In the Devil's Name Page 12

It was dusk, and gentle waves rolled lazily up the smooth sand. The evening air was warm and carried the scent of saltwater and wood smoke. Looking across the water, I could see the last sliver of the sun hovering an inch above the hills on the horizon, yet as I looked, that blazing blood red slice of light remained suspended in the sky and did not sink out of view behind the dark silhouette of the land. Though the turgid waves continued to slide up the shingle and recede back in the eternal dance of the tide, there was no sound. Not even that of my own breath or the blood running in my veins. This was the unsound of the void of deep space.

  I looked left and right. The beach stretched away in a straight line to infinity on either side without a bay or even the slightest deviation of the land.

  I turned around and there it was.

  The cave.

  The shadowy opening in the cliff face was right where I knew it would be. Above the high rock façade, which seemed to stretch hundreds of feet into the air, the forest stood in a brooding hush, as if in anticipation of some unknowable and terrible event.

  There was not the smallest acceleration of my (unheard) heartbeat, not a trickle of nervous perspiration travelled my brow. My palms were dry and my mouth moist. I felt a previously unknown state of calm, like the deepest sleep and sweetest dream. There was no fear, though this surreal experience would under normal circumstances have thrown me back into the arms of panic, which I had come to know and fear all too well.

  I was safe.

  I felt strangely doubled in some way, like I was sharing my mind and soul with another entity that was the source of my serenity. It was the light I had dreamed of before. It was peace.

  But there was danger here. I knew it the same way I had known the mouth of the cave would be there when I turned around.

  Something stalked in the gloom of the forest above the high cliffs.

  There was still the absolute absence of sound, and I saw nothing, yet I knew some unknown horror roamed those dark regions where no light fell between the trees. I knew it as a shadowy vibration in my mind and in the strange, yet benevolent other awareness which now seemed to co exist in my shell.

  The cave beckoned.

  I walked forward without hesitation.

  Chapter 27

  In the living room downstairs, Kyle Densmore was in an armchair reading when he heard the soft thump from upstairs as his son's mobile phone fell from his lifeless digits onto the bedroom floor.

  Phil had come back from visiting Griff a short while beforehand, and had gone straight to his room without a word. Kyle had resisted the urge to go after him, deciding to give the boy a bit of space. God knew he’d been through hell, and visiting his friend who had come so close to killing him would have been tough.

  Phil seemed to be getting better these days, though. The kid was a lot tougher than he knew, Kyle reflected, and he’d had to be, and not only during the past few months when his world had been turned on its head. Ever since he’d been born, it’d seemed Phil had had something to overcome. He’d been premature, spending the first few weeks of his life in an incubator and it had been touch and go for a while. Then there was the constant, menacing presence of his brother, culminating in the incident with the golf club, his extended stay in the hospital recovering, and the near break up of his parent’s marriage after Kyle had done what he did upon finding Phil, bleeding, burned and twisted from James’ administrations with the nine iron and cigarette.

  Kyle Densmore was a practical man, level headed and easy going. But on that day when he’d ran upstairs at the sound of Phil's screams and found James standing over the bloody and unconscious ten year old, nine iron raised for another swing, something had not snapped, but fucking shattered inside him.

  Kyle Densmore had never hit a man in his life, and especially abhorred the idea of using violence against children, but in James, he saw no child. Saw no son. He saw only hate, and that hate fuelled his own rage.

  In the aftermath, with Phil lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines, swathed in bandages and plaster and James gone, his anger was spent and he felt only a terrible hollow ache in his chest, although he could not regret what he had done. Knew he would never regret it because he had saved Phil's life. And if he lost one son so the other could live, then so be it.

  Rebecca, his wife, had a hard time coping with that horrifying, violent day, and for a while had sought solace milligram by milligram in little brown bottles. This and Phil's lengthy rehabilitation period had put a tremendous strain on the marriage and things had gotten shaky. Hell, had damn near collapsed under all the bad feeling, Valium, sleepless nights and crying.

  And though time heals, Kyle thought, it also erodes and leaves scars. Phil could tell you a lot about that.

  Kyle and Rebecca had met in Oban where they’d both lived at the time. They’d moved to Ballantrae when Rebecca, already pregnant with their first child, had been offered the job of librarian at the local high school. The proposed salary was far above the normal going rate, and Kyle, a sales liaison for IBM, worked mainly from home. The young couple had moved south to the sleepy coastal village, recently married and excited about striking out in their new lives.

  After the incident with James, Rebecca had been worn down by depression and had lost something over the years. She was never purposefully cold, but she had never regained the joy she took from life, which was what had attracted Kyle to her when they’d first met. Something had gone from her eyes, and she carried a faint but constant mantle of melancholy that seemed to weigh down her previously quick and easy smile. Although there was still love between them, Kyle realised that things were never the same after that day. You couldn’t suppress maternal instinct.

  Rebecca had succumbed to cancer a few years later, finally expiring when Phil was only ten years old. It had happened swiftly and without any prior warning. She was diagnosed after a doctor's visit where she had complained of stomach pain. Four months later, she was gone. Just like that. Rebecca had never smoked a day in her life, and went jogging twice a week, but such factors were trivialities to an uncaring God, Kyle thought bitterly. Once a man strong in his faith, he had turned his back on the church.

  In the dark days that followed, depression had set in, and Kyle, who had never been much of a drinker, developed a dangerous taste for single malt. His grief tore at him and even though he knew he had a ten year old son to care for, a boy that he loved dearly, the whisky blunted the sharp teeth of his sorrow.

  It was not until a particularly black day a month after Rebecca’s funeral that he woke up, but it’d been a close thing.

  That morning, after his son had gone to school, Kyle had locked himself in the house with a bottle of Glenmorangie and started drinking. He’d come around some hours later to find himself sitting on the kitchen floor. The whisky bottle lying discarded beside him on the linoleum was empty, his face was wet with tears and he clutched a fistful of his late wife’s sleeping pills in one hand and a photograph of Rebecca in the other.

  Through his own wretched sobs, he could hear his son's small scared voice calling for him through the letterbox. If he hadn’t heard that sound, Kyle Densmore doubted that he’d have seen another day. His son had pulled him back from the brink and they had been fiercely protective of each other ever since.

  As he read, Kyle's head jerked up at a strange sound emanating from the upper floor of the house. There was a peculiar hiss-snapping noise, which was followed by a weird change of pressure in the air, like hitting an air pocket while flying. This strange atmospheric shift caused the fine hairs on his arms to writhe and a shiver to pass down his spine in a not unpleasant manner.

  Kyle Densmore put his book aside and got up from his chair, heading up the stairs to Phil’s room.

  He knocked on the bedroom door, but there was no answer. The door was unlocked, and he entered.

  Phil wasn't there. The bedroom was empty.

  Chapter 28

  Inside that dark stony passage I tread, and although the sense of
some nearby malevolent hunger persisted, there was still no fear in my heart. The other presence in my mind was like a glowing shield which I gave myself to unquestioningly and with complete trust. Still there was not a whisper of sound, and the tunnel walls were lit by the familiar glow of candlelight.

  I could see the chaotic, scrawled graffiti that decorated the sides of the tunnel. The characters and lettering of the tags and mentions seemed to move and slither across the moist walls like snakes, changing their position on the rock. They flowed apart then together, morphing, swirling liquidly around the cave walls before rearranging and forming themselves into crudely drawn facial features.

  A raggedly drawn gaping mouth formed, above which a creased nose and slitted eyes appeared. The bizarre portrait, although crudely rendered, was a perfect likeness of Sam. And he was screaming.

  Another face fashioned itself on the wall, and there was Cairnsey’s anguished features, like Sam, wailing in tortured stillness.

  A third well known portrait drew itself from jumbled spray painted characters, and there was Griff, his good looks that had caused a flutter in the hearts of many of the girls in school twisted and distorted in pain.

  I stood there for a second, still unafraid, but feeling a deep melancholy and sense of loss. Somehow I knew that they were trapped here; prisoners in this dank and lonely darkness where bad things lived.

  I felt a single tear escape my eye and slide down my cheek, curving into the corner of my lips. I could taste the salt. My heart ached for my lost friends, and although I had mourned them already since the incident in this cave, this was a different kind of sadness. In my strange half dreaming state, I was aware that they had not moved on fully into the arms of death. They haunted this place, yearning for a freedom they were not to have, and I could feel their anguish like a splinter in my heart.

  I turned away from the faces of my friends imprisoned in the stone, and walked towards the orange glow at the end of the passage.

  I looked upon the killing floor once again.

  Pools of blood decorated the hard rock floor. Arterial sprays of crimson dashed the walls and claret drag marks streaked across the ground. The blood was fresh. The hard iron smell and taste of it was thick in the air, and I could see the candlelight reflected in the tacky wetness. Still I felt no fear, and knew this wasn’t real. Inner glow or not, nothing could have kept me in this bloody chamber for a second in my normal waking state.

  The blood was one thing, but seeing Cairnsey's detached head again, staring at me from the mouth of the secondary tunnel should have sent me bolting, screaming and insane from this terrible place. No way was this really happening.

  His eyes looked sad. Seemed to fill with tears almost as he looked on me with an unknowable expression of sorrow.

  I walked over and crouched down before him, tears spilling down my cheeks.

  “I miss you, Cairnsey,” I said to his severed head. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Everything’s so fucked up and all you guys are gone. I can’t do this on my own. How can I help you?”

  There was still the void like silence in the air. His mouth didn’t move, but I heard Cairnsey’s familiar voice in my mind.

  We’re not gone, Phil. We’re still here… and in here. Me, Griff and Sam. You’ll see. You should go now. It’s not safe. It’s coming…

  “What? What’s coming, Cairnsey?” I asked, pleading.

  Go now. You can’t be here like this… or you won’t leave.

  “I don’t understand! Help me, Cairnsey!”

  Get the fuck out, Phil. Now.

  And I could feel a dark presence getting stronger by the second. I turned and sprinted from the chamber, bolted through the tunnel and burst out onto the beach, just as I heard another sound staring to fill the air. It started as a deep rumble, felt as a low vibration in the bones more than actually heard, but slowly rising in pitch and volume to a rushing, howling scream like a fanged hurricane. Looking up at the cliffs above the cave, I saw something huge, dark and liquid fast burst from the trees and drop down the stone face before vanishing into the gloomy opening.

  I woke up, sprawled face down in wet sand.

  I was on my feet in an instant, alert and taut as an over wound guitar string. Recent experience had taught me that when you wake up and find yourself in a strange situation, you’d best be ready to move, but it was more than that. I felt an alien, somehow positive current buzzing in my bones, so faint it was only noticeable if you deliberately tried to feel it, yet it was there on the edge of consciousness. Like the subtlest Ecstasy pill you ever had.

  It occurred to me that I wasn’t as scared as I should’ve been under the circumstances. After all, I’d been standing in my bedroom just mere seconds ago, and had apparently involuntarily teleported, suddenly finding myself on the beach at Bennane Head, a stone’s throw away from the dark entrance to the caves.

  I spat sand from my mouth and looked around rapidly, taking in the surrounding terrain with a sweeping glance and seeing nothing threatening. The beach was mine alone. The sun was just bidding its final farewell for the day as it sank behind the horizon in the west, and the water lapped lazily around my ankles as the tide came in. The sea’s soft music and the plaintive cry of a lone gull were the only sounds.

  Although there was nothing to be seen, there was a slight, yet unsettling air of disquiet on this lonely stretch of sand. In my curious, hypersensitive state, I could sense faint waves of something discordant and unnatural emanating from that hated dark wound in the cliffs, and while not in the expected state of panic, I was loathe to go anywhere near the murky opening. Just standing thirty feet away at the waters edge chilled me. The only way off the beach however, was the mean, rugged path that led up to the road, traversing the rock façade, and the bottom of the path was a mere six feet away from the black, maw like cave entrance.

  Summoning all the guts I could muster, I took a deep breath and walked briskly forwards.

  With every step however, my courage quailed. The strident buzzing confidence I’d felt seemed to recede within my body till it was a cold hard ball, hiding as if afraid in the pit of my stomach. I forced myself on.

  Ten feet away from the cave, sweat had broken out on my forehead, and I could actually feel my knees wobbling. I was absently reminded of Shaggy from the old Scoobee Doo cartoons. Again, I willed myself forward.

  Five feet away from the path, and the sense of wrongness and fear filling the air reached a terrible crescendo. The black opening in the rock wall to my right seemed to want to pull me in. I was in no doubt that there was something very hungry and indescribably evil in there.

  I was a fraction of a second away from blind panic as I angled myself slightly to the left and stepped onto the path, the cave opening now at my back, just close enough for something to reach out with horrible speed…

  I was so close to losing control and breaking into a wild run, but I was determined to keep my pace steady. The dry, sandy path was treacherous and the last thing I wanted was to slip and take a tumble back down to the beach.

  Halfway up the trail, and the cold fear drew back a little. With every step away from the cave, the little bright light in my gut began to grow again. My confidence returned, and I crested the path, finding myself standing next to the bench where the mystifying Ozay had left the note containing the trips. Eat, drink and make merry he had written. And eaten they had.

  I stopped for a second, winded somewhat by the brisk ascent and the after effects of stress. I drew deep breaths and tried to gather my scrambled thoughts.

  Get a grip, get a grip. It’s all right now…

  I stepped out onto the road.

  With crushing suddenness, the sense of bad bloomed in my chest again like a black flower, and the good and bright awareness immediately shrank back again before it as I sensed something rushing up the rock face behind me. I turned back towards the cliff edge.

  I tried to tell myself I didn’t hear the hideous, hissing snigger or see th
at… thing, for a split second clambering spiderlike over the edge of the cliff.

  I froze. Instantly turned to stone by the crashing wave of rot and despair that polluted the atmosphere around the entity. It was like being hit with an oil slick, the almost solid impact and liquid suddenness, and it swept me up and spirited me away on black wings.

  At the awareness of something immeasurably ancient and foul, my muscles failed, and I stood there, still and lifeless as a statue in the middle of the road.

  Then the transit van came speeding around the tight blind bend and was upon me.

  It was so close I could see the grime on the radiator grille and notice that the driver had a large, ready to pop zit on his right cheek.

  I saw the almost comical 'o' of surprise his mouth made as he came round the bend doing forty in his transit van to find someone standing stock still in the middle of the road.

  I felt the heat from the engine on my body and knew I was dead.

  I flinched… and found myself standing on the other side of the road as the van swept harmlessly by, ruffling my clothing in its slipstream.

  I was untouched.

  For a second or two I just stood there, trying to digest what had just happened.

  It wasn’t as if I had no idea of how I’d moved a distance of approximately seven feet in a microsecond. I knew how I’d got there.

  I’d dodged the van.

  Sergeant Grace's words to me in the hospital surfaced in my memory. I remembered the look in his eyes.

  Big Ally, my constable, told me the boy moved so fast they couldn’t believe it. Like it was impossible, the way he was just on them in a second

  I recalled my own encounter with Griff at the campsite. The way he’d moved. That unnatural burst of speed.

  Now there I was, standing fighting fit on the grass verge, having impossibly crossed the distance from the middle of the road to the edge of the forest in the blink of an eye, when I should have been a crimson smear on the road and bloody chunks of meat on the van's grimy radiator.