The Nightmare Man: (Child of the Vodyanoi)

by David Wiltshire

  He switched on the source of light and clipped on the first slide. Mackay lowered the lens to just above the surface of the glass cover, and then with his eye to the eyepiece, focused the blurred image into sharp relief. The mass of cells before him were typical of a vaginal smear.

  He began to move the slide around. It took him only a few moments to find what he wanted. There, barely discernible because of their minute size, were clumps of cells with long fine filaments, like tadpoles. Sperm. So his gross findings were confirmed. The woman had been sexually assaulted.

  He consulted a reference grid on the slide, noted it, and made a quick sketch. For confirmation he undipped the slide and selected a second. Again he didn’t take long to fmd more sperm. He started to sketch, and then stopped, frowning.

  When his pencil moved on the pad again, it traced out shapes that Mackay had never seen before. Excitedly he moved the slide around, and then checked the others. There could be no doubt.

  The sperm, apparently human, contained a high proportion of strangely shaped anomalies. He sat back, puzzled. Suddenly, on impulse, he crossed to the small row of text books and periodicals contained on a single shelf.

  He was still there an hour later, turning over the pages of a fairly slim volume produced by the Department of Health and Social Security.

  Dunlop’s last patient cancelled because of the storm,, and Doris, snugly wrapped up in her coat, went off home, running through the near-deserted streets, blown along by the sleet-filled wind.

  He locked the front door behind her and then walked back down the corridor past the doorways to the surgery and the now empty waiting room. At the end of the hall he opened the door to the little laboratory and switched on the lights. The three impressions with the plaster piled on them, lay on the bench where Doris had left them.

  He picked one up and turned it over in his hand. The plaster was rock hard. Dunlop reached for the short plaster knife, and began to chip away at the edges until the impression loosened. Like opening an oyster he inserted the knife into the edge and twisted. The two halves fell apart.

  He switched on the flexible bench light and held the casting under it. It was distorted, blurred, but one thing was immediately recognizable. Dunlop found himself looking at human teeth shapes.

  He moved it around, deciding that they were lower incisors. Two, he could differentiate clearly, and the ones on either side, although they were distorted.

  Then something odd struck him. Where the upper incisors should have been was a bent ridge of plaster, obviously representing something man-made, but like nothing he had ever seen in the mouth before. And despite its crumbling border he could see that it came to a razor-sharp edge. Utterly baffled, he opened a second casting and found much the same. The third one was useless.

  Dunlop slumped on to the high stool and rubbed his jaw. It didn’t make sense. Nobody could have that in his mouth. It was too big. Having said that to himself he suddenly had a thought.

  Finding a pen and a sheet of his notepaper on his surgery desk he hurried back through the empty building, now resounding to the hammer blows of the gale, and sat down again on the stool.

  He began to draw, trying to prove to himself how the arrangement of the strange ridge to the lower teeth must look in closed occlusion from the side. All the time he referred to the castings before him..

  Eventually he took care with one drawing, finely shading in the teeth. Dunlop picked up the finished sketch and stared at it for a long time before he slowly lowered it back to the bench. He didn’t seem to like what he saw.

  Dunlop glanced at his watch, stood up and reached for one of the mailing bags they used to send work back and forth to the dental laboratory in Glasgow. He put the models in and added his last sketch.He locked everything up and got into his coat.

  It was only as he opened the front door did he realize how ferocious the storm had become.

  There was no demarcation between sea and sky; there hadn’t been even before nightfall. The Chieftan was rolling and pitching to a degree the Captain and crew had never before experienced. The bows dropped again into the boiling ocean, plunging on down to a frightening depth. To the men from the Regional Crime Squad it gave the awesome impression that it would never come up again. Grimly they held on to the iron bulkheads, most of them too ill to really care.

  The ship shuddered as though it had struck the bottom, and then slowly the bows came up, gathering speed and lifting into the air, throwing a curtain of water back over the bridge.

  The Captain strained to see through the window, the vertical wiper working backward and forward at maximum speed. It was worse than he had expected.

  The mountainous seas had struck them as soon as they had cleared the shelter of the inner islands. Hoping that things might improve he had kept on into the teeth of the wind. Now, the spray and the sleet were as one as the Chieftan fought her way north.

  There seemed to be no sign of an abatement in the force of the wind, and he had to have better visibility if there was to be any chance of getting into Inverdee. He checked the bridge clock. They were already half an hour late. By rights the lights at the end of the loch should be clearly in view by now. He moved to the radar plot and confirmed their position, and was turning back to his window when he saw it looming black and half submerged on the top of a white breaking wave one hundred yards ahead.

  It disappeared into an enormous trough.

  The Captain’s screamed order caused the helmsman to spin the wheel frantically, turning the ship to starboard as the First Officer ran to the engine telegraph.

  Then there was a frightening silence, even the wind seeming to stop for a moment as everyone stared in horror at the climbing bows. Another great wave rolled on and under them. The point of the bows hesitated, and then began to dive down into the watery abyss.

  There was nothing there.

  For a split second the Captain wondered if he had. been seeing things, staring for too long in a state of extreme anxiety. Then with an awful certainty he knew that something was just beneath the surface.

  The ship dropped dead weight into the dark valley, and then seemed to snatch and veered unnaturally to the right. The sea erupted into a boiling mass surrounding black twisted metal that crashed against the side of the Chieftan and dragged rearwards with a scream of grinding metal.

  The Captain ran to the side of the bridge as it passed. It was wreckage, but of what? He turned back to the First Officer.

  “Damage parties on the double. Make pumps. Helmsman, steer one-eighty.”

  Chieftan came around slowly as down below water blew in through a gash in the hull just above the water line. It ceased abruptly as the hull lifted clear of the sea, only to blow in again like a fire hose as Chieftan’s bows crashed down.

  In the forward cargo hold the crew waded through water already up to their knees, hanging on grimly for support as the room rocked wildly. They reached the torrent of water and started a desperate struggle to plug the gaping hole in the side.

  Chieftan came around and with the wind and sea running with her headed back for shelter in her home port. The Captain, satisfied that everything was under control, went below.

  He found the damage control party, sweat-stained, struggling with wooden props that supported rough leather patches filling the gashes. Water reached to his thighs as be waded across to the Chief. Engineer, who had rigged temporary electric inspection lamps on a running line.

  He nodded at the patches, through which water streamed at a fast rate.

  “How are we doing?”

  The Engineer, a craggy faced man with oil ingrained into his skin, wiped his hands on a rag.

  “She’ll hold. I’m thinking. Since we came about, the pressure’s been less.”

  The Captain patted him on the shoulder.

  “Goodman.”

  He looked at the water level.

  “Pumps working all right?”

  The Engineer nodded.

  “It’s going down n
icely.”

  The Captain had another look around, and then prepared to go.

  “I’ll buy you a drink in the Station Hotel when we get back, Andy, and I reckon we’re going to be doing that for some time.”

  The Engineer wiped the rag on the back of his neck.

  “That’d be nice.”

  The Captain waded back to the iron ladder that led aloft, put a foot on it, then stopped.

  “Any idea what it was?”

  The Engineer pointed at a pile of twisted metal.

  “That sheared off when it came in. We’ve stacked it there for identification.”

  The Captain released his grip on the ladder and splashed across for a closer look. He ran his hand on a strangely shaped section:

  The Chief Engineer joined him.

  “What do you make of it?”

  The Captain steadied himself as the ship rolled.

  “Not off a vessel is it? More like an aircraft tailplane do you think?”

  “Ay, I was wondering that myself. But an aircraft would’na be heavy enough to hole us, would it?”

  The Captain shrugged his shoulders non-committally.. “Maybe, maybe not. Can’t say I’ve seen this son of shape before, and I’ve picked up some aircraft bits in my time.”

  He took hold of one of the twisted plates and lifted it, judging its weight.

  “This is really solid. Looks more like part of a bomb fin to me.” '

  The Engineer wiped at it with his rag.

  “Do you think we’ve run over one of those missile things?” They looked at each other in awestruck silence.

  ★

  The pools of light from their torches began to show the awful sticky glutinous covering to the wrecked interior. Neither man spoke for a moment, as they looked at the blood-soaked room. Inskip let his breath fall away in an audible sigh of resignation.

  “Damn it, this is terrible.”

  It seemed a strange thing to say, but Robertson understood. Both continued to look around and were not moving when the sound came—from the next room.

  They froze, looking at each other, checking to see that they had heard right. Robertson wordlessly nodded confirmation.

  Inskip swallowed, and whispered, “Could it have been the wind?”

  Robertson never answered.

  This time something in the next room fell over. No way could it have been the wind.

  Surrounded by the evidence of insane violence, Inskip, tough though he was, felt decidedly shaky. Not for the first time he was glad of the presence of the bulky Robertson, who was reaching for a chair leg lying loose on the floor.

  The Inspector followed suit and armed himself. They moved slowly to the door leading into the bedroom. Inskip was aware of a totally alien feeling, a realization that he had no idea what to expect, only a ghastly expectancy.

  They let the door swing open, fists and sticks ready to lash in self-defence.

  The wind continued to moan, but nothing came from the blackness. The door wasn’t wide enough for them to go through together. Inskip gritted his teeth and knew it would have to be him first; it came with the rank.

  He uttered a silent prayer and started to edge into the room. As his face came around the door there was a sudden bloodcurdling snarl.

  9

  The snow came in a white torrent, covering the ground in minutes, sticking to the sides of houses, telegraph poles, trees and sheep. In half an hour, driven by the gale force wind, great drifts began to build at the side of the roads.

  It took Inskip and Robertson a nerve-racking two hours to get back to Inverdee with their grotesque find in a cardboard box. Inskip found himself turning from staring at the blinding snow racing towards them in the headlights, to look in fascinated horror at the box as it jiggled around on the bumpy floor, the lid waving open, her great wide eyes looking mockingly straight up at him.

  He remembered the awful moment when they had first seen her, blood flecked lips pulled back over her teeth in an obscene grin. Sheila Anderson’s head was bodiless, lying on the pillow of her bed with Whisky beside it growling at them.

  And then there was the nightmare decision to bring it back with them, for Mackay to confirm it belonged to the torso. When the moment came to pick it up, Inskip, bile lifting into his throat, found the only possible, practicable way was by her ... its... hair.

  As he had grasped the cold, damp mass and taken up the strain, the head had stuck by its congealed blood to the bedspread. It had suddenly come loose, the face tilting up to look at his hand. He had dropped it, and had shamefacedly to start again.

  The dog was mad. It wouldn’t come to them, lunging with foam-covered teeth at their outstretched hands. Rather than let it die of starvation, or attack sheep, Robertson had brained it with his chair leg.

  The wheels lost their grip again, the back of the Land-Rover coming around as though eager to overtake the front. Robertson carefully eased off the accelerator and steered into the skid. As soon as the vehicle straightened out, he put his foot gently back on the pedal, the four wheel drive smoothly pulling away. Twenty yards further on he had to execute the same procedure, only this time the back tried to pass on the other side.

  When they finally went by the entrance to the golf club, and fifteen minutes later the first outlying houses of Inverdee, he began to breath more easily.

  The snow was whirling around in the wind, rising upwards- in white columns that poured up over grey slate tiles like milky water, and blew away in the downward torrent.

  They reached Doctor Mackay’s detached, grey-stoned house, its double-bayed windows facing out over the little town. Inskip struggled up the path, shoulders hunched against the driving snow. He pressed the door bell but couldn’t hear if it rang above the noise of the wind in his ears.

  When the door opened he was swept into the large hall in a flurry of snow. Jenny Mackay, a short frail woman in her fifties, strained to close the door. He leant over her with one arm and pushed it shut.

  “That’s a bad one out there, Mrs Mackay.”

  She turned towards him, her little round face flecked with snowflakes.

  “It is indeed, Duncan. Was it the doctor you wanted?”

  Inskip nodded.

  “Not as a patient. I expect you know he’s helping us out with some police work?”

  Jenny gave him a reproachful look.

  “My husband doesn’t discuss his work with me, unless I can be of help to him. But he did say he was concerned about something, and told me to make sure the house is always locked when he’s out. That was unusual, I must say.”

  Inskip shifted uncomfortably.

  “Ay, that’s good advice. Is he in just now?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, he came home during the afternoon and spent all his tea time looking through his books. I asked him if there was anything he was concerned about, but he was too obsessed in looking up something that I just gave up in the end. It was then though that he suddenly upped and warned me to be careful about leaving the house undone! He went straight back to the hospital about an hour ago, to the path, lab.”

  Inskip experienced an odd sense of foreboding. He wondered what other problems the good doctor had turned up for him. Almost immediately he felt irritated with himself. The whole thing was getting through to him.

  “I’ll be getting along there then. I’ve got something for him.”

  “Could you do me a favour, Duncan?”

  “Yes.”

  She moved a small table and tore off a sheet from the top of a pad.

  “He should see to this lady as soon as possible. It’s quite urgent. Perhaps you could give him the message, then he could visit her on the way home.”

  “Of course.”

  Inskip reached out to take it when he had a sudden thought.

  “Is the ’phone not working?”

  Jenny Mackay shook her head.

  “No. It’s been out of action some ten minutes. No doubt it’s the storm.”

 
He agreed, and cursed his luck under his breath as he fought his way back down the now non-existent path to the Land-Rover, its engine running, wipers working steadily. He knew from past experience that severe line failures on the island took a long time to repair.

  As soon as he was in, Robertson slipped in the clutch and started a slow move, frightened of being bogged down.

  “Where to, sir?”

  “The hospital.”

  As they drove away, Inskip was glad he hadn’t carried the cardboard box up to the house with the heavy contents moving and banging about inside as he slipped and slithered on the path.

  Dunlop and Mackay looked up expectantly when Inskip walked into the path. lab.

  The box under his arm immediately took their attention, and automatically, from its size, they guessed its contents.

  Inskip nodded. “Ay, it’s a head. I’d like you to confirm if you can, Doctor, that it’s the right one.” He smiled without humour. “For all I know the island might be full of them.” Mackay picked up the box and turned to the door leading into the theatre.

  “Just a moment.”

  When he was gone, Inskip sank down uneasily on a chair, indicating for Robertson to do likewise.

  “The bloody weather could’na be worse. No doubt the ferry’s delayed and now the ’phones have gone.

  “Life’s getting too hectic. I think I’ll ask for a transfer back to the Gorbals and a bit of peace.”

  Dunlop grunted sympathetically.

  “Like a cup of tea? There’s some left in the pot.”

  “That’d be grand.”

  Dunlap poured out a cup for him and Robertson.

  “Sugar?”

  “Thanks.”

  Dunlop put the cups and sugar bowl before them, then took a deep breath.

  “I’m afraid your troubles don’t just end there.”

  Inskip halted the sugar spoon in mid air and looked up uncertainly.

  “What do you mean?”

  Dunlop scratched at his cheek.

  “We’ve detected some rather alarming facts about the murderer.”