‘What’s funny?’
‘When it started, I thought maybe McIntyre had a covert special effects team here in case you lot didn’t produce the necessary fireworks. What an innocent theory that seems now.’
‘Get me out of this, Paul, and I’ll buy you a very big drink.’
‘If I get you out of this Lucy, I expect you to sleep with me.’
‘Now you sound like Karl Cooper.’
‘Sorry. That was a bad joke.’
‘He hasn’t come back from the settlement yet, by the way. Arrogant fucker, excuse my French.’
‘I’ve noticed how fluent your French is.’
‘Another bad habit,’ she said, flicking away the butt of her cigarette. ‘Shall we go inside?’
He didn’t think they were going to get out of it. He didn’t think she did, either. Her nonchalance was put on. It was an act. But it was a courageous act. He admired her. And he couldn’t honestly remember being more attracted to a woman.
Chairs had been arranged around the main table in the galley. Some of them were unoccupied. When Napier and Lucy sat, he thought that the chairs remaining empty looked very empty indeed.
He’d asked Davis and Walker among his own men to attend. The others there were Lassiter, Jane, Alice and Degrelle. They comprised a forlorn little group. In his absence, it made Napier realise just what a charismatic man Kale had been. He’d possessed energy and presence and Napier felt guilty about him. He’d been the one who’d advised them all the previous night to counter the crisis by resorting to their skills. He thought of the good cheer and positivity Kale had radiated over breakfast and pictured the grisly relic left of him in the Land Rover’s empty interior.
Jane Chambers spoke first. She told the group about that morning’s events at the cottage. The chief sceptic about the paranormal among them wasn’t present. Cooper was still apparently searching for evidence of little green men from another galaxy amid the ruins of the settlement. But Napier thought that even Cooper would have been disconcerted by Jane’s account of what had occurred.
She spoke with the absolute conviction that Shanks had come and communicated with them. He had done so churlishly and perhaps even a little reluctantly. But it had been his voice and his warning to them could not have been more explicit or grave. They were in mortal danger. They were not asked to leave. They were implored to escape.
When Jane had finished speaking Napier looked at Lassiter and Lassiter raised an eyebrow in assent and he told them about his trip aboard the quad bike to check on Kale at the peat bog and the gruesome evidence he’d discovered there.
None of it looked like news to the ex-detective. But then Lassiter’s conviction that Kale should have returned sooner was what had prompted Napier to go looking for their archaeologist in the first place.
There was a silence after Napier had finished speaking. He’d begun his account thinking that it would conclude with general dismay and possibly a bit of panic and the need to talk one or two of his listeners down.
That didn’t happen, though. There was no one present who any longer believed they were confronted by imaginary fears. They were all genuinely scared. There was no discord. There was only the need for a coherent strategy to try to save their lives.
There was silence in the galley in the aftermath of his story. Outside the wind howled, growing in strength, buffeting the fabric of their shelter, making the titanium struts shaping it and the steel cabling keeping its shape taut, groan and sing with the effort. Rain hammered relentless on the roof.
Davis said, ‘Where’s Karl Cooper?’
Lassiter looked at his watch. He said, ‘He should have returned from the settlement an hour ago. He’s on his own. That was made clear to him before he set off. No one’s going out there after him in this.’
‘He could shelter in the tannery or the distillery,’ Alice said. ‘He might be better doing that than trying to walk back here in this weather.’
‘I wouldn’t fancy a night up there alone,’ Davis said. ‘Even before what we’ve just been told, I wouldn’t have fancied it.’
‘Ignorance is bliss,’ Walker said.
‘He won’t be alone,’ Jane said. ‘The little green men will have invited him to supper.’
Nobody laughed at the joke.
Degrelle cleared his throat with a rumbling cough. He said, ‘There is something I need to tell you all about the island and what happened here. It may not effect matters materially, but it informs what I intend to do tomorrow. I would prefer to do what I intend to in an atmosphere of hope and belief rather than general incredulity and scepticism. So I will tell you what I know.’
He smiled. It looked an effort for him to do so. ‘Let us take a short break before I begin,’ he said. ‘And I think a drink might be a sensible preparation for what I have to say.’
Napier looked at Alice, who looked sharply at Lassiter. He smiled at her and shook his head slowly and Napier felt relieved. He thought the ex-policeman his wisest and most resourceful ally in all this and so the last thing he wanted was to see him back on the bottle.
Chapter Twenty-One
Professor Philip Fortescue was better looking than McIntyre expected him to be. He had a portentous job-title and a sing-song Liverpudlian lilt to his voice that grated a bit on the phone. But in the flesh he was tall and fine-featured with wavy strawberry-blond hair he wore quite long. He was shy and hid rather behind the armour of his gold-framed spectacles. But he was not timid. He was fired up and determined.
‘Start at the beginning, Professor. Tell me all of it.’
‘You know the sea chest stuff. I don’t think there’s all that much time. We can’t sit around chatting.’
‘You’ve just endured a five hour drive. You need to eat something. I’ll order some food and a pot of coffee. You can’t run on empty, as our American friends are so rightly fond of saying.’
‘I don’t have any American friends.’
‘But you do know what I mean.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Persuade me of the provenance of the Horan journal and if you do I’ll read it and if I’m convinced by what it contains, I will help you in any way I can. I don’t see how I can say much fairer than that.’
Fortescue told him about Edith Chambers’ first phone call and Jacob Parr and the short account of the Great Affliction he had found. He told him about the Barnsley Nightingale and Lassiter’s name-change hunch and Emma Foot and his ordeal in the Elsinore Pit and the failure of Ballantyne’s bird to arrive. Then McIntyre read the journal as his guest first paused for breath and then ate ravenously.
He read with mixed emotions. The New Hope Island vanishing had fascinated him since childhood. He had abandoned his earlier, cherished belief in alien intervention without feeling as much disappointment as he would have expected to. Ever since viewing the film Shanks had shot and Lassiter had cleverly tracked down, he had suspected, at least subconsciously, that the mystery had in reality a much darker explanation.
He had not thought, though, that it would be as sinister as the Horan journal implied it was. He had thought the apparition Cooper had called a revenant just some poor restless spirit, an infant wretch unaware she had died of cholera or typhoid. The journal suggested it was something demonic, brought back in the shape of Ballantyne’s dead daughter to taunt him.
The fact that it was still there when Shanks had settled on New Hope was disturbing. The idea that it might still be there now, though, was terrifying. Seeing it in two dimensions on a screen in a viewing room was bad enough when you were cradling a large glass of single malt whisky. Having it creep up while you slept and wake you with its antic laughter was the stuff of nightmares.
While the spectre of his dead daughter had been taunting Ballantyne, his community had been slowly and deliberately consumed. They had called it the Great Affliction and it had invaded their Kingdom of Belief. But it had also been the Being that Hungers in the Darkness; something born of virulent magic a continent
distant to pursue and destroy in a vengeful spree and the vanishing had been the consequence.
McIntyre finished reading and closed the journal. He was no longer in any doubt about what had happened to the community on New Hope Island. He now felt that he knew conclusively. And the knowledge gave him no satisfaction at all. He felt sick and empty with dread at what he’d sent people into.
‘The thing is it’s still there, Mr McIntyre,’ Fortescue said. ‘Horan is emphatic on that because the sorcerer stressed the point with such certainty and solemnity. He regretted unleashing it, even as he lay dying. Unless the ritual is enacted that counters it, unless those words are recited that stops it, it just carries on. That’s what it was born for. That’s all it knows.’
Spite made flesh, McIntyre thought.
‘They’ll perish there if it isn’t put an end to. All of them.’
McIntyre didn’t reply. He was thinking of the scream Napier had reported hearing from Blake before failing to find Blake’s body. He was thinking about the joke he had made at the missing man’s expense.
‘What do you need?’ he said to Fortescue.
‘Is there still no radio contact with New Hope?’
‘There’s been no communication whatsoever since lunchtime yesterday.’
‘Think it will be re-established?’
‘I’m sceptical we’ll restore it anytime soon.’
‘Then I want you to charter me a helicopter.’
‘There’s an Atlantic storm in the vicinity of New Hope. It may last for a couple of days. The weather is still deteriorating there as we speak. Nothing is flying in that airspace.’
‘Charter me a boat, then. I have to get to the island.’
‘Can you handle a boat? Can you navigate?’
‘Theoretically, I can. I work at a maritime museum.’
‘We’ll take my plane from here to Mallaig and charter a vessel there. We may encounter some reluctance from the boat hire people, but we’ll get something if I pay over the odds. The Scots are passionately fond of money and I say that from personal experience. Though the coast guard will strongly advise against our going out, they can’t physically stop us, whatever the weather.’
‘You’re coming with me?’
‘I’m an experienced sailor from a seafaring family. I did my national service as a navigation officer aboard a battle cruiser and I’ve messed about in boats since I was a young child. Captains Pugwash and Birdseye have more legitimate seagoing expertise than you possess, young man. And those people are my responsibility. I sent them to New Hope Island.’
Degrelle told his little congregation what the Cardinal had told him. It was what Samuel Trent had imparted in the confessional after his escape in an open boat from New Hope Island in 1823. He had fled a full two years before the vanishing of the settlement. But strange and brutal things were going on there and the boy had played his murderous part in those events.
Ballantyne’s daughter Rachel died of diphtheria at the age of ten in 1806. She had been loved and she was mourned. But she did not stay restful in her grave. She returned to haunt the captain on New Hope. Her ragged apparition terrified the community and drove their spiritual leader half-mad with despair.
He would see her. And then he would not see her for weeks. He would foster in himself the half-dared hope that she had gone forever. And then one day he would feel a chill and lift his gaze and see her watching him from the heights or wake to see her standing inches above the floor at the foot of his bed, staring at him with the eyes that were only empty sockets now.
He knew the source of the magic that had rekindled her and contaminated her spirit with evil. He remembered his sadistic treatment of the sorcerer aboard the slave ship he had commanded in his former, sinful life. He knew that this was the man’s revenge for the punitive mutilation that had ended his existence.
Ballantyne thought he knew what it was that would break the spell tormenting him and manipulating Rachel’s tortured soul. And that was sacrifice. He had learned something of the customs of the countries he had traded with. He had spoken with their shamans and their holy men and their mystics and their priests and they all insisted sacrifice was the key to power and prosperity.
He knew it from Allbache and Dahomey and half a dozen other kingdoms he had traded with in Africa. He would pay for the power in blood to eradicate forever the dark magic contaminating his own Kingdom of Belief.
At first, Degrelle told his silent audience, he sacrificed only the dying. Then, he sacrificed the old. And when that did not work, he sacrificed the sick, if they ailed to an extent where it did not look like they would fully recover.
All of this was done in secret. None of the people from the mainland with whom the island’s commerce was conducted ever found out about it. But it did not work. Still Ballantyne was tormented by the spectre of the child he had loved and lost and grieved for so bitterly.
He built a special place, his Temple of Darkness, a church without windows in which the sacrificial ceremonies could be staged with elaborate ritual. He recruited boys from among his community to carry out the sacrifices for him.
These were accomplished with cleavers, said Samuel Trent, who was one of the boys instructed to carry out this bloody task. There were robes and incantations. Candles spluttered and incense wafted pungently. But Trent said it was no different really in method from the slaughter of a goat.
The sacrifices never entirely stopped. They decreased in number when they were seen even by the leader of the settlement to have no effect in freeing him from his torment. But by that time they were a part of what New Hope saw as its own religious orthodoxy. And so they continued, one a month, the sacrificial victim chosen by the drawing of lots.
‘He was a fucking lunatic,’ Walker said, when Degrelle had finished. ‘Sorry about the language, Father.’
‘I’ve heard worse,’ Degrelle said, smiling faintly.
‘He was a butcher,’ Alice said.
‘Thank God you didn’t enter the church when we went to the settlement,’ Lassiter said to her. ‘It was a charnel house.’
‘A Temple of Darkness,’ Jane said, ‘in a Kingdom of Belief. What are you going to do, Father? Are you going to sanctify the building?’
‘If there is anything demonic on the island, that will be its home,’ Degrelle said. ‘I will perform the rite of exorcism there in the morning.’
‘Weather permitting,’ Lucy said.
‘The weather won’t enter into it,’ Degrelle said. ‘I will brave the tempest or the deluge, my dear. It is what the Cardinal sent me here to do.’
‘You’re nervous about it, aren’t you, Father?’ Napier said.
Dregrelle said, ‘I’m fortunate in that I’ve never for one moment doubted my faith. But I don’t think I’ve ever faced a test as formidable as this. The island has been drenched in innocent blood. It has been a bastion of sinful pride and blasphemy. For two centuries, it has been contaminated with evil. It is a wicked place.’
‘I’m nervous just about tonight,’ Davis said. ‘That storm sounds pretty fierce. And it’s strengthening.’
‘You’re not as nervous as Cooper’s going to be, alone in that abandoned settlement,’ Lucy said.
‘He isn’t alone,’ Degrelle said. ‘Some living affront to God lurks in the church without windows. Something spewed from hell is harboured in that stone insult to Christian faith. He has that creature in the settlement for company.’
Lassiter said, ‘Does anyone really think Karl Cooper is still alive?’
‘I don’t,’ Alice said.
Walker said, ‘I should think that settles it, then,’ and he barked a laugh that sounded to Napier uncomfortably close to hysteria.
There wasn’t much drinking or much conversation after Degrelle had said his piece. He stated that he intended to set off for the settlement to perform his sacrament at dawn. Then he left for his room and his vigil of prayer and whatever scant ration of sleep that heavyweight penitent allowed himself.
Napier felt pretty tired on his own account. He was close to sleep himself when he heard a soft knocking through the thud and crush of wind outside, against his door.
It was Lucy. She closed the door behind her and shed her clothes still walking and slipped into the single bunk beside him. She felt deliciously warm.
‘What’s this?’
‘I suppose you could call it a down-payment on the bill for saving my life.’
‘I’m really sorry I said that.’
‘I know you are. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.’
He reached his arms around her and held her tightly to him. He kissed her.
When the kiss broke she said, ‘I’m going with Degrelle in the morning. It’s my job. If something happens, I need to be there to see it.’
‘Above and beyond, I’d say.’
‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Just hold me, Paul.’
They held each other at the start, flesh on flesh, entangled together. At the finish, they fell asleep that way.
Lassiter and Alice lay in her bed together, awake. She said, ‘I’m worried about what will happen to you, Patrick, if anything happens to me.’
After a moment he said, ‘What about the others?’
‘Jane and Lucy are coping. So is Napier, remarkably. His man Walker is on the verge of cracking up, though. And we have a priest in denial about the loss of his faith.’
‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ Lassiter said. ‘I haven’t left your side since hearing about the warning in the cottage and I won’t, now. If anything happens to you, I’ll already be dead.’
Shortly after he said that, she fell asleep. And Lassiter suddenly remembered the young professor from Liverpool with the arcane job title he’d refused to help because he could not let Alice come here on her own. He didn’t feel at all confident about his ability to protect her. They were all of them clueless here, all of them miles out of their depth. They were helpless, no more any of them really he feared, than prey. (Bit of a weird sentence here, doesn’t really make sense.)
The Colony Trilogy Page 26