Collectively, the contents of the trunk had brought a series of archive keepers and cataloguers episodes of bad luck. But Fortescue seemed to have become impervious to this, perhaps in the way someone who’d been vaccinated with a small sample of something virulent became subsequently immune to the disease itself. For a while he’d carried Ballantyne’s pocket watch with him everywhere, as a reminder of the fortitude he’d once shown on New Hope, this after the death of his wife unmanned him with grief and he’d daily need of proof that he’d once been strong.
Then he’d met Ruthie Gillespie. And a few months after meeting her, he’d quietly returned the slave ship captain’s Breguet to what should by rights have been its resting place. Except that Ballantyne’s watch was disinclined to rest, he thought now with a grim smile, opening the room’s door and then fumbling slightly for the iron key on his ring of them that would unfasten the sea chest’s lock.
Ballantyne’s chest had his initials inlaid on the wooden curvature of its lid. It was a personal touch that traversed the centuries with the intimacy of a whisper or a hug. All around Fortescue were the sort of marine artefacts of which he’d been this museum’s keeper. There were the tattered flags of battle and the oars of jolly boats and beaten drums and muskets with barrels fire-hardened in the ardent clamour of battle.
He opened the chest. He reached for Ballantyne’s watch, glittering proud amid the trappings of rank and items of antique plunder. And he felt it tick strongly with its pulse of sprung, impossible life, its blued steel fingers showing as they always did the time now, correct and precise.
He’d needed to do this, he realized, he’d needed this tangible example of something finely crafted and completely practical and totally other-worldly in the restlessly industrious way it toiled on, defying the laws of physics with its rhythmic, unstoppable life. He’d needed this evidence, this cold, hard demonstration that there were forces in the world simply inexplicable. The sceptic in him had sought this proof.
He noticed then a single finger or thumbprint smeared sweatily on the watch’s case back. He frowned. The print suggested that the sea chest had been recently opened. Someone had handled the watch, someone less than fastidious in their approach to the past and its surviving relics. Unless they’d just been fearful and careless as a consequence. The atmosphere down there could do that to people, Fortescue knew from his past experience.
He was at his destination in Manchester by 10.15am and by 10.30 the introductions had been completed and Georgia Tremlett had the Horan journal between her manicured hands. She looked very much the modern breed of academic, the sort with a regular gym habit and an eye for designer labels. She wore her hair short and tortoiseshell glasses with round frames. He didn’t think the glasses a prop. They didn’t make her look particularly studious, but they did look expensive.
‘Give me an hour,’ she said, leafing through the journal’s pages; through Thomas Horan’s fastidious copperplate, his steady depiction of an honourable man compromised by a sordid trade and embroiled in a hellish and uncanny episode. ‘I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forwards to reading this.’
Fortescue was reminded then that Horan had felt moved to hide his account from the world. Writing it had perhaps been cathartic for him; but he’d been so afraid of a family member or friend discovering it, he’d hidden it in a played-out shaft, sealed off and abandoned, at the mine where he’d treated the workers for free; a man so ashamed of his past, by then he’d become someone else. In Barnsley, he was Thomas Garland. By then, he’d taken his wife’s maiden name.
He found a quiet spot in the college building’s grounds, a cluster of benches around a fountain in the shade of a spread of conifers. He called Patsy Lassiter and told him where he was and who it was he’d shortly be with.
‘This is likely to be illuminating, light on darkness,’ Lassiter said.
‘Do you know who’s on the island now?’
‘Just a skeleton maintenance crew and a six-strong security team and Baxter’s architect, who is supposed to be leaving this morning, weather permitting, which it isn’t at present.’
‘Who’s your source?’
‘For meteorological info, I always use the BBC’s weather site.’
‘I meant for the New Hope stuff. You know I did.’
‘I made some pretty good friends in Southern Isles Area Command when I was on the island restoring the Shanks cottage. And if communications systems worked on New Hope I could talk to Derek Johnson, the head of Baxter’s security boys there. He was a Met police sergeant until starting his own business in the spring of last year. But my source is actually your stepdaughter. She cooked me dinner two nights ago.’
Fortescue was quiet. Then he said, ‘Bet she had you singing for your supper.’
Lassiter chuckled. ‘Like a canary,’ he said.
‘Did she tell you whether she’d finalized her interview with Felix Baxter?’
‘She’s hoping to do that this week. Do you ever feel, Phil, that our involvement with New Hope’s something we don’t have total control over?’
‘I’ve felt that from the start, Patsy.’
‘Brief me on what your expert has to say about what you’ve given her to read.’
‘You’ll be the first to know,’ Fortescue said, which wasn’t quite true. He’d be a close second, but Ruthie would be first. He thought about what he’d just said to Patsy thinking that if it hadn’t been for New Hope, he’d never have loved and then lost and grieved for Jane. He’d never have met or come to love his stepdaughter. He’d never have encountered Patsy, who was the best friend he had left alive. And Ruthie Gillespie would always have remained someone of whom he was entirely unaware.
Georgia Tremlett looked pale, when he knocked at its door and then entered her office. She sat behind her desk with the journal closed in front of her. She rose and offered him coffee and then poured for both of them from a cafetière into mugs on a little wooden tray. They faced each other seated across her desk.
She said, ‘There are differing theories as to the origin and nature of what the Albacheians called The Being that Hungers in the Darkness. And there are obvious mythological parallels elsewhere at different times in different regions of every continent.’
Fortescue frowned. He couldn’t think of any obvious parallels.
She said, ‘They believed it originated in a duplicate world, a world the mirror image of ours except essentially dark and corrupt. You invite it to be born here instead of there and it germinates and grows and becomes sensate and of course hungry. Only someone with enormous power could achieve this voidal transition.’
‘And Shaddeh had that power?’
‘Horan’s journal gives an insight into the character of the man universally regarded as the greatest West African sorcerer of the modern age.’
‘What are the other theories?’
‘Some scholars maintain that there’s a clandestine side to our existing world, a netherworld, if you will. It’s here among us but conceals itself. The Albacheian sorcerers discovered or created a portal into it and developed a way to engage with its inhabitants.’
‘None of this is very comforting.’
‘The third and final theory is that these are alien species. Some of the Albacheian art and iconography supports that argument. So does the long lifespan of the beings and the fact that they’re born already carrying their own offspring and are almost impossible to kill. Biologically, they don’t much resemble mortal creatures in some significant regards.’
‘Tell me about the parallels.’
‘The closest would be the Wendigo believed in by the Algonquian people in Native American mythology. Almost equally close is Grendel in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf.’
‘Beowulf kills Grendel.’
‘The significant point there being that of all the warriors in the known world, only the greatest of them, Beowulf, can kill her.’
Fortescue hesitated before saying what he said next. Then he sa
id, ‘I saw this creature. The Wendigo and Grendel were both anthropomorphic. The thing I saw was arachnid.’
Georgia Tremlett nodded. ‘That’s its natural form. It can only become humanoid after a sustained period of study. It would have learned to appear human to Ballantyne’s colonists. It would have lapsed and then been still studying David Shanks when he fled the island, which is why he survived it. How long were there people on New Hope for during the expedition you took part in?’
‘About six weeks in the run up, to secure the island against spoiler stories in competing media. It was sponsored as an exclusive. The actual expedition only lasted a few chaotic days.’
‘Not long enough,’ she said, shaking her head.
But Patsy Lassiter was there for six months and felt watched every waking moment.
‘I didn’t kill it, did I?’
‘The recent disappearance on New Hope would suggest otherwise.’
‘I recited the incantation Shaddeh made Horan write down.’
‘And you’re still alive. So maybe you did kill it. But you left its offspring on the island, growing in strength and appetite and growing in cunning too, all the time. The Being that Hungers is a very quick learner.’
‘What about Rachel Ballantyne?’
Georgia Tremlett shuddered. ‘An even darker kind of magic,’ she said. ‘That was Shaddeh probably so weak with delirium he was tempted into playing God. The thing Rachel Ballantyne became in her living death’s a persistent affront to the natural order. She’s a grave insult to nature itself. Death is supposed to be a one-way street, that’s emphatically the deal. Her continued existence makes the island a place of dangerous volatility.’
‘The weather’s pretty untrustworthy,’ Fortescue said. ‘And radio signals mostly don’t exist there.’
Dr. Tremlett laughed, bleakly. ‘That’ll be the very least of it,’ she said. ‘The Albacheians believed a creature such as Rachel Ballantyne’s become makes death itself contagious. I’m translating freely, but they called any domain roamed by what Rachel is now a Land without Light. They called it a Kingdom of Decay. To them, it was the Region of the Dreamless or the Realm of Anguish.’
‘The names sound quite poetic, but I get your drift,’ Fortescue said. ‘It sounds like they were very familiar with magic.’
‘It’s the principal reason for their extinction,’ Dr. Tremlett said. ‘They came to depend upon it. That corrupted and weakened them because it cost them their will for effort and enterprise and the other imperatives that make a society healthy and discipline it into being ethically sound.’
Fortescue remembered that the woman opposite him has started out as an anthropologist.
She said, ‘Shaddeh had every reason to hate Ballantyne, because according to Horan’s account, the man was basically his executioner. But the revenge he took on him was a terrible abuse of occult power, even by the rather decadent Albacheian standards of the late 18th century.’
‘Do you believe in magic personally?’
‘I’ve always kept an open mind,’ she said. She nodded at the journal, between the resting elbows supporting her chin. ‘This has opened it quite a lot further.’
‘An entrepreneur named Felix Baxter is planning to open a New Age resort on New Hope in the spring.’
‘I know, quaint habit though it is, I still read newspapers. Plus, I was born in Aberdeen, so I have a patriot’s interest in matters Scottish.’
Fortescue hadn’t been able to place her accent. Maybe there was a Celtic lilt, under all the layers of education. He said, ‘What do you think of that?’
She said, ‘New Hope Island has claimed lives ever since the days of the Colony Seamus Ballantyne established there. What you’ve shown me today gives me no reason to believe that pattern won’t continue.’
‘Can it be stopped?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘But I’ll do everything I can to try to find out.’ She gestured at the journal. ‘Could I hold onto this for a while, for further study?’
‘You can keep it,’ he said. ‘It’s mine to give, so now it’s yours to have.’
Chapter Six
The concierge at the Vincent had told Ruthie that there were four or five really first-rate pubs in Southport but that the stand-out for him was The Guest House, less than half a mile away. It had been built in the arts and crafts style and was completely authentic and intact. He said the pub was quietly atmospheric, the staff courteous, the food excellent and though she didn’t look very much like a beer drinker, the brews available varied and immaculately kept.
She’d spent the morning in their hotel room writing. She’d met her word-count quota without too much of a struggle. This new book was a departure for her, because its intended readership was fully-fledged adults. In the past, she’d always written for children or for teenagers. Almost eight years on from her debut, she was stretching herself. The twin challenges were an engaging plot and the right tone. If you were confident of your story, your characters would evolve naturally, or so she told herself. It was relatively early days, but going well so far.
She planned to visit the Atkinson, an arts centre on Lord Street that had re-opened a couple of years earlier after a massive refurbishment job to rave reviews. She also wanted to walk along the seafront and see the Marine Lake and Rotten Row. But first she would walk to the Guest House in Houghton Street and have some lunch. It was one o’clock and she was hungry. Phil had called her half an hour earlier to say that he was going to go back to the museum in Liverpool before returning to Southport, to check something out.
‘Didn’t you go there on your way to Manchester to get the Horan journal?’
‘I did, but something Georgia Tremlett said has got me intrigued.’
‘Did she say anything interesting?’
‘None of what she said was reassuring.’
‘My life has taken a dark turn since I met you.’
‘You asked me to meet you in the first place because your life had taken a dark turn already. Then you asked me out. You’re a writer. You should be strong on chronology.’
‘Ah, but I write fiction, not history,’ she said. ‘I can believe what suits me.’
‘There’s really no answer to that.’
‘What time will you be back?’
‘At about four.’
‘Meet me at the Atkinson coffee bar.’
‘Done.’
She walked along Lord Street, past Southport’s austerely beautiful war memorial and cenotaph; the great trees of the boulevard unburdened by leaves, the wrought-iron and glass canopies of the shop-fronts on the opposite side of the road rusting genteelly, the sky above grey and uniform but the day so far mild, dry and virtually windless.
The pub was quiet. She ordered her food at the bar and bought a large glass of white wine and went and sat in a small, wood-paneled room to the right as you faced the entrance. The single window was leaded and didn’t allow much light from the dullness prevalent outside. The paneling had a dark patina and the period furnishings were subdued. There was one other person in the room, a woman reading an old Penguin paperback with its curled and faded trademark orange cover. The stillness there might have struck Ruthie as odd, were she not preoccupied with a plot contradiction she hadn’t quite resolved that morning.
A cleaving blow of despondency hit her all at once, suddenly and completely unexpectedly, almost depriving her of breath. It passed, but it obliged her to glance at the woman seated rigidly behind the old paperback alone in the far corner.
This woman more than slightly resembled Ruthie herself. She had the same dark eyes and crimson mouth and the same straight black hair and precisely cut fringe. They both had pale complexions, but there were contrasting reasons for that. Ruthie’s skin was naturally pale. The dead woman, when she studied her, had the pallor of a corpse. Now, the ghost shifted her eyes from her book to meet Ruthie’s. They were absent of life, yet curious, which was unsettling. The woman was dressed in a double- buttoned coat of bl
ack wool. The buttons were metal and lustreless and the fabric fusty, now that Ruthie looked and her hair had a dull, blowsy lifelessness.
If she gets up, Ruthie thought, if she lurches to her feet, I’ll scream. But the ghost was here for her, she knew. It was why she felt so desolate. She gulped wine with her glass between the grip of both shaking hands and stood instead herself. She came out from behind her table and glanced out of the room towards the bar, just to ensure that she was still in the here and now. Behind the bar, the polite young bloke who’d served her polished a dimpled pint mug absently.
Ruthie walked over to the spectre and sat in a chair, not close enough to be reached out at and grasped between the grip of dead fingers, but as close as she dared get; close enough to converse. Proximity did nothing for the woman’s appearance. The book between her stiff hands was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
‘Has Fortescue not told you about me?’
Her voice was throaty with disuse. Her mouth moved when she spoke, but she didn’t shape the words. It was like watching a ventriloquist who wasn’t very good.
‘No,’ Ruthie said.
‘My name is Elizabeth Burrows. I once stole something from Seamus Ballantyne’s sea chest. When the chest is opened, I’m sometimes summoned back like this. I think that’s my punishment. I’m not proud of my dishevelment. I was stylish in life. I watched him for a while, your Keeper of Maritime Artefacts. He was aware of my doing so. I’m not surprised he’s tried to forget.’
‘Why are you talking to me?’
‘Your Professor’s just done something very brave and extremely stupid. He might share it with you but he’ll probably be too noble for that.’ Elizabeth Burrows’ ghost rasped out a chuckle. She said, ‘He’s a good one, as men go.’
Ruthie had an intuition then that Elizabeth hadn’t much liked men.
‘It was the fashion, politically,’ she said, ‘I was a student and there was a gender war. My day would seem very quaint to you, dear.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 58