyone killed him as yet,’ Grandlin said irritably. ‘It might have been suicide, misadventure, or simply an accident. Unless you know something different.’

‘Maybe I do.’ Billy smiled and strolled off.

Madame Elaine, Dilys and Alphonse were sitting in the lounge of the boarding house when Billy returned. Though he lived fifteen miles away he had rented a room for the duration of the ‘unpleasantness’ as Dilys termed the murders. And it was the murders they were gloomily discussing.

‘There’s certain to be a lot of people cancelling their rooms,’ Dilys whispered. ‘No one will want to holiday in Hunton if it means they end up dismembered.’

‘What’s wrong?’ Billy asked, sitting down. ‘I’m sure you could fill this house with ghouls if you played your cards right. Murder is big business, especially murders as strange as these.’

‘What do you mean?’ Elaine asked.

Billy told them about his encounter with the evasive policeman. He also hinted that he knew a good deal about what was going on and who was responsible.

‘The fates will decide what will happen,’ Madame Elaine intoned.

‘You and your bleeding fates,’ Dilys said peevishly. Then she burst into an enjoyable bout of hysterics. Alphonse hastily rose and mentioned going to see Glauca down at the beach hut where he was staying. After he left, Elaine and Billy lifted the wilting Dilys and carried her to her room. After they tiptoed away Billy was on the point of going to his own room when he found that Elaine was staring at him.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked abrasively.

Madame Elaine bit her lip. ‘You’re a very unhappy man, Billy, I can tell these things.’

Billy’s face blanched, but before he could respond, Madame Elaine turned her back.

There were twelve beach huts, identically shabby on the outside. Sergeant Grandlin found the one he wanted and rapped on the door. It was answered so rapidly that he jerked his hand back protectively.

‘Mr Glauca, is it?’ he asked.

‘I suppose so,’ Glauca said.

‘Can I possibly come in?’ Grandlin said quickly. He wanted to get this over quickly.

The man was disconcerting; those eyes on you all the time, unblinking. He stepped gingerly over the threshold. A singly dusty light bulb showed the hut was almost empty.

There was a camp bed, a pile of clothes in one corner, an enormous pile of seashells in the other corner.

‘Why do you have all those?’ Grandlin asked gruffly.

‘They’re to hear the sea in.’

‘What?’

‘Also, I want to stick most of them on the outside of the hut so the place will look proper. That’s if I have time.’

The policeman nodded. Trying to get to grips with this man was alarming. He was as shapeless and bland as quicksand, but there was something going on beneath the surface.

All of his questions were answered so openly that he had to be hiding something, but there was no reasonable objections to his answers. It was something of a relief when Madame Elaine and Alphonse entered. Grandlin said goodbye sullenly and went.

‘Bad policeman,’ Alphonse hissed when he was out of earshot. ‘Hey, Glauca, if ever you do anything, don’t fret over him finding out.’

Mister Glauca blinked twice.

There were three people walking on the beach, but only Billy Stoneman knew who was following who. But he did not yet know the reasons for it. Dilys had slipped out early in the morning and Billy was ready for her. He had been observing her for days, for no real reason other than his instincts told him to. She tripped down to the seafront, looking around her in rather a mad manner, then when she reached the huts she hovered outside Glauca’s abode. Eventually she decided against knocking and fluttered away to hide behind a sand dune.

Then Mr Gauca flapped out into the morning. His grey suit shone wonderfully in the fresh sun, but his eyes were perfectly neutral. He walked, straight as a knitting needle, down to the water’s edge, stared out to sea, then bowed his head. Billy, occupying the dune behind Dilys, got up when she did. Glauca suddenly darted across the sand. Dilys galloped and Billy puffed and panted. It was amazing that Glauca seemed entirely unaware of them.

Dilys caught up when Glauca when he sat down beside one of the beach groynes. The reporter hid on the other side of the barrier. ‘Please,’ he heard Dilys saying. ‘I know it was you who did it. You killed that leg woman, didn’t you? And you killed Moxy. Our Elaine’s not the only psychic one in the family.’ There was an ominous pause. ‘Now I want you to kill me too.’

The words struck Billy thunderously. He envisaged a vast field of spinning newsprint lit up by flashbulbs, with mile high headlines and his screaming by-line beneath. He walked in a daze back to his room, feeling extremely self satisfied. Throughout the day he considered his options. Telling the police immediately was ruled out straight off. They might not believe him anyway. His second idea was telling Madame Elaine. But that was ruled out also: she was too combustible and unpredictable. The third notion was to confront Dilys, but that might get him personally drawn into the business, with nasty consequences. He decided to let things take their natural course. He would have a grandstand seat for whatever unfolded.

Madame Elaine knocked on the door of the bathroom, but there was no response. She went through to the lounge to fetch Alphonse. They knocked again and called Dilys’s name. A flood of water surged under the door; they could hear both taps running furiously.

Alphonse tried to break down the door, but only succeeded in almost knocking himself out.

Madame Elaine called Billy and together they managed to gain entry. The fortune teller went in alone, already knowing the worst. Dilys was quite dead. She was bobbing up and down in the middle of the bubble bath, a large cork in a foaming sea. The bottom half of her body was entirely missing. The murderer had the decency, Madam acknowledged, to ensure that the torso was covered by a cardigan.

While Alphonse and Billy were frozen statues of shock, Elaine rushed up to her room and stared with great intensity into her crystal ball. Light coagulated and moved through the sphere. Visions began. She saw the living shade of Dilys wandering unhappily in the world. As the rolling sea engulfed her, something rose from that surf, terrible as a lost child. This creature was neither happy nor sad, merely misplaced. And Madame Elaine saw many other things she did not wish to see.

Unlike her unfortunate sister, Madame Elaine was immediately aware of being followed down to the beach. The sky and the sea were setting to darkness, and Mister Glauca was paddling behind her in the wash. He showed no shock at being confronted.

‘You’re not human,’ Madame Elaine said, right to his face.

Glauca stared whitely at her, looking like a small boy.

‘What can I be then?’ he said in his soft, bland voice.

‘The hell if I know,’ she answered angrily. ‘All I know, mister, is that you’re no man.’

Her sharp eyes tried to penetrate his disguise.

‘Why did you kill my sister?’

When it was clear no answer would come she took his unresisting hand and dragged him back to the beach hut. Alphonse, who was waiting for them, stood up nervously.

‘He admits everything,’ Elaine said. ‘Dilys, Moxy, the girl with the leg.’

‘Why did you do it, man?’ Alphonse screwed up his face with fear and disgust.

‘He’s not a man. He comes from out there!’

‘What, the sea? Yes, we imagined he was a sailor.’

‘I lived in the sea,’ Glauca said distantly. ‘Then I came here. I don’t know how it happened or what I was before, but I want to go back. I need to know what I am.’

Alphonse tried to make a run for it, but Elaine caught him and reeled him in. A loud crash outside broke the silence. Billy Stoneman, having heard everything, was running for his life, along the beach, down the promenade, then into the bar of the Royal Hotel. It took six vodkas and one hour to get drunk, and even then he wasn’t as drunk as he wanted to be.

He was on his seventh drink when Sergeant Grandlin found him.

‘What you been up to, Billy?’ he asked.

The reporter’s tongue began to flap wildly, though his words had little coherence. He told the policeman everything he thought he knew before collapsing into a heap. Grandlin radioed the station and got two officers to go to the boarding house while he went down to the beach.

The hut was deserted. He went back to the boarding house where the officers were standing white-faced outside the burst bathroom door. The bizarreness of the scene was as great as its obscenity. He wanted to pull the plug out because the body was bobbing in the bloody water. They back away from the broken door. The woman’s eyes were open, shining: she clearly knew something he did not.

Alphonse slumped over the oars in the rowing boat. He had been pulling steadily for twenty minutes and was thoroughly exhausted. Around him the sea was black and the lights of Hunton could no longer be seen.

‘We’re lost!’ he cried.

‘Oh, shut up!’ Madame barked. She turned to look at Glauca. He was lost in a secret world of concentration. ‘Have you worked out what you are yet?’ she asked him.

‘It’s very close,’ he said. ‘I nearly know…There’s something shifting in the back of my mind.’

The tiny boat was carried by the current until a dense dark shape loomed up near them.

‘Mother of bloody God,’ Alphonse exclaimed. ‘We’re going to hit the rocks. What a way to die, smashed to pieces in the company of a monster and a witch!’

Something on the rocks started to sing when they drifted closer. They saw the shape move.

‘Billy Stoneman,’ Madame said.

They drew alongside the rocks and Billy slithered on board. Then they were all illuminated by flashing blue lights. A police launch was coursing towards them. Madame Elaine grabbed the oars and propelled them towards the open sea. Alphonse screamed for more speed, seeing their pursuers gaining on them. Then Billy Stoneman witnessed something which sobered him.

Glauca had cast off his jacket and shirt. His skin was shining with sea spray in the moonlight. Almost imperceptibly the man’s shape started to change. His flesh darkened

and thickened, his arm’s mutated into triangular fins. The shoulders merged with the neck and formed an angular head. At the same time his legs fused together and became a streamlined body and tail. With one final shudder the transformation completed itself as Billy watched, aghast, seeing the huge mouth gape open to show rows of lethal teeth.

‘A shark!’ Billy screamed uselessly.

Madame Elaine and Alphonse, luckily for them, were concentrating on the approaching police boat. Its engine stopped as it bumped alongside their craft. One of the policemen tried to clamber down, but Elaine saw him off with an oar. Another well aimed blow sent a second officer into the sea.

The shark was floundering at the bottom of the boat. Alphonse and Billy regained composure enough to try to shift the beast, but it was too heavy for them. The fourth occupant of the boat was busy engaging Sergeant Grandlin. As the policeman got the better of the battle and a foothold on the boat, the shark lunged at him and Grandlin hurled himself back into the launch.

‘Quick.’

Madame helped the men to manoeuvre the shark over the side. For a moment Billy bitterly wished he had a photographer here. But he mercenary instinct was overruled by stranger emotions. An outlandish truth dawned on him: he was jealous of the creature. It occurred to him that it must be wonderful to live free from the burden of emotions, wandering free through the ocean.

Madame Elaine stared at him, then at the cold, rolling eyes of the predator. A moment later Billy toppled into the water, and that was the last that anyone saw of either of them.

Grandlin questioned Alphonse and Madame Elaine.

‘A shark?’ he echoed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘You saw it too,’ Alphonse accused. ‘Don’t say you didn’t see it. What are you going to say in your report?’

‘Billy was always a bad boy,’ the policeman said. ‘No-one would be surprised if he had a nasty habit of killing people. And poor Mr Glauca…’

‘Drowned trying to capture him,’ Madame said firmly. ‘I’ve had enough of the paranormal. I think I’ll go on running this place in remembrance of poor Dilys. What about you Alphonse?’

‘Still the café for me. But I’ll be more careful who I employ in future. And one more change – absolutely no seafood served in future!’

LEARNING CURVE

Before I had my heart operation, when they pulled out my teeth to avoid the risk of infection, my wife tried to console me by saying, ‘At least you can eat all the sweets you want now.’ She was at least right in trying to get me to re-assess my life. I gave up my stressful job and looked at replacing it with something more sedate that would perhaps benefit other people too. Eventually I found a seasonal position as a driver for special needs kids. I drove a minibus around resorts and leisure parks and hung around while the children went off and knocked themselves giddy on the rides. My wife’s prediction was right. I had free entry to a dozen tacky tourist traps, and all the candyfloss I could gobble, if I could stomach it. Watching the waifs going up and down and round and round on the rides was well and good, but the vicarious thrill fades when you’ve seen it a hundred times.

My heart condition prevented me going on the more death defying rides, and even some of the tamer rides filled me with irrational dislike. The Ghost Train was fine, except for the screaming passengers onboard, and I detested the painted horses on the Merry-GoRound with their dead wooden eye. But I reserved special hatred for the vicious old rollercoaster at Trefwood Fun Park, called the Hell Twister, which crouched on the perimeter of the park like a malevolent spider stuck in a sinister yoga pose. I have hated roller coasters ever since an uncle frogmarched me to the seaside to teach me a lesson for being the most miserable child he ever knew. Determined to demonstrate the value of fun, even if it killed me, he made me suffer the funfair log ride five times while he stood grinning manically as I got soaked to my underwear. Then forced me to ride the rollercoaster repeatedly until I learnt to enjoy it. Even in its heyday it could not have been a pleasurable ride and many seasons of exposure to the coastal elements had left the tracks corroded and warped by the harsh seaside wind. There was at least as much movement juddering side to side as there was going forwards, and I had to cling on for dear life when it plunged around a corner.

The ride at Trefwood was proof that childhood horrors can come back to torment you.

Every aspect of its geometry appeared designed for discomfort and turning the stomach of its unfortunate passengers. But for practical reasons I was had to wait in its shadow. In front of the coaster there was a shanty town of fast food kiosks where the absentee kids who detached themselves from their parties loitered, lured by rancid hotdogs and popcorn.

Behind the ride was a scrubby area at the border of the park, where hardcore teenagers gathered to smoke furtive cigarettes. The position gave a good view of the neighbouring rides and beyond the fence a restful dell in the middle distance usually contained a flock of sheep which stared blankly back at you, inured at the noise of the revellers. One afternoon I was pulled up by one of the park employees as I stood there.

‘I thought I’d never see a more miserable bloke than you,’ old Walter said. ‘But you’ve been outdone. Look up there!’

Walter was the sweeper upper of the establishment. He had a huge bristling broom which he shoved around to no visible affect all day long. It was a ceremonial rather than a practical implement. His moustache was a white, bristling miniature version of his brush. ‘’E’s more sour than ten o’ you,’ Walter said, pointing up at the coaster.

His half moon moustache lifted in an amused arc. I followed the line of his outstretched broom and saw only a blur as a row of carriages plunged down a precipitous slope. Then, among the pastel and fluorescent clothing of the passengers, I noticed a solemn column of rigid misery.

Only when the cars turned and entered into a slow climb did I see the human detail of the passenger. I involuntarily inhaled at the sight of him. Not only was he dressed all in black, his demeanour was drastically different to the frightened joy on the faces of the others. I never saw a whiter face in my life; all the more noticeable in contrast with the holiday tans of the other faces. He was older than most too – not Walter old, but certainly well over sixty. The only thing about him in motion was his wild, breeze blown hair. His hands were clamped on to the restraining rail and his mouth was set in an unrelenting line.

‘I’ve seen him before,’ Walter said beside me, leaning on his broom. ‘Once or twice a month he goes on that ride, nothing else. And looks just as spellbound at every turn.

Strangest parson I ever saw.’

I hadn’t noticed he was a priest, and when I looked up again I only saw the tail end of the carriages diving away out of sight. I shuddered and said I had to go back to the minibus to check something. After rounding up the kids I looked back and saw the evil serpentine coaster convulsing in the distance. I thought I also saw a dark figure sitting at the prow of the carriages, staring out over the fields like a figurehead.

I didn’t return for a month. But as soon as I entered Trefwood, Walter collared me and starting going on about the ‘strange vicar’ as he called him. According to him, the clergyman had been back three times in the past few weeks, and each time he spent longer and longer on the roller coaster. The last time, Walter swore, he rode on it two hours straight, staring out with wild eyes as the park and fields and sky careered past. He was scaring off the other passengers; some of the little kids swore he was a zombie. There was heated debate about what they should do if he turned up again. ‘But, it would be hard to blackball a vicar,’ Walter said truthfully. ‘What would happen if the papers got hold of the story?’

Before I had the chance to escape, Walter asked if I could use my contacts to find out about his troublesome clergyman.

‘What contacts would they be?’ I asked, surprised.

‘You know priests,’ he said conspiratorially.

Some of the groups I helped out with were organised by the church, or charities affiliated with different denominations, and Walter insisted that I ask around see if any of them knew the strange member of their profession who haunted the roller coaster. But I felt uneasy at his insistence and avoided Trefwood Park for a long time. When I did return it was with a larger group than usual and I was not able to break away from shepherding

duties for some time. I kept an eye out for Walter while I wandered about, but there was no sign of him. Something forlorn washed over me as I trailed around the pulsating park. I started to feel giddy and nauseous, as though some pressing disaster had latched onto me out of the seething throng.

One of the park employees escorted me to the medical room. After a rest and a cup of tea I felt better and made some comment about ‘not snuffing it just yet’, to Brian the assistant manager. I saw his mouth pucker and then he told me that old Walter had passed away at the weekend. He said he wasn’t sure he should have told me, seeing that I looked so poorly myself. I said I had no intention of being a copycat. But I did feel bad about the situation, as if I had let the old man down in some way.

‘How did he go?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Brian admitted. ‘He was doing his rounds as usual on Saturday, sweeping up and emptying the bins. Then he keeled over. It was quite quick, you know.’

‘Where did it happen?’ I asked.

‘Underneath the big loop on the rollercoaster.’

The old priest who rode the roller coaster ministered to Walter in his extremity, Brian said. The old vicar was on the ride at the time – he was the only one on it, bloody nuisance. When he saw old Walter tumbling over he rushed over to him. Brian didn’t know if the priest was a Catholic giving Walter the last rites, but he seemed to bend over and talk to him for a long time. The ambulance crew who arrived shortly afterwards thought the priest was asking Walter a lot of questions, rather than giving him any comfort.

One paramedic said the vicar got a bit shirty when he told him to clear off out the way.

Some people you can’t imagine being dead. To me the notion of Walter lingering on, just as he was before, suited my conception of him. I could visualise him continuing his rounds somewhere in the upper atmosphere, sweeping away stray bits of cirrus at a leisurely pace. If anyone deserved that modest back yard of heaven, it was him.

All I could say was that I hoped they had banned that blasted parson from the roller coaster. The site management had kicked around the problem for months and had been discussed with head office up in London. But how do you discreetly exclude a miserable looking priest from a fun park? The head office people washed their hands of it, as beneath their attention, so it was back to square one ‘So we’ve decided to throw him out next week,’ Brian said miserably.

‘Do you think that’s wise?’ I asked.

‘You’ve seen him,’ Brian said. ‘No one else wants to go on the coaster now. He’s a jinx.’

Then something struck me.

‘Has anyone actually talked to him?’

Brian laughed. ‘Talked to him? You’ve seen him. That would be insane!’

I thought for a moment, then dived in.

‘Put it off a week,’ I said. ‘Poor old Walter wanted me to ask around and try to find out about the priest. But I never did and I feel bad about it. I’ll see if I can find out anything and come back next week. If I don’t, I’ll speak to the man myself.’

Relief and incredulity clouded over Brian’s face. Then he smiled slowly and nodded.

The following Monday I began asking around about the priest. But there was no joy, day one and day two, from either the Methodists or the Catholics. On the Wednesday I had a call from a C of E vicar who had heard a ‘dry crackling’ on the clerical grapevine, as he put it. He intuitively leapt to an identification of the mystery man.

‘People think that priests are a strange lot,’ he said defensively. ‘But I knew who you were on about as soon as I heard the whisper. The man’s name is Barnabus Rees. He got into trouble a few years ago for unorthodox opinions. But the diocese didn’t want a fuss.

So he was shunted into retirement. He started a quack mail order business selling religious

gewgaws. I haven’t seen him for years and don’t want to. Good luck if you’ve got anything to do with him, in any capacity.’

That was all he was willing to divulge. I tried to Google the name Barnabus Rees, but had no luck. Then I played around searching various professions you might expect a discredited priest to fall into: exorcist, spiritual adviser, religious consultant, dowser.

There was no trace of the man. I would have to confront him personally.

There was a bank of leaden cloud lowering over the park when I went through the gates.

The threat of rain meant there were far fewer punters than usual. I felt dreadfully exposed without the company of a group to justify my presence there. I felt queasy and ill again and wondered if I should go ahead. But I had a sardonic vision of old Walter watching me, smiling, with his upturned brush propped under his armpit like Long John Silver. There were two other sources which seemed to be surveying me: someone unseen in the office and a second presence on by the roller coaster, which I had reached in a dream like state, climbing unaware up the walkway which led to the point of embarkation. There was no queue in front of me and no staff in the booth beside the entrance barrier.

I touched a section of the tubular steel rail which had been smoothed clean of paint by expectant hands clutching onto it. It vibrated faintly, then I heard the rumble of the carriages on the track, rising to thunder as they crashed around the last corner, screeching to a halt. There was only one passenger of course. He did not incline his head towards me, but I knew that he was aware of me. You would have thought he was a figure of metal bolted upright into the front seat. I knew he was staring wildly and relentlessly straight ahead and was glad that I couldn’t see his eyes.

The gates opened with a pneumatic sigh. The passenger did not move. My knees buckled as I stepped forward, and there was the merest nod of acknowledgment as I approached. I struggled to fit into the confined seat; it must have been thirty years since I went on a roller coaster. As I sat down I nearly leapt back up again.

‘Don’t sit behind directly me,’ the priest said. ‘It makes me uncomfortable and I’m trying to concentrate. Besides which, they don’t like anyone else seeing them, just me.

Kindly leave an intervening space between us.’

I mumbled something and shifted two seats back. The coaster jolted horribly and set off with a wheezing clank. I had to speak now; otherwise I would never manage to and would never find out what was going on.

‘What are you doing here?’ I whispered feebly. It was a wonder he heard me over the sound of motion.

‘I have discovered that this was a pagan place,’ he said, as if the phrase explained everything.

We were hurtled suddenly around the first bend before I had the chance to reply. Then there was a slow juddering crawl up to the first sickening peak.

‘Over and down that way.’ He curtly nodded, indicating somewhere to the left, past the boundary fence of the park. ‘That’s where they abide, in mockery of myself, and only visible from this demonic angle of the air. Each time I see them there they present some different vile cavalcade of indecency. I had never imagined the human body could adopt such obscene shapes. They defile that good green glade with their licentiousness.’

I craned my head but could see nothing of what he thought he was vividly witnessing.

Down in that direction was a lovely, quiet meadow that I had noticed before, but surely he could not have meant that peaceful place. It was difficult to think coherently because we had reached the peak of the first rise and teetered for a second, before plunging down the precipice, then around a screaming angle tilting to the right. All the time he seemed horribly unaffected by the gravitational motion which threw me from side to side. His head was trained abnormally on the point beyond the perimeter which was the focus of his diabolic delusion.

By the time we got to the third major convulsive twist in the track I was letting loose an occasional scream and Barnabas Rees was lost in a constant litany of chanted prayer or

exhortation. Very quickly I became disorientated and reluctant to look at him or any part of the landscape which went screaming past. During the quiet stretches of the ride he spoke again, but I was not conscious of what he said at the time, being more focused on keeping the contents of my stomach in place.

It came to an abrupt conclusion. I disembarked and staggered down to solid ground and remained there until my innards readjusted themselves. Someone asked me if I was all right and snapped me out of it.

‘It remains to be seen,’ I said sincerely. My heart was walloping against my chest. I leaned against the little booth near the exit path of the coaster. The young lad was looking at me with cool detachment. I looked behind him, confused to see a frozen image of myself on computer monitor behind him. Then I realised that it was a digital photograph taken from a camera fixed on the track. What a lovely keepsake, and a bargain at just a fiver per photo, or ten pounds if you wanted it framed.

‘Get rid of that,’ I said to the assistant when I recovered. The image of me vanished when he pushed the button. The Hell Twister contorted itself above my head, endlessly thundering around, like the world snake trying to swallow its own tail. I stood there waiting for the next thing to happen. The screens flickered with distortion, then I saw a brief glimpse of the dell, silent and empty, on the first screen, quite clear. Then it blanked and on the second screen there was the same place populated by an indistinct circle of people, moving perhaps in a rhythmic, circular way. I heard an interrupting sound and the shadow people scattered.

A sonic boom voice shouted out over the interference on the screens, answered high above me by the same voice, wild and incoherently carried away on the wind. It was the priest on the monitor and in the flesh, howling out of the chasm of his own hell. I will never know whether his final bellow was because I had intruded on his little self-punishing fantasy about the pagan goings on in the field, or whether the ungodly frolicking had finally pushed him over the final crest of his own mental big dipper.

He and I fell at the same moment, and I was left with three images branded into my mind. One was certainly real: the five screens in a row all suddenly filled with the furious face of Barnabus Rees shouting out, but silent, the features turning black as his heart exploded inside him. That much was real and for a souvenir I have, thanks to the cynical young lad in the photo booth, a print of that horrible visage in its last moments. He said he was sorry he did not have a picture of the man falling off the roller coaster a minute later. I think he was distracted by my passing out.

When I fell there were two successive pictures that flashed though my mind. I saw firstly the circle of dancers, all naked, laughing and going around that dell; an unchanged place, though it must have been centuries ago. All the men looked ridiculous, as naked men generally do. The women looked marvellous. ‘Walter must be there too,’ I thought. I thought I could sense him there. The second picture was mercifully abrupt. The dancers were there again, but on the fringe of the glade there was the priest, solemn, a fallen saint slowly peeling off his clothes and ready to join in, despite himself. There were ridiculous tears flowing down his face, as if anyone there cared. I distinctly heard Walter’s laughter in my mind.

I woke up in hospital and my worried wife later told me that I kept repeating one word while I was out: Inverkeithing. It was a year later when I found out what it meant, when, by chance, I stumbled over a quote from the Chronicle of Lanercost, under the year 1282: About this time, in Easter week, the parish priest of Inverkeithing, named John, revived the profane rites of Priapus, collecting young girls from the villages, and compelling them to dance in circles to [the honour of] Father Bacchus. When he had these females in a troop, out of sheer wantonness, he led the dance, carrying in front on a pole a representation of the human organs of reproduction, and singing and dancing himself like a mime, he viewed them all and stirred them to lust by filthy language. Those who held respectable matrimony in honour were scandalised by such a shameless performance, although they respected the parson because of

the dignity of his rank. If anybody remonstrated kindly with him, he [the priest] became worse [than before], violently reviling him.

And [whereas] the iniquity of some men manifestly brings them to justice, [so] in the same year, when his parishioners assembled according to custom in the church at dawn in Penance Week, at the hour of discipline he would insist that certain persons should prick with goads [others] stripped for penance. The burgesses, resenting the indignity inflicted upon them, turned upon its author; who, while he as author was defending his nefarious work, fell the same night pierced by a knife, God thus awarding him what he deserved for his wickedness.

‘I suppose he got what he was after in the end,’ I thought out loud about the priest. I became quite fond of him in retrospect, knowing what horrible pagan temptation he had struggled with. My wife didn’t express any sympathy for poor old Barnabus Rees at all.

‘It’s quite impossible to believe,’ she said. ‘Have you ever been to Inverkeithing? Far too cold to believe that anyone would want to cavort around naked in such a place.’