The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  Howie had found a jug of chilled cider by his bedside. He poured himself a little in a glass. It was sweet and chill and perfectly to his taste, unlike the rather bitter beer served in the bar. He shivered, as the sweat cooled on his body, certain that he was one of the very few cops who would have resisted the bait that they had offered him. Their single-minded resourcefulness when it came to his seduction was very frightening. McTaggart, he was sure, would not have hesitated to go in there with Willow and rut himself blind. As Howie knew him to have done with the whores on the quayside at Portlochlie. Of course, Howie had to admit that Willow was as far superior to any whore he had ever seen as Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, was to an ordinary woman. Aphrodite! He turned the word over in his mind. It had a pretty ring to it and it was only as Howie had drained the glass of cider that he made a disturbing connection … aphrodisiac.

  Panic was not an emotion that Sergeant Howie had suffered much before. But now the thought that there might, just possibly, be coursing through his veins an agent that could twist or bend his will, turn what he regarded as the base desires that he shared with every other man, but with God’s grace had learned to control, into a lust that he would be powerless to deny … that thought was the stuff of panic for Howie. For a moment he so far forgot himself that he assumed that this might be an extreme in which even God could not help him. Worse, he was tempted by the notion that the aphrodisiac, if one had indeed been administered, with the cider, freed him, at last, from moral responsibility. This idea came to him at about the time the music started again. It wafted up from the bar, starting with an extraordinarily seductive beat.

  Howie, who had once read a sex manual called The Young Christian’s Guide to Sanctified Bliss in Marriage, remembered that there was a great deal of discussion of the body’s rhythms.

  This insistent beat awakened a rhythm in Howie’s own body that soon bewildered and enthralled him. He could detect, now, that it was not only the drum in the bar below that gave the agonizing pulse, but a knock upon the wall that divided Willow’s room from his; the supple fingers that had stroked the corn-dolly so provocatively were summoning him again. The other instruments wound the beginnings of a lovely melody and Willow started to sing:

  ‘Heigh ho! Who is there?

  No one but me, my dear.

  Please come say, How do?

  The things I’ll give to you.’

  Howie’s window was open and he could tell by the clarity with which her voice came to him that her window too was open. Yet he didn’t dare lean out and look at her as he had the night before.

  ‘By stroke as gentle as a feather

  I’ll catch a rainbow from the sky

  And tie the ends together.

  Heigh Ho! I am here

  Am I not young and fair?

  Please come say, How do?

  The things I’ll show to you.’

  Her song was a simple enough invitation to him. As if the invitation her body had already made to him needed only to be underlined–enchantment to be added to the power of raw desire. Indeed, it was the sweetest, most enchanting song (how many overused words, he thought, took on their real meaning on this island) that a woman could sing to a man she was offering every pleasure it was in her undoubted power to bestow. That they were unimaginable pleasures for Howie, who had only the Christian’s Guide to go by, made them somehow more tempting.

  He longed for Willow’s initiation. And while he longed, she sang:

  ‘Would you have a wond’rous sight

  The midday sun at midnight?’

  To open his door and walk the few steps it would take to open her door and find himself in those voluptuous arms would be a journey, Howie thought, slipping steadily further into temptation, like that of Marco Polo entering fabled Cathay, the China of our ancestors’ quests. More marvellous in the telling, perhaps, but quite extraordinary enough to be the recurring dream, the incomparable memory of the man that made the journey. Howie wished desperately that he had not glimpsed the palpable reality of Willow. If only succulent, ripe Willow had not, but minutes before, been within his grasp and could in ten paces be so again. Howie stood, literally trembling with uncertainty, washing his body in the warm water, pouring just a drop or two of the essence of heather into the palm of his hand and spreading it across his chest before taking the cold water and rinsing it quickly off again. His thoughts never once went to the nightly report he should be writing, let alone to his prayers. It was Willow’s sweet prayer that besieged his senses:

  ‘Fair maid, white and red,

  Comb you smooth and stroke your head

  How a maid can milk a bull!

  And every stroke a bucketful.’

  Now she was just the other side of the wall. In counterpoint to the rhythm of the drum below, he could hear her slapping her own flesh in a tantalizing tattoo as she sang on. He put his ear to the wall and he could hear her deep breaths between the words of the song she still sang. He knew that he must go to her, for she was now in a kind of pain that only he could assuage. He knew that and was on the way to the door when it came to him, how he knew that. God, he felt suddenly, was with him and all at once he was able to shut out the song and fell to kneeling by his bedside as he had done every night since he was a child. He knew of the pain Willow felt because he remembered that Mary Bannock had felt it too.

  Mary was the antidote he was sure he must use for the tempting poison that flowed from Willow or the cider or both. Mary had breathed like that when, on a walk along the cliff-top fields outside Portlochlie one night, he’d held her very tight and ‘kissed her’, as the old song had it, ‘o’er and o’er again among the sheaves of barley’. Again in the car, before he’d asked her ‘to name the day’, she’d breathed like that. He’d sensed her pain when he had taken his hand from inside her thigh. The look in her eyes and the warmth of her kiss had told him what he had not yet been prepared to accept, that she’d waited long enough–that it had been unnatural of him not to marry her far sooner and take away the pain of waiting.

  He was appalled to think he might have given to a pagan slut what he’d saved for Mary; worse, he was about to take from Willow what he’d made Mary save for him! Now that, at last, he had exorcized Willow’s image from his mind, he longed to get back to Mary, to marry her so that they could explore each other spiritually and physically, guiltlessly and in joy. He was sure the Christian’s Guide would be a well-thumbed relic soon forgotten as he and Mary discovered their own ‘wond’rous sight’. In the sanctification of marriage and with procreation as their higher purpose, that, of course, would be well understood between him and Mary. He said ‘Amen’ to that out loud.

  In the surge of triumph that followed Sergeant Howie’s victory over Willow’s temptation of him, he noticed that the music had stopped and the whole inn had fallen quiet. He thanked God that, in His mercy, He had saved him from both sin and humiliation.

  Calmly then did he dutifully sit and write up his notes for the day, concentrating on the Rowan Morrison case rather than the many other little irregularities he had noticed. He had a new set of facts to record at the end of his notes:

  It seems plain that Rowan is not dead. No body, no death certificate, no convincing description of how she has died.

  This points to the anonymous letter writer being an islander. Someone with real concern for Rowan’s life. But may not have wanted to write about religious/sacrificial aspects of the child’s disappearance. Could that person be the gillie? No one else I have met so far seems a likely writer of the letter. The only possible reason (apart from sheer humanity) that the gillie might wish to write to us is her obvious rivalry with Miss Rose. A comparison of her handwriting could be useful.

  Otherwise, there is every evidence that almost all of the islanders are in on the conspiracy to hide the whereabouts of Rowan Morrison. With the possible exception of her mother, who might, along with a few other simple-minded people, believe in the metamorphosis story that Rowan runs in the fields as
a hare. Her resurrection later today will be awkward for Lord Summerisle and Miss Rose to explain to the mother, but I suppose some mumbo-jumbo will be produced. After the sacrifice. Hey, presto! Rowan will be provided with some convenient transmutation, which will be invented as a sop to the poor mother.

  The horrifying possibility that this intended sacrifice of Rowan may be part of a pattern will have to be considered. Can Daisy, the girl in the broken photograph, be an intended victim? Or is the photographic evidence being hidden simply to obscure the fact that last year’s harvest failed? Aren’t victims usually chosen from the brightest or the beautiful? Poor Daisy hardly qualifies on either count. So she’s probably safe enough.

  I cannot entirely discount the possibility that Rowan was made sick by eating a Saint Athelstan’s pippin. In which case it is just possible that she still lies sick or is already dead. Others may have become sick and/or died too. This hypothesis could explain:

  The lack of a death certificate.

  The absence of a body.

  The conspiracy of silence on the part of the community, because the fruit is their livelihood.

  The hidden Festival photograph, if more than the apples were affected.

  The only way of elucidating facts on this hypothesis are the same as if she were an intended sacrifice. Except, of course, that the sample apple in my possession will have to undergo immediate analysis on the mainland. I think the ‘sickness’ theory less likely than the ‘sacrifice’ theory due to the other circumstantial evidence.

  Since it must now be known all over the island that Rowan is being sought, but no one has come forward, and since May Day is upon us and there are only twenty-two more hours of it as I sit and write this, I intend to take the following action:

  0700 hours. Fly straight to Portlochlie.

  0800 hours. Report to the Chief Constable and request immediate police task force be formed under my command consisting of at least twelve constables.

  0900 hours. Attend opening of County Court with application for issue of firearms to officers of special task force. Also ask Judge to authorize an application of military aid to the civil power in the form of Royal Air Force helicopter to airlift the police out to the island. (Our seaplane would have to make five trips.)

  1000 hours. Call relevant ministry in Edinburgh, through the Chief Constable’s permission and ask for Order-in-Council to impose a complete curfew on the island, while a ‘search and question’ operation is carried out.

  Before 1200 hours, hopefully, task force arrives at Summerisle Township leaving nine constables to impose the immediate curfew confining everyone to their homes. Three other officers to be landed near Lord Summerisle’s castle. Lord Summerisle to be kept under strict surveillance till Rowan is found. Six motorcycles to be brought in with police officers.

  Howie smiled to himself ruefully as he scribbled a final note:

  No police officer will ever have had as much egg on his face as I, if this whole thing turns out to be a joke and Rowan is simply hiding for fun. But on the facts before me I can do no less than is proposed above, if I am to ensure the child’s safety.

  Howie closed his book and climbed into bed preparing to turn down the oil lamp and set the alarm on his wristwatch, when he saw the still unfinished jug of cider. What nonsense, he thought, to think it had been an aphrodisiac. Willow had stirred his senses with that glimpse of her body and her inviting song, but that was all. The cider itself was clearly innocuous, and very refreshing. Howie drank the remainder and, turning down his lamp, fell almost at once into a deep sleep.

  It might be imagined that of all the images that had impinged on Sergeant Neil Howie on the thirtieth of April and in the early hours of the first of May, Willow, luscious Willow, would have won pride of place in his subconscious–Willow or perhaps an erotically imagined Mary Bannock, since his love for her had won the battle for his soul, not to mention his body.

  Yet Howie dreamed of no woman at all unless you counted Rowan and she did figure in his dream. But as a little virgin dressed in white like the children in the Harvest Festival photographs. Of all odd places to find her, she sat in a huge oak tree that grew on a tiny peninsula in the lake by the sacred grove, her hands bound to a branch. She seemed to cry out regularly for help like a little cat caught in a similar predicament.

  Howie was there looking up into the tree wondering what was the fastest way to climb up and rescue her when Beech, the kilted madman with the claymore, appeared and rushed at Howie, slashing at him with his sword. The sergeant ducked and tripped Beech, who fell heavily to the ground. Before the guardian of the sacred grove could rise, Howie stamped hard on the wrist of his sword hand, making him lose his grip on the claymore. The sergeant grabbed the weapon and, looking down at the big man, saw only the withered trunk of a fallen beech tree, where before the man had lain.

  While it was now his intention to climb the great oak tree to rescue Rowan, Howie realized that he was not alone in the grove of trees. People seemed to him to be coming towards him in the distance. Behind a clump of ferns, near the lake, he could make out the figure of a man moving, or perhaps it was the fern clump itself that was advancing like the ‘woods at Dunsinane’. Hoping to forestall his attacker’s assault, Howie rushed forward and lunged at the ferns with his claymore, but the man who rose to ward off his blow was Broom, the piper, and the only weapon he had was his bagpipe, which Howie split like a pig’s bladder. It made a sighing sound as the air went out of it. The piper had gone and a broom shrub stood in his place.

  Then it seemed as if an entire army were marching towards him through the wood to the tuck-a-tuck of drums. Lord Summerisle was at their head dressed in his full regalia as a chief of the clan Morrison and all the other men he’d seen in the bar and elsewhere, young and old, Dr Ewan, Alder MacGregor, young Ash Buchanan, even the stringy figure of old Lennox, marched behind their laird.

  The strange thing was that none of them dressed in the neat showy kilts that tourists and Scottish nationalists from Glasgow affected but rather in the great shambling old kilts that men tucked into their sword belts when going into battle in the last great rebellion in 1745. Their shirts were undyed homespun, mostly worn under leather jerkins, and the band from the inn started to skirl their pipes to add menace to the drums. They wore long feathers in their bonnets and woad smeared upon their cheeks. They were, Howie thought, like an army of ghosts marching out of several obscure pages of Scotland’s history all at once.

  It had always been the lot of Scotland’s military and police to fight the prophets and the madmen, the romantics and the seers of their own race. On behalf of the Scottish Crown. On behalf of law and order. On behalf, as often as not, of Christ the King.

  He took the claymore and stood beneath the tree, his weapon raised to ward them off. But they did not even look at him as they advanced. Instead they gazed up at the girl in the tree. Sergeant Howie stood on the small peninsula that led to the oak, trying desperately to think of some adequate way of stopping the mob from snatching from the upper branch the poor wee cower’n’ virgin girlie, who was his charge. This, he knew, was his testing ground and he must not fail. He would fight them off till he fell, or reinforcements came. But there must be something he could say that would deter them. In Britain a mere word from a policeman should be enough. A piece of doggerel from his childhood came out of his mouth before he could stop it.

  Yet surprisingly, it stopped Lord Summerisle dead in his tracks, although his troops remained anxious to grab the child.

  ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium,’ quoth Howie, wondering why as he said it. ‘By the Nine Gods He swore …’ Nine Gods! That was it. These people must have at least nine gods!

  ‘That the great House of Tarquin

  Should suffer wrong no more.’

  But at this point Lord Summerisle couldn’t resist interrupting, in his deep umbrous voice.

  ‘By the Nine Gods he swore it!

  And named a trysting day.

  And bade his
messengers ride forth

  East and west, and south and north,

  To summon his array.’

  The ragged array behind Lord Summerisle had come to a halt and was listening intently to their laird’s words. Although they had lost the thread of his meaning, they looked like men who felt sure all would soon be explained.

  ‘The sergeant will tell us how it goes on, won’t you, Sergeant? Otherwise we’ll have to scale the tree and capture little Rowan, won’t we, lads?’

  ‘Aye!’ they all shouted in unison. Howie was not at all sure how it went on but knew he must bluff it out if he could.

  ‘Then up spake brave Horatio …

  Of … of Tuscan blood was he …

  Oh, I will stand at thy right hand …

  And hold the Bridge with thee …’

  ‘Wrong, ridiculous, pathetic!’ shouted Lord Summerisle, and the whole army surged forward, engulfing Howie. A dozen sword blows were striking Howie’s claymore from his hand. He felt himself falling from the small peninsula towards the cold water of the lake …

  When Sergeant Howie woke he was lying on his stomach, his sheets quite damp from his sweat. While his dream was full of the nonsense of typical dreams, he could see, at once, that it might contain a kernel of truth. Suppose Rowan were being guarded in the sacred grove? Suppose Beech was her real (possibly sane) guard? Suppose that the gillie and Beech were the real captors of Rowan and that she was a pawn in a battle between the ‘Protestants’ (as the gillie had called her brother Beech’s pagan schism) and the followers of Lord Summerisle’s catholic version of the old religion?

  Then again suppose Beech might simply be Lord Summerisle’s hired jailer, with his role dressed up for Howie’s benefit with the story of his strangeness and the myth of the ‘sacred grove’.