Two

The thing about not drinking anymore, Sniffs had discovered, was that everybody had a theory about it.

Some people thought he was ill. Some thought he was on tablets. Some thought Shona had made him stop, which was insulting both because Shona had enough to worry about without personally managing the collapse of his liver, and because Sniffs liked to believe at least one or two of his life decisions had come from inside his own head. A few people, mostly men with red faces and sad eyes, treated his sobriety like a personal attack, as if by putting down the glass he had said something about them.

Johnston was one of those.

“Jist cause you dinnae bevvy any mair disnae mean the rest ay us cannae hae a drink.”

That was what he had said through the door of The Argyle just before everything changed.

Christine had put him on the door. That was the first thing. Christine did not put people on the door. Christine was the door. But her phone had gone at half nine and it had been Ella, seventeen, home alone, saying there was a man in a black coat standing in the back garden, not doing anything, just standing. So Christine had pulled her coat on and pointed at Sniffs and said “You. Door. Naebody in efter hauf ten. Jules has the bar.” And then, because she was Christine and knew exactly who she was talking to, “Touch nothing, Sniffs. That means the till. It also means the optics.”

“Ah dinnae drink.”

“You dinnae drink. You’ve still got hands.”

And she had gone. And Sniffs had stood at the door of The Argyle with the keys in his pocket and Jules rinsing glasses at the far end of the bar, and had felt, for about four minutes, like the most trusted man in West Lothian.

Then the Johnston debacle had started.

“Lit us in ya bastard.”

“Naw. Fuck off.”

“Ahm chokin' fur a pint, Sniffs. Lit us in.”

“Yuv been telt. Naebody in efter hauf ten. It’s near ten tae eleven.”

Wheedling next. “Come on Sniffs, one pint, she’ll never ken.” Then annoyed. Then the line about not drinking any more, which had been designed to hurt and had, a little. Then a silence that went on too long for Johnston, who had never in his life let a silence go on too long.

Then came the fear.

Not drunk-afraid. Sniffs knew drunk-afraid. Drunk-afraid was loud and had a story. This had no story. Johnston’s voice had come through the door small, and level, and very clear, like a man reading out a ransom demand.

“Sniffs. There’s somebody at the side ay the bank.”

“Aye? Go hame, Johnston.”

“He’s no daein anyhin. He’s jist standin. Like he’s waitin oan a bus.”

“There’s nae buses.”

“Ah ken there’s nae fuckin buses.”

And then the thing Sniffs could not get out of his head, the thing that had come through the wood in a voice he did not recognise.

“Sniffs. Alex. Listen.”

Johnston never called him Alex. Nobody called him Alex except doctors, judges, Shona when she was really angry, and his mother in Polbeth, two miles and a lifetime away, on the two occasions per year she remembered he existed.

“He’s lookin right at me, man. He kens ah’ve seen him. An thir’s somethin else…”

The voice had trailed off into nothing.

“Johnston, fur fuck’s sake.” Sniffs had leaned in to the door. “Ah’ve seen you batter hauf ay Fauldhouse. Whit are ye shitein yersel fur? Jist go hame—”

"Alex, Sniffs, I...", said Johnston's voice, now beyond fear.

Sniffs put his hands on the door.

He had not opened it.

He had stepped back from it so fast his head hit the wall, and his fingers had clawed at the plaster like the Ben Vorlich turf, and from outside there had been a sound. Quick. Wet. Not a slither or a slip, but a Schlap. Like a cold piece of meat dropped on a butcher’s slab.

Schlap.

A sound more felt than heard, then nothing.

“Go hame mate," Sniffs said through the door, ending this nonsense before the fear overtook him, "Sleep it aff man."

He had then gone and stood at the bar with his back to the door, but the memory of that sound sat inside Sniffs' head like the start of a bad migraine.

The police had gone after the quiet lightning by the bank, though gone was maybe too simple a word. The thin one had spoken into his radio, finally, in a voice too low to hear, and the words had not sounded like police words. The broad one had told Sniffs to stay inside for the night, and had said it twice, and the second time had put a hand on his shoulder, which no policeman had ever done to Sniffs in his life for a reason that was not arrest.

A patrol car had arrived with no siren. Another army truck had rolled past, slower this time, its canvas-covered back sagging like it carried something heavy and ashamed. Men in uniform had moved around the bank alley with torches. One of them, wearing what looked like an army uniform, had come out and vomited into the gutter.

Then they had all left, taking their lights with them.

Nobody had told Sniffs anything.

This, Sniffs felt, was one of the major design flaws in the universe. Life kept happening to him and then refusing to explain itself. He had once spent a night in the cells in Livingston and had been given a leaflet about it. He had now watched a soldier throw up outside a bank and been given no further information.

"Would you like to know more." Sniffs recalled the banner from the movie Starship Troopers. Yes, he thought, I would like to know more.

By half one in the morning he was still awake, sitting on the edge of his couch, smoking out of the living room window and watching the street below. Wee Shona had phoned three times. The first time she had shouted. The second time she had cried. The third time she had asked him if he was alright, which was worse.

He told her he was fine, which was not wholly true but he was glad she was back in her flat, and suddenly felt bad about not going back down to take her home.

"Don't go out again", he had said. "I'll fire roond in the mornin' and see you."

Every time he closed his eyes he saw Johnston’s face, which was ridiculous because he had not seen Johnston’s face on Friday night. He had only heard his voice through the pub door, first wheedling, then annoyed, then afraid.

Then not afraid.

Not even terrified.

Past that.

There is a place past terrified. Sniffs had been near it once, at thirteen, in St John’s Hospital at four in the morning, waiting to hear about his dad. It was from that very quiet place that Johnston’s voice had come.

Sniffs looked at the dark street.

Three floors down and across from his stair, the bank sat with its windows black. The alley beside it was darker than it should have been. That was not poetry. It was a practical observation. The streetlamp above the cash machine was on, the chip shop sign still glowed faintly even though the place had closed hours before, and there was a security light behind the pharmacy that clicked on every time a fox passed with enough attitude. There should have been light in that alley.

There was not.

It looked like a gap cut in the town.

The dogs had stopped. Since Thursday every dog in West Calder had been going off its head about that alley, and now there was not a bark in the town. It was the silence of a house where the kids have gone very quiet in the next room.

“Fuck that,” Sniffs said aloud, and shut the curtains.

It did not help.

Sleep came eventually, not kindly, but like something thrown over his head.

When he woke, he was standing in a field.

It was dark and cold.

For a few seconds his brain refused to engage with this information. It tried to find normal things first. Bed. Bedroom. Window. Old Scotland top. The smell of smoke. Traffic outside.

Instead there was mud between his toes.

Sniffs looked down.

His feet were bare, white in the gloom and covered to the ankles in black earth. He became uncomfortably aware that it wasn’t just his feet that were bare. He was entirely naked, and the wind blowing over the deserted field in which he stood cut through his skin like a million twisted razor blades, and paid particular attention, in the way wind does, to the parts of a man that have the least to say for themselves in the cold.

Panic gripped him, as it does in the worst literary fashion.

This sort of thing used to happen when Sniffs was drinking. Not the naked-in-a-field part exactly, though there had been one Hogmanay near Polbeth that still came up in conversation if Davie Donuts was feeling cruel.

It was the blankness. The missing hours. The terrible internal drop when your own mind refused to hand over the receipt for where you had been. He had woken up once, fully clothed, with a fish supper on his chest and no memory of the previous eleven hours, and had eaten the fish supper, because it was there, and had felt that this was the lowest a man could go.

He had been wrong about that.

A return to that particular non-life state of blackness and despair was not something to be considered.

Ever.

Where the fuck am I? he thought, looking around and trying to piece together the last few hours. What the fuck happened? Ah wiz in bed. In mah fuckin' bed

The sky above was a twisted maelstrom of greys and blacks. Blue-white lightning speared between the ribbons of cloud, briefly illuminating the tortured sky and the deserted ground on which Sniffs stood.

Except lightning was the wrong word.

Lightning made sound. Even far away, it grumbled. It cracked. It spoke.

This did not.

Blue-white veins tore open above him and closed again without a whisper.

There was a sound, though. It took him a moment to hear it, because it was the wrong way up. It was the sound of the M8. Every person in West Lothian knows the sound of the M8, the way people who live by the sea know the sea; it is the sound of two cities going past you without stopping. But it was not coming from somewhere around him though. It was coming from above him. From behind the clouds. As if somewhere up there a great many things were driving very fast, in the dark, and none of them were going to stop either.

“Fuck this bollocks,” Sniffs said, because there are moments in a man’s life when poetry would be inappropriate.

He tried to walk forward.

He managed no more than a grunt of effort before he realised his feet were not just covered in mud. They were in it. Not stuck, the way a trainer gets stuck in the ground at a rain-soaked festival like T in the Park. His foot was actually in it. The earth had closed over the tops of his feet to his ankle, neat and firm, the way earth is closed over the top of something that you mean to stay buried.

He looked around the field, the insane light of the silent lightning helping him, which he did not thank it for.

The field was in rows. Long, straight, careful rows, running away from him into the dark, with the black earth mounded up along each one. Sniffs was standing in a row. And at intervals down his row, and the row beside it, and the row beyond that, there were other pale shapes standing in the earth, about the height of a person, very still, all facing the same direction he was facing.

“Naw,” Sniffs said.

He did not look at them closely. There are things a man decides very quickly not to look at closely, and he had decided.

“Naw, naw. This is just too fuckin' weird.” he said and tried to pull his foot out again.

The mud tightened around his ankles, gently, the way a hand does when you try to take yours back during an unwelcome handshake.

More silent lightning tore overhead as Sniffs, panicked, fell backward. He only managed to prevent his spine ripping out of his body by landing on his arse and elbows, his feet still firmly planted in the ground. Pain snapped up through his back.

“Aw. Yah. Fucker!” he groaned.

He pulled his feet again. Once. Twice. The mud made no sucking sound. It did not behave like mud. It held him with the calm certainty of something that had done this many times before and had not yet listened to a complaint.

It is at times such as this that being a fully paid-up member of the human race allows us to let a certain level of cynical cliché into our vocabulary. After groaning for a short while at the agony in his back, legs, and elbows, Sniffs decided he had been patient enough and lay back on the ground.

“FUCKING HELL. WHAT THE FUCK IS FUCKING GOING ON FOR FUCKS SAKE.” He screamed at the sky above. “FUUUUUUUUUCK—”

He sucked in a huge breath for his next admonishment of the scene overhead, and it occurred to Sniffs, now looking directly into the weirdness above, that the motorway noise behind the clouds had gone quiet, the way a room goes quiet when someone has shouted in it.

It was listening.

No wind in the grass.

No birds.

No town.

No thunder.

Just the field, and the rows, and Sniffs flat on his back in the middle of it with everything on show, and a great many things overhead that had stopped to hear what he would say next.

So that’s not lightning, he thought.

And then, because knee-jerk reaction had done all it could and achieved precisely fuck all, Sniffs started to think.

He was good at it. This surprised people. Anyone who met Sniffs casually filed him in such boxes that were labelled: schemie, big mouth, coward, boozehound, and possibly violent criminal. It was not a wholly unreasonable filing given the way Sniffs looked but he had also read every book in the little library in West Calder, including the ones about the Romans, and he did not drink any more because drinking made some of the aforementioned labels true.

He would put his hands up to the big mouth label though.

The useful thing about being scared shitless, if one was prepared to be philosophical about it, was that it narrowed the world. It burned away the rubbish. Sniffs’ world became his feet, the mud, the sky, and the question of what the thing that had planted him wanted him to grow into.

Something moved at the edge of the field and Sniffs literally stopped breathing.

It was not a person. That was the first mercy. If it had been a person, naked Sniffs stuck ankle-deep in nightmare mud would have had to engage with embarrassment as well as terror, and frankly he did not have the bandwidth.

It was low to the ground. A ripple in the darkness. A dragging shape.

No.

There were several of them...whatever they were.

They moved around the perimeter of the field in a slow, deliberate circle, the way the dogs from the farm moved around sheep, except that they were not dogs. Every time the quiet lightning flashed, Sniffs saw pieces of them. A pale joint. A wet curve. Something like a hand with too many angles to it. Then darkness again.

“Right,” Sniffs whispered. “Right. Nae bother. Just… field beasties. Space field beasties. Fine. Fine. They’ll be fae Livingston.” he laughed at his own fear-driven wit.

The mud tightened.

Pain bloomed in his ankles.

The lightning opened the sky again, and this time Sniffs saw something above the clouds.

Not behind them.

Above them.

A shape vast enough that his mind refused to hold it. Angles where no angles had any right to be. A blackness moving through blackness, and the motorway was the sound of it, of it moving, slow and enormous and not remotely interested in him individually. For one impossible second, the field, the clouds, the silent storm, the rows, and Sniffs himself felt like things arranged on a table for inspection by somebody who would not be back for a while.

Then the sky closed.

And he heard Johnston.

Not with his ears.

Inside his teeth.

Sniffs.

His body went cold.

“Johnston?”

There was no answer, only a pressure behind his eyes and the sudden certainty that Johnston was nearby. Not in the field exactly. Not alive exactly. But present in the way the stench of old cigarettes lives on in the Livingroom curtains.

He did not look down the row.

“Johnston, you there mate?”

The shapes at the edge of the field stopped moving.

Sniffs regretted speaking immediately.

The quiet lightning flashed.

At the far end of the field stood the man in the black coat.

He was beside a gate that had not been there a moment before. His coat moved although there was no wind. He was too tall, or the gate was too low, and his face at that distance was a pale patient thing that Sniffs could not have described to a policeman or even to himself. The man was standing the way the well-spoken doctor had stood outside the chip shop. Not waiting. Not leaving. Like he was watching a kettle come to the boil.

Sniffs, on his arse, lifted his head to see him better.

The man in the black coat lifted his head, a beat after Sniffs had lifted his own.

Sniffs’ stomach turned over. He had seen that copied-but-delayed movement before. He had seen it outside the chip shop, on the new doctor.

The man raised one hand.

Sniffs’ feet came free.

He did not wait to understand this. Understanding was for later. Running was for now.

He scrambled backwards, naked and mud-smeared, then got one foot under him and bolted across the field in the opposite direction of the too-tall man. Running naked with all the grace of a wounded shopping trolley. He ran between the rows. He did not look at what was planted there. Something turned its head as he passed and he did not look at that either. The ground slapped his soles. The cold air tore at his lungs. Behind him came the wet, quick sound he remembered from outside the pub door, the sound that had come through the wood and into his hands.

Schlap.

Schlap.

Schlap.

Not footsteps.

Meat thrown onto a butcher’s slab.

Sniffs ran harder.

He could see another gate ahead of him, this one looked wooden, old, and hanging open. Beyond it he could see a road. A proper road. Wet tarmac. White lines. A bus stop. A shelter with graffiti on the glass, and Sniffs could have wept to see it, because the graffiti said HIBS and that meant it was real, because nothing from beyond the stars would have thought of Hibs.

Civilisation, or a close approximation thereof.

He hit the gate at full speed and went through it shoulder-first.

The world turned inside out.

He woke on his bedroom floor, tangled in the duvet, one hand clawing at the radiator, his mouth full of the taste of soil.

Morning light pressed weakly at the curtains.

For a long time, Sniffs did not move.

Then, slowly, he sat up.

His feet were dirty.

Not metaphorically. Not I need a bit of a bath dirty. But Filthy. Caked in black mud, thick under the nails and smeared across the carpet where he had dragged himself from the bed. His knees were scraped. His elbows were scraped. Both his ankles carried a neat dark line around them, like the mark of a too-tight sock worn on a hot summers day, exactly where the earth had closed around them.

“Fuck,” he whispered.

He got up. He went through to the hall, because some part of him already knew, and he looked at the front door.

It was open.

Not wide. Open the way a door is open when somebody has come in and not quite pulled it to behind them. The landing light was on. And on the lino of the hall, and on the landing, and on the top three stairs of the close as far as he could see, were footprints. Bare feet. Black mud.

Coming in.

Sniffs stood in his hall in his boxers and looked at them for a long time.

There were no prints going out.

A man had walked into this flat in the night with mud on his feet, from the stair, across the landing, down the hall and into the bedroom where he had woken up. There was no sign of how the man had left it.

“Naw,” Sniffs said, quietly, to the hall.

He shut the door. He locked it. He put the chain on, which he had never done in six years, and stood with his back against it the way he had stood with his back against the bar in the Argyle on that Friday night that simultaneously felt like two days ago, and felt like a different lifetime ago, and just breathed.

His phone buzzed on the bedside table.

It would be Wee Shona.

He stared at the bedroom door until it stopped.

Then it buzzed again.

This time he went and answered.

“Shona?”

“Where the fuck huv you been?” she said. Her voice was tight. “Ah’ve been phoning aw morning.”

“Ah wiz asleep.”

“Bullshit. Listen tae me. Christine’s gone.”

Sniffs closed his eyes.

“What dae ye mean gone?”

“Ah mean gone. Ella says she never came hame frae the pub last night. Jules says they all left the pub at closing time last night but Christine never made it hame. The polis are here in the pub. They’re askin' aboot Johnston. They’re askin' aboot you.”

Sniffs looked down at the mud on his feet.

On the carpet.

Under his nails.

On the hall floor, coming in.

Outside, another truck passed slowly enough to make the windows tremble.

“Sniffs?” Shona said. “Alex? Are you listening?”

He looked towards the curtains.

For a second, through the thin gap where they did not quite meet, he thought he saw someone standing in the carpark at the back of the flats.

Black coat.

Still as a post.

Then the light changed and there was only trees, a woman with a pram, and the town pretending it had not begun to rot.

“Aye,” Sniffs said. His voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else. “Ahm listening.”

“Somethin's goin' oan? What are we going tae dae?”

Sniffs stood, mud cracking dry between his toes.

He thought of the unopened pub door. Johnston’s frozen fear. Christine leaving him in charge. Dr MacKinnon in the Courier. The well-spoken man and the weird way he seemed to delay-copy Sniffs’ movements. The quiet lightning. The field, and the rows, and what was standing in them. The shapes moving at the edge of things.

He thought of everybody who had ever looked at him and seen nothing but a waster with a big mouth.

Maybe they were right.

Maybe they were not.

“First,” Sniffs said into the phone, “ahm puttin mah shoes oan.”

“What?”

“Then ahm comin' tae the pub. Then we’re findin' Christine. Then we’re findin' Johnston if there’s enough ay him left tae find.”

“Sniffs…”

“And Shona?”

“Aye?”

“If ye see a cunt in a black coat, dinnae talk tae him.”

There was a pause.

“What if he talks tae me?”

Sniffs looked at the mud on his floor and felt, beneath the fear, something else beginning to move. Not courage exactly. Courage was for soldiers, heroes, dogs that jumped into rivers to save children, and women like Dr MacKinnon who told the truth to men who did not want to hear it.

This was smaller and uglier.

This was refusal to take this shit.

“If he talks tae you,” Sniffs said, “Give him a kick in the nuts, and run like a fuckin wounded deer."

Sniffs put the phone down and went to get washed up.