by Matt Hilton
“Don’t say anything, Bailey. Just drive.”
“What about Bob?”
“Bob told me I had to come with you.”
Watching her in the rear-view mirror, I said, “You know what I intend to do if I find this thing?”
Her sneer told me everything I needed to know.
I started the engine. “What about your police procedures?”
“Fuck procedures,” she said, eliciting a smile.
It was some time since I’d been behind the wheel of a car. But like I told Broom, you never forget. I gave the Subaru throttle, peeling around parked emergency vehicles and following in the wake of the ambulance.
“Are you armed, Bailey?” Shelly asked.
Broom gave a warning cough that I chose to ignore. Shelly wasn’t a police sergeant now. “Yes, I’m armed. This thing has to be stopped.”
“You won’t get any argument from me,” she said.
“Me neither,” Cash chipped in. “But have you got what it takes, brother?”
FORTYSIX
Near Burra Ness
It had turned out to be one unbelievable day. It was difficult crediting how so much had been crammed into so few hours. Arriving back at the deserted brick structure on the fringe of Burra Ness submarine tracking base, it felt as though weeks had passed since last I stared through the chain-link fence at it. The crows were gone, but even without their subtly menacing presence the hut still exuded a form of malevolence. Against the backdrop of the night sky it squatted like a malformed thing, the ancient telegraph pole jutting from its back like the rearing head of a serpent.
“Why have you brought us here?” Shelly asked.
Switching off the engine, I settled back in the seat. I quickly glanced at Broom and saw him bobbing his head in understanding.
“Call it a portent,” I said. “Something tells me that this place is important.”
“What? Like you’re a clairvoyant or something?”
“Or something.”
From behind me, I could detect the grumbling of an unbeliever. Not that I bothered explaining: to a believer no proof is necessary, to an unbeliever no proof is possible. In plain speak, even if what I was waiting for did transpire, Shelly wouldn’t accept it for what it was. In days to come she might attempt to make sense of what she’d witnessed and come to the conclusion that it was all down to chance and coincidence.
“The M.O.D. police have already checked this place,” she pointed out.
“When?” I asked.
“Earlier. I was updated, along with Inspector Marsh, when the naval staff joined us at Trowhaem.”
“What were they looking for?”
“Bethany Stewart. Who else?”
“Bethany isn’t here. She never has been.”
The silence became tangible. No doubt Shelly was debating how the hell I could know, unless I was somehow involved in Bethany’s abduction. It seemed an age before she stirred, clearing her throat and leaning forward.
“So why are we wasting time here, Bailey?”
“We’re not wasting time. I told you…I’m waiting for a sign.”
She laughed. It was a bitter sounding hack in the back of her throat. “What are you expecting? Divine intervention?”
I exhaled slowly through my nose.
“I’ve been there, Bailey. Believe me, you’ll be waiting forever.”
An image flashed into my mind.
A woman was lying in a bed. Frail, barely an ounce of fat remaining on her bones, life support machines all that kept her on this side of the great divide. Beside her sat Shelly. Not in uniform but jeans and a shapeless green sweatshirt. Her hair was lacklustre, and there were dark rings beneath her eyes. I knew that Shelly had sat in that selfsame place for many days.
Then I heard Shelly’s voice, barely a whisper: “No more cigarettes for me, Mum. Don’t you worry; I won’t touch a single one as long as I live.”
On the bed the woman’s eyes fluttered open. “You promise, Shelly?”
Shelly jerked upright, glancing around in mild panic. Then she leaned over the woman. “Mum? Mum?” Shelly stood up, shouting now: “Nurse! Nurse! She’s awake, my mum’s awake!”
A steady flow of nurses entered the private room. One of them began switching dials, checking vital signs. Another took Shelly by the hand and sat her down. “I’m sorry, Shelly. You know that can’t be possible. Your mum has already gone. There was no electrical activity in her brain.” Out of sympathy she didn’t mention the dreadful term ‘brain dead’. “It’s been more than an hour now.”
Shelly blinked back tears. “No. No. She spoke to me.”
“Sometimes God hears our prayers,” another nurse offered.
Divine intervention?
Blinking, I was back in the Subaru, my eyes tracking the raindrops down the windscreen. Unsurprised by what had occurred, I barely stirred. Paraphrasing a certain Wonderland character, things were definitely getting curiouser and curiouser. I wasn’t a psychic in the true sense of the term, but it was as if my intuitive streak was working overtime, and I’d just picked up on a traumatic episode from Shelly’s past.
“I’m surprised you’d say that,” I whispered to her.
Shelly sat back with the faintest of sobs.
Broom grumbled beside me, but I kept my eyes on the rain-washed screen.
It was a tableau that held for some minutes, each of us lost in our private thoughts. I don’t know about the others, but my mind was in a dark realm. Intuition, mediumship, whatever you wish to call it, my reading into a very personal incident from Shelly’s life had given me pause to consider. If indeed there was a higher spirit at work in the universe, something distinct and all seeing - God - then couldn’t it also be true that demons did walk the lower dimensions? Could Satan, Lucifer or the Skeklar be real too?
Was evil a tangible force?
Could evil attach itself to a thing, animal, beast or inanimate object?
The utility hut we stared at certainly gave the impression of being an evil place.
Nah, just bricks and mortar, I told myself. Places aren’t evil. You have nothing to fear from bricks and mortar.
What is evil?
Man, by virtue of his actions and his thoughts, I decided.
I reached beneath the seat and drew out the small strongbox containing Broom’s SIG Sauer. Placing the box on my lap, I slowly opened the lid and took out the gun.
My companions on this nightmare quest took in a collective gasp.
Not because I’d armed myself, their astonishment was more for what I too had noticed.
The door of the utility hut opened by tiny increments, as though the door had taken on a life of its own.
Breathless we all watched.
Within the open doorway, the interior of the hut was all raven shadows, but something stirred there, a writhing, coiling shadow against the darkness. Like smoke it issued from the hut, indistinct against the grey walls. Then it curled towards us, moving to and then through the chain fence.
Most pragmatic of the three of us, Shelly swore, “What the fuck is that?”
Neither Broom nor I had the words to explain. We could only watch as the sinuous form made its way across the road like water seeking the route of least resistance.
“What the fuck is that?” Shelly said again, but ten times more strident.
The smoky thing reached the bonnet of the car, writhed up it, becoming a shapeless mass of billowing mist that hovered there as if studying us.
“Get us out of here, Bailey,” Shelly commanded. “Get us out of here now!”
“No. Just wait,” I said. “Let’s see what happens.”
Broom was moaning but I couldn’t say if it was fear or awe that motivated him. Shelly pushed herself as far into the furthest corner of the backseat as she could find.
The smoke dipped, like a swan delving beneath a river surface. It disappeared beneath the car.
Shelly let out an undignified yelp, scrambling to get in the front.
I gently pushed her back into her seat. “Stay calm. Please. It isn’t doing us any harm.”
“Not yet,” she screeched. “What is it?”
Broom repeated over and over, “Ohmigod, Ohmigod, Ohmigod…”
Craning my neck down the curve of my door, I said, “I can’t see it. Can either of you see where it’s at?”
Still praying, Broom gave a quick glance out his window. “I think it’s still beneath us.”
“No,” Shelly cried. “It’s behind us!”
I twisted round, and through the misted rear window I could see something moving. The condensation on the window twisted the shape somewhat, but I wasn’t looking at insubstantial smoke. Something very solid stood surveying us from less than a few feet away.
“A man,” I whispered to the others. “There’s a man out there.”
Shelly slapped at the central locking, and all four locks engaged with a clunk.
“Get us out of here,” she commanded again.
“Just wait…” I cautioned. Still, I familiarised my finger with the SIG’s trigger.
“Is it the Skeklar?” Broom squawked.
Shelly batted at the condensation on the window before jerking back from what she saw. “It’s…it’s…”
Then the figure moved around the car. Almost languorous in his movement, he stepped up to the side window and peered in at me.
“It’s…just an old man,” Shelly finished, and I swear I felt the atmosphere inside the Subaru shrink as she sucked in a deep inhalation.
But I wasn’t staring at an old man.
At first glance the figure could be mistaken for an elderly man.
He was small of frame, bent at the shoulders, his head balding with only the barest scrap of hair sticking out in tufts over each ear. His skin was wrinkled. But there the likeness to an elderly man ended, and something truly strange began.
His flesh was of an unnatural pallor, slate grey, laced with blue veins that twisted beneath his parchment-like skin. And he was thin. Beyond thin; he was emaciated. Every bone of his entire skeleton was visible as though his skin was hung loosely over a frame of sticks and poles. And he was as naked as a newborn.
Strange enough, but the thing that told me that I peered back at something supernatural was his eyes. He had no irises. His eyes were blank orbs, a pale mauve and sickly yellow, the colours of a fading bruise. They were the blind eyes of something that dwells in the unlighted depths of caverns and forgotten places.
Yet he could see me.
And he smiled.
I experienced the same sensation that a goldfish must when a starving cat paws at his bowl.
Shelly, firmly entrenched in twenty-first century policing obviously wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. Plus, she can’t have made the correlation between the disappearance of the strange mist and the arrival of this thing.
“Who is he? What the hell is he doing here…nude?”
She pressed at the door locks, a second from getting out the car and confronting the thin grey man. What was she going to do? Charge him with indecent exposure? I slapped at the lock again, saying, “Don’t!”
“What?” she asked, but it was Broom who answered for me.
“The Haugbonde.”
“The hogboy? You have to be kidding me?”
“Does that look like a joke to you?”
The thin grey man, as though we were beyond his concern, walked to the front of the car. Bending, he laid both of his clenched fists on the bonnet of the car, and then craned forward. Staring at us. While Broom screwed his eyes tight, and Shelly scrambled to see what was happening, I returned his unnatural stare.
His thin lips puckered.
I remained stock till.
Again he smiled, but this time it was different.
The grey man reared back. He threw out both arms, and even from inside the vehicle I heard his ligaments and tendons creaking. His head lolled back on his shoulders and he emitted a high-pitched scream.
“What the fuck?” I’m not sure who said that. Maybe it was all three of us.
The scream curtailed until it was pitched beneath the ability of human hearing, and yet he still stood with his mouth stretched wide. How long that tableau held I couldn’t say; we all just sat there watching the uncanny thing screeching silently at the heavens. Finally, his head slipped forward, and again his sightless eyes sought mine.
He stood there, head nodding slightly.
I nodded back at him.
This thin grey man, this elemental spirit of nature, was not a threat to me. I can’t explain how I knew, I simply did.
The grey man lifted an open palm as if begging alms from a passing stranger.
“What is he doing?” Shelly whispered in my ear. “I should get out, Bailey. Ask him what he’s doing here.”
“Just wait,” I whispered.
“I don’t recognise him as an islander. Maybe he knows something about what’s going on.” Shelly was rabbiting. What was wrong with her? Couldn’t she see that this wasn’t some old hobo-cum-naturist who’d wandered off the beaten tourist path? What did she expect him to say? In fact, what would she do when he peered into her soul as he just had mine?
We heard the noise first. A fluttering, flapping sound, as though a canvas sail was being torn by hurricane winds. It was distant at first, but growing in volume as something approached. It was dark, the rain clouds blocking the moonlight, and the Subaru’s headlights were inefficient at pushing back the darkness. Still, the night suddenly became much, much darker. The shadows were solid; all that I could see through them was the thin grey man. He shone with his own luminescence under the headlight beam. Then he disappeared as the blackness thickened.
There were dozens of them, hundreds, maybe thousands. More crows than I’d warrant that the entire Shetland island chain could sustain. Ravens, too. Rooks and jackdaws. The occasional flash of white could have been from the plumage of magpies. There was all manner of carrion eater.
They flew in frenzy around the car. Wingtips and claws battered the metal, the windows. Small, rolling eyes peered inside. Beaks opened and shrill cries broke over us. The drumming of bodies on the metal work was like thunder. Reflexively, the three of us threw our hands over our heads, pushing deep into our seats. Broom and Shelly cried out, but strangely enough I stayed silent.
There was an understanding between the thin grey man and me. These birds had come at his bequest. They weren’t there to harm us.
“Stay calm,” I told my companions. “It’ll be over with in a second.”
With my words there was an immediate cessation of the clamour. The massive flock of birds cartwheeled skyward, leaving behind nothing of their passing but the odd streak of shit on the windows and some slowly drifting feathers that the wind caught and plucked away.
The headlight beam grew in brightness.
Standing in the light was the grey man. Untroubled by the birds he stood with that faint smile on his puckered lips. On his outstretched palm stood a single crow. It watched us with the same flat-eyed intensity as its master. The grey man spoke to the bird, its head cocking as though listening with rapt attention to his words. Then it hopped off his hand, swooped the few feet and landed with a chitinous clatter on the bonnet.
We all watched as the bird hopped forward and then beat its beak on the glass. Once, twice, three times. Then it streaked heavenward and we all craned our necks to see where it was going.
Twice it made a full circuit of the Subaru, before flapping off to the southwest. The bird cawed once.
“It wants us to follow it,” I said.
“It’s a fucking crow,” Shelly pointed out. “Not Lassie the fucking Wonder Dog.”
I clucked my tongue in exasperation, and shoved the gear stick into reverse and swung the vehicle round.
“Bailey…?” Shelly began.
Broom said, “Open your eyes, Sergeant. And your heart. Suspend disbelief if you have to. Only…let Carter do what has to be done.”
She
snorted, but didn’t argue. “Crazy.” Whether she meant me, the notion of our animal guide, or her own frame of mind, she didn’t make clear.
As I drove in pursuit of our feathered guide, she did ask, “What about that old guy?”
“He’s gone.”
She craned round to search for the thin grey man. The road was empty.
“The Haugbonde’s gone,” I clarified. Back to the smoke and the earth that gave him birth.
FORTYSEVEN
The road south
Broom’s Subaru was no Mystery Mobile, but all we required was a cowardly Great Dane with a penchant for over-sized snacks and we’d have been directly in the middle of a Scooby Doo cartoon. The blond jock was Broom. Shelly was the spunky Daphne. That would make me Shaggy - my unshaven chin and rumpled appearance only adding to the image. And, yep, Janet had to be the bookish Velma.
Anyone familiar with Scooby Doo knows that Velma often found herself in trouble, and it was up to the gang to save her. Usually she was resourceful enough to end up saving herself and solving the mystery while the others got themselves into various spots of bother. Made me wish that this was a children’s cartoon; at least then there would be some hope of finding Janet alive.
Instead of a goofy Great Dane we had a bird for our animal companion. The crow flew low, beneath the low-lying clouds. It didn’t deviate from the road, and flew only fast enough that we could keep pace. Periodically it turned its beady eye to us and cawed as if spurring us to greater speed.
Perhaps I was humanizing the bird. Maybe the only thing that attracted the crow to the Skeklar’s hiding place was the stench of death; it was a carrion eater after all. Maybe its occasional glance back and strident screech was to tell us to go away. We weren’t invited to dinner.
“This is just so insane,” Shelly said for about the umpteenth time. “We’re gallivanting about the countryside following a bloody bird!”
“Please, Sergeant McCusker…” Broom pleaded.
“No, no, no. Please don’t call me Sergeant. I’m not a sergeant. Not now. Not here. Not following a flamin’ crow.” She sighed melodramatically and flung herself back in her seat. Under her breath, she muttered, “Wish I’d had chance to get out of this bloody uniform. Anyone sees me and realises what we’re doing, I’ll be drummed out of the force. Probably chased by a mob of angry islanders armed with pitchforks and blazing torches.”
