Beware The Peckish Dead!

by William Stafford

  I found his camouflage, a cloak he had covered with grass and mud and stones. How could I have been fooled by such a cheap trick? How could I have been taken in by his deception? Why had he done this to me?

  Thoughts and questions crashed like waves against the rocks in my head.

  He must have known I would follow him. He had been manipulating me all along!

  But to what end?

  Why pretend to be lost in a fairy’s hole?

  Where have you gone, you deceitful brute?

  Why have you done this to me?

  Ice on my hand gave me a start. Drownded Ned’s fingers closed around my wrist and this time he would not let go.

  “Why are you showing me this, you whey-faced loon?”

  And then he spoke. Water spilled from his mouth as words bubbled to the surface.

  “Help... you...” he gurgled.

  “But why? Why would you, of all people, want to help me?”

  “Help...me...”

  “Yes, that’s what I said. Why are you helping me?”

  Drownded Ned shook his head. I detected a touch of impatience in his otherwise sorrowful countenance.

  “Help...me... You... help... me...”

  The penny dropped like a brick on my brow.

  “Oh! You want me to help you! My dear boy, what could I possibly do to help you?”

  Drownded Ned put his cold hands to my face and pressed his blue lips to mine. I went rigid, stiff from top to toe. I could not free myself.

  What was he, some kind of vampire? Or - I almost filled my undergarments - some relative of the dreaded Water Nymph?

  As the kiss continued, I was rendered limp. Cold from his lips coursed through my body, and with the cold came images, thoughts and sounds.

  Drownded Ned was showing me why I should help him and what I must do.

  I swooned in his arms but I dropped to the ground; my ghostly kisser had vanished.

  ***

  “Hector! Hector!” Miss Lindquist’s voice roused me from unconsciousness. “Oh, good; he is coming around.”

  My eyelids flickered and her face appeared, looming over me with a look of relief.

  I was back at the inn. I tried to sit up but Miss Lindquist pushed me back into the armchair.

  “How many fingers is it I am holding up?”

  I seized her hand and inspected it. “All of them! Didn’t you - weren’t you? - The Peckish Dead?”

  She shrugged. “They were not coming.”

  “But - they always come - first, the drowned boy, then the others...”

  “Fellow’s lost his wits,” muttered Laird Baird. “What precious few he had.”

  I sprang from the chair. “But you saw him!” I waved at the window. “Connie, I know you saw him. Drownded Ned! He was right there! He beckoned me to him and the next thing I knew I was-”

  “Tush, Hector. You are being melodramatic. There was being thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening, and then you are screaming and passing out.”

  “I screamed?”

  “Like you are being a little girl.”

  I helped myself to a generous splash of whisky.

  Had I dreamt it, then? The fact that my companions were all intact, all digits and extremities accounted for, seemed to indicate I had cooked up the entire encounter with Drownded Ned in my noggin. Did that mean his revelation about Cuthbert had also been a figment of my imagination? I did not know what to believe.

  “Oh, Hector!” cried Miss Lindquist. “Your arm!”

  “What of it?” I pulled back my sleeve.

  Marks blemished my otherwise perfect skin. Imprints of fingers where Drownded Ned had gripped me.

  “Looks like frostbite,” said Laird Baird, offhandedly.

  As soon as he said it, the marks faded and vanished but I had seen enough to confirm the reality of my experience.

  “We must to Baird Hall at once,” I announced. His Lordship bristled with consternation.

  “Now, steady on; you can’t go inviting people back to a fellow’s home as if you own the place.”

  “Very well,” I shrugged, “Let us abandon the area to the predations of those cannibalistic children and let us leave your grandson undiscovered.”

  I folded my arms crossly; I meant business.

  “Oh, Hector! What is it you are saying?” Miss Lindquist peeled strands of hair from my sweaty forehead until I slapped her hand away.

  “Miss Lindquist, I have had a vision. I know how to rid the land of the Peckish Dead.”

  “Oh, that is being marvellous!”

  “Then we must to Baird Hall at once,” chipped in her father.

  The three of us looked pointedly at Laird Baird until he relented.

  “Oh, very well!” he snapped. He waggled a warning finger in the vicinity of my nose - I was tempted to bite the end off, like I was Rab or Wee Wullie, or the others whose names I can never remember. “Frankly, I do not give a tinker’s cuss about those bally ghosts but bring me back my grandson and I shall be content.”

  I offered my hand. He sneered at it.

  “Let us not go overboard,” he repeated.

  You just can’t please some people.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The ride back to the Baird estate was fraught with tension. I had everyone keep an eye out for as much as a glimpse of Drownded Ned. Every flash of white - a clump of snowdrops by the roadside, a wisp of cloud sailing behind treetops, a lonely sheep masticating on a slope - increased the heartbeat. I could not be certain but I hoped Drownded Ned would keep his pursuers at bay until nightfall at the earliest.

  As we clattered and bounced along the rugged road, Ranulf Lindquist plotted the portal’s probable course through Laird Baird’s land. He told me the most likely spot was in some woodland near the old man’s croft, not far from the very place where the Bickerses had found the blasted beetle that had brought me here in the first place.

  “It will be dark,” he frowned.

  “It matters not,” I affected nonchalance. “The bloody thing is invisible anyway.”

  Laird Baird eyed me with suspicion - but that was nothing new.

  The carriage had barely come to a halt when I bounded out of it and tore across the courtyard to the kitchen door.

  “What, ho! Sally Forth!”

  I found the apple-cheeked cook up to her elbows in flour, kneading dough on a slab of stone.

  “Lanterns! We need lanterns and plenty of them!”

  The cook regarded me with a baleful eye. “Oh, do ye now? And what for, might I ask? If ye care to shed some light.”

  “That’s exactly why I want them! No time to explain,” I tried to impress the urgency of the situation on the woman. “The sun is going down.”

  “It does that quite often, I think ye’ll find; there’s no cause for alarm.”

  Infuriating woman!

  “Just tell me where they are and I’ll fetch them myself.”

  “Ye’ll have to ask Berryman.”

  “Berryman be hanged! In fact, we may all as well be hanged. They’re coming! Here! The Peckish Dead!”

  “That happens quite often too.” She held up a floury little finger that was missing its tip. “I was eight years old; I don’t even miss it.”

  “Now, listen here,” I snatched up a wooden spoon and attempted to menace her with it. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to keep all my body parts where they are, thank you very much. And unbitten off.”

  “Och, it’s just a wee tip. It’s more hygienic.”

  “Why? Because there’s one less thing to wash? You’re insane, woman. Now, where’s that blasted, bloody, buggering butler?”

  Berryman appeared at my shoulder.

 
“You ranted, sir?” he intoned.

  “Lanterns!” I seized his lapels and tried to impress on him the urgency of my request. “And plenty of them.”

  “Very good, sir. This way, sir.”

  He led me to a store cupboard where a dozen or so oil lamps were stored in neat rows. “We keep them primed and ready, sir, should the lights go out. The gas supply in this area is erratic at the best of times, and the electricity can be a damp squib.”

  I didn’t give a hoot about that. I asked him to dole out the lanterns to the others.

  “Very good, sir. Will there be anything else?”

  “No, that will be - Sausages!”

  “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  “Sausages! And plenty of them!”

  “I am afraid you will have to ask Mrs Forth for those, sir. I prefer not to have my head cleaved in twain, sir - a controversial stance, I am aware, sir.”

  Dash it all!

  I returned to the kitchen, where the cook was now pounding the dough, giving it a proper duffing-up as if - as if it were me!

  She greeted my request with unbridled contempt and so I rephrased it in more obsequious, wheedling tones with sugar on the top.

  “It’s for the young master!” I cried at last. That final volley brought down her defences, breaching the castle walls of her stony expression. Hot tears spilled out like boiling oil pouring from the ramparts but I would not be dissuaded. “For the young master,” I repeated. “Surely you can slip him a sausage or two?”

  She nodded and sniffed wetly into her apron, creating a floury stain on it like the Turin Shroud.

  I cleaned out her meat locker. Or rather, she passed out its contents into my hands, standing steadfast to her rule of allowing no one to touch her supplies. Before she could change her mind, I scurried from the kitchen to find out my confederates. I dished out links of sausages to His Lordship, Miss Lindquist and Lindquist père, along with a variety of cold cuts. Slices of boiled ham and corned beef might yet prove useful against the gnashing teeth of the Peckish Dead.

  «Keep all your extremities covered!» I instructed, demonstrating how to hold the sausages to appear like fat fingers.

  Ranulf contrived a mask from the boiled ham but when he approached his daughter to make her the same, Miss Lindquist recoiled.

  «No, Poppa, you will not be slapping your meat on my face.» She adopted instead the veil I had used in my ill-advised disguise as her ersatz sister.

  We conducted a final consultation of Lindquist’s calculations and then we set off into the grounds. The fairy path cut across woodland at the southern edge and it was there the portal was due to crop up. It was a braw, bricht, moonlicht nicht all richt, and my appointment with Drownded Ned was imminent.

  How could I not help him? He had recognised in me a kindred spirit, you might say. Hence the increased number of attacks since my arrival in the Highlands. He had been trying to communicate with me all along but, of course, those hideous come-afters put paid to any possibility of parlay.

  That poor boy. His efforts to save his marooned orphan brethren had brought about his death. His failure to save them meant he was cursed to roam the land in sorrow, pursued by the demonic entities those young boys had become.

  Had he lived, Ned’s life would have been a tough one. Riddled with guilt, to be sure, but also - as I realised during our eerie embrace - unable to live openly as his true self. Oh, I empathised totally. One only has to think of the bigotry of Laird Baird and the somewhat mediaeval law of the land in this supposedly enlightened age.

  Regardless of what he had shown me about Cuthbert, I was bound to help the lad. If I had not pulled myself out of my lowly beginnings by dint of my literary ambition, I could quite easily have had the life he was denied.

  My party of meat-bearing allies trotted after me toward the trees.

  “Are you being sure this will be working, Hector?” Miss Lindquist tottered after me, with her father after her and Laird Baird, armed with his not-so-trusty blunderbuss, bringing up the rear - which is ironic, when you think about it.

  “As sure as I can be being,” I answered her in kind. “Listen; it was the Hole that delayed Ned’s search for help. It whisked him off somewhere - to Loch Ness, I shouldn’t be surprised - where he swam and swam and swam, until he was altogether exhausted. Then the portal plonked him back at the lake where he drowned. Now we must use that very portal to save him from his mournful eternity and to save everyone else from his peckish pursuers.”

  I found the others were staring at me.

  “Well,” sneered Laird Baird, “I hope, for your bank manager’s sake, your writing is better than your speech.”

  The plan was simple - if you take all the supernatural shenanigans as a given, that is. We would station ourselves along the path - the woodland path, not the fairy one, which intersected ours in a dell up ahead. Following the appearance of Drownded Ned, we would await the inevitable. One by one, we would lead the cannibalistic children toward the dell, using our porcine accoutrements as decoys. I, at the end of the line, at the point where the woodland and the fairy paths crossed, would be the last lure. I would step aside at the last possible second and the Peckish Dead would plunge into the portal.

  I was prepared to go through it myself if I had to - I had pocketed Lindquist’s calculations as a contingency - I might need them to find my way back.

  A low mist hung around the tree trunks, swirling in lazy eddies. A chilly breeze chapped my cheeks. I would have blown on my hands to instill in them some warmth but I had two bunches of bangers protruding from my cuffs, as cold as dead man’s fingers. Would those demonic brats be fooled again?

  We were counting on it.

  For now, it was the waiting and the waiting and the waiting...

  A cry went up, farther along the path. Laird Baird! A moment later, another: Ranulf Lindquist. A moment after that, Miss Lindquist added her voice to the night air - By this time, I could see him coming. A faint shimmer like a will o’ the wisp, a luminescent column that grew and gained features as it approached.

  Drownded Ned, performing his part in the plan, passing each of the participants at their places along the path.

  Just feet away now, those sad, blank eyes transfixed me. His expression, usually unreadable, seemed to me to have a hint of gratitude in the twist of his thin, blue lips.

  He stood beside me and took my hand. I hadn’t the heart to tell him he was holding half a dozen sage-and-onion sausages. And freezing them, to boot!

  We continued to wait but did not have to wait for long.

  Laird Baird’s blunderbuss went off - the pre-arranged signal that the Peckish Dead were on the move. I hoped the old man would not be overwhelmed and could lead those beastly boys to the next station. All I could do was stand and listen, straining to see beyond that accursed mist.

  Distant commotion erupted in a renewed outburst a little closer. Ranulf Lindquist was shouting, Get off, get off!

  Miss Lindquist screamed. Presently, she was rushing toward Drownded Ned and me.

  “They are being here! They are being here!” she yelled, struggling to breathe as she ran. A dark shape - Wee Wullie perhaps - leapt onto her shoulder, taking her down beneath the blanket of the fog. That terrible sound, Omnomnomnomnom! as Wee Wullie snacked on some part of her - a part, I hoped, we had commandeered from Sally Forth’s larder.

  Ranulf Lindquist arrived with Young Stewie and the other one hanging from his sleeves. His sausage-fingers were gone, munched off. He cast the boys aside; they bounced off separate tree trunks and the archaeologist stooped to assist his daughter. Wee Wullie snarled and growled, an angry, rabid thing. Lindquist booted him up the backside, punting him squarely into the trees.

  Finally, Laird Baird hobbled up, using his blunderbuss as a walking staff. Rab, as tall as the old man, was strid
ing alongside him, holding a string of sausages with contempt. He shoved the old man to his knees before me, before Drownded Ned - and before the spot where the Hole was due to arrive...

  Rab clicked his fingers. The other boys composed themselves and joined him. They hissed liked furious snakes to see their erstwhile companion. Rab threw the sausages at my feet but all his disdain was aimed at Ned.

  You! His hatred was almost tangible.

  You! The other boys echoed.

  You left us! Wee Wullie accused. Sorrow and betrayal emanated from him - from all of them.

  “Hector!” whispered Miss Lindquist. “Be coming over here!”

  But I could not desert the spot. I must remain where I was. As bait.

  Why did ye no come back?

  This was the one whose name I can never remember. I want to say ‘Tam’ but I wouldn’t put money on it. The others took up the question - except for Rab, whose teeth were bared in a snarl.

  You abandoned us! He snapped savagely. You left us to become - what we became.

  Drownded Ned shook his head in slow denial.

  “Tell them” I advised from the side of my mouth. He gave what he thought was my hand a squeeze. His face distorted into a mask of surprise when he pulled away a bunch of sausages. “I can explain!” I gasped, backing away. Drownded Ned threw the sausages into the dirt.

  What happened next happened very quickly.

  Drownded Ned grabbed my sleeve and pulled me to the ground. A figure appeared out of nowhere and yelled.

  “Och, it’s you, ye wee bastards, ye!” and started throwing salt at the ghoulish quartet.

  “Jock Hitchin!” cried Laird Baird. “I knew you’d come up to scratch!”

  And so it was! The Hole had delivered up the old crofter. Gratified as I was to see him alive and well, his untimely arrival had just about buggered up the rest of my plan.

  The ghoulish boys launched themselves at the old man; perhaps they sensed genuine human flesh on offer rather than Sally Forth’s charcuterie. Auld Jock staggered but stood firm as their gnashing teeth clamped on various appendages.

  Omnomnomnomnom!