‘Seen the old video, have you?’ said the lobsterman. It was the first time we’d met and I knew he didn’t like me. There were only four of us in the pub that night: me, the landlord, his dog and this moody old shite. He sat in the corner huddled up against the wood panelling, puffing away at his rollies, shaking his head when I started asking about Pig Island. ‘Is that why you’re here? Fancy yourself a devilwrangler?’
‘Fancy myself a journalist.’
‘A journalist no less!’
He laughed, and looked up at the landlord. ‘Did ye hear that? Fancies himself a journalist!’
The place had that leery feel you sometimes get in these struggling local holes – like any minute a fight’s going to kick off behind one of the fruit machines even though the place is half empty. There were two alehouses in the community – the tourist one, with its picture window overlooking the marina, and this one for the locals, up a cliff path in the soggy trees. Stained plaster walls, stinking carpets and dingy, sea-dulled windows that stared out to where Pig Island lay, silent and dark almost two miles offshore.
‘They’ll not let you on the island,’ said the landlord, as he wiped down the bar. ‘You know that, don’t you? There’s not been a journalist on that island in years. They’re as mad as kettles out on Pig Island – won’t let a soul on the island, much less a journalist.’
‘And if they did let you on,’ said the lobsterman, ‘God, but there’s not a soul in Craignish will take you out there. No, you won’t catch any of us gaun out to auld Pig Island.’ He squinted through the smoke out of the window to where the island lay, just a dark shape against the gathering gloom. His white beard was nicotine-stained, like he must’ve been drooling in it for years. ‘No. Not me. I’d sooner go through the old hag’s whirlpool, pure fatal or not, than go round Pig Island and come face to face with auld Nick.’
One thing I’ve learned after eighteen years in this trade is there’s always someone who gains from supernatural phenomena. If it isn’t money or revenge it’s just good old-fashioned attention. I’d already been to Bolton to interview the tourist who’d shot the video. He had nothing to do with the hoax: poor beer-bloated sod couldn’t see past the next Saturday-afternoon league tables, let alone set up something like that. So who was gaining from the Pig Island film?
‘They own the island, don’t they?’ I said, twisting my pint of Newkie Brown round and round in the circular beer stain, looking at it thoughtfully. ‘The Psychogenic Healing Ministries. I read that somewhere – they bought it in the eighties.’
‘Bought it or stole it, depending on your position.’
‘Was an awful fool, the owner.’ The landlord leaned on the bar with both elbows. ‘An awful fool. The pig farm goes belly up and what does he do? Lets all the farmers in Argyll dump their dodgy chemicals out there. Ended up a death pit, the place – pigs all over the island, old mine shafts, chemicals. In the end he has to give it all away. Ten thousand pounds! They could have stole it from him, it’d be more honest.’
‘You won’t like that,’ I said, in a level, casual voice. ‘People coming from the south and buying up all the property round here.’
The lobsterman sniffed. ‘Doesn’t bother us. What we don’t tolerate is when they buy a place, then lock themselves away and get up to all their queer rituals. That’s when it bothers us – them hunkering down out there, consorting with the de’il, doing nothing but eating babies and giving each other a rare auld peltin’ whenever they’ve a mind to.’
‘Aye,’ said the landlord. ‘And then there’s the smell.’
I looked at the landlord. I wanted to smile. ‘The smell? From the island?’
‘Ah!’ he said, throwing the tea towel over his shoulder. ‘The smell.’ He fished under the bar for a giant bag of crisps and opened it, shovelling a fistful into his mouth. ‘Do you know what they say? What they say is the signature smell of the devil? The smell of the devil is the smell of shite – that’s what it is. Now, you go to anyone out there –’ He jabbed a crisp-covered finger at the window. Crumbs confettied on to his T-shirt. ‘– out on Jura or in Arduaine, and they’ll all tell you the same thing. The smell of shite comes off Pig Island. There’s no better proof of their rituals than that.’
I studied him thoughtfully. Then I turned and looked across the dark sea. The moon was out and a wind had come up and was whipping branches against the windowpane. Beyond our reflections, beyond the image of the landlord standing under the lighted optics, I could see an absence – a dark space against the night sky. Pig Island.
‘They piss you off,’ I said, trying to picture the thirty-odd people who lived out there. ‘They do their fair bit to piss you all off.’
‘You’re right about that,’ said the landlord. He came to the table and sat down, setting the crisps in front of him. ‘Do their fair bit to piss us all off. They’re not well liked – not since they fenced off that nice bit o’ beach on the south-east of the island and stopped the young folk from Arduaine going out with their boats. They’d only be wanting a wee game of footy or shinty in the sand, the weans, Godsake, no need to be so stern about it, is my opinion.’
‘Not your perfect neighbours.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re not.’
‘Where I come from, you behave like that you’re asking for a hiding.’
‘So you’re starting to see my point.’
‘If it was me I’d be trying to think of how to make their lives difficult.’
‘We’ve been tempted!’ The landlord laughed. He licked his fingers carefully, then put them to his eyes, like tears of mirth had gathered there. ‘I don’t mind telling you. Been tempted. Put some paraffin in their bottles of bevvy, maybe.’
‘You know, if it was me, I’d – I’d – I don’t know.’ I shook my head and looked at the ceiling, like I was searching for inspiration. ‘I’d probably try and set up some kind of…dodgy rumour. Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘I’d set up a hoax – spread a couple of rumours around.’
The landlord stopped laughing and rubbed his nose. ‘Are you saying we’re making it all up?’
‘Aye. Takin’ the piss, are ye?’ The lobsterman sat forward, suddenly flushed. ‘You takin’ the piss? Is that what your message to us is?’
‘I’m just saying,’ I met his eyes seriously, looking from him to the landlord and back, ‘it’s got a smell about it, hasn’t it? I mean, devil-worshippers? Satan walking the beaches of Pig Island?’
The colour in the lobsterman’s face paled very slightly. He crushed the rollie in the ashtray and stood, drawing himself up to his full height. He took a few deep, fighting breaths, and looked unsteadily down at me. ‘Laddie, tell me. Are you a man who is easily shocked? You’re a big man, but I reckon you’re one who’d shock easy. What do ye think?’ he said to the landlord. ‘Is he? Is he a man who’d go in a funk if he saw something peculiar? Because that’s how it looks from where I stand.’
‘Why?’ I said, putting the glass down slowly. ‘Why? What are you going to show me?’
‘If you’re so clever you don’t believe what we’re saying, then come with me. We’ll see what kind of a hoax is gaun on.’
Pig Island, or as it’s called in Gaelic Cuagach Eilean, lies in the small cup of sea at the edge of the Firth of Lorn, caught like a precious stone in a setting between Luing, Jura and Craignish Peninsula – like it’s been placed to block the entry to the Sound of Jura. It’s a weird shape: like a peanut from above, covered in grassland and dense trees, a wide rocky gorge running down the middle. Once, before the pig farm and the chemical dumping, there’d been a slate mine operating in the south of the island, with a community of miners and a regular ferry. But by the time I got there Pig Island was almost totally cut off. Once a week the Psychogenic Healing Ministries sent a small boat to collect supplies. It was their only contact with the world.
I knew a bit about that part of Scotland – wrote bits and pieces about it from time to time. But my bread and butter was debunking work. One of the things that comes as birthright to a Scouser is knowing the stripe of bullshit when you see it and I’m a natural sceptic, a full-blown non-believer: a Scully, a James Randi, an out-and-out hoax-buster. I’ve flown round the world chasing zombies and chupacabras, Filipino faith-healers and beasts in Bodmin; I’ve used glass vials to collect dripping milk from the breasts of Mexican virgin statues – and in that time I’ve worked up a hard skin. But even I had to admit there was something odd-looking about the Psychogenic Healing Ministries’ island. If you were going to believe in devil-worship you’d picture it happening somewhere remote and sea-wreathed like Pig Island. That night, as we jolted and bumped along a dark path that led to the end of the peninsula, I stared out of the window at its dark, desolate shape and for a moment or two there I had to tell myself not to be an old tart about it.
The landlord had crammed me into the back seat of the lobsterman’s beat-up rust-bucket of a car. We left the dog in the pub: ‘Because he’s a mad rocket when he comes out here,’ said the landlord, as the car pulled off the road on to a thin, muddy beach. ‘Makes him crazy and I’m not putting him in a paddy just because you won’t take my word for something.’
We got out of the car and I paused. I hadn’t been out on the lash or anything, but I’d sunk a fair old few in the pub and it felt good for a moment to fill my lungs with the night air. The beach was silent, and there was already a breath of autumn in the air. It was gone eleven but Craignish was so far north the sky was still edged with blue. You’d almost think that if you stood on tiptoe and squinted you’d see the land of the midnight sun peeping at you from over the horizon, maybe a reindeer or a polar bear on a giant mint.
‘See the pipe?’ The lobsterman walked away to the south, totally steady in spite of the whisky, his old shoes leaving dull prints in the mud, his moon-shadow long beside him. ‘The wee stank over there?’ He was pointing to the long, low shape of a sewage pipe straddling the beach ahead. ‘You get the conditions right – a nice westerly, an ebb and a spring tide – then everything from out at Pig Island gets washed up, not in the loch or even on Luing, where you’d expect it, but here, on this side of the peninsula. Most of it gets caught on the other side of that pipe.’
The landlord hung back, giving me a dubious look. His face was a little pinched seeming in the moonlight. He turned up his collar like it was suddenly dead cold out there. ‘Sure you’re ready for this?’
‘Yeah. Why not?’
‘It’s not for the faint-hearted, what’s caught up under that pipe.’
‘I’m not faint-hearted,’ I said, looking down the beach at the lobsterman. ‘I’ve seen everything there is to see.’
We walked for a while in silence, only the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, and the tinkle of a halyard on a boat moored somewhere out in the sea. The smell hit me first. Even before I saw the lobsterman hesitate at the pipe, looking down on the other side, before I saw him shaking his head and leaning over to spit out something in the sand, I knew it was going to be one of those stomachturners. One of those times I’d regret the last pint. I took a breath and swallowed, tapping my pockets as I got nearer, hoping I’d find a stray bit of chewy or something to take the taste away.
‘Worse is it?’ said the landlord, approaching the lobsterman. ‘Got worse?’
‘Aye – there’s more. More than there was last week.’
I held my T-shirt up to my nose and peered down on the other side of the pipe. Dark shapes bobbed and buffeted in a yellowish foam. Meat. Decaying chunks of flesh – impossible to tell in the slime where one piece ended and the next began. The breaking waves forced them into the crevice under the pipe, tangled them in ribbons of tasselweed. Decomposition gas fizzed from under the raised flaps of skin, sending bubbles to the surface.
‘What the fuck’s this?’
‘Pig meat,’ said the lobsterman. ‘Dead pigs. Killt in one of them rituals on Pig Island and been washed off the island.’
‘Police have seen it,’ the landlord said, ‘and they’ve not cared to do anything about it – can’t prove where it’s coming from and, anyway, a few dead pigs aren’t hurting anyone, is their manner of thinking.’
‘Dead pigs?’ I looked up at the mouth of the Firth. The moon picked out the silvery tips of waves as far as the eye could see – to where Pig Island peeped round the end of Luing, silent and hunched, like a dozing beast. ‘All of this is dead pigs?’
‘Aye. That’s what they say.’ The landlord puffed out a series of short, dry laughs – like the world never ceased to amaze him. ‘That’s what the police say – everything here is just pig meat. But you know what I think?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think that when it comes to the lovers of Satan you can never be too sure.’