The Blackhouse

see where we were going.

Calum set off up the ladder, making it tremble beneath him, the rattle of it transferring to the fire escape. ‘For Christ’s sake keep the noise down,’ Angel called after him in a stage whisper, grabbing the ladder to hold it steady. Then he turned to me. ‘Right, orphan boy, on you go.’ He grinned, and I just knew this was all going to end in tears.

As I had thought, it was relatively easy getting on to the roof from the ladders. Even for Calum. I joined him, crouching on the flat, tarred surface, and we could see, through the crenellations, all the way down to the harbour below. The trawlers looked unreal, toy boats lined up against the quay, the town spreading itself up over the hill behind, necklaces of light tracing the lines of the streets as they criss-crossed each other in a traditional grid pattern. Somewhere, away out in the Minch, we saw the lights of a tanker making its way steadily north through a heavy swell.

In the moonlight I could see the pitch of the attic roof quite clearly. There were a couple of skylights, but no light in either of them.

‘Where now?’ Calum whispered.

‘Let’s just sit tight and wait to see if a light comes on.’

We crouched down with our backs to the battlements, knees pulled up to our chests to try to keep warm, and waited. I checked my watch. It was nearly five past ten. I heard some rattling and giggling from the fire escape below, and was tempted to give up right there and then and climb back down. But the thought of Angel waiting for us at the foot of the ladders was enough to make me decide to give it another few minutes.

Suddenly a light went on in the nearer of the two skylights, and an elongated square of yellow fell out across the roof. Calum’s eyes positively gleamed with anticipation. ‘That must be her.’ He was suddenly emboldened. ‘Come on.’ And he scuttled across the roof to the skylight. Since I was there, I thought, I might as well have a look, too. So I followed him, and we crouched for a minute or more below the level of the window, plucking up the courage to raise our heads into the light and peer in. We could hear the sound of water running, and someone moving about below the window.

‘You go first,’ I said. ‘Better hurry up, before the window gets all steamed up and we can’t see anything.’

A look of worry flitted across Calum’s face. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Slowly he eased himself up the pitch of the roof until he was pushing up on his tiptoes, and I could see him peering in the window. I heard a loud hiss, and then he was crouching down beside me again, a face like thunder. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so angry. ‘Bastards! Fucking bastards!’ I hadn’t heard him swear like that either.

‘What is it?’

‘See for yourself.’ He drew another deep indignant breath. ‘Bastards!’

So I pushed myself up the angle of the roof until my face was level with the window. Just as someone on the other side took it off the latch and pushed it out. I found myself face to face with a big, round, white-faced woman wearing a pink bath cap and nothing else. The startled look on her face could only have been a reflection of my own. I’m not sure if it was my scream or hers that I heard, but we both screamed, of that I am certain, and she went staggering backwards and fell into her bath, great mountains of juddering white flesh displacing gallons of hot water all across the floor. For a moment I was paralysed, staring in shock at the fat, naked woman floundering in the bath. She was sixty if she was a day. My face must have been clearly visible in the bathroom light, because she was staring back at me, her legs still in the air. I had no wish to see what they revealed, but found my eyes drawn in horrified fascination. She took a deep tremulous breath that sent her mountainous pink breasts quivering, and she screamed the scream of the dead. I thought she was going to burst my eardrums. I slithered back down the roof and almost landed on top of Calum.

His eyes were like headlamps. ‘What happened?’

I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get the hell out of here!’

I could hear her screaming, ‘Help!’ And, ‘Rape!’ And thought that now she was just indulging in wishful thinking. Lights were going on all across the roof. I ran back over to where we had climbed up from the ladder, and I could hear Calum pattering along behind me. I squeezed between the crenellations, turning and dropping a leg down to find the top rung, before I realized it wasn’t there.

‘Shit!’

‘What is it?’ Calum looked terrified.

‘The bastards have taken the ladder away.’ So that had been their plan. To trap us up on the roof. They must have known Anna would not be taking a bath that night. She might even have been in league with them. What none of them could have foreseen, however, was that we would be spotted by the fat lady who was. Now the ladder was gone, we were stuck on the roof, and the whole castle had been alerted. It could only be a matter of time before they found us, and then there would be hell to pay. I climbed back on to the roof, anger fighting with anticipation of the humiliation to come.

‘Well, we can’t just stay here.’ Calum was panicking. ‘They’ll find us.’

‘We’ve got no choice. There’s no way down unless you’ve suddenly grown wings.’

‘We can’t be caught! We can’t!’ He was becoming hysterical. ‘What’ll my mother say?’

‘I think that’s the least of our worries, Calum.’

‘Oh God, oh God,’ he said again and again. ‘We’ve got to do something.’ He started climbing through the crenellations.

I grabbed him. ‘What are you doing?’

‘If we get on to the ledge, we can jump down on to the fire escape from there. It’s only about ten feet.’ This from the boy who only ten minutes earlier had been claiming a fear of heights.

‘Are you mad? Calum, it’s too dangerous.’

‘No, we can do it, we can.’

‘Jesus, Calum, don’t!’ But there was nothing I could do to stop him. He braced himself with a hand on either side of the gap, and slid down until his feet found the ledge. There were lights coming on now in the north tower. The woman was still screaming, but her voice had become distant. I had a mental image of her running naked along a corridor somewhere, and I shuddered.

I saw Calum glance down, and when he turned back again his face was sheet-white in the moonlight. There was an odd look in his eyes, and I felt my stomach lurch. I just knew something bad was going to happen. ‘Fin, I was wrong. I can’t do it’ His voice was quivering and breathless.

‘Give me your hand.’

‘I can’t move. Fin, I can’t move.’

‘Yes, you can. Just give me your hand and we’ll get you back on the roof.’

But he was shaking his head. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t. I can’t.’ And I watched in disbelief as he just let go and slipped backwards out of view. I could not move. It was as if I had been turned to stone. There was a yawning silence, and then a dreadful clatter on the fire escape below. Calum never made a sound.

It must have been a full half-minute before I could bring myself to look. He had missed the second-floor platform completely, falling another whole floor to land on his back on the handrail and slide down on to the metal grille. His body was twisted at an unnatural angle, and he was not moving.

Right then felt like the worst moment of my life. I closed my eyes and prayed fervently that I would wake up.

‘Macleod!’ My name came up to me from below, and I heard a clatter on the fire escape. I opened my eyes and saw Angel on the platform. He had the ladder out there again, and was fumbling to slide the extension up the rungs. The top of the ladder scraped across the wall just beneath the crenellations. ‘Macleod! For fuck sake, get down here now!’

I was still stone, the same granite as the walls, a part of them, locked there for eternity. I couldn’t drag my eyes away from the prone, twisted form of poor Calum thirty feet below.

‘Macleod!’ Angel almost bellowed my name. Blood rushed back through my frozen veins and I began shaking almost uncontrollably. But, still, I could move again. And with jelly legs, I clambered like an automaton through the crenellations and on to the ladder, going down it faster than was safe, my hands burning on the cold metal. I had barely reached the platform when Angel grabbed my jacket. His face was inches from mine. I could smell the stale