Cape Wrath

by Paul Finch

  “You aren’t going to believe this,” he said, as they approached him.

  “What?” Alan asked anxiously.

  Nug turned and pointed. They followed his gaze, and saw that, coming idly through the trees towards them, with an almost blissful lack of concern, was Professor Mercy. Surprised, they noticed that she had taken her boots and socks off, and was walking barefoot. White chickweed blooms had for some reason been braided into her flowing blonde tresses.

  “Hello there,” she said with a serene smile. “Have you two got back together again? Oh, that’s nice. I’m so glad for you.”

  11

  They left Clive’s body where it was, at first because they were unable to remove it, but later because it made sense to.

  Both Alan and Barry tried to loose Clive’s hands, but the tent pegs had been hammered in with such brutal strength that they were lodged fast. Then Nug reminded everyone that the police would regard this as a crime scene and, though it was sickening beyond belief to do so, it would probably be for the best to leave the grisly picture untouched. Smeared with blood, shivering with nausea, the two lads withdrew, and the entire party – what remained of it – retreated through the woods to the camp, where they built a much larger fire than normal, then huddled around it in a strained and frightened silence as the night descended.

  Professor Mercy was the only one apparently unafraid. She hummed quietly to herself as she sat there, occasionally commenting to the rest on the joys of summer and of camping out under the stars, and all the while linking daisy-chains together and weaving blooms into her hair.

  “Who’d have thought it?” said Barry, staring at the woman, visibly spooked. “She’s totally flipped. It’s like she’s retreated back to her childhood.”

  “I’d have thought she’d have been the last one to go,” said Linda, articulating all their feelings.

  “That’s the value of true love for you,” David commented. “Enjoy it while it lasts, because when some bugger comes and snatches it away, it’ll fuck you up big time.”

  Alan, meanwhile, shocked though he was by the Professor’s breakdown, could think of little else but the terrible rite of the Blood-Eagle. Even in the endlessly violent world of the Vikings, there were only four or five recorded instances when this most potent sacrifice to Odin had ever been enacted, and most of those were attributable to Ivar, who even by the standards of his own people, was regarded as a deranged beast when the mood was on him. The student couldn’t suppress a violent shudder. He turned to Nug, seated next to him.

  “Have you ever … I mean ever, heard of this in the modern age?”

  Nug shook his head dully.

  Alan couldn’t take it any longer. He leaped up. “First the Millstone, now the Blood-Eagle. Let’s admit it, there’s some lunatic on this island thinks he’s Ivar Ragnarsson!”

  Linda gazed steadily up at him. “That’s impossible. John McEndry’s the only boatman in miles. He’d have known if someone else was out here.”

  “Perhaps it’s one of us, then?” Barry suggested.

  Linda gave him a startled look. “Don’t be ridiculous …”

  Barry jumped to his feet too. “Think about it! Who else knows this subject well enough? They don’t teach the Blood-Eagle on the National Curriculum, do they?”

  The following silence was thick enough to cut with a knife. Only the spitting and snapping of the flames disturbed it. Even Nug, who’d reacted with as much hysteria as anyone else at the first sight of Clive’s butchered carcass, but who had probably been the first of them all to get his head back together, seemed uncertain. He glanced warily up at Alan and Barry, as if wondering just how much any of them knew about their fellow students.

  Finally, Linda spoke again: “But why would any of us do it?”

  “Perhaps someone’s got a bit too wrapped up in this Norse legend bullshit,” Barry said, and he turned and gazed at David. “Perhaps someone thinks he’s personally involved.”

  David blinked in surprise. “What’re … what’re you looking at me for?”

  “Where’d you get that name from?” Barry demanded. “Thorson?”

  David now stood up. He glanced round uneasily. “My mum and dad …”

  “Obviously, but where did they get it from?”

  David looked bewildered by the question.

  “He means it sounds Scandinavian, David,” Nug said. He too was now watching their youngest member carefully.

  “Well … my great-granddad was from Norway.”

  “What a fucking surprise!” said Barry, darkly satisfied.

  “Oh come on,” Alan interjected. “You can’t be serious. Look at him, he’s just a kid. Whoever did that to Clive had physical strength … like you.”

  “Or like you!” Linda put in, suddenly standing and pointing. Again, her brief reunion with Alan had ended the moment they’d found themselves back in Barry’s company. “You’re not a weakling, Alan.”

  It was Barry who replied: “Yeah, but fortunately for Alan, he was with the rest of us while this happened. And so was I.” He looked again at David, who now seemed very small and isolated. “You, on the other hand, weren’t. In fact, you were also with Craig when he got killed.”

  David backed away a step. “This … this is ridiculous,” he stammered.

  But now that he thought about it, Alan began to wonder too. It was true what Barry said: David had been absent from the group during both fatal instances, and on the last occasion, they’d even caught him washing his arms and body.

  David started to cry. “I’ve not killed anyone,” he insisted, as they advanced on him.

  Despite his protestations, they tied him up, not only knotting his hands together, but lashing him to the trunk of one of the nearby pine trees with guy ropes from his tent. He wept and pleaded with them throughout, often piteously, but they felt they had no choice. They stood him in his sleeping bag for protection against the cold before pulling the bonds tight, and told him they’d bring water and food whenever he wanted it, but aside from that, there was little other solace they felt inclined to offer. Barry even suggested looping a limp noose around David’s neck and tying it off on one of the higher branches, just to make sure he didn’t try to wriggle free during the night, but Nug drew the line at that.

  “We’re not bloody barbarians, Barry,” he said tersely. “We’re only doing this much because we’ve no other choice.” And he strode back to the fire.

  Barry shrugged, and looked round at Alan. “Just a precaution. Soon as we’re asleep, there’ll be nothing between him and us but this lot.” And he reached out and, for the fourth or fifth time, tested the security of the ropes. They were already so taut that he couldn’t even get his little finger behind them.

  “Try not to enjoy this too much, eh,” Alan advised. “Like Nug said, we’re not barbarians.”

  Barry sneered. “I don’t suppose it was barbaric what he did to Clive and Craig?”

  “We don’t know it was David,” Alan replied.

  “We’ve a pretty good idea, though, haven’t we?” Barry hawked and spat. “And what’s going to happen when we get him back to civilisation? Awww, the poor lad, he’s had a terrible upbringing. His dad was a drunk, his sister a junkie, he accidentally saw his mum’s stocking-tops at church one Sunday and went round the fucking bend. It’s not his fault he did this, he’s sick, he’s ill. Community care, that’s the thing for him.”

  And with a bitter snort, he turned and went back to the fire.

  “Alan, none of that’s true,” David stammered, still tearful.

  “I know,” Alan said.

  “Surely it’s obvious I haven’t done any of this! Tell me, how did I get Craig up that tree?”

  Alan made no answer. He looked steadily at the boy. The matter of Craig being found 30 feet off the ground was bothering him too, but one thing was undeniable: so
meone put him up there and, so far, David was the only realistic suspect, unlikely though he seemed.

  “This is only a temporary arrangement, David,” Alan eventually said.

  “How temporary?”

  “Til McEndry comes with the boat. Twenty hours, that’s all.”

  “Twenty hours!” David wept. “What if I need a piss or something?”

  “Piss your pants, like most of us have already done,” Barry shouted from the direction of the fire.

  David turned mortified eyes on Alan. “I … I can’t do that.”

  “Don’t tempt me, Thorson!” Barry shouted again. “Or I’ll come over there and tie a knot in your dick, as well. That’ll solve the problem, eh!”

  “Try and get some sleep,” Alan said quietly, before moving away himself.

  A moment later, he’d sat down by the fire. The heat and colours of the flames washed over him. Briefly, reality wavered; it was luxurious and dreamy. Then he glanced down at himself, and realised that dry blood still blotched his t-shirt and caked his forearms. Ordinarily, he’d have been repulsed at the very idea, but now – for no good reason he could think of – it didn’t concern him sufficiently even to make him get up and go down to the pools, to wash off.

  “You know, the berserkers used to deliberately daub that shit all over themselves,” Nug said from across the fire. “Their hands, their faces, their hair, their beards. Must have been a hellish sight when they were coming at you team-handed.”

  He was gazing into the heart of the blaze as he spoke and, fleetingly, Alan saw the same thing: the flames and smoke of a dark and infernal age. He recalled that famous quote from the old English Book of Prayer: “A furore nordmannorum, libera nos, dominae!”…”Deliver us, oh Lord, from the wrath of the Northmen!”

  It pretty well spoke for itself, of course. The Anglo-Saxons weren’t exactly shrinking violets when it came to blood and vengeance, but even they at first quailed in the face of Nordic ferocity. Yet since the 1960s, it had become fashionable in historical circles to rewrite the known facts of the later Dark Ages, and to highlight the positive aspects of Norse culture: their exquisite craftsmanship with wood, metal and stone; their eco-friendly mythologies; their sumptuous writings; their skills as shipbuilders; and their courageous, pioneering spirit. All undeniable, of course – proper analysis of the records revealed the Scandinavians to be farmers and traders at heart, who, when they colonised new land, created flourishing, lawful and artistic communities, and who only occasionally went a-viking, as they cheerfully referred to it. Such new thinking often made Alan smile, however. He wondered how the average English or Irish peasant, especially those living by the coast or on the banks of broad rivers, would have responded to that. Whatever the university modernists thought, the written facts held that when the dragon-ships were sighted on the horizon, it was usually very bad news. It meant rape, carnage and destruction on an unparalleled scale. It meant hatred, terror and pain. It meant total war: churches and villages sacked, livestock seized, crops trampled and burned, and a harvest taken of the people; women and children stolen into bondage, men slaughtered, either there on the battlefield, or later, on grim woodland altars, sacrificed to gods that to Christians were more like demonic entities.

  And with that latter detail, so often dismissed these days as fiction, Alan felt he was now personally acquainted. It made his guts churn when he thought about it, set his head spinning just to imagine the awfulness of such savage, torturous deaths. Of course, like all Viking sacrifices, the Millstone and Blood-Eagle, as well as having a terrorising psychological role, also served important ritualistic purposes; to grant you the strength of your enemy’s spine and the wind of his lungs, respectively. But just because you understood an atrocity didn’t mean you could even contemplate condoning it. Surely, only those born in darkness and dire hatred could find it in themselves to spike someone to a tree and turn him inside-out while he still lived?; only those whose deities were forces for utter evil, could bend a man backwards until his spine simply broke, and believe that in doing such a thing to some poor, helpless creature, they would attain power and glory?

  The fire suddenly flared, distracting Alan from his thoughts. He glanced up and saw that Barry was throwing more wood into the flames. Like Alan, Barry was also stained with Clive’s blood. As the athlete stood there, tall and muscular, black crusty streaks on his arms and t-shirted torso, a determinedly fearless expression on his face, it struck Alan that he no longer felt quite so hostile toward the big guy. The Viking armies who’d tried to enslave England in the 9th and 10th centuries were finally driven into the marshy, eastern portions of the country and forced to sue for peace, because a succession of warlike English kings fought them to a standstill. The likes of Alfred, his son Edward the Elder, and his grandson, Athelstan, responded to the extreme violence of the Norsemen with extreme violence of their own; and, for a time at least, it worked. Bullish and boorish, they and their kind must have been, literally, a royal pain in the arse when you were close to them in the ale-house, but perhaps the warrior class weren’t so bad after all. There were certainly worse things in Heaven and Earth than Barry Wood and his sort.

  “You know,” Barry suddenly said, hunkering down, “I’ve been thinking. When we get back to the mainland, we can make a mint out of this.”

  Alan looked slowly round at him. “What?”

  Barry nodded eagerly. “We can coin it. I mean, how often do you get stuck on a remote island with a psycho killer? Sunday papers’ll be selling their sons and daughters to get their hands on this story.” And, so encouraged, he stood and wandered thoughtfully back to his tent.

  A moment passed, then Alan glanced blankly at Nug. “You know, you think you see something in someone, then …”

  “Don’t say it,” Nug replied, shaking his head. “I know.”

  12

  The next morning, David had gone.

  A bundle of empty ropes was all that remained by the tree.

  “What the fu …” Nug said, stunned into instant wakefulness.

  He’d woken early, and, despite being drowsy and bleary-eyed, had thought first of checking on the prisoner and taking him a bottle of water. Now he turned and staggered away from the bare tree-trunk, shouting at the top of his voice. Within seconds, with the exception of the Professor, who slept on undisturbed, everyone else was up and about. Panic and uncertainty went through them like an infection.

  Barry swore and threw his boots on the ground. “Jesus Christ! I knew it was him!”

  “We don’t know it was him,” Alan replied.

  “Why’s he run off, then?”

  “He’s probably just frightened. Like I said yesterday, he’s only a kid …”

  “He’s a guilty bastard!” Barry spat. “Thank God he didn’t do any more of us while we were asleep, that’s all I can say!”

  Nug was still shaking his head, perplexed. “I just don’t get it. Those were proper butterfly knots. There’s no way he could’ve untied them.”

  Linda, who’d knelt down beside the tree to retrieve the ropes, now turned a pale, frightened face towards him. “He didn’t – look!”

  And she held up a bunch of rope-stems. Almost to a one, they hung in frayed tatters. Below them, it could be seen that the knots were still intact. Alan approached her incredulously. He took one of the ropes and held it up, rubbing the gnawed remnant between his finger and thumb. It was moist, as though slathered in spittle.

  “These … these have been chewed,” he whispered.

  The others had now fallen silent. Barry finally came forward. “Chewed? They’re made of durable nylon! He couldn’t have …”

  “Well, what else does this indicate?” Alan shouted, thrusting the ragged stub into the athlete’s face.

  “This is impossible,” Linda said slowly.

  Nug turned and gazed up the wooded slope. “I think we’ll get up to the
dig,” he said.

  Barry stared at him. “You’re thinking of work at a time like this?”

  “No,” Nug replied, still gazing uphill, and starting to walk. “I just think we’d better get up there. Like, now.” And he began to run. “Come on, quickly!”

  Without really knowing why, the others followed him. The fear spread through them rapidly. Within seconds, they were virtually racing each other to get there, shouting, screaming, terrified of being left behind.

  As he ran with them, Alan found himself wondering about actuality, beginning to contemplate the possibility that this was some prolonged and rather nasty dream. Now that he considered it, it was astonishing the way they had just slid from one world – that sane one where archeologists camped out on Hebridean hillsides and dusted down artifacts all day – into another, a chilling and surreal one – where class jokers became mad killers and six miles of sea was suddenly an unbridgeable void. He hadn’t even noticed the point when they’d passed over, where the mundane had ended and the horror had begun. Maybe he’d seen too many splatter movies?; maybe spilled blood and human innards were so ten-a-penny these days that the difference between grim reality and gratuitous special-effect was too negligible for the human subconscious to perceive? Even now, with Alan and Clive dead, and Professor Mercy withdrawn into fantasy, it was unreal. It was like, at any moment, he expected them all to come out of the woods laughing, taking off their make-up and breaking out the bottles of champagne.

  This possibility, no matter how slight, which he clung to precariously over the next few minutes as he trampled uphill, was utterly shattered when they finally reached the top and came alongside the dig … and found what was left of David.

  As below in the camp, the kid had been propped against an upright and securely bound there, only this time the upright was the megalith … and the bindings were his own entrails.

  David’s mouth was frozen open in a silent shriek. His eyes were glazed over, and his head lay awkwardly to one side, the mop of ginger hair fluttering in the sea-breeze. All that was visible because his face and head were probably the only parts of his body that weren’t sodden with gore. His shirt and sweater had been forcibly removed, and a fissure either cut or torn in his lower belly. From out of this, ravel upon ravel of moist, pink intestine had been extricated, then wreathed tightly around him and fastened solidly in place with a variety of knots equally complex to those that Nug had tied below.