The Colony Trilogy

by Cottam, F. G.

  They planned a live-in concierge for whom Baxter’s people were still thinking up a hipper, less stuffy job-title. But that person had not yet been hired. None of the lower-rank staff had been recruited. There was no one down there to let whoever was doing the hammering in. More pertinently, there was no one to protect her should the person at the door grow impatient and force an intrusion.

  That’s if it was a person. Waiting for the banging at the main door to resume, she remembered the manner in which the sitting room of her suite had grown dark and the whump of impact and the thorny bristle still wedged in the crack in her supposedly unbreakable picture window.

  She switched off the movie she’d been trying to watch. She looked around her, absently inventorying the high-end fixtures and fittings among which she stood. Just for a moment Helena felt a bit like that screaming woman must have felt in her deserted hotel in a TV movie she’d seen once, years ago, entitled The Shining. Helena wasn’t one of nature’s screamers. But that hammering on the main door had just started again and was doing everything possible to push her in the direction of flapping, screeching, bug-eyed hysteria.

  She had no means of calling for help. She had nothing resembling a weapon. She thought about this. She thought about the island’s baleful reputation, about its reputed ghosts. Maybe that was Seamus Ballantyne himself down there, ragged and frayed and indignant about the space surrounding her she’d stolen from his little kingdom’s sky. Or perhaps it was someone more recent, Greg Cody cold and clammy having stumbled dead from the chilly depths.

  She went to the bathroom and her disobedient fingers pushed everything on the shelf above it crashing into the sink. The hammering continued. By now she was badly shaken. She retrieved a deodorant aerosol and shook it. She did so deliberately, though her hand was shaking anyway. If she smoked she’d have a lighter and the means to improvise a flame-thrower from the aerosol can, just by igniting the spray jet at the nozzle. But she’d never smoked. What she had instead was a piss-poor alternative to pepper spray or Mace. It wouldn’t deter Ballantyne, if he’d dragged himself from hell to confront her. It wouldn’t disarm whatever had collided with the window and eclipsed the light.

  She heard a voice, then, faint but clear. It was shouting her name and the tone of it sounded familiar. She knew it, she realized. She closed her eyes and relief bathed her like some buttery lotion applied expensively to the skin. Only then did she notice that her skin had been covered in raised goose-bumps that were fading now. It was Derek Johnson’s voice. Johnson was the head of the island’s small security team, charged with maintaining the island’s integrity and guarding the plant and other equipment there. She’d seen him only that morning, when he’d come from their base at the island’s western extremity to tell her about poor Greg Cody.

  She went down and let him in. He was large and burly looking in his fur-lined Davy Crockett hat and heavy gloves and ski parka. She could hear the tick of the engine cooling in the night chill on the quad bike behind him he’d ridden there. She had recovered her composure to the point where she could just about resist hugging him in joyful relief.

  ‘You look pale, Ms. Davenport,’ he said. ‘Hope I didn’t startle you.’

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  She made him coffee. He took off his jacket. His sleeves were rolled to above the elbow and his thick arms were heavily inked in Maori-type designs. He had dense dark hair and his brow was an Easter Island ridge. His eyes were warm and friendly but he looked a handful, which he probably was. The other five members of the security crew were built to similar dimensions. She was reminded for the second time that day that Felix Baxter didn’t scrimp.

  ‘Why have you come here, Derek?’

  ‘Fluke, really, Ms. Davenport,’ he said.

  ‘Helena, please,’ she said.

  ‘Most of the time, that big analogue transmitter we’ve got is just an ornament. There’s something strange about atmospheric conditions on the island.’

  You can say that again, Helena thought.

  ‘All we get out of it most of the time is this banshee wail. It sounds like something not human, singing. Must be static or interference, I suppose. Very intermittently, though, it functions. It functioned an hour ago when the chief came on and ordered me over here to come and check on you.’

  ‘This was Baxter himself?’

  ‘He’s the only chief I answer to.’

  ‘Sounds like a premonition.’

  ‘Maybe it was,’ Johnson said. ‘He actually instructed me to stay the night, here at the complex, both nights, till you’re scheduled to leave, if you’ve no objection?’

  ‘I’ve no objection whatsoever,’ Helena said.

  ‘I think Cody is the reason he sent me,’ Johnson said. ‘Cody isn’t really adding up.’

  ‘Does the island ever strike you as kind of spooky?’

  Johnson didn’t answer for a moment. He held her gaze. He said, ‘The mood’s shifted since Greg disappeared. It sounds a bit callous now but to us all, behind his back, he’s always been Captain Sensible. Not rash in the slightest, if you get my drift. Not a fanciful sort. Not accident prone, without some provocation. And I felt watched, riding over here tonight. I didn’t see anyone, but it wasn’t a comfortable feeling.’

  ‘What’s the official line on Cody?’

  Johnson shrugged. ‘There isn’t one. The chief says it’s unhelpful to speculate. He’s severely allergic to bad publicity. I’m sure you know that.’

  ‘Off the record?’

  ‘He screamed, Helena. Every single one of us heard it. It woke us. Do people scream, walking into the sea?’

  Helena swallowed. It was time to change the subject. ‘I’d just started watching a movie, before you started banging on the door,’ she said, ‘300.’

  Johnson grinned. ‘Gerard Butler in a jockstrap,’ he said. ‘Lena Headey in not very much at all.’

  ‘So you’ve seen it already. Could you bear to watch it again?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said.

  ‘There’s beer in the fridge if you’d prefer that to coffee,’ Helena said. ‘There are tortilla chips in the kitchen.’

  His grin broadened. He said, ‘Shame we can’t send out for pizza.’

  She smiled at that. The joke was a bit limp, but she couldn’t honestly remember feeling more delighted in her adult life, just at the sight and sound of another human being. She’d been properly spooked. And if her reaction was out of proportion to what had actually occurred, it didn’t feel at all that way to Helena.

  ‘I was in the settlement when I heard the singing,’ Lassiter told Edie. ‘It was this forlorn, papery sound. The song was, The Recruited Collier. You remember when we were leaving 18 months ago, you told me to bone-up on my folk music if I was coming back to the island?’

  ‘You said you listened to a bit of Laura Marling and I said that wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘I’d taken your advice by the time I returned. Eliza Carthy, Cara Dillon, The Fishermen’s Friends, even a bit of Bellowhead. And Kate Rusby, so I was familiar with the song I was hearing.’

  ‘Next you’ll tell me you were there in the dark.’

  ‘I was. After Alice died I was invulnerable in the sense that I didn’t fear anything because nothing could be worse than that. I’d been terrified of losing her because I was so scared of being left alone and that had gone and happened to me, the thing I was most afraid of.’

  ‘Sometimes love is selfish.’

  ‘Yes, Edie, sometimes it is.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Looking for what it was I found.’

  He followed the source of the singing. It drifted out of a metal grill over an aperture between two settlement buildings, the gap between their stone flanks narrow enough to conceal the entrance unless you knew it was there. In moonlight, Lassiter could see a set of descending steps roughly cut into stone. The grill was iron and rusted in flakes that the metal shed when he tried to shift it and though it moved heavily
, it wasn’t secured. Hinges moaned in stiff protest after two centuries of disuse. Cold iron death-rattled in his grip. The singer he was listening to hadn’t apparently required the space he did to get down there.

  There was a torch in his pocket he didn’t take out or switch on. The beam of bright light would have been intrusive. Darkness was relative that far north in June and there was enough dusky illumination for him to see by as he descended the steps and his eyes adjusted.

  The remains of the colony’s dead, those that had been fortunate to die naturally, were laid out in cavities cut into the rock. They were skeletal under the tattered remnants of their clothing and shoes and they were still. Some of them were elderly. About half of them were children. He’d found their sepulchre. More accurately, he’d been led to it. Or was it truer to say he’d been lured there?

  Rachel Ballantyne was not quite still. She was clothed in a fusty, ragged nightgown and her hair was a straw halo of neglected curls. She had her back to him and sang with her hands at her back, clasped demurely at the base of her spine. It didn’t do to examine the flesh of her fingers too closely. After all this time, their resemblance to claws was too close for comfort.

  After a moment, Lassiter saw that her torso was entirely motionless because of course little Rachel had not been mortal for an age. She sang without breathing. She had no requirement of breath. This was unnerving. More unnerving was his observation that she performed her song with her feet, petite and filthy, trailing the ground down there by as much as a metre. The song, with its sad lyrics and melancholy refrain, eventually concluded.

  ‘You’re a curious man, Mr. Lazziter,’ Rachel said, into the thick, subterranean silence.

  Her speaking voice was somewhere between a whisper and a moan. Her accent was the spoken English of two centuries ago. He didn’t think it safe just then to answer her.

  ‘Fierce curious,’ she said, ‘even with your heart cleaved. I’m sorry for your loss.’

  ‘And I for yours,’ he said. His voice, to his own ears, sounded level and calm. It was not a reflection of how he felt. Her torment was awful, almost contagious this close. The scent of human decay came off her in a sweetish, nauseous assault. He dreaded her turning around, just drifting unmoored through the dim space down there and thereby showing him her time-dimpled vestige of a face. She might touch him. He could not imagine anything more dreadful than her cold and lonely caress.

  ‘Did you like my singing?’

  ‘It was beautiful, Rachel.’

  ‘Beautiful, as I once was. At least, my father said I was.’

  ‘By all accounts, he was not a man inclined to lie.’

  The thing that had once been Rachel Ballantyne hung there silently for a while. Lassiter thought this might be his cue to leave, but didn’t wish to miscalculate that. And when she spoke again, he realized he’d been mistaken. She said, ‘I’d beg one favour of you, Mr. Lazziter.’

  ‘I’ll do anything I can,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve never asked a favour once of anyone till now.’

  ‘Then I’d say after all this time you’ve earned the right.’

  ‘Tis grievous troublesome a task, Commander.’

  ‘I’ll do anything I can for you,’ he said again.

  ‘End this for me,’ she said. She held out her arms to either side of her in a pose just for a glimpse in the prevailing gloom ragged and angelic. Whatever she was, whatever wretched thing she’d become in death, her dimensions remained those of the petite child she’d been alive. ‘I’m tired and broken and piteous,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorely desirous of rest.’

  ‘If I can find a way to bring you peace, I will,’ he said. ‘I promise you that, Rachel.’

  ‘Find a way,’ she said. ‘Help me die.’

  And so Patrick Lassiter completed the story of his stay residing in the cottage on New Hope Island. Edie knew there was more, but he’d stuck to the facts. The rest concerned his suspicion that something hostile and malicious observed him there and that its hostility grew until the balance between his wish to grieve privately and his need to escape its growing threat had shifted far enough to force his hand.

  Edie said, ‘My stepfather is a man who always keeps his word. In that regard, I expect you’re exactly like him. It means you’ll be going back there. You’ll have to. You’ll do all you can to keep your pledge to Rachel Ballantyne.’

  Lassiter seemed to ponder this. He cleared his throat with a cough before speaking. He said, ‘I’ve never been a father. And she isn’t a child, really and hasn’t been for a very long time. But her torment’s a terrible thing to witness. I’m sorrier for her than I can say. She deserves an end to her suffering. That encounter haunts me, Edie.’

  ‘It would haunt anyone. But you’re not just anyone. She chose you and it sounds as though she chose wisely.’

  ‘Your stepfather is going to find out everything he can about the magic practiced by the sorcerer described in Thomas Horan’s journal. The island is a malevolent place again and in a few months Felix Baxter plans to have it packed with affluent New Age tourists.’

  ‘Folkloric myths from 200 years ago aren’t going to give Baxter a moment’s pause for thought. He’d think my stepdad a crank. He’d laugh out loud at him.’

  ‘Laughter can sometimes make a very hollow sound,’ Lassiter said

  ‘Things changed for you there after you found those secret places,’ Edie said. ‘Someone or something wasn’t happy about you finding them. You were tolerated before that. After that, you were trespassing.’

  ‘You’re very astute.’

  ‘I’ve had some good teachers,’ she said. ‘When are you going back there?’

  ‘It has to be before Baxter’s experience opens up. And it can’t come soon enough for Rachel.’

  ‘Despite the monster?’

  ‘Like Phil, I keep my promises.’

  ‘I’d guessed that.’

  ‘But I don’t think I can keep this one without help.’

  Chapter Four

  Ruthie Gillespie was an early riser. She woke every morning with a twin craving for caffeine and nicotine she liked to answer at the table in her garden, regardless of the weather, with a cafetière of coffee and two or three cigarettes, getting these needs out of the way before brushing her teeth vigorously and greeting her guest and lover with what she hoped was an innocent smile.

  She was up at 6am on this particular Sunday morning and didn’t wait for Phil to stir naturally. They’d had a pretty early night and he’d had enough sleep to her mind by 7am and she had a proposal to put to him that was best served by an early start.

  ‘Is there a fire?’ he said, when she’d shaken him awake, ‘Did somebody die?’

  ‘Do you think you can research your voodoo academic on the move?’

  ‘Depends,’ he said, after a pause. ‘I can’t do it at the wheel of a car.’

  ‘But you can do it in the passenger seat.’

  ‘Theoretically,’ he said. ‘But why would I have the need?’

  ‘Because we’re going north today,’ she said. ‘We can spend the night at that nice hotel that footballer owns in Southport. We can be there by mid-afternoon. We can take a stroll along Lord Street and visit the arcade at the end of the pier.’

  ‘Why on earth would you want to visit a seaside town, when you live in one?’

  ‘Because it’s romantic,’ she said, ‘because it’s spontaneous, because Ventnor doesn’t have a pier. And because it means you’ll only have to drive 18 miles tomorrow morning to pick up the Horan journal from your old museum.’

  ‘Steven Gerard doesn’t own the Vincent. He’s just a shareholder.’

  ‘Splitting hairs because you’ve woken up grumpy,’ she said, reaching for a pillow and clubbing his head with it.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘It’ll be exciting for me,’ she said, ‘driving your car.’

  ‘Exciting is one way of putting it.’

  Fortescue’s car was a 21 year-old Pininfarina-design
ed Fiat Coupe Turbo his brother had sold him claiming it was a babe-magnet. This had not proven to be the case. Not on a single occasion, it hadn’t. The car was fast and powerful and nice to drive if you didn’t mind positioning your backside six inches above the tarmac but he felt ambivalent about it and very ambivalent about someone so inexperienced as Ruthie was, driving it the 300 mile route north to Merseyside.

  ‘I know you’ve got mixed feelings about your car,’ she said. ‘Basically you were conned into buying it. But that doesn’t matter now because I’m in your life.’

  ‘And you’re totally indifferent to cars.’

  ‘Picky about my men, though,’ she said.

  ‘Less of the plural, please,’ he said.

  ‘Are we going north today or not?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Then get your arse in gear, Professor,’ she said. ‘We’ve no time to lose.’

  Edie Chambers had arrived home on Saturday night in a taxi Patsy Lassiter had ordered and insisted on paying for. She’d been troubled by a bad dream in which Rachel Ballantyne had turned floating in space to face her and had possessed the features of her flogged ghost Jacob Parr, lewd and rum-ravaged and scarily revolting above her waifish body and framed by her lustreless blonde curls.

  Despite the dream, she woke up on Sunday morning feeling refreshed and energized. He kept booze for guests, but she’d been sufficiently diplomatic at Patsy’s house to drink nothing stronger than Diet Coke. She was clear-headed and decided to do some research into Felix Baxter, the property magnate and entrepreneur behind the New Hope Experience.

  She hoped to finalise a date for their interview over the coming week and knew that thorough research saved time later face to face for the really important stuff. Questions asked from a position of obvious ignorance understandably annoyed interview subjects. Asking them was amateurish and insulting and she’d make sure she was well informed enough about him to avoid doing that.

  He was 39 years old and single, though there was a love child he’d fathered in an early relationship with a regional beauty queen from his home city of Newcastle. His son was named Danny and he was 18 and enjoying a gap-year travelling before going to Goldsmith’s College at the University of London to study film production. Judging from the number of pictures of them together at premiers and concerts and the biggest fixtures on the football calendar, the two were close.