Tag Archives: edinburgh myths

The Beast With One Back

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All I could see of the beast at the bottom of garden was a pair of red eyes shining out from the thicket of brambles where it was trapped. Or at least I hoped it was. A trail of blood leading into the thicket told me it was badly wounded and all the more dangerous for it.

The question was: what flavour of beastie was I entertaining in my own backyard. From the neon eyes clearly not one of the usual suspects. Or at least none of the things that usually roamed the mean streets of Bruntsfield. You’d be surprised what you can find lurking just over your threshold, waiting for a gold embossed invite RSVP.

A low, trickling growl grew into a full throated roar. I flinched involuntarily and wondered what the hell I was going to do now. It wasn’t exactly a SSPCA or council call-out because if it was what I suspected, everyone would die. And die hard.

I remembered I had a steak in the fridge. It was to have been my Friday night treat: burned to a crisp and washed down with a bottle of Talisker. Now it was just food for whatever skulked in the thicket, raw and rare steak bloody.

An icy north wind nipped the back of my neck and I noticed for the first time that no birds sang. It would be dark soon and whatever it was I was going to do, I needed to do it now. I turned to head back to the house when:

“Don’t go,” the beast rasped. “I want to kill you here, out in the open where I can see the light fade from your eyes. A last request you might say.”

And it chuckled, the gurgle of phlegm and blood not quite disguising the rustling of old leaves as it tensed, gathering itself for that final leap.

“Isn’t that a tad drastic,” I tried to say, but it was too late because by then the beast was upon me, slavering jaws biting and snapping, crimson eyes rolling in its bloody foam-flecked head.

There was a moral here somewhere but it didn’t look like I’d survive long enough to be humbled by it.

The Ghost Formerly Known As….

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I sat with the crime-scene photographs and the dead star of the show swaying above them leaching most of the light from my desk lamp and the warmth from the room. The ghost was a hulking, tattered thing with little memory of the person it had been in life and driven more than a little mad by its brutal exit. The taint of mildew, mould and rot saturated the air, as though I was standing in the middle of an old grave. As long as it didn’t have my name on it, I wasn’t too concerned.

Yet.

I took off the dark glasses and studied it with more interest. There was a partial notion of a face: a snub nose so extreme it could have graced a shrunken head, and a sliding slant of facial feature that only just fell this side of human. This was what happened to the dead. Over time they forgot the exact size and shape of the flesh over-coats they had worn in life. Finally they lost all resemblance to the people they had been, spiritually decomposing in ironic homage to the way of the flesh. At the end they were nothing more than a plume of dirty smoke or patch of cold that you might feel as a shiver down your spine if you walked through it, but nothing more. The emotions were always last to go, stubbornly clinging on like dim-witted hangers-on after the main attraction had upped sticks and gotten the hell out of Dodge.

But some ghosts had a compelling reason to hang on delaying the decay and I was looking at a prime example. In life, it had been a woman called Amy, murdered in one of the most baffling unsolved cases I’d ever come across. From the evidence the police did manage to find, there was no avoiding the conclusion that death had been a release. The marks on the bones showed that flesh had been cut raising the grim possibility it had been done while she was still alive. The bindings found with the pitiful remains, told a dismal tale of captivity for at least a few days, maybe a week. A rusty hook and three skewers with traces of old blood had been found in her lonely cellar grave leading police to the conclusion Amy had been tortured until they had ground her down into so much meat. These weren’t empty guesses: the police had seen this type of murder before, not often, but enough know a thing or two about this type of predator and what they got off on.

So no, it had not been hard to work out why the ghost formerly known as Amy had decided to stick around.

The question was, what was it going to do now?

On the face of it you’d think there was nothing to fear from what was after all only a collection of spectral filaments. And nine times out of ten you’d be right. But the unadulterated rage that held this spectre together made it the exception that proved the rule. The fact that I had summoned it by using the photographs and some of Amy’s old clothes supplied by her grieving family didn’t protect me.

“Amy,” I murmured, “listen to me.”

The ghost howled, more sense than sound of an emotion so intense my vision began to spot, colours flashing at the periphery, and I could feel the first stirrings of a monster migraine. It lowered its partially composed face to mine, the intense cold raising the hackles on the back of my neck, and began to swirl around the chair I sat in, faster, faster, creating a thick, choking blanket making it impossible to breathe without extreme effort.

“Amy,” I whispered, traitorous tongue unable to shape the clotted air into meaningful sound. “Ben and Sarah-”

But apparently the ghost understood, because it keened, a high despairing sound sharp enough to shatter the glass of whisky on my desk, soaking my papers and lobbing an eye watering stench of ethanol into the room for good measure. But that must have distracted it somehow because the pressure eased slightly and my breathing adjusted itself to the restricted supply of air.

“Amy,” I said deliberately using its name in life as much as possible, “Jerry’s asked me to find and kill the people who did this to you. I said I would.”

Promises, the very words that contain them, have power and no one knows that better than the dead. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when it let me go. What I wasn’t prepared for was force of it and I almost fell off the chair, choking. As I righted myself and my lungs became reacquainted with an unrestricted oxygen supply, it calmly took up its original position hanging like a ragged curtain above the photographs as though nothing had happened.

Now all I had to do was come up with the goods.

What Deacon Brodie Did Next

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Of course every Edinburgher worth his or her salt knew that old story. He had been a councillor and skilled cabinet maker by day and a gambler and rotten thief by night. The cabinet maker got invited into his victims’ homes where he took wax impressions of their keys, and the thief sneaked back while they were sleeping and robbed them blind. He led this double life until caught and hung on a gibbet ironically designed by his own fair hand.

Or so legend would have it.

But rumours persisted that he did not really die on the gallows and was instead spirited away to another life in the Americas.

The lesson to me was clear: don’t spend your time designing gibbets. If you do, you’d better have a rope-proof escape plan.

The Last Drop

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A crowd of thousands appeared from nowhere and I was trapped in the middle of a milling, shrieking mob. Buffeted this way and that under louring, rain soaked skies and choking on mud and worse, I began to feel oddly disconnected, as though this was happening to someone else.

Or at least I did, right up until the moment the roaring, filthy throng surged unexpectedly forward, carrying me along for the ride. I prayed to the god unlucky enough to rule over such rabble that it wasn’t a one-way ticket.

As though in answer, the forward momentum came to an abrupt halt and a deep throated baying began. There was no mistaking that sound: something or someone was going to die.

Even had I been deaf the source of such collective joy was blindingly obvious as it loomed above the heads of the crowd a mere hundred yards in front of me. But it still took me a moment to recognise it for what it was: gibbet and hangman’s noose perched jauntily on top of a raised, wooden platform.

Some lucky soul was heading for the short drop with the sudden stop.

The stark, clean lines of the gibbet made gothic poetry against a darkened sky.

Until it occurred to me that it might be meant for me…

In The Beginning

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Eventually I came to an oddly familiar crag precariously perched on a series of hills above an estuary. A dark sky boiled above oily waves as they dashed themselves on the rocks beneath as though urging them on in their suicidal ambitions.

I had never seen such a bleak, dispiriting place.

Who could live here and more importantly, why?

The roiling clouds cleared just enough for me to make out signs of what passed for human habitation: a series of shambling, dilapidated shacks that looked like the track of some contagion upon diseased skin.

Now I knew what I was looking at and wished to the god I didn’t believe that I had been left in ignorance.

Edinburgh, mon amour.

The Grass Is Always Meaner

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The white light of dawn did not flatter Greyfriars Cemetery. Not that this discouraged the ill advised idiots that flocked here in their droves with no idea about what they were messing with, or what the place was really for. As for me, it had always been my dearest ambition not to be found dead here.

Around four hundred years ago, the cemetery had moonlighted briefly as an open air prison for over a thousand people, their suffering leaving an indelible stain, like smoke damage in a diseased lung. It had been this little wheeze that had attracted such dark energies to the place, rather than its day job as a bone-yard. Now it pulsed with a febrile heat, as though something was about to hatch and I knew I was running out of time.

The great vaults were ornately carved: grinning skulls and coy angels coupled together in a sexless dance of death and resurrection; obsessively carved by the living in the hope of making sense of their own one way ticket.

Many of them were so old that the stone itself was crumbling as though in wry tribute to the way of all flesh. Theses cages of stone and iron were of course only for those rich enough to afford such pointless ostentation, constructed to keep the corpses safe from the attentions of the body-snatchers, or Resurrection Men as they were ironically known. They failed of course.

The grass on the other hand looked healthy and vigorous, fed on the superior nutrients leached from the great and the good. At least they had finally given something back to the community.

Flesh Fish

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I sat in the car because, simply, there was nowhere else to go.

To the west, the darkening stain of an oncoming storm gradually cast a caul over the deserted street where I was parked and the sensation of being smothered was very nearly overwhelming. Yet there was still a shimmering quality to the air, as though trying to contain something that was intent on getting out.

I knew the feeling.

To my left was a fish shop which, although it displayed the closed sign, still had meat of indeterminate origin in the window. Great, grey eels were stacked on one side next to what looked like a small pieces of shark meat. Dun coloured fillets rubbed innards with something that had a huge head and lots of small, sharp teeth reminding me of an old school-mate from primary school.

A blurred burst of purple and red in the interior of the shop made me look again. The darkened interior stared blankly back at me and the hairs began to rise on the back of my neck because in that brief monent I had seen a familiar hulking shape: a creature I knew had never been burdened with the vulgarity of a pulse and the flesh over-coat that contained it.

Two doors down in the window above the grocer’s, the corner of a net curtain twitched as though hastily dropped by whatever was behind it. I was trapped in the eye of the storm, knowing that something irrevocable was just about come crashing down, something from which neither I nor this benighted village was ever going to escape.

I did what I normally did when faced with the end of the world, the end of humanity, the end of the end: I pulled out my hip flask and drained it dry.

Dead and Alive

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“Just go straight ahead,” I said distractedly scanning the silent streets thronged by the legions of the dead, all calmly tracking my progress.

“I’ll let you know when.”

The last leg of the journey to the hallowed ground of Greyfriars Cemetery was grim. As we drove up Lauriston Place, past the old Royal Infirmary and round into Forrest Road, the horror of one of the older parts of the city opened its arms and enfolded me like a long lost lover. A mass of shades, spirits and revenants shimmering like a heat haze at high noon thronged the streets. I could still make out the road through their insubstantial forms, but the view was distorted and warped; twisted out of true by presences that had no business here. Some of them manifested as pools of moving shadow, a darkness in perpetual motion flitting across the assembly of the dead like a disease liberated from an artificial confinement. A shiver ran down my spine as I realised now what I was looking at: the birth of a necropolis where the dead wandered at will, unfettered by the mostly unconscious restraints imposed by the living. They had always been around, but not with this overwhelming power and purpose.

Dawn of the Dead indeed. So what the hell was high-noon going to bring?

Matters Of Life And Death

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The legions of the dead reach out to me with insubstantial fingers and when I can’t or won’t pay attention to them, it makes them angry, mean. And it never stops. The demands are incessant and if I’m lucky obscene rather than insane. It goes on day and night wherever I happen to be, whatever I’m doing. If someone has died there, I’ll be the first to know. The thing is that death doesn’t improve most people. Especially as time passes and they forget who they were in life; then you’re left with what you might call the raw essence. Mostly, that’s not a pretty sight, sound or feeling.

No wonder I drink.

It’s almost the only thing that deadens the complaints and perverse whisperings that go on constantly whether I’m in the toilet going for broke or trying to get a leg over. It’s all the same to them and they don’t care if I’m asleep or awake. I can screen it out to an extent like white noise, but not always and never completely. They wait like jackals, greedy for that moment when my concentration starts to slip so they can subsume me with desires that should have died along with their flesh envelope.

But it’s what they evolve into that really sickens me. Still, I suppose it’s a life of sorts.

Just not as we know it Jim…

Hide and Bleed

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It’s so traditional to wait on disaster befalling you, so why not ring in the changes and seek it out yourself? At least that’s what I told myself when I took out my scrying glass and signed my own death warrant.

The gleaming reflections of my scrying glass soon revealed my murderer-to-be perched on the top of Salisbury Crags. His tall, powerful frame and wings, the pinions of which rested on the ground on either side of him as he balanced on the Crags edge, were limned in red as the winter sun set over Edinburgh. It could have been classic fallen angel stuff as he contemplated his new kingdom with all the grace and terrible beauty of a Gustav Doré illustration. Except this kingdom was no more than a holding pen and the beast so delicately poised above it would gladly annihilate everyone and everything in it.

He turned quickly as though aware of being spyed upon and the last rays of the dying sun made a halo around his head the colour of old blood. The hair was long, a burnished blue black, stray strands of which were being blown across his face as though he was a wild animal staring out from behind bars. His skin was dark and the high cheekbones and tip-tilted eyes gave his face an easy glamour not often found in this forgotten, frozen corner of the world.

He wore old, battered leathers and a pair of boots that had metallic sigils of unknown origin worked into them. The nose was straight, the mouth full above the cleft chin. It was a terrible beauty, the last face you looked upon as you died screaming, giving him the gift of your intestines and gladly.

For the old ones like Luke, there was no need to fear the last faltering rays of a dying star because nothing interfered with their games of hide and bleed. The red ruin that day in and night out swelled and blocked city gutters up and down the length and breadth of the country was more than testament to that.

But he was on my trail and I was going to have to face up to that and try to find a way to kill him before he killed me. The slightly tricky part was how could you kill the unkillable before it killed you…