A History of Fear: A Novel

A diosrienting, creepy, paranoia-inducing reimagining of the Devil-made-me-do-it tale.

—Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club

A History of Fear

A Novel

Luke Dumas

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For Amy

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say

What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,

Which in the very thought renews the fear.

—DANTE ALIGHIERI, TRANSLATION BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Editor’s Foreword

The Devil is in Scotland.

Who among us did not experience a prickle of fear the first time they read those now infamous words? When Grayson Matthew Hale stepped foot on Scottish soil, few could have predicted that this ordinary young man, without a speck on his moral or criminal records, would soon be known throughout the country by a more sinister name, a name synonymous with cold-blooded murder and the dark side of American zealotry: the Devil’s Advocate.

If you are reading this, you’re likely already familiar with Hale and his precipitous rise to fame. You’ll know that he made headlines in 2017, when, as a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, he confessed to the slaughter of fellow student Liam Stewart and claimed the Devil himself as his master and accomplice. You’ll know too that news of Hale’s confession exploded across the nation with headlines such as KILLER CONFESSES, SAYS DEVIL MADE HIM DO IT, and AMERICAN KILLER CLAIMS SATAN IN SCOTLAND, propelling its subject to instant notoriety.

One might think that, as the journalist who broke the story of Hale’s confession, I would be numb to the terror of those words by now, but their effect on me has scarcely dulled since they first appeared in my inbox.

I still remember that night. It was the second of March 2017 and I was burning the midnight oil at the offices of The Scotsman, where I freelanced as a news reporter focusing on petty crime in the capital. A major deadline loomed, and my flat was playing youth hostel to my boyfriend’s rather exuberant kid sister and her friend. Seeking a bit of silence in which to work, I had set up camp at the desk of a stranger, liberally decorated with Disney figurines and photos of the owner’s crusty-eyed bichon frise. Fueled by adrenaline and lashings of instant coffee, I had just crossed over into the wee small hours when came the unmistakable sound of a new email hitting my inbox.

I was used to getting messages at all hours, but this one made me pause. The address was anonymous, the subject brief and unsettling: THE DEVIL’S BACK.

Suspecting it was spam, I almost deleted the message unopened, but something, perhaps mere wanton curiosity, compelled me to explore further. Clicking through, I was met with a brief note from an unnamed writer informing me that an Edinburgh man named Grayson Hale had been charged with murder. I knew this name. Some months before, Hale had been trumpeted as a key suspect in the disappearance of Liam Stewart, whose case had garnered its own heap of press attention. This information, if it could be corroborated, was a lucky break.

But as I was about to find out, the real story lay in the untitled attachment: a full transcript, mysteriously acquired, of Hale’s outlandish admission to police, which, in addition to sending a jolt of cold dread through my body, was about to change the course of my life.

Abandoning my existing project, I worked through the night to verify the document was authentic and scrape together five hundred words for the morning edition and its online equivalent. Little did I know, in the course of a single article I would become the author of the most-shared Scottish news story of the decade and inadvertently coin the moniker by which Hale is better known today.

Over the following weeks, I went on to appear on half a dozen news programs and podcasts, solidifying my reputation as the foremost expert on the crimes of Grayson Hale. Forced to enact a charade of journalistic neutrality when in reality the mere mention of Hale’s name set my insides wriggling like a cavity of worms. It was not until I was assigned to report on his trial, however, that my fear reached a fever pitch.

Even more than the sensational nature of his claims, what disturbed me most of all was that those claims did not seem to tally with the person who spouted them from the witness box. Where I had expected a raving lunatic, Hale presented as exceedingly normal—a benign and intelligent if introverted young man, who fully acknowledged the absurdity of his tale and maneuvered the prosecution’s mocking inquisition with such agility that anyone present would have been hard-pressed to doubt him. His was a story that became more unbelievable at every turn yet somehow more undeniable—a story not just of devils and fiends, but of the darkness that nests within the human soul like a seed awaiting rain.

For more than a year I believed that story had ended in the courtroom, when the jury delivered a guilty verdict condemning Hale to a life behind bars. It seemed a foregone conclusion that he would drift quietly into the obscurity of his sentence, his only legacy a harrowing and unresolved narrative that, like the legends of Thomas Weir and the Loch Ness Monster, promised to linger in the annals of Scottish history for years to come.

But as you are no doubt aware, he did no such thing. Just nineteen months into his sentence, Hale commanded the headlines once again when his body was discovered in a high-security cell at Her Majesty’s Prison Edinburgh suspended by a bedsheet cinched around his neck. His government-issue jumpsuit was slashed and torn, the flesh beneath crisscrossed with bizarre lacerations. One prison officer reportedly described the wounds as being like claw marks from a small, three-fingered animal.

No suicide note was found. There were no known witnesses to the event. According to a spokesperson for the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), Hale had been living in segregation, a.k.a. solitary confinement, for his own protection and the protection of others.

After a thorough investigation, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman released a report declaring Hale’s death self-inflicted. The marks on his person, which received only a few words’ mention, were dismissed as minor and incidental to the hanging, which the autopsy recorded as the official cause of death. An inquiry into the possible cause of the wounds was inconclusive, although their shape and position reportedly made self-harm unlikely.

Naturally, speculation raged, each explanation more disturbing than the last. Some believed Hale had been murdered by a fellow prisoner, or even an officer, perhaps one with ties to the Stewart family. Others maintained a more ominous theory: that the marks on his body substantiated his well-publicized accounts of having been pursued by demonic spirits. What should have been a definitive end to his story left the nation—myself included—with still more questions about the Devil’s Advocate and the demons, real or metaphorical, with which he had grappled in his final moments.

Like many, I didn’t know what to think. Had Hale hanged himself as the report concluded? Was his suicide just the last in a long line of violent and psychotic acts? Or—there was no other way to put it—was it possible he had been telling the truth?

Soon the uncertainty became too much to bear. I found myself struggling to eat properly, or sleep. I lay awake at night, haunted by the questions I could not answer, questions that wore down my body to skin and bone and shredded my nerves to a throbbing pulp. My work suffered, my relationship on the rocks. Before long it became a matter of necessity: I needed to know what had happened in that cell. Needed to know the truth about the Devil’s Advocate once and for all.

To my surprise, it seemed I just might.

Within days of the announcement of Hale’s death, whispers began to circulate around the newsroom that prison officers had discovered, in his cell, a manuscript of more than two hundred A4 pages written in the deceased’s own hand, presented on the desk like a last will and testament. Reportedly bearing the title The Memoirs and Confessions of Grayson Hale, the document was said to describe, in unflinching detail, Hale’s account of his diabolical liaison and the months leading up to the murder of Liam Stewart. I privately rejoiced; this was it! At last we would hear it directly from him, the story he had been trying to tell us all along. At the very least we might catch a glimpse into the twisted mind of the country’s most notorious killer and finally lay our fears of the Devil to rest.

However, despite the public thirst for answers, the SPS refused to release Hale’s manuscript, stating there was no precedent for the publication of the private journals of prisoners living or deceased. They even denied my request for facsimiles of the document, citing section 34 of the Scottish Freedom of Information Act 2002, which exempts public authorities from having to divulge information related to the investigation of a person’s death. Not even a media-fueled campaign of public outrage could dislodge the SPS from their pedestal of bureaucratic obstinance.

Still, I remained adamant that the nation had a right to answers—and I would not rest, literally or figuratively, until we had them. Thus, with the help of my friend Iain Crawford, a professor at Strathclyde Law School, I lodged an appeal with Scottish information commissioner Marjory Brown in May of last year. Upon reading her decision, my heart sank. Despite my best efforts, Commissioner Brown upheld the SPS’s judgment, reiterating the exemption under section 34. I nearly tossed the letter aside, tears of frustration stinging my eyes.

But as with the mysterious email that had started it all, something told me to read on.

The public interest must nevertheless be taken into account. As the requestor clearly notes in her letter of appeal, Hale’s manuscript represents far more than information held by a public authority. It represents a document of extraordinary cultural significance, whose study, contemplation, and publication—as the requestor herself proposes to undertake, and for which she has demonstrated she is uniquely qualified—stands to contribute significantly to the nation’s cultural and historical legacy. Therefore, I request that the SPS make available to the requestor, for the purposes of study, annotation, and dissemination, the manuscript of Grayson Hale and all related attachments.

And so, with the blessing of Commissioner Brown and the family of Liam Stewart, whom the sales of this book will benefit, I am pleased to present in the following pages Grayson Hale’s full and unexpurgated manuscript—a document of a most singular nature.

You may be surprised to find, as I was, that much like its author, the manuscript confounds expectations and evades easy classification. What is this strange memoir? you might ask. An imaginative fiction of diablerie and death? An astonishing first-person account of one man’s descent into madness? Or is it something even more ill-boding: a warning sent straight from the depths of hell?

In an attempt to answer this question, I’ve spent the last several months conducting extensive research into the man behind the manuscript, from his dark and complicated history to the events leading up to his arrest, unearthing much that Hale himself seemed keen to keep buried. To this end, I present this text with a series of supporting additions, including courtroom testimony, text messages, and interviews with Hale’s relatives and acquaintances. Whether these inclusions go far enough toward revealing the true nature of Hale’s memoir—well, I shall let you be the judge.

Daniella Barclay, MSc, NQJ

Edinburgh

13 March 2020

THE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF GRAYSON HALE

BY HIMSELF

With Intermittent Notes, and Other Evidence, by the Editor

BLACK WATCH BOOKS

Edinburgh | Glasgow

One

THE DEVIL FOUND me at the dodgy end of Leith Walk, having lured me by use of guile and the pretense of employment, the thing I needed more than anything.

It was night and a hatefully cold one for September. The wind ripped at my body like an ocean breeze turned inside out, its softness frozen over into a shrill and ragged edge. I shoved my fists in my pockets and pushed on toward my destination. I didn’t know what it looked like, the pub where he had asked to meet. Only its name. My eyes flicked up to check the signage over every passing doorway. To my left, the wide four-lane street buzzed with a steady stream of cars and double-decker buses. The sidewalk was busy with carousers and tourists. A gaggle of teenagers in minidresses brayed in thick accents, unfazed by the chill on their bare skin.

I weaved between them, desperate to find the place—eager to escape more than just the night air. For at that moment I found myself gripped by a subtle anxiety, which quickened my pace to a hurried clip, and rained sweat down my forehead despite the cold: I was being followed.

It had begun a few blocks back, when the stranger emerged from a building on the opposite side of the street. I couldn’t make him out in the darkness, but his eyes seemed to track me as I passed. Then, with a cold twist of discomfort as I glanced across my shoulder, I saw him crossing the road.

Surely it was a coincidence. Probably on his way to meet a friend for drinks, or to a movie at the Omni Centre. So then why did he follow in my wake, moving in and out of sight in the crowd as if trying not to be seen, closing the gap between us, then dropping back when I started to notice?

A feeling of panic burgeoned within me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the man. All but forgetting my potential employer, I continued to throw casual glances over my shoulder, as if merely taking in my unusual surroundings.

I had been living in Scotland not quite two weeks and still couldn’t wrap my head around its streets: the tiny cars, the flagstone sidewalks, the buildings joined in an endless repeat of weather-beaten sandstone, differentiated only by the variously colored shop fronts that made up the ground floor. A laundromat framed in royal blue. The gleaming black of an Indian restaurant. A bookshop draped in a hoary skin of hunter green. They blurred past me as I hurried ever faster through the night, panting under my breath, certain both that I was out of my mind and that my pursuer was gaining on me.

Then quickly the character of the street began to change. Where Leith Walk met Picardy Place, the bars blazed out pink and purple light, assaulting the street with throbbing music. Garrulous men stood under snapping rainbow flags, smoking and laughing and touching each other’s arms. With my head down I barreled on, twisting my body so as not to touch or be touched. Not out of any sense of prejudice, you understand. I’d lived my whole life in California, after all. My aversion was simply to being touched, by anyone.

Darlin’, you look amazin’! said a man swaggering toward me, his arms flung wide, a wedge of hairy chest exposed to the night. I leapt aside to avoid him, relieved when he threw his arms around someone else entirely.

As I moved past them I saw something that brought me up short: the sight of a man who was the mirror image of myself.

Indeed, for a moment I believed I was staring at my reflection in a pane of glass. A reflection whose movements seemed to operate independently from my own. It couldn’t have been a reflection, then, but an identical stranger, for he resembled me in every way. My neglectful physique. My reluctant suntan. My ragtag outfit of hoodies heaped over sweaters and tees, because I still didn’t own a decent coat. There was my double, slouched against the side of a club, dragging on a cigarette. I was unable to move, my mind reverberating with unintelligible sound, like a cavern in which a dozen people had shouted at once. His lips parted; smoke billowed and ran away on the wind.

The me who was smoking locked eyes with the me who was staring, and grinned.

Then someone crossed between us and, as my double passed back into view, he was a different person altogether. A person whose appearance was so dissimilar to my own that only a powerful delusion could have been responsible for such a mistake.

The stranger was taller by several inches. His clothes were black from head to toe. His dark hair gleamed violet in the radiance of the club. He was older than me, approaching thirty, yet there was a boyish quality about him. His lips set in a resting smirk. His eyes hooded and lingering.

All right there? His voice was low, shot through with a suggestion of amusement; I realized I was staring.

Sorry, I—

Nae bother, mate. Look all ye like.

Mortified, I headed off, my eyes on the sidewalk.

The stranger called after me. Grayson, is it?

I twisted my head around. A glint of metal lettering over the entrance of the club caught my eye. But it couldn’t be: SILVER STAG. The very place I was looking for.

You’re D.B.?

A plume of smoke curled out of his open mouth.

No’ what you expected?

Words evaded me. I couldn’t easily say what I’d anticipated of my potential employer, but not this.

We’re the same, you and me. He dropped the butt of his cigarette and stepped on it.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask what he meant.

No’ from here.

O-oh?

S’ just the accent. I tend to pick them up.

Now he mentioned it, I could detect the impurities in his brogue: plunging u’s that suggested time in the north of England, and something American, too, in his long a’s.

So the job, I insisted.

He nodded, conceding. I have a book that needs writing.

A book? You mean, like a ghostwriter?

This came as a welcome surprise. The online ad had been vague. WRITING HELP NEEDED. Seeking a competent writer for part-time assistance. Postgrad in English lit/religious studies highly preferred. I’d figured it was a tutoring gig. But writing a book… that had a ring to it. A good addition to the résumé. The kind of work my father would have done, if he’d had the chance. What sort of—?

Come have a drink and I’ll tell ye.

He motioned toward the entrance of the club. I spied the dance floor beyond, with its slicing purple light and so many bodies in motion. Most of them male, not that it mattered. The heat of the place poured out onto the sidewalk, inviting me in. Perhaps one drink.

But as D.B. held my gaze, something changed in his expression, or maybe it was my perception that changed. Like my eyes had finally adjusted to the dark and saw clearly what before had been cloaked in shadow. A shiver ran through me—not the kind that rattles the chest and shoulders but that emanates from deeper down, rumbling out of one’s core. A shiver that had nothing at all to do with the climate.

I couldn’t say what exactly, but there was something not right about this man.

Sorry. I just remembered I—

Someone pushed past me, shunting me forward. A random coincidence with the character of a threat, like whoever had pushed me was in league with the stranger. Like the whole street was conspiring to get me inside.

Well?

My feet were already working underneath me, carrying me backward. I—I have to go.

Turning, I fled. A frightened animal bolting away from a threatening noise.

An effeminate voice jeered as I jostled through a crowd of pedestrians. Well excuse me, Your Highness.

Keep going, just get away, I thought.

My would-be employer called after me. Another time.

I pretended not to hear, pressing on at speed. Finding myself fleeing an unknown danger reminded me of the stranger from before, the one who had been following me. In the weirdness of meeting D.B., I’d completely forgotten him. Where had he gone? Was he following me now? Looking around, I ascertained my pursuer had gone. But something told me I had not seen the last of him.

Editor’s Note

Exhibit A

Among the first of Hale’s friends and acquaintances whom I interviewed as part of my investigation was Oliver Ollie Fillmore, Hale’s Edinburgh flatmate from September 2016 to February 2017. We met at a swanky rum bar in Soho, London. He arrived nearly thirty minutes late, looking just as he had at Hale’s trial: not tall but handsome and well-built, his designer clothes mismatched and wrinkled, as if hastily selected from a pile on the floor. His mop of light brown hair fell unwashed around his shoulders. He ran his hands through it as he dropped into the chair opposite me, drawing attention to the trace of a scar around his left eye. Here I present an excerpt of our interview, recorded 18 July 2019.

BARCLAY: Grayson writes in the manuscript about the night he went to Leith Walk, the night he claims to have met the Devil—

FILLMORE: Oh my god. That night was, like, the most horrific experience of my life, not even joking.

BARCLAY: You remember it?

FILLMORE: I’ll literally never forget. I was having a drink at Teviot, right, and I had my phone in one hand, glass in the other. I go to take a sip and completely miss my mouth and literally spill cider all down my trousers. It looked like I’d actually pissed my pants. I had to walk all the way across Bristo Square with this huge wet stain down my leg to meet my Uber. I literally thought I was going to die of embarrassment.

BARCLAY: I’m confused. I thought you meant something happened with Grayson.

FILLMORE: Chill out, I was getting there.

BARCLAY: Oh—sorry.

FILLMORE: So I go back to the flat, and as soon as I get there I grab my iPad and FaceTime my sister—Victoria, she’s a barrister in London. I was like, "Vic, you will not believe what just happened to me," and I told her what happened. She literally couldn’t breathe, she was laughing so hard. Then Grayson comes in, and I’m like, Here we go, expecting him to be all hacked off—it always got his back up when I FaceTimed my family in the sitting room. But he was always hacked off about something, to be honest. One dish in the sink and he’d make some sarky comment and then literally storm around the flat like a black cloud for an hour. I used to call him Storm Grayson. That used to wind him up so bad.

BARCLAY: So you weren’t good friends, then.

FILLMORE: He was literally a nightmare.

BARCLAY: How did you end up living together?

FILLMORE: Met online. I’d just transferred to Edinburgh from LSE for my third year. Pretty glad to be out of there, to be honest. Faculty were arseholes. I was by far the cleverest person in my year, but I didn’t give a toss about excelling academically. I think my lecturers were intimidated by me, actually. Luckily, one of my father’s best friends was a vice principal at Edinburgh. They thought I’d be a better fit there.

BARCLAY: He’s an MP, isn’t he, your father? Kensington and Chelsea, I believe?

FILLMORE: I don’t get any special treatment because of it. Probably the opposite—everyone hates MPs, especially the Tory ones.

BARCLAY: Right.

FILLMORE: He doesn’t know I’m sitting this interview. He thinks I’ve gone to see the polo. He ought to know I prefer cricket.

BARCLAY: So you transferred to Edinburgh…

FILLMORE: Father didn’t want me living in halls, so he bought this flat—Victorian tenement, two-bed, nothing special, really. He said I needed to get a flatmate, a postgrad. Probably wanted someone older to keep an eye on me. So I posted on the uni student housing forum. Seeking laid-back guy flatmate. Straight, obviously. Grayson got in touch, and he seemed to fit the bill.

BARCLAY: I want to go back to that night. You said he came back from Leith Walk and he was hacked off?

FILLMORE: I expected him to be, but he seemed more nervous than anything. He came in all out of breath, and sweating, like he’d been running. I finished with my sister and found him standing at the window, looking out. When I asked why he was breathing like that, he jumped about a foot in the air. It was fucking hilarious. Said he’d just been to Leith Walk to meet some guy about a job. A rim job, I’ll bet, I said. He got all pissy and stormed off. "Oh god, I said. Bundle up, everyone, Storm Grayson’s rolling into town." It was literally the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

BARCLAY: Did he say anything about the person he’d met on Leith Walk?

FILLMORE: Can’t remember. But when I went to draw the curtains, I saw there was someone on the street down below. A man.

BARCLAY: What man?

FILLMORE: Dunno. Couldn’t really see him. But he was staring up at the flat.

Two

THAT NIGHT, I dreamt my hands were on fire.

At first only a little—a small flame flickering at the center of my palm. It didn’t hurt, but the surprise of it made me cry out. Instinctively I tried to brush it off, but doing so only caused my other hand to catch. Within seconds both hands were engulfed and there was nothing I could do to extinguish them. A pail of water appeared on the floor by my bed, but even after I plunged my hands in they continued to flame. I tried using my bedclothes to smother them but only set my bed alight.

The blaze traveled from the mattress, up the walls, and spread to the ceiling. From my room to the next, then flat to flat, floor to floor. The whole building crumbled around me as it went up in smoke. The fire spread out across the city, razing homes big and small, churches, schools, destroying lives. Continued on up to the clouds in the sky and the moon and the stars, until the world was nothing but a raging inferno. It swallowed me and flourished, for my body seemed to power it, to nourish it. The destruction, the terror: I held it in the palm of my hands.

And I liked it.

I woke with a start.

It was early, the first burst of daylight starting to spill across the bare white walls and heavy wooden furniture of my bedroom. Though I lay back, there was no hope of returning to sleep. I couldn’t shake the familiar feeling of the dream. It swirled around my subconscious like an eel in dark water. I hadn’t had that dream in years.

The events of the previous night came later, snapping back on my memory like a rubber band pulled taut. My faceless pursuer. My double. The man I knew only as D.B. I lay gazing up at the bedroom ceiling, not entirely sure of what, or who, had been real.

In the bathroom, I pulled off my shirt and regarded my body with the kind of numbness that follows years of daily shame. The soft, downy chest. The emasculating curve of my sides. The scars that stood out against the whiteness of my upper arm like tattoos. Three vertical lines, the middle one slightly longer than the others, the flesh pinkish red and rippled where the burns had healed over. Having almost managed to forget they were there, I perceived them with a tingle of discomfort, then slunk away from my reflection.

The main university library was a horizontal warehouse of sadness sandwiched between the verdure of George Square Gardens and the sprawling lawns of the Meadows. It contained more than two million books and some of the most important literary documents in Europe, yet a passerby might mistake it for a call center servicing a midsize life insurance outfit. Inside, the building was just as dull and gray, each floor a vast maze of metal bookcases, dust-colored carpet, and fluorescent lighting arranged around a central cluster of partitioned desks.

I had the third floor to myself that night. In a few weeks’ time this place would be an ant farm, but in the preterm quiet it was ghostly and bereft, an atmosphere heightened by the lateness of the hour. I palmed a scrap of paper covered in numbers, reading the next on the list as I navigated the stacks. RO581. The International Companion to Scottish Literature: 1400-1650.

It took me a couple minutes to find the right section. Maneuvering through the row, I readjusted the books I was cradling as my arm began to ache. There were five or six of them, including a few my academic supervisor had rattled off in the final seconds of our afternoon meeting. It was the first helpful recommendation she’d made.

A moderately esteemed literary scholar specializing in the verse of the Scottish islands, though she herself was from Sussex, Dr. Fiona Wood was a disappointment as voluminous as the thick, oversized sweater that drooped over her rotund frame like a layer of burnt-orange blubber. Her research dealt largely with identity, place, and religion, which in theory should have qualified her to oversee my master’s degree by research on the impact of Calvinism on Scottish identity in Enlightenment-era literature. However, she seemed to have barely looked at my proposal, more concerned that I was taking full advantage of the city’s delights than getting started on my research.

Have you done Arthur’s Seat yet? she said, elbow-deep in a rumpled tote bag. Her cell phone could be heard somewhere deep inside, emitting a swishy, tropical refrain. It’s a gorgeous climb if you’re up for it.

Not yet, I said.

Oh, you must. You really must.

The chime of the marimba persisted as she continued to rummage.

So about my research proposal—

You did send that over, didn’t you? She hoisted the bag up onto her lap. "You know, I wouldn’t worry too much at this stage. You’ll figure it out as you go. Let the research guide you. The important thing is to