by Robin Hardy
Howie could see from his window that the sun was not yet up, although the lightning of the sky had begun and it was still not five a.m. by his watch. God, he believed, had shown him, in his vivid dream, the one quite obvious clue of the previous day, which he had ignored. Now he must act on the hint God had given him. It was a reward, perhaps for his resistance of last night’s temptation that he’d been granted this grace.
The dawn song had started. Howie could hear a blackcap and, appropriately enough, a willow warbler. Soon a chiffchaff and a sedge warbler and some starlings joined in with their song. The sun’s pale rays had reached Howie’s window when the nightingale, perhaps knowing it, at last, to be May, added his incomparable voice to the chorus.
CHAPTER IX
Dawn –
on May Day
WITHOUT A MOMENT’S HESITATION, WITHOUT PAUSING to shave or clean his teeth, suppressing even an urgent need to relieve a bladder awash with cider, Howie donned his uniform and crept from the still-darkened inn, carrying his shoes.
He did not put his shoes on his feet until he had crossed the gravel path outside the inn. Once on the green he ran all the way across it till he reached the start of the High Street. Here, once again, he took off his shoes and, braving the dew, in his stockinged feet, he made his way directly to Dr Ewan’s house.
Moments later he was wheeling the ancient B.S.A. motorcycle back up the hill towards the green. Only when he had gotten it onto the grass, having seen no one, not so much as an alley cat, on his entire expedition, did he don his shoes once again and start the machine. He rode along the route that the gillie had used to bring him back from the castle via the sacred grove.
Behind Howie the sun was rising, lighting the tops of the fruit trees. Tree pipits, swallows, and chaffinches were busy breakfasting among the blossoms. Beyond, the distant wood, with its huge oaks, was coming into view.
Howie was afraid that he would not easily be able to recognize the place on the outskirts of the wood that they had called the ‘sacred grove’. Then he remembered that a stream ran downhill from it, emerging presumably from the ‘source’ that they had mentioned, probably some spring, by that lake he’d seen through the trees.
When he finally spotted the stream, he realized that he was within sight of both the circle of stones and the castle. This proximity to Lord Summerisle’s lair added to Howie’s natural nervousness at the possibility of having to do battle with the mad Beech. He remembered the ploy he’d used for disarming Beech in his dream and hoped it would work in real life. It was, after all, only one of the simpler manoeuvres of unarmed combat that he’d learned at Police College.
Dismounting at a spot where he could once again glimpse the lake through the trees he hid Dr Ewan’s machine in a clump of bushes. As he was walking, as quietly yet alertly as possible, among the huge oaks he heard the distant trickling of a spring (perhaps itself the Source?) that gave him an almost unbearable urge to relieve himself.
Yet behind any of the huge, gnarled tree trunks, their bark sometimes twisted into curiously menacing, half-human expressions … Beech, the guardian and self-styled king of the scared grove, might be lurking. This was no time to unzip himself, when, at any instant, a sharp claymore might be aimed at any part of his person.
He looked all around him continuously, searching, as he had been taught to do–the distance, the middle distance, and the near-about-him–always listening, trying to sort out in his mind’s ear the sounds that were manifestly birds or rabbits or the maddeningly trickling water so that he would recognize the sound of a man moving, if and when it came.
After travelling in this way for about forty yards the old oaks thinned out, and he could see the lower part of a tree that could only be described as a giant oak, its trunk being four times larger than the average tree around it. About it there seemed to be lying on the ground an extraordinary collection of rubble. From the twenty yards’ distance that Howie now saw it, his first thought was that it might simply be at the centre of a garbage dump. While it was not on a peninsula as he’d imagined the ‘special’ tree in his dream, it did stand in a large clearing and its huge roots seemed to border the lake itself. Its branches were obscured from him by the overgrowth of nearer trees. Ominous to Howie were the voices of dozens of ravens coming from the direction of the oak.
Then he heard a sound that he had not expected in the grove. Some people were riding horses nearby. Howie crouched behind a thornbush to watch. Such was the camouflage of the many intervening branches that he saw first a handsome black stallion, prancing and frisky in the cool morning air. Then he could make out its rider as being the gillie dressed in a smart stag-hunting coat of dark green. Behind her she led a riderless, bay mare on a leading rein.
‘Beech,’ she called, ‘you must come now!’
The tall figure of Beech materialized from behind a stunted tree trunk only twelve yards from the point the sergeant had reached.
‘Sorrel, how can I leave when someone may desecrate the tree, the Source? All that it is my high duty to guard and preserve? Suppose I return to find someone has taken my place?’ Beech seemed to try to sound reasonable.
‘On this one day each year Lord Summerisle has promised no one will challenge you to take your place. No one! As for desecration … Beech, you know that no one would dare! Your place is with the rest of us today. Please, Beech, for my sake,’ she pleaded.
‘What about the policeman?’ Beech seemed half-persuaded.
‘He’ll be looking for the Queen of the May,’ she answered, and went on: ‘He’s dead ignorant, poor thing, but even he could hardly expect to find the Queen of the May in the sacred grove.’
Reluctantly, Beech looked around him and then climbed on the back of the mare, taking the reins from his sister.
‘Ride on, Sorrel,’ he said quietly to the gillie. Then, wheeling his horse, he shouted down the echoing corridors of primeval oaks:
‘If someone lies waiting to take my place out there, let him remember that only by killing me in battle can he truly be King here. Or if he dare to desecrate this holy place, he must remember the awful penalty: that when I return I will cut his navel from his belly and nail it to the tree. By his intestine unwinding from within him, shall I bind him to the trunk. Only by sacrificing him in this way can the goddess be appeased. He has been warned.’ With which he put his mare to a canter, and followed his sister out of the wood.
Howie’s mind reeled at all that he had just heard. What he could not wait to see was the whole of the great tree. Feeling quite safe now he ran forward until all of it was revealed to him, and even before that, when he had only glimpsed part of it, he already felt an urge to vomit. For hanging from every branch there were the mangled bodies of animals. Hens, pigs, deer, dogs, cats, kittens, puppies, ducks, geese, swans, and several horses large and small had been hanged from the tree–had clearly died by hanging from the tree!
Cawing cacophonously, the ravens left the grisly breaking of their fast and fluttered up into the topmost branches of the oak.
For Howie, gazing around him in fear and dread, this ghastly manifestation of the excesses to which the islanders had been driven by their frightful cult brought down further ‘horror upon horror’s head’.
That fear had crept more frequently about his flesh these last twenty-four hours, than ever before in his life, was certain. Now, for a measurable minute, he thought of running, actually running to the motorcycle and riding straight for the safety of his seaplane and the familiar voice of McTaggart on the radio. Then he controlled himself and somehow forced himself to note, not dispassionately (that would have been asking too much), the dreadful details of his surroundings.
Hard though he looked, Howie spotted no evidence of human sacrifice either on the tree or upon the ground. Among the thick tentacled roots he examined what he had thought was garbage, at a distance, and so, in a way, it was. The bones of long since decomposed ‘victim’ sacrificial animals lay everywhere, but among them was something
more unexpected. Close to the tree, upon the side that faced the lake, were hundreds of crudely carved hands and feet, hearts and ears, et cetera. Some were made of wood and others of clay. Scratched upon them were names like Jonquil, Maize, Peony, Yew, Poplar, and Sycamore. People’s names, as Howie had learned now to recognize them.
Howie had read somewhere that the Roman Catholics went in for something like this at shrines where saints were supposed to preside over miracles. But where they simply paid for candles to burn–exactly as he made offerings as a sideman at Saint Andrew’s to support the church–these Summerisle people, if you could grace them with that human name, clearly offered up the suffering of animals so that the goddess would grant their requests. And their various ills would be cured. There could be no other explanation for the unspeakable scene above him on the tree.
In a rage now that made him feel as if his very heart would explode with the pace of his own quickened, pulsing blood, he determined to desecrate that tree. When he had finished, he felt both physical and symbolic relief at being able to defile the thing he hated; the sacred pool too had been gratifyingly polluted by his Christian effluent.
It was only as he was walking back to the motorcycle that it occurred to him to wonder whether sacrilege could possibly also be the offence of desecrating someone else’s shrine. But their involving animals surely made the difference? The Jews had them ritually bled to death, but he’d been assured by a Jewish acquaintance that it was quite painless. Would he arrest a man who deliberately pissed on a vivisectionist? Howie supposed he would, and was suddenly somewhat conscience-stricken by what he had done to the mad Beech’s sacred tree.
That Rowan was who they meant, when they talked of the Queen of the May, was quite evident. Equally certain was he that she was not in or around the sacred grove. He therefore rode straight back to the township. In doing so he passed Lord Summerisle with Broom, the piper, and another hearty figure in a kilt. They were as unnerved to see him riding by at this early hour on Dr Ewan’s machine as he was surprised to see them in the curious activity in which they were involved.
Lord Summerisle appeared to be abroad in a white smock, and hard at work. Up a ladder that was leaning against one of the oaks he was using a golden sickle with which he was carefully cutting large sprigs of mistletoe from the tree. Standing immediately below, with a look of intense concentration on their faces, were Broom and the other man, holding a large muslin net outstretched between them. It seemed to Howie, as he sped by, that it was as if they were playing some game, in which there was some dire penalty if the mistletoe fell onto the ground. Lord Summerisle carefully let fall a piece of mistletoe that was carried by the wind, so that the two below very nearly miscalculated and almost dropped it. All three shouted at each other like a group of bad-tempered tennis players who have forgotten that what they were playing was only a game.
Howie was back in his room at the inn by six thirty, having returned the motorcycle, with Dr Ewan still apparently none the wiser. He found hot water waiting for him again, in a jug outside the door, and he set about shaving and washing himself with the self-satisfaction of a man who has got a good start on the day.
Rowan was to be Queen of the May, whatever that involved, and with twelve cops coming to the island it shouldn’t take long to find her.
CHAPTER X
May Day –
Morning
WILLOW KNOCKED AND ENTERED WITH A TRAY OF TEA and toast and whistled to see the slightly hirsute, muscular sergeant stripped to the waist.
‘Morning, Sergeant Sleuth,’ she said admiringly. ‘Wish you’d given me the favour of a little of that brawn of yours last night.’
The sergeant looked up at her and grunted.
‘G’morning!’
‘Och! Well, it’s May Day. No time for hard feelings. But I did ask you. Never had a refusal before. I must be getting old and haggard before my time.’
She pulled the still-closed curtains in the room open with a smug smile on her face, knowing all too well that she was utterly gorgeous.
‘I thought you were going to come and interrogate me between the sheets last night. I was looking forward to it.’
‘I never said I would,’ protested Howie, putting on his shirt. ‘Would you have told me where the Queen of the May was kept, if I’d visited you?’ he asked.
‘D’you think they tell me things like that? It’d be much too easy for the likes of you to worm it out of me, don’t you see? But I was still sad you didn’t come … and say a special “how do!”’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Howie gently. ‘I’m engaged to be married.’
‘And that stops you?’ She giggled at the outrageousness of such a notion.
‘It’s just that I don’t believe in it before marriage,’ said Howie.
‘I must say you are a gallant fellow, Sergeant,’ said Willow making for the door, a little piqued. ‘Still, suit yourself. I expect you’ll be going back today, won’t you? You wouldn’t want to be around here on May Day … not the way you feel.’
‘Aye, I’ll be flying back within the hour to Portlochlie. But I’ll be back later with some more police officers.’
‘Tell me, Sergeant, do they all think like you?’ asked Willow teasingly, lingering at the doorway while he finished dressing. ‘Or can I count on you bringing me back some husky mainlander to show me a real good time? They say the men over there are starved of it.’
‘By your standards, Willow,’ said Howie disappearing down the stairs, munching some toast as he went, ‘they certainly are!’
As Sergeant Howie walked down the High Street towards the harbour he noticed that the township seemed entirely deserted. He looked down the side streets and up towards the green but there was no sign of a human being anywhere. Except for the solitary figure of Miss Rose bicycling towards him on the other side of the street, as if she hoped to escape notice, perhaps because her fair hair was wound tight with old-fashioned curlers.
Unfortunately for her, she was at the place where the hill was at its steepest.
‘Where is everyone this morning, Miss Rose?’ asked Howie, crossing the road at a run and managing to stand in front of her, blocking her progress.
‘They’re all inside preparing,’ said Miss Rose, breathless, and dismounting.
‘For May Day?’ asked Howie.
‘Of course!’ she answered.
‘Miss Rose, you’re the teacher of comparative religion. Tell me, a Christian, about what May Day means to you?’
Miss Rose looked rather flattered, as Howie expected she would.
‘It is a feast of fecundity, Sergeant,’ she explained, ’celebrated in the form of an ancient dance-drama, which has, as you may well expect, a complete cast of characters.
‘Firstly, there is the Hobbyhorse, or man-animal, who leads the ceremony chasing the girls with his tarred skirts.
‘Secondly, there is a man-woman, what we call the Betsy, or Teaser, always played by the community leader, in this case, Lord Summerisle.
‘Thirdly, there are six sword dancers who throughout the dance continuously make a lock of their swords–a clear symbol of the sun.
‘And fourthly, there is the sacrifice whose death and resurrection, of course, is the climax of the dance …’
Sergeant Howie had taken out his notebook and a pencil.
‘Would you care to make a statement on where the victim is being kept?’
‘The victim is as symbolic or not as the Christian’s bread and wine, my dear Sergeant. What does that represent?’ asked the schoolteacher.
‘The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ said Howie.
‘You eat it at Communion, do you not? And the Roman Catholic Christians believe it is turned miraculously to the real thing in their mouths. Others believe it is symbolic. A matter of taste, I suppose, if you’ll forgive the pun.’
‘I can’t forgive it,’ said Howie furiously. ‘Now perhaps you’ll tell me where your sacrifice is being kept.’
; ‘Like your bread and wine or Host, as I believe you quaintly call it, our sacrifice is reserved. We haven’t even told the sacrifice of their honourable, indeed, sacred, fate. It is doubtful that the sacrifice would understand if the truth were suddenly made plain.’
‘Are you suggesting some kind of fatted calf?’
‘Symbolically that is exactly what I’m suggesting. I’m sure I’ve said enough now to one who is on his way to report all this to the Chief Constable of the West Highlands. I must say the mainland must be becoming more like a police state every day. When you’re not interfering in education, you’re poking your nose into religion. Sad that it has to be such an ignorant nose at that! Good day, Sergeant!’
With which Miss Rose climbed unsteadily aboard her bicycle and wobbled laboriously up the High Street hill.
Howie, now seriously concerned about the time, hurried on down to the harbour.
The harbour master was sitting on a bollard, painting an eye on the front of a beached fishing boat when Howie reached the quay.
‘Morning, Sergeant,’ said the harbour master, cheerfully enough.
‘Morning,’ responded Howie. ‘I need to get to my plane.’
‘You won’t find a cat stirring this morning. I’d best take you out myself,’ said the harbour master obligingly. He rose and the two men made their way down the steps of the quayside to a small dinghy, which they boarded.
As the harbour master was rowing Howie across the water to the seaplane, a crowd of fishermen came out of the building where the nets were manufactured and mended. They stared silently out to sea at the retreating rowboat. All wore elaborate animal masks–otters, badgers, foxes, eagles, rats, et cetera.
In the curious attention to detail of their masks lay a bucolic seriousness of purpose that denied these figures any air of simple revelry. These were not the trivial pretendings of people who were simply throwing off identity to be freer in their enjoyment of a masked ball. Rather, each figure that watched Howie seemed to wear the mask sympathetic to his or her own soul, rather as transvestites wear the clothes of the sex with which they wish to identify.
