Free Tormentor by William Meikle Page B

all happy at me infringing on his domain when I went to fetch the first load of wood. He hissed at me angrily, but after that he seemed resigned to losing his perch and took to glaring at me from the dwindling pile each time I stocked up.
    The sparrows weren’t at all happy that I was spending less and less time with the patio doors open. They took to tapping on the window with their beaks in attempts to get my attention, and I usually gave in to their demands when my fingers threatened to tap along in time.
    Having the fire going in the main room meant that my gaze was often focused on the fireplace itself, and on the mantel in particular. I took to talking to Beth again, especially while painting and at times it felt like our conversations were guiding my brushstrokes. The abstract had become a dense, multilayered riot of color, predominately black and red but shot through with golden yellow and azure blue. I saw now it was not as abstract as I had thought, but was in fact a seascape, of sorts, but not of any view I had ever set eyes on.

 
     
     
    3
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    On the Saturday before Christmas I took a taxi down to the Dunvegan Arms.
    “You’re looking well, son,” was the first thing old George said as I joined the usual crowd in the snug. I ordered a round and it was only when I returned from the bar that I realized we had a new member of the Saturday Club—the local minister, Alexander Wark. I’d seen him around town, but never spoken. He’d always looked dour and forbidding, and was the last person I’d have expected to join the little group of drinkers I had come to call friends.
    “Don’t mind auld Alex here,” George said, laughing. “He’s not about to give us a lecture on the perils of drink. He likes to come in around Christmas for his one night of drunken debauchery a year.”
    The minister smiled and looked like a completely different man.
    “Aye—on every other Saturday night I’m over at your place shagging your wife.”
    Once again we were off and running for a night of jokes, stories and not a little verbal abuse. Alex Wark proved more than capable of giving as good as he got; he was also a font of scurrilous gossip that would have dismayed the ladies of the town had they heard it uttered, here in the local bar.
    “And what about you, lad?” the minister asked, an hour or so and several beers into the evening. “How are the Spaniards treating you?”
    You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone round the table went quiet, so much so that we could hear some of the local youths working up to a fight in the main bar.
    Alex laughed and addressed the other men around the table.
    “Come on, you mean you’ve let the lad live up in that house all this time and you haven’t told him its history? Shame on you. That’s no way to treat a pal.”
    “We didn’t want to frighten him,” Sandy Johnston said.
    “Didn’t want to frighten yourselves, you mean?” the minister replied. He turned to me.
    “Get me a Talisker and I’ll tell you a story,” he said.
    I didn’t need to be asked a second time.
    * * *
    “How much do you know about the house?” he asked. We’d taken ourselves off to one side. Old George launched into one of his stories as the others studiously ignored us, which was fine by me.
    I told Wark what I thought I knew—about Mrs. Menzies, about old Tom dying in the cottage fire, and about the wee drummer boy.
    He laughed.
    “My, you have been busy—and all that without even talking to these reprobates here about it. And what haven’t you told me?” He put a hand out and covered my left fingers—they had started to twitch. “I’ve seen that before—Annie Menzies had the same affliction, not long before she passed.”
    I wasn’t about to tell a man I’d only just met about the soot marks, or the messages on the laptop, or the beeps and rhythms of the message—that’s how I now thought of it; a message I was never able to decipher. He seemed to see