When I woke up from that dream the Devil was up and about at the fire, making tea, and there was such a surreal domesticity about the scene that I felt comforted, but still there was a residue of sorrow. Anyway, as I said, I didn’t tell Bill about that dream.
What I did tell him, I write down here. In the morning – I say ‘morning’ only because it felt like that, but I really don’t know what time it was – the Devil made me tea, and then he told me it was time to go. I said I couldn’t go into the river again. He said I would have to, it was the only way that I could leave. I suppose by then I trusted him, or I would never have got in the boat. I sat at one end, and he paddled us out into the dark pool. The flames of the fire made the gravel twinkle and threw long orange fingers across the water. The black rock loomed above us. I felt like some character in a Fenimore Cooper novel, or one of those brothers in Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae, deep in the American wilderness.
‘Now, Gideon,’ he said, shipping the paddle. ‘Go and do what you have to do. It won’t take long. Then we’ll meet again.’
‘What is it I have to do?’ I said. I sat on the edge of that tiny vessel, trembling over the tar-black water, and the question came out like a whine. I sounded like a child bewildered by a classroom task he doesn’t know how to perform. I did not want to go, nor did I know how to go. Did he expect me to slip into the water like an otter?
‘You’ll understand what you have to do when you’re back there,’ he said.
‘But where will we meet?’ I said. ‘And when?’
‘I fancy somewhere peaceful, away from the crowds,’ he said. ‘Away from the noise and confusion of life.’ He looked up into the cathedral above us and then back at me with a smile. ‘Does anywhere occur to you?’
‘The Stone,’ I said immediately.
‘Ah, but will it be there?’ he asked. ‘Anyway, that’s not very adventurous, is it? Let’s have an adventure, Gideon. Let’s escape from the world, you and I, let’s go on the run.’
I felt again an uncertainty as to whether the next idea that appeared in my head had sprung there of its own accord, or had been put there by some power of his. Maybe it was simply because I’d thought of Stevenson a moment before. At any rate, I instantly imagined, when he suggested the two of us on an adventure, Davie Balfour and Alan Breck at large on Ben Alder, and I named that dismal mountain.
‘An excellent idea,’ he cried. ‘“Am I no a bonnie fechter?” and all that? Ben Alder it shall be, come wind, rain or snow.’
‘But when?’
‘Whenever,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about when. When you’re ready. I won’t let you down.’
‘It’s a big mountain,’ I said. ‘A big wild place. How will we find each other?’
‘Gideon,’ he said, ‘trust me. If you go there, I’ll find you. Do you think I couldn’t be at your side in an instant? Trust me.’
Trust me. Those were the last words I heard him speak. He began paddling again, smiling at me all the time, and soon the boat was pushing in under the great flat rock where we could not hear each other. I couldn’t see how, even if I’d wanted to, I could possibly get out of the dinghy and on to the rock. I reckoned, of course, without his mighty strength: now, looking back, I see that my willingness to co-operate in this procedure was completely irrelevant. I made a shrugging gesture at him, to indicate that I was at a loss what to do. He smiled again, and with the paddle indicated a point somewhere above my head. I glanced up to see what he was meaning. There was a sudden rocking of the boat, and when I looked back at him he was standing up on the wooden plank with a happy grin splitting his face, both hands were gripping the handle of the paddle and he was in the act of bringing the flat of its blade down upon the side of my head.
Bill said, ‘And then what?’
I said, ‘And then the next thing I know I’m waking up in a hospital bed. I don’t remember Chae Middleton fishing me out at all. I thought I did at first, but it was the Devil fishing me out I really remembered. After he hit me with the paddle, he must have taken off my boots and stuck his trainers on my feet. Then… well, your guess is as good as mine. He was certainly capable of simply throwing me up on to the rock. From there the water would have washed me off on the other side and I’d have continued my way down the Keldo. After that – well, you need to ask other people about what happened after that.’
XXXVII
It was well after midnight when Bill, taking his tape-recorder but having surrendered the cassette to me, left the manse. He’d promised to say nothing about it for the time being. I’d asked him again what he thought of my story. He said he’d have to think about that. It was a lot to take in. Did I propose telling anybody else about it?
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘How could I not tell people? I’ve spent three days in the company of the Devil.’
Bill looked horribly uncomfortable. It was acceptable, it seemed, to tell my story into a tape-recorder – that was like the extract from Menteith I’d read for his exhibition – but saying it out loud as if I meant it, that was another matter.
‘Be careful, Gideon,’ he said, speaking slowly for once. ‘You’re only just out of hospital. Take your time, don’t do anything hasty.’
‘I’ll do what I have to do,’ I said.
I asked him if he’d like a copy of the transcript when I’d typed it up. He said he would, but he was leaving Monimaskit the next day and didn’t know if or when he’d be back. He wrote down a London address for me.
‘Should be down there already,’ he said, becoming a little more upbeat, ‘but I stuck around when I heard you’d been found alive. Can’t wait any longer, though. Next commission has to be finished by January, show opens first of February. In Lewes – the Sussex Lewes, not the Hebridean one.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Piltdown Man,’ he said. ‘Famous case of Edwardian skulduggery – literally. Skull of missing link discovered in quarry.’
‘I’ve heard of it. It was a hoax, wasn’t it?’
‘Absolutely. Rival archaeologists falling over each other with claim and counter-claim. Bit of a change for me, but still touches on the idea of myth versus fact, what people want to believe, that kind of thing.’
‘Fabrication,’ I said. ‘Truth versus invention.’
‘Absolutely.’ He stopped suddenly, as if he had blundered. ‘Don’t think that’s what I’m thinking, Gideon. About you, I mean. It’s just hard to take in. Would you believe your story if you heard it from somebody else?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘All I know is it happened to me. I can’t pretend it didn’t.’
‘Be careful,’ he said again, and we shook hands. He headed off into the night. I did post him a copy of the transcript but I never heard back from him, and I never saw him again.
For the next two days, Friday and Saturday, I stayed shut away from the world while I typed up the recording. It looked a miserable concoction on paper, and reading it again now I see that my words inadequately express the intensity of what I’d experienced. Meanwhile the phone rang incessantly, but I ignored it, letting the messages stack up and eventually taking the receiver off the hook. The doorbell rang too, half a dozen times each day, and to get peace I was forced to answer the most insistent of these callers, a reporter from the local paper. She wanted the ‘inside story’ of my survival: I told her she would have to wait, but that all would be revealed in due course. I pled frailty and exhaustion and asked her to respect the fact that I was still recovering. To my amazement and her credit, she went away. She was a polite, pleasant young woman with no future in the newspaper industry.
I was visited also by the police, on the Friday, in the form of my old acquaintance Andy McAllister. Andy had been in his early twenties when he’d come to the door with the news about Jenny. He’d been rosy-cheeked and innocent then, a churchgoer with a young wife and a baby boy that I’d baptised, a young bobby who thought he could make a difference. Now he was in his mid-thirties, a sergeant, overweigh
t, grey-faced, cynical and divorced. I hadn’t seen him at the Old Kirk for years.
‘I just wanted to check a couple of things with you, Mr Mack,’ he said, ‘about your recent accident. If you don’t mind.’
I had to let him in. We sat in the kitchen and he asked questions and made laborious notes of my answers. ‘I’ve got to put in a report,’ he said. ‘We had a lot of manpower out looking for you last weekend. Not just us: the fire service, mountain rescue. Anything you can tell me about where you were, how you got out, would be helpful. For future reference, in case anybody else ever takes a header up there.’
I said I couldn’t remember anything after the fall until I woke up in hospital. A vague recollection of somebody taking me out of the water, that was about it.
‘That was Chae Middleton,’ Andy said grimly. ‘That one would take anything out of the water.’
‘I’ll need to thank him,’ I said.
‘I wouldna bother,’ Andy said. ‘He’s been fou all week on account of you. He’s in the Luggie every night, getting stood drinks by all and sundry and telling anybody who’ll listen how he saved the minister. I wouldna worry about thanking Chae.’
He asked me why I’d gone after the dog. ‘We’re always telling people not to have a go, not to tackle burglars, that kind of thing, but they dinna listen. You must have known how dangerous the cliff was.’
‘It was instinct. I didn’t weigh up the pros and cons, I just went after him.’
‘A dog’s a dog,’ he said. ‘I understand you weren’t wearing appropriate footwear either.’
I did not contest this. The Devil’s trainers were sitting by the back door. I fetched them, and he inspected them as if they might be a murder weapon. He started shaking his head and telling me about kids who got lost in the mountains in tee-shirts and wellies. I cut him short.
‘Andy,’ I said, ‘I’m very tired.’
‘I’ll no be much longer,’ he said. ‘What about these three days, now? I don’t see how you can have been in the river for three days. Nobody could survive that. You must mind something about that time.’
‘I’m trying to,’ I said. ‘I’m writing things down as they come to me.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing so far. I think I was unconscious most of the time.’
He obviously wasn’t satisfied, but I didn’t give way. He asked a few more questions, some of which were reworkings of earlier ones, as if he was trying to catch me out. I looked at my watch. He looked at his. He said, ‘Lot of water under the bridge since I was last here, sir.’
‘Yes, Andy,’ I said.
‘How are you? In yourself, I mean?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘It was a terrible loss, Mr Mack.’ I looked blankly at him. ‘Your wife.’
‘That was a long time ago,’ I said. ‘I’ve moved on.’
‘Aye, of course,’ he said. ‘Some folk can. But still…’ In his ham-fisted way, he was trying to build a psychological profile of me. He was trying to work out if losing Jenny had led me, eleven years later, to throw myself off a cliff.
‘I got over it, Andy,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’
He stood up to go. ‘Well, if you remember anything else, you’ll let me know.’
I showed him out, promising full co-operation. It was five o’clock, a lovely September afternoon. I stood on the doorstep, absorbing the air and the light. I was just going back in when a car turned into the drive, honking its horn. It was Lorna Sprott.
‘Gideon,’ she said, virtually falling out of the car in her rush, ‘thank God! I’ve been leaving messages and trying to phone you all day. I thought you might be sleeping. Then I thought you might be lying dead on the kitchen floor. Are you all right?’
She hugged me, and I hugged her back. It was the least I could do. Jasper was in the car, and she let him out so he could thank me in person for saving his life. He did this by throwing himself at my chest, causing me to stagger backwards. When he’d calmed down we went into the manse and through to the kitchen. I put the kettle on. Lorna expressed concern about my limp. I told her it was nothing.
‘I’ll never, ever be able to thank you enough,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have done it but you did, and I’m so, so grateful. Can you imagine what it’s been like? I blamed myself, I blamed Jasper, I blamed you. It’s been a total nightmare. I even blamed God. And then on Tuesday, when they said you’d been found! I mean, the joy! The sheer joy of it, Gideon!’
‘I really didn’t mean to put you through all that,’ I said.
We had to go over everything, from the moment Jasper saw the rabbit to the phone call she’d received telling her I was alive. At first I played it as I had with McAllister, claiming memory loss for most of the three days. But Lorna was more persistent and gradually she got more out of me. I told her about what Bill Winnyford had called my NDE, and this led me to describe the first tunnel I’d been in, and then the pool, and then the cave. She listened intently.
‘This is amazing, Gideon. Don’t you see how important this is? You were so close to death. You saw what it was like. You weren’t frightened until you started to come back. And the light… It’s what people always hope it’ll be like, but fear it won’t be. Not outer darkness, but bright, eternal light. But it’s even better than that: God didn’t want you to die then. He sent you back to us.’
I remembered my friend’s words: no more games. I bit the bullet. ‘No, Lorna,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t God who sent me back. It was the Devil.’
So I told her. Or rather, I went and got the cassette-recorder and rewound the tape and played it to her. We sat and listened to this voice that was mine and yet wasn’t mine talking about my three days with the Devil. We might have been listening to a ghost story on an audio-book, but I knew we weren’t. Jasper snoozed on the floor with his nose between his paws. The light began to go outside. We listened on, right to the end.
I switched off the machine. I told Lorna that the Devil had taken me out in the boat the next morning, hit me over the head with the paddle, stolen my boots and flung me back in the river. I didn’t tell her that I’d arranged another meeting with him.
‘I feel like I need a drink,’ she said.
‘I’ve got wine,’ I said. That was all she drank, white wine. Two glasses made her squiffy.
‘No, thanks. Not a good idea. I need to drive home.’
‘There’s plenty of room here,’ I said, ‘if you want to stay.’
I said it in all innocence. I don’t know why I did: I’d never suggested it before and I didn’t want her to stay. She looked at me sadly, as if I’d suggested we go to bed together. As if I’d made the offer too late.
‘No, I have to go. Gideon, you must promise me something.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Don’t tell anybody else about this. What I’ve just heard… Gideon, it’s mad. It’s completely and utterly mad. It’s also deluded, foolish, unpleasant and blasphemous. You’re not well. You’re clearly not well at all.’
‘I’m completely well, Lorna,’ I said. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. How can it be blasphemous? It’s the truth. There isn’t a word of a lie in what you’ve heard.’
‘Of course it’s blasphemous. It goes against everything we stand for. You simply mustn’t repeat it.’
‘I can’t not. I have to. It’s what happened.’
‘I’m taking your services this weekend and next,’ she said. ‘I beg you to let me do that. You have to rest. Your mind is disturbed. You’re a minister of religion. You cannot go around telling people that you not only met the Devil but you actually got on with him. That you slept with him, for God’s sake. All that stuff about… I know you said there was nothing sexual in it, but don’t you see how disastrous it would be to speak about such things? To claim that the Devil lives in a cave in your parish. That you walked to the centre of the earth or wherever you think you went. That you don’t really believe in God at all, and he’s gone off on holiday somewhere. You’ll destro
y yourself and bring ridicule on the Kirk if you breathe a word of this to anyone. Which, if there is any truth in what you say, is precisely what the Devil wants you to do.’
She was right, of course. Everything she said made total sense.
‘It is the truth,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I have to tell the truth.’
‘At least wait,’ she said. ‘Will you let me take the services? This week and next?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I haven’t the energy for that. I haven’t even thought about it.’
‘Well, thank God for that at least,’ she said.
She stood up, and Jasper stretched and got to his feet. Lorna’s eyes were full of tears.
‘I hate to see you like this,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I should leave you alone.’
‘I’m fine. I promise you, I am absolutely fine.’
‘No, you’re not, you’re not well.’
‘Lorna,’ I said, and I pointed behind her, ‘there are the shoes. Was I wearing those when we went for that walk?’
She turned and saw the trainers, which I’d dropped on the floor after Andy had examined them. I could see the shiver that went through her.
‘I don’t know what you were wearing,’ she said. ‘I don’t notice things like that. Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t, what difference does it make?’
‘It makes all the difference in the world,’ I said.
‘I’m going now, Gideon,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. Are you sure you’re not going to do anything daft? I don’t mean about that tape. I mean, you won’t do anything to yourself, will you? Hurt yourself?’
‘Quite sure,’ I said. ‘I promise.’
She accepted my assurance, which was illogical on her part. Everything else she’d heard she thought profane, blasphemous, insane invention. But she seemed to trust me when I said I wouldn’t do myself any harm.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 34