Cape Wrath (12 page)

“Piss your pants, like most of us have already done,” Barry shouted from the direction of the fire.

David turned mortified eyes on Alan. “I … I can't do that.”

“Don't tempt me, Thorson!” Barry shouted again. “Or I'll come over there and tie a knot in your dick, as well. That'll solve the problem, eh!”

“Try and get some sleep,” Alan said quietly, before moving away himself.

A moment later, he'd sat down by the fire. The heat and colours of the flames washed over him. Briefly, reality wavered; it was luxurious and dreamy. Then he glanced down at himself, and realised that dry blood still blotched his t-shirt and caked his forearms. Ordinarily, he'd have been repulsed at the very idea, but now – for no good reason he could think of – it didn't concern him sufficiently even to make him get up and go down to the pools, to wash off.

“You know, the berserkers used to deliberately daub that shit all over themselves,” Nug said from across the fire. “Their hands, their faces, their hair, their beards. Must have been a hellish sight when they were coming at you team-handed.”

He was gazing into the heart of the blaze as he spoke and, fleetingly, Alan saw the same thing: the flames and smoke of a dark and infernal age. He recalled that famous quote from the old English Book of Prayer: “
A furore nordmannorum, libera nos, dominae!”…
”Deliver us, oh Lord, from the wrath of the Northmen!”

It pretty well spoke for itself, of course. The Anglo-Saxons weren't exactly shrinking violets when it came to blood and vengeance, but even they at first quailed in the face of Nordic ferocity. Yet since the 1960s, it had become fashionable in historical circles to rewrite the known facts of the later Dark Ages, and to highlight the positive aspects of Norse culture: their exquisite craftsmanship with wood, metal and stone; their eco-friendly mythologies; their sumptuous writings; their skills as shipbuilders; and their courageous, pioneering spirit. All undeniable, of course – proper analysis of the records revealed the Scandinavians to be farmers and traders at heart, who, when they colonised new land, created flourishing, lawful and artistic communities, and who only occasionally went
a-viking
, as they cheerfully referred to it. Such new thinking often made Alan smile, however. He wondered how the average English or Irish peasant, especially those living by the coast or on the banks of broad rivers, would have responded to that. Whatever the university modernists thought, the written facts held that when the dragon-ships were sighted on the horizon, it was usually very bad news. It meant rape, carnage and destruction on an unparalleled scale. It meant hatred, terror and pain. It meant total war: churches and villages sacked, livestock seized, crops trampled and burned, and a harvest taken of the people; women and children stolen into bondage, men slaughtered, either there on the battlefield, or later, on grim woodland altars, sacrificed to gods that to Christians were more like demonic entities.

And with that latter detail, so often dismissed these days as fiction, Alan felt he was now personally acquainted. It made his guts churn when he thought about it, set his head spinning just to imagine the awfulness of such savage, torturous deaths. Of course, like all Viking sacrifices, the Millstone and Blood-Eagle, as well as having a terrorising psychological role, also served important ritualistic purposes; to grant you the strength of your enemy's spine and the wind of his lungs, respectively. But just because you understood an atrocity didn't mean you could even contemplate condoning it. Surely, only those born in darkness and dire hatred could find it in themselves to spike someone to a tree and turn him inside-out while he still lived?; only those whose deities were forces for utter evil, could bend a man backwards until his spine simply broke, and believe that in doing such a thing to some poor, helpless creature, they would attain power and glory?

The fire suddenly flared, distracting Alan from his thoughts. He glanced up and saw that Barry was throwing more wood into the flames. Like Alan, Barry was also stained with Clive's blood. As the athlete stood there, tall and muscular, black crusty streaks on his arms and t-shirted torso, a determinedly fearless expression on his face, it struck Alan that he no longer felt quite so hostile toward the big guy. The Viking armies who'd tried to enslave England in the 9th and 10th centuries were finally driven into the marshy, eastern portions of the country and forced to sue for peace, because a succession of warlike English kings fought them to a standstill. The likes of Alfred, his son Edward the Elder, and his grandson, Athelstan, responded to the extreme violence of the Norsemen with extreme violence of their own; and, for a time at least, it worked. Bullish and boorish, they and their kind must have been, literally, a royal pain in the arse when you were close to them in the ale-house, but perhaps the warrior class weren't so bad after all. There were certainly worse things in Heaven and Earth than Barry Wood and his sort.

“You know,” Barry suddenly said, hunkering down, “I've been thinking. When we get back to the mainland, we can make a mint out of this.”

Alan looked slowly round at him. “What?”

Barry nodded eagerly. “We can coin it. I mean, how often do you get stuck on a remote island with a psycho killer? Sunday papers'll be selling their sons and daughters to get their hands on this story.” And, so encouraged, he stood and wandered thoughtfully back to his tent.

A moment passed, then Alan glanced blankly at Nug. “You know, you think you see something in someone, then …”

“Don't say it,” Nug replied, shaking his head. “I know.”

 

The next morning, David had gone.

A bundle of empty ropes was all that remained by the tree.

“What the fu …” Nug said, stunned into instant wakefulness.

He'd woken early, and, despite being drowsy and bleary-eyed, had thought first of checking on the prisoner and taking him a bottle of water. Now he turned and staggered away from the bare tree-trunk, shouting at the top of his voice. Within seconds, with the exception of the Professor, who slept on undisturbed, everyone else was up and about. Panic and uncertainty went through them like an infection.

Barry swore and threw his boots on the ground. “Jesus Christ! I
knew
it was him!”

“We don't
know
it was him,” Alan replied.

“Why's he run off, then?”

“He's probably just frightened. Like I said yesterday, he's only a kid …”

“He's a guilty bastard!” Barry spat. “Thank God he didn't do any more of us while we were asleep, that's all I can say!”

Nug was still shaking his head, perplexed. “I just don't get it. Those were proper butterfly knots. There's no way he could've untied them.”

Linda, who'd knelt down beside the tree to retrieve the ropes, now turned a pale, frightened face towards him. “He didn't –
look!
”

And she held up a bunch of rope-stems. Almost to a one, they hung in frayed tatters. Below them, it could be seen that the knots were still intact. Alan approached her incredulously. He took one of the ropes and held it up, rubbing the gnawed remnant between his finger and thumb. It was moist, as though slathered in spittle.

“These … these have been chewed,” he whispered.

The others had now fallen silent. Barry finally came forward. “
Chewed?
They're made of durable nylon! He couldn't have …”

“Well, what else does this indicate?” Alan shouted, thrusting the ragged stub into the athlete's face.

“This is impossible,” Linda said slowly.

Nug turned and gazed up the wooded slope. “I think we'll get up to the dig,” he said.

Barry stared at him. “You're thinking of work at a time like this?”

“No,” Nug replied, still gazing uphill, and starting to walk. “I just think we'd better get up there. Like,
now
.” And he began to run. “Come on, quickly!”

Without really knowing why, the others followed him. The fear spread through them rapidly. Within seconds, they were virtually racing each other to get there, shouting, screaming, terrified of being left behind.

As he ran with them, Alan found himself wondering about actuality, beginning to contemplate the possibility that this was some prolonged and rather nasty dream. Now that he considered it, it was astonishing the way they had just slid from one world – that sane one where archeologists camped out on Hebridean hillsides and dusted down artifacts all day – into another, a chilling and surreal one – where class jokers became mad killers and six miles of sea was suddenly an unbridgeable void. He hadn't even noticed the point when they'd passed over, where the mundane had ended and the horror had begun. Maybe he'd seen too many splatter movies?; maybe spilled blood and human innards were so ten-a-penny these days that the difference between grim reality and gratuitous special-effect was too negligible for the human subconscious to perceive? Even now, with Alan and Clive dead, and Professor Mercy withdrawn into fantasy, it was unreal. It was like, at any moment, he expected them all to come out of the woods laughing, taking off their make-up and breaking out the bottles of champagne.

This possibility, no matter how slight, which he clung to precariously over the next few minutes as he trampled uphill, was utterly shattered when they finally reached the top and came alongside the dig … and found what was left of David.

As below in the camp, the kid had been propped against an upright and securely bound there, only this time the upright was the megalith … and the bindings were his own entrails.

David's mouth was frozen open in a silent shriek. His eyes were glazed over, and his head lay awkwardly to one side, the mop of ginger hair fluttering in the sea-breeze. All that was visible because his face and head were probably the only parts of his body that weren't sodden with gore. His shirt and sweater had been forcibly removed, and a fissure either cut or torn in his lower belly. From out of this, ravel upon ravel of moist, pink intestine had been extricated, then wreathed tightly around him and fastened solidly in place with a variety of knots equally complex to those that Nug had tied below.

There was a moment of choked silence, during which, incredibly, Alan found himself marvelling that there was sufficient space in the cramped confines of the human abdomen to contain so much tough, fleshy material. Then all hell broke loose.

Linda turned away and began screeching like some bizarre bird; Barry fell into an animal-type crouch, then grabbed up a heavy shovel from the pile of tools and turned savagely on the others; Nug dropped onto all fours and hung his head to the bloody grass. Only Alan stayed where he was. He was appalled, but unsurprised – perhaps because he'd partly expected this, because he'd known all along that David Thorson, no matter how Scandinavian his origins, simply could not be the killer.

Or because he again recognised the depredation for what it was.

The Walk. Another sacrifice to Odin, this one to grant you the courage found in your enemy's guts. Yet again, it was an elaborate speciality of Ivar's. The victim was sliced open, then made to march around a sacred obelisk, unwinding his own bowels as he went, gradually wrapping them around the stone until he either died from shock or haemorrhage, or was hacked down by the watching warriors – though they would show such mercy only in approval of extreme strength or courage. David clearly hadn't made it to that final, more honourable stage.

Linda had stopped screaming, but now was sobbing uncontrollably. She sought Barry's arms, but he pushed her roughly away. “Just get back, all of you!” he screamed, threatening to swing the shovel.
“Get the fuck back!”

Nug clambered urgently to his feet. “Get real, arsehole!” he shouted. “It isn't possible one of
us
could be doing this. I mean, this is real Dark Ages stuff. We're talking deep-rooted barbarism!”

Barry gave a crazy laugh. “What, you mean like … we're too nice?”

“No, he doesn't mean that, but he's right!” Alan put in. “We've known each other since we started out on our bachelor's. That was six years ago. I'm sure if one of us was twisted enough to be doing this, we'd have sussed them by now.”

There was a tense moment, as they panted and sweated and stared each other down.

“So w … what are we saying?” Barry finally stammered. “There
is
someone else on this island, after all?”

Alan nodded, breathless. “Someone who's been watching us all the time we've been here.”

Linda whimpered as she glanced over her shoulder. The others did the same; it was unavoidable. The steep pinewoods below them now took on a dread aspect. The dim spaces between the trees were suddenly deep, impenetrable; the calling of gulls, which had previously echoed along the cliffs, was now uncannily silent.

“Right,” said Nug resolutely. “We stick together for what's left of the time we're here. And we stay up on this hill. It's exposed, and if we keep vigilant, no-one should be able to sneak up on us.”