The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  With which she was gone up the wooden stairs, her splendid arse quite muted in its invitation. But still not the debutante’s arse it had been at dinner time. He could see her reach the landing and go into a room directly above that into which the band and all the young people were now crowded.

  Howie collected his own key and his overnight bag from behind the bar and went on up the stairs, finding his room easily from the number tagged to the key. It was, indeed, next door to Willow’s room. Having undressed and washed himself briskly from head to foot, using the pitchers of hot and cold water he found thoughtfully provided on the old-fashioned marble washstand, he put on his thick wool pyjamas and after carefully folding his uniform, placed it under the mattress on the bed for overnight pressing.

  Now came the ritual of writing up his daily report. He sat himself at a little table by the window and, taking out his notebook, started to list chronologically the increasingly strange events of the day and the night. Then he listed the birds he had seen, getting as far as the black-browed albatross, when he was interrupted …

  Howie could hear something happening in the garden behind the inn onto which his open window faced. He looked out, craning only slightly to do so, and found he could see the open but curtained bay windows of what was apparently Willow’s room next door. The light from the downstairs bar and the little room under Willow’s bedroom flooded out into the night, illuminating a yard full of extravagantly large rhubarb plants with huge leaves.

  Howie could discern two men standing there now, talking in low tones. One was a strikingly tall, dark-haired man in his mid-forties, wearing a crimson reddish dress kilt, which Howie recognized as that of the clan Morrison. Wearing no jacket, he stood out against the strange, giant leaves in a ruffled, white evening shirt, a formal stock tied carelessly around his neck. The figure beside him was that of a kilted youth whose age was hard, in the dim light, to determine except that Howie judged him to be a beardless boy; a fact soon to be confirmed when he heard the lad’s newly broken voice. In one hand the youth grasped a tree sapling. Howie noticed that he had the arched, trailing branches of a young willow tree.

  A flute and a drum started to play below in the little room by the bar and Howie heard the curtains of Willow’s room open. Looking up at her window, he saw her there, leaning languidly forward, her opulent breasts resting on the sill. He drew back into his room where he could watch without easily being seen.

  The tall man had taken a dagger from his sock and passed it to the boy beside him. The lad then, holding the tree in one hand and the dagger in the other, walked firmly forward, gazing up at the lovely, smiling Willow. The music stopped. The youth started to cut the branches off the sapling with the dagger, until only the slender trunk was left, clenched firmly in his hand. Silence had fallen all over the inn. No sound came even from the crowded room below Willow’s bedroom.

  Boldly, in a gesture of clear significance, the boy planted the tree in the soft earth under Willow’s window. Down below in the small room, the drum started throbbing. The boy stepped back to join the tall man behind him who, placing his hand reassuringly on the boy’s shoulder, called up to the fair girl in the window.

  ‘Willow MacGregor,’ he said in a pleasant, deep, cultivated voice. ‘I have the honour to present to you Ash Buchanan.’

  ‘Come up, Ash Buchanan,’ invited Willow.

  The boy’s expression was one of sober anticipation. Manhood lay ahead of him but, like every virgin lover before him, he was starting on an odyssey into the unknown. He walked to the back door holding himself straight, his pace dignified, unhurried; conscious of the many eyes upon him from the windows of the inn. Howie realized that the boy would have to cross the bar, full of the older islanders, to reach the stairs and expected to hear the lewd yells that had greeted Willow’s offer to take him to his room. But the inn remained silent except for the steady beat of the drum. Howie could hear the boy’s footsteps on the floor in the bar beneath him and then on the stairs. While he was conscious of the boy’s ascent to Willow’s room, his attention was taken by a curious exchange between Willow, still standing at the window, and the tall man in the yard below.

  ‘Another sacrifice for Aphrodite, Willow,’ said the man with the deep voice.

  ‘You flatter me, Your Lordship. Surely you mean to Aphrodite,’ responded Willow.

  Howie had guessed as much, but on the phrase ‘Lordship’ he peered as hard as he could at the dark, saturnine figure in the ruffled shirt. So that was Lord Summerisle. Howie had a similar image in his mind when he tried, as a child, to imagine the corrupt Lord Byron. Only later had he learned that the wicked poet was rather short and had limped.

  ‘I make no distinction, Willow. You are the Goddess of Love in human form, and I merely your humble acolyte.’

  This sounded like the old, oily, upper-class flattery to Howie’s egalitarian ears, and he hated it.

  Lord Summerisle bowed before turning away and Willow blew him a kiss. But as if caught by an afterthought, he turned back to call after her.

  ‘Willow! Enjoy yourself and him. Only make sure you’re ready for tomorrow’s tomorrow!’

  Willow, having herself turned to meet her lover (who was tapping firmly at her door), looked back at Lord Summerisle and spoke almost breathlessly in response.

  ‘The day of death and resurrection …?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Lord Summerisle, ‘and of a somewhat more serious offering than tonight’s.’

  ‘Death and Resurrection.’ The words tolled like funeral bells in Howie’s mind. Christ’s Resurrection was celebrated on Easter Sunday, two days after the Friday on which it was customary to mark His crucifixion. What single day could possibly hold both a death and a resurrection? Unless it be some mindless religious quirkery like that of the Wee Frees at Plockton on the mainland. But suppose the death planned were that of Rowan? By what possible horrible charade could her resurrection take place the same day? Howie knew these speculations were wildly fanciful. Yet the excesses that he had seen the islanders permit themselves bred such speculation. Never in his life had Neil Howie’s imagination led him to such fantasies as now crept into his mind. Rowan dead, the victim of a ritual involving a sexual assault. Why else choose a victim with the surely virginal, but probably just-mature-enough age of Rowan Morrison? Rowan’s body resurrected. But how? Here Howie’s imagination boggled and the experienced Sergeant of Police’s judgement took over. ‘Death and Resurrection.’ A phrase that could mean almost anything. It could mean Halloween! Calming himself, he knew that he must simply note what he’d heard until something else, some future evidence, should flesh it out with clearer meaning. In the meantime, the rational sergeant could not control a certain growing dread of what was happening on the island, of a future evil he might, so easily, be powerless to prevent.

  Lord Summerisle had walked away and was lost in the darkness, leaving Howie unable to stop himself listening to the sounds all around him in the inn.

  The door of Willow’s room opened and closed and Howie clearly heard the soft gasp of the boy seeing or feeling something amazing. Howie tried to damp down his clamouring imagination. Then the inn was alive with music, with the singing of dozens of voices.

  ‘I put my hand all on her knee

  She says to me do you want to see?

  I put my hand all on her breast

  She says do you want to be kissed?

  I put my hand all on her thigh

  She says to me do you want to try?

  I put my hand all on her belly

  She says to me do you want to fill’ee?’

  But before each verse, the singers sang–with a gentleness quite unlike their rambunctious rendering of the ‘Landlord’s Daughter’–a chorus of sweet advice to Ash and every boy who had gone that way before or since.

  ‘Gently, gently, Johnny,

  Oh gently, gently, Johnny,

  Johnny, my Jingalooo!’

  Howie knelt by his bed and prayed for respite from the
terrible desire, the quite frightening sensuousness that was spreading through him. As he affirmed to himself that he feared God and His terrible retribution for those who defied His Law … he found himself feeling for his prayer book in the half-dark of his room. To hold it would be a reassurance. Instead, his fingers touched a tiny scroll he had previously noticed that lay upon the bedside table. Thinking with a sudden onrush of hope that it might be a note from whatever hand sent him the anonymous letter about Rowan, he took it over to the oil lamp on the table by the window.

  I think I could turn and live with animals.

  They’re so placid and self-contained.

  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.

  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.

  Not one of them kneels to another or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago.

  Not one of them is respectable or unhappy all over the earth.

  He read it with a growing sense of fear. Whoever had selected the text, Howie guessed, had meant him to read it. He could hear the deep, cultured, umber tones of Lord Summerisle’s voice. But perhaps similar homilies were placed in every guest room of the inn, as Gideon bibles might be on the mainland.

  Willow’s gentle laugh reached him now. It was a happy, tinkling laugh of discovery and joy. Then her voice changed subtly and she spoke in the unmistakable language of woman loving, woman loved, using no words save ‘yes’ and sounds that came in undulating cadences as Ash, making himself a man, drove her, at last, to her bliss.

  Neil Howie longed to stop imagining her. Tried, for a terrible moment of confusion, to imagine Mary Bannock in her place. Then pulling himself together, he concentrated on the image of His Lord dying, for him, on the Cross, and he succeeded and was calm and grateful. He heard the hubbub of conversation start once more in the bar below him, was conscious that the music had stopped, and lying exhausted on his bed, slipped, at once, into a deep sleep.

  CHAPTER IV

  Monday Morning –

  the 30th of April

  A DREAM, THEY SAY, LASTS ONLY SECONDS BEFORE waking. At once forgotten usually, it leaves a stain on the consciousness, like a slow-developing photograph.

  Sergeant Howie awoke to the sounds of horses and wagon wheels on the cobblestones. His sleep had been so deep that it had left less impression than might have been expected from the surprises and traumas of his first day on Summerisle. But as he flipped over the pages of his notebook, all the pieces of the strange conundrum that was the quest of Rowan Morrison reappeared. Much like the first glance at a brand new jigsaw puzzle they gave him the distinct impression of being pieces from two or more puzzles and not just the one he’d come to solve.

  Then, as he was shaving with the steaming hot water that Alder MacGregor had brought him, he started to remember his dream. It wasn’t much that he remembered but it seemed as real as the equally extraordinary things he’d witnessed the previous night. The dream image was of Willow sitting astride him while she ran long, supple, bell-ringing toes through his ‘short, back, and sides’ haircut. Should he feel guilty about a mere dream?

  He looked at his body as he sluiced it in the warm water, standing in the small zinc tub provided. Had she somehow come through the wall and seduced it, robbing him of his precious seed? Only the bolted door he’d had to open to admit Alder MacGregor with the can of water told him this was impossible, until, gazing at himself in the discoloured mirror, he realized the truth. Desire was moving him again at the very thought of Willow. The dream had been acted out in his subconscious, a place in which he had somehow omitted to pray for protection from what his mother had kindly called, when he was a growing boy, the ‘old Adam’ in him, and every man. He must beware of these people, even in his sleep. Fear of the unknown, Howie knew, had driven men to start their search for God. Yet he, who had long since found God, now seemed to be facing an unknown here on Summerisle. Gone or going were some of his own comfortable verities and in their place, dark and palpitating as a toad under a leaf, Howie sensed his own fear, waiting for him. He dismissed these thoughts for the present as the result of an overindulgence of his imagination.

  After a breakfast of good, scalding strong tea and some tasty porridge (a huge improvement on dinner the night before), he stepped blinking into the bright sunlight of a clear spring day.

  Willow, swathed in a practical apron, that blessedly masked her opulent charms, was scrubbing the bar tables and humming to the sound of distant music. She paused in her work to greet Neil Howie.

  ‘Good morning, Sergeant. Isn’t it glorious?’

  ‘Very nice, Miss,’ said Howie, avoiding any emotive superlatives.

  ‘I expect you’ll be going back home tonight?’

  ‘That depends,’ said Howie guardedly. ‘Where’s the village school, please?’

  She pointed across the almost deserted green to where it rose to a kind of plateau, beyond which everything was out of sight, but from which the jaunty music seemed to be coming.

  ‘On the far side of the green, beyond the maypole, hard by the old church. You can’t miss it,’ she said. ‘Have a good day!’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Howie and paused. He remembered a phrase that he’d heard her say the night before. Something about which he’d resolved to question her, or Lord Summerisle, when he should meet him.

  ‘So what’s happening here on tomorrow’s tomorrow?’

  ‘That’s a funny way to put it.’ Willow seemed baffled by the phrase. ‘Do you mean the day after tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Howie. ‘I thought the other was a local expression.’

  ‘How quaint!’ said Willow, as if the likes of her had never heard the likes of a phrase like that.

  ‘Well?’ insisted Howie.

  ‘Now let me see,’ said Willow, with a hint of impatience in her voice. ‘The day after tomorrow will be May the second … nothing as far as I know!’

  She smiled demurely at him as if to conclude the subject. Howie, supposing, for an instant, that she had answered him, started to walk across the green. Then realizing she hadn’t, he turned.

  ‘I mean tomorrow! What’s happening here tomorrow?’ he asked. But Willow had gone, leaving the steaming, clean tables behind her.

  As Howie approached the rise in the green that led to the plateau beyond, he could see just the top of the maypole in the near distance. Howie assumed it was a maypole, because of what Willow had said, but it looked, with its pale bark, like a freshly cut ash tree, its branches lopped off, leaving little stubs on the trunk, and ‘topped’, so that a slew of red and white ribbons could be attached. From the curious perspective of viewing the top of the pole, before he could see the rest, he was surprised to see a lad, whom he at once recognized as Ash Buchanan, climbing the trunk and placing a rounded wreath over the top so that the maypole was crowned.

  A great cheer went up at this and as Ash climbed down the pole the sergeant found himself close enough to take in the whole scene. Forty or more young boys ringed the maypole holding red and white tapes, which they tied around their waists, facing inward towards the pole. The small band that had been playing in the inn on the previous night was sitting on the churchyard wall. Howie realized that it must have been here that he had walked when he had come upon the women who ‘rode a cock horse’.

  The beauty of the scene pleased Howie although something in the symbolism of Ash’s crowning act troubled the back of his mind. It was good to see all these healthy-looking boys enjoying themselves, for they all chattered excitedly as a man who had the slightly fustian look of a schoolmaster organized them into their circle. The tune that the musicians were playing was a pretty air, which Howie half-recognized as a folk song he knew. Willow’s directions had been accurate, and what was plainly a small school building stood in the background. The schoolmaster ran to the centre of the circle of boys and started to sing to the music.

  Howie always felt faintly embarrassed when an adult sang out loud in public
, when it wasn’t either in a concert hall or in church. He knew it was a personal prejudice, probably an inhibition that came from being raised never to draw attention to himself. Then the words of this folk song filtered through to him as he walked by the now dancing boys, who shook their ribbons till they made patterns like swimming red and white fish against the blue sky.

  ‘In the Summerisle woods there growed a tree,’ sang the schoolmaster to the band’s music.

  ‘And a very fine tree was he.

  And on that tree there was a limb

  And on that limb there was a branch

  And on that branch there was a spray

  And on that spray there was a nest

  And in that nest there was an egg

  And from that egg there was a bird

  And on that bird there was a feather …’

  Howie remembered the song. They had sung it in the glee club at his school, and he listened with half his attention to see if he remembered the words aright. The schoolhouse he was approaching was a similar building to the one he had attended. Much like hundreds of others in the Highlands. Two identical wings of brick and granite. One assigned to the boys, the other to the girls. He peered through the window of the girls’ classroom … to see them all seated at their desks happily thumping their pencil boxes in time to the boys’ song. None of them noticed him.

  Howie thought how fresh and innocent they looked with their wonderful, rosy, Highland complexions, and listened with them to the next verse of the song.