The Man in the Moss (24 page)

           
He felt old. Suddenly she was starting to look wiser than
he felt. How they changed. Every time they came home from University they'd
grown stronger and more alien. Catherine studying archaeology at Oxford and
Barney, her twin (who he'd rather imagined would follow him into the Church) at
the London School of Economics and now researching for a prominent Conservative
MP - Barney, the one-time Young Socialist.

           
'Have you got a boyfriend, Cathy?' he asked suddenly.

           
'Why do you ask?'

           
'Because I'm your only surviving parent.'

           
Her nose twitched mischievously. 'And you'd got around to
wondering if I was gay, I suppose.'

           
He felt his eyes widening. Was this indeed what he'd been
wondering? One of those forbidding, shapeless lumps that lay in the mental
silt.

           
Cathy swivelled suddenly on the piano stool, lifted up
the wooden lid to expose the keys, and began to beat out the opening bars of
'Jerusalem'.

           
'I don't think I'm queer,' she said, addressing the keys.
'But some people find me a bit strange.'

The frosted peat was quite
firm where he walked. Didn't even need his wellies today.

           
Fifty yards out, Willie stopped.

           
Bog oak, he told himself, that's all. Probably passed it
hundreds of times, but they get turned around by the wind, bits break off.

           
The Moss looked like a dark sea sometimes. You came down
from the village, across the road, and it was like chambering over the rocks to
get to the bay. That was on a misty day, when the Moss stretched quickly to the
horizon. But on a bright morning, like now, you could see how the bog actually
sloped gently upwards, then more steeply towards the mountains, Kinder Scout in
the distance.

           
On a beach there was driftwood. In a moss, bog oak, great
chunks of blackened wood coughed up by the peat. Made good, strong furniture.

           
Benjie wouldn't cross the road to the Moss, but The Chief
had followed Willie, reluctantly, big paws stepping delicately over the black
pools at the edge, where it nearly met the tarmac.

           
Now fifty yards into the Moss, The Chief stopped too and
made a noise at the back of his throat that was half-growl and half-whine...

           
'Bog oak,' Willie said to the dog. 'You never seen bog
oak before?

           
Point was, though, he personally had never seen owt like
this before. The size of it. The fact that it had suddenly appeared in a place
where there were no trees, save a few tatty corpses.

           
He walked up by the side of it, and its shape began to
change, but it still didn't make you think of anything scarier than half an oak
tree with its branches all crushed up and twisted.

           
But when he got around it, looking back through the
branches towards the village, this was when his breath got jammed up in his
throat, when he felt like he was swallowing half a brick.

           
Willie backed off to where the dog was crouching and
snarling, his black lips curled back over his teeth. 'All right, Chief,' Willie
said hoarsely.

           
He looked back to where Benjie stood, forlorn in his red
tracksuit.

           
'You're going t'ave to explain this,' Willie told
himself, his right hand building up a rhythm on his hip pocket where there was
a bunch of keys. 'Lad's countin' on you. Better come up wi' summat a bit
quick.'

           
He straightened up.

           
'Bog oak.'

           
He'd stick to his story. The fact that he'd never seen
bog oak like this before was
his
problem. Just had to make it sound convincing for the lad.

           
Willie marched boldly up to the thing, grabbed hold of
the end of one of its branches to snap it off, about nine inches of it.
'Strewth!' It was like trying to snap a crowbar. It came off though, all at
once. 'Go on,' he said to The Chief. 'Fetch it.'

           
And he threw it as hard as he could, glad to get it out
of his hand if truth were told. It felt cold and hard, just like iron or stone.
But it was wood all right, nowt fossilized about it, too light - he'd hurled it
into the wind and it landed barely ten feet away.

           
'Well, go on then!' Bloody hell, he'd thrown dozens of
sticks for this dog over the years.

           
The Chief didn't move; the thick fur on the back of his
neck was flattened, his eyes were dull and wary, his tail between his legs.

           
'You soft bugger,' Willie said.

           
What this was, the dog was close to Benjie, they'd grown
up side by side. Only natural he'd picked up on the kid's fear. Aye, Willie
thought, and it'd've put the shits up me too, at his age.

           
Then he thought, admitting it to himself, What do you
mean, at
his age...
?

           
He tried to look at the thing dispassionately. It was
amazing, like a work of art, like bloody
sculpture.

           
But it didn't make him think of a dragon. Dragons were
from fairy tales. More than that, dragons were animals. All right, they had
wings and long scaly tails, but they were animals and there was nowt scary
about animals.

           
Willie wanted to back off further, until he couldn't make
out the details. He wanted to crouch down at a safe distance and growl at it
like The Chief.

           
Basically he didn't want to see it any more, wished he'd
never seen it at all because it was the kind of shape that came up in your
dreams. This was stupid, but there was no getting round it.

           
The tangle of branches wrapped round, woven into each
other like pipes and tubes, like a human being wearing its intestines on the
outside.

           
And out of all this, the head rearing up on a twisted,
scabby neck, and the head was as black as, as ... as peat. It had holes for
eyes, with the daylight shining through, and a jagged, widely grinning mouth,
and on either side of the head were large knobbly horns.

           
And where one of the horns went into a knob, there was
even the beginnings of another face, like one of them gargoyles on the
guttering at St Bride's.

           
But what was worse than all this was the way the thing
thrust out of the peat, twelve feet or more, two big branches sticking out either
side of the neck-piece, like hunched shoulders, and then smaller branches like
dangling arms and hands and misshapen fingers, like they had arthritis in them,
like the Rector's fingers.

           
And when a gust of wind snatched at it, the whole thing
would be shivering and shaking, its wooden arms waving about and rattling.

           
Dancing about.

           
Willie remembered something that used to scare the life
out of him when he was little. The teacher, Ernie Dawber's uncle, telling them
about Gibbet Hill where hanged men's skeletons used to dangle in chains,
rattling in the wind.

           
'Oh, come on... !' Willie said scornfully. He was
shivering himself now - cold morning, coldest this year, not expecting it,
that's all there is to it, nowt else.
           
'Come on.'

           
Walked away from it across the Moss, towards the little
lad and the village, wanting to run, imagining Benjie screaming,
Run, Uncle Willie, run! It's come out of
t'bog and it's after
you ... !Run!

           
He kept on walking steadily, but the fingers of both
hands were drumming away, going hard and steady at his thighs.

           
'Bog oak,' Willie made himself shout. 'Bog oak!'

Part Four

CHAPTER
I

Across the border, heading
south, Moira ignored all the big blue signs beckoning her towards the M6.
Motorways in murky weather demanded one-track concentration; she had other
roads to travel.

           
You should take a rest, Moira
. The Duchess.
Unravel yourself.

           
Well, sure, nothing like a long drive to a funeral for
some serious reflection ... for facing up to the fact that you were also
journeying - and who knew how fast? - towards your own.

           
The countryside, getting rained on, glistening drably,
looked like it also was into some heavy and morose self-contemplation. It was
almost like she'd left Scotland and then doubled back: there were the mountains
and there were the lochs. And there also was the mist, shrouding the slow,
sulky rain which made you wet as hell, very quickly.

           
Cumbria. She stopped a while in a grey and sullen
community sliding down either side of a hill. Wandered up the steep street and
bought a sour, milky coffee in a snack-and-souvenir shop. A dismal joint, but
there was a table where she could spread out the map, find out where she was
heading.

           
Many places hereabouts had jagged, rocky names.
Nordic-sounding, some of them. The Vikings had been here, after the Romans
quit. And what remained of the Celts? Anything?

           
She looked out of the cafe window at a ragged line of
stone cottages with chalet bungalows, Lego-style, on the hillside behind.

           
She watched a couple of elderly local residents stumbling
arm-in-arm through the rain.
           
English people.

           
... this guy was
telling us, at the conference this afternoon, how the English are the least
significant people - culturally, that is - in these islands ... mongrels ... no
basic ethnic tradition.

           
And what the hell, Moira wondered, were New Yorkers?

Mungo Macbeth, of the
Manhattan Macbeths. Could you credit it?

           
Moira had another go at the coffee, made a face, pushed
the plastic cup away.

           
She sighed. Poor Macbeth. Poor glamorous, superficial
Macbeth. Who, back home, through the very nature of his occupation and his
connections, would likely have whole queues of mini-series starlets outside his
hotel room. Who, in New York, would have been chasing not her but his lawyer,
wondering if a bonestorm was an Act of God or maybe worth half a million in
compensation.

           
But who, because this was Scotland, the old ancestral
muckheap, and because of the night - the crazy, surrealistic, Celtic night -
had behaved like a man bewitched.

           
Moira took her plastic cup back to the counter, which was
classic British stained-glass - stained with coffee, congealed fat, tomato
ketchup.

           
'On your own?' the guy behind the counter said. He was
lanky, late-twenties. He had a sneery kind of voice out of Essex or somewhere.
Nowhere you went these days in Britain, did the people running the tourist
joints ever seem to be locals.

           
She said, 'We're all of us alone, pal.' And, slinging her
bag over her shoulder, headed for the door.

           
'You didn't finish your coffee,' he called after her.
'Something wrong with it?'

           
'It was truly fine.' Moira held up the back of a hand.
'Got all my nail varnish off, no problem.'

About half an hour later,
she surrendered to the blue signs. On the motorway the rain was coming harder,
or maybe she was just driving faster into it. At a service area somewhere
around Lancaster, she found a phone, stood under its perspex umbrella, called
her agent in Glasgow and explained where she was.

           
'Previous experience, Malcolm, told me not to call until I
was well on the road, or you'd instantly come up with a good reason why I
wasn't to cross the border.'

           
'Never mind that. I have been telephoned,' Malcolm said
ponderously, the Old Testament voice, 'by the Earl's man.'
           
Oh, shit.