He was a puzzle. He was a contradiction. He looked around 50 years old and he wasn’t a ghost. He puffed on a pipe, had a persistent smoker’s cough and occupied three-dimensional physical space. He ate and he drank. And sparingly, he conversed. As Fortescue had gathered his senses and alertness and cogency fought the pillowy numbness of the drug, he’d thought them perhaps safer with this fellow than they’d have been at the mercy of the psychotic Dennis. Except that there was no guarantee Dennis wasn’t coming back. And it was the man studying him who had drugged them and tied them up.
And he’d hinted at an ominous fate for them, hadn’t he, just after Edie had passed out and just before he’d been claimed by unconsciousness. The watch beat against the meat of his thigh. He wondered what had become of Patrick Lassiter.
The man studying him had eyes the same pale, frozen blue sometimes refracted through icicles. He hardly blinked. He had two noticeable ticks. One was taking the bowl of his pipe and shifting it so that the stem rattled between his teeth. The other was smoothing the cravat he wore between the span of finger and thumb.
Now, he said, ‘Before the gal wakes up, I’m going to tell you a few things. You have the look about you of an educated man. And you have Seamus Ballantyne’s Breguet in your pocket, which is mightily curious.’
‘Who are you?’
‘You know who I am. I’m David Shanks.’
‘You’re no older than 50. Shanks was born in 1895 and died in 1970.’
‘Death, my bedraggled young chum, is a relative term.’
‘Is that a pun?’
‘Very good,’ Shanks said. ‘You’ve heard of the Dweller on the Threshold?’
‘Only in relation to the song,’ Fortescue said. But Van the Man had recorded that one well after David Shanks had deliberately ended his life. And Shanks ignored the remark.
‘Theosophy, sport, an astral double, an entity with a strong affinity for someone living; think doppelgänger and you won’t be all that far off.’
‘If you see your doppelgänger, you die.’
‘Sad, young Dennis had to go. The lad showed immense promise. But that’s life. Eh? Only one of us could live it and inevitably, it wasn’t to be him.’
It was why the two women had died in the way they had. He’d had no further use for either of them. They’d been disciples of Dennis Shanks. But unwittingly, it had been David who had sent them off on missions they would not conceivably survive. Dennis had become David first and secretly in spirit, his intellectual and emotional identity established before the material change took place. The physical transformation had taken rather longer to effect. Fortescue didn’t know this for certain, but it seemed reasonable to suppose the transformation would be triggered from within.
He was looking at an echo given substance, a reflection made flesh, a memory become concrete in the weirdly empty paradox of a person without a soul. With his busy mannerisms, his antique vowels and his anachronistic garb, before him stood a living, breathing contradiction. The point was though that he was living and breathing and doing so with a distressing degree of vitality. And he was thinking, too. This self-made man had ambitions and intentions and all of them were dark.
Fortescue was fully alert now. He’d remembered the book Lassiter had told them about, the one Rose Brennan said Andrea Thorpe had given her son on his 18th birthday, the life-work compiled by his grandfather David, the key to occult power, the talismanic tome ensuring Shanks could not be hurt by Rachel Ballantyne despite her desperate eagerness to do him fatal harm.
‘Dennis thought he’d inherited the recipe for a casserole, when the dish transpired to be a bouillabaisse instead,’ Shanks said. He chuckled. He sounded pleased with himself. Why wouldn’t he? Something he’d contrived before his death nearly 50 years ago had worked out exactly as he’d intended it to in giving him a second chance at mortality. How many men could successfully orchestrate that?
And at what ongoing cost, Fortescue wondered, as Edie began to stir into wakefulness beside him, bound as he was, numbed, trussed-up, fodder for whatever perverse malevolence this master sorcerer planned next for them.
‘You perished 46 years ago. That’s the age at which you’ve engineered your return.’
‘I was always going to be as old as the length of time it took,’ Shanks said, ‘the calendar determined that. And they do say life begins at 40.’ He winked.
‘You were old and broken but this rebirth of yours required you to destroy yourself then. That was done at no cost to you because by the time of your suicide your life was without quality.’
‘I’d made some mistakes,’ Shanks said, ‘I’ll admit to that. I’d become a bit careworn.’
‘Has this ever been done before?’
‘Not to my knowledge, not successfully,’ Shanks said.
It was why he was being humble about his rackety and sometimes sordid old life. His new one was not just a second chance. It was a source of immeasurable pride to him.
‘At what cost have you come back?’
‘There are repercussions. Perhaps they’d be more accurately termed reverberations. There’s always a price to pay, chum, in one’s dealings with the serious stuff. My grandson paid it. I wouldn’t say he did so willingly, but overall I’ve no complaints.’
Except the man before him was a living affront to the natural order. Fortescue suspected the price exacted of Dennis no more than a down-payment, a deposit made with further, future instalments pledged. More deaths, more sacrifices of good people to ensure that the magic held fast.
Shanks said, ‘Lucy Church was pregnant, something neither she nor her husband yet knew. Your friends are all dead, except for Lassiter, who’s insensible by now with drink. His time approaches.’
Fortescue didn’t reply.
‘I’ll relieve you of Ballantyne’s timepiece in the morning. You’ll no longer have any use for it, after our little stroll up to the church in the settlement and the brief service there I’ll preside over.’
Repercussions. Reverberations. Always a price to pay.
Fortescue looked down at the handcuffs locking his wrists.
‘You’re thinking you won’t cooperate,’ Shanks said. ‘But you will, for her sake.’ He flicked a nod at Edie. ‘I can make it quick, chum. Or I can drag it out awfully for her. That’s entirely your choice.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘It’s not really a climb,’ Lassiter said.
‘You are joking?’ To Ruthie, any incline not involving a lift or an escalator qualified as a climb. This was outdoors, remote and all uphill. It more than earned that description.
‘I mean it’s not technical,’ he said. ‘We can get to where we’re headed without ropes and crampons.’
‘I’m wearing hiking boots,’ she said. ‘I’m carrying a rucksack. We’re ascending in altitude, it’s a climb.’
‘What’s in the rucksack, water and sandwiches?’
‘Two distress flares, a disposable lighter and an emergency packet of fags.’
‘Great,’ he said, ‘we’ve no water.’
‘There are freshwater tarns,’ she said. ‘They were in the brochure, when the retreat was talked about. Do you think he’s got Phil and Edie?’
Lassiter was silent, except for his breathing, which was steady and unforced. He was ludicrously fit and she was anxious, awaiting his reply.
‘I think he has, by now,’ Lassiter said.
‘We’re being watched and followed.’
‘Not by anything human, we’re not.’
‘Can’t you sense it, Patsy?’
‘Of course I can. This is become a domain of ghosts, now, remember?’
‘I do,’ she said.
‘And not just any old ghost,’ he said. ‘We’re higher up the food chain than that, Ruthie. I think we both know who’s watching us.’
She had torn the relevant pages from her copy of Island Life and Lassiter had read them, the long, lyrical description of what Sandy Banks had built in desperate tribut
e to the dead trawlermen haunting him. They were looking for a shelf or plateau in the lee of the tallest crag on the heights at a spot sheltered by the contours of the rock from being visible from below.
And after 40 more minutes of ascending in silence, they clambered over a loose boulder in the gap between two walls of granite and there it was, still and grey in its isolation, a cone of stones about twelve feet high and eight at its base in circumference. It appeared bigger, a man-made contrivance so at odds with the surrounding wilderness it looked somehow profound and sacred.
‘Bloody hell,’ Ruthie said.
‘Sandy Banks was a fictional character,’ Lassiter said. ‘So who built it?’
‘Dennis Thorpe built it,’ Ruthie said. ‘It doesn’t look recent, but it is. He wrote about it first and came here and constructed it afterwards.’
‘Why would you announce your secret to the world, even in a novel? It makes no sense.’
‘I’ve a theory about that,’ Ruthie said, rummaging in her rucksack. She hadn’t told the whole truth about its contents. She’d bought a jemmy outside Lancaster, a mini-crowbar about a foot long and made from hardened steel. It had been heavy to carry up there but she’d need of it now. She pried the stones at the base of the cone, her soft hands quickly blistering and shedding skin as she worked stones loose and fashioned a cavity big enough for her body. She took off her jacket and using the torch app on her phone to see by, crawled in.
A minute later she crawled back out again holding a hessian sack. Lassiter cut the cord at the sack’s throat and an oilskin package, tightly bound, spilled out onto the ground. He crouched and cut the twine binding and a book was revealed to them. Its cover was ornate, a jewel housed in an elaborate bronze relief at its centre. There were no words on the cover, but the pages inside when they opened the book were dense with them; with lists and formulae and diagrams all done by hand.
Lassiter said, ‘What else is in there?’
‘Framing made of ship’s timbers and bits of broken pallets, some netting and a snapped oar and an old lobster pot. Flotsam and jetsam, basically, nothing you’d call evidence of a crime. Can you climb, Patsy?’
‘We’ve been through that.’
‘Up there, I mean, she said, nodding at the top of the stone monument. ‘I need a chimney.’
He took the jemmy from her raw grip and anchored it under his belt at his back where it wouldn’t hinder movement. He was carefully agile and attained the peak and pried her opening in minutes. She put the book and the stuff that had wrapped it back into the base of the cone. She took the flares from her rucksack and gave one to Lassiter as he jumped the last few feet back to the ground.
‘Two of these is probably overkill,’ he said. ‘They burn ferociously.’
‘Good,’ she said, ‘at the count of three.’
The flares were designed to ignite and blaze brightly even in a deluge. They had kindling and a stiff upland breeze here to encourage them and Lassiter’s chimney worked well. In seconds the contents of the cone were roaring with orange flames and the fissures in the stone glowered crimson with ferocious heat.
‘What now?’ Lassiter said.
‘We don’t stay here,’ Ruthie said. ‘And I’m going nowhere near the colony settlement and the crofter’s cottage has gone.’
‘I still think Phil was right about the hide,’ Lassiter said. ‘And I still think it’s located somewhere close to the old expedition compound. If Phil and Edie are still alive, that’s where we’ll find them.’ He nodded at the monument, a sizzling, radiant beacon now of incandescent heat. ‘Think this’ll work?’
Ruthie shivered. ‘God help us if it doesn’t,’ she said.
Edie was the first of them to see her. She was seated atop one of the whisky barrels in the gloom in the corner of the cellar close to its ceiling. She was very still and you’d have said she was watchful, except that her eyes appeared no more really than gouges in a face that was pale and wormy and distressingly weary for that of so young a child.
Shanks and Fortescue only became aware of her when she began to sing. She sang, The Recruited Collier. It was old enough a song that Rachel Ballantyne might have learned it in life. Or she could have plucked it from the mind of Edie, who had once been taught it. Rachel recited its lyrics in her long-dead, maudlin quiver of a voice. Edie and her step-father had heard this voice before, oozing like decay out of the radio transmitter brought uselessly to New Hope by Lucy Church. The expression on his face told Edie that David Shanks, by contrast, was hearing Rachel sing for the first time.
She sprang upright, the trick of a child’s sinister toy, and was standing, looming suddenly atop the barrel. She was ragged and her hair a windblown nest of blonde knots. She stepped off the barrel’s lip and hurtled through the air towards them. Edie flinched at the inhuman speed she moved at. She didn’t come all the way down, though. She stopped abruptly with her filth-blackened feet trailing several inches off the stone flagged floor. This close to them, her hair was unstill, seething with parasitic life. Her skin had a pale, vaguely remembered pallor. This close, Edie could smell her. It was quite subtle, just a hint of corruption so ancient it made her mind reel and her senses recoil.
‘You can’t hurt me,’ Shanks said. ‘I’ve taken precautions.’
To Edie, he sounded shrill and unconvincing. More, he sounded unconvinced.
The black maw that was Rachel’s mouth stretched in a wide smile and she raised a hand. She opened it and something bronze and elaborately moulded with a blackened jewel at its centre smouldered there, shedding ash, filling the air with the acrid scent of burned paper.
‘I’d have sported with you anyway, Captain Shanks. It would have been no fun for you,’ Rachel said. ‘Then you contrived the death of Mr. Napier. I’d become fond of Mr. Napier, fierce fond in truth, in my abiding loneliness. He was a good and honest soul, brave and forthright. You’ve none at all of his qualities. Now he’ll never sing me a lullaby, as he pledged he would. I believe he would have kept his word. You’ll suffer, Captain, as a consequence of that.’
Shanks stood rigid with terror, his sang-froid having all at once deserted him, staring incredulously at the soot-blackened relic Rachel held in her hand; though it was more of a claw than a hand in truth Edie thought, knuckled, boney, close to fleshless.
‘I could help you,’ Shanks said to her.
‘I can be helped, Captain, it’s true. Someone good could give me respite. Sergeant Napier might have done that, since he was courageous and true and kindly. ‘Twas your tinkering magic killed him before he could.’
‘Don’t underestimate my power,’ Shanks said, but there was the keening note of a plea in his voice, undermining his words.
The leer of Rachel’s gash of a mouth stretched further. Edie winced and Shanks half-stumbled a retreating step. She said, ‘You have no power. The black haired lady burned your power to ash not half an hour since.’
‘It can’t be over even before it’s begun,’ Shanks said. His voice was petulant and fearful and a whisper now.
‘You think your magic a match for mine?’ Rachel sounded scornful. More ominously, to Edie, she sounded amused.
‘We needn’t be enemies,’ Shanks said.
But Rachel Ballantyne had finished with debate and negotiation, boringly adult stuff for any little ten-year-old. ‘Turn away and close your eyes, Mr. Fortescue and Miss Chambers,’ she said, ‘while I show Captain Shanks my true self. Put your hands over your ears. Open your eyes again only when you’re quite sure all is become still and quiet once more.’
Edie was thinking how composedly Rachel spoke for a child, the finality of her tone as unsettling as the sight of her. She did as she’d been told. When the screaming began, she sang to herself to drive out the sound, but could still hear it. She was surprised at how long it went on for. She opened her eyes only when she was sure all was silent and still. She looked at her step-father, who looked at her as he struggled with the knots in the rope binding his ankles.
Epilogue
Fortescue and Edie found the same freshwater tarn Terry Conway had located, both so thirsty they were almost beyond speech in the aftermath of their drugged slumber. And it was there that Ruthie and Patrick Lassiter found them in the early hours of the morning.
They’d had to pass quite close to the settlement on their journey from the heights, and by then it was after midnight, but if the old colony’s ghosts were present, they were sleeping, for which Ruthie and Lassiter too were both grateful.
They waited for it to become fully light before setting off for Stornoway aboard the R.I their supposed rescue party had arrived aboard. That had been left intact. Dennis had been the boat-burning Shanks. His grandfather hadn’t bothered with such spiteful trivialities. Such anyway was Ruthie’s theory, who explained why she thought Dennis had presented the clues he had in the pages of Island Life.
His grandfather’s book had been in Dennis Shanks’ possession for 16 years and the occult powers he’d accrued suggested he’d studied it rigorously. He would have seen and learned the spells and incantations keeping its author safe from demonic interference. He would have practiced and recited them. He wanted to become as powerful as his ancestor, that ambition luring him inexorably into a cleverly sprung trap. The significant difference between the two men was that David Shanks would never have jeopardised his power and security by putting the book where it was at risk of being destroyed.
Theosophy had informed much of his grandfather’s early dabbling in magic. The book he’d compiled testified to that. At some level, perhaps unconsciously, Dennis had feared the threat of the Dweller on the Threshold. Taking the book to New Hope, building the monument that housed it, giving the location of his grandfather’s protection in the novel, was his guarantee of revenge should that suspicion prove eventually to be true.
The Colony Trilogy Page 50