Masque of Anarchy

As the figure got closer I could just about make out the curious shape of a man dressed in a tall hat and black cape. His face looked jolly but as light from a flickering torch shone on it briefly, I saw that he was wearing a mask, a Guy Fawkes mask! What fresh madness was this?

‘Rise like lions after slumber,’ said the man in the mask as he walked towards Regan and his gang.
‘In unvanquishable number’ he continued, his voice soft but stern, educated but with a hint of the potential for violence.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ demanded Doncaster.
‘Shake your chains to earth like dew
which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many, they are few’ carried on our strange fellow, his hands hidden beneath his cape as he approached.
‘Hit him with your truncheon’ ordered Regan and one of the police put his hand to his pocket and paused, waiting to see if the masked man got closer before revealing his intent.

‘What is freedom?’ The mask continued to speak.
‘Ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well-
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.’ And his head very deliberately turned towards the two policemen who stared at him before collapsing to the ground unconscious. Had I seen the masked man move? I could swear I had the idea of sudden violent movement towards the two uniforms but it was so fast I now couldn’t even be sure it had happened.
‘Jesus Christ Almighty!’ exclaimed Regan and pushed Doncaster in front of him towards the masked man. There was a blur and Doncaster’s wig was off and spinning in the air as the SPL man’s chin hit the floor with a sickening crunch then Regan had produced a pistol from his jacket and was aiming it at the motionless man in the mask.
‘I swear, I’ll shoot. You come any fucking closer and I’ll shoot you like a…’
There was a flapping of the cape and the gun was in the left hand of the masked man, his right was holding Regan’s fist and squeezing; I could hear the knuckles rending and breaking as Regan made to scream but in the blink of an eye, the man emptied the bullets from the gun, closed the chamber and darted his left hand to Regan’s mouth and muffled his cries before the gun had even hit the floor. At least I think that’s what I saw – it was all so fast and the corridor so damned dark. Then Regan fainted from the pain and the man stood for a minute without moving, that awful smiling mask gazing silently at the four bodies on the ground.

‘You can come out now,’ he said, to me obviously. Not wanting to get on the wrong side of such a new and remarkable creature, the latest monstrosity to appear operating within Scottish football, I stood up and walked over. He knelt down and reached both hands behind the heads of Regan and Doncaster and produced something from their necks: two little rolled up scrolls which he opened, read and held out for me to see; they said simply, ‘destroy Rangers’.
‘Gollums,’ said the man. ‘Lumbering brutes with no real intelligence but useful should they be placed in the right environment with instructions buried in the back of their necks. No wonder John Reid went to so much trouble to install them here, they have a mission and they won’t stop until they’ve carried it out. Or someone stops them.’ He crumpled the scrolls and dropped them into the gloom then reached his gloved hand under his cape and produced two new scrolls.
‘Their new instructions,’ he said and reached behind Regan and Doncaster’s necks and tucked them away. He turned and that sinister mask regarded me, its eyes creased in soundless mirth, the unsettling smile unmoving, straight black hair falling down in a severe fringe from a hat that wouldn’t look out of place in a gunpowder plot.

‘What was on your scroll?’ I asked him. He continued looking straight at me in silence for what seemed like an eternity as my bowels dissolved in fear that he might attack me for being very much on the same side as the men at our feet. Then he simply said, ‘Fuck up your attempt to destroy Rangers’ and he swung his cape at me, I flinched and when I opened my eyes he was gone. I didn’t wait around and was soon out of that damned place and scuttling down through Kings Park looking for a taxi.

Later I wondered about what had just happened, about the new instructions my masked man had given Regan and Doncaster – they were as simple and straight to the point as their original mission to destroy Rangers but to fuck it up, how would they do this having got so far without anyone in the Scottish media saying a word about what was by now, pretty bloody obvious even to an idiot like me – even to the Traynor! That beast had been the only one who was spot on about the whole affair but since he is such a sociopath, everyone had ignored him. How to fuck up destroying Rangers… How on earth would they manage this? I soon found out: one day later the SPL revealed that SPL secretary Ian Blair had ‘investigated’ the Celtic EBT case and decided there was no case to answer.