The Black Halo (59 page)

‘And the mornings,’ he was saying, ‘you cannot imagine what they are like. The sun, the dews, the flowers. The sweetness. Why, there have been times when I rolled in the dew
like a hare. I have been so filled with joy. Have you ever felt such joy?’ Only in the Lord, thought the student, only in His worn body yellow as parchment. Only in the psalms, in the
holiness of a church, its peace and stillness. Only then. That was joy.

Mac an t-Sronaich tapped his pipe casually. ‘I don’t suppose you have any tobacco,’ he asked.

‘No,’ said the student, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t smoke.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I can always steal some. People here often leave their doors open. It’s amazing. They don’t wish to admit that I can destroy their way of life. They
want to hang on to it. They don’t like to admit that I am different from them, that I can live without them.’

Suddenly the student was filled with anger. Why should this man kill me, he thought. I have never thought about it all till tonight.

Well, yes, I did hear of him. My mother especially warned me about him. She would say, Take your milk and go to sleep or Mac an t-Sronaich will get you. So Mac an t-Sronaich must really be quite
old. The anger poured through the student’s body like wine. Who does this murderer think he is? That he can rampage about this moor and kill anyone he likes. He looked around the twilit cave
for a log but could see nothing he could use as a weapon. He felt his muscles tense. After all, he was not weak. He had thrown the javelin at the sports. He was in good shape, he had never drunk or
smoked. Now he would have to fight for his life.

Better now while this holy anger possessed him before it drained away. Later, his body might be like water again.

He stood up.

‘Where are you going?’ said Mac an t-Sronaich.

‘I am going away,’ said the student.

‘So that is what you are at?’ Mac an t-Sronaich carefully tamped the fire in his pipe and advanced. It looked as if he had been doing this for years, advancing through the smoke with
his red cheeks glowing.

‘I cannot let you go,’ he said to the student. ‘You know that.’ His beard was long and tangled, the muscles on his arms were huge. He put out his arms slowly. His eyes
were on fire in the dark. The student stepped back. And then they were grappling with each other in the smoke that tingled and sparked.

It was the first time that the student had ever struggled with anyone. The arms of the monstrous murderer were about him, squeezing him, he was losing his breath. And then the most amazing
thought came to him. Why, this is like love. This struggle is like love. Murder itself is like love. It is as if the cat is in love with the mouse as it flings the body up in the air, as it devours
it, leaving violet-coloured intestines. He struck the arms away from him, and seized Mac an t-Sronaich by the throat with the frenzy of self-preservation. In order to save himself he had to be like
Mac an t-Sronaich. He must empty his mind of books, ideas, become naked and pure.

‘I shall not be killed,’ he shouted aloud, ‘I shall not be killed. I refuse to be killed.’ And his voice echoed back to him.

And this extraordinary love that was involved in death almost overwhelmed him. Their legs were locked together but he would not let Mac an t-Sronaich’s throat go. No, that was what he must
cling to, the throat of this man who was not so young after all as he had been. Why, he must have been on the edge of that moor for years listening, mocking. He squeezed and squeezed. Mac an
t-Sronaich managed to unlock his hands from his throat. He retched for a while and before he could recover himself the student was on him like a wild cat. He kicked him with his heavy boot right in
the stomach. Then he jumped on top of him and held him by the throat again.

‘I will kill you,’ he shouted, ‘I will kill you.’ Never, never, had he thought he would be like this. Energies of the most astonishing kind flowed through him. Whose were
these bell-shaped cheeks glaring up at him? His body was behaving with a logic of its own. Let him stop thinking, leave it all to his body, that was the secret. The long tangled beard thrust at
him. He pushed the mouth slowly away from him with his hand.

This was the devil he had always wanted to kill, the devil that had tormented him, in the summer nights. Here he was in front of him, not abstract but concrete. He kicked again with his boot.
Then he ran away into the darkness outside. He trembled in the silence watching the mouth of the cave. But no one came out. Instead he heard an insane laugh, and then a voice.

‘Good for you, my friend.’ The voice seemed to echo and echo. Yes, he thought, I will sit and watch the cave mouth till I see a shadow across it. He fumbled around him in the dark
and found a big stone. He heard the secret mutterings of the night. I must not fall asleep, he thought, I must not fall asleep. And so he watched the flickering mouth of the cave. But no one came
out. Instead he heard snoring as if Mac an t-Sronaich had fallen asleep or perhaps he was just pretending.

If only I had a wall that I could keep between him and me, he thought, feeling at his torn clothes. He held his breath till eventually the dawn came up red and angry. All night he had stayed
awake. Then when the light bloomed he ran as fast as he could across the moor. He knew after a while that Mac an t-Sronaich would never catch him. And yet he kept seeing him, following him at a
distance, sometimes on his left, sometimes on his right, sometimes even ahead of him. The mouth was full of broken teeth, he cast a salty smell on the air, there were coils of worms about his body.
The fire shone like the fires of hell. Sometimes the moor itself seemed to disappear and he was back in his room at the college or he was at home and his father’s head was bent over the
table, bearded and still as if carved from stone. And the voice of Mac an t-Sronaich screamed at him as he ran and ran. And his body was infected with rage and shame. Bestially the dawn glared
around him. There were clouds like red hot cinders in the sky. The dew arose around him smokily. There were red flowers like wounds growing from between the stones.

Oh God, he thought, this world will never be the same again. I shall never return to my college now that I have, like the mouse against the cat, fought in my grey nakedness. He was like a white
vulnerable root, which had finally been tugged out of the earth.

‘My God,’ he shouted from the bare moor, but no answer came from the sky. His voice hammered against it with a metallic sound. And then in the distance like an echo he seemed to hear
the voice of Mac an t-Sronaich. And he saw again the enigmatic whirlings of the smoke in the cave. He knew that Mac an t-Sronaich was not dead and would never die. Even among the fog and lights of
gas-lit Glasgow he might meet him. Even in his own house. Even in his own mirror.

In the thatched house the fire was in the middle of the floor and they sat on benches around it in the smoke. There were six people altogether. This was the ceilidh house in
the village, the one where on certain nights there was a gathering to tell stories, sing songs, sometimes play music. This was a tradition in the Highlands in the old days.

The host was called Squashy. At one time he used to be a shoemaker: now he was retired. He would sit by the wall watching the world go past, for his legs were very bad with arthritis, and he
could walk only with the help of two sticks. He had never left the island in his life but he read a fair amount and thought that he knew more than he did. His favourite reading was about Egypt and
the pyramids, the burials of the Pharaohs in big tombs which had been prepared by slaves, the murders of servants, the voyage of the king-god across the sky.

He was not married and lived with his sister. She had been at one time a servant on the mainland in a hotel but she was also rather simple-minded and wore stockings which accordioned down to her
ankles. She deferred to her brother even though he had seen less of the world than she had. He treated her with contempt.

He was in fact speaking at that moment, saying ‘ . . . and do you know that they had mummies in those days. My sister here Mary doesn’t know what a mummy is but the rest of us do,
don’t we? They used to take the bodies and make them into mummies, that’s what they did in those days.’

‘What did they treat them with, eh?’ asked Cum, who was a big fat man wearing a fisherman’s jersey. He was engaged in building his own house and had been so for years. He had a
thin daughter with very thin legs who would meet the boys on Sunday among the corn.

‘I don’t know what they treated them with, I wasn’t there, was I?’ said Squashy shortly. ‘But it was something mysterious, you can depend on that.’ He shifted
his bottom on the hard wooden seat. ‘They were very clever people and what they put in their heads they put in their feet.’ And he looked significantly at Cum with his small, angry red
eyes as if implying, They would have finished your house years ago.

‘That’s true, it would have been something mysterious,’ said Shonachan. Shonachan was perhaps forty years old. He came from an odd family who hardly ever left the house. There
were seven of them altogether and he was the only gregarious one. The others would sit at windows gazing out on to the road: one in particular was shouted at and laughed at by the local children
and he would shake his fist at them from behind the curtains. One sat in a corner of the house endlessly repairing fishing nets as if he were a spider. Shonachan found relief in his visits to the
ceilidh house.

‘And another thing,’ said Squashy, leaning back against the whitewashed wall, ‘another thing. They buried them deep in tombs so that no one would ever find them. And people
tried to rob the tombs but they got lost among the passages and they were never found again.’

The others thought of this among the swirling smoke of the fire, their faces shining, for all of them believed in ghosts and mysterious events: why, there was supposed to be a ghost at the
corner of the road. And also Alastair Macleod had seen a ghost the last time he was home from his work on the mainland and shortly afterwards he had died. Ghosts were not to be taken lightly. The
fire shone on their faces and they imagined the false passages and the robbers lost among them.

‘That may be true,’ said John Smith consideringly. Curiously enough he had never been given a nickname by the villagers. He was the scribe who used to write their letters for them if
they were at all official, and he would show them the letters, and they would all think what a clever man he was. ‘Dear Sirs,’ he would write, ‘thank you for yours of the 21st
inst.’ Imagine that, the 21st inst. He had also been to America and he had many stories and had at times picked Squashy up on a number of points. But Squashy was like an eel in a river,
difficult to catch.

‘That may be true,’ said John Smith. He looked around him with a judicial air. ‘That may be true,’ he repeated. Only he gave the impression that he didn’t believe
it.

‘Of course it’s true,’ said Squashy, ‘it’s all in the books.’ His books coloured the air around him with a foreign radiance and John Smith stared at him as if
saying, ‘Well, for the moment I will let you away with this. Many things happen in this world and I have seen them myself, having been to America, while you haven’t been out of the
island.’

Squashy continued, ‘And another thing. The cat was their god and that’s another thing that you find out. They wouldn’t allow anyone to do anything to a cat.’

The sixth person, who was called Pat and who was also the local postman, listened carefully. Cats, eh, what was this about cats? Dogs perhaps, but not cats. Nothing had happened so far this
night and he was comfortable, almost sleepy. But nevertheless the others were wary of him because of his reputation. Sometimes he thought that they would prefer if he didn’t attend their
ceilidhs. But being alone in the house he sometimes felt the need of company and he couldn’t prevent himself from coming. It wasn’t his fault that he was as he was. It was inheritance,
it had been in his people. It was a sorrow and a triumph, that’s what it was.

The cat glared at him from his seat beside the fire.

Oh, God, let me have peace, he thought, let it not happen tonight.

‘The cat,’ said Squashy, ‘that was what they worshipped.’

‘Imagine that, the cat,’ said his sister.

Cum thought, One of these days I’ll finish my house. My wife wants it finished. And yet the other day when I was shifting that big stone I felt a twinge. It’s still there.

Pat listened. He enjoyed being in this social ring, damned though he was. He loved the glitter of the fire, the voices, the stories. Why, one day he would like to visit those pyramids in the
desert.

‘There’s a lot we don’t know about right enough,’ said Shonachan. He dreaded going back to the house where the hearth was often cold. He wished they had a housekeeper.
And he was smoking far too many cigarettes. One of these days he would have to give them up or they would kill him. Full strength Capstans. In the mornings he coughed and coughed and spat and spat
and he fought for breath and his chest ached. But what could he do?

With regard to yours, thought John Smith, with regard to yours, I have to tell you . . .

They don’t know, thought Squashy, what my life is like sitting by the wall in the heat or the cold, my hands turning red round the sticks, thinking, thinking . . . Why did this have to
happen to me? And this stupid sister of mine as well. That is another cross I have to bear. They don’t know the length of my days and without Egypt where would I be? His little moustache
quivered with self-pity.

And then it happened to Pat, they could all see it happening. He stood up and as if in a dream walked to the door through the smoke which loomed and drifted around him. Just like that it
happened. Again. And he was frightened. Oh, he was frightened, but he was also compelled. From that warm circle, that ring of smoke and fire, he went out into the frosty night, for it was freezing
heavily and the stars were clearly visible in the sky, twinkling and sparkling.