The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [57]
Quire fastened a couple of the buttons on his own coat, closing it up. It was by no means cruelly cold, but nor was it the kind of night to be running around bare-chested. There was an eerie silence settled over the Canongate, he noted as he jogged down towards the South Back. That alone was enough to tell him that it must be the very dead of night, for it was only then that no one was to be found abroad.
He glanced up, found the moon high on its course, shining dimly through a sheet of thin cloud. Almost enough light to go chasing after whatever miscreant this was, but perhaps not quite. The last time he had done something similar, he had ended on the ice of Duddingston Loch. That was not the sort of experience he longed to repeat.
He peered down the South Back. On one side of the lane, the high walls and locked gates of workshops and yards and small breweries; on the other, a much lower dry-stone wall, beyond which lay only a narrow field and then the great black natural fortress of Salisbury Crags. From where Quire now stood, those ramparts obscured a great swathe of the eastern sky, and hid their approaches in impenetrable night.
He could see a little further along the line of the South Back. There, just about to disappear from view, the man who had been beating at Quire’s door was moving steadily away. He was trotting down the centre of the lane. Not looking back, not running. Apparently not greatly concerned at the possibility of pursuit.
Quire advanced a little further. These circumstances were too strange for him to trust them entirely. He walked along South Back, drifting closer to the wall bounding the fields on his right, so that he could look over it and sweep his gaze across the open grass. Nothing. He looked back towards the man, and in that very moment the night closed about that retreating figure and hid him from view.
Quire stopped, and stood there staring. The cold was starting to get in and lay its fingers across his chest. He shivered. He would not sleep again now, he knew. Not with the memory of that sudden assault on his door so fresh. He would be relieved, though, if all this mysterious encounter cost him was the loss of half a night’s sleep.
Then he heard, faint, out there in the darkness that had swallowed the man, a soft cry. Not frightened, but pained. There was a muffled, indistinct thump, as of something falling to the ground. Quire took a few more steps in the direction of the sound, wishing the clouds would be kind to him and permit—even if only for a moment—the moon to throw its full light over this small portion of the city.
A part of him wanted to call out, but the greater part was too uneasy to accede. One more stride, and he could just make out, slumped in the middle of the lane, a prone form. He looked behind him. Still he was entirely alone. He frowned at the fallen man. Could it be, he thought, that this was nothing more than a fool, hopelessly drunk, beating at random doors in the Canongate and now overcome by his own excesses? That would be annoying, but at least he might get himself another hour or two of slumber, if there was no need to fret about what might happen as soon as he closed his eyes.
The man was not moving at all. Quire wondered whether he should go down there and give him a good kick; see what that revealed. In the next instant, all thought of drunks, and of sleep, was utterly gone.
Out of the darkness beyond the prostrate man, stepping over and around him, came hounds. Three of them. Huge, rangy beasts, perhaps wolfhounds. Quire’s breath caught in his throat. The beasts arrayed themselves in a line