Civilian Casualties
[INT. MAGNUS INSTITUTE, ARCHIVES, JOHN’S OFFICE]
[TAPE CLICKS ON.]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Sergeant Terrence Simpson, regarding an outbreak of violence in the crofting community of Lancraig, Ross-shire. Original statement given 19th July, 1993. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.
Statement begins.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
The thing is I wasn’t even responding to a call out. Well, I mean I was, but it was a break-in about ten miles further on, and I just wasn’t in a hurry. I mean, Lancraig is the sort of place you don’t even notice you’ve been through if you’re not looking. A half mile of road with a handful of white or stone cottages dotting the fields. Nothing you’d recognize as a shop, and it’s two miles the other way to the post office.
Lancraig is what they write on the map, but to most people it’s just… more empty highland. It’s like that with a lot of old crofting communities. They’ve all got their little parcel of land for farming and a big ol’ stretch to keep the sheep together, but it’s a poor life, really, and hard work. Lends itself to isolation well. Too well, sometimes.
I knew Callum McKenzie, or at the very least, he knew me. Again, not well, but North Highlands police tend to serve a lot of very small communities, and (laughs) I stood out like a sore thumb. He called me “the bastard English,” but he always did it with a smile on his face. His little house served as a pub for those minded to use it; he didn’t have a license, but if the landlord didn’t mind, who was going to raise a stink about it? I could’ve, I guess, but it would have been a damn stupid thing to do, turn them all against me. He even showed me the still he kept out back, once, and I’m very thankful I was on duty at the time, or I might’ve had to drink some out of politeness.
So I’m driving, heading over towards this break-in over in [Delnessy,] when Constable Carla Ross, my partner, starts telling me to slow down. Now, Ross had known Callum a lot longer than I had, being about ten years my senior on the force, and had a good twenty years experience policing these communities. I dropped speed, and she stared out at one of the crofts next to us, making this little noise of uncertainty. I was just about to speed up again when she gasped, and yelled to stop the car.
There wasn’t really anywhere to park, but the road was wide enough to pass on, and barely saw two cars in an hour, so I just stopped where we were, and we got out. Staring out over the low, stone wall, I could see a figure, stood in the middle of the field. Took me a moment to recognize Callum McKenzie, holding a pitchfork as he looked out over his croft.
But no… the angle was wrong. He – he wasn’t holding his pitchfork, he was just – gripping the handle. And I realized, with a jolt, that the sharp tines were buried in his stomach.
From this angle, I could just about make out the ends of them, protruding from his back. And suddenly everything seemed very still. Ross acted before I did; she vaulted over the wall and started running towards Callum, calling his name, and I followed a second after her. But then he turned, and we both stopped short. I can’t exactly say what it was in his turn that so unsettled me. Maybe it was too violent, too smooth. It seemed like the pitchfork should have flown out of him, but it stayed wedged in place.
Maybe it was something in his eyes, or that smile of his. Or maybe just the sheer amount of blood on him that didn’t seem right for the neat punctures that we’d seen. Then he turned, and began to run towards us at a dead sprint, pushing the handle that protruded from his torso towards us like a battering ram. I called to him to stay still, to wait there, while we got help, but he just. Kept coming.
Then Ross told him to stop, and I could hear in her voice that she was afraid of him. I was, too. As he got closer, I saw him let go of the bloody pitchfork and drop his hands to his sides like claws. Broken glass was pressed into his fingers, glinting red in the morning sun, and I knew with absolute certainty that he intended to kill us.
The moment before he reached us, I grabbed the handle that still stuck from his belly. It was pure instinct, and my hands exploded in sharp pains as splinters from the rough wooden handle dug into my fingers and palm, but Callum McKenzie stopped dead, with a horrible lurch as the metal prongs buried themselves still deeper. Ross stood there, baton in hand, clearly desperate not to use it as Callum swung his glass covered arms at me, trying to slash my face, and coming within an inch or two of doing so, only kept at bay by the distance of the pitchfork’s handle.
I finally got a look at his eyes, expected to see mania, or a glassy stare… but when they met mine, they were clear, and focused. His smile got wider. “Bastard English,” he snarled, and paused a moment, assessing the situation. With a grunt of effort, he pushed himself further onto the tines of the fork, moving slowly, agonizingly up them, desperately trying to make it those last few inches to reach my throat.
Then there was the sound of something tearing, and I think he must have ruptured something, because his legs went out from under him, and where blood had been oozing before, it now began to gush. He choked, as it started to fill his throat, and I tried, I really tried, to reach out and help him, but he still slashed out at me with those mutilated hands. And I couldn’t get close enough.
Then it was quiet. Ross still stood there, baton raised in exactly the same position, seemingly frozen in confusion, and disgust. She looked at me as if I might have any explanation, but what the hell was I supposed to say? We just kept looking at this broken man, her friend, who had literally killed himself attacking us.
I went back to the car to radio for help, but it – it didn’t seem to be working right; all I could hear from it was the – (steadying breath) – faint noise of static, and… what sounded like bagpipes. I walked back over to Ross, who was now crouched over the body of Callum McKenzie. She looked up at me and shook her head slowly. Standing back up, I could see her hand was slick and red. Then she pointed silently over my shoulder.
My breathing was erratic, and I could feel the tell-tale signs of shock beginning to creep into my body, but I forced myself to turn around. All I could see was the white, one-story cottage behind me. But then my eyes fixed on the broken window, and the streaks of blood around the door. I knew what she was thinking, and I just nodded, took out my own baton, and quietly approached the small house.
It was… silent. No sound at all, save the bleating of a sheep in a nearby field. I’ve never quite got the hang of sheep. I know that sounds daft, but… it’s their throats, you see. They’re so like humans, that when they… baa, it doesn’t – it doesn’t sound like a sheep – Does that make sense? It sounds like a person pretending to be a sheep. Sheep don’t kill each other, though. Not like this.
Anyway, the sound didn’t exactly do anything to put me at my ease. When we entered the house, I instinctively reached out for a light switch, but couldn’t find one. A-a lot of these old crofter places don’t have any electricity, or at least not mains power. It didn’t matter, though. There were plenty of windows to light up the scene in front of us.
The fireplace had long since burned out, but the rocking chair next to it was still occupied. An elderly woman sat there, a blanket over her legs, and a cross-stitch frame in her lap. If it wasn’t for the cook’s knife that pinned her to the chair through the throat, I’d have almost called her serene. Her feet didn’t quite touch the floor, so the draft from the open door rocked her back and forth, back and forth.
On the floor in front of her, two corpses, middle-aged, with rough, weathered faces, were entwined together in an embrace that almost looked affectionate. Until you saw the blood staining their teeth and hands, or the ear still clenched in the younger man’s smile, fresh torn from the other’s head. They had each had their own throats cut, crudely, and plastered across their faces was a smile that seemed to occupy a frozen space halfway between ecstasy and an all-consuming anger. Neither of them had any fingers left at all.
Their murderer was in the kitchen, head forced into an oven, now cold, and burned beyond recognition. The bloody vegetable knife was limp in her hand, and the glass embedded in the back of her neck placed her death firmly at the feet of Callum McKenzie. At this, Ross let out a small cry, and left the room to be sick.
I was feeling completely numb by now, and felt nothing but a dull fascination when I saw the circle pattern of cuts on the dead woman’s arm. The angles made it almost certainly self-inflicted, and it gave the impression the skin was a simple tug from coming away like a peeled potato.
The back door was kicked in, and I could see a small lump of pink flesh just beyond it. And then another. The ground was disturbed as if by a struggle, and I suddenly realized what had happened. Ross had returned by now, shaking and pale, but just as quiet as I was, and together we followed a trail of bitten-off fingers like breadcrumbs taking us home. Home, in this case, was the lawn just outside the cottage of Angus Stewart, an acre or so of land he kept clear for meetings or parties or… whatever other events the tiny community might find they needed space for. Yesterday, it had been the parking of a small sky-blue transit van.
I recognized it of course. It belonged to a young lady from Inverness – I never got her name – who ran a small, mobile lending library that traveled around the villages and crofts of the highlands. Now, she lay at the center of… absolute carnage. Eventually it would be conclusively established that all sixteen other residents of Lancraig were there, though to simply look at the scene it was impossible to tell mud from blood from flesh from bone, and I thank god every day that not one resident of that poor, doomed place had children.
The head of Angus Stewart leered up at me from the ground, lips parted in that same expression of fury and joy, cheeks latticed with steel sheep wire. A sudden thought struck me, that, since our struggle on arriving with Callum McKenzie, neither myself nor Constable Ross had made any noise at all. If there were survivors, they had no way to know it was safe.
Abruptly, I shouted, calling for anyone who might still be alive, telling them they could come out. I tried to ignore the edge of panic in my voice, but my only answer was the mocking bleating of sheep, and those impossibly distant pipes. Ross glared at me, clearly startled by my shouting, and stepped gingerly through the dirt and viscera towards the center. Neither of us could pretend we cared about preserving evidence at that point. These people, good people, had slaughtered each other for no reason at all, and there was nothing we could do to change that fact.
I don’t know exactly how the woman who ran the library van died – at a certain point the injuries sort of all seemed to… bleed together, if you’ll excuse the expression. All I could see for certain is that she held a book in her hands. It was a paperback, old and unloved, with obvious signs of wear long before it found itself in this chaos. The cover and title were unrecognizable, now far too soaked in blood, but it was clear that at some point while holding it, the woman had torn it clean in two down the spine, and now held half in each of what was left of her hands. Ross told me later that she’d gotten a good look at the pages, and that every single one of them was blank.
That was when our backup arrived. It looked like whatever strangeness had affected the radio had been only on our side, and my frantic messages had reached the station loud and clear. It was a whole mess, for a long time – you might have read about it in some of the papers; I think the official report covered it as a ‘drunken brawl that got out of hand.’ It wasn’t, obviously, and no one who was actually there signed the report, but almost everyone who actually dealt with the scene got signed off several weeks with stress, so… didn’t get to have much say in the matter.
There really didn’t need to be any proper cover-up. It was an isolated place, and the folk who had still been living there were on the older side, with little real connection to the outside world. I guess the media doesn’t really care about crofters, especially once the police had swept up the more gory details.
I moved back to Macclesfield shortly afterwards. It pretty much ended my marriage, since my wife was why I’d moved up to Inverness in the first place. (shaky breath) But I just couldn’t go on up there. I can’t stand the sound of bagpipes, and sometimes, at night, I still hear sheep in the distance.
ARCHIVIST
Statement ends. Hm. An Englishman returning from Scotland with a fear of bagpipes and sheep. I’m sure we can all relate. (hm) In many ways the Slaughter fascinates me. There seems to be, in all cases, a question at its heart about control. Is it a mindless dance, dragging participants along by the beat of a drum, or is there a kernel of will in there, lucidity and deliberateness to the random fury and violence? I suppose that’s the question with so much of violence, war. How much are you really in command of yourself, or others?
I’m not sure what scares me more: the idea that deep down, everyone is in complete control of their actions, that everything is, on some level, intentional; or that ultimately we don’t have any control of ourselves at all, and the rest is just… rationalization. (shaky breath)
Another Leitner, obviously. Not one I can readily identify, though it sounds like it would now be… inert, anyway. Given the blank pages, I do wonder whether its destruction was a last-ditch effort to stop its effects, or the exact thing that released its power in such an… extreme way. Regardless, I’ve hit another research dead-end with this.
It’s… frustrating, to be honest. I finally feel myself; I feel… focused, and ready, and I find myself basically alone. I’m now sure Martin is actually avoiding me. (shaky breath) Basira was right about the Institute being watched, though. In the last week I’ve seen two different people wearing symbols for the People’s Church of the Divine Host, and it’s rare I go anywhere without cobwebs, anymore.
I, uh, find myself keeping my guard up around mannequins, as well, though I’ll admit, that one is more likely to be my own projection. (sigh) But honestly it’s the internal threats I’m worried about. Peter Lukas is just – sitting up there, doing whatever the hell it is he and Elias have planned, and Melanie –
[The Archivist doesn’t notice, but low static begins and immediately begins to increase in volume.]
ARCHIVIST
– still has that bullet pumping violence into her, waiting to turn this place into another Lancraig. I just wish there was – (confused) What? – (continues)
Wait. I d-didn’t – Did I read that somewhere? Or…
(lets out a breath) Well, right, yes. (clears his throat) The bullet didn’t show up on electronic or mechanical scans, but it’s still lodged in her leg, just above the tibia. And it’s been getting slowly infected ever since – I need to find Basira.
[He gets up to leave.]
[TAPE CLICKS OFF.]
[INT. MAGNUS INSTITUTE, ARCHIVES, MELANIE’S CAMP BED]
[TAPE CLICKS ON.]
[The Archivist takes a deep breath.]
ARCHIVIST
You’re sure about this?
BASIRA
No. But if you’re right, I don’t see what choice we’ve got.
ARCHIVIST
No, I mean…
BASIRA
Oh, yeah, the stuff she takes is pretty strong these days. She should be out for a while. (off of Archivist) What, sleep is hard.
[The Archivist sighs.]
ARCHIVIST
You’ve been staying here too.
BASIRA
Got a camp bed at the other end, near the tunnels. I like to keep an eye on them.
[She starts opening a box.]
BASIRA
Besides, I wanted to give her some space, you know?
[Some packaging crinkles as it’s handled.]
BASIRA
But, yeah, living outside the Institute’s just not safe anymore.
ARCHIVIST
What about Martin?
BASIRA
I think he’s still got a place? He’s not down here, anyway.
ARCHIVIST
Right. (breath) So, how, how does the –
BASIRA
Do you want to get on with this or not?
ARCHIVIST
Yes, right, sorry. You, uh, you managed to get the anesthetic?
BASIRA
Here. The guy said it was a nerve block, should numb pretty much the whole leg.
ARCHIVIST
Right. Right. Was it hard to come by?
BASIRA
(flat) No, I just popped down Superdrug.
(duh) Yes, it was hard to come by.
ARCHIVIST
Do – you couldn’t get any general anesthetic, knock her out fully?
BASIRA
Oh, sure, did your spooky brain tell you the right dosage to not kill her?
ARCHIVIST
N-no, it didn’t.
BASIRA
Then it’s got to be the local.
Here, get on with it.
ARCHIVIST
What, me?
BASIRA
Yeah. She comes around, she’s going to kill someone, and, you know, not it.
[The Archivist sighs.]
ARCHIVIST
Fine, give it here.
[He opens the box.]
BASIRA
The guy said you’d need to hit the right nerve for it to work. Do you know much about –
ARCHIVIST
Here.
BASIRA
You sure?
ARCHIVIST
Yes.
BASIRA
Okay, go for it.
ARCHIVIST
(steadying breaths) Right.
BASIRA
And pray the injection doesn’t wake her.
ARCHIVIST
Yes, thank you, Basira. You’re sure we shouldn’t just… tell her?
BASIRA
I really don’t know how she’d take it. Not well. If we want to get it out of her, this is it.
ARCHIVIST
…Okay.
[Silence as he steadies himself, then injects her with the anesthetic. A shaky breath of relief as nothing happens.]
ARCHIVIST
Right. How long does it take?
[Ratting as Basira checks the packaging and/or the needle is placed back in its box.]
BASIRA
About half an hour, he said.
ARCHIVIST
Right.
BASIRA
You better be right about this.
ARCHIVIST
I am.
[TAPE CLICKS OFF.]
[INT. MAGNUS INSTITUTE, ARCHIVES, MELANIE’S CAMP BED, THIRTY MINUTES LATER]
[TAPE CLICKS ON.]
[The Archivist sounds much closer when he speaks. He’s whispering, a bit.]
ARCHIVIST
Right, pass me the scissors.
BASIRA
What? I thought you had the scalpel.
ARCHIVIST
For the trouser leg!
BASIRA
Oh – right.
[She hands him the scissors, and he cuts through the leg of Melanie’s trousers.]
ARCHIVIST
God, look at that.
[That same static from earlier in his office is back, and it again begins to intensify.]
BASIRA
I don’t – It’s a leg.
ARCHIVIST
No, inside.
BASIRA
I don’t know what you’re seeing, John.
ARCHIVIST
It’s – christ, it’s all rotten.
BASIRA
Can you see the bullet?
ARCHIVIST
Yes.
BASIRA
You’re ready?
[The Archivist laughs dryly.]
ARCHIVIST
No. You’re sure you don’t have – restraints, or –
BASIRA
You think she’s going to sleep through being tied down? I’ll try and grab her if she wakes, but…
ARCHIVIST
(takes a deep breath) Okay. Here we go.
[One last set of shaky breaths before he begins to cut into Melanie’s leg in the worst form of homemade surgery. We can hear the squelch of the scalpel as it hits flesh, amidst John’s breathing.]
[Then the bullet is removed, and both Basira and Archivist let out relieved sighs. At least, until –]
MELANIE
GET OFF ME! GET OFF OF ME!
[Something slams, most likely Melanie lashing out. The following is chaos, all overlapping and confusion and slams and mishandled medical equipment:]
ARCHIVIST
OH JESUS; Get her, she’s awake –
MELANIE
GET AWAY!
[Melanie pushes something and it crashes on the floor, likely either the scalpel or the scissors.]
ARCHIVIST
[She’s] not supposed to [unintelligible] –
BASIRA
Melanie, it’s okay –
ARCHIVIST
Listen, what the [an–]
BASIRA
Melanie, I’ve got you_[r]_ [unintelligible] –
MELANIE
DON’T TOUCH ME –
[She stabs John with something, and -]
ARCHIVIST
AAAH! AAAAH!
MELANIE
I’LL KILL YOU, I’LL KILL YOU –
BASIRA
Alright, [I’m right] behind you; John, run.
ARCHIVIST
[unintelligible] [let’s] go.
BASIRA
Just go!
ARCHIVIST
[I don’t think she] knows –
MELANIE
I CAN’T FEEL MY LEG; I CAN’T FEEL –
ARCHIVIST
It’s just anesthetic! It’s just –
BASIRA
We have to get out of here now!
MELANIE
GET AWAY FROM ME –