In the Devil's Name

by Dave Watson

  McCabe was aghast.

  “You want to sit aboot in the fuckin’ bushes for what? Another three hours? Well, fuck that,” and he made to stand up and leave. It was his car that had brought them here, and he had no intention of waiting around for ages in the cold forest till Jannets decided to go and do this wee fanny.

  Jannets grabbed him by the throat as he was trying to rise and slammed him back to the forest floor. With his free hand, he reached inside his tracksuit jacket and pulled out a foot long machete. He put it to McCabe's throat.

  “You're fuckin’ stayin’ here till ah tell you to leave,” Jannets spat. He moved the machete up McCabe’s face and drew the edge down his cheek. Jannets had spent two hours straight that afternoon sharpening the weapon. Blood ran.

  McCabe drew in a breath to shriek, but Jannets clamped a hand over his mouth and held the point of the huge blade over his left eye. His scream died before it reached his lips.

  McCabe seemed to be trying to melt into the moist forest floor in a futile attempt to get away from this lunatic and his machete. He squirmed there, prone and whimpering.

  Jannets turned to look at Bunny, who just sat there, pale in the face and mouth hanging open, a look of disbelief in his eyes. He pointed the giant blade of cold steel at him.

  “Goin’ anywhere, Bunny?” he asked, almost casually.

  “Naw, Eddie. Cool, man. Just chill, eh?”

  “Ah’m chilled as you like.”

  “Cool, mate. Whatever you say, big man. Ah’m no goin’ anywhere,” Bunny assured him, palms outward in a placating gesture. This cunt’s fuckin’ lost it big time he thought to himself.

  Jannets turned back to McCabe; still prostate on the ground, looking like he was deciding what music he’d like played at his funeral and blood running in a thin trickle from his cut cheek into his ear. Jannets took his hand away from his mouth slowly but pointed the machete back at him.

  Oh, Jesus. The crazy bastard's gonnae kill me…

  “Car keys,” he ordered.

  McCabe slowly reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew the plastic tab with his keys attached. He wasn’t about to argue. Jannets snatched them from him with his free hand and deposited them in his own pocket.

  “We’re stayin’ for a while. Right?”

  “Nae bother, Eddie. Just cool out, man ok?”

  Chapter 14

  “Anyone getting anything yet?” Griff asked.

  Sam blinked, looked around, seemed to listen to the forest for a second, examined his palms briefly, then shook his head.

  “All systems normal so far,” he said.

  “Nothing yet,” agreed Cairnsey “but it’s only been fifteen minutes. Remember the trips we had at Glastonbury last year? Took an hour for those ones to kick in.”

  “Got them from Barnsey, didn’t we?” asked Griff.

  “Dodgy cunt,” confirmed Sam, nodding.

  Cairnsey looked over at Phil.

  “And how you feeling mate?” he asked.

  Phil had been sitting for the last five minutes sipping slowly from a can of Tennent’s and not speaking, just staring off into space immersed in his own thoughts. Occasionally his head would start nodding to the music coming from the portable stereo. He looked up at Cairnsey's question.

  “Feeling good, my man,” he said with a bleary eyed smile.

  “Ya fuckin’ stoner!” crowed Sam as he lit up a joint.

  “Damn straight. Don’t need no steenkin’ acid.” He patted the bong which lay against his thigh like a lapdog. “Got me all the fun I need right here,” and he arched his back and stretched luxuriously. He was sitting on the forest floor with his legs stretched out towards the as yet unlit fire they had built, his back propped against a tree stump, which was surprisingly comfortable, although that might have been something to do with the three hits from the bong he’d taken so far.

  “Don’t get too comfy there, Phil,” Cairnsey said. “We’ve still got to walk down to the caves. You’ll be too stoned to move soon.”

  “Don’t you worry about me, young Joshua,” Phil replied. “I’ll worry for all of us. Especially the carrots.”

  The others looked at him as if he’d just said he wanted to shag his pet hamster, such was the absurdity of the statement.

  Griff gave a weird, uncertain chuckle.

  “What are you talking about, man?” he asked with a giggle.

  Phil looked confused. He frowned and almost smiled, then blinked a few times. Shook his head.

  “Erm…ha…emmm...”

  Sam started to giggle as well.

  “Er…I mean….ehhh…” Phil was saying.

  Cairnsey now started to chuckle, way down in his belly, and for the first time noticed a slight feeling of nausea.

  “What were we…who…what the fuck…” Phil continued his baffled, fractured sentence.

  ”What the fuck were we just talking about, man?” he asked, having completely forgotten. Then he stated to laugh as well.

  In a split second it happened, and in that tiny splinter of time, Sam, Cairnsey and Griff, unknown to each other, felt a glorious shining moment of pure euphoria. Every nerve ending in their bodies lit up ecstatically and they shuddered inside with a blissful rush. For a fraction of their lives, they were superhuman. Then it passed, leaving the unmistakable feeling of a strong trip, broken through at last.

  And the laughter took them; crashed down and obliterated them.

  Cairnsey fell forward onto his face, laughing a very loud, donkey-like, braying laugh and pounding the ground with his fists.

  Griff had fallen backwards off the log he had been sitting on, and lay there on his back, helpless, with his legs drawn up and hugging his ribs, laughing in a shrieking girlish manner.

  “Carrots!” wailed Sam. “What’ve carrots got to do with anything?!” He somehow forced the words out through lungs and a throat blissfully contracted with mirth, struggling to breathe.

  Phil was just sitting there, chortling away and shaking his head, still wearing that hilarious baffled look on his face.

  “Why would I say anything about carrots?” he asked, completely clueless.

  The other three laughed even harder.

  “Ahhhh! Stop it, man! I’m gonnae pish myself!” pleaded Cairnsey between his donkey brays.

  Sam was now rolling about on the ground, kicking his legs and holding his face which was going purple and felt like it would explode if he laughed anymore. An agony of pure happiness.

  Griff was trying to stand up, but fell over again, his legs with all the consistency of sponge.

  “I think the trips have kicked in,” he managed to gasp, then gave up and just lay there, his body shaking with great racking spasms and close to losing control of his bladder.

  It went on for some time.

  Finally, the fit passed and they could speak again.

  “Ohhh, Jesus, Phil you crack me up,” said Griff in a strangled voice, rubbing his stomach.

  Sam was wiping his eyes with his sleeve.

  “Never hit the giggles like that before, man,” he said.

  Cairnsey stood up, still chuckling a little, and went over to put right the stereo which had been knocked over during the laughing fit. He stretched his legs and flexed his fingers. A pleasant buzzing sensation seemed to flow through his body and he gritted his teeth and flicked his tongue, enjoying the simple tactile pleasure of just feeling.

  “Well, my trip’s definitely kicked in,” he said. “How ‘bout you bums?”

  “It’s all good,” Sam said and lifted his beer. Griff agreed.

  “All feelin’ fine my friends?” Phil asked with a wistful smile, for a second regretting not taking the trip and despite himself, feeling a little left out.

  “These are good, mate” said Sam. “Damn shame you passed it up.” He grinned at him, winding him up a little.

  “Screw you, punk,” Phil came back.

  ”You want to start heading down the cave while it’s still light, and before we start tr
ipping too much?” Cairnsey asked.

  Phil tensed at his words. Again a flash of apprehension flashed through him, but again it was gone before he could grab hold of it properly. The peculiar feeling was even more so now that he was stoned. When he tried to analyse it, the inside of his head felt like cotton wool and he couldn’t focus on anything at all.

  Forget it, he told himself. Just enjoy the night. Start thinking about it too much and you’ll be stuck in a downer all night.

  “Caves it is,” Griff announced, clapping his hands together with a report like a pistol shot, making Phil jump.

  Chapter 15

  After a brief and unsteady, yet amusing walk down the steep rugged path that traversed the cliffs and led to the beach, they arrived at the mouth of Sawney Beane's cave.

  The opening in the rock had at one point been sealed off, as the cave led into a labyrinth of tunnels that some said went back into the cliffs for a mile or more. The Sawney Beane legend was known among those interested in folklore and those simply of a macabre slant all over the world, and tourists would sometimes visit the grisly attraction. Before the entrance had been sealed, a local who had been walking his dog on the beach outside one day had noticed a ghastly smell emitting from the dark opening in the rock, and being a concerned citizen had contacted the authorities fearing that maybe a gas or sewage pipe had been ruptured underground. What they had instead found deep inside the twisting labyrinthine cave system, was the half rotted corpse of an American tourist, a camera still round his neck and wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a grinning Nessie and the slogan ‘I Love Scotland’. As it turned out, the unfortunate individual had been reported missing a few months previously. The local council had had the entrance to the caves sealed up as a precaution against the same thing happening again, but the safety measure hadn’t lasted long. A few months later, the entrance was breached again, presumably by some over enthusiastic sightseer with a tool kit, a morbid sense of curiosity and too much time on their hands. The authorities had never got around to resealing it again.

  Griff took a torch from his backpack and shone it into the dark opening. The initial passage led back into the cliff face for about fifteen feet then twisted away to the left. The rocky corridor was empty but for a few discarded drinks cans, old cigarette butts and joint roaches, and a used condom. Graffiti decorated the walls in a riotous clash of spray painted and marker drawn tags and mentions; people’s names, dates, crudely rendered pornographic illustrations and declarations of adolescent love and footballing allegiances covered the stone surfaces of the cave walls and ceiling in a variety of clashing colours, lending a strangely chaotic urban feel to the natural cavity in the earth. The cave had been used as a hang out spot for decades by generations of local teenagers, and some of the dates inscribed on the walls went as far back as the sixties.

  “Helooooooo,” Griff called into the darkness in a wavering singsong voice. “Any insane cannibals home?”

  Not a sound came from within but a steady drip, drip, drip of water leaking from the tunnel roof and echoing around the stone walls. They filed inside, Griff taking point with the torch.

  They rounded the corner at the end and it opened out into a large, roughly oval chamber with the roof seven feet overhead. As with the entrance tunnel, the walls here were covered with graffiti and there were odd bits of litter strewn around on the ground plus the charred remains of an old campfire. There were two narrow, inky black openings in the rock walls of the chamber which led deeper into the cave system. The boys had explored these two passages on a previous trip to the caves some years before, and had found that each of them had several more ever narrower, but still passable tunnels branching from them. They hadn’t explored much further, such was the danger inherent in the disorienting and claustrophobic nature of the underground maze. It was also very dark, narrow and generally unsettling as fuck.

  “Lets get some candles set up here,” Sam suggested. “Not freaking out or anything, but a little light wouldn’t go amiss. Don’t fancy breaking my ankle down here.”

  Griff handed him the torch and from his backpack produced a box of long red dinner candles and a couple of ornate, silver plated three pronged candle holders. He’d taken them from the dining room at Griffiths Hall and knew they were antique items, each worth thousands of pounds if sold at auction. Cairnsey grinned in appreciation of Griff’s forward thinking and refined aesthetic taste.

  “Nice touch, dude. Minted,” he said.

  “Be prepared,” Griff replied seriously, giving the Boy Scout salute, “and when possible, be classy.”

  He handed out the candles and holders to the others and soon the cavern was lit in an ambient flickering glow, which caused shadows on the rough graffitied stone walls to change shape and position in a fascinatingly eerie way.

  Beers were opened, a joint was sparked. A CD was played on the portable stereo; a slow bluesy ballad with a lone singer, his haunting voice accompanied by a softy plucked acoustic guitar.

  Phil recognised the melody. He’d heard it in a film they’d all watched at Sam's place a few weeks before, but he’d be fucked if he could remember the name of it now. It was hard to recall details like that when you were cataclysmically stoned.

  “Sam,” he said. “What’s that tune called?”

  “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” Sam answered absently, looking around the walls and ceilings.

  Griff looked up from studying his palms.

  “Really? I’ll be damned. That’s mighty interesting,” he said.

  “What is it?” Phil asked. The name of the song had for some reason sent a jolt of ice into his gut.

  The others smiled. Whenever Griff said something was ‘mighty interesting’, you could bet your ass that he would proceed to go off on a lengthy, yet entertaining and often educational monologue. It was Griff's story time, as they liked to call it.

  “Do tell,” Cairnsey invited him.

  Griff accepted the invitation, and sat forward.

  “Well, the Beane family had their shit organised. As we all know, these caves go back into the cliff and underground for a good distance, and the family had separate chambers for different purposes. They had chambers for storage of loot, and another for keeping the pickle jars they kept their victim's body parts preserved in, one for cooking, chambers for sleeping in, and of course, the killing chamber.”

  Griff paused for effect to let his words sink in. He saw that his friends were looking at him expectantly and he went on, subtly dropping his voice to a near whisper.

  “When they grabbed someone on the road above the cliffs, some of their victims would have been killed on the spot or dragged into the woods. In fact, the remains of the Beane’s last victim were found in the woods not far back from the road, probably close to where the tents are. But most of the time when they snatched someone, the actual slaughter would take place in the killing chamber.”

  Griff paused again, looking at his friend's expressions. He could see they were right into the story now. He was even feeling a little spooked himself. Damn these trips were good.

  “They were eventually caught when someone got away,” he continued. The boys all knew the story, but Griff was just so damned good at telling it.

  “This guy and his wife on horseback were on their way home from a fair when they were attacked on the road. The guy was tooled up with a sword and pistol, and managed to fight his way free, but not before his lady had fallen from the horse in the struggle and killed in front of him. He later told how the cannibals had slashed the woman's throat with their bone daggers and lapped up her blood like it was a fine wine, then they gutted her right there on the road.

  "At that point, the story goes, the guy bolted and rode furiously back to town. He returned later that same night with a group of thirty or so people and discovered what was left of the woman's body in the woods. There wasn’t a trace of any attackers.

  "A couple of days later, King James heard about it and sent a platoon of his soldiers
with bloodhounds to try and find the killers, and that’s when they discovered the caves. They say that the hounds wouldn’t go inside at first and had to be beaten by their masters, and that when they did get inside they found severed limbs hanging from the cave ceiling on hooks, big barrels of vinegar with more preserved body parts inside, piles of clothing, weapons and valuables taken from their victims. They say that the cannibals attacked them, and there was a brutal fight which left four of the soldiers and a bunch of the Beane family dead. When it was over, they rounded up Sawney, his wife Black Agnes and the forty or so surviving inbred relatives, and they were all carted off in chains and burned at the stake in Edinburgh.“

  It was taking all of Griff's concentration to keep his mind on the narrative. He could feel the chemicals from the acid coursing through his veins like a sweet lava, and found it increasingly difficult to keep his train of thought on track. He glanced at one of the candles and saw how the slight draft coming in from the beach was pushing the flame back and forth, making the tiny tongue of fire resemble a small, swaying dancer. He sat there silently rapt, oblivious to his friend’s expectant expressions, mesmerised by the subtle hallucination and having completely forgotten he was in the middle of telling a story.

  “And?” Sam prompted him.

  Griff jumped a little and looked at Sam as if he’d never seen him before.

  “And what?” he asked, having no idea what his friend was talking about.

  “The story. Finish the story,” Sam said, laughing.

  “Was I telling a story? What about?”

  Sam considered this for a few seconds, chuckling in his chest.

  “Shit man, I’ve no idea. These trips are awesome! Cairnsey, what was Griff's story about?”

  Cairnsey wasn’t listening. He sat there facing the wall and running his fingers along the rough surface, a fascinated look on his face. “Man, this rock feels like… like skin or something,” he was saying, apparently to himself. “Scaly, rough skin…”