The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  ‘He wants us to burn our lovely priapic chair?’ he heard Lark twitter in amazement, as he made his way to their garden gate.

  What he neither heard, nor saw, was the strange sight of the three old women racing upstairs as fast as touches of arthritis and the burden of old age would allow. Elbowing each other aside in their attempt to get ahead in the race, the three of them finally reached the room in which the priapic rocker stood alone in the window. The excitement of Howie’s visit had aroused a kind of cackling hysteria in them and only the rollicking pleasures of the chair could now fulfil and relieve them. Each grimly fought for the chance to be the first to, up with her clouts and closing her eyes, sink thankfully onto her hardening vision of the essential Howie.

  The sergeant stood in the street thinking over the lock of hair in his pocket and trying to put the evidence at his disposal into a new pattern to see if it would fit. Suppose the hair was Rowan’s? Any old lady could make up a story about her hair once being the same colour. The old harridans had been teasing him, of course, in pretending to misunderstand his questions about sacrifice, but something Miss Rose had said earlier came back to him now. She had hinted that she viewed the Christian taking of the sacrament, particularly in the Roman Catholic rite, as a form of symbolic cannibalism, at best.

  He took stock anew. Suppose that Rowan was dead and not buried but that she was ‘reserved’ in a frightful pagan parody of the Christian eating of flesh and drinking of blood, to be literally consumed by the community? Nothing, now, would surprise him. Her hair could then have been divided up as a keepsake, which might be thought, by the credulous, to have some magic power. Perhaps to the three frightful old birds, it might be hoped to bring rejuvenation. The cannibal theory, as he privately dubbed it, was not one that the sergeant was yet ready to entirely embrace. For it still seemed less likely than that she was alive and being prepared for sacrifice. But the impossibility of searching the whole island was already discouragingly clear to him. What he could do was go to the places where a dead body might be prepared for human consumption. The butcher, the baker, and so on. He remembered that these shops were clustered together at the foot of the High Street. He walked straight there.

  Howie recognized the baker as he entered his bakery and shop. The two were all part of one large room with a plain counter, for serving, to one side. The baker Howie remembered as one of the swordsmen he’d seen at the rehearsal. As the sergeant entered, the man was raking out the charcoal from the open space under the large iron door, which enclosed his oven, on the back wall.

  ‘What’s in here?’ asked Howie, pointing to the iron door.

  ‘That’s bread in my oven,’ explained the baker. ‘Would you be thinking I’ve toasted the little girl up in it?’ he asked laughing.

  ‘Open it!’ thundered Howie.

  The baker looked incredulous.

  ‘I don’t like opening my oven when she’s cooling,’ he said and moved to bar the way to the oven door. But Howie thrust him aside with a forceful push that sent the man sprawling. Before the now angry baker had time to recover, Howie had opened the door. Inside, Howie saw a long coffin-shaped baking tin about seven feet in length. He stared at it for a long moment before reaching to remove it, then he burned his hands and was forced to look around for, find, and put on a pair of oven gloves. The baker stood watching him in mute and angry puzzlement, but he made no move to interfere with Howie, to help him or hinder him. Howie managed to slide out the huge baking tin and lay it on a table. He removed the top to reveal the figure of a full-length man who seemed to be made out of sheaves of wheat, all rendered as a crusted bread. The baker laughed at the sergeant’s surprise.

  ‘What is this?’ asked Howie sharply.

  ‘The life of the fields–John Barleycorn!’ said the baker.

  Howie grunted and, snatching up a knife from the counter, approached the large bread figure. His intention was to slice into it to see if there was anything in the way of a body inside it, but he heard the baker gasp as he poised the knife, ready to cut into the figure.

  ‘If you want to look inside … that is it … isn’t it?’ asked the baker nervously.

  ‘Yes, what about it?’ asked Howie, wondering if the man was frightened of what would be discovered.

  ‘Please let me. I’ll slit him down the side like a French loaf. Then you can have your look inside him and it won’t … deface him so …’

  Howie found nothing inside. He went through the butcher’s shop and found nothing except for a rather sickening mask fashioned from a real bull’s head, which its owner proudly put on for Howie, explaining that in it he, the butcher, became Old Brazenface.

  The fishmonger had nothing in his ice storage room either except, predictably, fish. He, too, was anxious to show off an elaborate costume in which, he explained, he represented ‘the salmon of knowledge’.

  ‘You can’t eat enough salmon, y’know, Sergeant,’ said the fishmonger, as if anxious to improve the sales of this expensive and scarce fish. ‘And for why, you’ll be asking. Because it is said that it acquired mystical lore through eating the nuts of the divine hazel trees, which fell into a well beneath them. These nuts conveyed to the salmon knowledge of everything that was in the world, and, by extension, those who can catch and eat of its flesh acquire supernatural sight. But maybe you’ve known all that since you were a babby?’

  The sergeant left before being exposed to any more fishlore. Exhausted, Howie made his way slowly back up the hill. It was well past noon and he had found nothing so far. All he had were two almost equally ghoulish theories, one of which must soon prove to be correct. As far as preventing a crime or having enough hard evidence to start making any arrests, he was hardly closer than he had been when he’d risen at sunup.

  CHAPTER XI

  May Day –

  Afternoon

  A BUXOM YOUNG WOMAN WAS WHEELING A BARROW UP the High Street selling jellied eels, fresh shellfish, and cool apple juice. The rosy-cheeked young woman cried aloud:

  ‘Cockles and mussels. Alive, alive … oooh!’

  Sergeant Howie suppressed a reflex instinct to ask her for her street-vendor’s licence. He knew she would have none and he was extremely hungry. He bought a half-pint of jellied eels, sprinkled some vinegar over them, and munched thoughtfully as he trailed the barrow up the High Street. People ate shellfish alive because the shellfish were nonvertebrates, and also, he had to admit, buying himself a half-pint of cockles, because they tasted better that way. His final purchase was a half-pint of apple juice with which he washed down his impromptu meal.

  The girl continued to utter her cry as she trundled her barrow, and Howie, who was slightly paranoid about being poisoned by these people, was relieved to find a good many folk came out of their houses, in varying stages of readying themselves for the procession, and bought from her.

  He paused at that point on the hill of the High Street where the undertakers, carpenters, and coopers had their courtyard. His digestive system was pleading with him to stand still for an instant and give it some rest from all this ceaseless activity, while it was busy coping with eels, cockles, vinegar, and apple juice.

  ‘Alive, alive … ooh!’ shouted rosy cheeks.

  Howie considered her cry and, by extension, another possible fate awaiting Rowan. For the first time that day a thought crossed his mind so horrible that he had to dismiss it because he refused to believe that these people, credulous, superstitious, and misguided though they might be, would be capable of inflicting such a fate on a fellow human being. Whatever else they might do they would not attempt to eat the poor, wee girlie alive, surely? Eating her dead (even cooked), he had already accepted as a remote but hideous possibility.

  He had been on the point of returning to the Green Man to glean what he could, when he realized that the undertaker’s shop could not be ignored. It was such an obvious place to put Rowan, if they’d already killed her, that he had assumed that the idea would never have occurred to people as devious
as they. However, they could have wished him to assume that. So he went about searching all the buildings around the courtyard. Everyone had left for the day and he searched undisturbed. The carpenter’s shop was innocent of anything unexpected. The cooper’s shop was naturally full of barrels into which Howie peered only to find them all empty except an old cracked one in a distant corner, from which came a plaintive cry. The sergeant had to climb over a stack of barrels to get near the one from which the sound seemed to come. But his hopes had so risen at this strange cry that, as he set about climbing towards it, he made too much haste and caused a kind of barrel avalanche. As it turned out a tabby cat had given birth to kittens in the old cracked barrel and she hissed at Howie’s deeply disappointed face as he peered down at her.

  He left the undertaker’s parlour till last (it seemed so obvious a place as to be the least likely). There were coffins in various stages of construction. Two were laid out on trestles. In one of these he found the body of a drowned man of about sixty. Pennies covered his eye sockets and what looked like a Saint Athelstan’s pippin held his jaws open. Curious, Howie removed the pennies to find the eyes gone. The skull beyond seemed as hollow as an empty nut. Howie shuddered and thought he felt a sympathetic prickling in his own brain, or perhaps it was only the involuntary tightening of the scalp as he fought back an urge to be sick. He replaced the pennies hurriedly. He wondered if they were a bizarre cosmetic notion to spare the relatives.

  When he opened the other coffin it was after a count to ten. It was as if he half-feared he was going to find a dismembered Rowan and half-hoped he would find her if only to know she was safe from further pain or fear. There was a man’s body inside. Not Rowan’s. But the corpse had been mutilated.

  Sergeant Howie took all this in almost simultaneously with a strange mixture of shock and relief. He peered at the arm from which the hand seemed to have been severed just above the wrist. The sergeant knew enough about pathology to be certain that the hand had been removed sometime after death. He remembered the old gravedigger’s tale of the Hand of Glory.

  Perhaps it was Dr Ewan’s curious idea of a post-mortem, in which case there would have to be a report to the Department of Health about it and, in the event of anything suspicious, a report would have to be made to the police. Howie looked at the man who had lost his hand, who, like his fellow cadaver, bit on an apple, and slowly realized that he recognized him. He was a man he’d seen dancing licentiously with Willow on the first night of his visit to the island. The very same man he’d seen in the library the day before. A man who would say shush no more.

  He left the place hurriedly, anxious to get to the inn and have a rare drink of whisky. He very seldom felt that urgent need, but now he almost ran across the green in his hurry to get to the bar.

  To his considerable surprise the bar was empty except for Willow and Alder MacGregor. Both were still drying glasses from the morning’s celebration.

  ‘Give me a whisky, please,’ said the sergeant peremptorily as he strode into the bar.

  Alder MacGregor looked at the sweating, dishevelled sergeant with wry amusement and went behind the bar to pour a dram of malt whisky, ‘Summerisle’s Inheritance’, the only name brand available on the island. Willow was more welcoming.

  ‘Hullo!’ she said cheerily enough. ‘You’re back early! Where are the other coppers?’

  ‘I didn’t go,’ said Howie. ‘My plane wouldn’t start!’ Alder MacGregor set the dram of whisky down in front of Howie, who drank it off at a gulp, letting the aftertaste slowly come to him, feeling his jangled nerves relax a little. Alder MacGregor watched him with amusement.

  ‘So he spent the time, instead, turning the whole village upside down!’ said Alder. ‘No wonder he’s worn out. Did you find the girl?’ asked the innkeeper.

  Howie shook his head and finished his drink.

  ‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ said Alder MacGregor matter-of-factly.

  Howie set down the empty dram glass with a bang.

  ‘I think I’ll rest in my room for half an hour,’ said Howie. ‘And I don’t wish to be disturbed,’ he added meaningfully to Willow.

  ‘I’d stay there till tonight if I were you,’ said Alder MacGregor. ‘We don’t relish strangers much today!’

  Howie was already on his way from the bar and up the stairs towards his bedroom. He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. A plane was flying somewhere in the distance.

  A bomber from the Royal Air Force’s Scottish Coastal Command was making a routine flight out over the Atlantic. The special radar equipment it carried was part of NATO’s early warning system. On this first of May, the squadron leader flying the plane had been instructed by his commanding officer to veer off course by nearly sixty miles and overfly Summerisle, thirty-six miles southwest of Stornoway, to see if he could sight a police seaplane in the harbour there. He had been told that there had been a breakdown in radio communications, and a positive sighting would reassure the West Highland Police.

  The squadron leader wheeled his ungainly flying radar station over the island at about thirteen forty-five hours, British summer time, at a little under two thousand feet. He and his crew could see the police seaplane quite clearly as it rode at anchor near the quay. They radioed this news back to their headquarters, received an acknowledgement, and set their course northwest in the general direction of Greenland.

  The weather report was for a fine unclouded day. The crew of the plane was particularly relaxed. It was the received wisdom from the powers-that-be that May Day was the most unlikely day of the year for the Soviet Union to start World War Three. ‘Of course,’ the squadron leader was saying, ‘if one May Day the bigwigs of the Soviet presidium do not turn up on the reviewing stand in Moscow for the great annual parade, then we might as well start bombing, rocketing, and cruise missiling the hell out of them, cause sure as “God made little apples” their ironware is already on its way.’

  ‘D’you think our ambassador’d have the sense to signal us?’ asked his flight lieutenant, who was watching Summerisle lazily as it started to recede. Suddenly he craned his neck and stared back for a full ten seconds, then tapped his squadron leader’s arm.

  ‘I could have sworn I saw a huge man standing on a cliff back there. Gigantic he was!’

  ‘What kind of man?’ asked the squadron leader. ‘One of those rude drawings on hillsides left by our horny Celtic ancestors?’

  The flight lieutenant had looked back again, for an instant, but then relaxed, settling down to do his duty and fiddle with the expensive machinery bought for him by the British taxpayers.

  ‘No, sort of three-dimensional. Anyway, too much cloud now to see,’ he said.

  Sergeant Howie lay on his bed, his eyes closed. Suddenly he became aware of a whispering outside his door, which he seemed to have left ajar. He lay straining to hear, ready to feign sleep.

  ‘I don’t like to use it on him!’ Willow was whispering.

  ‘The laird said we must take no chances, didn’t he?’ whispered Alder MacGregor irritably.

  ‘Yes, but with the Hand of Glory,’ whispered Willow with a little squeak, ‘there’s no telling when you wake. He might sleep for days.’

  ‘All the better!’ said Alder MacGregor in an almost normal tone of voice. ‘We don’t want him butting in! Light it up!’

  Howie heard some scuffling and the striking of a match. They were now approaching his door. He closed his eyes and could hear Willow’s dress rustling as she crossed the room and stood beside his bedside table.

  ‘That’ll make you sleep, my pretty sergeant!’ she whispered putting something down with a metallic click. Howie could smell an unpleasant sweetish, pungent odour. Willow was on her way back through his door, stifling a laugh.

  Howie could tell that they were outside on the landing and that his door remained open. So that he didn’t, for the moment, dare open his eyes, but continued to listen carefully.

  ‘What’s the time?’ asked Alder MacGregor in a lo
w voice.

  ‘Nearly quarter to,’ Willow replied.

  ‘Well, I’ll go and change!’ whispered her father. ‘We can’t do without Punch. You’d best get on ahead. They’ve given you girls five minutes’ start, haven’t they?’

  ‘All right! ’Bye,’ said Willow, and she was on her way, tiptoeing downstairs. Alder MacGregor walked down the corridor to his own room. When all was silent Howie cautiously opened his eyes and looked in the direction of the noxious smell, then stifled a scream.

  The Hand of Glory–the hand almost certainly of the man in the library, amputated at the wrist, was stuck on the spike of an old-fashioned candlestick, with each dead finger aflame, like five frightful candles. It loomed over Howie, from his bedside table, as if it were going to gag him with its flesh-singed, flaming fingers.

  Half-fainting from fear and horror, Howie took a sideswipe at the candlestick and knocked the whole thing to the floor. Somehow he managed to stop himself vomiting although the cockles and apple juice surged, so that he tasted them again, but bitter and bilious. Gritting his teeth, he knelt on the floor beside the amputated hand that had come loose from the candlestick. Wetting his finger and thumb with his saliva, he extinguished the flaming digits of the dead hand, nearly retching again at the smell. Then, at the far end of the passage, he heard, and then saw, Alder MacGregor walk from a corridor closet to his own room carrying his Punch costume, including an elaborate mask with the traditional hooked nose and jutting chin on a grinning face.

  There was no other sound in the inn.

  Howie did not even wait to work out, in his normally legalistic policeman’s mind, what justification he could have for his next action. Whether attempting to lull an officer into deep and lasting sleep with the Hand of Glory was simply ‘impeding him in the course of his duty’ (God knew, a serious enough offence), or something far worse, hardly mattered for the sergeant now. He was determined on action, and violent action at that, because he had seen the perfect way to shadow the procession. He was going to take part in it! But masked, as Punch!