The Horror Movie.

A taxi sloshed through the gutter puddles. crushing a discarded Irn-Bru can atop a loose drain covering. The combined sound made Tim Hampson shudder, it reminded him of the sound of pushing down the lid of an old V.H.S machine. It reminded him of “The Movie”

Nowadays the kids could call up everything on their fucking phones in an instant. Anything from cute cats through the emotionally disturbed poorly socialised twenty-somethings screeching over video games to live -as it happened- terrorist atrocities. They wandered around filming themselves and watched each other oblivious to the crumbling material reality around them. The city was about to collapse in on itself, Christ, the whole planet was about to implode and all they'd do is tweet about it and expect others to clean up the mess. They'd be taking selfies in the wasteland of civilisation. His contempt was mostly made up of jealousy. They had no idea the horrors people like Tim had to clean up, nor how vile the things that were just swept under the carpet.

Tim stubbed his cigarette out against the rough brickwork. After looking around to make sure he wouldn't be spotted and fined by the city council's ersatz S.S. officers he flicked the extinguished butt out into the broken gutter. There was a pint and a whisky still needing to be drank inside the Carpenter's Arms, so he went back inside to tackle both. He stepped in right on cue.

Lights, camera, action.

“It was a routine bust” McCormac was telling the others but his eyes were watching Tim as he entered. He looked relieved that Tim had arrived when he did.

Hampson almost walked back out the door. It was time for the “the story” again. For nearly a decade they had been training new detectives and in that time both he and McCormac had told “the story” so often that it had become something other than a shared memory, it had become a myth. Still, the newbies always wanted to hear about the famous cops and the notorious “Wraithlin Paedo Circle” and the two of them always obliged. Was hard to turn down free drinks when they were the only thing that help blot out hideous reality. Perhaps the oblivious kids with their mobile phones were no worse than he was after all. He felt like a hypocrite as he looked at the young officers standing their waiting to be regaled with their famous tale.

Hampson hated the way McCormac would always start with “it was a routine bust.” It was meaningless, all busts were routine until they weren't, until they spiralled out of control. He was tired of being dragged on to play his bit but since it practically guaranteed him a couple of drinks he didn't mind hamming it up for the audience. It had been nearly twenty years since it had happened and most of “the story” was little more than a series of narrated “bits” the two of them had concocted based on dwindling memories of an event neither of them had ever been properly capable of enduring.

When it came to “the story” the truth was more shocking, depressing and existentially bleak than the fable they'd constructed in order to cope. No fucker wanted to know the truth, not then, not now. Christ, he knew the truth and had spent twenty years attempting to erode it with Tennant's, Grouse, a pharmacopoeia of antidepressants and a script woven from comforting lies. He was less a cop in these moments, more an actor in a horror movie, retelling his grim story. He didn't enjoy lying to himself and others but the truth was not a convenient, comfortable narrative where the good guys win. The kids on the force didn't want to know the truth. Most of them would be exposed to insane horror and violence anyway; better they continue to consider it brutal and random. No one wanted the truth to be true, least of all Tim. But it was, and he was done with it.

McCormac on the other hand was in his element. He was the true showman. He loved nothing better than to tell everyone about his part in bringing down a notorious sex gang. Hampson knew it had been probably the greatest -and worst- moment of McCormac's life. Or perhaps, like Tim, he just tried to deal with the trauma by making it dissolve into fiction. Perhaps McCormac was trying to erase the truth through absurdity. Still it wasn't fair to heap all of that upon him. Hampson himself had been an active part in consolidating the fable, the act, “The Story”. That's all it was now, a story.

It didn't matter. Hampson had been introduced. Time to play the part, tell the tale. As if on cue the jukebox played a song from that era, “Come As You Are”. It made Tim wonder if he should have blown his own brains out back then like that singer did..

“Then Tim says to me... Tim, what was it you said?” McCormac asked, as always.

Tim Hampson rolled his back across the bar to face them. In days gone by, before it was banned he would have lit a cigarette, took a deep drag and exhaled. Not now. Instead he took a quick belt of his whisky and gasped it down. “You've got to understand, we were dealing with another case. I mean we knew that there wis an investigation. At that point eighteen wee lassies and twelve boys had went missing from care homes and we're no talkin' rebellious teenagers fucking off onto the streets. The auldest wis nine. That didnae go un-noticed.”

Nine. She had been the oldest by far. As he recited his lines he remembered the photograph of her face, a little pale girl with freckles and bushy ginger hair. underfed and with the distant, empty stare of a child who'd never known any love, no family, raised in institutions. Nancy Connelly. The rest of the kids averaged about seven years of age. In days gone by he could have recited all those names, but he knew he'd struggle to name half a dozen now. He only remembered Nancy's because his aunt had the same name.

“But the problem was that the kids came from almost as many different places so no one put two and two together.” That part was, at least, true. Rivalries between regions was big in those days, often fuelled by sectarianism as much as anything else. Those blue-nosed masonic weegie fuckers thought they should be running the whole show. Same as the mick twats in Lothian. Not only were the pricks not any help but they had actively hindered the investigation. No national crime databases in those days, just a bunch of snide fuckers, bent as fuck and loaded with dirty secrets far worse than fucking the odd abandoned kid.

“Noo were were just workin' on following up on a traffic case. Apparently some bloke had got a lot of parking tickets down in Newcastle and when they checked his licence they found the vehicle was licenced in oor neck of the woods.” He continued and glanced at McCormac who took the story from him.

“That's whit we were reduced to, chasin' traffic violations. We followed it up and found the licencee. He was some Eastern European punter from Rutherglen, told me he sold it to his cousin in Wraithlin and that he'd assumed the documents had been transferred. He gave us the name and address. We weren't too happy about that. Wraithlin was a shite-hole then, no that it's changed much. The Lennox estate was somethin' else though. Dossers would stay homeless rather than take a council flat in that dump.”

That had also been true, if exaggerated for narrative purposes. The estate was a cluster of flimsy, brown, rectangular three storey blocks seeming held together by damp, nicotine, stained wood-chip and laundry lines bound to the graffiti covered verandahs. Hampson recalled the half naked filthy kids cavorting with packs of semi-domesticated dogs through the streets shouting “POLIS! POLIS!” as they drove into the estate. Wraithlin had been a hastily flung up overspill town and had all the charm of a suburb of some bankrupt Stalinist Hell. The Lennox estate was like a slum on the borders of that infernal hinterland.

“This was durin' the nineties, before all that Euro-money went into tartin' up these places. The folk were poor, didnae trust the police and so they were tight lipped when we turned up. First of all we learned that the guy's cousin had been the Local Pastor. He'd fucked off back to Poland or wherever and left a local boy in charge of the van and community centre. He was some fat, simple lad called Jim Muldoon.” McCormac added. At that name the newbies all nodded and made noises of disgust and recognition. Muldoon had become the main antagonist of the story. It made sense since his name was all over the national press by the end.

“Slippery fucker that one.” McCormac hissed, finishing his lines and shaking his head.

Nothing could have been further from the truth but this was how the lie began, how the tale went from something unspeakable to mundane, everyday horror. Hampson remembered the first meeting with the lad, softly spoken, well kept. A young Leftie trying and succeeding to make a difference in the lives of the abandoned souls of Lennox Estate. He took up where McCormac left off “Aye. He was all smiles and pleasantries. Said he'd so much paperwork he must have forgotten to change over the details of ownership. Owned up to the parkin' fines too. We had nothin' to go on after that visit. but I had a hunch there was something up. Couldnae put my finger on it though.”

The lad had acted suspicious, that much was true. Tim had the feeling he was up to something, nothing they could pin on him, just a copper's instincts perhaps. “It wisnae until about three weeks later that we got words from the boys in Carluke that they had reports about a man with a dirty white transit van who'd been seen a few times with various crying children. Noo there were tonnes of those things so we never put two and two together. Still both of us were still suspicious of the boy. Somethin' about him just didnae sit right. It was shortly after that the bosses got wind of the scale of the missing weans, fae a bunch of concerned social workers who'd apparently been told tae keep quiet.”

“Still wisnae oor case though.” McCormac added for emphasis.

“Naw, in fact if I recall correctly we ended up filing the Muldoon case. It was only when the story hit the papers that Rab here got a hunch.” Tim said introducing McCormac's next “bit”.

McCormac grinned and nodded. “I noticed that there seemed to be a pattern of abductions, they all seemed to be along two main routes, as far as Largs and Berwick and moving down as far as Morpeth, in Tyneside. That is when it clicked. I told Hampson my hunch and we got onto the cops in Newcastle to check the dates of Muldoon's tickets.”

Tim butted in as he always did. “That was the key. He'd been in Newcastle the day or the following day after nine of the abductions. He had a white van, we were more convinced than ever that he was a suspect in this case. So we went to the boss with what we had.”

That wasn't the only thing that emerged, every one of those parking tickets had been written at the ferry terminal. That wasn't in the script though, it had been edited out, a fact pruned during the cultivation of the fable. An important fact and one that lead to questions and other, dangerous, narratives. That was another truth that never made the final reports nor was it ever mentioned in the court case.

McCormac emptied his pint glass and slammed it down on the bar. Tim recognised this as a punctuation point, a pause, an intermission so the audience might have a drink. One of the young officers immediately called for another round, they almost always did, as if bound into this drama as much as the older men.

Small talk broke out as the glasses were passed but everyone was waiting for the rest of the story. Neither Tim nor McCormac would offer it up, they'd wait until someone brought it back up. It never took long. That night was no different. One of the lads, a bloke who reminded Tim of “Oor Wullie” couldn't wait.

“So what happened when ye went to your boss about Muldoon?” he asked, desperately.

“Nothing really. He had dozens of potential suspects with white vans so he told us to follow it up. Neither of us thought he was taking it too seriously but we were.” Tim answered

“Aye, we were.” McCormac agreed his tone suitably grim.

“We decided to keep tabs on him, watch what he was up to. As I said earlier, he was a slippery fucker, did all sorts of community and charity work. He did odd jobs and ran a youth club. Can ye imagine that fucker in charge of kids?” Tim's stomach churned as he recited those lines. A truth turned malevolent, the actions of kind young man turned sour by lies. A life sold up as a tabloid sacrifice.

Muldoon had indeed been a charity and community worker, the boy had been a hero and the lies had turned him into a monster, to protect even greater monsters, real monsters. No wonder Tim hated this bit. It was the betrayal of decency of the fundamental idea that civilisation is built on. It was something Tim himself had joined the force to protect and instead he had been reduced to lying for free drinks. He loathed himself, loathed this part he had been forced to play and now played so well. He was typecast, playing the same role over and over without respite.

As he took a pause and a sip, the others gave dutiful responses; gasps and hisses. He didn't know how much longer he could do this. He closed his eyes and sighed. “We nearly convinced ourselves we were barking up the wrong tree.”

“That's right. The two of us were sitting in the car arguing about whether we were wasting our time when suddenly he runs down the stairs from his flat and takes off in the van.” McCormac added. For the first time he had a worried look on his face. The scowl was asking if Tim was okay. He nodded and gave McCormac a wink to reassure him. He'd noticed though, noticed that Tim was starting to crack.

“We followed him carefully for hours. Keeping our distance, making sure he didn't spy us. At a Care Home just outside Penicuik. The two of us fucking watched as the bastard quickly jammed two wee boys into the back of the van and drove off. Then we knew it was on. We called it in.” McCormac clicked his fingers.

Another lie. What they really did was follow Muldoon back to the Lennox Estate, they watched as he escorted the two bemused little boys into his flat and then after waiting ten minutes deciding on what to do, McCormac had angrily walked up to Muldoon's door and banged heavily on it.

“You should have seen the place, pig-sty disnae even begin tae describe it. Place was filled with empty take away cartons and children's shoes. He even had porno images taped to his walls, the dirty bastard.”

Muldoon had none of that, his apartment was spotless, he had a cross over the fireplace. He had opened the door and merely sighed at the sight of the two officers and with a tragic, exhausted look said “I think you'd better come inside.”

Hampson recalled walking into the young man's apartment, recalled his slumped shoulders and the brown cardigan, even after all this time and all the lies, that memory was seared into his mind. The lad had been defeated.

“Of course the bastard was caught bang to rights, though we never found any of the kids, we did find enough circumstantial evidence to nick the fucker. It was then he confessed.” Mcormac said, with a sense of satisfaction.

Muldoon's actual confession was almost instantaneous and came unforced. “Look officers, it was me who took the kids but it's not what you think.” He had said and then showed them the two tiny bedrooms with four bunkbeds each inside.

The two little kids were there, watching Eastenders on an old portable television, one of those ones with the extendible aerial still attached. Hampson remembered McCormac angrily asking what was it all about then. Neither of them believed the man but it wasn't long until their view changed.

“I'm rescuing them.” He had said.

“The prick claimed he was “rescuin' them” can you believe that?” McCormac scoffed.

Caught red handed with two small boys in his room it was hard for the officers to believe him but Hampson realised that all the trips to the Newcastle ferry port must have meant something. Finding himself naturally slipping into the “good cop” role to compliment McCormac's angry “bad cop.” He had been willing to hear the boy out.

Muldoon had escorted them back out of the children's room. He asked that they follow him and walked into a smaller bedroom. After McCormac and Hampson had entered Muldoon had locked the door behind him, The move that had increased Tim's suspicions and they did not subside when the lad went over to a wardrobe and removed a locked box. Unlocking it he removed from it a black videotape cassette which he rattled at them. He shoved into the huge slab of a VHS machine and pressed play. “This is what it is all about.”

McCormac paused, took another drink, let Hampson continue the tale, continue the act. The ritual defamation of a dead man. He did. “So then Muldoon starts telling us about the others involved in his little rape and murder ring.”

Muldoon had clunked the video into the player. The quality was terrible, a degenerated copy of a copy filled with snow and lines but behind all that both of the officers could see obvious hand held camera footage of several men in suits forcing children into what looked like a condemned church with a crooked Steeple. The footage was shaky and sometimes all that could be seen were smears of light. Hampson knew that Church, he had seen it up the road from Wraithlin in another town, a town, it was claimed, that even the cops avoided unless absolutely necessary.

The crew disappeared inside with the children. McCormac had made some smart-arse remark Tim recalled but he also recalled his voice was wavering. Muldoon fast fowarded through several minutes of footage until they could see inside through a cracked window pane.

Inside that church there were spotlights and cameras. It was well lit and busy with people, not including the suited men with the kids. It took a while for Tim to realise that the majority of the other people were children too, most of them filthy. One of the kids, a boy no older than fourteen stepped forwards. He had bulging eyes and wore only a vest and track suit bottoms. The footage was silent but there was no mistaking that kid was in charge. He gestured to the kids that the suited men had brought in and the men released them, wherein the kids tentatively moved towards the young lad.

The camera followed them. Some of the older children made a circle around the new arrivals and the boy was in the centre, he looked to be introducing himself to them. Tim remembered both of them stood in silence watching the tape. He didn't know what to expect but what followed he would not have even been able to imagine. It was there, suddenly and without warning.

What it was Hampson could not properly process let alone describe. It was as if someone had just dropped a giant stone through the roof. It certainly reminded him of one of those Stonehenge pillars but it was not stone, it was made of some dim radiance through which light flickered, as if through trees. It was some kind of doorway, a portal to somewhere utterly else and from it four figures emerged, many parts of which seemed familiarly human.

They were, however, not human. One was tall and thin to the point of having spindly almost insectile limbs. It wore garments that appeared to made from leaves and twigs threaded through tight white silk with silver or at least pale, glinting brocade. Its neck was as thin as its limbs and supported a head which looked like a cubist bust. It had eyes, of a sort, an angle with punctured holes for a nose and large and frighteningly exposed yellow teeth. The thing's skin emitted a greyish hue and any sexual characteristics it may have had were indeterminate. As it crawled out of the portal another smaller figure stepped out behind it. This one was a mound of matted filthy hair that obscured most of it's seemingly naked body. The shoulders that were exposed were pale and scarred as were its legs which were ended with cloven hooves. It had horns too. Long horns that stretched out from the sides of its head. Horns with sharp points. The third floated in, a ghost of a woman, in rags and with empty eye sockets, she had no hair but wore something like a crown of thorns upon her bald skull. The last to step forward moved past the others to meet the boy; a skeletal creature like something escaped from a bad fantasy novel. It wore armour of all things and brandished a sword. Tim dreaded to think what it might do with the sword.

Tim remembered being stunned by the emergence of the creatures but recalled McCormac's own terrified complaints. “What the fuck is this halloween bullshit?” He had barked.

“They are of the Unseelie. Powerful beings with powerful allies.” Muldoon had said.

McCormac had said nothing to that and Tim was too busy watching the video to really take it in. The skeletal thing made a nod to the boy which looked so forced that even though the video was silent one could hear it creak. The boy in turn nodded and gestured to the children. At this the four creatures stepped back and raised their limbs in the air. The boy and most of the other children did too. Above them something large and dark seeped into being. Like the doorway the creatures came through, this dark thing could not be apprehended very well by the eyes not until it shot thick vine like tendrils down and grabbed the terrified children. Soon each tiny child was bound by masses of them. Something shot down, a thick glittering barb which wasted no time in puncturing one of the children's skulls. The tendril pulsed once and then the child was dumped back onto the floor, blood ejaculating furiously from the massive head-wound. Even though there was no audio, one could feel the screams of those terrified kids. The other children, the ones who'd already been there, rushed forward to pick the child up as the thing above them repeated its brutal assaults on the tiny kids one after the other. It was monstrous. Even recalling it made Tim feel sick.

“Turn it aff.” McCormac had said, almost in tears.

Muldoon refused and insisted, “Watch.”

The children who had been assaulted by this ghastly entity were stripped naked by the other kids. They lay there pale and motionless, each with a large noticeable hole in their skull. After a few moments they began to jerk, to writhe as if they were marionettes pulled by invisible strings. They stumbled and stretched, a mockery of walking and then they stepped back towards the men in suits.

According to Muldoon, he and his allies were smuggling children out of the homes because they had been marked for this obscenity. That there were powerful people involved and that it all had to be done on the Q.T. because who the fuck would believe that horror movie?

Back at the bar McCormac shook his head feigning world weary disgust. “Because of Muldoon, we ended up arresting twelve people. All of them were linked with him all of them care home workers.”

The suited men on the video had stood through all of this without batting an eyelid then one of them turned and looked directly at the camera. For an instant, before he pointed at the window and the film shut off, McCormac and Hampson both saw his face, and both recognised his gaunt and bespeckled idiot face. A former Secretary of State for Scotland.

“that's no who ah think it is, is it?” McCormac had said.

Muldoon had nodded. “The very same, they're up to their eyeballs in it, the lot of them.” Muldoon responded sombrely.

There was no doubt in Hampson's mind, no-one would set up such an elaborate and insane grostesquerie just to protect himself from fucking and murdering kids. Most who did that sort of thing had difficulty in tying their own shoelaces.

The Truth was that Muldoon confessed to protect the operation. The truth was that he made a deal. He would confess but only if he could get those boys to the Amsterdam ferry. No-one could be told that, no-one could ever know. The two cops agreed with him and that night the three of them drove to Newcastle where they met a Polish pastor, the original owner of the van, who took the kids across the water.

After Muldoon's false confession, the boys upstairs put two and two together and soon raided the whole operation. It hadn't taken them long to figure out who was trying to rescue the kids. All of them, Muldoon's entire network, social workers, priests, community workers, even a couple of guards from the port were arrested on trumped up charges and convicted as a paedophile ring. McCormac and Hampson were hailed as heroes for cracking the case. They kept quiet as a lot of good and decent people were locked up.

“An' that, as you say was that.” Hampson finished, but that wasn't that. Those who were feeding the children to that thing had just become more cautious, more clandestine. Twenty years later kids were still going missing from care homes up and down the country. No one said anything, there were no police reports but Hampson knew it was still happening.

The young detectives seemed, as they always did, pleased with the tale and another round of drinks was forthcoming. One of them said “those guys were fucking monsters.” and all agreed. Hampson knew they were not, he knew that there were good people who were punished, that there were sick fuckers who ran the world and then… then there were monsters, real monsters. But who would believe that?

The truth was not only stranger and darker than fiction could ever be but it was also whole lot less plausible. He took another drink, it made it much easier to forget the distinction between lies and truth. The bell rang for closing time. The house lights came up and the crowd shuffled out into the dark wet night satisfied by the evening's entertainment. Tim stood on Hope Street and looked up at the light coming through the glass of Central station. Even that was a lie and he was tired of them

“See you tomorrow?” McCormac half asked.

Hampson nodded. “Aye.” knowing that was just one more lie. A final one, he'd had enough of lies, had enough of tomorrows. McCormac patted him on the back and Tim winked and headed towards the Broomielaw where he took a right down towards the Squinty bridge. He stared at the dark water below. The Clyde had been hungry these last five years. He didn't know how many people had plunged into its cold, dirty water, dozens perhaps, lonely people, sad people, people who'd snapped, who'd endured more than their fair share of the horror the world had to offer. The Clyde, for its part, swallowed them whole. Tim stood at the edge of the bridge, took off his shoes and offered up himself for its supper.