Chapter Three
Three
He made it back to the tram terminus just in time for turnaround.
Grabbed a seat at the window and dozed with his head against the glass as the tram rattled back into town.
Ragged, flash-lit dreams, fragments from the war, stalking his shallow sleep.
Machine gun fire, screams and pleading eyes.
A soft, Welsh-accented voice. And somewhere in there, little Ellie Furlough, falling terror-stricken into a hole filled with mud and rusted barbed wire and the rotted corpses of men still somehow moving and moaning in pain…
He jolted awake, a half dozen stops short of the city center.
On the other side of the glass, the rain appeared to have relented, and the interior of the tram felt abruptly stuffy and overheated.
He shook off the dream, got out at the next stop, and walked the rest of the way to Skoldergate.
Around him, the city shuttered and fussed its way toward end of day—lights in shops and offices going out, blinds going down, men and women with keys locking up and hurrying home.
Along each street, the gallows-arm iron streetlamps took up the fight against the early dark.
Corner of Skoldergate and East Cavendish there was a brazier stand selling roast chestnuts.
Duncan stopped to get a bag and chat to the big weatherbeaten Glaswegian who ran it, a marine color sergeant called Crammond who’d managed to mislay his lower left arm and eye on a beach at Gallipoli.
The army had duly fitted him with a natty aluminum replacement built by some French-sounding firm working out of Hendon—De Soutier or something—and Crammond affected a black patch to cover the scar-edged void where his eye had once been.
Been ma leg, he was known to comment to his customers, coulda goan the whole hog and got masael a fuckin’ parrot, too.
“Awright, big man?” he asked Duncan, using his prosthetic hand to prod and stir the current scatter of chestnuts on the griddle. “Whit ye up tae?”
“Out to Rawbury.”
“Oh aye—dumpin’ trip, wiz it?”
Duncan nodded.
“That mean ye’re goin’ tae the Forest again soon?”
“Looks that way.”
“Sooner you than me, pal. Work I wouldnae dae if ye paid me a fuckin’ peerage.”
Crammond’s first job after demob, he once confided to Duncan, was with a Re-clearance crew working the fringes of the vast new growth now carpeting the ground between Loch Lomond and his native Glasgow.
There was a big national drive to employ disabled veterans—your company could get the King’s Crest for it—and the newly established Forestry Commission was no exception to the trend.
For most of that first summer home, Crammond had made himself useful around the logging camps in whatever way he could; had even helped pioneer some specifically tooled limbs designed for Forestry work that were apparently part of a coming trend in the prosthetics industry.
At the time, he viewed the Forest and the tales he’d heard about it with the same mix of skepticism and fascination most returning soldiers had.
On the one hand, it seemed like a bunch of old wives’ tales.
On the other hand—well, ye had the fuckin’ Forest, right there in front o’ ye, newly grown and seemingly overnight.
Ye couldnae really argue wi’ that, now, could ye?
Since the trees were actually there, and no argument about that, Crammond split the difference and just concentrated on getting paid to chop them down.
Then his new limbs started talking to him.
In ma heid, like. Tellin’ me no’ tae cut the fuckin’ trees, leave them be, what did they ever dae tae me?
These communications, initially soft and liminal, grew more insistent over time, and more violent; incitements dinning in Crammond’s head, like teeth grinding on tin, to jist stoap cuttin’, turn his metal-and-leather appendage on his fellow workers, why not, and ultimately on himself.
Thought it wiz jist the fuckin’ shell shock, ye ken?
But then one day ah’m intae the tree line wi’ this big sook oot o’ Inverness, ah’ve got a limb on wi’ this big fuckin’ saw blade.
And it turns, all by itself, that blade, goes to chib this teuchter in the neck.
Fuckin’ limb moved like it wiz alive. Ah fell over oan ma erse, wiz the only way tae stoap it, pretend ah tripped oan a fuckin’ root.
But ah saw the way that teuchter looked at me efter, and ah knew he knew.
By then, the disappearances had started.
The men were hearing uncanny voices from deeper in the forest, a growing terror stalked the forestry camps after dark.
Whole fuckin’ circus wiz comin’ apart. Ah took oaff that limb and ah fuckin’ walked.
Literally fuckin’ walked, man, right back to Govan.
After that, like so many veterans with combat stress reaction, Crammond drifted.
His neighborhood would not hold him, nor in the end would the wider cradle of Glasgow itself.
Everything in the city just reminded him of what he’d been before the war, what he’d lost, and how there was no way back to any of it.
The drift took him down to London for a while, some work that Duncan gathered was less than wholly legal or wholesome, then on to Birmingham for more of the same or worse, and finally to Erlsley, where he worked doors and dealt cocaine and mostly stayed out of trouble.
Random collision with a chorus girl dancing at the Lyceum cemented him in place and, as the relationship blossomed, apparently gave him something approaching peace.
The hot chestnut stand followed soon after, mainly as a cover for more lucrative illicit activities.
Against Crammond’s expectations, it did quite well.
Now he and his girl were ensconced in expansive furnished lodgings above a confectioner’s over on Mitchell Street, and were making plans to actually buy the place.
Duncan had been across there a couple of times, but he didn’t make a habit of it.
The girl, May, didn’t seem to like him. Crammond once mentioned something about her coming from tinker stock, various aunts and grandmothers who had the Sight, and Duncan guessed that the gift had made its way down the generations.
In which case, what she saw when she looked at him wasn’t likely to reassure her very much.
Duncan held up his end of the blether with Crammond for a while, long enough for night to fully fall, then he took his paper-bagged chestnuts and headed off with their comforting heat held one-handed to his chest. Fifty yards up the street and across, Erlsley Bird Cabs was a beacon of yellowish light between shop frontages already shuttered and dark.
A single car sat in the rank outside, a rickety-looking prewar Unic, one of its ornate head lamps listing visibly lower than the other.
No driver at the wheel—he was in the office, chatting up Niamh.
“Broken down, aye?” Duncan asked, banging noisily inside. The door was sticking since last winter, and no one seemed disposed to do anything about it. “I’ll come out and take a look at the engine if you want.”
He knew the cabby—a wiry, weatherbeaten thirtysomething with powerful, work-worn hands, years of farm labor in his past, trench memories in his gaze.
No one you’d choose to cross. But these days, the Forest trumped the trenches in all but the most extreme cases, and Duncan was a bigger man into the bargain. The cabby shrugged.
“Car’s fine. Just on my way out for some snap, like. Takin’ orders.” He turned back to Niamh. “So you want owt bringing for you, hen? Butty or summat?”
Niamh shook her head, smiling a rueful smile.
The cabby said something softly under his breath, grabbed his cloth cap off her desk, and crammed it on his head.
He nodded at Duncan with measured defiance and walked out.
The door banged behind him, the echo of the noise flew around the high-ceilinged room a couple of times.
They watched through the window as the man bent and cranked his Unic to life.
“Could you try not to scare away all the pretty birds, Duncan?” Niamh, no longer smiling so much. “Sure, it’s boring enough sitting in here without them being scared to talk to me, too.”
“Him?” Duncan stared balefully out at the cabby as he climbed aboard his chariot and clattered away into the night. “He could have stayed.”
She picked up the post from where it lay sheafed on her desk, shoved it at him like a challenge.
“For your information, Duncan Silver, I have a father and three brothers back in Galway for that paternal shite. That’s why I left.
Don’t need it from you here as well, just because—” Her voice snagged on the last word, tore open into the hacking cough.
She stifled it before it could get properly started, hurried into other conversation, voice tightened with the effort. “So how was the Merry Widow Rush?”
“Aye, it’s a changeling.” Leafing absently through the thin sheaf of envelopes, pretending not to notice the cough. “Dropped it off out at Rawbury.”
“You don’t sound too happy about it. It’s a job, isn’t it?”
“It’s complicated. Rush moved home at least once in the last six months.
Dowgreave, outside Macclesfield, before she ended up here.
It’s right on the fringes of the Forest. Been there a couple of times; it’s risky country.
The Huldu could easily have worked the switch while she was still living there.
I’ll need to talk to Garner, see if he still has his ear to the ground over that way. ”
“You want me to call him?”
“No, I’ll do it. Garner’s prickly at the best of times. You don’t need that grief.”
Niamh rolled her eyes. “I’m a big girl, Duncan.”