Glister

by John Burnside

  “All right,” Morrison said, finally. “Let's start this again, at the beginning.” He spoke slowly, quietly, as he had trained himself to do, to inspire calm in others. He had practiced his calm look in the mirror, as he ran through lines in his head that he thought would be reassuring. He wished he looked older. Or not so much older as more experienced. People knew it wasn't that long since he'd worked as a lowly security guard—a night watchman, in effect—at one of Brian Smith's properties in the Innertown. To date, he'd not learned much in the job, but he had learned one thing, which was that people didn't quite trust young policemen. “Who, exactly, went where and how long ago?” As soon as he finished speaking, he was annoyed with himself. He'd just broken one of his principal rules. One question at a time. Take it slowly. Keep everybody calm, get one person to talk.

  Tom Brook looked at the boys, then shook his head. “Well,” he said, “I know it sounds odd. He's only been out there a short while, really.” He turned to one of the boys, who had started to cry openly now. “It's all right, Kieran,” he said. “The policeman's here. We'll find him—”

  “Find who, Tom?” Morrison's mind was already drifting back to tea and digestives at the police house. Maybe to sit awhile with Alice, quietly together at the kitchen table, in those days before sitting with Alice had not been a chore. This was going to be nothing, he could feel it. Maybe he was new to the job, but he had an instinct for police work. This would be nothing more than a silly prank, or some misunderstanding. He didn't want to spend the rest of the night wandering around the poison wood, looking for some runaway who'd only been gone for an hour and a half.

  “It's Mark Wilkinson,” Tom Brook said. He already seemed less sure of what had transpired. Morrison's native skepticism was obviously catching. “They say he went into the woods and he hasn't come back.”

  Morrison looked at the boys. It was odd: they really had got a scare, that was obvious, but the taller lad seemed as much embarrassed as frightened. The boy Brook had addressed as Kieran was smaller, a little stocky, but with a sweet, almost girlish face; he was close to desperate, a step away from hysterical even, looking from Morrison to Tom Brook as if he suspected that they were the ones who had made his friend vanish into thin air. “So,” Morrison said, “tell us exactly what happened. From the beginning.”

  In spite of their different emotional states, the boys were utterly consistent. It seemed they had been playing a game out in the woods, and because the game was an old Halloween ritual, probably dating to pagan times, Morrison quickly returned to his suspicion that this was all a storm in a teacup, that the disappearance was some kind of schoolboy's hoax, a piece of silly theater that had simply gone too far. Possibly the taller boy, whose name was William, had been party to the hoax all along, but then something had happened that wasn't in the script, which left him torn between worry and skepticism—and also embarrassed, because the game they had been playing was a girl's game, one that Morrison only knew about from one of those “Did You Know” type articles he'd seen in the paper the previous week. Maybe Mark, or one of the others, had read the same article about how, once upon a time, a girl would take a bobbin and tie it to one end of a length of cotton thread. She would go out into the woods and, after repeating the necessary spell, she would toss the bobbin out into the dark as far as it would go, keeping a tight grip on the other end of the line. The bobbin would fly out into the darkness and land some distance away, hopefully still attached to the line, while the girl stood waiting for some sign—a movement, a tremor, something tugging urgently, or gently, at the line, calling her out into the dark. The article had said that, when they followed the line out to where the bobbin had landed, those pagan girls believed they would meet their future lovers in spirit form, and so perhaps learn who it was they were to marry when the appointed time came. Mark had suggested to the others that they should play this game out in the poison wood, to make it more real; he had even seemed to think the trick would produce some result, that there really would be someone waiting in the dark at the end of the line.

  “So what did you think you would find?” Morrison asked William. “You're a bit young to be thinking about a wife.”

  William looked even more embarrassed than before. “We weren't looking for wives,” he said, with obvious distaste.

  Morrison gave him an encouraging smile. “So what were you looking for?” he asked. William stared at his feet then, not wanting to look any more foolish than he already felt. Morrison turned to Kieran, who had begun to calm down. “How about you?” he said. “What were you looking for out there in the woods, son?”

  Kieran shot a glance at William, who shook his head but kept his eyes fixed on the ground. “We were looking for the Devil,” he said, after a moment. “It was Mark's idea. He said this thing about girls and husbands and stuff was all rubbish, it was really a trick to find the Devil.” Now that he had stopped crying, he seemed angry. Or indignant, rather—and Morrison sensed that Kieran was one of those boys who would grow up angry at the world for occasionally including him in its problems.

  “The Devil?” he said, in his best skeptical-policeman's voice.

  Kieran stared at him. “Yeah,” he said angrily.

  Morrison turned to Tom Brook. He wanted to say something reassuring, to tell them all that this was either a hoax gone wrong, or one of those minor mysteries that everybody laughs about afterward, but Brook spoke before he could say anything. The man looked both sad and relieved.

  “You don't go looking for the Devil, son,” he said. Both boys looked up at him then. He was the older man, so he had their attention. “Didn't anybody ever tell you that?” he said. He turned to Morrison and gave a sad, but conniving smile. “You don't need to go out to the woods searching for the Devil,” he said again. “The Devil finds you, doesn't he, Constable?”

  That had been the story. Daring himself to look the Devil in the eye, Mark Wilkinson had thrown his bobbin into the dark reaches of the poison wood and, when nothing happened, he had walked out alone, tracing the line to where it had fallen. The last thing he'd said to the others before he vanished into the shadows was that, if he didn't come back right away, they shouldn't wait for him. Then, with a laugh, he had walked out of the ring of flashlight and vanished among the trees. William and Kieran had waited a long time for him to come back, but they were too scared to go out into the Devil's night to look for him. Instead they had panicked and run, leaving their one flashlight behind. Morrison heard their story patiently and decided that the best thing—the only thing—to do was to pack these boys off to their beds, and go out into the poison wood to investigate. First, though, he would go by the Wilkinson house, to see if young Mark was tucked up in bed, laughing at the trick he had played on his friends, while congratulating himself on his lucky escape from the Devil. It was nothing, this story, just a kids' game, and Morrison was surprised the boys had got into such a state about it. Still, the poison wood was a pretty scary place at night, even with company and a flashlight. “All right. Here's what we'll do,” he said, “I'll go out there and take a look. If nothing else, then maybe I'll find your torch, at least. Mark is probably back at his house now, watching TV. You boys get off home, too. There's nothing to worry about.” He turned to Tom. “Maybe Mr. Brook could see you back?”

  Brook nodded. “It's not far,” he said. “I've got nothing better to do,” he added.

  That was when Morrison remembered what a very special anniversary for Tom Brook this night was. It was a story everybody knew, a story Tom would trail silently around with him for the rest of his days, defined by this one event, this one painful fact. For it had been around this time last Halloween that Tom's wife, Anna, had died from a huge, inexplicable growth in her brain that had eventually driven her insane. She had been reduced, at the end, to an abject, desperate creature who, lying in her own bed, believed she had been buried alive. For several days before she finally gave up the ghost, she'd clawed desperately at the imaginary box in which she th
ought herself enclosed; when he had gone round to the house briefly to see if he could do anything to help, Morrison had been reminded of the story of Thomas à Kempis, the saint who really had been buried alive, a fate that was only discovered years later, when Thomas was disinterred for a more distinguished burial site after his canonization. Contemporary descriptions said that the body was wizened and twisted, the arms curled up under the coffin lid as if the author of the Imitatio Christi had died while trying to push his way out, the fingertips a robin's pincushion of splinters and dried blood, where he had scratched and clawed at the wood in his desperation to be free. Morrison had heard that story in school, while his mother was on her sickbed; after she died, he would go to the churchyard and lie on the grave with his ear pressed to the ground, listening. He had been terrified that his mother was still alive down there, with six feet of earth holding her down, scratching and crying to be free. When he'd heard about Anna Brook, Morrison tried to imagine how he would have felt if he'd been obliged to listen to his mother calling his name, in some bloodied darkness deep under the ground, and been unable to do a thing to help her. That had been Tom Brook's fate: to see his wife buried alive, to watch her clawing at her coffin lid, to hear her screaming for help, and be forced to sit helplessly by. Tom knew, as Morrison knew, that his wife wasn't actually buried alive, that her predicament was imaginary, but her agony was no less real for that. It had been a terrible time and Morrison was disgusted with himself for forgetting this anniversary so easily. “Thanks, Tom,” he said. He wanted to say something else, something commemorative perhaps, but he didn't know what. He turned back to the boys. “There's nothing to worry about,” he said. “Everything's going to be fine.”

  Over the next few hours, Morrison went about his business with a feeling more of irritation than concern. He stopped off at Mark Wilkinson's house before he did anything else because, as he'd told the others, finding the boy there was the most likely scenario. When he got to the house, however, at just after eleven o'clock, the Wilkinsons were watching television and they seemed more upset at being interrupted at the crucial point in the film than anything else. They certainly didn't seem concerned for their son. After showing Morrison into the front room, they hadn't even switched off the television, though the mother did turn the sound down a little. Still, all the way through the interview, they kept sneaking glances at the screen, to see what was happening. This annoyed Morrison, who also found it difficult to sit in a room where a TV was turned on and not be distracted. Though he hardly ever watched it at home, it struck him as a fairly innocent distraction and it was company for Alice when he was out and about. That night, however, there was something dully obscene about those images flickering on the screen and the sound of the actors talking, dialogue spoken just quietly enough that, even though he didn't care a whit about what they were saying, Morrison found himself straining to follow. Perhaps because of this, or maybe because the parents seemed so unconcerned, the interview did not last long. It seemed the boy hadn't come home yet, but the Wilkinsons made no show of being worried. “Mark often stays out late,” the husband said, darting a quick glance at the screen. Clint Eastwood was pointing a gun at somebody.

  “He's stayed out all night a couple of times,” the wife added. She seemed oddly blasé about it, as if she didn't much care what the boy did, or what might happen to him. Morrison thought, talking to them, that it was no surprise Mark was out there in the dark, wandering around in the poison wood, playing stupid games to scare his pals. In fact, the longer the conversation went on, the more he disapproved of these people. At the same time, however, he knew he didn't have any right to judge them. He didn't know what their lives were like. You only had to take one look at them to know that marriage to either one couldn't be much fun. “He just goes off, without a by-your-leave.” She glanced at the TV. “I think it's his way of teaching us a lesson.”

  “I see,” Morrison said. He sounded like a policeman from a TV program himself at times. “So, can you think of any reason why he might have wanted to teach you a lesson tonight?”

  The woman gave him a sharp glance. She had sensed his disapproval and she was none too pleased. She turned to her husband, whose face was as blank as a TO LET sign; then, with nothing doing there, she swung back to Morrison and gave him a bitter smile. “Probably,” she said. “Nothing would surprise me with him.”

  Morrison was working hard not to show his exasperation. “Well,” he said, “do you know of anywhere he might have gone?”

  The woman didn't look at him, but kept her eyes defiantly on the screen. “He might have gone to my sister's,” she said.

  “Your sister's?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sall's.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Oh, she's not there now” the woman said, with an oddly triumphant expression. “Sall's dead. Somebody else lives there now.” The woman seemed as indifferent to her sister's death as she did to her son's apparent disappearance.

  “He just goes over there, sometimes,” the man put in. “He loved Sall,” he added, a little wistfully, Morrison thought.

  “She spoiled him,” the woman said. “She didn't have kids of her own.”

  Mr. Wilkinson had started to get interested now. “Well,” he said, “she couldn't, could she?”

  His wife shot him a warning look and he slipped back into semi-torpor. “Anyway,” she said, “he goes over there and hangs about. God knows why.” She gave Morrison another of her tight smiles. “I mean, he knows she's dead.”

  It was around then that Morrison decided he didn't see any point in continuing any further, so, after noting down the aunt's address and a few more-or-less token questions, he stood up. The Wilkinsons stayed where they were, on the sofa. “Well, I wouldn't worry,” Morrison said. “It's probably just a bit of Halloween high spirits.”

  The woman looked at him. “Probably,” she said.

  Morrison stood a long moment, then the man finally got up. “I'll get the door for you,” he said.

  “Don't worry,” Morrison said. “I'll see myself out.” The man looked surprised at this, then relieved. He sat down again and turned to the television. By the time he got to the front door, the TV was back at normal volume.

  As he closed the Wilkinsons' gate, Morrison had debated whether to let the matter go for the night and follow up the next morning—and without a doubt, he would have been better off if he had. If someone else had found the boy, there was a good chance that things would have turned out differently, not just in this one case, but in all the cases that followed. On another night, perhaps, he would have gone back to the police house, to check in with Alice and have a cup of tea, but that night, something nagged at him, something he couldn't put his finger on. So he'd fetched the car and gone over to the poison wood to take a look. Even then, he'd been in two minds and he'd considered just going home and waiting till morning, thinking himself a fool for bothering. If the parents didn't think the boy was in any real trouble, he asked himself, why should he? About half an hour into the search, however, he found what looked like a little den among the trees, a natural shelter of scrubby bushes and rubble, the kind of place where some lonely child might go to hide out. Not a place for a gang, but a secret, enclosed space where a boy with more imagination than friends might sit out late, playing at wilderness. Or that was what it looked like at first; it was only on closer inspection that Morrison saw that it was really the first in a series of such closed spaces, the first tiny room in a series of rooms, one leading to another, until, in the fourth, he found a strange little bower where someone had made an elaborate display, all glinting, colored fragments of glass and china, the bushes decked with swatches of stripy fabric, the floor splashed here and there with what looked like tinsel and glitter. It was all new, a special place that someone had just built—a bower, like those elaborate structures that some exotic birds make, when they want to attract a mate. At the same time, it also had the feel of a chapel, a special place set aside
for prayer, or contemplation, or possibly sacrifice—and it was as if that thought, that wisp of an impression, drew Morrison's torch beam away, dancing over the cold, glittering floor of the den across a wall of twigs and tattered scraps of nylon and old curtain fabric to the body. A boy's body, Mark Wilkinson's body, suspended from the bough of the largest tree; suspended, perfectly bright and neat and—this was what disturbed Morrison most, this was what his mind kept going back to afterward—absurdly gift wrapped, at the throat and around the chest and ankles, in tinsel and bright lengths of fabric, like a decoration or a small gift hung on a Christmas tree. Morrison knew it was Mark Wilkinson right away, though there was no reason to be so sure: the face was covered with blood and grime and there were faint creases in the dirt on his cheeks, where he might have been crying—though Morrison wasn't sure of this, because the boy's face looked oddly calm, even though his eyes were open and he was suspended in the tree like a figure from some makeshift crucifixion. Morrison didn't know why, but he was convinced that whatever had happened here had only just finished, maybe only a few minutes since. Still, he didn't have to check the boy's pulse to know he was dead. Yet it wasn't the fact of death that horrified Morrison so much as his own reaction to the crime scene. It was nothing like the climactic moment in a film, where someone discovers a body and screams: he didn't reel away in disgust, he didn't cry out or run to fetch help. Worse still, he didn't remember who he was and start doing his job. Instead, he came to a halt at every level of his being. He came to a total standstill in his mind and in his nerves and in his blood, suddenly drained of energy and will, captivated by the horror and, at the same time—and this was what transfixed him—by the sense that there was some kind of meaning in all this. Had he got there soon enough to intervene, or a few hours later—the next morning, say—it might have been different. There would have been something to do, set actions to perform; or everything would have been frozen and drained of color, a crime scene, a collection of evidence that someone, though probably not John Morrison, could have read like a book.