by Phil Rickman
'So you think it's youngsters, then.'
'I don't know. All I'm saying is it's often kids. The kind, if you saw them, you could probably tuck a couple under each arm.'
'Aye, well, like I say, it's not me ... so much as the wife. I wanted to wait up there, maybe surprise 'em, like, give 'em a bloody good hiding, but ...'
'I think your wife was right,' Hans said. 'Don't get into a vendetta situation if you can help it. It's probably a phase, a fad. They'll go off and find another circle in a week or two, or perhaps they'll simply grow out of it. You've told the police, and apart from the, er, the ram ...'
'I've not told coppers about last night. Only you. There's nowt to see. Only ashes. No blood. No bits.'
'How far is the nearest circle from where you live?'
'Half a mile ... three-quarters. But it's a tricky climb at night, can't do it wi'out a light, and wi' a light they'd see me comin'. Jeep's no bloody use either, on that ground.'
'So you saw the fire ...'
'Bit of a red glow, that were all.'
'And your wife heard ...'
'She thought she heard. Like I say, could've bin a sheep ... fox ... owl ... rabbit.'
'But she thought it was ...'
'Aye,' said Sam Davis. 'A babby.'
'There's a dragon,' the boy said, and his bottom lip was trembling. 'There is ...!'
'Gerroff,' said Willie Wagstaff.
He'd been for his morning paper and didn't plan to bugger about on a day as cold as this, wanted to get home and put a match to his fire.
'You go an' look, Uncle Willie.'
This was Benjie, nearly eight, Willie's youngest sister Sally's lad. Tough little bugger as a rule. He had The Chief with him, an Alsatian, Benjie's minder.
Willie folded up his paper, stuck it under his arm. 'What you on about at all?'
'...'s a dragon, Uncle Willie ...'s 'orrible ...'
He was about to cry. Pale too. Cheeks ought to be glowing on a morning like this. Especially with having the day off school, to go to Matt's funeral.
Then again, could be that was at the bottom of this. Death, funerals, everybody talking hushed, a big hole being dug in the churchyard for the feller he called Uncle Matt. And Benjie trying to understand it all, seeing this great big dragon.
'All right,' Willie said, pretending he hadn't noticed the lad was upset. 'I'll buy it. Where's this dragon?'
'On t'Moss.'
'Oh, aye. And what were you doin' on t'Moss on your own then, eh?'
'I weren't on me own, Uncle Willie. T'Chief were wi' me. An' 'e dint like it neither.'
The big dog flopped his mouth open, stuck his tongue out and looked inscrutable.
'Gerroff,' said Willie. 'That dog's scared of nowt. All right, lead the way. But if you're havin' me on, you little Arab, I'll ...'
When the farmer had gone, Catherine came in with a mid-morning mug of tea for Hans, and he asked her, 'You hear any of that?'
'Bits.' His daughter sat on the piano stool. She was wearing a plain black jumper and baggy, striped trousers with turn-ups. 'Got the gist. What are you going to do about it, Pop?'
'Well,' said Hans, 'I don't really know. Obviously I don't like the sound of this baby business. And I'm not one to generalize about hysterical women. But still, I think if a child had gone missing virtually anywhere in the country we'd have heard about it, don't you?'
Cathy looked serious, as she often did these days, as if she'd suddenly decided it was time to shoulder the full responsibility of being an adult, as distinct from a student.
'No,' she said. 'Not necessarily.'
'What do you ... ?' Hans looked puzzled. Then he said, 'Oh. That.'
'It's been exaggerated a lot, of course, but that doesn't mean it doesn't go on, Pop.'
'You're beginning to sound like Joel Beard.'
'Oh, I don't think so.'
'Well,' said Hans, 'if there really is a possibility of something of that nature, then he should tell the police, shouldn't he? But where's his evidence? His wife thought she heard a baby crying. As he said, it could have been any one of a dozen animals, or the wind or ...'
Cathy said, 'A friend of mine at college did a study of so-called ritual child abuse. What it amounts to, in most of the cases which have been proved, is that the ritual bits - the devil masks and the candles and so on - are there to support the abuse clement. Simply to scare the children into submission. So in most cases we're not talking about actual Devil worship ...'
'Just extreme evil,' Hans said. 'Where's the difference exactly?'
'I'm not an expert,' Cathy said, 'but I rather think there is a difference.' She grinned slyly. 'I think it's something Ma Wagstaff could explain to you if you caught her in the right mood.'
Cheeky little madam. Hans smiled. 'I'm the accredited holy man in these parts, in case you'd forgotten. Anyway, why didn't young Sam go to Ma Wagstaff for advice?'
'Because he hasn't lived around here very long. He doesn't know the way things operate yet.'
How they changed. There'd been a time, not so long ago, when Cathy had been dismissive, to say the least, of Ma Wagstaff and all she stood for.
'And you do, do you?' Hans said. 'You know how things operate.'
'I'm getting an inkling.'
'Perhaps we should discuss this sometime.'
'I don't think so,' Cathy said.
Hans frowned.
'I don't think words can really pin it down,' she said. Or that we should try to.'
She looked at him blandly. All open-faced and pain-free. Twenty-three years old, a light-haired, plain-faced girl - even Hans had to admit she was no great beauty. However, there was a knowingness about her that he hadn't been aware of before.
He felt old. Suddenly she was starting to look wiser than he felt. How they changed. Every time they came home from University they'd grown stronger and more alien. Catherine studying archaeology at Oxford and Barney, her twin (who he'd rather imagined would follow him into the Church) at the London School of Economics and now researching for a prominent Conservative MP - Barney, the one-time Young Socialist.
'Have you got a boyfriend, Cathy?' he asked suddenly.
'Why do you ask?'
'Because I'm your only surviving parent.'
Her nose twitched mischievously. 'And you'd got around to wondering if I was gay, I suppose.'
He felt his eyes widening. Was this indeed what he'd been wondering? One of those forbidding, shapeless lumps that lay in the mental silt.
Cathy swivelled suddenly on the piano stool, lifted up the wooden lid to expose the keys, and began to beat out the opening bars of 'Jerusalem'.
'I don't think I'm queer,' she said, addressing the keys. 'But some people find me a bit strange.'
The frosted peat was quite firm where he walked. Didn't even need his wellies today.
Fifty yards out, Willie stopped.
Bog oak, he told himself, that's all. Probably passed it hundreds of times, but they get turned around by the wind, bits break off.
The Moss looked like a dark sea sometimes. You came down from the village, across the road, and it was like chambering over the rocks to get to the bay. That was on a misty day, when the Moss stretched quickly to the horizon. But on a bright morning, like now, you could see how the bog actually sloped gently upwards, then more steeply towards the mountains, Kinder Scout in the distance.
On a beach there was driftwood. In a moss, bog oak, great chunks of blackened wood coughed up by the peat. Made good, strong furniture.
Benjie wouldn't cross the road to the Moss, but The Chief had followed Willie, reluctantly, big paws stepping delicately over the black pools at the edge, where it nearly met the tarmac.
Now fifty yards into the Moss, The Chief stopped too and made a noise at the back of his throat that was half-growl and half-whine...
'Bog oak,' Willie said to the dog. 'You never seen bog oak before?
Point was, though, he personally had never seen owt like this before. The size
of it. The fact that it had suddenly appeared in a place where there were no trees, save a few tatty corpses.
He walked up by the side of it, and its shape began to change, but it still didn't make you think of anything scarier than half an oak tree with its branches all crushed up and twisted.
But when he got around it, looking back through the branches towards the village, this was when his breath got jammed up in his throat, when he felt like he was swallowing half a brick.
Willie backed off to where the dog was crouching and snarling, his black lips curled back over his teeth. 'All right, Chief,' Willie said hoarsely.
He looked back to where Benjie stood, forlorn in his red tracksuit.
'You're going t'ave to explain this,' Willie told himself, his right hand building up a rhythm on his hip pocket where there was a bunch of keys. 'Lad's countin' on you. Better come up wi' summat a bit quick.'
He straightened up.
'Bog oak.'
He'd stick to his story. The fact that he'd never seen bog oak like this before was his problem. Just had to make it sound convincing for the lad.
Willie marched boldly up to the thing, grabbed hold of the end of one of its branches to snap it off, about nine inches of it. 'Strewth!' It was like trying to snap a crowbar. It came off though, all at once. 'Go on,' he said to The Chief. 'Fetch it.'
And he threw it as hard as he could, glad to get it out of his hand if truth were told. It felt cold and hard, just like iron or stone. But it was wood all right, nowt fossilized about it, too light - he'd hurled it into the wind and it landed barely ten feet away.
'Well, go on then!' Bloody hell, he'd thrown dozens of sticks for this dog over the years.
The Chief didn't move; the thick fur on the back of his neck was flattened, his eyes were dull and wary, his tail between his legs.
'You soft bugger,' Willie said.
What this was, the dog was close to Benjie, they'd grown up side by side. Only natural he'd picked up on the kid's fear. Aye, Willie thought, and it'd've put the shits up me too, at his age.
Then he thought, admitting it to himself, What do you mean, at his age... ?
He tried to look at the thing dispassionately. It was amazing, like a work of art, like bloody sculpture.
But it didn't make him think of a dragon. Dragons were from fairy tales. More than that, dragons were animals. All right, they had wings and long scaly tails, but they were animals and there was nowt scary about animals.
Willie wanted to back off further, until he couldn't make out the details. He wanted to crouch down at a safe distance and growl at it like The Chief.
Basically he didn't want to see it any more, wished he'd never seen it at all because it was the kind of shape that came up in your dreams. This was stupid, but there was no getting round it.
The tangle of branches wrapped round, woven into each other like pipes and tubes, like a human being wearing its intestines on the outside.
And out of all this, the head rearing up on a twisted, scabby neck, and the head was as black as, as ... as peat. It had holes for eyes, with the daylight shining through, and a jagged, widely grinning mouth, and on either side of the head were large knobbly horns.
And where one of the horns went into a knob, there was even the beginnings of another face, like one of them gargoyles on the guttering at St Bride's.
But what was worse than all this was the way the thing thrust out of the peat, twelve feet or more, two big branches sticking out either side of the neck-piece, like hunched shoulders, and then smaller branches like dangling arms and hands and misshapen fingers, like they had arthritis in them, like the Rector's fingers.
And when a gust of wind snatched at it, the whole thing would be shivering and shaking, its wooden arms waving about and rattling.
Dancing about.
Willie remembered something that used to scare the life out of him when he was little. The teacher, Ernie Dawber's uncle, telling them about Gibbet Hill where hanged men's skeletons used to dangle in chains, rattling in the wind.
'Oh, come on... !' Willie said scornfully. He was shivering himself now - cold morning, coldest this year, not expecting it, that's all there is to it, nowt else.
'Come on.'
Walked away from it across the Moss, towards the little lad and the village, wanting to run, imagining Benjie screaming, Run, Uncle Willie, run! It's come out of t'bog and it's after
you ... !Run!
He kept on walking steadily, but the fingers of both hands were drumming away, going hard and steady at his thighs.
'Bog oak,' Willie made himself shout. 'Bog oak!'
Part Four
the burial
CHAPTER I
Across the border, heading south, Moira ignored all the big blue signs beckoning her towards the M6. Motorways in murky weather demanded one-track concentration; she had other roads to travel.
You should take a rest, Moira. The Duchess. Unravel yourself.
Well, sure, nothing like a long drive to a funeral for some serious reflection ... for facing up to the fact that you were also journeying - and who knew how fast? - towards your own.
The countryside, getting rained on, glistening drably, looked like it also was into some heavy and morose self-contemplation. It was almost like she'd left Scotland and then doubled back: there were the mountains and there were the lochs. And there also was the mist, shrouding the slow, sulky rain which made you wet as hell, very quickly.
Cumbria. She stopped a while in a grey and sullen community sliding down either side of a hill. Wandered up the steep street and bought a sour, milky coffee in a snack-and-souvenir shop. A dismal joint, but there was a table where she could spread out the map, find out where she was heading.
Many places hereabouts had jagged, rocky names. Nordic-sounding, some of them. The Vikings had been here, after the Romans quit. And what remained of the Celts? Anything?
She looked out of the cafe window at a ragged line of stone cottages with chalet bungalows, Lego-style, on the hillside behind.
She watched a couple of elderly local residents stumbling arm-in-arm through the rain.
English people.
... this guy was telling us, at the conference this afternoon, how the English are the least significant people - culturally, that is - in these islands ... mongrels ... no basic ethnic tradition.
And what the hell, Moira wondered, were New Yorkers?
Mungo Macbeth, of the Manhattan Macbeths. Could you credit it?
Moira had another go at the coffee, made a face, pushed the plastic cup away.
She sighed. Poor Macbeth. Poor glamorous, superficial Macbeth. Who, back home, through the very nature of his occupation and his connections, would likely have whole queues of mini-series starlets outside his hotel room. Who, in New York, would have been chasing not her but his lawyer, wondering if a bonestorm was an Act of God or maybe worth half a million in compensation.
But who, because this was Scotland, the old ancestral muckheap, and because of the night - the crazy, surrealistic, Celtic night - had behaved like a man bewitched.
Moira took her plastic cup back to the counter, which was classic British stained-glass - stained with coffee, congealed fat, tomato ketchup.
'On your own?' the guy behind the counter said. He was lanky, late-twenties. He had a sneery kind of voice out of Essex or somewhere. Nowhere you went these days in Britain, did the people running the tourist joints ever seem to be locals.
She said, 'We're all of us alone, pal.' And, slinging her bag over her shoulder, headed for the door.
'You didn't finish your coffee,' he called after her. 'Something wrong with it?'
'It was truly fine.' Moira held up the back of a hand. 'Got all my nail varnish off, no problem.'
About half an hour later, she surrendered to the blue signs. On the motorway the rain was coming harder, or maybe she was just driving faster into it. At a service area somewhere around Lancaster, she found a phone, stood under its perspex umbre
lla, called her agent in Glasgow and explained where she was.
'Previous experience, Malcolm, told me not to call until I was well on the road, or you'd instantly come up with a good reason why I wasn't to cross the border.'
'Never mind that. I have been telephoned,' Malcolm said ponderously, the Old Testament voice, 'by the Earl's man.'
Oh, shit.
'Hoping you were fully recovered.'
'Right...' she said cautiously.
'And most apologetic about the abrupt termination of your performance the other night by the inexplicable precipitation from the walls of approximately a hundred stags' heads. Now, was that not an extraordinary thing to happen?'
'Bizarre.'
'Several people had to be treated for minor lacerations, and there were two broken arms.'
'Oh, dear.'
'So naturally the Earl wanted to reassure himself that you had not been damaged in any way.'
'I'm fine. Just fine.'
'Because you seemed to have disappeared. Along with one of his guests, a gentleman called, er, Macbeth.'
'Sorry,' Moira said. 'No more money.' She hung up and ran back into the rain, black hair streaming behind her, before he could say anything about witchy women.
The psychic thing.
A millstone, a fucking albatross.
She started the car, the eight-year-old BMW with a suitcase in the boot, the suitcase jammed up against the Ovation guitar steeping in its black case like Dracula in his coffin - we only come out at night, me and that guitar, together. With sometimes devastating results.
The damned psychic thing.
If you really could control it, it would be fine. No, forget fine, try bearable. It would be bearable.
But going down that old, dark path towards the possibility of some kind of control. Well, you took an impulsive step down there, the once, and you found all these little side-paths beckoning, tiny coloured lanterns in the distance - follow me, I'm the one.
