Emotionally Weird(61)

The power must have gone off because there were no comforting lights from the farms and cottages spread around the hillside, no visible topography of any kind. It was so quiet I could have heard a mouse rustling through the stiff grass, or an owl’s wing swooping, but no mouse rustled and no owl swooped.

Then the silence rumbled into unwelcome life with the sound of heavy breathing – a slack snorting that belonged to something teratoid and beastly. From behind the crest of the hill steam clouds of ogreish breath bellowed into the cold air and a phosphorescence rose like a nightmarish sunrise, fringing the stone sisters with an unearthly arc light. I didn’t wait to find out the source of this strange incandescence but took off, stumbling down the hill as fast as I could.

The stertorous breathing, like a labouring steam engine, was following me, but I didn’t look behind. It was accompanied now by a dreadful reek of foul-smelling stinkhorn and hard-boiled egg sandwiches. I tripped over a root and fell into something cold and plashy which I hoped was nothing worse than a burn, although I could feel oozing icy mud. For a second I thought I caught a glimpse of something gleaming in the dark – a flash of silver and bronze, something fishy and scaly and then in an instant it had gone and everything was quiet.

~ So is that magic realism? Nora asks.

‘No, it’s fiction.’

Or more like a kind of madness. When I got my breath back I noticed a bus shelter further up the road and hurried towards it. There was a timetable stuck up inside but it was too dark to make out the tiny print. I sat on the narrow, plank-like bench and waited, although the idea that a bus might come along any time soon seemed highly unlikely somehow.

A light appeared in the distance, less alien and monstrous than before but nonetheless bobbing across the darkened landscape like a will-o’-the-wisp. As the light got closer it started to resolve itself into not, as I’d hoped, a bus, but a car. The car slowed to a halt beside the bus-stop and the driver leant over and opened the passenger door.

‘You’ve missed the bus,’ a familiar voice said. ‘Get in.’

I got into the car and slammed the door. ‘You are following me, aren’t you?’

‘In your dreams,’ Chick said.

Until very recently, time had been a slow slurry of nothingness for me; now the days were suddenly packed to overflowing, a turn of events that I found surprisingly unwelcome.

‘A dragon?’ Chick queried mildly, as if I’d said something as unremarkable as ‘a door’ or ‘a Dandie Dinmont’.

To pass the time as we travelled the road and the miles to Dundee, Chick gave me a brief and reluctant rundown of his curriculum vitae: ‘Tulliallan Police College, three years as a village policeman in teuchter land because the cow had a hankering for it, the birth of the bairns, the move back to Dundee when the cow got bored of teuchter land, joined the CID, Lanzarote, blah, blah, blah, the rest is history.’

‘Blah, blah, blah?’

Chick took a half-bottle of Bell’s from his pocket, took a large swig and then handed it to me. The whisky tasted sour and made me gag, but I kept it down.

‘Good girl,’ he said. We were silent for a long while and then Chick said reflectively, ‘I was a good policeman, you know.’

‘I believe you. Did you work on any famous cases?’ I asked him, thinking about The Hand of Fate , wondering if Chick could be some help with police procedure, modes of detection, and so on.

He gave me a sideways look and after a while said, ‘I worked on the Glenkittrie case. Ever hear of that?’

‘No.’

‘Famous in its day,’ he said, draining the dregs of the whisky.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Some other time,’ he said and peered into the empty bottle as if he was trying to conjure up more whisky.

When I cast a glance at Nora I see she has grown pale as any corpse during the course of this innocuous tale.

~ You’ve got a party to go to, she reminds me, very like someone who is trying to change the subject.

I had completely forgotten about the McCue party and certainly had no intention of going.

I must have fallen asleep.

‘You fell asleep,’ Chick said when I woke up. I had been sitting uncomfortably with my head resting against the door of the car. I was numb with cold and the whisky had left a bad chemical taste in my mouth. Chick was reading the Evening Telegraph by the light of a torch. He lit a cigarette from the stub of the one in his mouth.

There was a familiar look to the street we were parked in but it took me a few sleepy seconds before I registered that we were in Windsor Place, parked right outside the McCue house.

The McCues were en fête – from where I was sitting I could see into the brightly lit living-room. I could just make out the faint vibrating thum-thum of rock music. Several people who looked as if they had last danced around the time of the Suez crisis were capering to the music – but in a constrained way, shuffling their feet and occasionally doing something daring with their elbows. Grant Watson was one of them, turning pink with exertion as he pushed his limbs around out of time to the music. I decided I would be in more jeopardy inside the McCue house than I had been in the hands (or whatever) of a rampant dragon.