Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘The Shian.’

  ‘They say they come from another world, but the truth, the scriptural truth, is that there is only this world, created by God, and that man is his highest creation, and that these are made things, creatures sent to pervert our God-given manhood and womanhood.’ Peterson’s getting hot about this. His mouth has a head of steam behind it.

  ‘So, if they are made by the devil, then they have no souls.’

  ‘Only God can give spiritual life.’

  ‘So they’re no different from animals. It wouldn’t be any more of a sin to kill one than it would be to kill a cat. In fact, you’d be doing the world a favour, getting rid of a minor demon.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘I’m not getting at anything, Gavin. Just trying to put things together. So, they’re a threat to your identity, you envy them their extraordinary fecundity, and your church basically gives you open season on them.’

  ‘What are you saying? Are you saying that I killed those ones on University Street? Do you think I did? Gillespie accused me of that; he was like you, he thinks that anyone who hates them wants to kill them. I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘You did it to three North Belfast Catholics, and they’re the same species as you. They have souls. These are only animals.’

  ‘That was before. I’ve been washed in the blood. I’m a Godfearing, God-loving man.’

  ‘But not as much as you fear the Shian, isn’t that right? You fear them, and you love them. You just told me you’re the kind of man who loves what he fears, fears what he loves. They scare the shit out of you, but they attract you at the same time. They’ve got the things you want. Community, children, identity — every Shian knows what it is, where it comes from, it’s got ten thousand years of recorded history behind it. What’ve you got? Four hundred years since the plantation — these people had planted five entire planets by then. And now they’ve got the thing you dedicated your life to: they’ve got your country. That’s why you go to that club, to look at the thing you fear. You wouldn’t touch them, you wouldn’t do the things the others there do, that’s bestiality. You go to look. Look good and long and hard. Love. Fear. Like that old film with Robert Mitchum where he had love and hate tattooed on his knuckles. He was a God-fearing, God-loving man too. He killed people.’

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘Then why were you in that club?’

  ‘I was on business.’

  ‘Exterminating Outsiders is business?’

  ‘I didn’t exterminate anyone or anything.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. I’ll tell you why. We have a psychological profile of who we’re looking for. It fits you like a glove. Everything you say, everything you do, everywhere you go, everything you’ve done, the profile was there first. How do you think I was able to tell you all those things about yourself? The profile. The profile tells me that you killed those Outsiders, Gavin.’

  ‘You are talking bullshit now. This is bullshit. Complete bullshit.’

  ‘The profile even predicted you’d react that way when directly accused. You did it, Gavin. Why not tell me? This is true, no word of bullshit: I’ve seen cases like this before. They protest and they protest that they didn’t do it, but the funny thing is, deep down inside, they really want to tell me. They want someone to know. Some because they’re proud of what they’ve done, others because it sickens them, they can’t live with it inside, eating them away. Are you proud, or is it eating you away? And I’ll tell you something else. The ones it’s eating up, when they do tell someone, it stops. The looks of peace on their faces; it’s amazing, Gavin. You can tell me, Gavin. Why not? We’ve already got you. This way you get to tell it how you like. You killed them, didn’t you?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, I keep telling you I didn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘Then why were you in the club? What was your business?’

  ‘The tape. All right? The fucking tape. That was why I was in the club. You think I’d go to something like that? I was there to get the tape.’

  The silence seems much longer than measured by the wall clock.

  ‘The tape?’

  Peterson sighs. The wind and the spirit go out of him, he crumples, withering. Littledick has him, but it’s not the fish he was angling for. The Shian-killer is still out there, swimming in dark water.

  ‘There’s a DUP councillor. Sammy Dow. He’s on the Planning Committee. Wife, kids, goes to the old Paisley church on the Ravenhill Road, and every Tuesday evening when his wife thinks he’s at a committee meeting he’s at that place. The Chink has other rooms, out the back, where you can go with them. We have a camera in one.’

  ‘We?’ Willich asks.

  ‘The UDF.’

  ‘You’re blackmailing a Belfast City Councillor,’ Dunbar says.

  ‘It’s bigger than that. It’s who leads the Protestants in Belfast. The Democratic Unionists went downhill after they stuck Paisley in Purdysburn. They’re finished. The UDF is the voice of the Protestant community. There’re elections coming up in May. By then we should have enough on enough DUP men to swing the North and East Belfast wards.’

  ‘You’re going to smear them?’

  ‘And show the pan-Nationalist front we’re as dirty as them? No; so as not to split the Unionist vote, we’ll arrange a series of electoral pacts where the DUP will stand aside in favour of a UDF candidate.’

  ‘Jesus, it is Kincora all over again,’ Willich says. Then: ‘How high does this go?’

  He’s trapped. Learn this from the Taigs: confession is good for the soul.

  ‘To the top.’

  Roisin Dunbar closes her fist under the interview table. Yes! Got you, Pastor McIvor Kyle, you smug bastard. I’m coming to winkle you out of your big brick bunker and God is going to turn his face away. She looks at the clock on the wall. Eighteen thirty-five. An hour and ten minutes to crack.

  The cars are going out. The barrier is up, and they are going out in convoy. Ten cars, four police in each, five teams of two. They have search warrants, and an attitude. Ten minutes before, Roisin Dunbar had come through the CID office and her search team had fallen in behind her while the others cheered and applauded and shouted encouragements like ‘Go, Rosh!’ and ‘Fuck the bastard’, and she had felt like gangbusters. Underneath that beige trench coat there’re Batgirl’s boots and black lycra.

  The cars turn out on to Donegal Pass. A uniform stops the traffic for them. Down on to the Ormeau Road. Along Cromac Street into Victoria Street and on towards the M2, a big line of dark-coloured Fords. They lose the first two cars at the lights on York Street by the Art College. Two for the Crumlin Road Dissenting Presbyterian Church. Four more at the turn off on to the M2, accelerating smoothly up to high speed cruise, for the Glengormley Faith Tabernacle. Another two straight on into the York Road, for the Dee Pee Fortwilliam Mission. Detective Sergeant Roisin Dunbar leads the last two, left up the Limestone Road, right at the lights up by the Waterworks on to the Antrim Road. Two cars for Pastor McIvor Kyle’s Victorian residence at Ben Madigan.

  Batmobile! Yah!

  Two cars turn between the sandstone gate pillars and crunch up the pink gravel drive between the rhododendrons.

  ‘We’re doing the wrong jobs,’ Detective Chief Inspector Willich in the passenger seat comments, observing the Scrabo sandstone pile of nineteenth-century bourgeoiserie among the mature shrubs. ‘If you really want to coin it, invent a religion.’

  ‘Tell me that again when we’ve got him in an interview room,’ Roisin Dunbar says.

  The two dark Fords draw up at the foot of the worn steps leading to the glassed-in porch. Security lights flick on, AI-guided security microcameras lock on to the figures stepping from the open doors.

  Her team orders up behind her. Roisin Dunbar faces the front door and assertively presses the bell push. A speaker gives her three bars of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ and a chip-personality says. ‘Welcome to the home of Pastor McIvor Kyle. Please sta
te your name, your business, and whom you wish to see.’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Roisin Dunbar. Police. We have a warrant to search Pastor McIvor Kyle’s premises.’ The team try not to laugh as the door-dog prissily answers, ‘Pastor Kyle has been notified of your presence and will receive you shortly. In the meantime, I shall play you some music.’ It’s ‘Burdens Are Lifted at Calvary’. The door-dog gives them all of it, followed by ‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus, Safe in the Arms of Him’. After that, ‘The Old Rugged Cross’.

  Roisin Dunbar is not going to ask pretty-please of a chunk of silicon.

  ‘Barry, give him a call on your mobile.’

  The police admire Pastor McIvor Kyle’s view of the lough and the lights of Holywood beyond. An aircraft lifts off from the City Airport across the river. Container ships are moving in the channel.

  ‘He’s not answering.’

  ‘Right, lads. Barry, Doug, Kev and Joe, round the back.’

  Dunbar tries the door-dog again. She gives it one bar before using the police over-ride to put it into receive-only mode. Still Pastor McIvor Kyle does not answer the call.

  ‘Sarge! Boss!’

  She’s glad she’s wearing heels she can run in. The big plastic cod-Victorian conservatory juts out from the back of the house like a penis extension. It glows with lamps. Dunbar wonders how they did that nice pink speckle effect on the glass. She wonders further; why are her officers standing on the lawn with strange, lost boy looks on their faces? There’s a figure sitting in a cane chair in the conservatory, lolling back against the glass. She stops. There’s something amiss with it. It has no head. That pretty pink dapple effect is blood.

  ‘Jesus,’ Willich breathes.

  The seated figure is dressed casually, but its identity is immediately apparent. Below the ragged stump of neck is a clerical collar, once pure white, now washed-in-the-blood red. Its lap is a mess of raw flesh. Through the smeared glass Dunbar can make out another figure front down on the floor. Hands are outspread, gripping the tile-effect vinyl. A lake of blood has leaked from the cauterized arteries of the neck and congealed. This figure is wearing a long floral print dress with a cardigan.

  ‘Sarge, one down in here!’ Barry is at the kitchen door, peering through the glass.

  ‘An ambulance. Get a fucking ambulance!’ Dunbar screams as she runs to the kitchen door.

  ‘Bit late for that,’ someone says as Barry unsnaps his mobile.

  The third body is on the kitchen floor, another woman, curled around her own dismemberment as if in shame.

  ‘Get us in there,’ Willich says thinly. ‘There may be survivors.’ But he isn’t convincing anyone. Nothing has been left alive in that house.

  ‘It’s open,’ Barry says, looking in amazement at the handle in his hand as if he has broken something not his.

  ‘Boss!’ Kev has made it to the double garage, where there is an Alsatian-sized dog kennel. There is a dark huddle half in, half out of it. ‘They killed the dog! They killed the fucking dog!’

  In their last couple of years on the Woodstock Road, Karen had had a cat, an evil black bastard tom with half its tail missing. Stumpy, she had called it. She hadn’t so much had the cat as the cat had had her. It had come in out of the entry and she’d given it chicken bones and scraps and once you start that you never get rid of them. It fought and it sprayed and it stank of piss but Karen had to have it on the bed at night. It would sleep between them, languishing in body heat, purring asthmatically. If you tried to move it, it would draw blood. Gillespie would toss himself awake in the night, not knowing why he had woken, and though he could never see it, for no one can see a black cat in a dark bedroom, he knew that the thing was staring at him. He could feel the heat of its eyes on his skin. He could not drift back into cramped sleep while he felt its eyes on him. He knew that the reason he had woken was because the cat had opened its eyes. It could do this any time it wanted, open its eyes, and wake him.

  He wakes, but it is not dark. It is not the front bedroom of the terrace house on Hatton Drive. In the waking moment he does not know where he is; it feels like some fragment of a dream, but eyes have woken him. He can feel the heat of cat eyes watching him. He tries to sit up. Enormous pain. Everything pain. Everywhere. He can’t find the top of the bed. It seems to go on for ever. Jesus fuck, the pain. He rolls on to his side and meets the eyes. They are watching him from a distance of centimetres, cat eyes, slitted eyes.

  ‘Piss away off, cat,’ he mumbles at them.

  The cat lifts its head off the bed. It turns it to one side, quizzically. It blinks its big eyes and then says something to him.

  ‘Fuck!’ Andy Gillespie is halfway across the bed that seems to go on for ever. It feels like he’s getting smacked about all over again, but he wants away from that thing.

  The cat that talks shrieks and leaps up. It lands on its back legs and skitters away with cockroach speed, across the bed, on to the floor, through the open door. Flailing stick arms, spindly legs; it’s a cat-monkey thing from hell, wailing.

  ‘Jesus!’ Gillespie bawls.

  A silhouette appears in the door. Outsider tall. Outsider thin. Ounserrat Soulereya, dressed in a pair of baggies and nothing else. The cat-monkey thing from hell is clinging to her side, like a cat-monkey thing from hell should. Its mouth is clamped to her single breast.

  ‘You are awake at last, Mr Gillespie. I am glad. I am sorry that Graceland alarmed you.’ She murmurs something in a language Gillespie does not understand. The thing on the tit looks up at her, blinks and twitters a response.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The doctor in the casualty department advised that you have rest to assist your recuperation. I was recovering from kethba so Ananturievo gave you some pills to make you sleep. I fear he may have given you too many.’

  Lying on the back seat of the cop car, watching the street lights strobe through a pain so intense it was almost bliss. Feeling he’d brought the car seat with him, glued to his back, into the casualty department, into the cubicle, into the X-ray department, can’t you see it?, I’ve got the back seat of a car rammed up my spine. Faces asking him his insurance details and when he couldn’t provide them, trying to sell him a policy. Faces doing things at very great distances, with immensely long arms, like machines. Robot cleaning, robot bandaging, robot injecting. He remembers saying the word ‘No’ a lot to a policewoman in a beige coat who kept morphing into a vision of the Virgin Mary. No, no no, no charges. No pressing charges. Another car — a taxi — more lights, and something picking him up and leaving the back seat where it should remain and carrying him up endless stairs that smelled funny. Funny smelling stairs. Immensely long machine fingers, undressing him.

  He’s bollock naked, in a bed, in a room, in a flat, in a planha, in the Annadale Embankment Hold. He’s freezing cold. There’s what feel like fur under his ass. The bed is the room. It looks like it’s grown from the walls. Several people could sleep in it together. Several people probably did. They like to sleep together, curled up in each other’s body heat. Kiddy and Mummy and non-paternal Daddy and wur Andy. There were four in the bed and the little one said…

  ‘Graceland?’

  ‘I wanted it to have a human name as well as one in Narha. Is it not a fine designation?’

  ‘Graceland.’ The thing is looking at Gillespie now. Way too much knowing behind the slits of its eyes. It spits out the tit, scrambles down its mother and scurries across to the edge of the big bed. It props its chin on the fur mattress and stares at Andy Gillespie. ‘What time of day is it?’ he asks. He’s not sure what way the light falls this side of the river, but it looks odd.

  ‘It is sixteen o eight. You have been asleep for ten hours. Fortunately, you avoided major injury or fracture of limbs, but you have sustained heavy bruising and contusion.’

  He can’t move. His muscles have locked. He looks at his hands gripping the edge of the silky white covering; they’re swollen and black. He doesn’t want them to be his. They don’t look li
ke the hands he knows. They look like vile black insects that have swallowed his good hands while he slept.

  ‘I am not long awake and aware myself,’ Ounserrat is saying as Andy Gillespie tries to lift the sheet and look at the damage down there without tearing himself into pieces of pain. Oh Jesus, it’s a mess. ‘It is a strain, going into kethba. And I was concerned about the blow I had taken to the belly. I had to monitor the state of the embryo.’

  ‘You’re pregnant?’

  ‘Semi-pregnant. Graceland is one of a pair of twins, but I chose to bring only it to parturition. I am holding the other embryo in stasis until such time as I can afford to raise another infant.’

  Semi-pregnancy. ‘And is it, ah, all right?’ Graceland’s squealing something to its mother. Ounserrat speaks to it in the same familiar-yet-alien burble. Is there a Shian kid-speak? He thought they all learned Narha the way he learned Narha, through the chemicals. He can make out a word here, a word there, but they’re either inappropriate or incongruous.

  ‘All is well, Mr Gillespie. Lesbianism will be born whole and sound.’

  ‘Lesbianism?’ Some time he’s going to be able to stop asking questions. But not quite yet. ‘You have a name for a foetus?’

  ‘It must be called something. It is at the stage where an identity is imprinted. The name spoke itself in a dream, while I was recovering energy after kethba.’

  Gillespie tries to lie back in the huge bed that fills an entire room. Slow agonies. Is that a heartbeat he can feel underneath the soft, warm fur? The fucking thing’s alive. Everything’s flesh with these people. Then: ‘Who hit us?’

  ‘I suspect it was minions of Mr Gerry Conlon. While you were talking with your acquaintance, I noticed the club owner speaking on the telephone and looking in your direction.’

  ‘Shit.’ Then; for it’s an afternoon of abrupt transitions, ‘Shouldn’t you be out delivering pizzas?’