‘Nothing to concern you, Mother.’
‘Alasdair’s a good boy,’ she said, looking at Davy and then his father. ‘He’s always been good to the auld folk.’
‘Mother,’ said McLeod with a smile and a shake of the head. ‘Hush now.’
He turned to Dr Fraser and dropped his voice.
‘I’m sorry for Mother,’ he said. ‘She does not always know what is going on these days.’
‘I understand,’ said Davy’s father. ‘There’s no need to apologise. You were telling us about the Stone.’
‘Och, there’s nothing more to say really,’ said McLeod, putting his glass down. ‘But I must ask you to humour us in this matter and stay clear of the dunes and the Stone. ’
There was a change in McLeod’s manner as he spoke. Davy was aware of a new earnestness in the man’s voice, almost as if he were warning them of something. His mind went back to Murdo – the man with the shotgun.
These people are crazy, Davy thought, crazy enough to shoot a person for walking on a patch of ground they think is special for some stupid reason.
‘And another thing,’ said McLeod with a rather forced smile. ‘Should you be tempted to go round the dunes on to the beach beyond, be aware that the tide comes in awful quick there and the current is fearful strong. It’s best avoided altogether.’
With that, McLeod got to his feet and smiled, rubbing his hands together, and said that it was time he and his mother left them in peace. If there was anything they needed – anything at all – they had only to ask. His house was just a quarter of a mile away.
g
The following weeks dragged slowly by for Davy. He looked forward to the end of the holidays when he would return to the mainland to go to school, although even that was not without its negative aspects, for it was a new school and Davy did not make friends easily. In fact, at his last school, he had not made friends at all.
His father’s enthusiasm for the island was infuriating. The more boring Davy found it to be, the more his father would trumpet the discovery of some new bay or hill or patch of peat bog.
And if the days were dull, then the nights were interminable. The island was further north than Edinburgh and so the summer days seemed to stretch on for ever, as a strange twilight lit the land at ten o’clock at night.
Davy had difficulty sleeping and resented the fact that there was this gift of extra daylight hours without the least use to put it to. And even if there had been anything to amuse him, he wouldn’t have been given the opportunity to make use of it, because his father still insisted on enforcing his bedtime.
Many a night Davy would lie awake, staring at the ceiling, staring at the curtained window and the glow that lit its floral pattern, seething with resentment, fuming with anger at his father for bringing them to this godforsaken place.
It was on one such twilit night that Davy got up from his bed, unable to sleep, and went to the window. Pulling back the curtains, he looked out over the bay, the sea a strange mother-of-pearl hue, more like burnished metal than water.
There was something so unearthly about that daylight that was not quite daylight; it gave everything an ominous look.
His attention moved to the Clach Crotach – the Hunchback Stone – and its forbidden dunes. An idea suddenly occurred to Davy and he smiled. Why had he not thought of it before?
g
The next day could not have been more different to the eerie stillness of the previous night. The Atlantic Ocean was wild and flecked with white foam. Brooding clouds capped the far hills and a fierce wind whistled round the eaves of the house and bullied the few twisted trees that stood about it.
Davy set off along the track as soon as breakfast was over and his father had left for the fisheries. Dr Fraser had grinned happily when Davy had told him that he intended to go for a run. At last the boy seems to be accepting this place a little, he thought. At last he seems to have stopped moping about.
Davy walked a short way up the track before running away from the house and away from town and past the Hunchback Stone. After about a mile he turned off on to a narrow path that led down to the shore.
He ran between two dunes, his feet sinking in the soft sand, the dune grass whistling in the wind. He ran on to the open white sand that stretched out in a kind of dreamlike blankness in all directions, and on, crossing the tideline, shells and dried seaweed crunching and crackling underfoot, until he reached the water’s edge. The sea roared and growled deafeningly as he stood hands on hips, doubled over, panting.
The cloud was so low it moved across the bay like a sea fret, shrouding the far hills and mountains of the mainland, so visible on clear days.
This concealing veil emboldened Davy. He was in an enclosed world, shielded by the mist and by the raucous music of the weather. No one could see or hear him, that was for sure.
He approached the Crotach Stone, though something about the strange horizonless view and the swirling mist made it seem as though the Stone approached him, looming darkly.
Davy looked at the offerings at the foot of the Stone: the offerings he was about to steal. There was nothing he really wanted. The aim was to cause as much offence to these awful people – to Mrs McLeod and the other ‘auld folk’ of this wretched place – as he could.
It would be obvious who had taken them. No one else on that pathetic island would ever have had the gumption to do it. They would know it was Davy and the shame and scandal would be too great to bear. His father would never be able to stay. They would be shunned and spurned. They would be lucky to leave with their lives once old shotgun-wielding Murdo heard about it. But at least they would leave, and that was all Davy cared about.
He pushed his hand into the cleft. He rooted around and suddenly winced, pulling his hand free. There was a gash in his forefinger. It was deep and opened horribly as he looked at it, the slippery pink workings under his ripped skin all too visible. Davy felt queasy and reached out to hold the Stone for support. It was surprisingly warm to the touch.
Blood dripped in great ruby drops, falling on to the cleft rock and the lace handkerchief and the candlestick and the carving knife deep down that had given him the wound. He grabbed the handkerchief and wrapped it round his fingers. It was wet from the mist and salty, but it was better than nothing.
Davy looked at the drips of blood on the cleft stone and grinned to himself. What could be more valuable than your own blood? he thought. If that did not merit a wish, then what would?
‘I wish Father would grow to loathe this place as I do,’ snarled Davy bitterly. ‘I wish he would take me back to Edinburgh and be done with this stinking island.’
Once the wish was made, Davy felt a little foolish. It was all well and good to make a wish, but he was not as gullible as Mrs McLeod and the rest of the ‘auld folk’ of this backward place. He grabbed a few of the more portable objects – an old watch, a spoon, a snuffbox, a brooch – and stuffed them in his pockets. He stood up and walked away, heading down towards the beach, so that he could circle back unseen.
He looked back at the Crotach Stone on the dune top and his heart fluttered. There was something about it that really did suggest a man – a hunchbacked man – standing, leaning forward into the breeze, waiting, listening.
Davy turned away and then looked back quickly. He laughed to himself. Was he really trying to trick the Stone into giving itself away? He had definitely been on the island too long. He laughed again as he stared at the Stone. But it was a nervous laugh, and when he walked away he did not look back a third time.
His finger was throbbing and the lace handkerchief was wine red. He wanted to unwrap it to check his finger but he could not bring himself to do it. He walked over to the dune, his head spinning a little.
‘I hate this place!’ Davy yelled into the indifferent roar of the wind. ‘I Hate This Place!’
As he walked towards the beach, he noticed for the first time that there were signs of old buildings embedded in the dunes. Walls for
med from great hunks of salmon-pink and sea-green granite lay peeping from beneath a blanket of sand, veins of quartz glittering wetly.
Davy sat down with his back to a dune so tall it could have sheltered an army. He rested in an oasis of calm amid the savage roar of the wind, the ocean growling and snarling and frothing rabidly below him at the sand’s end.
He took a deep breath, and the smell of the salt air and the heady scent of seaweed pulped by the breakers on the shore stung his nostrils. The wind had found a tiny gap in the dune’s defences and was swirling the sand into a spinning vortex of sugary grains. As they spun, they lifted the sand to reveal something buried beneath.
Davy leaned forward to give the wind a helping hand, curious to see what this sunken thing might be. Two or three passes of his bloodied, bandaged hand revealed, to his horror, a face: a human face, very pale, its eyes closed as in sleep.
Davy scrabbled back, staring wide-eyed at the face, the sand shifting about its nose and brow and pallid, white forehead. It was a body buried in the sand.
He thought of the warning to stay away and wondered with dread if he was looking at the body of the last person who did not heed that warning.
He made himself creep back closer and bent forward, fascinated. It couldn’t have been here for long. There was no sign of decomposition.
Then the eyes opened and Davy screamed.
He stood up to run away but as he turned he saw three or four more faces rising out of the fine white sand, like sleepers awakening from a deep slumber. He stopped, too shocked to know what to do other than yell.
‘Father!’ he shouted. ‘Father!’
But the wind took his words and sent them fluttering out across the sand.
Something grabbed his leg. Davy looked down and saw an arm emerging out of the sand near his feet and holding his shin. He tried to shake it off but the arm was stronger and began to pull him down.
The last thing Davy saw was the Crotach Stone standing on the dunes above him, leaning into the mist, as the wind screamed in his ears. The auld folk crowded in around him and the sand flooded over him like water.
g
‘Will you be wanting a funeral, Doctor?’ said McLeod. ‘I know the man to speak to. If you want me to see him, I will.’
‘No,’ said Dr Fraser coldly. ‘That will not be necessary, thank you. I think it would be proper to take Davy back to Edinburgh. His mother is . . .’ His voice faded away.
‘Aye,’ said McLeod. ‘I understand.’
Dr Fraser had Davy’s body packed in salt by the foreman at the fishery, and two days later he was ready to sail back to Edinburgh. He would bury Davy next to his mother in Greyfriars Cemetery.
As the cart pulled away from the house, Dr Fraser’s eyes were drawn irresistibly to the standing stone on the dune top. A passing cloud had plunged that area into deep shadow while the sea beyond was dazzling bright with sunlight.
The Clach Crotach stood black against the brightness like an exclamation mark, and the doctor’s mind unwillingly returned to the scene at the beach where they’d found him – Davy’s body on the shoreline, lying tangled in seaweed, his flesh horribly savaged by the action of sea and sand.
What had possessed the boy to swim in the sea on a day like that? Why could he not have heeded McLeod’s warning about the tide?
Dr Fraser turned his collar against the cold wind that suddenly seemed to be blowing up from the west, tossing the manes of the horses and fluttering the canvas lain across his son’s coffin. He wanted nothing more than to get away. He had never loathed anything so much as he loathed that island now.
*
Again the image was so very clear in my mind: the Crotach Stone, the fearful ‘auld folk’, the remains of Davy left on the tideline like driftwood. And again there was that other something in the lee of the giant dune. But as before, the image slipped away before I could discern what it was.
I had always had something of a prejudice against the Scottish islands, and this tale had done nothing to dispel it. There was a boy from those parts in my dorm at school and he was the most frightful bore. He never missed an opportunity to regale us with the supposed wonders of the islands. I resolved in that instant never to be tempted to travel north.
‘Do you believe the past can live on and affect the present?’ asked the Woman in White.
‘I suppose I do in a way,’ I said, leaning back in my seat. ‘I mean to say, history is deuced important. But I don’t think that it can actually live on. I mean, I don’t believe in ghouls that can rise up and grab you. I don’t believe in ghosts. I do not believe in the supernatural at all.’
‘No?’ she said, with raised eyebrows.
‘No,’ I said.
She sat looking at me with a curious expression midway between amusement and disbelief. I found it intensely annoying and make no apologies for the fact that I frowned back at her in response. After all, this woman barely knew me. What cause had she to doubt anything I told her? I did not believe in the supernatural and that was an end to it.
I thought that people who claimed to believe in such things were charlatans or, at best, misguided or mistaken in some way. I was sure that most so-called supernatural occurrences could be explained, provided a sufficiently rational mind was brought to bear. Had I been a witness to something I couldn’t explain, perhaps I would have felt differently, but I had not.
But then . . . there was one curious incident when I was very small that came back to me in that carriage, came back to me with a startling vividness.
‘What is it?’ said the Woman in White.
I was about to say that it was nothing, but I found that I had an urge to tell this story before it faded once again.
‘I was remembering something,’ I said. ‘Something I had forgotten – or thought I had forgotten.’
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘I was playing near the river not far from our home. I was young: not more than five years old. I slipped and plunged into the water. Although I was able to swim a little, the water was cold and deep and full of eddies and underwater weeds in which I quickly became entangled.
‘I cried out, but that just meant I swallowed a mouthful of foul-tasting water and began to sink even further among the reeds. I tried with all my might to make for the riverbank, but to no avail.
‘Then a woman who must have been walking nearby came to my aid. She leaned down and reached out to me. I stretched out my arm to meet hers, but the gap between our fingers, though it could hardly have been more than a few inches, might as well have been a mile.
‘I cried out again and splashed even more desperately, but if anything the gap seemed to get bigger. My vision was blurred by the water in my eyes and by my own tears, and I could see nothing clearly at all except the fingers of the woman’s hands.
‘She leaned so far over the edge of the riverbank that she was in real danger of falling in herself. But still our fingers didn’t meet and I continued to flounder in the cold river.
‘All my hope drained away. I seemed doomed to drown, and the poor woman who would have been my rescuer likewise doomed to watch it happen. There was no time for her to go for help. Had she done so I would have been at the bottom of the river before she found anyone.
‘Then suddenly there was a great splash and I felt strong arms around me and I was lifted free of the weeds and pulled clear of the river and out on to the bank, where I lay coughing and spluttering in the arms of my father.
‘My mother was there at his side, crying and calling my name and stroking my hair. My father was crying as well. It was the first and last time I ever saw him do so. And, to complete the picture, I too was overcome with sobbing, so grateful was I to have been saved.
‘I looked in vain for the woman who had tried to save me, but there was no one there. I asked my parents where she’d gone, for they couldn’t have failed to see her: she was there only an instant before they arrived. But they said they’d seen no one and when they asked me what she look
ed like, I found that I could give them only the very vaguest description: the more I tried to fix her image in my mind, the more it slipped away, like a dream does when you wake up.
‘My mother was convinced that it must have been my guardian angel, trying to give me hope until help arrived.’
‘And what do you believe?’ said the Woman in White.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was a long time ago. But she had certainly helped me. Without the woman on the riverbank holding out her hand to me, I may have given myself up to the river.’
‘And yet still you are resistant to the notion of the supernatural,’ she said with a smile.
‘I may simply have imagined it,’ I said. ‘Or the woman may have walked away and my parents, too preoccupied by my rescue, failed to notice her.’
The Woman in White clasped her hands together and shook her head.
‘Always looking for a rational explanation,’ she said.
‘Is that so very bad?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes the rational is no defence against the irrational.’
‘Yes, but we’re only talking about stories,’ I said. ‘Mr Wells can write about monsters from Mars, after all – but that doesn’t mean they exist.’
‘It doesn’t mean they do not,’ she answered.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said with a frown. ‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Just because something is told as a story and that story is part legend or myth, or feat of imagination, does not mean there is no truth in it.’
‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘I suppose . . .’
‘But why don’t I tell you another story?’ she said. ‘I may as well. There is very little else to entertain us.’
I looked around at the sleepers in the compartment and was forced to agree with her.
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘What is the story going to be about?’
‘Oh, but that would spoil it entirely,’ she said with a grin.
g
Gerald
Emma Reynolds clumped up the steep cobbled street, a few yards behind her mother. The stones were slippery from the morning’s rain and the wet street had a snakeskin sheen to it.
Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth Page 9