Redhead

by Ian Cook

  “It’s about getting rid of the lot of you, once and for all,” Neferatu replied.

  He beckoned the taller of the guards who had brought Rebecca out of the tomb. “You know your orders, Inherkhau. Move her on.”

  Rebecca stood her ground, even when a guard held a spear to her leg. “Look at these children. They’re freezing cold.”

  Neferatu smiled again. “Don’t worry yourself about that. They’ll soon be warm.” He laughed. “Very warm.”

  Inherkhau stuck his spear into Rebecca’s back, making her cry out with pain, and forced her into the Ring.

  Neferatu stopped two of the guards. “Get the scum to prepare their own pit,” he commanded them.

  Within minutes, the captives were all handed a variety of digging implements: shovels and spades for the adults, and trowels and even sticks for the smallest children. Inherkhau thrust a spade into Rebecca’s hands.

  The guards ordered them to start digging in the middle of the Ring. At first they only removed the thin turf, but as the pit slowly deepened, a pile of dirt grew alongside. As the smallest and weakest of the children soon grew weary, guards marched over, seized them and threw them out of the pit. They huddled together, cowering whenever the guards approached them.

  Neferatu strode over towards them. “Take the biggest to find wood,” he ordered. “Anything, as long as it will burn.”

  After an hour or so, the pit was about twenty foot square and two foot deep. By this time, those digging consisted mainly of the few men, the rest ordered to level out the pile of soil and rocks. The only woman now left digging was Rebecca, the others having been dragged away as they collapsed with exhaustion, to be dumped with the children. Her back ached as it had never ached before, and her hands were now bleeding.

  A tough-looking, middle-aged man edged towards her. She recognised him immediately; it was Sandy Lewis, the man she and Jim had met at the Stones of Stenness.

  Unobtrusively, he pulled his shirt out of his trousers, ripped off a strip of it and handed it to her. “Use this,” he said quietly.

  Rebecca took it, tore it into two, wrapped the pieces around her hands and stayed close to him while she dug her spade again into the stony subsoil.

  “Listen, I have to tell you something. You’ll think I’ve gone mad, but it’s absolutely true,” she whispered, trying not to draw attention. “You’ve got to believe me.”

  “What is it, lass?” he replied, throwing a shovelful of rubble out of the pit.

  “They threw me into the tomb at Unstan just now. It sounds crazy, I know, but I had a vision there of a strange man. He looked like some kind of wild hippie, but his clothes were made out of some sort of rough material. He could have been one of the people who lived around here in ancient times. Anyway, he spoke to me. I couldn’t understand what he was saying – but I could tell it was important and urgent.” Sandy carried on digging as he listened. “Then I heard my mother’s voice – I know it was my mother. She said this man was telling me I had to put back the Odin Stone. As quickly as possible. I was thinking – what if it’s true? Maybe it could save us?”

  Sandy looked astonished. “What? The Odin Stone at Stenness?”

  “Yes. The one that was destroyed years ago. That was his message.”

  Sandy was quiet for a moment. “A lot of us have been having visions – I have seen my grandparents. But the Odin Stone? How on earth can that be put back?”

  “There must be a way,” insisted Rebecca. “And it may be our only hope.”

  At that moment, Neferatu, who was standing some way away, noticed them talking. He stormed over. “Keep digging,” he shouted at Rebecca. “There is no time for talking. Soon, the sun will come up, and you and your wretched people will meet your fate. You will be gone. Forever.”

  Then he marched over to Inherkhau. “It’s time for you to go now. They will be waiting for you on the island. Be back by dawn.”

  Inherkhau nodded and went to talk to a group of guards. Minutes later, unnoticed by those below, a flock of birds hovered over the Ring, before heading due north, led by a peregrine falcon.

  Rebecca and Sandy watched Neferatu stride away purposefully towards the entrance to the Ring and disappear out of sight.

  “Who is that?” asked Sandy. “Is he in charge of all this? Is he responsible?”

  “His name is Neferatu,” she said, under her breath. “I don’t know why, but he wants to kill us all. He seems to think I’m special. He tried to kill me before – said I was some sort of queen. I know he means to kill me, and probably you, too. And everyone one else here who’s been rounded up.” A guard came up quickly and hit Rebecca’s leg with his spear.

  Just then, there was a loud noise at the entrance to the Ring; a heavy clanking noise that echoed around the stones. At the entrance to the Ring, Rebecca and Sandy could see that the guards had become visibly excited, raising their spears and cheering, as something seemed to be making its laborious, clumsy way towards the Ring.

  Everybody seemed to be mesmerised, captors and captives alike, their eyes straining for a glimpse of whatever it was coming ever closer.

  Sandy grabbed Rebecca’s arm, forcing her to turn round and look at him. “I’m going to try and make a dash for it. I know about the Odin Stone – and I think I know what they were on about in the tomb. Listen, I don’t know what’s happening right now, but this could be our only chance. No time to tell you. I just hope I can put it back. I’m sorry, I’ll have to leave you here – but if I get away now, I may be able to help. Before it’s too late. Bye!”

  He checked around. The guards were becoming increasingly excited by events outside the entrance, and the captives stood silently, all looking in the same direction, as if spellbound by whatever fate had in store for them.

  Sandy now crept slowly sideways until he reached the darkest corner of the pit. Then he climbed out, crouching close to the ground. Moving cautiously toward a huge upright stone, he caught sight of a fiery glow and the gleam of hot metal, slowly approaching the entrance like an old steam engine. The guards seemed overjoyed. Seizing his chance, Sandy slipped away into the darkness and sprinted down the hill towards the loch.

  At first, it was impossible to discern what it was. Then the guards roared with excitement. As the huge, flaming monster was hauled into the Ring, the children started whimpering, and the men and women gasped in horror.

  CHAPTER 70

  It took two blows with a sledgehammer to break through the front door of the fisherman’s cottage on the Orkney island of Norstray.

  At the time, Jock Lewis, Sandy’s only brother, was working on his car by the light of a hurricane lamp in the garage to the rear.

  Duncan, Jock’s fourteen-year old son, was in the tiny front room doing his homework by the light of a candle. The boy started with fright when he heard the front door crash in, and cowered against the wall as the three men burst in on him. One grabbed him by the arm, twisting it behind his back. The boy howled in pain as he was marched out of the house and into the street.

  Hearing his screams, Duncan’s mother ran in from the kitchen. A second man cuffed her around the head and bundled her past the smashed-in door. She screamed for her husband, but as Jock rushed in from the garage, he barely made it to the back door. A blow to the face broke his nose. With blood streaming down his face, he was kicked and beaten and then shoved outside to join his wife and son.

  Wiping the blood from his face, Jock looked aghast at his bloodied hand and at his brutal attackers. As if in some sort of nightmare, where everything is topsy-turvy, they were not, as he had first imagined, some unknown gang of hooligans. He was horrified to find that these were people he knew. These were his neighbours, people he had known for twenty years.

  “Hamish! Malcolm! What in hell’s name is going on? What’s up with you all? What have we done?” he cried, trying to find some reason behind the situation.

  Malcolm threatened him with his fist. “Just shut it, ginger scum.” He made as if to kick Jock,
but pulled back and turned to Hamish and Rob, another neighbour, who had armed himself with a wooden chair-leg. “Okay. Let’s go! Let’s take them to the Devil’s House.”

  Jock’s wife was clutching her son, sobbing quietly with shock. When Rob laid a hand on Mary’s shoulder and started to shove her forwards, it was too much for Jock. “Get your bloody hands off her,” he bellowed, and charged forwards, knocking the lump of wood out of Rob’s hands. Malcolm leapt to grab the cudgel, raised it above his head and brought it down on Jock’s skull as hard as he could. Jock slumped to the ground, groaning.

  “Pick him up,” growled Malcolm. “Look, this is only just the beginning. Get moving! No time for talking.”

  Jock was hauled up and stood there, totally shocked and bewildered, nursing his swelling bruise and shaking his head in disbelief at Rob.

  The three of them were herded along the main village street by the three men. Neighbours, who up until today had apparently been their friends, now stood silently in doorways. Curtains twitched as shadowy faces watched the procession from behind their windows. Jock put his arms around his wife and son, looking at each man in turn, still searching for some sort of meaning behind it all.

  At the main road junction just outside the village, they caught sight of another bedraggled group of red-haired men, women and adolescent children; this time accompanied by a gang of about fifty men armed with pitchforks, lumps of wood and even shotguns. Norstray’s population was small, and Jock and his family were able to recognise almost everyone there, captors and captives alike.

  Some of the armed men conferred together and then, with more curses and threats, moved their captives along a narrow lane.

  The ruins of the kirk appeared on the horizon, standing out bleakly against the night sky. About a hundred yards before it, the group came to a halt. In the gloom, the austere building seemed to have taken on an even more forbidding aspect than usual, and the graveyard tombstones stood proudly erect, like grim and impartial observers.

  As Jock and his family watched, a large peregrine falcon flew in and perched on the highest point of a wall at one end of the ruin. Then two sparrowhawks, smaller than the falcon, arrived out of the darkness and joined it, taking up position slightly below, as if in deference to the falcon. The birds seemed to be eyeing the crowd below expectantly, their heads twisting from side to side.

  When they were followed by a flock of six kestrels, which landed at the opposite end of the building, the landlord of the Fisherman’s Rest raised a pitchfork in the air.

  “Christ Almighty, is this what he meant, that weird stranger?” he said. “How did he manage this? It’s super-human, that’s what it is!” He gestured to the others with the pitchfork to move the captives along through a broken doorway, into the nettle-covered interior. Jock raised his fist, only to have the pitchfork thrust brutally against his chest.

  The captors took up position at the doorway, while their prisoners watched with unease as a flock of hen harriers swooped in and landed, strutting menacingly along the top of the broken walls.

  As more and more birds arrived, the air became thick and threatening with feathered activity. A terror-struck young girl turned to her parents. “What’s happening? Why are all these birds here?” she cried, echoing the primeval fear of the evil they seemed to represent, felt by all the captives.

  The fear made them restless. Then it turned to rage. One young man, unable to contain his fury, made a desperate dash for freedom through the doorway, but was viciously beaten back inside.

  Yet more flocks of birds – kites, buzzards and ospreys – continued to circle and then settle, forming a continuous, thick, black band around the top of the walls. As the birds became more agitated, the sound of their rustling feathers grew louder. Intermittently, there would be a flap of wings, as two or three birds flew from one side of the ruins to the other.

  A light rain was now beginning to fall, adding to the misery of those within the walls, where there was a growing sense of impending doom. There were shouted appeals for explanations and calls for mercy but, apart from the odd curse, they went unheeded. A boy of fifteen, a friend of Duncan from the next village, started to complain that he was hungry and was rapidly hushed by his father. But other men, unable to contain themselves, started to force their way towards the doorway, shouting angrily for their release and threatening their captors with revenge.

  Then, suddenly, as if some unknown force were being unleashed in protest against what was going to happen next, a blast of wind knocked the birds off balance, so that they fluttered around and settled again wherever they could. A flash of lightning lit up the whole landscape and was followed by a clap of thunder so violent that it shook the ruins. As the echoes of the thunder faded away, small pieces of masonry rattled down. Then there was silence.

  It was as if the birds had received an invisible signal. They rose up as one into the air and circled menacingly above the ruins. The falcon flew up higher than the rest, as if it were somehow in command, and hovered, scarcely visible now in the night sky.

  But it was the falcon that was the first to dive down on to the throng below. It swooped down, slicing the face of a woman who was looking up, leaving a thin line across her cheek from which blood started to well.

  As the captives instinctively lowered their heads to protect themselves, a pair of harriers landed on the shoulders of a man who had covered his head with his hands. One of them caught hold of his ear and, with a few jerky movements, pulled at the ear until the lobe tore away in its beak. The man screamed in pain and beat the birds off. They flew up above the building, wheeled tightly and swooped down to attack again.

  For a brief moment, the bulk of the birds held back. Then, as if sensing blood, they fell together like huge black hailstones on to the terrified crowd below. The captors instantly retreated from the building to avoid the fate of those inside, but quickly moved back, taking up position in the doorway and under the open windows, so that no one could escape.

  Terrible screams filled the night air as the birds landed on their prey, flapping their wings and stabbing with their beaks. Any attempt to fight them off was futile. Occasionally, someone might beat a bird off, but it always returned to attack again, pecking savagely at the hands trying to protect the face.

  As the captives withdrew their badly injured hands, one after another the birds dived in to peck at the exposed eyes. Only then did some of the birds, with chunks of flesh or part of an eyeball held firmly in their beaks, leave the fray to flap triumphantly up and on to the walls. There they perched, consuming their gains.

  Clothes were ripped and torn away, exposing areas of flesh into which their beaks were sunk. The almost inhuman screams of terror and pain were half-drowned by the beating of wings.

  It took no more than five minutes or so for the carnage to be complete. The birds’ intent seemed to be to maim, to blind, rather than to kill. Those blinded started to move around, fumbling, tripping over, colliding with each other in their attempts to escape the horror. Too distraught to speak, they wailed and moaned, nursing gashed cheeks, bloodied arms and legs or ripped ears.

  The birds and the captors began to drift off. The birds circled for a while, as if inspecting the bloodbath below. But the captors melted away into the darkness without speaking, some with faces bearing an expression of grim satisfaction, while others were expressionless, as if unable to comprehend the grotesque climax that had resulted from their dreadful actions.

  CHAPTER 71

  Sandy Lewis had managed to escape from the Ring of Brodgar unnoticed, with Rebecca’s words still ringing in his ears. He knew enough about the Odin Stone and its magic from local folklore to understand what she had been talking about. He had also had his own visions. One after another, his grandparents had appeared to him in dreams, so real that he had thought they were in the room with him, and had told him not to fear for his future. He didn’t know what they had meant exactly, but the experience had powerfully affected him.

&n
bsp; Even so, he found it hard to believe that putting back the Odin Stone could help the poor wretches he had left behind, and yet what choice did he have? It was the faintest of hopes, but the only alternative was to accept without a fight the massacre of innocent people under circumstances of almost unbelievable barbarity.

  Having escaped the immediate danger, he planned to make for his brother Jock’s dinghy, moored in the Bay of Ireland nearby. If he used the engine, he could easily make the short distance to his fishing boat at Stromness. From there, it would take an hour or so to reach his family and friends on the island of Norstray and get some help.

  He was in sight of Sandy Ness on the island of Norstray when the wind caught his little fishing boat sideways on. A powerful gust whipped across the bay and swung the boat around. Grabbing the wheel, he caught a glimpse of a strange black cloud of circling birds rising into the night sky and hovering above the ruins of the kirk. Seconds later, blood-curdling screams and cries of pain cut through the air towards him.

  He froze for a second, then slammed the engine into full-ahead, made for the shore and beached his boat. Even as he clambered out of it and splashed through the shallow sea, he could see birds wheeling haphazardly above him, one or two swooping down menacingly in his direction.

  Stumbling over the shingle, he made his way towards the kirk and climbed over the wall into the graveyard. A solitary kestrel dived towards him, missing his head by inches, before disappearing up into the darkness.

  At the entrance to the kirk, he came to an abrupt stop and almost retched. There in front of him was a scene from hell, a reenactment of a medieval painting of Judgment Day. Men and women, with gaping blood-streaked hollows for eyes, staggered around, hands held out in front of them, tripping over fallen bodies and bumping into the walls. Some were lying on the ground, sobbing hysterically, shrieking in pain. Others lay there, twitching uncontrollably. One or two were lying completely motionless among the nettles.