Cape Wrath (15 page)

Alan and Nug stared, aghast. At first they were too stupefied to react, so for several seconds longer Linda fought alone. She scratched and bit, did everything the steely grip allowed her. But to no avail. Only when the Professor grabbed down at her crotch, grasping it mercilessly, was the stranglehold broken. Linda tried to go into her martial arts routine. She hit the Professor with blow after blow, but none of it meant anything compared to the crushing pain between her legs. She twisted and gave a muffled scream of agony.

The Professor responded by lifting her mouth from Linda's, and laughing dementedly. Then, with seemingly no effort at all, she took the girl by the throat as well as the crotch and raised her bodily from the water, lifting her up until she was high over head and throwing her.

Almost impossibly, Linda travelled several yards through the air before crashing into the muddy shallows by the shore. Her assailant wasn't finished there, however. She stalked in pursuit of the winded, gasping girl, reaching down and hauling a heavy, nobbled branch from under the lily-pads as she went.

The two men had now started into the water. Frantically, they shouted warnings. But Linda was too stunned to make sense of them. She looked up groggily, and only realised the Professor had a weapon when she saw it arcing through the air towards her. She tried to shield herself with one arm, but it made no difference. The arm was smitten down, and the sodden wood impacted on the girl's skull, cracking across its middle.

Nug screamed profanities as he tried to get there, but both his and Alan's progress was slowing dramatically; they were now waist-deep, and their feet were sinking in semi-liquid muck.

Stunned by the blow, Linda slumped down onto her face. With a shriek of insane glee, Professor Mercy struck at her a second time. Again, the wood collided with the girl's already bloodied head, this time smashing itself in two. Linda rolled sideways in the mud. It didn't halt the attack. The Professor now commenced beating the girl up and down her prone body, using both pieces of the broken club like unwieldy drum-sticks.

“Believe me now?” Nug gasped, as the two men fought their way across.

Alan watched transfixed as he struggled on, never having seen such ferocity in a physical assault. Not happy, it seemed, with the two cudgels, the Professor now began stamping on Linda with her bare feet, paying yet more attention to her head, which lolled limply from side to side as it was kicked and buffeted.

“You mad, barbaric bastard!” Alan screamed, finally realising that, whatever was going on on this hellish island, this was
not
Professor Mercy he was watching.

She, he …
it
, turned to face them and, rather than fleeing from the superior odds, gave a long, crowing ululation, then hurled itself forwards. The men were still knee-deep, but the possessed woman came at them with the strength and energy of a race-horse, her face a contorted mask. The blows she rained down on them were vicious. One made jarring contact with Alan's shoulder, and for a moment he felt certain it was broken. Another ripped across Nug's left cheek, laying it bare to the bone. They grappled with her, trying at first to restrain her, but so fiercely did she resist that this rapidly became a futile course. Soon Alan was hacking punches into her body, while Nug had wrapped his brawny arms around her neck and was trying to drag her down into the frothing water. When the pieces of wood were wrested from her grasp, she tore at the men with her fingernails, slashed at them with her teeth. Her strength seemed superhuman. She drove a knee into Alan's groin, knocking the wind out of him with a single blow, then turned and butted Nug full in the face, smashing his nose nearly flat. As he squawked and staggered backwards, fresh blood pumping through his clasping fingers, she rent at the ribs exposed through the tears in his t-shirt, flaying flesh from the bones.

This wasn't so much a fight as stand-up butchery, Alan realised. Professor Mercy … Ivar … whatever this monstrous thing was, was tearing them apart while they were still alive.

He clambered to his feet and threw himself onto her from behind. She twisted and went down on one knee, tossing him over her shoulder like he was a sack of feathers. He'd been ready for this manoeuvre, however, and as she threw him, he snatched handfuls of her long blonde hair so that when he splashed down, he was able to drag her head after him and plunge her face beneath the foaming surface. She still fought wildly, hammering blows into him. Nug, however, was sufficiently recovered to fling himself on top of her as well, and now, strength combined, they were able to force the raving woman entirely under the water, and to hold her there.

Seconds seemed like minutes as she writhed beneath them, as they fought to keep her down with everything they had. It scarcely occurred to them that what they were actually doing was drowning someone. So vicious had the attack upon them been that they'd instinctively moved from mastery to murder as a solution, and they weren't even conscious of it.

But it was more difficult than they'd ever imagined, mainly because both of them were now utterly exhausted. Even when the Professor ceased struggling, she proved a killing weight to lug across the pool; her splayed limbs had tangled themselves in pond-weed, her entire naked body was plastered in mud.

“Is … she dead?” Alan stammered.

“Dunno,” Nug gasped. “I'm no expert …” He was grey-faced with pain. Blood leaked profusely from his broken nose, from the countless slashes and gashes on his neck and torso.

Five minutes later, they'd dragged the limp woman out of the water and were hauling her by the feet up through the woods, the twigs and pine-needles slithering around her, her golden hair streaking out behind.

“What the hell are we doing this for?” Alan wondered. He too was racked with pain.

“Got to get her up to the dig,” Nug replied. “Enclose her in the barrow and block it up again.”

Alan gazed at him. “You sure that'll work?”

Nug shook his grizzled head, his sodden hair flopping about. “No idea. We'll stuff all the relics back inside as well, Ivar's bones, everything …”

It took them over a quarter of an hour to pull the woman up through the pinewoods and out onto the open hillside. At no point did she speak or even stir. Her face remained deathly white, the now bruised and broken features as composed as though she was asleep.

“I can't believe we're doing this,” Alan panted.

“You got any better ideas?” Nug replied.

“God help us. If she isn't dead, we're talking about burying her alive!”

Nug said nothing for a moment, but progressed slowly up the slope, wincing with pain. “At the most, it'll be for a few hours,” he finally muttered. “The sooner we get to the mainland, the sooner we can get someone back here to try and sort this bleeding mess out.”

At last they got alongside the barrow. Both men sank to their knees, wheezing for breath.

Above them, the sky had turned a sombre slate-grey. The wind gusting past was still seasonably warm, but growing progressively stronger and louder. It was as though the whole atmosphere of the island was slowly, subtly changing. Up on this exposed and blasted piece of hilltop, it was difficult to picture the peaceful, sun-laced pinewood they'd been camped in for that last couple of days.

“Come on,” Nug said, stirring himself to life again.

They hauled the Professor over to the entrance passage. Nug went in first, backwards, dragging the woman by her arms. Alan followed, pushing, shoving, doing anything he could. They had no torch with them now, of course, so it was pitch-black in there. They were no longer concerned about the niceties of archaeology, however. If valuable things crunched and broke under their knees, they felt it was a price worth paying. They didn't try to arrange Professor Mercy's body so that it wouldn't interfere with the find; they simply dumped her in the interior, then scrambled back outside, one after the other.

Nug went straight to the field-lab, knocked the awning aside and grabbed up handfuls of those relics they'd so far brought out. “Get as much as you can,” he said, hurrying back to the barrow.

Alan did, and for several minutes, they crawled in and out of the tomb, re-depositing everything they'd found. The corroded helmet, the coat of mail, the fragments of skull and rib, the brooches, the book-mounts, the pendants and neck-rings, the silver coins, the pieces of amber and jet, the chessmen cut from ivory. None of it meant anything any more.

“Good riddance to a pile of shit!” Nug said, squatting down and going back inside one final time.

Alan walked back to the pillaged relic-trays. They were now scattered over the grass, empty. Pins, tools, tabs, all lay useless. Pages of notepad scrawled with vital information fluttered about in the wind. A pang of regret went through him, but then he glanced up and saw the blood-stained megalith, with David's eviscerated body still lying at its feet, and his resolve hardened. He cast around on the floor for any tidbits of bone or metalwork that might have eluded them.

And that was when he heard the step behind him.

He glanced round, expecting to see Nug. Instead, he saw Linda … and Ivar's femur, long, hard and curved like a bow as it swept round towards his face.

There was a crashing blow, a flash of light, then Alan was on the grass, his vision flickering and fading. The last thing he remembered seeing was Nug crawling head-first out from the barrow, and Linda standing to one side of him, entirely alone but, despite all the laws of physics, lifting the portal-stone high into the air ...

 

When Alan came to, the wind was howling around him. Above, the sky was almost black, which in its turn reflected in a dark and truly terrible sea. Thunder reverberated through the heavens. In the far distance, lightning flickered. He glanced around closer to home, and was both chilled and revolted to find himself naked and bound upright against the megalith. His fetters were the entrails of David Thorson. They were cold and slick against his skin.

“Welcome back,” said a voice.

Alan glanced up. Linda stood directly before him … or rather, what had once been Linda stood before him. She too was entirely nude, but now smeared all over with blood and brains, every inch of her sumptuous flesh coated in the viscous matter. It gleamed on her jutting breasts, matted the soft down between her thighs, was thoroughly worked into the now glutinous, tangled, spiked-up mane on her head. Only her eyes were unsullied; they shone like pale jewels in the midst of the frenzied, red and grey daubing.

“Oh … oh, Jesus Christ,” Alan stammered.

She smiled a lupine smile; her canines seemed unnaturally pronounced between her ordure-caked lips. “How often you Christians call on that God of yours.” She indicated the corpses of David and Nug – the latter with his head now a crushed, masticated pulp – lying side by side next to the barrow. “And how often he fails to answer.”

“Linda,” Alan began, his voice breaking with terror, “you've got to try and get a grip.”

Still she smiled. “Ah yes, Linda. This is the body you desire, is it not?” She hefted her young breasts, squeezing the nipples between her thumbs and forefingers so that they expanded into ripe cherries. “I've watched you from close. I've seen your hopeless yearning for it. Your desperate misery because it wasn't given over freely to you.”

Alan could only stare aghast at the horrible thing now taunting him. It looked like Linda, it spoke like Linda, it
was
Linda … yet it wasn't. There was a frightening maleness about her cruel expression, about the way she held herself, about the threatening, brutish stance, the hunched neck, the glaring, hate-filled eyes.

“You should simply have taken it,” she advised. “Whenever you wanted, with force. That would have been the warrior's way … and so rewarding.” She rolled a thick, red tongue across her white teeth. “Ah, the joy of spending in an unwilling cunt … and spending hard, and then beating and disposing of that cunt, as it deserves, as we did the sacred virgins at Coldingham Abbey …”

Alan didn't need to be reminded about that ghastly atrocity. In 870, Ivar attacked the nunnery at Coldingham on the Northumbrian coast. Among heathen nations, there'd been a great and lucrative slave-trade in holy women. On this occasion, the sisters had known about the coming raid in advance, and in a madness of terror, had taken blades and disfigured themselves, hoping to render themselves worthless as merchandise. It backfired. When he discovered what they'd done, Ivar's wrath was appalling to behold …

“They thought to revolt us,” Linda scoffed. “They did. But determined that it was our day, we took them anyway, again and again, in every way possible, in every hole, 'til they were worn out from us. And then, because we couldn't sell them, we burned them –
burned them!
– as punishment for the horrors they put us through.”

Alan tried not to visualise the awful spectacle of 200 inverted crosses along the shore, on each one a nailed naked body writhing as the flames licked at it from the heaped faggots beneath. He kicked and twisted in his slippery bonds, but for the moment at least they held him fast. “Even your own people hated you,” he hissed.