Preternatural: Carter Bailey Book 1

by Matt Hilton

  Broom scowled. “You have to understand that, though it may sound as whacky as hell, some of the people here have certain beliefs that would be laughed at by people living in the modern conurbations where computers and mobile phones and High Definition television are the order of the day.”

  That’s easy for you to say, I thought. In my own erudite way, I said, “Yeah.”

  In full flow - and an excuse to take even less notice of his motoring skills - Broom explained. “As you are probably aware, this island, as well as the other Shetland and Orkney islands, owe much of their heritage to Norse seafarers who settled communities here from the ninth century onwards.”

  “Vikings,” I said.

  Broom flicked his eyebrows. “We’ll call them Vikings if you like, but that is a very generic term used these days to determine a number of Scandinavian races. But anyway, that isn’t important for the purposes of what Stan was referring to.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. All you need to know is where the tales originated.” For some reason unknown to me, Broom changed gear, the engine whining in protest, then changed back to the original once more. “That is in Viking villages and communities.”

  When I didn’t respond, he cleared his throat. “Contrary to popular misconception the Vikings weren’t all axe-wielding barbarians who had nothing better to do than rape and pillage their way across half the known world.”

  “Damn,” I quipped. “My illusions shattered again.”

  Broom exhaled through flaring nostrils. “Obviously your knowledge of Norse lore is relegated to watching reruns of that old Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis hokum.”

  “Spartacus?” I asked, hiding my smile.

  “No, Carter. ‘The Vikings’.” Realising too late that he’d been had, he squinted at me. I was quick to nod his attention back to the road ahead. His driving was bad enough without taking his eyes off the road. He gave an exasperated hiss. “Most Vikings weren’t hairy-arsed berserkers; they were craftsmen, artisans, traders, but predominantly they were farmers.” When I didn’t argue, he went on, “As do many agriculturally led communities, they laid great importance on the successful harvesting of their crops. To ensure a bountiful harvest these people adhered to strict practices that included prayer and offerings to their large pantheon of deities and demigods. Now…again contrary to common belief, there is more to Norse mythology than Odin, Thor and Loki. There is a veritable sub-pantheon of lesser-known figures, spirits who resided in the mountains and forests, in the rivers and the land. Have you, by chance, heard the legend of the Haugbonde?”

  As I shook my head, he added, “Sometimes he is incorrectly referred to as the hogboon or hogboy.”

  Still didn’t mean anything to me. “Can’t say I’ve heard the story. What is he? Half-man, half-pig?”

  “Not at all. The name is a mispronunciation of the original Scandinavian dialect. The Haugbonde has nothing to do with pigs or anything else out of nature. Basically, he was, for want of a better term, a guardian spirit of the land.”

  After our earlier discussion of Zero Point Field’s, demon magnets and other preternatural powers, our conversation regarding Norse folklore barely raised a jitter of disbelief in my voice. “You’re going to tell me that Stan believes in this ‘hog boy’ and that he’s somehow responsible for the death of a child.”

  “Wait,” Broom said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “Fair enough. But I’m right, aren’t I?”

  Broom decelerated on his approach to a corner. On our right, the craggy hillside sped by, on our left the mist-shrouded waters of Yell Sound. If Broom didn’t slow down enough it was going to be a choice between hillside and sea. At the last second he gained control of the car and swept us around the bend. Back on a straight, he deemed it safe to continue. “The hogboy. Compound word, by the way, not the two the way you pronounced it. His legend is more particular to the Orkney Islands, but he also made it here to Conn, the tales carried here from the old Norse lands by the original settlers. Though generally seen as a benevolent figure, the hogboy also had a dark side. He reputedly lived in the mounds and hills, and he protected the domestic livestock from interference from the trow folk. He-”

  I held up a hand. “The trow folk?”

  “The Orkney and Shetland variant on the troll legend. Mean sons of bitches.”

  Inclining my chin, I allowed him to go on.

  “He - the hogboy, that is - protected the animals, the land, and was even said to fix household articles left out for repair.”

  “Sounds like a fairy tale I heard as a child,” I butted in. “The shoemaker and the elves.”

  Broom conceded the point with a grimace. “Could share a common source mythology. Who knows? Anyway, it’s not important. The point is, the hogboy, though normally benevolent, expected reward for his protection. He demanded liberal payment by way of large quantities of ale and milk, and the islanders repaid him by pouring them on to the mounds where he lived. As long as he was appeased in this manner, the hogboy was happy. Fail to give him his due, though, and it was an entirely different matter altogether.”

  “I’ve heard similar folk tales,” I said. “This spirit would then turn malevolent and torment the people, bringing disease and catastrophe.”

  “Uh-hu. There are further beliefs that hold more weight for the islanders. You will find them hard to accept, but, as I said, the islanders are of ancient stock and hold fast to the ancient beliefs.

  “Most importantly. Once dissatisfied, protection from the trow was removed by the hogboy. This left an opening for the evil little fuckers to lay waste to the land. Tales of the trow are abundant, primarily those where they stole pretty girls, or they replaced newborn children with changelings, or, if a person was sick, they stole away his spirit and hid it in the hollow hills where they lived, never to be found again.”

  Clucking my tongue apparently wasn’t a good idea.

  “I know, I know. Sounds foolish doesn’t it?” Broom gripped the steering wheel with renewed ferocity and spun us through a curve in the road. “But the signs have been presenting themselves of late.”

  “The signs? What, like omens?”

  “No. Like the unusual amount of deaths from pneumonia and such. A couple of stillborn births. The drowning of a crew of fishermen on an otherwise calm sea.” He lifted a hand off the wheel to stab at the air with a finger. “One of which, by the way, is the father of the child reportedly killed this evening.”

  Coincidence, I thought.

  Broom went on, “All of these deaths, not to mention the ungodly weather we’ve been experiencing of late, the islanders point the finger of blame at one thing; attracting the anger of the local hogboy.”

  Prudence was the best course in this matter, so I merely nodded along with Broom so he didn’t labour the point any further. “It all began last year with the excavation of a Viking settlement on the island. Despite warnings from the islanders, the archaeologists disturbed land reputedly guarded by the hogboy, attracting his ire. In response, the hogboy has loosed the trow on the land. Like Stan said back at the café, Carter. There has been talk. After a delay supposedly caused by the trow, the archaeologists have recently resumed their digging; the islanders said things could only get worse. The death of this boy has borne out their warning.”

  I looked across at him and saw that Broom had actually bought into the madness of the island prophesy. He shrugged, bobbed his large head. “I told you something was wrong on the island,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah. But we’re talking trow and hogboy’s here, Broom. Stuff straight out of fantasy.”

  “There are more things in heaven and earth than we dream of in our philosophy,” Broom reminded me by way of quoting Horatio.

  Which was why I now hovered at the periphery of a violent crime scene, searching for unnatural forms creeping with malicious intent through the woodland. Trying hard to validate my actions by telling myself I did so with huge skepticism and the intentio
n of proving how wholly wrong Broom was.

  NINETEEN

  Police office, Skelvoe

  On the wall of Shelly’s office, a framed photograph of her predecessor Sergeant Jack McVitie held dominance. Twenty years service on the island before succumbing to Parkinson’s disease at the relatively young age of fifty-three had given him the reputation of a firm but fair authoritarian. He was loved by the officers under his command, admired by the law abiding, and even earned the grudging respect of those hard-arses whose heads he’d bashed some sense into. He was the kind of sergeant who took no nonsense, but would bend a rule to suit the ongoing peace of the island if he saw fit. Tough as old boots, but with a heart of gold, people said. Definitely not the type to faint at the sight of blood - even if it was dripping from the stump of a child’s severed head.

  In the photograph, he was smiling as he held up a certificate of commendation, awarded him at a civic reception. He was the kind of man who wore his uniform with pride, looking dapper in silver-buttoned tunic, his greying hair cut especially for the ceremony. His smile was genuine, but there was something in his liquid eyes that spoke of his discomfort. As if he was thinking, ‘This is all well and good, but what are the bad guys up to whilst I’m wasting my time here?’ Shelly couldn’t meet McVitie’s gaze. Because, that was exactly how she felt he’d perceive her wasting time scrutinising the internet when she should be out there running down this sick-minded child killer.

  Clearing her throat didn’t help her conscience, but it did help get her mind back on track. Ignoring the reproving McVitie stare, she bent back to the computer. The police CMIS system hadn’t thrown up anything of interest about Carter Bailey that she didn’t already know. His date of birth, last known address etc. was as he’d told Bob and her the night before. A call to the PNC bureau on Yell hadn’t helped either. Now it was time for the less procedural route of a Google search.

  She keyed in the list criteria. Various pages kicked back. A few didn’t tell her too much, other than that he’d once been co-owner of a sports clothing firm. It raised an eyebrow when she saw the name of the company. Rezpect Sports. She was sure she had a pair of Rezpect training shoes in a cupboard back home. She also recognised his business partner, James Pender, as being a Wimbledon hopeful for a couple of years. There was nothing in these company editorials that gave any hint as to why Bailey was now traipsing around the moorlands of Conn looking as though permanently living out of a suitcase.

  She skimmed through further pages regarding Rezpect Sports, until she noted the pages dedicated to various tabloid newspapers and magazines.

  “Now then,” she whispered as she clicked onto the first page and took in the headlines. “Wouldn’t you just know it?”

  LOCAL MAN SOLE SURVIVOR OF FAMILY SLAUGHTER.

  Sucking in her bottom lip, she continued to read. Only two paragraphs in, she sat back frowning. The story wasn’t going the way she had expected. Carter Bailey wasn’t the perpetrator of this violent crime: he was a victim. A victim of the brutality of his younger brother, Cassius Bailey, who, it appeared, was subsequently killed during a fight between the siblings to protect Carter’s fiancée and unborn child.

  She recalled something about the horror of this tale. Remembered watching on TV shocking news bites centred on a derelict mill, a sudden blizzard and the disembowelment of a pregnant woman by a devil worshiping serial killer. Though taking the law into one’s own hands is severely frowned upon by the police in general, Shelly could recall her own feelings that Carter Bailey should have been awarded a medal for his destruction of his beastly sibling. The case had been debated in the squad room on numerous occasions, also over pints of beer in the bars where cops hung out after their shifts. Shelly and all her colleagues had silently, if not publicly, applauded Carter’s actions in drowning his murderous brother.

  Of course, as the media spin took hold, it wasn’t too long before doubt crept in. Maybe it was a little too convenient that Cassius took all the blame, and that the knife used to gut the woman had ended up in the river, destroying the validity of the forensic examination. Okay, Carter Bailey had received some pretty nasty wounds during his ordeal, but it was surmised that most of them could have been self-inflicted. The scars to his chest, though ugly, weren’t life threatening. The broken nose and the gouges to his eyebrow and scalp could have been a result of fighting off his brother whilst Cassius fought off his jealous brother.

  This line of thinking came from two undeniable truths. The woman, even pregnant as she was, was found to have the semen of the dead brother within her. Secondly, testimony from work colleagues of Carter Bailey said that there had been problems between the engaged couple. It was whispered that Carter Bailey had fled work in an agitated state, returned home and found his fiancée and brother in the throes of passion and from there had carried out his murderous vengeance on the two that had betrayed him.

  This theory was easily destroyed when it was announced that Cassius Bailey was the prime suspect in numerous similar deaths spanning a number of years and as many countries. The subsequent case file put together with the aid of Interpol had cleared Carter Bailey of all wrongdoing.

  Still, ugly rumours have the power to persist. There’s no smoke without fire, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, blood is the tie that binds, and numerous other clichés abound. There were still many that surmised that the brothers were both engaged in the brutal murder spree, and it was down to a falling out over the lust for Karen that saw their fight to the death.

  The theory had often been bandied around, until numerous other horrors took precedence of the news reports, and the exploits of Cassius and Carter Bailey were supplanted, effectively forgotten.

  “Until now,” Shelly spoke out loud.

  She glanced up at Jack McVitie, his fluid gaze oozing over her like an oil slick. She grunted. “See, Jack. I wasn’t wasting precious police time, after all.”

  She read further reports spanning the months following the incident at the water mill. Then clicked on an accompanying photograph depicting a worn down Carter Bailey stepping from a taxi parked at the entrance of a private hospital. Bailey’s dark hair was shorter than he wore it now, his face thinner. The scar on his eyebrow was a dark smudge that matched the rings beneath his eyes. And the eyes themselves; caught at an angle, the sun gave them a scarlet, diamond keen edge, as though someone else peeked from behind a mask at the gathered paparazzi.

  Shelly squinted at the image. Was that the same look she’d caught last night when Bailey had leaned into the car to say his goodbyes? Were those the eyes of a defeated soul or the barely repressed gloating eyes of a killer?

  “What’s it going to be, Carter?” she asked the image on the screen. “Are you really as innocent as they say, or were you and your brother partners in murder? Are you here now to take up where you left off?”

  No sooner had she voiced the thought than doubt crept in. Perhaps it was wrong for her to place the blame of this atrocious murder at the feet of a man whose only crime was to survive something as equally horrendous. Maybe if someone dear to her had been brutally tortured the way in which Bailey’s fiancée had, then she would be marked with a similar cast to her eye. Perhaps the look wasn’t the Mark of Cain as she’d first suspected, but the total dejection of his spirit.

  “Deus ex machina.” The expression leapt into her mind. ‘A god from the machine’. A phrase derived from a convention in ancient Greek drama whereby a god was lowered onto the stage by an elaborate piece of equipment to solve the problems and end the play. It was the modern equivalent of the dead soap star stepping out of the shower and the realisation that his supposed demise was all just a dream. Or the all too handy character in a mystery novel that just happens to turn up in time for the sleuth’s denouement. “Am I doing that to you, Carter Bailey? Am I making you the fall guy?”

  Shelly drew in a slow breath.

  “But, if that’s the case, why the hell do you frighten me so much?”

  TWEN
TY

  I know you for what you are, Carter Bailey. But should I fear you? You’re here to stop me, are you? Should I kill you now or later?

  I stood so close, listening to your conversation. But you didn’t notice me. Your writer friend has faith in your abilities to see the darkness in the souls of men, but your gaze slipped by me. Is it because you have no faith in what he says?

  You should listen to him. His teaching will only make you stronger. The stronger you become, the more satisfying it will be when I finally kill you.

  Serendipity, in the shape of Paul Broom, has brought you to me.

  Perhaps we will have found each other regardless. Destiny decrees the inevitable. But I must say, Broom’s inclusion has quickened the process, and we are going to meet soon. I watched you as you got off the ferry; I saw the look that you shared with Janet. I will be her ruination, as I will be yours.

  I watch you as you slink at the edge of the crowd. You wander alone. Vulnerable. Out of sight of the others. It would be soooo easy.

  Should I kill you now?

  Should I kill you later?

  My mind is made up.

  TWENTYONE

  Near Ura Taing

  “This is all a pile of crap,” I scolded myself.

  Broom was talking allegorically. He had to be. Hogboy and trow? Those were creatures out of Tolkien or the fairy tales of The Brothers Grimm. Surely, he was using the simile to explain the mindset of the real killer? Okay, I could accept that there could be a lunatic out there that believed he was some creature of legend, but the way in which Broom explained it told me he was talking genuine hogboy, genuine trow.

  That gave me cause for concern. Made me re-evaluate my take on my own mentality. I mean, it was the selfsame Paul Broom that believed that I was a vessel imprisoning the dark essence of my brother and that I had the capacity to unearth evil like I was some sort of paranormal bloodhound. It was Broom who’d supplied to me a very illegal SIG Sauer semi-automatic handgun in order to blast this evil back to hell. Kind of plays havoc with the old sanity chip, when the very same man had me out searching for hobgoblins and the like. The problem being, I was going along with him. I could stand there and tell myself that I was simply humouring my friend, that I owed him a debt of allegiance, but that wouldn’t excuse me from carrying a concealed firearm if any of the nearby police officers decided I was acting suspiciously enough that it would justify a stop and search.