And he threw it as hard as he could, glad to get it out of his hand if truth were told. It felt cold and hard, just like iron or stone. But it was wood all right, nowt fossilized about it, too light – he'd hurled it into the wind and it landed barely ten feet away.
'Well, go on then!' Bloody hell, he'd thrown dozens of sticks for this dog over the years.
The Chief didn't move; the thick fur on the back of his neck was flattened, his eyes were dull and wary, his tail between his legs.
'You soft bugger,' Willie said.
What this was, the dog was close to Benjie, they'd grown up side by side. Only natural he'd picked up on the kid's fear. Aye, Willie thought, and it'd've put the shits up me too, at his age.
Then he thought, admitting it to himself, What do you mean, at his age…?
He tried to look at the thing dispassionately. It was amazing, like a work of art, like bloody sculpture.
But it didn't make him think of a dragon. Dragons were from fairy tales. More than that, dragons were animals. All right, they had wings and long scaly tails, but they were animals and there was nowt scary about animals.
Willie wanted to back off further, until he couldn't make out the details. He wanted to crouch down at a safe distance and growl at it like The Chief.
Basically he didn't want to see it any more, wished he'd never seen it at all because it was the kind of shape that came up in your dreams. This was stupid, but there was no getting round it.
The tangle of branches wrapped round, woven into each other like pipes and tubes, like a human being wearing its intestines on the outside.
And out of all this, the head rearing up on a twisted, scabby neck, and the head was as black as, as… as peat. It had holes for eyes, with the daylight shining through, and a jagged, widely grinning mouth, and on either side of the head were large knobbly horns.
And where one of the horns went into a knob, there was even the beginnings of another face, like one of them gargoyles on the guttering at St Bride's.
But what was worse than all this was the way the thing thrust out of the peat, twelve feet or more, two big branches sticking out either side of the neck-piece, like hunched shoulders, and then smaller branches like dangling arms and hands and misshapen fingers, like they had arthritis in them, like the Rector's fingers.
And when a gust of wind snatched at it, the whole thing would be shivering and shaking, its wooden arms waving about and rattling.
Dancing about.
Willie remembered something that used to scare the life out of him when he was little. The teacher, Ernie Dawber's uncle, telling them about Gibbet Hill where hanged men's skeletons used to dangle in chains, rattling in the wind.
'Oh, come on…!' Willie said scornfully. He was shivering himself now – cold morning, coldest this year, not expecting it, that's all there is to it, nowt else.
'Come on.'
Walked away from it across the Moss, towards the little lad and the village, wanting to run, imagining Benjie screaming, Run, Uncle Willie, run! It's come out of t'bog and it's after you…!Run!
He kept on walking steadily, but the fingers of both hands were drumming away, going hard and steady at his thighs.
'Bog oak,' Willie made himself shout. 'Bog oak!'
Part Four
CHAPTER I
Across the border, heading south, Moira ignored all the big blue signs beckoning her towards the M6. Motorways in murky weather demanded one-track concentration; she had other roads to travel.
You should take a rest, Moira. The Duchess. Unravel yourself.
Well, sure, nothing like a long drive to a funeral for some serious reflection… for facing up to the fact that you were also journeying – and who knew how fast? – towards your own.
The countryside, getting rained on, glistening drably, looked like it also was into some heavy and morose self-contemplation. It was almost like she'd left Scotland and then doubled back: there were the mountains and there were the lochs. And there also was the mist, shrouding the slow, sulky rain which made you wet as hell, very quickly.
Cumbria. She stopped a while in a grey and sullen community sliding down either side of a hill. Wandered up the steep street and bought a sour, milky coffee in a snack-and-souvenir shop. A dismal joint, but there was a table where she could spread out the map, find out where she was heading.
Many places hereabouts had jagged, rocky names. Nordic-sounding, some of them. The Vikings had been here, after the Romans quit. And what remained of the Celts? Anything?
She looked out of the cafe window at a ragged line of stone cottages with chalet bungalows, Lego-style, on the hillside behind.
She watched a couple of elderly local residents stumbling arm-in-arm through the rain.
English people.
… this guy was telling us, at the conference this afternoon, how the English are the least significant people – culturally, that is – in these islands… mongrels… no basic ethnic tradition.
And what the hell, Moira wondered, were New Yorkers? Mungo Macbeth, of the Manhattan Macbeths. Could you credit it?
Moira had another go at the coffee, made a face, pushed the plastic cup away.
She sighed. Poor Macbeth. Poor glamorous, superficial Macbeth. Who, back home, through the very nature of his occupation and his connections, would likely have whole queues of mini-series starlets outside his hotel room. Who, in New York, would have been chasing not her but his lawyer, wondering if a bonestorm was an Act of God or maybe worth half a million in compensation.
But who, because this was Scotland, the old ancestral muckheap, and because of the night – the crazy, surrealistic, Celtic night – had behaved like a man bewitched.
Moira took her plastic cup back to the counter, which was classic British stained-glass – stained with coffee, congealed fat, tomato ketchup.
'On your own?' the guy behind the counter said. He was lanky, late-twenties. He had a sneery kind of voice out of Essex or somewhere. Nowhere you went these days in Britain, did the people running the tourist joints ever seem to be locals.
She said, 'We're all of us alone, pal.' And, slinging her bag over her shoulder, headed for the door.
'You didn't finish your coffee,' he called after her. 'Something wrong with it?'
'It was truly fine.' Moira held up the back of a hand. 'Got all my nail varnish off, no problem.' About half an hour later, she surrendered to the blue signs. On the motorway the rain was coming harder, or maybe she was just driving faster into it. At a service area somewhere around Lancaster, she found a phone, stood under its perspex umbrella, called her agent in Glasgow and explained where she was.
'Previous experience, Malcolm, told me not to call until I was well on the road, or you'd instantly come up with a good reason why I wasn't to cross the border.'
'Never mind that. I have been telephoned,' Malcolm said ponderously, the Old Testament voice, 'by the Earl's man.'
Oh, shit.
'Hoping you were fully recovered.'
