The Man in the Moss

by Phil Rickman

  'Anyway, don't expect a happy ending, OK? This is a traditional song. You don't get many happy endings in traditional songs. It's called ... "Lang a-growin' ".'

  The bastard McBain would have handled this better. For the sake of ethnic credibility, he'd do a couple of songs in the Gaelic, of which he understood scarcely a word. What she had these days was a different kind of credibility: sophistication, fancy nightclub ethnic, low and sultry vocals, folk tunes with a touch of jazz guitar, strictly rationed to what she could handle without fracturing a fingernail.

  'He's young ...' Hearing her own voice drifting vacuously on the air, the words like cigarette smoke. '... but he's daily .. . growin' ...'

  Over an hour ago, she'd called Lottie's number. A guy answered, obviously not the boy, Dic. The guy'd said Lottie was at the hospital in Manchester. Muffled voices in the background - this was a pub, right? She'd asked no more questions. She'd call back.

  The hospital. In Manchester. Oh, hell.

  The Great Hall was huge, the acoustics lousy. When the song was over, applause went pop-pop-pop like a battery of distant shotguns. The stags' heads gathered grimly below the ceiling, so many that the antlers looked to be tangled up.

  'Splendid,' she heard the Earl call out magnanimously. How many wee staggies did you pop yourself, my lord, your grace, whatever? Maybe you invited members of the Royal Family to assist. Traditional, right?

  Moira did a bit of fine tuning on the guitar. She was wearing the black dress and the cameo brooch containing the stained plaid fragment that was reputed to have been recovered from a corpse at Culloden. Credibility.

  'This song ... You may not know the title, most of you, but the tune could be slightly familiar. It's... the lament of a girl whose man's gone missing at sea and she waits on the shore accosting all the homecoming fishermen as they reach land.

  The song's called "Cam Ye O'er Frae Campbelltoon". It's, er, ... it's traditional.'

  Traditional my arse. Me and Kenny Savage wrote it, still half-pissed, at a party in Kenny's flat in 1982 - like, Hey, I know ... how about we invent a totally traditional Celtic lament ...

  She told them, the assembled Celts, 'The chorus is very simple ... so feel free to join in ...'

  And, by Christ, they did join in. Probably with tears in their eyes. All these Scots and Irish and Welsh and Bretons and the folk from the wee place up against Turkey ... writers and poets and politicians united in harmony with a phoney chorus composed amidst empty Yugoslav Riesling bottles at the fag end of Kenny Savage's Decree Absolute party in dawn-streaked Stranraer.

  What a sham, eh? I mean, what am I doing here?

  And Matt Castle dying.

  Tears in her own eyes now. Last year he'd told her on the phone that he'd be OK, the tests had shown it wasn't malignant. And she'd believed him; so much for intuition.

  The damn tears would be glinting in the soft spotlight they'd put on her, and the Celtic horde out there, maudlin with malt, would think she was weeping for the girl on the shore at Stranraer - and weeping also, naturally, for the plight of Scotland and for the oldest race in Europe trampled into the mud of ages.

  'Thank you,' she said graciously, as they applauded not so much her as themselves, a confusion of racial pride with communal self-pity.

  And that makes it nine songs, over an hour gone, corning up to 10.30. Time to wind this thing up, yeh? Lifting the guitar strap out of her hair. Let's get the hell out of here.

  At which point someone called out smoothly, 'Would it be in order to request an encore?'

  She tried to smile.

  'Maybe you could play "The Comb Song"?'

  It was him. It would have to be. The New York supplier of Semtex money to the IRA.

  'Aw, that's just a kiddies' song.' Standing up, the guitar-strap half-off.

  'Well, I don't know about the other people here,' the voice said - and it was not the American, 'but it's the song I most associate with you, and I was rather disappointed not to hear

  'Oh, hell, it's a good long time ago, I don't think I even remember the words ...' Who the fuck was this?

  'If you go wrong, I'm sure we could help you out.' She couldn't make out his face behind the spotlight. She looked up, in search of inspiration, but her gaze got entangled in antlers.

  'Also,' she said miserably, 'it isn't exactly traditional. And it's awful long. See, I don't want to bore your friends here ...'

  'Miss Cairns ...' The Earl himself took a step towards the dais, into the spotlight, the light making tiny dollar-signs in his eyes. 'I doubt if any of us could possibly be bored by any of your songs.' A touch of threat under the mellifluousness? Some flunkey had replaced the empty Guinness glass by her stool with a full one. She picked it up, put it down again without drinking. There were murmurings.

  What the hell am I going to do now? She felt their stares, the more charitable ones maybe wondering if she was ill. Aw, shit...

  What she didn't feel any more were the eyes of the Watcher.

  This had maybe been a mistake. Sometimes you made mistakes. It probably had been the American and it probably was no heavier than lust.

  'I warn you,' Moira said, as the Ovation's strap sank back into her shoulder, 'this is the longest song I ever wrote.'

  And to the accompaniment of a thin cheer from the floor her fingers found the chord, and she sang the rather clumsy opening lines. Trying not to think about it, trying to board up her mind against all those heavyweight memories tramping up the stairs.

  Her father works with papers and with plans.

  Her mother sees the world from caravans ...

  The song telling the story of this shy, drab child growing up in the suburbs of a staid Clydeside town with the ever-present feeling that she's in the wrong place, that she really ought to be some other person. Bad times at school, no friends. Brought up at home by the grandmother, restrictive, old-fashioned Presbyterian.

  I wish to God you hadna been born.

  Your hair's a mess, get it shorn.

  Get it shorn ...

  Then the song becoming a touch obscure - one night, around the time of her adolescence, the child seems to be in this dark wood, when the moon breaks through the clouds and trees, and she finds she's holding ... this curious, ancient comb. It's a wonderful magic comb and apparently is the key to the alternative reality which for all these years has been denied to her. She runs it through her hair and becomes electrified, metamorphoses into some kind of beautiful princess. Fairytale stuff.

  ... She sees herself in colours and

  She weighs her powers in her hand ...

  Dead silence out there. She had them. Oh, it had its magic, this bloody song which intelligent people were supposed to think was all allegorical and the comb a metaphor for the great Celtic heritage. Most likely this was how the American saw it, and the other guy who'd demanded the song.

  A bastard to write, the words wouldn't hang together - sign of a song that didn't want to be written.

  The song knew from the start: some things are too personal.

  Chorus:

  Never let them cut your hair

  Or tell you where

  You've been,

  Or where you're going to

  From here ...

  Couple of twiddly bits which, after all these years, she fluffed. Then dropping down to minor key for the main reason she hadn't wanted to perform this number, the creepy stuff, the heavy stuff.

  And in the chamber of the dead

  Forgotten voices fill your head ...

  Sure, there they are ... tinny little voices, high-pitched, fragmented chattering, like a cheap transistor radio with its battery dying. Tune it in, tune it in.

  Who is this? Who is it?

  No.

  No, no, NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Oh, shit, please, don't die, Matt, don't die on me now ...you have no right ...

  Singing on, through her wild tears, an awed silence in the room like a giant cavern, hall of ages, caged in bones. You think you k
now this song, these words, Mr New York Irishman... ?

  ... for the night is growing colder

  and you feel it at your shoulder ...

  Icy-bright singing now, purged of that phoney, Guinnessy growl. One or two women out there shivering and reaching for their cardigans. The song rippling across the night sky, down the dark years, and you're watching its wavering passage from a different level, like an air traffic controller in a tower late at night. Something flying out to meet it, on a collision course.

  Give up, you fool, there is no heat.

  The Abyss opens up beneath your feet...

  Here he is again, uncertainly into the spotlight, looking around. Hello again, Earl, something wrong is there, my lord, your grace ... ? Is it cold for you in here? Will you get some servant to turn up the heating, throw more peat on the fire?

  And all the while, will you listen to these wee voices, chattering, chattering, chattering ...

  The comb is ice, it's brittle, oh.

  You cannot hold it, must let go ...

  Yes, let it go. It's a trinket, it's worthless, it takes your energy. Let it drift. Let the night have it. Let ...

  These - Christ - these are not my words. These are somebody else's words.

  I'm singing somebody else's goddamn words!

  And the comb is being pulled away now in a deceptively soft silver haze, gently at first, just a tug. Then insistent, irritable - let it come, you bitch - and slender hands, slender like wires, scalpelling into her breast. Feeling delicately - but brutally and coldly, like a pathologist at an autopsy - for her emotional core, for the centre of her.

  somebody ...

  In a frenzy she's letting go of the song, she's groping wildly at the air, feeling her spirit straining in her body as the big lights come on, huge shimmering chandeliers.

  Moira has fallen down from the stool.

  She's lying twisted and squirming on the carpeted dais, both arms wrapped around the guitar. From miles away, people are screaming, or is it her screaming at them ... Stop it! Catch

  it! Don't let it go from here! Help me! Help me!

  She can hear them coming to help her, the army of her fellow-Celts. But they can't get through.

  They can't get through the walls of bone.

  The walls of jiggling swelling bone. Not just the skulls any more; the plaster's fallen from the walls and the walls are walls of bone, whole skeletons interlocking, creaking and twisting and the jaws of the skulls opening and closing, grisly grins and clacking laughter of teeth, right up against her face. She's trapped, like a beating, bloody heart inside a rib-cage.

  She sees the comb and all it represents spinning away until it's nothing but a hairline crack of silver-blue. She watches it go like a mother who sees her baby toddling out of the garden and into the dust spurting from the wheels of an oncoming articulated lorry.

  Mammy!

  But you can't hear me, can you, mammy? The connection's broken.

  I'm on my own.

  But no.

  There is a man.

  A tall, thin man, with a face so white it might be the face of some supernatural being.

  No, this is a real man. He's wearing an evening suit, a bow-tie. He has a small voluptuous mouth and an expanse of white forehead marked with greyish freckles, and the white hair ripples back from the forehead; not receding, it has always been that way. She ought to know him; he knows her.

  And where she keeps the comb.

  This person, unnoticed in the hubbub by everyone but her, is lifting the black guitar case from the steps of the dais and examining it to see how it opens. He looks at her, furiously impatient, and the air between them splinters like ice and when she tries to see into his eyes, and they are not there, only the black sockets in a face as white as any of the skulls.

  Their eyes meet at last. His have projected into the sockets from somewhere. They are light grey eyes. And there's a whiteness around him, growing into arms like tree-branches above his head. No, not arms, not branches.

  Antlers.

  Moira shrieked, flinging the guitar away from her. It made a mangled minor chord as it rolled down the steps of the dais.

  She threw herself after it, headlong into the glass-spattered Guinness-sodden tartan carpet, clawing at the pair of shiny, elegant evening shoes, the air at first full of swirling, unfocused energy.

  And then, for a moment, everything was still.

  Most of those in the room were still seated at their tables, with drinks in front of them, the men and women in their evening wear, white shirts and black bow-ties, jewellery and silk and satin. The American half out of his seat, dark Irish hair tumbling on to his forehead. The Earl on his feet; his expression ... dismay turning to disgust; was this woman having a fit? In his castle?

  Everybody shimmering with movement, but nobody going anywhere.

  Projector-jam.

  Until the first skull fell.

  It was possibly the smallest of them, so comparatively insignificant that Moira wondered briefly why anyone would have admitted to having shot it, let alone wanted to display it. She watched it happen, saw the antlers just lean forward, as if it was bowing its head, and then the wooden shield it was mounted on splintered and the poor bleached exhibit crashed seven or eight feet on to a table, crystal glasses flying into the air around it.

  'God almighty!' a man blurted.

  The white, eyeless head toppled neatly from the table into the lap of a woman in a wine-coloured evening dress, the antlers suddenly seeming to be sprouting from her ample Celtic cleavage.

  For a whole second, the woman just looked at it, as though it was some kind of novelty, like a big, fluffy bunny popped onto her knees by an admirer at a party. Her glossy red lips split apart into what appeared for an instant to be an expression of pure delight.

  It was this older woman next to her, whose ornate, red-brown coiffure had been speared by an antler, she was the one who screamed first.

  More of an escalating gurgle actually. Both women jerking to their feet in quaking revulsion, clutching at one another, chairs flying ...

  ... as, with a series of sickening ripping sounds, several other skulls cracked themselves from the walls, all at once ...

  (Look!' Some guy grabbing the Earl by the shoulders, shaking him.)

  ... and began to descend in, like, slow motion, some so old they fell apart in the air and came down in pieces.

  Moira's audience in cowering disarray. 'Stop this!' the Earl commanding irrationally, limbs jerking in spasms, semaphoring incomprehensible fear, like a spider caught in its own web.

  'Stop it! Stop it at once!'

  This tumultuous tending and creaking from all the walls. Even the great fire looking cowed, burning, back, low and smoky as though someone had thrown muffling peat at it.

  Next to the fireplace, this severe and heavy lady - a matriarch of Welsh-language television, it was said - just sitting there blinking, confused because her spectacles had been torn off and then trodden on by a flailing bearded man, some distinguished professor of Celtic Studies, eyes full of broken glass, one cheek gashed by a blade of bone.

  And, pulling her gaze away from this carnage, in the choking maw of the great fireplace Moira thought she saw a face ... so grey it could only have been formed from smoke. The face swirled; two thrashing arms of smoke came out into the room, as if reaching for her.

  Moira whispered faintly, 'Matt?' But it was smoke, only smoke.

  The butler guy weaving about helplessly in the great doorway as the stag skulls fell and fell, this roaring, spitting avalanche of white bone and splattering glass, battered heads and scored skin, people yelping, moaning, hurling themselves under collapsing tables, craving shelter from the storm.

  She caught the black guitar case as it fell towards her. Caught it in her arms.

  Come to mammy.

  She sat bewildered on the bottom step of the dais, in the refrigerated air, in the absurdly shocking mess of glass and antlers.

  I hav
e to be leaving, she thought.

  Hands on her shoulders. 'You OK? Moira, for Chrissake ... ?'

  'Get the fuck off me!'

  But it was only the American, Mr Semtex.

  'Please ... You OK? Here, let me take that...'

  'No! Let it alone, will you?'

  She saw the white-faced man on his knees, not six feet away. He was holding one of the skulls, a big skull, one antler snapped off halfway, ending in a savage point, a dagger of bone. There was blood on the point.

  And blood welling slowly out of his left eye, blood and mucus, a black pool around the eye.

  The other eye was very pale, grey going on pink. He was staring at her out of it.

  Moira clutched the guitar case defiantly to her throbbing breast.

  'Just hang on in there, pal,' the American said to the white-faced man. 'We're gonna get you a doctor.'

  Ignoring the American, the man with the injured eye said (and later the American would swear to her that he hadn't heard this, that the guy was too messed up to speak at all)...

  The man said, very calm, very urbane, 'Don't think, Miss Cairns, that this is anything but the beginning.'

  CHAPTER VI

  In Matt Castle's band, Willie Wagstaff had played various hand-drums - bongo-type things and what the Irish called the bodhran, although Matt would never call it that; to him it was all Pennine percussion.

  This morning, without some kind of drum under his hands, Willie looked vaguely disabled, both sets of fingers tapping nervously at his knees, creating complex, silent rhythms.

  Lottie smiled wanly down at him. They were sitting on wooden stools at either end of the kitchen stove, for warmth