by Paul Finch
There was a moment of choked silence, during which, incredibly, Alan found himself marvelling that there was sufficient space in the cramped confines of the human abdomen to contain so much tough, fleshy material. Then all hell broke loose.
Linda turned away and began screeching like some bizarre bird; Barry fell into an animal-type crouch, then grabbed up a heavy shovel from the pile of tools and turned savagely on the others; Nug dropped onto all fours and hung his head to the bloody grass. Only Alan stayed where he was. He was appalled, but unsurprised – perhaps because he’d partly expected this, because he’d known all along that David Thorson, no matter how Scandinavian his origins, simply could not be the killer.
Or because he again recognised the depredation for what it was.
The Walk. Another sacrifice to Odin, this one to grant you the courage found in your enemy’s guts. Yet again, it was an elaborate speciality of Ivar’s. The victim was sliced open, then made to march around a sacred obelisk, unwinding his own bowels as he went, gradually wrapping them around the stone until he either died from shock or haemorrhage, or was hacked down by the watching warriors – though they would show such mercy only in approval of extreme strength or courage. David clearly hadn’t made it to that final, more honourable stage.
Linda had stopped screaming, but now was sobbing uncontrollably. She sought Barry’s arms, but he pushed her roughly away. “Just get back, all of you!” he screamed, threatening to swing the shovel. “Get the fuck back!”
Nug clambered urgently to his feet. “Get real, arsehole!” he shouted. “It isn’t possible one of us could be doing this. I mean, this is real Dark Ages stuff. We’re talking deep-rooted barbarism!”
Barry gave a crazy laugh. “What, you mean like … we’re too nice?”
“No, he doesn’t mean that, but he’s right!” Alan put in. “We’ve known each other since we started out on our bachelor’s. That was six years ago. I’m sure if one of us was twisted enough to be doing this, we’d have sussed them by now.”
There was a tense moment, as they panted and sweated and stared each other down.
“So w … what are we saying?” Barry finally stammered. “There is someone else on this island, after all?”
Alan nodded, breathless. “Someone who’s been watching us all the time we’ve been here.”
Linda whimpered as she glanced over her shoulder. The others did the same; it was unavoidable. The steep pinewoods below them now took on a dread aspect. The dim spaces between the trees were suddenly deep, impenetrable; the calling of gulls, which had previously echoed along the cliffs, was now uncannily silent.
“Right,” said Nug resolutely. “We stick together for what’s left of the time we’re here. And we stay up on this hill. It’s exposed, and if we keep vigilant, no-one should be able to sneak up on us.”
Barry nodded, then bent down, scooped up the pick and handed it to Linda. “Anyone who hasn’t got a weapon had better make sure they get one,” he said, hefting the shovel like it was a halberd.
Nug picked up a trowl. Alan went for the hand-axe … then froze rigid.
“Oh shiiit,” he said slowly. He glanced up at them all with haunted eyes. “The Professor. She’s still down there. And she’s on her own!”
13
The Professor was okay. In fact, she was thoroughly enjoying herself.
She was now stark naked, and lay full length on the ground just to one side of the camp. Her arms and legs were spread, and she’d festooned her entire voluptuous body with daisy chains. She was humming gently, her eyes riveted on the daylight glinting through the high branches.
They stood for a moment, watching her. Then Barry snorted. “This is almost getting comical,” he said.
Linda hurried up and helped the Professor to her feet, quickly stripping off her own plastic cagoule and draping it over her shoulders. It covered the woman to just below her naked buttocks.
“Any other time you saw the Prof dressed like that, you’d want to scoot to the bog for a quick one off the wrist, wouldn’t you,” Barry added. “Now that’d feel like a sex crime.”
Nug mumbled in agreement. Alan’s thoughts were elsewhere, however. “Listen,” he said, “about this plan to just stay on the defensive. I’ve been thinking … I mean, I’m in favour and all that, but why don’t we check out the lighthouse first?”
Initially both Nug and Barry were too distracted by the sight of Linda ushering the now-giggling Professor away into the shelter of the camp, to respond. When they finally did, Nug was puzzled: “The lighthouse? What’s the point? Didn’t you say it was all locked up?”
Alan nodded. “Yeah, but if we can break in somehow … Well, there might be some communications equipment.”
“You mean like a radio?” said Barry.
“Or even a phone,” Alan replied. “I mean, no-one’s stationed there, but people will have to come and do maintenance now and then. There might even be stuff left over from when it was manned.”
Nug and Barry looked warily at each other. Though they were loathe to admit it – a trek up to the island’s remote north-western tip was likely to be an ordeal and a half under these circumstances – both clearly felt it would be worth a try.
“So are we all going?” Linda asked, when Nug had finished explaining the plan.
Alan shook his head. “No. We’re doing what we said we were doing. I suggest you, Nug and …” He glanced at the Professor, who had now been talked into pulling on some waterproof leggings; she smiled back at him, a little girl lost in a world of wonders. “You, Nug and Jo, make your way back up to the barrow. That way, you should have a good view of the island’s interior, and at the same time can look out for passing boats, if there are any. You see one, you holler yourself hoarse. Light a fire or something.”
Nug nodded, and felt at the zipped pocket in his khaki pants, where on field-trips he always kept a box of matches.
“Me and Barry’ll go and check out the lighthouse,” Alan added.
“Why you two?” Linda asked.
They looked at her. She was watching Alan with a mixture of suspicion and fear. Like the rest of them, she was now pale, worn, bedraggled with dust and sweat. Her fists were clenched so tightly around the rubber-clad handle of the pick, that her knuckles glowed white.
“I mean … no disrespect to Nug,” she added, “but I’d rather have Barry with me.”
Nug shrugged. Alan however shook his head. “If I’m right about the radio, anyone going to the lighthouse is likely to draw this lunatic out. They’re almost certain to get attacked first, because he can’t afford to let them reach it.” He stared at Linda. “So … you may prefer to have Barry, but the chances are I’ll need him.”
Linda returned the stare boldly, unimpressed by his self-sacrifice. Beside him, Alan felt Barry stiffen. “So we’re going as bait?” the rugby player said.
“Something like that.”
“Nice of you to tell me.”
Alan rubbed his forehead. He was too tired to argue further.
“And if you two are both killed, what happens to us?” Linda asked.
“We do what we said,” Nug told her. “Stay around the barrow and form a defensive position. If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll have only six hours to wait before McEndry gets here.”
There was a silence as they considered this possible, rather awful outcome. Six hours wasn’t so long in the real world, but here?
“Any more questions?” Alan said. There weren’t any. He glanced skywards. The sun had long ago vanished under a cover of heavy clouds, but a simmering summer heat had now descended on the island. He didn’t want to say it, but it looked as though a storm was brewing.
“Let’s get a move on,” he finally muttered. “I can’t see there’s anything to be gained from hanging around.”
“Clive’d probably agree with you,” said Bar
ry, as the two of them set off across the low valley, circling the bog-pools and trudging up through the woods towards the ravine.
Five minutes later they’d entered it, but from here on the going became slow and cautious. Alan had drawn the hand-axe from his belt and was now nervously scanning the high places above them. No faces peered down, however; the only sound was the scuff and scrape of their boots on the stones … that and the faint, eerie echo it created.
“If we do manage to get into the lighthouse, we’ll give it a good going-over while we’re there,” Alan said. “Search it all the way up, from its basement to its the lantern gallery. Be a good place for someone to hide out.”
Barry gave a grudging grunt. “You seem to be giving a lot of orders at the moment.”
Alan glanced sidelong at him. “Why … do you think you should be?”
“That’s a stupid idea, is it?”
“Get a life, Barry.”
The athlete scowled. “I know you’ve still got the hots for Linda, you know.”
“You really want to talk about that now?”
Barry smiled to himself. “There’s nothing to talk about. She’s with me. That’s all there is to it. You’re like … totally out of the picture. If you were ever even in it.”
Alan found himself coming to a standstill. There was a tingling along his spine, a sudden singing in his veins. It wasn’t a sensation he’d ever had before, but he liked it. A powerful, throbbing heat seethed through him.
It wasn’t like it was his own hand, when he reached out and grabbed Barry’s shoulder …
The next thing Alan knew, he was gazing dreamily up at the sky. It was framed between the rock walls of the gorge; as he gazed at it, two white seabirds flitted across. From far away came the gentle lulling of the waves. The breeze whispered in the spikes of heather next to his head.
And then the screaming started. The terrible, terrible screaming. It began like a whimper, like a sound of confusion or bewilderment. But it rapidly grew in volume and intensity, until it banged around inside Alan’s skull in a deafening, hysterical frenzy.
Perplexed, he turned his head to look. And that was when he saw Linda, backing slowly out of his vision, her facial expression like one of those Greek drama masks, the gaping mouth fixed in a rigid shriek, the eyes ready to start from their sockets, they were so wide and manic.
Alan was utterly lost for words. He knew things had been hard between them recently, but what was all this shit about? He tried to talk, but couldn’t. For some reason he lacked the strength. Not that it mattered much. Linda was already out of earshot. In fact, a moment later, she was out of view. She’d stumbled backwards away from him, until he could no longer see her. He then heard what he assumed was the fading hammer of her boot-soles as she turned and fled properly.
Alan wondered what he’d done this time to annoy her. Then he wondered what he’d been doing, full-stop. Why the fuck was he in this position? It had suddenly struck him that he was flat on his back, and that his body, which he was only vaguely aware of, felt so relaxed that he could barely move it. He tried to remember what had happened, but his memory came back only in spits and spots. A ship’s prow rising and falling; a long green shore. Then, like a dash of cold water, he recalled the deaths of Craig, Clive and David, and a bolt of horror went through him.
He tensed where he lay. The word “Barry” came to his lips.
Barry … yes. Barry must have hit him, or something … knocked him unconscious, though Alan had no actual recollection of that. He knew that something angry had passed between them. Yet, when he turned his head sideways, he felt no dizziness, no pain, no stiffness in his neck or shoulders. If anything, he felt good, refreshed, as though he was re-emerging from a long, restful sleep. Apart from one thing, of course. The fact that he was wet all over.
Drenched.
Now Alan sat up and gazed down at himself … and for a moment, his mind went blank with shock.
It was as though someone had brushed bright red paint all the way up the front of his trousers and shirt. His boots were coated as well, and his arms and hands. They literally were coated, front and back, as though they had actually been dipped in the paint.
Except that, it wasn’t paint.
Alan realised that much even before he staggered upright, his stomach churning in on itself, a hot, metallic reek now breaching his nostrils. He turned where he stood, viewing the ground around him. Red too. Bright red. In fact, there was red everywhere, streaking the heather, spattering the boulders, daubed in vivid filigrees on the rugged walls of the canyon, dripping from mossy overhangs, forming thickening rivulets between the smaller stones and pebbles.
Some atrocity had been enacted here. Some minor holocaust.
Or perhaps not so minor.
For when Alan finally turned 180 degrees and surveyed the ground directly behind him, his heart almost stopped in his chest.
Barry lay there. What had once been Barry. A parody of Barry. A sick joke of a thing formerly known as Barry. And incredibly, it still lived.
Alan approached on faltering feet, over ground awash with the blood still pumping from the hacked and jagged stumps where the naked athlete’s arms and legs had once been attached, still spouting from the ripped, raw hole in his face where his braggart’s tongue used to dwell.
Even then, deranged as it no doubt was, unable to focus on anything but its own mind-numbing torment, the blasphemous ruin of a man tried to shuffle away, feebly, pathetically, able only to use the muscles in its buttocks and its back, the severed ends of its truncated limbs twitching, the eyes rolling in terror in its tortured face.
Alan reached a shaking, helpless hand towards his former foe. His own strength was ebbing, however, his own head swimming with nausea. Finally he turned and fell onto his stomach, retching violently, wave after wave of slime and mucous rushing from his mouth.
Even as he lay there vomiting, he beheld new horrors: perhaps 10 yards away was a wide flat rock, now riven with multiple slash and chop-marks, and of course splattered deepest crimson. Beside it lay countless slivers of meat and bone, muscle and gristle. Strong, supple, athletic limbs now so much mulch and mince; and, beside all that, the hand-axe – bright red from the edge of its shiny blade to the base of its hickory handle – that had been used to render even the renderings, to ensure that all the miracles of modern science could never make good this mutilation.
It was no consolation to Alan to know where this latest madness had come from, to recall the hideous moments in the old chronicles when Viking raiders were said to have left mockeries of men in their wake; pitiful half-creatures, no longer able to plough or hoe, to thresh, to sow, no longer able even to feed themselves, to attend to their own toilet, to climb from their beds in the morning; tiresome lifelong burdens for the families they’d better hope would be prepared to look after them. And, of course, Ivar, notoriously associated with this cruelest of butcheries. Ivar again. Always IVAR!
Alan now hated the infamous name more than any other in history. More than Hitler, Stalin, Vlad the Impaler, Jack the Ripper! He called curses down upon it as he clambered to his feet, grabbed up the axe and tottered back to where Barry lay, the lips blue on the cripple’s twisted, rictal mouth, the eyes still rolling, yellow like marbles, the pupils startled, permanently wide.
Alan couldn’t stand any more. Screaming aloud that he hoped Ivar the Boneless was burning in the deepest tract of Hell, he drew the axe back over his shoulder, then swung it down with every ounce of strength he had, driving it inches-deep into the front of Barry Wood’s skull, splitting him open between the eyes, and ending the poor wretch’s agony in a single murderous blow. Instantly, those eyes glazed over. Fresh blood spurted from the gruesome new wound, but only for a matter of seconds, at the end of which it slowed to a gentle, gurgling trickle.
Jesus God Almighty, it was no wonder Linda had run. In fact, the next
thing he knew, Alan was running himself. Stupored, he lurched down the gorge towards the woods, the hatchet swinging limply from his hand. Torrid moments passed as he stumbled through the trees, the summer heat seeping into him, his pallid flesh crusting over as the blood congealed, his clothes hanging in thick, clotted folds. Sobbing for breath, he blundered from one trunk to another, all the time gibbering, choking, calling out for help, suddenly heedless that his cries might bring the ruthless slayer down on his own head.
When he finally toppled into the camp, there was nobody there; the fire was a heap of ashes, the tents unattended. Without thinking, he turned and began lumbering uphill in the direction of the barrow. That’s where Nug had said they’d be, holding out on the most exposed portion of the island, watching all flanks at the same time.
For this reason, they saw him long before he reached them.
Nug had just been in the process of cutting David’s stiffening body down from the megalith, sawing through the taut coils of pale, slippery intestine with the edge of his trowl. Linda was now beside him, however, jabbering insanely, gesturing wildly with the pick. In contrast, and in near-surreal fashion, Professor Mercy was further down the slope from the other two, collecting more flowers. As Alan hobbled towards her, spittle dripping from his bloodied chin, she looked up and gave him a joyful, child-like smile … which lasted for less than perhaps five seconds, by which time she had registered the state he was in, the desperate, monstrous expression on his face, and the terrible weapon clasped in his crimson claw. With at first a whine of fear, then a wail, then finally a prolonged shriek of utter, abject terror, the woman turned and fled, throwing herself down the hill and scrambling away into the pines, her screams echoing and echoing long after she’d vanished from view.