Tormentor (13 page)

Dheannain sùgradh ris a nighean duibh

N’ deidh dhomh eirigh as a ‘mhadainn

Dheannain sùgradh ris a nighean duibh

Dheannain sùgradh ris a’ghruagaich

‘Nuair a bhiodh a’ sluagh nan codal

It didn’t take me long to find where it came from. It was a chorus from a folk song, its origins lost in time.

I played with the young dark-haired girl

When I woke in the morning

I played with the young dark-haired girl

I played with the long-haired girl

When everyone was asleep

As I read, the verse’s rhythms synchronized in my head with the drumming of my fingers on the desk.

I found myself chanting, almost singing the short verse throughout the day as I wandered around the house. I had one of my intermittent bouts of cleaning; I vacuumed and dusted, did all the laundry, and cleared the sink of dishes and cutlery. And all the time the verse, melded now in my mind with the repeater rhythm, went round and round in my head.

In late afternoon I rewarded myself with a microwave pizza and a beer. I sat at the dining table, looking out the closed windows at the foggy scene beyond. I’d changed the view again with my placement of the cairn of rubble I excavated from the root cellar. It sat on the edge of the shore, a squat pyramid, dark against the fog behind it. It drew my gaze so often while I was finishing the pizza that in the end I rose and closed the view off by drawing the curtains. What I couldn’t close off was the Gaelic verse, a new earworm going round and round in my head, worse than any pop song or advertising ditty, a constant whisper that seemed to be a warning of the night still to come.

Nuair a bhiodh a’ sluagh nan codal
; when everyone was asleep.

* * *

I put off going to bed for as long as I could—I watched two more movies and drank—coffee rather than beer or Scotch. All that meant was that I knew there would be a wakeup call from my bladder in the early hours of the morning, which only added to my trepidation.

I opened the patio doors and looked outside around midnight. There was nothing to see but fog—even the new cairn was lost in the soft gray darkness. I wasn’t in the least tempted to venture outside. I closed the windows and the curtains, had a shower and went to bed.

Sleep was the last thing on my mind, but I was physically exhausted after my trials on Hogmanay, then the subsequent drinking, walking and cleaning. I had hoped that would be enough to send me to the land of Nod, but it wasn’t to be.

The shadows danced and swayed on the ceiling, keeping time to the chant that continued to echo in the void in my brain. It was all I could think about.

Dheannain sùgradh ris a’ghruagaich

‘Nuair a bhiodh a’ sluagh nan codal

I waited for my dark-haired girl to come.

My fingers drummed the rhythm on the sheets. My legs twitched in time. I danced, lying there on the bed, keeping the beat with my partner in the shadows. Shimmering luminescence flitted across the window, as if something moved just out of sight on the shore. I couldn’t get out of bed to look—the chant had me struck immobile.

The shimmering poured into the room like an incoming tide, blue and gray and silver, all dancing. The stereo started up in the main room.

No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.

The Gaelic chant swelled, roaring in my ears in accompaniment. A deeper shadow moved in the doorway; she stood there, the lady in the cloak, her hair no longer pinned up but streaming in a swathe across her shoulders, black as pitch.

I opened my arms. She came to me.

Dheannain sùgradh ris a’ghruagaich

‘Nuair a bhiodh a’ sluagh nan codal.

I played with my long-haired girl when everyone was asleep.

Again I felt her body against mine, cold as the fog yet heavy, most definitely alive. She lifted her head up to look at me, her hair falling away from her face—green eyes, deep as rock pools, lips the palest of pale, almost blue.

We kissed. As our lips met she fell into me, cold and mist and blue mixing like oil paints on a board, ice in my veins.

I fell into a darkness where there was only the beat, only the dance.

I was lost, forever dancing.

In the morning I could scarcely look at the mantel and at Beth’s urn, sitting there, accusing me. She’d been dead these years past, but it didn’t make me feel any less sure that I’d just betrayed her. Again.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

My laptop pinged. I had mail. It was just one word.

Deeper.

* * *

I headed for the car, intending to drive into Portree to the hardware store for a pick or a shovel, but I’d forgotten about running the battery down. The engine coughed and spluttered twice. It almost took, then quit permanently. I took out my phone to call for a taxi. It started to beep at me, taking up the now-familiar rhythm.

No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.

Even from inside the car I heard the stereo start up, filling the house with the drumbeat, sending my gut vibrating in sympathy.

I got the message.

The beat got louder still as I put on the overalls, gloves and hat, but lessened to a whisper, no less insistent, when I lifted the skillet and headed out to the shore. I went down to the root cellar, climbed in, and started to dig into the hard-packed earth.

3

It took several minutes to crack the top surface, and I thought I was in for a long hard day’s work, but the hard-packed earth proved little more than a crust above much softer, wetter ground. I dug quickly through layers of soil interlaced with blacker patches that were obvious signs of fires—many fires, over many years. Twice the skillet clinked on fragments of clay pots, and a third time on a piece of rusted iron that might have been a short sword many centuries past.

Still I dug—two feet and more down while the stick figures on the cellar walls danced in the shifting shadows. The soil got heavier, a dark peat sodden with water. I was cold, wet and filthy; my arms ached and my head pounded along with the whispering beat of the drums.

I screamed in frustration as the drumbeat got louder. I raised the skillet and brought it down, hard in the soft peat.

I hit something. The drums beat faster and my digging matched the new rhythm, throwing up damp piles of peat, sloshing icy brown water everywhere until I had it uncovered. I looked down at what looked to be a rolled tube of decaying leather lying at the bottom of a dark muddy pool.

The drums fell quiet.

I had to climb down into the new hole to fetch my discovery, cold water gripping me from ankles to balls, turning my legs to stone. I heaved the leather up out of the hole and dragged myself up after it. Even then I wasn’t done. I lifted the leather tube out of the cellar, rolling it up onto the surface, but when I tried to pull myself out after it, my legs gave way beneath me and I fell back, splashing in an inch of mud and slush.

The drums started to beat insistently again.

“Okay, okay—I’m doing it,” I shouted.

It took all my strength, and I did it using mainly my arms, for my legs seemed to have turned to soft putty, but after an interminable scramble, I pulled myself out of the cellar and rolled to lie alongside the thing I had brought up out of the hole.

It was only then that I had my first good look at it. It looked like a four-foot-long sausage—one that had been cooked, then left in the fridge too long. It had been burnt at one time, judging by the blackened areas and charring that was clearly visible, but whatever it contained had been rolled tight—there seemed to be at least three visible layers of leather, and possibly more waiting to be uncovered.

The drums beat a staccato rhythm, pounding the repeater beat into my skull. I knew what was being asked.

With a tired groan, I lifted the leather tube—more water ran inside my sleeves but didn’t make me much wetter than I already was—and staggered, bent almost double, up to the house and in through the patio doors. I trailed a spattered pattern of mud and water into the house and dropped the thing with a wet smack on the dining room table.

The drums fell silent, the only sound coming from a steady drip from the table to the floor.

* * *

I stripped naked in the bathroom and stood under a hot shower for ten minutes until I was completely rid of the numbing cold. My arms and legs tingled and went bright red, but it was an improvement from the gray-blue I had seen there before the shower.

While I was putting on some dry clothes, I started to feel the chill again. I went back to the main room and lit a fire in the grate, piling on as many logs as I could manage until the flames roared and waves of heat drove me back. I poured a large Talisker, gulped down half of it, and took the rest over to have a closer look at what I’d brought in.

It was already drying out. The top layer was cracked and almost brittle. I peeled back a piece of it and it came away in my hand, crumpling under my skin to a mushy pulp. I was afraid to do any more exploring in case the whole thing fell apart on me, so I left it dripping on the table and returned to the sofa to rest my weary limbs.

What had I just done? The message had been clear enough—
Dig until I tell you to stop
. Well, I’d done it, and found something. Had I reached the center, the truth at the heart of the mystery? At that precise moment, I was too tired and too confused to care.

I was asleep within seconds.

* * *

When I woke it was dark again. I was sweating, sitting in a red room; flickering flames from the dying fire cast scarlet and black shadows to all corners. Drums—several of them—beat in the far distance where a soft voice sang in accompaniment.

Nuair a bhiodh a’ sluagh nan codal
; when everyone was asleep.

But whatever was in the room with me was no Celtic lady. I felt its anger, a red rage to match any flame. I tried to get off the couch, but my torso was squeezed and constricted. It sat on my chest, breathing its hate in my face, and I could only lie there and take it as the drums beat and the flames flickered.

Sweat ran into my right eye, stinging, blurring the room into a wash of color. The drumming intensified, shaking the walls and rattling the windows. The stereo kicked in—”Spanish Harlem” again, then, so loud as to be almost deafening, “Boots of Spanish Leather.”

Dylan wailed, a drum crashed a final beat that shook the house to its foundations, and the weight on my chest lifted as the patio doors blew open.

A chill breeze wafted the fire back to life and I sat up, gasping for air.

My laptop flickered as it booted up and I heard the ping of incoming e-mail.

4

I had another grid for my program—screeds of it this time, eight columns and over six hundred lines. Fortunately I’d set the thing up so that it was a relatively simple matter to get the grid into the program’s small database. I got it running, hooked it up to the stereo, and left it to play softly in the background while I had a shower and shave and rustled up some breakfast.

I was so used to the beat by now it was almost soothing. The terror I’d felt on wakening faded to little more than the memory of a bad dream. Beth’s urn rattled on the mantel, as if dancing to the beat. I took some coffee and toast onto the patio. As I walked past the dining room table I saw that the leather bundle was cracked and dry, almost toasted by the fire. I’d tackle that after breakfast.

I had a feeling the end was close now.

* * *

I had my last breakfast in the house sitting on the patio watching a misty dawn over the loch with drums beating softly as a backdrop. My sparrow friends came down and danced at my feet as I fed them crumbs.

I had a final look at the view, drained my coffee, and went to have a closer look at what I’d brought up out of the hole.

Boots of Spanish Leather.

It was obvious that the leather, even old and cracked as it now was, had at one time been rather fine, embroidered as it was with scenes of sailboats and docks. It may have been Spanish, but I did not get that confirmed until I unrolled four layers, each of which was in better condition than the last, and finally revealed what lay inside. A distant drumbeat started up, rumbling from afar, as I peeled back the last section.

At first it looked like little more than a jumble of bone and silver, until my mind processed what I was seeing.

It had been a burial, sometime in the deep past—a man of some import at that. His skull, grimacing from bottomless eye sockets, was mostly intact, as were two femurs.