In the Devil's Name Page 18

  The three storey high block of flats lay at the foot of the hill on which I was standing, about a hundred metres downhill, and the morning air was so still that the sounds that followed carried with easy and terrible clearness up the hill to my position.

  An escalating series of yells, screams and sounds of desperate struggle from the flats filled the air, and I could only stand there, rooted to the spot and numbly transfixed by what I was hearing.

  There was a gunshot, a second, then no more. Terrible bangs and crashes accompanied the cacophony of panic, as if the building itself and not just the occupants were being torn apart.

  There was also the sound I feared the most; the sibilant hissing and sniggering of the monster that had taken my dad the previous night, and I could feel that nauseating, sick pressure in my head that seemed to herald its presence.

  I was close enough to the flats to see a woman no desperately trying to open a window of a second floor apartment. I could even make out the look of naked horror on her face before she was abruptly jerked out of sight. A second later, the window where she’d been standing exploded outwards, and amid the glittering rain of shattered glass, there sailed a headless dismembered torso. The body fell to the unforgiving concrete below, and I heard the impact from where I stood.

  More windows in the building simultaneously smashed open, vomiting forth a bloody hail of mutilated bodies. The air outside the building was suddenly full of falling glass and torn corpses, and again, I ran.

  The sickening music of tinkling glass and impacting torsos followed me.

  Chapter 41

  The Harvester stands in a blood soaked room. In minutes, it has turned what was a human habitation into an abattoir.

  The feeding has been good here; over a score of souls in one delicious red sweep. With those already taken, it needs only a handful more before its quota is complete.

  Labhrainne’s blood still runs though, and the Harvester cannot return to its own plane of existence until it runs no more.

  Even after the frenzied slaughter of the humans in this small tenement, it’s infernal thirst and rage burns. In other areas of the village, it simultaneously gathers more souls through physical embodiments that are extensions of itself. It experiences the carnage at each kill, sings to the slaughter and continues bloodily and relentlessly on, tearing and feeding, twisting and perverting at random locations like a hungry and unstoppable tornado until its quota is complete.

  The harvesting of souls is the very essence of its existence. It knows, nor cares not for any vocation other than to hunt and kill.

  It hesitates before moving on to its next killing ground, sensing there is a presence close by. One with energy akin to its own, yet somehow different.

  Its essence rises upwards, passing like vapour through the roof of the ransacked building that’s walls run red with blood, and it scans the outside terrain.

  There. Moving away at speed across the top of the hill.

  Labhrainne’s blood. Its prize quarry.

  There will be extra satisfaction in snuffing out this one, as it has already escaped once, somehow slipping out of the Harvester’s grasp even as it lay helpless in the blood and maimed flesh of its father.

  It will not escape again.

  Clicking its many barbed limbs in anticipation of the kill, the Harvester follows.

  Chapter 42

  I’d no destination in mind as I ran from the hill. I just needed to move, and quickly.

  I found myself flying across the fields at a supernatural rate. The bracken and gorse bushes sped past me in a blur as I hurdled fences and dykes with ease, sure footed and never faltering on the uneven ground. I felt elemental; at one with the wind, and a great sense of excitement swamped my mind, pure and dangerous. I again experienced the peculiar sensation of sharing my body with that bright presence that was at the same time part of me and independent. The thrilling light surged through me as I ran, and I realised I was screaming in ecstasy as I bombed across the landscape, accelerating further still and feeling utterly indestructible.

  The corrupt feeling of pressure in my head had gone, and sensing that I was in no longer in immediate danger, I made a conscious effort to slow myself. As I came to a reluctant standstill, I found myself standing in the middle of a fairway on the golf course located just past the south end of the town.

  The hill where I’d been standing before was about two miles north of this point, and figuring that I’d ran for about twenty seconds, I was stunned to realise that this meant I’d been moving at about three hundred and sixty miles per hour.

  The thought was just there, already formed in my mind, and I frowned in confusion. Maths had never been my strong point. Griff though, had had an uncanny ability to figure things out in his head.

  I turned in a circle, trying to figure out my next move. The big detached villa belonging to the Delaney family was close by. I could see the rear side of the house across the road which ran down the south side of the golf course to my left. I knew their son, Jamie from school, and although we never socialised, I was friendly enough with the guy having played with him in the school football team. He was a fucking fantastic left mid player, and there’d been rumours that he’d been watched by talent scouts from Kilmarnock and even Rangers. I also knew his sister Susie who was in the year below us and who I’d once winched at a school disco. A tall, pretty blonde lass with hazel eyes and a wicked tongue.

  I made my way toward the house, thinking I could maybe explain my appearance by saying I’d been in an accident, use their phone to call Grant and maybe even borrow a change of clothes. It was a half arsed plan, but the best I could come up with at the time.

  Chapter 43

  Sergeant Stephen Grace glanced across at Ally Marshall, sitting rigidly in the passenger seat of the speeding police car. Until now, the lad had done a decent job of hiding his fear, but it was plain as day on his face now. The young constable tried the radio for the tenth time since they’d sped away from the burning petrol station, the terror evident in the tremor of his voice.

  “Foxtrot Sierra six to Control. Come in, Annie.”

  Static.

  He tried again.

  “Come in Foxtrot Sierra seven. What’s happening at the Delaney place, Kenny?”

  More static.

  They’d heard no more from Kenny since his last transmission when he’d been babbling about mutilated corpses.

  Ally threw the handset down with a frustrated curse.

  “Keep your head, son,” Grace advised. “I don’t know what's going on, but you need to stay calm. What’s your primary duty?”

  “My what? Sarge, I don’t…”

  “Your fuckin’ primary duty!” Grace roared. “What’s the first and foremost duty of a police officer? What did they teach you at Tulliallan?”

  “The preservation of human life, sir,” Ally responded automatically, suddenly remembering how this had been drilled into him and all the other recruits at the Scottish police college. “The first duty of a police officer is the preservation of human life,” he repeated.

  “Good. Now sort yourself out, son. You won’t save any cunt’s life if you’re not calm.”

  Grace’s own training officer had used this same shock method on him when he’d been a new recruit, a week out of training and faced with a fierce street fight between Hearts and Hibs fans after an Edinburgh derby game. Grace had been petrified; the sight and sounds of the hundred or so men brutally punching, kicking and slashing at each other in ferocious, unrestrained hand to hand combat had temporarily unmanned the young recruit, and he’d frozen, unable to move in the face of the sprawling, vicious melee.

  His superior had grabbed him roughly by the collar and screamed in his face, what’s your primary duty? and that had broken his paralysis. He’d managed to collect himself, and had waded into the fight in a seemingly impossible attempt to restore order. He’d come away from it with a fractured cheekbone, a concussion and a shallow but painful stab wound to the
leg, but he’d done his job. Now it was time for Ally Marshall to do the same.

  To be fair to the lad though, this situation was different to a mob of football casuals knocking fuck out of each other. Very different.

  Stephen Grace had over thirty years police experience on his young charge, but the real reason he was keeping his calm better than Ally Marshall was that he’d actually been expecting something like this to happen sooner or later. For a long time, he’d felt that there was something wrong with the village, as if the town were built on a sleeping volcano.

  He could count on one hand the amount of people in Ballantrae who’d lived in the village for more than twenty years, himself included, and that incident in the summer with those kids up at Bennane Head had awoken memories in him that had started to fade from his thoughts.

  What had made that carnage more chilling to him, as if it wasn’t bad enough already, was that one of the boys involved was from the same family that had been mixed up in the other bloody business that had occurred decades before.

  Young Dean Griffiths even bore a remarkable resemblance to his late grandfather.

  His troubled thoughts were interrupted by Ally Marshall trying the radio again.

  “Control, come in. This is Foxtrot Sierra six.”

  Grace gripped the steering wheel more tightly and wrung the leather cover between his large calloused fists. His own training, forty years distant, hadn’t covered what the procedure was in the event of losing contact with your controller and all other cars and officers on shift. He doubted Ally’s more modern instruction had prepared him for dealing with such an eventuality either.

  “Davie, are you there? This is Foxtrot Sierra six calling Foxtrot Sierra five. Control, come back. Kenny? Annie? Does anybody copy?”

  Ally’s voice had taken on a frantic, pleading tone as he desperately sought a response from the mocking static that was the radios only voice.

  “Give it a rest, Ally,” Grace said. “We’re here.”

  The car topped the rise in the road that ran parallel to the eighth fairway of the golf course, and the Delaney residence came into view. Kenny Young’s patrol car was parked outside, the driver’s side front door lying open. Grace eased off the accelerator, braking to a halt just behind the other vehicle.

  Ally was already scrambling out the passenger side door and Grace clumsily followed him, his arthritic hip sending a twinge of pain through his lower body as he manoeuvred himself out of the car. Ally was moving hastily towards the broad one storey villa.

  “Wait, Ally,” Grace called after him. He knew from experience that it was essential to check your surroundings before rushing into a potentially hazardous situation.

  The house showed no signs of life. The green painted wooden gate that gave access to the path running down the left side of the villa to the back garden was open and swayed back and forth lazily in the faint morning breeze. Its unoiled hinges made a high pitched squeal with each movement. It was the only sound to be heard.

  “Kenny? You there?” Grace called loudly, breaking the eerie silence.

  There was no answer.

  Grace became aware of an odour on the air; the sweet, subtle stench of something rotten. From the grimace on Ally’s face, he knew the younger constable had detected it as well.

  He walked around the abandoned police car, searching for some sign of the missing constable. There was no sign of a struggle. No blood spots or any damage to the vehicle that he could see.

  “Sarge, look at this,” Ally said.

  Grace turned around, seeing the younger man crouched down and examining the ground. The driveway leading up to the front of the Delaney’s house wasn’t paved with tarmac, but instead covered with those small rounded pale stones that made that homely crunch sound under foot and tyre. Ally was on his haunches, pointing to an area of the drive where the covering seemed to have been disturbed.

  There were a series of short parallel furrows dragged through the small stones less than an inch apart exposed the dirt underneath, as if someone had dragged a small headed rake along the ground. Grace walked past Ally, noting that the marks ran in the direction of the front door of the villa which was lying open.

  The narrow furrows were only about a meter long before they ended. There followed an unmarked area of the ground for a further ten metres or so before the small driveway stones showed further signs of disturbance. This time, Grace could make out a wider, single indentation some four meters in length and a half meter across, as if a wide piece of tubing had been dragged along the ground. This larger marking ran all the way to the front door.

  Grace squatted down to examine the indentation more closely and detected a faint but noxious odour that stung his nostrils and was separate from the other sweetly rotten stench that he now could tell was coming from inside the house.

  The small stones of the driveway here also seemed to glisten somewhat in the morning light, and Grace reached down and ran his fingertips across the pebbles. They came away slicked in a viscous transparent liquid like clear snot. His fingers immediately began to tingle and he quickly wiped them on his trouser leg.

  He looked up to inform Ally of this strange find.

  But the young policeman was gone.

  Chapter 44

  I was just approaching the rear garden of the Delaney place when I heard the car approaching at the front of the house. The crunching noise the tyres made on the stones made me freeze for a moment. Jamie’s dad had made him help pave the driveway with those wee white stones the previous year, and I remember him moaning loudly at football training about his back being sore from his forced labour.

  I heard the engine cut off, and car doors opening and closing. There was the crunching of footsteps on the driveway, and then a voice which I recognised as that of Sergeant Stephen Grace called out for someone named Kenny, who I assumed to be Kenny Young; one of the other cops who worked in the area.

  Wanting to avoid the attentions of the police, I threw myself to the ground, hiding in the long grass of the scrub land between the rough of the golf course and the Delaney’s back garden.

  I lay there in frustrated indecision, wondering if it might be better to just go and announce my presence to the big Sergeant. He knew me quite well, and had treated me kindly after what had happened earlier that year, but part of me still insisted that it would be a foolish move.

  As I crouched in the reeds, unsure of my next move, a faint but familiar tingling sensation in the pit of my gut warned me that I was not alone. The sick pressure began to build again in my skull.

  I frantically looked around, seeing nothing. I could feel the diseased presence of that other entity getting closer, but there was nothing in sight.

  The pressure in my head suddenly increased rapidly, and I clutched the sides of my head, wincing in pain. It seemed to be coming from right on top of me, but still there was nothing to be seen. The sick swelling sensation grew even heavier, and with a low agonised moan, I fell back in the grass. Facing upwards, through eyes half shut in agony, I could now see a faint shimmer in the air above me.

  It floated there for a second; a formless patch of nothingness in the air that shimmered like a heat haze, only it didn’t give off pleasant waves of summer warmth, but waves of a bleak chill that made me feel black and decayed inside.

  It descended slowly, and I sensed it was taking a twisted joy in my distress, savouring it. It came closer, closer, until I could have reached up and touched the thing had it had physical substance. The shimmer began to take on a dark colouration and form twisting, roiling tendrils that whipped through the air like thin smoky tentacles.

  I lay there on the grass, helpless and paralyzed once again in terror as one of those vaporous appendages morphed into a very solid looking curved claw with a wickedly serrated underside. This obscene talon, a meter long, midnight black and imprinted with sickly red striations, hovered above my prone body, twitching in anticipation. I heard a guttural chuckling in my head, hideous with an u
nmistakable note of victory.

  I closed my eyes and waited to die as the disembodied claw slowly pushed down on my left shoulder. A horrible numbness and deep, deep cold spread in me as the manifestation of this thing pierced my flesh and pinned me to the ground beneath my thrashing body.

  Chapter 45

  The Harvester floats above its helpless, writhing quarry and enjoys this moment of power.

  It feels the fear pouring off Labhrainne’s blood in waves and drinks it in, taking sustenance from its terror. At these close quarters, the Harvester senses with new depth the strange otherness of this particular insect. Beneath the aura of fear and despair, there is a spark of energy that is somehow like its own; a unique spiritual signature that only those that walk on both sides of the veil possess, and should not be present in a mere human.

  Interesting.

  The Harvester senses other humans nearby. It visited this particular location earlier this same morning in one of its many manifestations, and had fed upon the souls of a family of four and one other; what the humans called a 'policeman'. A peacekeeper in the realm of the living. It took particular pleasure in the devouring of those who fought to preserve order in any dimension of existence, and the Harvester had already tasted the souls of another three of their kind this very bloody and glorious of mornings. Born of chaos, it exults in the destruction of those who seek order.

  While it holds the strange defenceless human beneath it, impaled through the shoulder, it seeks out the nearby others and finds that they too are 'policemen'. The Harvester is a creature ruled by sensation, and can ill resist the alluring pleasure that slaughtering a further brace of peacekeepers will bring.

  With a single thought, the Harvester splits its consciousness. Part of it remains observing the peculiar struggling worm pinned beneath it, while another piece of its consciousness returns to the hunt, eager to drink of the souls of more ‘policemen’.