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Authors: Robin Adair

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Nicodemus Dunne was. He’d had it birched into him at school. With rhetoric and some Latin and Greek. Anyway, he liked numbers. He paused, then said, “15,840 feet. At 5,280 feet to the mile—why, that’s—”

“You have the right of it,” said O′Bannion. “Three miles … perpen-bloody-dicular and getting nowhere!”

THEY CLIMBED TO that routine for the rest of the working day. Dunne and O′Bannion were young and fit. Still, the palms of their hands had soon become slippery on the rail, from sweat and the blood and water from burning, bursting blisters. They felt the muscles of their legs cramp and their hips threaten to seize up. They soon shed their sweaty shirts, but nothing could stop their inner thighs and scrotums being rubbed raw. The patterer now agreed with the men who called the mills “cock-chafers.”

At one stage, they felt the blades suddenly become stiffer and harder to depress. They had to use all their strength to make the wheels turn.

“That bastard!” O′Bannion gasped. “He’s playing with the brake.”

On each machine, a warder started, stopped and, in between, could regulate the speed by releasing or applying a screw-controlled drag on the giant drums. To torment the prisoners, this keeper was slowing the mill. As the men battled the inertia, O′Bannion snorted. “Now you know why they call the buggers ‘screws’!”

THE DAY′S ORDEAL ended half an hour early for all workers on the Great Mill, but Dunne was sickened by the reason for their early mark. Like the others, he had sometimes not moved briskly enough and had been bruisingly rapped on the shins as he mistimed the next descending steps. But, with the day fading, a man three stations away slipped between the steps. The wheel ground to a halt, but it was too late. The screaming man’s leg was broken and mutilated. By the time the shambles was cleared, the day was over.

The names of O′Bannion, James Bond and the other day-men were ticked off and soon they were outside the grim gates. The patterer knew, however, that he was still far from free.

“I have to get back to the heart of the town, but every constable’s eye—and every soldier’s—will be wide open for me,” he said. Then he had an idea. “Will you do me a service?” he asked O′Bannion.

The Irishman nodded. He believed his new friend was innocent of the crime for which he was being hunted.

“Here’s threepence. It will buy you a pie at the Hope and Anchor.”

O′Bannion frowned. How could food from the pub help? “You want a pie?”

The patterer smiled. “I wouldn’t say no to one, but you can have the pie—I really want the pieman.”

And he proceeded to explain his plan.

WHILE HE WAITED for O′Bannion to return, Nicodemus Dunne was surreptitiously busy.

He made his way to the nearby Benevolent Society asylum for the poor. Unseen, he filched, from washing still laid out over bushes to dry, a large overall garment and a cap. He added what appeared to be a cape of sorts to his laundry haul. Next, from a shed at the back of the asylum, he wheeled a wooden wheelbarrow. It squeaked loudly enough, he thought, to wake the dead at the nearby Sandhills cemetery. But again nobody challenged him.

Back in the shadows, now by the side of the main road, he settled down to wait. He was weary from his day of fruitless walking and soon felt himself dozing off. A crackle in undergrowth brought him back to alertness. And there it was again; he could not quite pick the direction it was coming from.

“Pieman, is that you? O′Bannion?”

The only response was a crashing blow to the back of his head. A flash like lightning, then pitch-darkness swallowed him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Why, was there ever seen such villainy,
So neatly plotted and so well performed?

—Christopher Marlowe,
The Jew of Malta
(1592)

A
REGULAR METALLIC SOUND AND A VOICE WELCOMED NICODEMUS Dunne back to the land of the living.

“Snick, snick,” went the sound.

“Bugger!” and “Bloody hell!” said the voice.

Through the pain that steadily pounded his head, the patterer recognized the action of a flint and steel—someone was trying to use a tinderbox to make fire. And, it seemed from the oaths, trying unsuccessfully. The tinder, or kindling, would not take a spark from the friction. “Snick, snick” was the last thing he remembered as he again lost consciousness …

The clicking and human voice had gone when Dunne woke again from the black pit and blinked his brain back to near full awareness. It seemed to be—still? again?—nighttime and he felt a frisson of cold. At first, that was almost all he could feel: He found he could not move his arms or legs. He flexed his fingers and toes, but movement ended at his wrists and ankles. He did find that he could move his head, though, forward and to each side.

With a sudden fearful thought, he wondered if he had suffered an apoplexy that had paralyzed parts of his body. Then came the realization that, in truth, he was in bondage on the ground, spread-eagled.

One thing: He could see. Out of the corner of one eye, he was able to make out the vague silhouette of the wheelbarrow he had stolen earlier. He could not speak, however; a wad of what tasted like clothing fabric gagged him.

He tried to remain calm. It seemed that he was in much the same area that he remembered before the sudden blow and the dive into unconsciousness. Raising his head as high as possible, he suddenly realized why he felt particularly cold. He was naked; which was also why he could feel the rough ground under his back and limbs.

He must have groaned through the gag. Or perhaps his movement was discernible, constricted though he was. A dim presence—he could not even call it a figure—appeared on one side. A male voice broke the silence: “So, you’re awake, patterer … Mr. Nicodemus Dunne … Ring-master!” The last was said as a jeer.

All Dunne could do was gurgle.

“You should know me,” said the voice.

Dunne shook his head. He heard again the conflict of the flint and steel. A spark must have taken in the tinder, for now he could hear the man puffing the glow into further life. Moments later, the captor transferred the flames to a small fire on the ground, too far away to reveal his identity or warm the patterer.

“Yes, you certainly should,” repeated the figure. “You smashed me with a rock when you sided with the Indians—you, a white man, taking their part against your countrymen. All we wanted was some fun, a bit of pussy. Their women are all pink inside, just like ours.

“I looked for you all over, you bastard. My two mates were too yellow-gutted; they wanted no part of it. But I wasn’t going to forget. I finally saw you in the town and found out more about you. You’re no more a Ringer than I am. Just an old lag with a fancy tongue, yapping out the news.

“Then, this morning, near the jail, I got lucky. You appeared and joined that train. So it was no secret where you were going and I only had to follow you and wait outside the House of Correction. I don’t know who helped you that morning—yet. Maybe you’ll tell me. Don’t shake your head. I’ve got ways. But I’ll get square with him, too. And those bloody blacks.”

The patterer’s chest moved convulsively in a coughing spasm and his breathing through his nose seized up. He began to choke and suffocate.

“Can’t have that, can we?” said his tormentor. “You’re not going to leave me—yet.” He ripped out the gag and Dunne’s breathing gasped gradually back to normal.

“What are you going to do?” whispered the patterer. He could barely make himself heard.

“Do? I’m not going to
do
anything to you. Not personally. But my friends here are.” Dunne felt the faintest touches on his chest. There seemed a barely perceptible movement, like someone dusting his skin with a feather.

“You know what that is?”

The patterer shook his head. He was still too hoarse to speak properly.

“I’m dropping a handful of bulldog ants on you. There’s a nest nearby, almost alongside in fact, and, with a little bit of encouragement, these small fellows, not so small really, will do you in for me. You see? I thought, if I knife you or bash your brains in and if I did get caught, I’d swing. But here’s a way that kills you and I won’t have harmed a hair on your head.”

Dunne knew the red-and-black bulldog ants, which were called soldier ants because of their ferocity and tenacity. They grew to an inch long and had agonizing stings. But could they be killers?

“Now, how good are they?” said the man, reading Dunne’s thoughts. “Well, a couple will hurt but not necessarily harm. So here’s the help I said I’d give them …”

The patterer felt a rain of scattered sensations, even lighter than those made by the ants, fall on his chest and groin. There were two needles of pain, then a third.

“I’ll lay a trail from the nest and dust you all over. They’ll follow it—to an even tastier meal: you. The bait? Have a bit yourself.” Some of the rain fell on Dunne’s face and lips.

He tasted sugar.

That fatal calling card—again. His inward groan was stifled by a chilling thought: Was it all just crazy coincidence? Or did it mean that, somehow, the mad mass murderer had turned the tables and caught the hunter?

Then a pitch-topped torch flared to illuminate a face and body standing over the prone prey. The patterer could not recognize the young man he had flattened at the Miller’s Point. Something about him was familiar, though.

“You know what they’ll do to you?” The voice was excited. “These little buggers will eat you alive. They’ll bite you so hard that you’ll pray you could tear your skin off. They’ll creep into your eyes and into your ears, up your nose and into your mouth. They like sweat and body muck. You’ll flinch and struggle and maybe squash a few. That’ll only make them angrier. And they’ll crawl up your arse and even into the eye of your cock.”

“Shit!” said the patterer. It came out only as a strangled sob. His captor nodded and laughed.

Then deliverance came on a divine wind.

CHAPTER FORTY