The Merciless Dead

by John Burke

With hypnotic slowness the men fell into a steady anticlockwise shuffle. An eerie silence fell, so intense that Beth felt she had gone deaf, and yawned to clear her ears. The first sound to penetrate the hush was a rhythmic chant, emanating from Hunter yet without any visible movement of his lips. The men of the circle took up the theme one by one, growing louder and louder, then stopping abruptly while they resumed the silent shuffle with an air of rapt concentration.

  They had all gone into a trance. Beth felt the audience around her being lured into just such a hypnotic dream state. The only faint sound now was a mesmeric pulse of breathing, as if the earth itself were breathing in and out. Real life, the rhythms of the contemporary world, had been suspended. The silent, drifting movement of the ghost dancers was more terrifying than any military march played full blast by a phalanx of pipers.

  Jacques Hunter stooped, straightened up, stooped again, pacing dreamily around with his hands towards the earth, palms open in an entreaty for it to ‘roll back like a blanket’.

  Beth tried again to unblock her ears with a yawn; but felt a stab within her head like a sudden migraine, and somehow she was seeing Luke Drummond and he was trying to communicate with her, while in the background white men and Redskin braves were quarrelling along the boundaries of what she somehow knew to be an Indian reservation.

  All at once the vision was wiped out and sound was restored. The dancers moved faster, and began to sing more loudly, an incantation that was more a demand than a plea. The circle began to open out. It became a wide arc with Hunter at the centre, leading it towards James Fergus Ross, the ends beginning to curl slightly inwards like arms preparing to embrace the old man — or claws to trap him. Hunter’s invocation rose high above them.

  ‘Now is the time for truth to descend on the accursed Rosses.’

  Another wild shout clashed with the chanting: a screech that seemed too powerful to be coming from old Ross’s shrivelled body. ‘What sort of damfool game is this? For Christ’s sake, somebody, get these clowns off my land.’

  ‘Let the wasichus tremble,’ intoned Hunter, his arms appealing now not to the earth but to the heavens.

  ‘Wasichus?’ Ross was urging his chair aggressively forward over the lumpy ground, aiming straight at Hunter within the arc.

  ‘Stupid old bugger,’ breathed Randal — but admiringly.

  ‘Wasichus?’ howled Ross again. ‘We were the ones, the white men, who opened up your godforsaken —’

  The rest was drowned by the roar of a helicopter circling over the site, looking for a landing space. The old man’s fury was nowhere near the intensity of Jacques Hunter’s, shaking his fists high in the air and proclaiming in a high monotone imprecations against this blasphemous intrusion.

  The spell was broken. The audience fragmented, stumbling about, fending off bewilderment with derision. ‘What the shit was all that about?’ … ‘Who let that nut case take over?’ … ‘Watch him, God knows what he’ll …’

  As the helicopter settled on a level stretch in front of the old Rent House, there was a wild roaring and whooping from beyond the Raven Hotel. Randal grabbed Beth’s arm and dragged her out of the way as two young men on horseback galloped past, followed by a posse of youngsters laughing wildly and heading their mounts straight into the middle of the crowd as if on a hunt or embarking on their own Riding of the Marches.

  ‘Cowboys and Indians now?’ breathed Randal. ‘Just what the hell …’

  Beth found herself laughing hysterically. ‘It’s a rave. Sons and daughters of Mr Ross’s old enemies, out for a carve-up. Spoilt brats, out to smash things up. Summoned through the internet to trash the old man’s celebrations.’ She ought to have been angry at yet another disruption of all her constructive work; but by now it had all become too ludicrous.

  ‘They’ve left it a bit late.’

  As the riders thrust their way recklessly in and out of the crowd, a small coach swung into the car park, discharging a group of uniformed local police who dashed on to the arena. They were met by two men running from the helicopter. DCI Rutherford pointed at Jacques Hunter, who was making no attempt to flee. He stood there in frozen outrage, oblivious to the hoots and insults of the mounted teenagers and to the police converging on him, and disdaining to acknowledge the arrival of Rutherford or the words that he began reciting.

  ‘A caution?’ said Randal. ‘The man’s beyond caution now.’

  Nick Torrance stood isolated on a briefly open patch of moss, looking desperately from side to side.

  Beth was suddenly aware of Morwenna Ross lifting that device in her hand and levelling it at the makeshift croft which had been her own pet idea. A dramatic finale to the day’s programme.

  ‘No.’ Beth tried to draw Randal closer. ‘What d’you think she’s …’

  Mrs Aird was unobtrusively beside Morwenna, a hand on her arm. Her voice was quiet, but carried clearly. ‘It’s too late. Ye canna bring them back. That red man’s spells’ll no’ bring his land back the way it was. Blow up your silly little bothy, and the spirits of the folk ye’ve chosen as your own will somehow become flesh? Nae, lassie. Let them rest. Ye were never one o’ them. They canna be called up.’

  Morwenna hardly seemed to notice when Mrs Aird took the remote control from her.

  Two of the invaders rode up to the door of the cottage, looked at one another, grinned and nodded, and leapt from their horses to make a joint attack on the front door. For a few moments they were involved in a fight with someone inside who managed to drag them both out again, twisting the arm of one until the crack could be heard through the turmoil all around.

  Nick Torrance sprang forward and went in.

  The audience swayed to and fro, breaking up into groups, wanting answers to questions. Some people wanted to rush away, others to stay and find out what dramatic conclusion they might expect to their day. Yet as they drifted away to the edges of the arena, or out to the car park, the ground was unusually clean — a bare, bleak scene, eerily tidy, with none of the usual debris of drink cans and plastic wrappers.

  As Jacques Hunter was led away by two uniformed constables, Nick Torrance’s arm around his wife led her, stumbling across every tussock and rocky outcrop, to join Rutherford.

  The DCI looked her up and down and said: ‘If you’d still been on my team, you’d have been up on the carpet for this little bit of nonsense.’

  20

  Jacques Hunter had been driven away, silent, wrapped in his own unshakeable self-certainties and making no pretence of even listening to the questions Rutherford was asking. There would be plenty of other questions later, in suitably austere surroundings, but Rutherford saw a long, exasperating ordeal ahead.

  How could Hunter have gone about things so brazenly? ‘He must have known we’d catch up with him,’ he said to his Wester Ross opposite number, who was still trying to make head or tail of what had been happening. But for Hunter there had been no uncertainties. The self-belief that had got the man to the top in the business world ruled out any doubts on any other matter. There seemed to be little difference, Rutherford concluded, between a ruthless tycoon and a religious fanatic.

  Another police contingent was rounding up the men and women on horseback and herding them into a congested corner of the car park. Confused groups of the overseas visitors were demanding answers to questions about the debacle they had just gone through. There was all the resentment of a cheated football crowd wanting their money back.

  To Beth’s amazement, Morwenna Ross had come out of her own trance of disappointment and began moving from one group to another, soothing, apologizing; anxious to cling to some authority and to some lingering belief in what she had worked so passionately to achieve. Backing her up, old Ross urged his buggy along in her wake, with his two guards plodding behind.

  He came back at last to Beth and Randal, pleased with himself. He was the real James Fergus Ross once more, rejuvenated, coping, reclaiming authority, talking people into agreeing with him, acknowledging the fact that
, whatever might go wrong, he was still there, still able to set everything right with a peremptory snap of his fingers.

  What, thought Beth, would he make of being told that he was one of ‘the wrong Rosses’ — all his daydreams poisoned? She glanced at Randal and knew that he was thinking the same thing.

  Who was going to tell the old man now?

  ‘Should never have hired that bloody savage,’ were his first words. Then he looked from Randal to Beth and back again. ‘Come on, you two, let’s go where our whole story started.’

  The wheels of his chair bumped towards the rebuilt croft. From the reconstructed façade they looked back over the panorama of confusion.

  ‘And now,’ said Randal, ‘someone has got to tidy up that mess.’

  ‘I was thinking you’d be a great help.’

  ‘You know, sir,’ said Beth, ‘Morwenna is still on board. She’s been committed to you and the whole project from the start. You only have to put your faith in her, and she’ll go on believing in the Ross legend.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she? Legend? It’s all true, dammit.’

  ‘Depends which way you look at it,’ said Randal. ‘Or which bits you’re looking at.’

  ‘Son.’ Old Ross put his bony hands on his knees and stared up pleadingly. ‘You know you’ve got to come back in with me. The group needs you.’

  ‘But do I need the group?’

  ‘Look, David —’

  ‘Randal.’

  ‘Oh, all right, damn you. Randal. You didn’t like the way things were going. Okay, make them go differently. Make them go your way.’

  Randal laughed. ‘With you just sitting there and never blowing your top?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll raise my voice when I have to. I need someone to argue with. And so will you. Neither of us is the type to want yes-men who are really no-men forever plotting behind our backs.’ Then he let out something halfway between a laugh and sigh. ‘Oh, come on, let’s face it, I won’t be arguing with you or anyone else for long. You can see just what state I’m in. The day’s not far off when … aw, hell, the day’s right here now when I’ve got to give up. I can appoint a manager to handle routine business, but I want the Foundation to be bigger and better than that. To be in the right hands.’ His head turned coaxingly, again as perky as a little bird’s, towards Beth. ‘Come on, I can see you understand. You’ve been one of us for ages. You belong. You can tell him, can’t you? He owes it to us. There was a Ross family here in this croft. The family was driven off to the corners of the world, but we’re back again.’ He waved his hand like a feeble, fluttering wing at his son. ‘You’re back again. You can’t just walk away again.’

  There was a long silence. They watched groups break up and reassemble; saw Morwenna motionless in a cleared space, staring at the mock croft, such a travesty of the solid one at their backs.

  Nick Torrance was still holding Lesley’s arm, easing her towards a hummock on which she collapsed while he bent over her, talking — reassuring or accusing?

  ‘Well?’ asked old Jamie. There was a tinge of defeat in the question. ‘I’m asking if you want to be in on it. On your own terms … Randal.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Beth. ‘He does.’

  Randal protested. ‘Hey, now look here —’

  ‘You two,’ cried old Jamie gleefully, ‘are going to have arguments all the way. And it’ll all be worth it. Dammit, you only go on a white-knuckle ride because you want to have the shit scared out of you. And find it’s been fun.’

  ‘You,’ said Beth, ‘are a deplorable, conniving old man.’

  ‘From you, gal, I know a compliment when I hear one.’ The old man turned back to Randal. ‘With a wife like that, son, you won’t go far wrong. Now, make up your goddam mind.’

  ‘He’s already made it up,’ said Beth.

  *

  ‘Right,’ said Nick Torrance fiercely. ‘Time we went home. Where from now on you’ll stay put. Understood?’

  Lesley struggled to find something to say.

  Her whole being was still wrenched by guilt and terror, and a dreadful anger against herself.

  They stood outside the door of the croft which had not, after all, provided the spectacular display to end the proceedings. A few yards away the Indians were huddled by one of the camera rostrums, powerless without their leader.

  Nick Torrance was as white with anger as his wife, yet was on his knees beside her, still holding her tightly to him. ‘In future’ — his voice was shaking uncontrollably — ‘you’ll stay at home and find something sensible to occupy your time. No more going off on wild goose chases without backup. Your old mate Rutherford could have told you that, right?’

  ‘Right,’ she whispered.

  ‘Now let’s get out of this pathetic pageant.’ He waved in the direction of the helicopter. ‘Our chauffeur awaits. And it’s going to need a lot of drinks parties to pay him off.’

  Lesley was aware of a small, quiet figure beside them. She eased herself out of Nick’s arms and smiled awkwardly at Mrs Aird.

  The old woman said: ‘It was too late.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Aird. Too late for what?’

  ‘To bring them back. No way any o’ them can be summoned back. Nor are these the lands they’d care to return to.’ She looked up into Lesley’s face, her old eyes startlingly clear and bright. ‘And for you, be on your way and carry your son into the future.’

  ‘I haven’t got a son.’

  ‘But you have. Ye’re carrying him the noo. Be on your way wi’ him.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Nick protested. ‘I mean, you want us to believe … I mean’ — he stared at Lesley — ‘are you going to believe this sort of —’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lesley joyfully. ‘I do believe.’

  ‘Of course.’ Mrs Aird’s voice was as clear and radiant as her eyes. ‘Because you’re one of us. Ye have the gift. And ’tis fitting ye should tak’ this wi’ ye.’ From under her shawl she produced a small wooden picture frame. ‘This was left wi’ us by one o’ the true Rosses who’d been helped by my family until banished far away. I’ve cherished it, but the time has come to hand it on. You’re one of us,’ she repeated.

  Lesley took the frame and peered down on an embroidered sampler, its details blurred by tendrils of damp within the glass. She was able to make out simple but graceful patterns, dominated by a raven in the top right-hand corner. All at once she found herself guessing wildly that this was what they had all been vainly looking for.

  This scrap of humble local craft — the rumoured Ross Tapestry?

  She laughed at the absurdity of it, then was worried that Mrs Aird might be offended by the laugh. But the lines and blemishes of the old woman’s pitted, worn features had become smooth with a sweet tranquillity quite out of keeping with the turmoil which was gradually being sorted out around them.

  The red hue of the embroidered words across the bottom of the design had faded, but the text was still legible.

  Cha till mi tuille

  Through the clamour of voices still seething around her, Lesley heard a thousand echoes across the centuries of the words she found herself whispering:

  ‘We shall return no more.’

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