In the Devil's Name

by Dave Watson

  “Calm down, Phil, you’re okay. I’m on my way and I’ve phoned the police and an ambulance. Now listen to me, are you badly hurt?”

  “I’m cut in the arm dad, Griff tried to eat me and I can’t see very well and there’s lots of blood and I’m cold and I’m scared…”

  “Phil, Phil, Listen to me. You need to find something to put on the cut, a jumper, anything and press hard on it. Take your belt off and fasten it tight above the wound. Lie down and raise your legs above your body…”

  “…I love you dad…”

  “Phil, PHIL! Stay on the line, please son, don’t go. Listen to me. I’m coming for you. Just lie down and…”

  “They ate him dad… in the devil’s name… and m’ sleepy now….”

  “No, stay with me, son, please try and stay awake, its okay…”

  “He spoke to me… afta they cut his head off… how’d tha’ happn’…”

  The tunnel in his eyes was getting longer every second and now he couldn’t speak anymore. So tired.

  Just before he faded away he could hear sirens in the distance and his father crying on the phone.

  The mobile fell from Phil’s lifeless fingers.

  Chapter 20

  When I woke up I was in a hospital bed.

  As before, I hoped upon waking that it had all been a nightmare. Then again, the reality of my situation became apparent.

  My dad was sitting at my bedside. The painkillers they had given me made my mind feel like a damp sponge, but I recalled all that had happened. If it hadn’t been for the sluggish way in which my brain was working, I might have started screaming at the memory. As it was though, I could only close my eyes and moan a bit.

  “Phil?” dad was saying. “It’s okay, you’re safe now. It’s over.”

  I cried for a bit then. Two of my best friends were dead, and for all I knew, so was Griff. I’d really hit him hard with that log. I’d killed Sam. My closest friend since we were five years old.

  My dad didn’t say anything for a while. He just sat there holding my hand and letting me cry. What could he say, really? It was like those situations at funerals where you have to queue up and shake the hands of the deceased person's close relatives and offer some meaningless sympathetic gesture.

  After a while I stopped.

  “Is Griff alive?” I asked my father.

  A strange look passed over his face.

  “Yeah, he’s alive, Phil,” he said, although I caught the cautious look on his face, as if he wasn’t sure of the answer himself.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about it right now, son. Just relax and enjoy all these free drugs they’re pumping into you,” he joked in an attempt to lighten me up.

  “I need to know, dad. Please tell me. Where’s Griff?”

  My dad's weak smile slipped off his face and he sighed.

  “They’ve arrested him. Phil, you need to rest, son.”

  I could tell he still wasn’t telling me all he knew though.

  ”I need to know now, dad.”

  He must have seen something in my eyes. I really did need to know.

  “When we found you,” he said falteringly, “Griff was there. He was… at Sam.”

  I was confused for a second, my drugged mind struggling to comprehend my father’s meaning.

  “At Sam?”

  I saw the horror in dad’s haunted eyes. A look I could identify with. Then I understood.

  “He was eating him, wasn’t he?”

  My dad just turned his head away.

  “Get some sleep, son,” he said, stroking my brow. “You’re going to need your strength.”

  I drifted away again.

  When I next awoke, surfacing slowly from a strange dream where fast, dark things clawed and bit far below the earth, my dad was still there, but he was accompanied by a policeman.

  My head was still foggy. I had no perception of time. As far as I knew I could have been lying in that hospital bed for weeks.

  “What day is it?” I asked.

  “It’s Sunday, Phil,” my dad said. We had gone camping on the Friday night. It had only happened two days before. “How are you feeling?”

  I let out a brittle laugh.

  “Wonderful.”

  I looked up at the copper standing over my bed. It was Sergeant Stephen Grace; well known long time resident and top cop in the bustling metropolis of Ballantrae. He was a big man, solidly built with short cropped iron grey hair and a fearsome, craggy face that made you think of Clint Eastwood when he's pissed off. He had kind eyes though at that moment, and he wore a sympathetic expression. Then it hit me.

  I had killed Sam. Was I going to be arrested?

  Sergeant Grace seemed to understand me.

  “Just want to let you know Phil, that there’s nothing to worry about. Your friend Dean has told us everything that happened. He’s signed a full confession. There'll be no charges pressed against you for the killings. As for the drugs we found at the campsite, we’ll need to speak to you about that in time. I know you’ve been through hell, but it’s my job just to ask you a few questions later, alright?”

  I just nodded. Fine, deal with it later then.

  The big copper awkwardly gave me a pat on the shoulder, nodded to my dad and retreated from the room.

  After a while, I slept again and dreamed of a bright light that seemed to speak to me in a language that I didn’t understand, yet I felt no confusion. Only peace. There was strength in that voice, but there was also madness and the potential to destroy.

  Chapter 21

  When I got out of the hospital some weeks later it was like starting a new life. It felt like I’d been reborn, but not in the Christian way people usually associate with the term.

  My life had changed completely. Before that night at Bennane head, I’d been getting ready for another summer. I’d just left school, was confident about the upcoming exams, planning on going to university in September. I had my mates, the weather had been cooking, and it was all good times.

  Now there was this.

  When I’d come out of my morphine induced, trance like state, Sergeant Grace came back, and I told him everything I could remember. He listened patiently to it all, never rushing me or interrupting. I didn’t tell him about Cairnsey's severed head talking though. Told myself that that hadn’t happened, that I was just in shock and had imagined it.

  When I’d finished, he said he was satisfied with my version of events and then he told me what he knew.

  When I’d called my dad from Bennane Head that night, my father had phoned the police from his mobile and then jumped in the car. They’d arrived to find me unconscious in the tent, lying in a pool of blood. They’d also found Griff dismembering Sam's body with the machete.

  Griff, he told me, had attacked the horrified constables and had killed one of them before the other cop had managed to overpower him and knock him out cold.

  I remember the strange, scared look on Sergeant Stephen Grace’s face when he told me about that.

  “Big Ally, my constable, told me the boy moved so fast he couldn’t believe it. Like it was impossible, the way he was just on them in a second.”

  With Griff unconscious in the back of the police car, and my panicked father on the scene, the paramedics had loaded me into the ambulance and revived me. My heart had stopped for almost a full minute.

  In the hospital I had emergency surgery on my arm, which they say I almost lost due to a particularly virulent infection, the likes of which they’d never seen before.

  I remember nothing of this. The last memory I have before waking up in the hospital was seeing Sam lying at my feet, grinning up at me with the machete buried in his temple.

  The police found five bodies in total. Sam they found at the campsite. The mutilated remains of Cairnsey, John Mcacbe, Eddie Jannets and Bunny Kerr were discovered by police with sniffer dogs inside the caves beneath Bennane Head.

  At the time, that had thrown me comp
letely. What the fuck were those three junkies doing there? I had no memory of encountering them that night.

  At the police station, a securely shackled and restrained Griff had calmly and smilingly related the events of the evening in great detail.

  He confessed to the murders of Constable Sean Hogan and John Mccabe.

  According to him, Jannets, Mccabe and Kerr had attacked himself, Cairnsey, Sam and me in the caves after I had passed out from the effects of alcohol and cannabis. Cairnsey, Jannets, Macabe and Kerr all died in the ensuing violence.

  Griff took full responsibility and relieved me of any involvement, other than as a victim. He told the cops that me killing Sam was self defence, and that he and Sam had chased me through the woods, fully intending to murder and eat me the second they found me.

  The cops asked him if he still wanted to eat me.

  He replied he wanted to eat everyone.

  I was questioned about the bag of Thai stick and the pencil case full of pre rolled spliffs that the cops found, but I was never charged with anything, even though I said that it was mine. We’d all chipped in to buy the weed, but you don’t grass on your mates, even if they are dead or insane.

  It was huge news for a while, how three promising young students, fresh out of high school and about to sit their final exams, had gone on a murderous spree in a small town in Scotland, killing three local drug addicts, one of their own number and a policeman.

  “SAWNEY BEANE CANNIBAL MURDERS IN AYRSHIRE – 6 DEAD” the headlines screamed.

  “MUTILATED REMAINS FOUND IN CAVE OF LEGENDARY KILLER BEANE” and so on.

  With a full confession from Griff, the cops could wrap it up and put the whole mess behind them. The official verdict was that as a result of a huge overdose of powerful lysergic acid diethylamide, (LSD to you and me) Griff, Sam and Cairnsey had become disassociated with reality and murdered Jannets and his cronies in a deranged hallucinatory state before turning on each other. Just the tragic result of some bad trips gone very wrong.

  The case was closed anyway. Griff was sent to a high security psychiatric ward in Glasgow. I wasn’t even summoned to court as a witness. They said there was no need. The whole thing, from start to finish took less than a week. Griff was already banged up in a secure privately owned psychiatric ward by the time I got out of the hospital. Even back then I was surprised at how swiftly the usually painfully slow justice system had functioned.

  Griff had also told the police about Ozay, the guy who we were supposed to meet to buy the trips from. They checked it out, but there was no record of any dealers going by that name, fake or otherwise. They spoke to Barnsey as well, who Cairnsey had called when we were at Bennane Head. Barnsey said he hadn’t spoke to Cairnsey that night and that he’d never heard of anyone called Ozay.

  The media wanted to speak to me of course, but I never entertained them, and soon something horrible happened somewhere else, and there were new stories to chase. The whole mess died down pretty quickly, considering.

  When I left the hospital I didn’t leave the house for almost two months. Most of that time I spent in my room with a lot of lights on, day and night.

  I cried a lot and even wet my bed a couple of times. The first few weeks were the worst. I refused to sleep because of the nightmares and took a lot of speed just to keep me awake, but that made me too alert. I couldn’t stop thinking. I was paranoid as fuck. Anywhere I went in the house I had to have lights on. And when I did fall asleep out of sheer nervous and physical exhaustion, I’d have fevered dreams that were like postcards from hell. Most of these were centred around the cave at Bennane Head, and though there were countless terrifying variations, there was always a recognisable dark shadow that capered and shifted, never in full view but glimpsed only peripherally. Always, this presence, this entity, would be on the edge of the nightmare, never actively partaking but overseeing the bloody mayhem that ensued in my mind every night for dark uncounted weeks.

  I regressed to the mental state of a child; terrified of an open wardrobe in the night. Certain that a hungry skittering something would come sniggering out of the dark and take me.

  Eventually my dad got me to see a therapist. I stopped taking speed, swapping amphetamines for anti depressants and sleeping pills, and things got a little better. The nightmares became less frequent, although they lost none of their terrifying potency when they did come.

  I started smoking cigarettes as well, which pissed my dad off a bit I could tell, but he never said anything. I guess he figured that I’d enough on my plate without him nagging me.

  In between the slowly decreasing bouts of nightmares and waking paranoia, I would occasionally have the dream of the strange light that I’d first experienced in the hospital. Always there was the same reassuring, yet dangerous feeling of power that seemed to come off this disembodied, whispering glow like waves on an oscilloscope. Though I didn’t understand it, it somehow gave me a little island of peace when all around me was a typhoon battered ocean of darkness where unspeakable things swam.

  The funeral was bad.

  Going to the funeral of two of your best friends is tough when you’re eighteen. I found it tougher than my mother's funeral, which I’d attended at the age of just ten.

  It was agreed between the parents that Sam and Cairnsey would have a joint service as the boys had been such good mates and to avoid dragging out the misery.

  The one thing about the funerals was that I knew what music Sam and Cairnsey had always wanted played at their service. We’d had this conversation one night when a few beers had made us morose and we’d been talking about death. As a tribute to my friends, I’d contacted the crematorium where the service was to be held in advance and made sure that their wishes were carried out.

  Cairnsey had chosen When the Music’s Over by The Doors as his exit music, and Sam, always the wise ass, had insisted that he’d be cremated to the tune of The Prodigy’s Firestarter. His mum Maria, from whom Sam had inherited his sense of humour, smiled through her tears as the heavy, thumping dance tune had played, and later thanked me for it, saying she could think of nothing more fitting for her boy.

  I’d like to say I was stoic and dignified during the service, but I can’t. I was a wreck. I wept and sobbed like a child and had to leave. Maria came and found me in the graveyard, curled up on the ground behind a tombstone. God bless that woman, but she sat down on the wet grass and took me in her arms, holding and comforting me like I was a squalling infant and wept right along with me. She’d known me since I was no more than a toddler, and I’d killed her only son. Neither of us spoke a single word. We just sat there and cried together.

  In August, three months after it had all happened, I got a letter from Griff. The letter was short, only a few sentences.

  Alright mate,

  How’s life going back home? Did you pass the exams ok? Guess I won’t be going to uni as planned though, eh? Haha!

  I’d like to see you, Phil. I know you must be pretty wound up about what happened, but maybe if you come and see me, I can shed a little light.

  Come soon, bud.

  Griff.

  Chapter 22

  I knew I had to go.

  The whole thing just didn’t make sense to me. We’d taken acid plenty of times in similar circumstances; camping out in the woods or in a field outside of town, so it wasn’t like the guys had been new to the experience and had lost their minds, going on a killing spree. I remembered Sam and Griff chasing me through the forest that night. They’d been focused and single minded in their hunt, and anyone who’s ever had a strong dose of acid will tell you it’s near impossible to concentrate on anything for more than a minute or so once the trips kick in. God knows how Aldous Huxley managed to write The Doors of Perception.

  Point was, it was hard for me to believe the guys had simply wigged out and suddenly turned to eating raw human flesh as the result of a bad trip. Acid just doesn’t do that, I don’t care how many tabs you’ve swallowed.

&nbs
p; I figured Griff, completely nuts as he now apparently was, might have some answers. Back at Bennane head, when we’d fought at the campsite, he’d told me he wasn’t tripping, yet I remember in the caves, before I passed out, how he and the guys had been falling about laughing and going on about the candle flame looking like a dancer and how weird the surface of the cave wall had felt. That was classic trippy behaviour. There were too many questions I didn’t know the answers to, and I needed closure before I could move on with my life, such as it now was.

  Another thing was, I missed him.

  Strange as it may sound, seeing as he’d tried to kill me, but friends are friends, and since that night when my world had turned upside down, I’d been without the guys I’d grown up with. The guys who I’d shared so much with and who’d helped to shape the person I was, as I had with them. That’s what friends are to me. Like the family you pick for yourself.

  I needed a connection to the life I had before Bennane Head, and besides, I felt bad that I'd been too fucked up to go and visit Griff already. Mates are mates.

  Chapter 23

  A few days later, I found myself at the highly secure private mental hospital on the outskirts of Glasgow which was Griff’s new home. I was checked in at reception, had my picture taken and was given a plastic visitor’s badge with my photograph on it which I clipped to my shirt. A pretty female nurse came and collected me from the foyer, then led me through a baffling maze of clean, antiseptic smelling beige coloured corridors and down a few flights of stairs to a small visiting room where my friend was waiting for me.

  Griff looked pretty much the same. His hair was a bit longer, and he’d lost a bit of weight, and there seemed to be a new firmness around his jaw. Other than that he was just Dean Griffiths, heir to the Earldom of Ayrshire and all round clever clogs. My pal.