The Testament of Gideon Mack

by James Robertson

  He crouched again and touched my right leg. ‘I’ll mend that,’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘How do you propose to do that? Are you a doctor?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I can mend things if I choose to.’

  I let that go. I wanted to ask him something else.

  ‘There is a legend about this place,’ I said. ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘This place?’ he said. ‘Oh, does it exist then?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I admit it exists. I admit we are here. Do you know the legend?’

  ‘I might,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’ He sprawled in front of me on the ground like a scornful teenager.

  I began to tell him the story of the lady of Keldo House. Within a minute he was yawning rudely. It was obvious that he already knew it. ‘She made a pact with the Devil,’ I said. ‘He was supposed to live down here.’

  ‘Was he?’ he sneered. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I read it in a book,’ I said. ‘One of my predecessors wrote it down.’

  ‘Menteith,’ he said instantly. ‘Meddling old fool. Well, a fine end he had, hadn’t he?’

  I asked him how he knew about Menteith, and he said the same way he knew about everybody. Ministers, priests, pastors, nuns, choirboys, bishops, popes, he knew all the Christians that had ever lived by rank, denomination and serial number. ‘Baptists, Quakers, Lutherans, Mormons,’ he said. ‘Bloody millions of you. Tens of millions. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus. Hundreds of millions. And all the others. Heathens, whatever you want to call them. Billions and billions. Atheists, infidels, pagans, sun-worshippers, all of you with your doubts and certainties and hopes and fears. There isn’t one human being I don’t know about.’

  ‘And how did you come by this amazing knowledge?’ I asked.

  ‘I have a library,’ he said. ‘A great big library with books to the ceiling, and I read up about you all every day.’ He held my gaze for a second, then burst out laughing. ‘Do I fuck! I know about you because you’re all the fucking same.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, really,’ he mimicked. He got to his feet slowly. ‘Oh, cut the crap, Gideon. You know who I am. Let’s stop playing these tedious games, eh?’

  ‘You started it,’ I said, but before the words were out of my mouth my ears were assaulted by the most appalling noise. The rock walls seemed to shake with it. If you’ve ever been out walking, in a quiet glen say, when one of those low-flying jets suddenly comes out of nowhere a hundred feet above you, and if you can imagine that din multiplied ten times, that’s what it was like. It was so loud that it drowned the sound of the river. I thought the roof was coming down on us and raised my arms to cover my head. It was only as the echoes were dying away that I realised that the roar had come from his mouth, and that there had been words in it. And my brain unscrambled the words from the echoes, and what I think they were was ‘I SAID, CUT THE FUCKING GAMES!’ But it didn’t matter really whether there were any words or not. I just knew that it was not possible for a human being to make such a noise.

  I feared for myself then, sitting there with him standing over me. He seemed to have grown taller, or I had shrunk. But then his fury vanished, and he hung his head like some unhappy giant in a fairy tale. ‘I’m sick of the fucking games,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sick, sick, sick of them.’

  In his despair I saw quite clearly, as if the light of all the centuries were shining on him, his haggard weariness. He was not, as I had thought, a young man at all. I knew at that moment who he was.

  ‘The legend is true, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You are the Devil.’

  He turned away from me. ‘Am I?’ he said. Then he spun back again. ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Yes, yes, that’s what I think.’

  ‘That’s what I think too,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s who I must be. A miserable devil. So now we understand each other.’

  I thought of the roar. I thought of the unbearable weight of him on the settee. I thought of his strength. What further evidence did I need? But still I could not stop myself.

  ‘Prove it,’ I said.

  Now he looked at me as if I were the mad one. ‘What?’

  ‘Prove it. If that’s who you are, prove it.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to do, show you a cloven hoof? Horns in my head, a forky tail and live coals for eyes? Is that what you want? Do you want me to take you up some mountain and show you my empire? Make loaves out of these stones? Throw myself off the steeple of your church and land without a scratch? I can do all of those things. I can do anything you ask. Do you want me to speak in many tongues? I can do that. I know every language and every dialect of every language that’s ever existed on earth. Do you want me to show you my supposed greatest achievements? Battlefields, wars, torture chambers, famines, plagues, snuff movies, blitzkriegs, child porn, multiple rapes, mass murders? I can do that too, but what’s the point? You know it all already and you don’t believe I’m responsible for it. So what is it you want me to prove? That I exist? Look, here I am. Do you think I’m doing this for fun?’

  He looked totally dejected.

  ‘You must understand,’ I said, ‘that I’ve never seriously thought you existed at all. It’s a bit of a shock now, to find you just a few miles from Monimaskit.’

  ‘Don’t think you’re privileged,’ he said, sparking up a bit. ‘Don’t think I’m paying you some kind of special attention. I do like Scotland, though, I spend a lot of time here. I once preached to some women at North Berwick who thought they were witches. They were burnt for it, poor cows. I preached at Auchtermuchty another time, disguised as one of your lot, a minister, but the folk there found me out. Fifers, thrawn buggers, they were too sharp. But I do like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that’s always just below the surface. And I like the way you deal with religion. One century you’re up to your lugs in it, the next you’re trading the whole apparatus in for Sunday superstores. Praise the Lord and thrash the bairns. Ask and ye shall have the door shut in your face. Blessed are they that shop on the Sabbath, for they shall get the best bargains. Oh, yes, this is a very fine country.’

  In spite of his claimed affection for Scotland, he seemed morose and fed up. Suddenly he brightened.

  ‘I know what I’ll do if you want proof. I’ll do what I said I would. I’ll fix your leg.’

  This did not strike me as a good idea. ‘No,’ I said. ‘A surgeon should do that.’

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’d like to.’

  When I said no again I heard a low rumble growl round the cave, which I took to be the precursor of another stupendous roar. I made no further protest. He went over to the fire and I saw him put his right hand into the flames, deep into the middle of them. He was elbow-deep in fire but he didn’t even flinch. His jacket didn’t catch alight, and his hand and arm were quite unaffected by the heat. He stayed like that for fully three minutes. Then he turned and his whole arm was a white, pulsating glow. He came towards me and reached for my leg with that terrible arm, and I shrank away from him.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt me,’ he said, ‘and it won’t hurt you. Don’t move.’

  I was too terrified to move. I was still clutching my mug of tea and he took it from me with his left hand and placed it on the ground. I closed my eyes and waited for the burning agony, but it did not come. I was aware only of a slight tingling sensation on my right thigh. I opened my eyes and looked down. There was intense concentration on his face. His hand was inside my leg. Where the bone bulged out the skin was sizzling and popping like bacon in a pan, but there was no pain, only this faint tickle. He was pushing and prodding the bone back into place, welding it together. Smoke and steam issued from my leg, but still there was no pain. I felt only an incredible warmth, like the warmth of the spirit in his black bottle, spreading through my whole body. His hand twisted something and my le
g gave an involuntary jolt. ‘Don’t move,’ he snapped. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ I said.

  Another minute passed. The hand was now red-hot, not white, and he began to extract it from my leg. Soon only his fingers were left, an inch or so deep in my flesh. He looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back. I didn’t much like his smile, there was something lascivious about it. He pulled his fingers out, and, although every part of my body was warm, I was aware of a cold sucking sensation around the wound as he withdrew. I saw my skin sealing again, puckering then tightening up over the flesh and bone. I once saw someone in a unit on the Monimaskit industrial estate shrink-wrapping jars of jam in twelve-packs using a heat-sealing machine. That was what it looked like.

  He stood with his right hand hanging down, fast returning to its normal colour. There was no damage whatsoever to his flesh or clothing. He let out a long breath and wiped his brow with his left arm. It was the first time I’d seen him affected by any exertion.

  ‘You shouldn’t have moved,’ he said. ‘I overdid it with the bone. Still, it’s better than it was. You’ll have a lot of bruising, that’s all.’

  I couldn’t speak for some time. Eventually I managed the single word, ‘Why?’

  ‘I can heal as well as Jesus,’ he said. ‘I just never had the opportunities.’

  He took our mugs back to the pot and refilled them. The tea was grainy and stewed when I drank it but I didn’t complain.

  I said, ‘You’re not how I expected you to be.’

  ‘How did you expect me to be?’ he said. He seemed friendly and relaxed again, and sat at one end of the settee. I pulled my legs up to make room for him and found that I could do so with relative ease.

  I said, ‘Not like this. I don’t suppose I had any real expectation of ever meeting you, so I never thought about it.’

  ‘You fell back on stereotypes,’ he said. ‘Why should I fit a stereotype any more than you do? You’re not your typical Church of Scotland minister, so why should I be your typical… whatever. I’ve hardly ever known a “typical” minister, when I think about it. There’s always something that marks you out. Menteith now, hardly a Christian thought in his head, but a good mountaineer till he slipped. Thomas Chalmers – one of the funniest men you could ever meet, even when he didn’t mean to be. Knox – a beautiful singing voice, and not averse to a drink either. Kind to women and children too, unless they happened to be royalty. Robert Kirk – what a strange mixture he was…’

  WW: He knew Robert Kirk?

  GM: Apparently, yes. ‘He went in too deep, and couldn’t get out,’ he said. I would have pressed him on this, but then he said something else: ‘Your father, he was an odd one too.’

  I suppose I ought not to have been surprised. I sat up still further, pushing myself away from him with my heels. I was aware of my naked legs, my socks, my absurdity. ‘My father?’ I said. ‘What did you have to do with my father?’

  ‘I watched him for years,’ he said. ‘A sad, frightened man. He was so like you, or you’re so like him. You may have started off from different places but you’ve both spent your lives scuttering about in theological mud. Even if you think you haven’t. The hours and hours he spent in that study of his, wondering where he’d gone wrong.’

  ‘My father never thought he’d gone wrong,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t he?’ he said. ‘I used to watch him from the garden sometimes. He was a mess, Gideon. Even before the stroke he was a mess.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you?’ he said. ‘I think you’ve known it all along. He was hiding. You don’t think he was in there because he believed, do you? Don’t you think he would have been out fighting the world if he’d really believed? He didn’t. He didn’t have a shred of faith left, not after the war, anyway. He pretended he believed, he tried to force himself and everybody around him, but he couldn’t. He’d seen too much.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ I said.

  ‘I know everything,’ he said.

  ‘You’re lying,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘If you say so. Ask your mother next time you can be bothered to visit her.’

  ‘My mother doesn’t know anything any more,’ I said. ‘She never did and she certainly doesn’t now.’

  ‘Oh, she knows,’ he said. ‘She might not have the right words, but she knows.’

  He stood again and took his empty mug back to the table. ‘Find out, Gideon,’ he said.

  I lost my temper. I shouted at him, why couldn’t he just tell me? He shouted back, hadn’t he already done enough? He’d saved me from drowning, he’d given me heat, food, drink, he’d mended my leg. How much did I want from him? I said, ‘I just want you to tell me what you know about my father.’

  ‘That’s not the way it works, Gideon,’ he said. ‘You know that. Speak to your mother. Look into her eyes and ask her. Do you hear me? Look into her eyes. There are reasons for you to go back and that’s one of them. And now I have things to do. We’ll talk later.’

  And again, as abruptly as he had done before, he vanished into the shadows.

  As soon as he’d gone I got to my feet. I had cramps in my legs and the blood beginning to flow through them was painful and pleasurable at the same time. It made me want to move, to act. He had folded what was left of my trousers and hung them on the back of the settee, and they had fallen to the ground behind it. I put them on – they were ripped and shrunken but at least they went on. My right leg seemed pretty strong. I couldn’t put my full weight on it but I could certainly hobble. Next I looked for my boots. They had been by the fire when I’d last looked, but they weren’t there now. In their place was his pair of beaten-up old trainers.

  WW: He’d taken your boots for himself?

  GM: So it seemed. I hadn’t noticed, but he could be so quick, he could have lifted them in that last moment by the fire, slipped off his own shoes and put the boots on later, in the shadows. Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it. I eased my feet into the trainers. They didn’t have any laces, but my feet were swollen, so they fitted quite well. They probably suited me better at that moment than my boots would have. Then I started to look around.

  It was all so disappointingly mundane. Given the powers he obviously had, my Devil was living a very basic existence. I inspected the jars and bottles on his shelves and found only oats and lentils and tea. No sulphur or other diabolical substances. The plates and pans were old and worn and dirty, but all I had seen him consume was tea, so I didn’t think they were much used in any case. Perhaps he lived in opulent splendour somewhere else. There was the matter of his immaculate turn-out, his coming and going at all hours. Time seemed different to him. Where did he go when he wasn’t there? The ramshackle encampment in the cave was like the home of someone who had – almost – given up trying.

  Next I searched for a route out of the cave via the river. I’ve said that the smoke from the fire went up a shaft in the rock. I tried to look up this to see if I could see daylight, but the heat was oppressive and the smoke obscured any possible view. So then I went down to the beach, pushed the dinghy into the water, grabbed the paddle and scrambled in. I wasn’t keen to be back on the water, but if I could find a way out before my host returned, I would take it. I steered the boat across the black pool towards the cascade at the other end. The noise was thunderous but it seemed to me that the volume of water was less. Maybe the rain had stopped. As I approached, the boat began to spin in the eddy created by the water entering the pool and I had to paddle constantly to get in close. I saw that the pool was separated from the main course of the river by a jutting promontory of rock, and that at the foot of the chute down which I had been flung there was a large flat-topped rock sloping away on either side, constantly washed by hundreds of gallons of white water. Anything that came down the chute, it seemed, either slid off into the pool or continued its helter-skelter way down the other, much broader side of the rock, and then on, presumably to emerge wherever the Keldo did. It w
as hard to assess from the unstable boat, but I reckoned the chances of ending up in the pool, as I had done, were about one in ten.

  I remembered that he had hinted that my exit route was to be by the river. I was determined that this would not be so. I paddled back to the beach, pulled the boat clear, and returned to the fire. I picked up a few logs and threw them on. Then I took a deep breath and set off to look for an alternative exit in the only other direction available to me. I headed deeper into the cave, towards that other, distant, red light.

  (At this point Bill Winnyford asked me to stop as he needed to change over the cassette. We refilled our glasses. I’d had my eyes closed for much of the time I was speaking – I found it easier to recall details that way. Now, looking at him over my whisky, I asked him what he thought.

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it.’

  ‘You’re not worried about being alone in the house with a man who says he’s spent time with the Devil?’

  ‘Not a bit.’

  ‘Am I telling the truth?’

  He spluttered a bit. ‘Only you know that,’ he said. ‘Unfair question. Show me your leg.’

  I stood up, undid my trousers and lowered them to my knees. Bill whistled and leaned forward to inspect the right thigh.

  ‘Impressive,’ he said. ‘It looks like boiled marble. But…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘As I’ve been learning, Bill, nothing does. You either believe or you don’t.’

  ‘The jury’s out at the moment,’ he said diplomatically.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘If that cassette’s ready to go, I’ll tell you the rest.’)

  GM: The roof of the cave was about twelve feet in height over the area by the fire. It was like this for another twenty yards or so, then it came down steeply to about seven feet, and the walls closed in around me so that I found myself in another long tunnel, a dry one. The rock was cold to the touch, the ground was firm. At first the light from the fire behind me showed me the way. When this faded, I was left with only the distant glow ahead as my guide.