No one at the compound was asleep. They’d moved both of the bodies and wherever they’d been taken to, both were out of sight. Phil Fortescue was playing sentinel and when the poncho-clad bulk of Napier’s shape resolved itself through rain and gloom into someone recognisable, he lowered the shotgun he was armed with and had raised, looking mightily friendly and relieved.
Napier gestured for Fortescue to follow him into the comms room. They needed to be of one accord and so all needed to be in on what they’d decide do next. He didn’t think Dennis Shanks would risk his own skin attacking them physically. That had been the job of his foot-soldiers and both their assault missions had proven suicidal. If he didn’t learn from that, he was a fool and a fool very definitely wasn’t what they were dealing with.
Lucy was on him before he could get the poncho off. He thought the hug she gave him as he entered the comms room the most welcome he’d ever been given in his life. He returned it just as ardently and then Alice and Edie came over and all at once it was a group hug, Napier in tears at the warmth of them, their getting wet because he was sodden and not minding it, not minding it at all. The thought occurred to him that he’d willingly die protecting these people. But then, he’d known that from the outset about himself. He sniffed and had to wipe his eyes. He’d no choice.
When the huddle eventually broke, Patrick Lassiter put an arm around his shoulder and said, ‘Thought we’d lost you, Paul. We really can’t afford to do that, now.’
‘He’s on his own.’
‘And he’s close,’ Lassiter said.
‘How do you figure that?’
‘Neither of his women travelled very far to get here in the weather we’re enduring. They arrived relatively dry and their boots weren’t muddy. They came from a practical distance. Phil’s burial chamber or storm shelter or whatever it is, is close to where we are now. I’d assumed beneath the colony settlement. I think we all had. That supposition was wrong.’
‘Are you planning something?’
‘Not before daybreak and not without hearing what you’ve got to say. But there’s no question we’ve got to take him on. He’s intent on harming us.’
‘Destroying us, more like.’
Lassiter nodded. ‘Ireland gave him a taste for it and what he did here to his writer-group victims only further whetted his appetite. His motive might be to do with the occult, unless he’s just an old-fashioned psychopath. Either way, he means to kill us all.’
‘And either way he’s in for a fight.’
‘Tell us what occurred tonight.’
They sat in a tight circle. Edie handed him a mug of cocoa. Kevlar fabric rippled and shuddered around and above them in gusting moans of wind. Rain spattered in fitful, thrumming tattoos. And Napier told them about a dialogue he’d endured with what a little girl dead 200 years had since her mortal life become. None of them laughed or even looked surprised. New Hope Island was a place that encouraged belief and then gradually inculcated terror. The look on her face told Napier that even Edie Chambers now appreciated that, who alone among them, had never been there before.
‘I think the book unlikely to be with him,’ Lucy said.
‘Why?’ Edie said, ‘you’d surely keep something so important close to hand, where you can protect it.’
‘That’s a bit too obvious for him,’ Lassiter said. ‘He’s cunning and deliberately counter-intuitive. I’m with Lucy and the book’s nowhere near his hide.’
Alice said, ‘The obvious place to look would be the Shanks cottage, since it’s still an intact shelter and since David Shanks compiled the book in the first place. Hiding it there would be a sort of double-bluff.’
‘Or a trap,’ Fortescue said. ‘He’ll know we know about the book and its importance. He’ll have figured out his background has been probed. Research trips to Ireland when he never set a story there were always going to look suspicious once investigated. Rose Brennan was the eternal probationer because he didn’t fully trust her. He’d have expected her to blab.’
‘Makes you wonder why she’s still alive,’ Lucy said.
‘With Rose, it was all about the sex,’ Lassiter said. ‘She admitted as much to McClain. But she learned enough tricks to protect herself, unless she’s just outside his sphere of influence, which I suspect is quite local. County Clare’s a distance away. He’s not God.’
‘If the weather’s eased by then, I plan to go to the Shanks cottage in the morning,’ Alice said. ‘I’ll go even if the weather hasn’t eased, can’t delay it any longer. There are answers there and in my experience the dead don’t lie.’
Lucy shuddered and Napier saw her do it. She was thinking of McIntyre, he knew. She’d been extremely fond of her boss, his protégé, in truth. It was difficult to think of someone with such energy and presence suddenly and so entirely gone. It was the brightest of lights abruptly extinguished.
‘I’ll go with you,’ she said to Alice.
‘Then I’ll go too,’ Napier said. ‘In case it is a trap.’
Lassiter said, ‘The rest of us will stick together and look for Phil’s bunker.’
‘It’s not mine,’ Fortescue said. ‘It’s where Dennis Shanks is holed up, though, I’m certain of that. And we need to find it.’
‘First light, then,’ Alice said.
Lucy was staring at their so far useless radio transmitter. She took a breath and went over to it and switched it on. She’d explained to Napier that it was supposed to find its own factory-set digital frequency and match that automatically to its twin in the Chronicle newsroom in London. If newsroom staff had succeeded in getting through to them, the transmitter at their end would have picked up the signal and powered up in response. They’d surely have been trying, so Napier wasn’t very optimistic about what his wife was doing now.
She overrode the factory setting and began to try to tune into a viable frequency manually. She was good with technology and unlike her husband, she trusted it. Napier had seen too many fuck-ups with hi-tech weapons and comms systems in his military career to do that. But if anyone could get this kit to work now, it was her.
She got a wash of sound that became a babble of competing noises. Then there was a severing into abrupt, black silence. And then a voice began to ululate out of the transmitter’s speaker so starkly inhuman that it made Lucy recoil physically and wipe both hands, as though touching the console’s buttons and dials had left them soiled, on the thighs of her jeans.
Napier recognised the song. It was The Banks of the Nile. His own interpretation of choice was that sung so majestically by Sandy Denny. Her version had been so good almost no one else had dared to cover it in the forty-odd years since it came out. It was a wonderful recording. After hearing the song sung tonight, he thought he might never listen to it willingly again.
They all listened to it now, though. Everyone in the comms room was rigid and intent, stricken by the spectral melancholy of the lyrics moaned out of the transmitter. To Napier it was the aural equivalent of blood seeping through a bandage. Except of course that blood was warm and only the living bled.
‘Your biggest fan,’ Phil Fortescue said.
Alice said, ‘Is that one she plucked out of your mind?’
Napier switched off the transmitter. He wasn’t confident doing this that it would stop Rachel Ballantyne’s singing. When it did, he felt thankful for small mercies. He said, ‘I think that song dates from the Napoleonic Wars. She may very well have heard it in life. But it’s fair to say it’s one of my favourites, or fair to say it was, until now.’
‘I’ll make us all another drink,’ Edie said, who seemed to think that keeping them fortified was her new vocation. She was an intern, wasn’t she? Interns liked to be industrious and keep themselves occupied.
They had a plan. They had two plans, but they were complimentary, so that was okay, Napier thought. The formal business had been concluded. He stood after drinking his cocoa and yawned. Lucy smiled at him as she hadn’t in months and as he hadn’t in mont
hs, he winked back at her. He said, ‘Could you tell me where I’ll find Alex McIntyre resting?’
‘I’ll take you to him,’ Lucy said, ‘but it’s been a long night already, Paul. Do you really want to see him now?’
‘Once, when I was floundering, he offered me a life-line,’ Napier said. ‘I think the least I can offer him in return is a prayer.’
‘Amen to that,’ Fortescue said, who Napier thought had been closer to Alexander McIntyre than any of them, almost a surrogate son until the death of Jane Chambers. He was regretting the terms and length of the exile self-imposed from them all since then. It was plain from his expression. Alex would have missed Phil sorely over the last two years and nothing could be done about that now.
‘How did you leave it with him, Phil?’ Napier asked.
Fortescue cleared his throat, but his voice wasn’t steady when he spoke. He said, ‘Just tonight, early tonight, I told him he was the best friend anyone could ever hope to have.’
‘That’s something.’
‘It is, Phil,’ Lassiter said. ‘He’d have been moved, hearing that from you.’
Lucy smiled a conflicted smile, affection and grief competing on her face. She took her husband by the hand and went to lead him out of their shelter and towards his prayer.
They were almost at the entrance when the lights went out. These were solar powered and running down and quite feeble. Sunlight had been scarce since the arrival on the island of Lucy’s party. Patrick Lassiter had time to think that the odds of their lamps failing naturally and simultaneously astronomical, before something slithered and pawed as though blindly, scrabbling and pushing at their door.
Because the light had been feeble and because Napier had been right earlier about the storm and the sky was clearing outside and in patches brightly starlit, they could see well enough for Napier and Lassiter to grab the shotguns.
The thing outside heaved at the door, which was holding. Napier raised his gun and gestured for Phil Fortescue to unlatch it. It occurred to him that they might be confronting Rachel Ballantyne’s raised ghosts, a deputation of the island’s centuries-old dead, in which case cartridges of lead shot would likely prove quite useless. But they couldn’t cower like children under the blankets having a bad dream. The nightmare here was all-too real and needed to be faced.
The door opened inward. The figure outside it stood dead and mutilated, headless and one-armed. The remnants of its clothing were blood and rain soaked. Bone fragments and bits of sinew glimmered in starlight in the gaping wounds Napier had earlier inflicted killing the person it had been. When it moved, it moved jerkily, no more lifelike than a puppet governed by invisible strings. Only the lower jaw remained of its head. Napier heard Edie Chambers try to stifle a scream.
It raised an abrupt arm and pointed a finger steadily at Paul Napier. The gesture was accusatory but to Patrick Lassiter, looked more like something from some gory pantomime than anything real or sincere. What had once been Mabel Farrow was moving but inanimate, clumsily mobile but obviously inert. He was watching a grotesque bit of occult manipulation. Christ, Gospels be believed, had raised Lazarus from the dead. Dennis Shanks had only jolted antic movement into something still a corpse.
The Mabel Farrow thing dropped the arm remaining to it with a creak of rigour audible now the wind had dropped and the rain desisted. It turned and swayed and then began a stiff-legged walk out of the compound. They followed it. Lassiter suspected no one particularly wanted to go, but equally no one was prepared to be left behind alone.
The figure walked over the slicked cobbles of the harbour and then on, southward, to the shoreline. It possessed the uncertain gait, he thought, of a toddler. It slithered over pebbles, the unconscious weight of it odd-sounding on the shingle, flat, lifeless. Once at the water’s edge it walked steadily into the sea, the surface calm now, no more than a murmur as though exhausted, spent, after the sustained hours of white-flecked, churning violence to which it had subjected itself.
Mabel Farrow’s body disappeared beneath the surface. Lassiter looked around. It was the false dawn with a clear sky now of a late summer night, more accurately an early summer morning in the Western Isles. He sniffed salt air. He looked at the others. Phil Fortescue had one protective arm around a shaken looking Edie Chambers. Alice and Lucy were holding on to one another. Paul Napier was cradling his shotgun as tenderly as someone might an infant child.
He thought, not all of us is likely to survive this. Perhaps none of us are. He felt grateful he’d made the decision he had about Ruthie Gillespie. He was vacillating on that one, perhaps understandably. He said, ‘Shanks seems to have recovered from the effort of killing McClain and his people. In occult terms I’d call what just occurred, what he calls the consequent.’
‘He was showing off,’ Napier said.
‘Nothing to what he’ll have planned,’ Lucy said.
‘We have to find him and kill him,’ Fortescue said.
Napier said, ‘We have to find that book.’
‘The real dawn’s a couple of hours away,’ Alice said. ‘We should all try for some sleep. The cabaret’s over for tonight.’
‘Work experience,’ Edie Chambers said. ‘On balance, it really sucks.’
They all laughed at that. The line was braver than it was funny, but it’s human instinct always in darkness, to seek out the light.
The cabaret hadn’t quite finished. Alice was wrong about that. Shanks had orchestrated an encore. When they went to check, the body of Jennifer Spring had gone, sea-bound like her dead sister-in-darkness, they all assumed.
But the body of Alexander McIntyre remained, naked now and lashed to the underside of a wooden stake pile - driven by who knew what forceful mischief at an angle into the peaty ground. He was suspended palely there and his chest and belly had an elderly droop and his balls hung flaccid. And that had been the point, Napier thought, the stripping of his dignity in death. Paul Napier was fraught and tired and wretchedly concerned for Lucy and Edie and in this mood, in this place, thought McIntyre’s cadaver resembled nothing so much as the carved figurehead of a death-ship. Together, they delivered him stiffly down.
The smell was the first thing that signalled the change taking place at their compound refuge, when they returned together to the comms room. It reeked of mustiness and damp. The lamps had relit themselves and their white glare exposed clumps of moss flourishing in the corners where the walls met their ceiling. There were fissures becoming cracks that would mature into rents in the fabric of their walls.
They had returned to decrepitude, to a place of accelerating decay. Mildew splotched the metal housing of the radio transmitter like the weeping sores of some disease. Their pots and kettle and camping stove were pitting with corrosion and when Lucy broke open a sealed ration pack, she gagged at the spongy, fungus touch of the spoiled food it contained as it swelled, the rot blossoming between her hands.
‘We have to salvage what we can and get out of here straight away,’ Lassiter said. ‘The higher the ground, the firmer underfoot, so let’s head to the settlement, where we know there’s at least solid shelter for us all.’
‘Please God,’ Lucy said, ‘anywhere but there.’
‘Patsy’s right,’ Napier said, ‘we don’t have a choice. We need to re-group immediately and then take this creepy bastard on and finish this. We use the one advantage given us, which is this break in the weather. Our plans are still viable, or one of them is, but we’re totally vulnerable without a base.’
He said this staring at the hunting knife he’d stripped from the corpse of Jennifer Spring. He’d taken it out of his belt. Even as he spoke the words, the shiny steel of the blade was dulling with an orange spread of rust.
Their still-viable plan was the trip Alice planned to the Shanks cottage. Going to the colony settlement would take her halfway there. Approaching anywhere Dennis Shanks might be hiding in plain sight no longer seemed practical, though. He was too powerful again for that. They’d been distract
ed and enfeebled by the storm when they’d been very close to wherever he was. Now their window of opportunity regarding him had gone. Alice didn’t think he’d conjured the storm. He’d just been lucky there. He’d sent his women as distractions. He’d sacrificed them to gain time while his power was being restored to him.
The walk up to the settlement reminded her of her recent trek in Dorset to the beacon at Blackmore Vale outside Shaftesbury. Melbury Beacon seemed a million miles removed in atmosphere, though, from this restless, desolate landscape. And their little pastoral holiday of only the previous week seemed a hundred years ago.
She walked beside Lucy, the two of them matching each other stride for stride. She said, ‘I’m glad at least to see you and Paul getting on so well. It’s a bit of consolation. I’d heard rumours.’
‘Rumours of an affair?’
Alice shrugged. ‘Nothing so specific and I don’t have any appetite for gossip when it’s malicious. I’d just heard your marriage had hit a stony patch.’
‘Paul’s faithful and gentle and brave,’ Lucy said, ‘if I needed any reminding of the brave part, the last 24 hours have provided it.’
‘So what’s gone wrong?’
‘Our life’s comfortable. From the outside, it’s enviable. But when I first met my husband I was a war reporter. I was a hard-living risk taker. Nothing’s replaced the adrenaline thrill of all that.’
‘Adrenaline’s not sustainable, long-term,’ Alice said. ‘But you must have been getting plenty of it here. I know I have. On balance, give me humdrum any day.’
Lucy stopped walking and brushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. The wind had dropped generally but it was breezy as they gained altitude, in the exposure approaching the heights. She glanced towards Napier, to make sure he was still out of earshot.
The Colony Trilogy Page 47