Tormentor (9 page)

2

The area around Dunvegan on Skye has long been known as one of the most haunted places in the islands, if not in the whole country.

Thanks for telling me.

That was the first line of the story, and it didn’t get much more reassuring after that. I was sitting out on the patio—I had two wooly jumpers on, and my thick socks, and still I felt cold, but I was more comfortable reading this particular tale out in the open.

There are so many stories to be told it is hard to pick just one, but perhaps the strangest of all is the tale of the Drummer Boy of the MacLeods.

Donald’s family were fisher folk, making a living off the bounty of Loch Dunvegan from a house of the eastern shore to the north of the castle, but Donald’s eye was always being drawn to the castle itself, to the soldiers, and to fortune and glory. In his head he was a drummer boy, and he beat out martial rhythms on all available surfaces in the house, driving his mother to distraction by holding mock battles with plates, cutlery and anything else that came to hand as he led his army in the fray.

When the call came for the clans to join Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion, the chief called for all available men to join him. Donald’s father was one of the first men to declare allegiance, but Donald was to be left to look after his mother and sisters. The boy would have none of it.

At the banquet before sailing, he sneaked in to the great hall with his bodhran in hand and even as the chief addressed the men, started up his beat. Donald’s father was furious, and would have had the boy beaten to within an inch of his life, but even as he tried to snatch the drum from the boy, a cry went up in the crowd.

To a man they turned. The old flag was fluttering above them, although there was no breeze in the hall. And as they watched, strange markings appeared on the aged silk—black crosses and lines that coincided with the beats of Donald’s wee drum.

The chief took this to be an omen.

“Where did the boy learn to do such a thing?” he asked.

Donald’s father could not reply—and the boy himself did not say, although he smiled, somewhat sadly, even as the chief declared that he would be the one to lead the men in the coming battles.

The very next day they went off to war. There is no need to tell here of the bloody failure of the rebellion, although it is said that Donald never flinched from his duty through the long campaign, even when called to lead the final doomed march onto the field of Culloden.

It is said that Donald’s mother knew the exact moment when the boy fell, so far away on the highland moor, for a drum beat out a rhythm that shook the whole house. Donald’s father returned weeks later and they put the boy’s body to final rest.

They buried the bodhran with him, and folks around Dunvegan swear that to this day, on quiet nights the boy can still be heard in and around the house, beating the drum and calling his army to battle.

I thought I had a bloody good idea exactly what house the story was referring to. The book was dated 1922, but the story, set as it was in Jacobite times, took the tale back to the mid-eighteenth century. And it seems I’d been wrong about the markings on the flag—they had come after the rhythm was set, and were not the source of it. Whatever it was I had uncovered over the summer and early autumn, it was far older than I had previously thought.

However, it all seemed moot now—there had been no soot marks for weeks, and no more anonymous email correspondence. I left the book on the mantel to remind myself to return it to Alan’s father, and went back to my routine.

* * *

There was one more thing of note.

I developed a nervous habit. It started one early December morning out on the patio. I was feeding the sparrows when I caught myself drumming with the fingers of my left hand on the table. It took several seconds for me to realize it was the repeater beat. As my fingers moved, I saw the associated soot marks in my mind;
no limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.

Realizing what I was doing, I stopped at the third repeat, but at intervals in the days following I noticed it happening more often, especially if I let my mind drift. It wasn’t too difficult to control, just bloody annoying, and I put it down to having spent so much time listening to the programmed beeps I’d set up on the laptop. To stop myself being tempted in the future, I deleted the program and burned my worksheet containing the grids. With a small degree of concentrating on what I was doing, I was also able to suppress the finger twitching completely, and I finally thought I was rid of the earlier compulsions that had gripped me.

* * *

In the second week of December I gave in to the growing chill in the house and started lighting a fire in the main grate. The stoat was not at all happy at me infringing on his domain when I went to fetch the first load of wood. He hissed at me angrily, but after that he seemed resigned to losing his perch and took to glaring at me from the dwindling pile each time I stocked up.

The sparrows weren’t at all happy that I was spending less and less time with the patio doors open. They took to tapping on the window with their beaks in attempts to get my attention, and I usually gave in to their demands when my fingers threatened to tap along in time.

Having the fire going in the main room meant that my gaze was often focused on the fireplace itself, and on the mantel in particular. I took to talking to Beth again, especially while painting and at times it felt like our conversations were guiding my brushstrokes. The abstract had become a dense, multilayered riot of color, predominately black and red but shot through with golden yellow and azure blue. I saw now it was not as abstract as I had thought, but was in fact a seascape, of sorts, but not of any view I had ever set eyes on.

3

On the Saturday before Christmas I took a taxi down to the Dunvegan Arms.

“You’re looking well, son,” was the first thing old George said as I joined the usual crowd in the snug. I ordered a round and it was only when I returned from the bar that I realized we had a new member of the Saturday Club—the local minister, Alexander Wark. I’d seen him around town, but never spoken. He’d always looked dour and forbidding, and was the last person I’d have expected to join the little group of drinkers I had come to call friends.

“Don’t mind auld Alex here,” George said, laughing. “He’s not about to give us a lecture on the perils of drink. He likes to come in around Christmas for his one night of drunken debauchery a year.”

The minister smiled and looked like a completely different man.

“Aye—on every other Saturday night I’m over at your place shagging your wife.”

Once again we were off and running for a night of jokes, stories and not a little verbal abuse. Alex Wark proved more than capable of giving as good as he got; he was also a font of scurrilous gossip that would have dismayed the ladies of the town had they heard it uttered, here in the local bar.

“And what about you, lad?” the minister asked, an hour or so and several beers into the evening. “How are the Spaniards treating you?”

You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone round the table went quiet, so much so that we could hear some of the local youths working up to a fight in the main bar.

Alex laughed and addressed the other men around the table.

“Come on, you mean you’ve let the lad live up in that house all this time and you haven’t told him its history? Shame on you. That’s no way to treat a pal.”

“We didn’t want to frighten him,” Sandy Johnston said.

“Didn’t want to frighten yourselves, you mean?” the minister replied. He turned to me.

“Get me a Talisker and I’ll tell you a story,” he said.

I didn’t need to be asked a second time.

* * *

“How much do you know about the house?” he asked. We’d taken ourselves off to one side. Old George launched into one of his stories as the others studiously ignored us, which was fine by me.

I told Wark what I thought I knew—about Mrs. Menzies, about old Tom dying in the cottage fire, and about the wee drummer boy.

He laughed.

“My, you have been busy—and all that without even talking to these reprobates here about it. And what haven’t you told me?” He put a hand out and covered my left fingers—they had started to twitch. “I’ve seen that before—Annie Menzies had the same affliction, not long before she passed.”

I wasn’t about to tell a man I’d only just met about the soot marks, or the messages on the laptop, or the beeps and rhythms of the message—that’s how I now thought of it; a message I was never able to decipher. He seemed to see some of it in my eyes though.

“The house is getting to you, isn’t it? You shouldn’t let it. They’re only stories—a strong man has nothing to fear from stories.”

“And what about a weak man?” I said softly.

He smiled.

“That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “Any time you need to talk, you know where the church is.”

“I’m not a believer.”

“It’s not compulsory,” he said, and laughed. “But you didn’t buy me a drink to get a sales pitch. You bought a story—another story.”

He took a sip of the Talisker before continuing.

“You’ve probably realized by now that your house is old—you’ve gone back in your stories to the time of the rebellion—but it’s older than that—much older. I suspect that some of the stonework might even go back to the earliest inhabited history of the island, several thousand years before Christ. Short of mounting a full-scale archaeological dig, the really early stuff is probably lost forever in the mists of time. But there is something I can tell you—the church has extensive records, as has the castle, and I pride myself on being something of a local historian. That’s how I know that there is a basis in truth in the name of the house. There was indeed a Spaniard—or rather, several of them.

“The aftermath of their defeat by Drake saw many armada vessels attempt to make their escape by heading up the east coast and through the Pentland Firth to try to lose themselves in the islands before making south to home. Most didn’t make it—the seas around northern Scotland are treacherous at the best of times, and that, combined with one of the worst storms in memory, meant that many Spaniards were dashed on Scotland’s rocky shores. Five of them, in a single lifeboat, ended up here.

“Their names are written in the parish records if you choose to look—there is no denying they were here. Just as there is no denying they were given your house to stay in and work the land. It’s written that it was a gift, of sorts, from the church—‘Ye dwelling and five acres that no honest man will touch, for it be blighted.’”

I stopped him there.

“Why weren’t they imprisoned? Weren’t we at war with Spain?”

The minister laughed.

“You might have been, but Scotland wasn’t. That was Elizabeth’s war, and she wasn’t all that popular in these parts. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what ‘blighted’ means—although there are plenty of acres of ground on the island that have proved too difficult to work for an honest man to make a living.

“As far as I can tell, they lived there for several years. There are no records of any of them taking a wife—although that does not mean there was no fraternizing with the local women, just that none of it was sanctioned by the church.

“And there is only one other thing I can tell you. Three years after they arrived, they were all dead and buried. Their stones are out at the back end of the churchyard. They’re faded and worn now, and scarcely legible, but if I have read them right, the men all died on the same date, and all have the same words inscribed beneath their names.

“‘Gone to meet their maker, marching to a different drum.’”

* * *

When I switched on the radio the next morning, I heard “Spanish Harlem,” quickly followed by “Spanish Eyes” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.”

It seemed the period of dormancy had been broken.

4

The conversation with the minister marked the start of a new phase in my relationship with the house, as if it had peeled back another layer of the onion and taken me one step closer to the center of the mystery.

My twitch grew more pronounced. I found myself drumming out the repeater rhythm on my desk, on the kitchen table, even going so far as typing to the beat when composing e-mails on my laptop.

No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.