The Colony Trilogy

by Cottam, F. G.

  She said, ‘The challenge I’m looking for has been staring me in the face without me seeing it, Alice. I only began to realise that after Alex McIntyre’s death. It took the island and what’s happened here to force me to see what it is I don’t have. The same is true for Paul. What we need to take on and share is parenthood. It’s bloody obvious.’

  Alice smiled and hugged and then kissed her. She said, ‘You’ll make a wonderful mum and he’ll be an epic dad.’

  ‘He will,’ Lucy said. ‘And you and Patsy will make epic godparents.’

  ‘Patrick will be hugely flattered to be asked,’ Alice said. ‘I know I am.’

  ‘Assuming we make it,’ Lucy said, frowning. ‘You think the cottage a good idea?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a good idea at this stage,’ Alice said. ‘We’re being outfought and out-thought by someone who wants us all dead. It’s more a case of desperate measures and trying to find something that works.’

  ‘I’m frightened of going to the settlement,’ Lucy said, ‘and I’m not a coward. But I’m terrified at the thought of going to the cottage.’

  ‘I have to go, Lucy,’ Alice said. ‘My knack of seeing things most people can’t, has come back for a reason. I think I’ll find the reason there. You don’t have to come.’

  ‘I have to do something,’ Lucy said. ‘If I stop to think about any of the things that have happened to us here I’ll probably go into shock. I’ve got to press on to have any chance of surviving this. We all do. Keeping going is the only thing keeping us going.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  As those surviving the assault on them on New Hope Island reached the old colony settlement there just after 8am, Ruthie Gillespie was setting off from the Avis car hire depot in Brighton, having travelled there by minicab from Lewes. While they sheltered and rested up and caught up on some precious sleep, she drove, thinking about the chaos this unplanned business was inflicting on her word-count regime, how much of her scant savings she could afford to spend on the enterprise and whether Febreze would disguise the smell of tobacco smoke she was inflicting on her rented Ford Focus as she defied the stern regulation forbidding her to light up in it.

  Febreze could work wonders. She’d learned that as a charity shop volunteer, gaining ‘retail experience’ for her CV years earlier, though she’d actually volunteered because she thought Help the Aged a worthwhile cause. She wasn’t just smoking as she sped north, she was pretty much chain-smoking. But life was all about checks and balances. While she was smoking for England and writing not a single word worth counting, she wasn’t drinking at all and had no intention of doing so anytime soon. That was something, wasn’t it?

  As Alice’s group set out from the colony settlement for the crofter’s cottage on New Hope’s southern apex, it was 12.30 in the afternoon and Ruthie was outside Lancaster, buying stuff she needed from an outdoor and adventure store. There she discovered a performance clothing and accessories brand named Patagonia, manufacturing the attire she required in muted shades and styles that wouldn’t totally shame her. She was less honestly concerned about style than about colour. She didn’t want to advertise her presence when she got to the island to Dennis Shanks. She managed to get everything she needed either in black or in subdued shades of grey.

  Back on the motorway, she switched on the radio. Everything on the station it was tuned to seemed to be by the folk singer, Kate Rusby. Maybe it was a birthday or anniversary tribute. There was no banter to explain between the songs. She knew about the singer from Phil Fortescue’s story about how he’d come originally to know Edith Chambers. So when they played Kate Rusby’s version of The Recruited Collier, it made Ruthie shiver. Then she sang a song entitled, Who Will Sing Me Lullabies that for some reason made her shiver even more.

  She was about to switch stations when Sandy Denny finally replaced Kate, singing The Banks of the Nile. Most of the really old stuff Ruthie liked, though she habitually denied it, was by The Cure and Twisted Sister and Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus. But her dad had been a Fairport Convention fan and so she’d grown up with Sandy Denny and she loved this one.

  Sandy finished her song and Ruthie put her foot down harder on the accelerator pedal. The music had left her feeling even more anxious than she had for the people on the island. She switched the radio off 60 miles from the border with Scotland. She was averaging 90 between the speed cameras and she needed to concentrate. It would be another half an hour before their descent from the heights took Alice Lang’s party to within sight of the cottage built and then abandoned 80-odd years earlier by the soldier turned crofter and sometimes magician, David Shanks.

  Before the cottage came into clear view on a clear afternoon without much breeze and becoming pleasantly warm, they saw the wisp of smoke rising from the fire lit as a welcome for them in its grate. It wasn’t really necessary on a day like this one was turning out to be. Alice thought it perhaps some tradition of highland hospitality. It didn’t warm her heart, though. It seemed as ominous as the innocent sea did to her just then, framing the whitewashed walls of their destination with a postcard, azure glitter that stretched to the horizon.

  The exterior of the cottage became no less handsome as they got nearer to it. The whitewash had the bleached purity of recent application. The windows were intact and their glass spotless. The roof was whole, its slates grey and uniform with just the odd splash of seagull shit to make them seem real and not topping out some improbable movie prop. It was a cottage out of Brigadoon or The Quiet Man in its Celtic picturesque perfection. They had expected something closer to a ruin. But the old abode of the self-styled crofter David Shanks looked as good as it probably had on the day he’d completed it.

  The fire was wood-burning. The scent of the smoke was sweetish and vaguely salty and the fuel no doubt gathered at the tide-line and then chopped and stacked when it had properly dried out, but by whom?

  The immaculate domestic theme continued inside the cottage. A walnut bodied grandfather clock ticked resonantly smelling of wax polish against one wall. The two armchairs facing the fireplace were covered in burnished leather with brass studs and were plump with horsehair in the upholstered places where a body would recline in them. There was a Welsh dresser and a wall of bookshelves and a Belfast sink. The single tap above the white ceramic stone dripped, its lose washer enabling the one delinquent note somewhere otherwise pitch-perfect.

  Alice looked from Napier to Lucy wondering did they feel as uneasy as she did. Lured and trapped, she was thinking, though the door remained open at their backs, facing the beach and the shingle descent to the sea.

  ‘This is beyond weird,’ Lucy said. She fumbled out her phone. ‘I’m going to take some photographs.’ Her instinct for a story had returned.

  Alice said, ‘Paul?’

  Napier looked at her. He raised his eyebrows. He cradled the shotgun he’d inherited from Alex McIntyre like he’d been born with the weapon between his arms. Like an infant child with its comfort blanket, she thought, gaining neither solace nor amusement from thinking it because a weapon wasn’t deadly when you aimed it at a ghost and because the observation was an accurate one. He looked for once more childlike than formidable, lost like they all were.

  ‘We got here unobserved,’ he said. ‘There was no one watching us, I’m certain of it. I’d have seen them.’

  ‘Then why does it feel like a trap?’ Alice said.

  There were framed photographs on the walls. In one of them two men were pictured. They occupied this very room. One of them was seated and elderly, white haired and with fierce eyes. His smile did nothing to diminish the harshness of their pale glare. A younger man stood behind him with his hands resting fondly on the old man’s shoulders. Alice studied the picture. The physical resemblance between the pair wasn’t just strong, it was remarkable.

  ‘Dennis Thorpe, who’s really Dennis Shanks, with his grandfather,’ Napier said from behind her.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ she said. ‘D
avid died in 1970 and Dennis wasn’t born until 1983.’

  ‘Everything here’s impossible,’ Napier said, ‘doesn’t seem to stop it happening though.’

  Lucy came back in from taking her exterior shots of the cottage. She walked over to the wall of books and studied their spines. She said, ‘He’s not left anything important here, not unguarded, he hasn’t. He just isn’t careless enough to make it that easy.’

  ‘I’m going to turn the place upside down anyway,’ Napier said, ‘just to piss him off.’ He pulled Jennifer Spring’s hunting knife out of his belt, ready to slice through upholstery and gut the mattress on the neatly made up single bed occupying one corner. ‘I might torch the place,’ he said. ‘I’m in that sort of mood.’

  He paused with the knife in his right hand and the shotgun relegated to his left. They were there at Alice’s initiative. This was her mission and good soldier that he still was, he was too disciplined to do anything destructive to the cottage until she’d fulfilled it. There was a protocol. Alice was in charge.

  Now she thought about that and looked around doing so, she saw the place was full of objects she thought probably shared a curious and sometimes dire history. There was a polished artillery shell on one side of the fire-surround, no doubt a souvenir from the Great War. There was a Bakelite wireless and ashtrays, all clean, made of crystal and beaten copper and onyx. There were the books and the pictures, of course.

  There was a music box on a plain oak table she thought David Shanks had almost certainly sat to write at. It was the table’s only embellishment. Its flat rectangular surfaces were latticed in ivory yellowed by nicotine and the passage of the years. She could picture him picking it up and turning the delicate metal handle to tease out its melody when he got momentarily stuck while composing an essay or a poem.

  She reached for it, but her fingers never quite got there. She heard a single, short, corrosive snarl of mirth. In the clipped, received pronunciation of the first part of the previous century, a voice gravelled by tobacco said, ‘Adieu, my dear.’ The music box, she knew without hearing it, had in its playing days, teased out Auld Lang Syne. That had been its only melody. Around them, the room darkened, like an abrupt eclipse. ‘Oh, no,’ Alice said, ‘oh dear God no, not like this.’

  Water blasted through the widows and doorway in a sudden, cataclysmic flood before the wave engulfed the cottage entirely and its walls were pulverised into rubble by the tonnage and momentum of a white-capped, massive, surging wall of sea.

  After only a few seconds of elemental violence, the wave had retreated. The sea was calm again. And the land had been scoured of all but the foundations of the dwelling that had been there, everything else of it, living and dead, dragged into the deep and perished in oblivion.

  Patrick Lassiter remembered his first occult experience vividly. It had taken place in a pub in Liverpool after he’d been through the things contained in the sea chest donated to the maritime museum there by Seamus Ballantyne’s wife. He’d been shaken by that experience and as he did habitually in those days, afterwards sought the comforting glow of whisky and found a seat in a crowded saloon bar, sharing a table with a strikingly handsome and well-dressed young woman he later came to realise had been a ghost.

  She’d strongly resembled Ruthie Gillespie, when he thought about it. They’d been similarly dark-eyed and ruby-lipped and pale, under the twin geometric helmets of their glossy black hair. Except that the former had been emphatically dead and the latter was very much alive. Delightfully alive, he thought and the thought was a bitter one, because he’d just had another experience beyond what he could rationalise; it was why he’d been reminded of the Liverpool event. Only it wasn’t a ghost this time, it was instead a foreboding. He’d been assaulted by the cold, abrupt certainty that his wife, Alice, was dead.

  They’d split up for their search. It was a desperate tactic in circumstances becoming increasingly bleak, but there was a sort of logic to it. Edie Chambers had accompanied Phil Fortescue, retreated now into a state of numbness not far removed from shock, only because they hadn’t felt able to leave her alone and vulnerable in the settlement. Phil was having to half carry and half chide her into motion by then, but at least he had the muscle and the patience for the task and he had the motivation because he loved her as he would have his own child.

  Lassiter searched separately because they could do twice the looking that way and because it made them separate targets and therefore twice the job Dennis Shanks would otherwise have in taking them on. It had felt quite promising, in the sense that it was action, it was doing something positive; until a moment ago and the soul-cleaving certainty that his wife was no longer alive.

  He stopped. He tried to gather himself. He was at a point to the east of the colony’s old harbour looking for the bruised grass of human tracks, for any anomaly of earth or scrub or rock that might signal something subterranean, hidden beneath the bland apparent innocence of the surface; a crypt or a catacomb, a place of safety, of refuge and concealment. And he knew what he had to do, because he didn’t trust his own new-found talent for psychic insights.

  Why should he? He’d never experienced one of those before. The cold certainty of his first, had by this point buried his heart in the grave of his chest, but he had nevertheless to be absolutely sure. He had to see for himself that he wasn’t wrong. Some faint, dull flicker of hope stirred in him, nagging at him that he might be mistaken, merely pessimistic, only deluded. It was desperation, this, he knew. But he’d ignore that knowledge until he’d seen the physical proof.

  Overland, on a route bisecting the island, the Shanks cottage was a good couple of hours distant over difficult and sometimes hazardous terrain. It was further if you took the coastal route, looping to the west and back again, but it was actually quicker because the going was so much better on the packed sand between the shingle and the sea. Lassiter set off at a trot. He’d jog to his destination. He was fit and could endure exercise and he had an urgent need of certainty.

  He remembered something Paul Napier’s wraith had said about the island: ‘He has stirred this place, worried its memories as a bad dog will worry sheep. It is become a domain of ghosts, now.’

  And a place of prophecy and premonition, not just haunted but enchanted, contaminated by the magic Dennis Shanks had wilfully contrived there. Lassiter ran, wondering if there was any point in a prayer, blind to the shimmer and sparkle of the lovely late afternoon weather New Hope now basked in, seeing only the face of his wife turn as pale as porcelain on touching the cuff-links in Shaftesbury the week before in the moment of fate that had been the beginning of what had lured them inexorably back here.

  They only found it because they’d been offered an invitation to do so. The trap door lay open, canted at an angle of about 30 degrees, tarnished chains anchoring it above the earth surrounding it, clods of grass thickly spread across its surface to conceal it, a flight of stone steps leading down into darkness when Phil Fortescue peered into the gloomy maw of the secret chamber it revealed.

  For about the thousandth time that day, he considered their situation. They were hungry and thirsty. Hunger had drained them of energy. When the night came, they would be cold. He thought that their chances should they confront Dennis Shanks, more to do with survival than retribution and that limited ambition still too much to hope for. He would sacrifice his life protecting Edie’s and would fight with everything he possessed, but still thought the sacrifice would be futile.

  He knew now that they’d been toyed with from the outset. They’d been predictable because they’d been led by the nose. He suspected with something approaching a gloomy certainty that Paul Napier, Lucy Church and Alice Lang weren’t coming back from the Shanks cottage. They’d been lured there as he and Edie were now being lured underground, probably to their graves.

  Did they have a choice? Like his late friend Paul Napier, Fortescue didn’t really think they did. He thought his one chance might come from Dennis Shanks’ overconfidence
at how effortlessly every part of his scheme was slipping into place. If Shanks relaxed, if Shanks blinked, Phil Fortescue would be on him. He had fast hands and both of them carried a punch, something he’d undersold, telling Ruthie Gillespie about his boxing prowess. Ah, Ruthie; someone beautiful he’d known only for an incandescent moment and knew now he would never see again.

  Gently, he took Edie by the hand. He said, ‘We’ll have to take these steps slowly, letting our eyes become accustomed. We need to be able to see, when we get to wherever they lead.’

  ‘I’m scared, Daddo,’ she said.

  He almost broke and wept at that. He hadn’t the remotest conviction at all that this lovely girl had long to go on living. He wouldn’t witness her end. He’d be dead himself by then. It was no honest consolation. He winked and smiled and squeezed her hand. ‘C’mon, kiddo,’ he said, ‘slowly now, like I said.’

  They were cautious and deliberate and by the time they had descended the long, narrow flight cut into the island’s granite bowels, they could see quite adequately in the light spilling down from above them. It was a single space. It was cavernous in its dimensions. Large hooped barrels were lined along either wall, flanking them. They were oak and their hoops fashioned from iron and the space was dry so though the iron had pitted and dulled, it hadn’t rusted down the still, dark decades. There was no one else down there, but someone had been, not long since, a table at the end of the room still bearing the plates and cutlery of a recent meal.

  ‘They distilled their whisky in the settlement, but they matured it down here, from where they took it to their dock once they’d sold it to their customers on the mainland,’ Fortescue said. He rapped a barrel with the knuckles of a fist.

  ‘Full,’ he said. ‘They must be copper-lined. The whisky would have eaten through the wood, otherwise, after all this time.’

  ‘I quite fancy a drink,’ Edie said.

  ‘Bit early for me,’ he said.