by Lee Moan
He lay in her bed that following morning and looked into her coffee-coloured eyes and realised he had found his soul mate. He remembered clearly thinking that the beast—their passion for each other—would never go away. Nothing could kill it.
And now . . . now she was leaving. Leaving the island. Leaving him.
“I know what you’re thinking,” McNamara said suddenly. “That it’s all your fault. About Becky, I mean.”
Sam cleared his throat. “To be honest, Father, I don’t know what to think right now. I woke up this morning and realised the centre of my universe is gone.”
McNamara nodded understandingly. “I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose your child.” McNamara toyed with his glass for a moment. “I almost had children,” he said. “Before I became a priest.”
“Really?”
McNamara nodded. “I was married. Married young. Too young, really. Beth, her name was.” He took a healthy swig of the scotch and returned his gaze to the heat of the open fire. “When we first married, neither of us wanted children. We were both agreed on that. For ten years we just enjoyed each other, and I, for one, felt absolutely at peace with our decision. I assumed Beth felt the same. But things change. People change, right under your nose.”
“She wanted children?” he asked.
McNamara nodded slowly. “Apparently she’d wanted them for a long time – years, in fact. I asked her why she never said anything to me about her change of heart and she said she’d tried to tell me countless times, but had only been met with a blank wall. I just wasn’t listening, she said. I never really listened, that was my downfall.”
Sam saw tears standing in the old man’s eyes. “Hey, she didn’t mean it.”
“Oh, she did, Sam! The woman never said anything she didn’t mean. I can attest to that. She was damned right. I didn’t listen, not really. Too wrapped up in my work, too much a slave to the daily grind.” He sighed heavily, a tear slipping down his cheek, which he swiped at with the back of his hand. “Beth died of a brain haemorrhage six weeks after we had that conversation.”
“God, I'm so sorry,” Sam said.
McNamara managed a tight smile. “I decided to join the priesthood after that. But for years I had to live with the guilt. I still do. If I’d listened to her sooner, maybe . . .”
They sat in silence for a while, listening to the crackle of the fire.
The door opened and a strong gust of wind blew through the sleepy barroom. Sam watched two locals walking in, two of the old fishermen who lived and worked on the north shoreline, catching turbots and hake in their tiny two-man boat.
Lily, the barmaid, who was sitting on a bar stool reading a battered old copy of Hello magazine, visibly brightened on seeing them. “Harry! Lionel!” she cooed. “How’s the sea treating you?”
Lionel, tall and bearded, slapped his cap on the bar. “Been kind most o’ the morning, Lil. But it looks like it’s goin’ to turn unfriendly.”
Harry confirmed this with a nod of his shining bald head. “Aye, there’s a storm in the air. A big ‘un, too.”
Lilly had begun pulling them two pints of ale with expert ease. But on hearing this news, she paused and regarded them as if they were both losing their marbles. “Storm? What storm?” she said. “It’s as calm as a vicar’s bed out there today. The weather forecast says fine for the evening.”
The two men sat down on bar stools which evidently had their names on them, shaking their heads sagely at this conflicting report. “I’m sorry, Lily,” Harry went on, “but there’s no more accurate weather forecast than the one made by men who work out in it. And I’m telling you, there’s a killer storm coming.”
“If I were you,” Lionel added, “I’d close up early, Lil. Just for safety.”
Sam, who had been listening to all of this with keen interest, downed his drink and looked across at his friend, the priest. They exchanged a look of mutual concern.
A storm was coming. A big one.
40
Sitting in the safety of her Jeep, Kelly Burnett watched Rachel Thorne climb into the taxi as the driver loaded her suitcase into the boot. Her heart soared with each passing moment. If she had ever doubted the power of fate before she certainly didn’t now. Everything she had wanted to happen was now coming to pass. To be here to witness it was scintillating. As the taxi’s headlights disappeared down into the cup of the valley, she settled back and took some long, deep breaths. The hard part was still to come. She hadn’t seen Sam yet since she’d arrived on the island. And she knew he would not be best pleased when he discovered it was her who had told his wife the truth about them. But that was his own fault for not having the guts to do it himself. She had only been doing what fate demanded, clearing a path for them.
The clock read five-twenty.
Now all she had to do was wait for Sam to come home. Then, she would make her bid for his heart.
41
The clouds above Rook Hill cemetery were slate grey and fat with rain. Forks of electrical discharge hissed on the underside of the cloud bank, a deep-throated cough of thunder periodically punching a hole through the fabric of night.
The pressure was building, filling the air above the cemetery with an unnatural heat. Unseen by any human eye, two discarded cans of cheap lager cracked and imploded as if crushed by invisible hands. Lengthy blades of grass pulled taut, stretching skyward. The cormorants and heron gulls and puffins had fled from the sky, taking shelter in the cliffs on the far side of the island. The goats on the Nightingale Farm bleated a mournful lament into the hot night air.
The pressure building, building.
Then, a blanket of white light flashed brilliantly for a half-second. A heartbeat later, thunder filled the night. Harsh, deafening thunder. Jagged forks of lightning reached down into the unforgiving earth of Rook Hill, tearing into the asphalt and granite, sending up pillars of smoke as grass and stone and earth were singed in the attack.
Amethyst fingers of electricity rolled over the gravestones of the deceased—as if searching for something . . . or someone—trembling over the intricate stone carvings, pressing in through the cracks and seams, violating the consecrated flesh within. Finally, the forks of lightning moved away from the cemetery, drifting in the direction of the town, scorching the earth as they went.
As the lightning did its work, the pregnant clouds released their rain in an untamed downpour.
The storm had broken.
The island shook with the screams of the dead.
42
“She’ll come back,” McNamara said, apropos of their recent talk about absent wives, one living, one dearly departed.
Sam, his eyes fixed on the blurred network of lights outside the pub windows, shook his head. “No, she won’t.”
“I can understand how it feels like that right now. Feels like your heart’s been ripped out. But in time, she’ll come back to you. She has to. You have a history together.”
Sam sipped his scotch. “I wish I could believe that, Father. But I’m all too aware of the statistics for couples who lose a child. Especially an only child.”
“With all due respect,” McNamara said, leaning forward and lowering his voice, “fuck statistics. They can be used to say whatever you want them to say. What matters is the human heart. It’s the only thing that matters. You and Rachel had something. When I first saw you two together I thought, man, there goes one lucky couple. I envied you. It was in the way you looked at each other. I saw a friendship that went beyond any normal platonic friendship. To find that kind of special relationship inside a marriage is unique and cannot be tossed aside. It’s special. That is why she’ll be back.”
McNamara sat back and took a healthy swallow of his drink. Sam’s eyes watered with emotion at the old man’s speech. He stirred his drink. “You’re right that we had something. But . . . I screwed it up, Father. I screwed it up just like every man who's ever had something special. He feels the subconscious desire to kick it to hell, to dest
roy it. Whatever we had, it’s dead now.”
“No, not completely. As long as you’re both breathing, there’s still hope.”
Thunder rolled outside, followed by a flicker of white light. There was a large bay window at the back of the bar and the two fishermen and Lily, the barmaid, stood in front of it, watching the growing storm.
“Do you know what they call this island?” McNamara said.
Sam looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Ever heard the locals refer to it by its true name? Lazarus Island. Centuries ago the Norsemen ruled these islands. There were a lot of Viking settlements here, usually as a midway point between pillaging the Scots and trying to overthrow the Celts in Ireland. Many battles were fought on these shores. These islands have seen a good deal of death and mayhem down the ages, most of it long forgotten. But there’s one story which has survived, one that’s been passed down for centuries.”
McNamara turned his glass around on the table repeatedly, gathering his thoughts before beginning.
“Erik Uldammer was a great Norse king. He defeated many of the Saxon armies back in those days. He was leading his army against the Angles when he died in battle aboard his boat in the North Sea. His men carried him to Scalasay—well, it was called something else back then, obviously—and buried him up on what we now call Rook Hill. Legend says that the Norse gods were unhappy with Erik’s death. He’d died before his time, before he’d completed the work they'd set out for him. So, one night, they sent down a great storm, and during that storm a bolt of lightning struck Erik Uldammer in his grave and brought him back to life. For one night, the dead king returned to his defeated army and rallied them for one last battle. They defeated the Angles at sea, and in the early hours of the following morning, Erik Uldammer, his mission accomplished, returned to his grave.”
Sam smiled broadly. “A good story,” he said.
The old priest nodded. He looked at Sam with a serious expression. “Don’t give up hope, Sam,” he said. “Never give up hope.”
43
Darkness.
The hiss of rain.
And the cold. The bitter, numbing cold.
His first thoughts are fragmented, unconnected. There is a period of waiting, of searching the empty black space of internal consciousness.
Is this consciousness?
Or dreaming?
This is followed by a heightened awareness of simple motor functions: his eyelids blinking with great effort—heavy, dry eyelids raking across dry eyes. Aching fingers twitch and contort, the muscles awakening from a form of paralysis.
His brain tells him to draw breath. But after a painful first attempt, he finds he cannot. Deep within his chest, in the centre of his being, there is a dull, bitter ache, a pain like nothing else he has ever experienced. The heart which once pumped like a car piston and fed his powerful body with life-giving blood is a cold dead thing in his chest. Lungs which had only recently enjoyed the sweet air of the Scottish highlands are now two lifeless lumps of tissue. But he is awake. He is aware. He knows these things with a dreadful clarity that defies the beliefs he has spent his life forming. His eyes are open, but his body is a dead vessel.
He tries to scream, to cry out his rage and fear, but no real sound escapes him except a dusty, hollow sigh, the expulsion of dead air. The muted scream dies in his throat, replaced by the distant roll of thunder.
He raises his head from the soft cushion beneath and the sheet covering him falls away. He is in what appears to be a storage room. In the darkness he can just make out shelves of supplies. Medical supplies? He is sitting on an examination table, the type found in hospital wards or doctor's surgeries. To his left is another examination table with a white sheet covering what must be a child's body. He has a vague recollection of a little girl. Pigtails. Missing front teeth. But the memory is painful to him. The figure beneath it is absolutely still.
He senses a strange tingling in his hands and lifts them up. Tiny circles of blue electricity flitter over his skin. They rise up his hands to his fingertips and then discharge themselves in the air in front of his face.
He does not fully understand it, but a spark of terror ignites deep down inside.
He sees the outline of a door straight ahead and swings his legs off the table. The sensation of movement, of simply being able to make his limbs move again, is strangely invigorating. He drops down onto his booted feet and, after a moment of extreme dizziness, finds his balance. He approaches the door, boots squelching, and then stops.
He fumbles in the dark, his fingers finding the door handle. He turns the handle but the door is locked.
Panic sets in.
No! I have to get out! I have to get out of here!
Summoning his strength, he begins to yank at the door handle. Then he raises his leg and kicks at the door, again and again and again.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Eventually, the door splinters. He kicks some more and the door breaks into pieces. He is about to push his way through when an explosion of thunder shakes the walls around him. The ceiling in the centre of the room shatters as a terrifying bolt of amethyst lightning punches through it. He covers his eyes from the blinding light, then dares to peek. The lightning forms itself into a rod, crackling and spitting in all directions, before its central shaft begins to move around the room.
It seems to sense the table with the child’s body laid on it and leaps over to it. The shaft of lightning flows over the white sheet and seconds later it stops as suddenly as it had arrived.
In the silence which follows he is left with the hiss of smouldering roof tiles and the smell of singed cloth.
The figure beneath the sheet twitches.
He watches as the child sits up on the table, the sheet still covering her face, and a high-pitched scream fills the room. She screams and screams and screams until he thinks he might go insane from the sound.
His sluggish, paranoid mind struggles to ascertain why this child is here with him in this nightmare. But then the sheet slips from the girl's face and he recognises her—the little girl with the blonde pigtails and the missing front teeth—and he begins to put together fragments of memories: a ferry crossing, the ocean, the journey in the prison van, an explosion . . .
A new set of images flood into his mind, images which had haunted him in the space between life and death, images he couldn't possibly have witnessed himself, but images which seem real to him nonetheless. He finds himself floating above the doomed ferry like a ghost, an omniscient spirit, seeing everything and everyone. He sees the prison van alone on the lower deck of the ferry. The rear door is shut, which tells him he must still be inside. This is minutes before the explosion happened. His vision swoops higher into the sky for a moment before descending back towards the lower deck of the ferry. He hovers over a man in fisherman's bib and overalls as he approaches the van. He glances around furtively as if sensing the new presence above him. Then, after a muttered curse, the man crouches down near the rear of the vehicle. That's when Garrett sees the device in his hands. Some form of grey explosives strapped to a clock, just like in the movies. The man sets the timer. He reaches under the van and attaches the device to the underbelly.
Garrett feels his vision blurring, as if his shock and anger are distorting the view. He controls himself, knowing this vision may end at any moment, and he forces himself to move around so that he can see the man's face. His spiritual body shifts forward at his command and he sees the man. Mid-fifties, rough features, large moustache . . . one eye missing. No eye-patch, just a swirl of scar tissue around the missing right eye. Garrett has the vague sensation of knowing this man, but the knowledge evades him.
Who are you? Who are you?
As the man gets up to leave, the vision comes to an abrupt end.
He finds himself back in the dark store room.
The little girl's screams fill his mind.
Thunder rumbles overhead, the murmur of watchful gods.
“Stop
screaming,” he says.
The girl stops. “Where am I?” she asks, eyes wide, searching. “What's ha-happening?”
“I don't know,” he tells her. “I'm sorry, I just don't know.”
Before she can ask any more questions, he slips out the door and is gone.
44
At ten minutes to six, the taxi pulled up in front of the Garrett house. Rachel stared out through the wind-lashed glass at the orange square of light in the old woman’s bedroom, asking herself if it was a good idea to come here at all. She had not come to say goodbye to Cynthia, her first and last patient during her unhappy time on the island, out of any kind of affection for the woman. She had always formed strong bonds with her patients in the past, but had found it almost impossible to do so with Cynthia. She had questioned her reasons for this lack of affinity, but in the end she could only put it down to the history of the Garrett family—and in particular what her ‘beloved son’ had done. Rachel knew now what it was like to lose a daughter to a random, incomprehensible force; and for the families of the three girls Ben Garrett raped, that was very much the same. In the same way that God or Nature or the Incomprehensible Turn of Events had snatched her little girl from her, so Ben Garrett had snatched those girls from those mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, choosing those particular girls with no more reason or motive than that their hair colour was right or the dress they were wearing was wrong. Perhaps what people hated most about people like Ben Garrett was the fact that they had turned themselves into an illegitimate force of nature. Like a tornado or an earthquake or a dead ship beneath the waves, men like Ben Garrett chose who was to die on that particular day for no discernible reason. The only difference between the two was that the fury and grief of the human race cannot be vented on an earthquake or a tornado. But a man like Ben Garrett can become a target for that hate.