The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  ‘Did I do it right?’ she cried.

  ‘Dear little Rowan,’ said Lord Summerisle gathering her in his arms, ‘you did it excellently.’

  The women kissed her warmly too, and Miss Rose pointed to a rotund figure that had appeared in the distance. Mrs Morrison beamed, a picture of maternal pride.

  ‘Mummy!’ shouted Rowan happily and ran to her mother’s arms.

  The sergeant walked quickly to the cliff’s edge to see if any path down existed. His was the principal and only danger. Now at last, too late, he saw it. He found himself gazing at sharp oblong rocks pointing up, like the stone fingers of a drowning man, from the turbulent sea below. Once again the feeling of vertigo suffused him and he swayed at the cliff’s edge. He felt a girl’s hand pull him back and glanced around to see Willow looking up at him with an expression of tender awe on her face. Remarkable, he thought, there’s not a trace of sexiness there now. But what the look that had replaced it boded he could not, as yet, tell.

  Lord Summerisle walked over to him. He spoke carefully and, although his words were, as ever, patronizing, his manner wasn’t.

  ‘Welcome, Fool!’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘You have come of your own free will to the appointed place. The game is over.’

  ‘What do you mean? What game? Which game?’ asked Howie, who was sick to death of games.

  ‘The game of the hunted leading the hunter,’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘You came to find Rowan Morrison. But it is we who have found you, just as we intended to do.’

  Sergeant Howie was now roaming the immediate cliff area to see if there was any possible route down. If he could evade them till dark he knew he had a chance. There was no danger that police would not be sent from Stornoway if he failed to make some contact in the morning. Lord Summerisle followed him, explaining what Howie had already understood, in a wave of bitter realization, the moment Rowan had said ‘Did I do it right?’ They had all done it right. But this insufferable madman must rub the salt in, as if it made any difference, now Rowan was safe, whether he, a simple police officer, understood all their complex mumbo-jumbo or Summerisle’s ludicrous rationale for it.

  ‘You see our research had told us that you were just the man we wanted, and we were determined to get you here. Of course we were equally determined to control your every action and thought once you had arrived. We were rather successful, don’t you think?’ Lord Summerisle seemed to be asking this question quite seriously.

  ‘Successful?’ shouted Howie. ‘If you call wasting two days of a police sergeant’s time with an elaborate game … yes, very successful!’

  ‘Specifically, we persuaded you that Rowan was being held as a sacrifice because the crops failed last year.’

  ‘But they did fail last year,’ retorted Howie. ‘I saw the Harvest photograph.’

  ‘Oh yes, they failed all right,’ agreed Lord Summerisle. ‘Disastrously so, for the first time since my great-grandfather came here. The blossom came, but the fruit withered and died on the bough. That must not happen again this year.’

  Sergeant Howie was only half listening. There was no way down the cliffs. His mission, in a sense, was completed, however unsatisfactorily, and he knew he had to get away from these people, and back to the mainland, as fast as possible. The certainty that they would try and hold him was reinforced by the appearance of the Oak, the Hobbyhorse man, now dressed simply in a roll-necked sweater and his kilt, but standing, arms akimbo, looking quietly determined. He added to the ring of swordsmen.

  The sergeant knew he could not possibly run the gauntlet of so many armed men. He could, however, try to walk through them, defying them to attack or hold him, and acquaint them of the potential gravity of any such actions.

  He’d read his Kipling. How, he asked himself, would a Highland sergeant have faced a similar situation in India in the old days? Looked the natives straight in the eye and never faltered. At the slightest threat he’d have promised them the vengeance of the Great White Queen. But all these men were Scots, like himself, and they appeared to have a White Goddess of their own. His Queen was far away in London and here he was all alone, standing right on top of their White Goddess’s limestone womb. He didn’t fancy his chances but he was determined to face it out with dignity.

  Howie squared his shoulders and prepared to try to march quickly out of the trap. But Lord Summerisle stood in his path.

  ‘Listen to me, Howie. I don’t think you’ve quite understood our position on sacrifice. And it’s vital that you should,’ said Lord Summerisle urgently. ‘Animals are fine, of course, but their acceptability is limited. A child would have certainly been excellent … but we hold them all far too dear. These people are very sentimental. Besides, the sacrifice of a child wouldn’t be nearly as effective as the sacrifice of the right kind of adult.’

  ‘What right kind of adult?’ Howie snarled the question at Lord Summerisle and stepped right past him without waiting for an answer.

  He started to walk towards the swordsmen who held positions on a series of raised ridges, where the cliffs sloped upward to the evening sky. Even as he watched, the long, tireless horizon line came alive, and the whole congregation of the islanders came into view. They wore their masks still, and stared down at him. He stopped in a mixture of wonderment and fear. Then they all took off their masks and seemed to bow to him.

  Miss Rose and Willow now came and held him gently by the arms.

  ‘You see, Sergeant,’ said Miss Rose, ‘we needed a stranger who would come of his own free will–who would come here with the power of a king, as you have power, by representing the law …’

  ‘… Who would come here as a virgin, as we have good reason to believe you still are,’ added Willow.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ said Howie brusquely, brushing them aside. He walked with a measured step, looking up at the islanders. No one ran to intercept him. Oak, whom he was approaching, bowed low like the others.

  ‘You are a fool, Sergeant Howie,’ shouted Miss Rose in her clear, lilting, Scots voice.

  The sergeant glanced back at her, heard a footfall behind him, and recognized the trap too late. His left shoulder was twisted, and his right leg kicked from under him by the enormously strong Oak. Howie found himself spinning, rolling like a log down the grassy slope till he came to a halt at Miss Rose’s feet. His arms were ready to thrust himself up into a standing position, but Oak was too fast for him and had him pinned from behind. It was the big man who brought Howie to a standing position again, his huge forearms wound back under the sergeant’s biceps, and with his big fists locked, holding the back of Howie’s neck.

  The wretched sergeant found himself again facing Miss Rose and Willow, with Lord Summerisle watching from a few yards away. In Oak’s grip he was as helpless as if he had been in a straitjacket.

  ‘You, Punch, are a fool. One of the great fool/victims of history,’ Miss Rose instructed him, ‘for the role of Punch is to be the King for a day … and who but a fool would want that?’

  Lord Summerisle, like Miss Rose, ever the pedant, ever the teacher, patiently explained it all to his agonized prisoner.

  ‘Punch got his hump, you see, to protect him from the traditional scourging that purified him. You are happily already pure so there will be no need to scourge you, Howie. Punch, in the shadow of death, was also always offered the most sumptuous of women. We offered you Willow, a ‘dish’ indeed to set before any king, but you, in defence of your virginity, rejected her, as we hoped you would. For it makes you doubly acceptable to the gods.’ Lord Summerisle made it sound as if Howie had just won an Oxford blue in rowing.

  Willow was holding a gleaming dirk in her hand, the kind of ornamental dagger Scots wear in their knee-length socks. This was obviously no toy, but honed and sharp, and she was pointing it straight at his throat. Howie could hear the trampling of hundreds of feet behind him as the congregation made its way to surround him–to touch him, if they could. But the swordsmen protected ‘the King’ from the people’s ‘rea
ched out’ fingers and hands.

  A small basin and a jug of water were now being held before Howie by the hairdresser.

  ‘Sergeant Neil Howie, you will be anointed and revered as a king,’ said Miss Rose in ringing tones. ‘You will undergo death and rebirth. Resurrection, if you like. The rebirth, sadly, will not be yours, but that of our crops.’

  Howie feared his death, and he thought it was Willow’s knife that might bring it to him at any moment. But he answered defiantly:

  ‘I am a Christian and as a Christian I hope for resurrection, and even if you kill me now it is I who will live again, not your damned apples!’

  He looked over his shoulder at the congregation and shouted so they could all hear him.

  ‘No matter what you do you cannot change the fact that I believe in the life eternal as promised to us by our Lord Jesus Christ!’

  ‘That is good,’ said Lord Summerisle when Howie’s gaze had returned to Willow’s knife. ‘For believing what you do we confer on you a rare gift these days. A martyr’s death. You will sit at the right hand of your God, among the elect!’

  Howie heard the sound of a Celtic harp, somewhere in the crowd, start to play a refrain. Both women unpinned their long, fair hair and Willow now plunged her knife deftly forward, but it was not to cut his throat, as he had feared, only to slit his Punch costume from the neck to the codpiece. She and Miss Rose hummed a kind of lullaby as they undressed him. When he stood entirely naked they took the basin and the water and washed his body, drying him tenderly with their hair. Miss Rose used some ochre to anoint him in four places upon his chest and also upon his forehead.

  They were punctiliously gentle with him. Having washed him and anointed him they presented a deliciously scented oil for him to smell and then rubbed it into his thighs and his back, into the places where, by some strange prescience, they seemed to know he ached. Yet their knowledgeable caresses were as painful in their way to poor Neil Howie as if they were the arrows that had struck Saint Sebastian. If death really faced him he valued his purity as never before. He felt defiled by their very touch.

  Then they rinsed their hands of the oil and, taking a plain, white, raw-cotton shift, pulled it over his head and tied a cord loosely around his waist.

  They stopped their humming and ended their strange task singing these words:

  ‘Sleep, close and fast!’

  In the silence that fell upon the entire congregation, Howie wondered what ghastly charade they now had planned for him. What was to be their next terrible game, and when would they stop playing with their ‘mouse’ whom they mocked with the name of ‘king’?

  Lord Summerisle gazed around at his islanders with the look of a visionary who has seen his own prophecy come true.

  ‘And now,’ he said to Sergeant Howie, ‘it is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man.’

  CHAPTER XIII

  Sunset –

  on May Day

  HOWIE REALIZED THAT HE WAS NO LONGER HELD BY Oak, that he stood among them unconstrained. Now might be his chance to speak to them all, to persuade them. He turned suddenly and walked straight into the crowd that opened before him. He was horrified to find that part of their indifference over his progress was because they were still engaged in tearing his clothes and even his shoes into minute pieces and haggling and quarrelling over the distribution of them.

  But as he spoke they gave him their attention. Yet the quality of the hearing they gave him seemed to resemble more that of people listening to an old Caruso phonograph record than a crowd trying to comprehend a speech from the unjustly condemned. He spoke. They watched his lips intently and tried to memorize the cadences and timbre of his voice. They drank in the manna they seemed to think his closeness to them conferred.

  ‘Wrap it up any way you want,’ shouted Howie, so they could all hear, ‘but you are committing murder. All of you. Each and every one of you will be guilty! Before the law of the land. Guilty! Your punishment will be a lifetime in prison. Why suffer that punishment for no reason? For there is no Sun God. There is no Goddess of the Orchards. Your crops failed because the strains failed. Fruit is not meant to grow on these islands. It is against nature. True, for a while, due to the science of the laird’s great-grandfather, the fruit grew. But their failure means exhausted strains, worked-out soil, or a quirk in the weather. You must go back to the laboratory for the answer. And back, perhaps, to the true God that no amount of science has yet disproved. Killing me won’t bring back your fruit. Summerisle,’ he called out to the laird who stood listening on the fringe of the crowd, ‘tell them that you know it won’t.’

  ‘But I know it will,’ said Lord Summerisle in his deep, confident voice. ‘The sacrifice of the willing, kinglike, virgin fool will be accepted!’

  The people had looked at their leader more to hear the incantation of this dedication of the sacrifice than in expectation of any other answer to the sergeant’s exhortation. Howie understood this and shouted at them again, in desperation, trying to get through the religious trance he sensed in them, to the reasoning machinery of their brains. But they had all started to hum like a vast swarm of bees, as if in response to the laird’s words.

  ‘But don’t you all see,’ Howie desperately reasoned with them, ‘if the fruit fails again this year you will need another blood sacrifice, and it will have to be a more important one than me! Next year no one less than the King of Summerisle himself will do. D’you hear me, Summerisle? If the crops fail, your people will kill you next May Day!’

  Howie pointed a prophetic finger at the laird.

  On Lord Summerisle’s face there was a flicker of anxiety at these words. Only Miss Rose seemed to notice this, however, and she glanced at Lord Summerisle speculatively. The rest of the congregation was humming louder and louder now, more like the approach of a swarm of locusts than the mere buzzing of bees.

  ‘Don’t you see I’ll be missed?’ yelled Howie in sudden extreme panic, elbowing his way through the crowd. ‘They’ll come looking for me!’

  But Lord Summerisle was shouting in a peremptory tone:

  ‘There will be no traces! Come on! Bring him up, Oak.’

  Howie felt himself seized from behind by the familiar hands of the huge Oak. Dozens of other strong arms tossed him aloft, so that he rode along on the sea of their upstretched hands.

  ‘No! Just think what you’re doing. In the name of God, just think what you’re doing!’ he kept shouting to them until the moment when he had reached that point where the sloping cliff-tops met the plateau at their summit. Here they tied his hands behind his back, holding him, the while, up in the air, his face to the setting sun.

  Gently they lowered him to the ground and turned him so he faced east.

  Then he saw the Wicker Man. Standing alone on the plateau, looking as if the very oak wood itself had been metamorphozed into the shape of a gargantuan man.

  ‘Oh, God!’ cried Howie. He still could not quite see its purpose. Only knew his terrible fear of it.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, no!’ he cried.

  What Howie saw was a figure over sixty feet high, constructed of segmented wicker cages lashed together to form the shape of a man, and topped by the huge eyeless wicker head that blindly faced the sun. The cages that made up the arms and shoulders and pelvis of the man were filled to overflowing with goats, sheep, pigs and calves, chickens, and sundry other edible birds. The central partition of the giant’s stomach and chest was an empty cage, its door open to receive the principal victim, a ladder leading up to it from the ground. Heaps of brushwood were piled around the legs of the Wicker Man.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, no!’ yelled Howie to his Saviour, who, for a moment, he was sure had forsaken him. ‘No, Christ, no!’ Sergeant Howie screamed as only a man can who has not really believed, until now, that death awaits him inescapably and right away. He had been so sure that gentle Jesus, whose name he praised day and night, would (it was his innermost conviction) take him, Howie, his servant, only in his lean an
d slippered age, hopefully in his sleep. Now here was a cage built specially for him. Here were people who openly proposed to burn him alive. There stood the four torchbearers close to the brushwood kindling at the feet of the giant. This, at last, was no charade. But the whole meaning of their May Day. He was their sacrifice. He the Host. He the body and blood of their sacrament. The tuck-a-tuck of drums reminded him now of his dream of Lord Summerisle’s ghostly army. Oak half-led, half-pushed him, barefoot, across the open heath to the Wicker Man. Thistles stung his feet and several times his legs refused to carry him further and he fell to his knees, only to be lifted to his feet again by Oak. Looking back in wonder at the awful congregation and the small band of balladeers, he saw that they all followed Lord Summerisle, first Miss Rose and Willow, then, in orderly twos and threes, the rest of the islanders, stretching half a mile back to the cliff face, to the spot where he and Rowan had emerged from the White Goddess’s womb such a short while ago.

  As he got nearer and nearer the monstrous structure and could hear the lowing of the calves, the snorting of the pigs, and the occasional anguished clucking of the birds in their constricted draughty baskets, he was struck with a terrible remorse at his doubt of his Saviour. These innocent, unknowing victims of the islanders’ ignorance and cruelty were to be his companions in death. Summerisle was right that they had conferred upon him one great gift, for what was a comfortable demise abed in comparison to the glory of a martyr’s death? It was not that he had given up all intention of escaping if he could, or all hope that help, at the last, would somehow, from somewhere, come. He simply discovered that his manhood and his faith were indivisible. He would live as long as he could as a man, he would certainly die, if it was God’s will, with the dignity of a Christian and, if they saw him as such, yes, as a king. Pride was one sin his Maker would have to forgive Sergeant Howie. That, as they no longer had to push him towards the steps of the Wicker Man, became certain. He turned and walked backwards now, looking his executioners in the eyes, showing them his lack of fear, his faith. Allowing Oak to simply guide him.