The biggest selling of the mid-market tabloids had run Edith Chambers’ taster story as a full-page exclusive. Ruthie was thrilled for Edie and the story was punchily written, but she didn’t think they’d have given it quite the prominence they had without the Chronicle’s New Hope history.
The paper had been Alexander McIntyre’s flagship title and had sponsored the expedition in ’10. That said, she thought the average reader would find the story entertaining enough. Felix Baxter’s vision was ambitious and his enthusiasm, to most people, probably contagious. There was plenty of gloom and doom in the news and the New Hope Island Experience story was by refreshing contrast upbeat and optimistic. Ruthie thought the doom and gloom would come to it eventually, though. They just hadn’t yet arrived.
She waited until 7am and then called Phil.
‘I’ve seen it,’ he said.
‘You must be very proud of Edie, though?’
‘That’s like asking a Titanic survivor did they enjoy the voyage otherwise.’
‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’
‘Edie approached Baxter because she’s ambitious and learned a bit about opportunism from her Auntie Lucy. But Baxter probably gets interview requests every day of the week and routinely turns them down in the old-fashioned belief that time’s money. So why say yes to a student journalist?’
‘Her surname rang a bell and he checked her out,’ Ruthie said. ‘He knew her mum went on the expedition. He probably wanted to pump her for what she knows about the island.’
‘Edie called me last night,’ Fortescue said. ‘She called me after she filed the Chronicle piece. That’s exactly what he did, yesterday morning, before the interview proper.’
‘What did she tell him?’
‘New Hope’s a dangerous place.’
‘Not what he wants to hear.’
‘She’s flying there with him tomorrow, weather permitting, coming back Monday.’
‘Well, like you said, she’s an ambitious girl. Did she tell you anything else?’
‘Yeah,’ Fortescue said. ‘She thinks something’s happened recently to Baxter. She thinks he’s had an experience that didn’t fill him with hope, new or otherwise.’
‘He was in Liverpool last weekend,’ Ruthie said. ‘He mentions that in Edie’s piece. Maybe Lizzie Burrows had a busier schedule than just me.’
‘He asked Edie specifically about Rachel Ballantyne. She said he didn’t look at all comfortable doing it.’
Ruthie said, ‘Nothing’s going to stop him going ahead, not now it’s not. A quitter’s the last thing he is.’
‘He’s a megalomaniac,’ Fortescue said. ‘I reckon he’s probably a lot like Seamus Ballantyne was.’
‘That thought occurred to me this morning.’
‘Spooky.’
‘Speaking of which, Phil, we should do the bracelet thing tonight, The Bite of Fright?’
‘The tooth is out there,’ he said.
‘It’s us going plaque in time.’
‘Or plaque to the future,’ he said.
‘Either way, we’ll get to the root of it.’
‘A slightly gum prospect.’
They’d joked and punned around this sobering eventuality since journeying back south. It was a way of trying to trivialize and domesticate what they intended to do. It hadn’t really worked, though. And she was right, he thought, they couldn’t put it off indefinitely.
They concluded their call. Ruthie had gone inside to make it. She brewed more coffee. It was 7.30 and not yet light. She spooned Coffee-Mate into her mug and tore the cellophane off a fresh pack of cigarettes. A growing part of her wanted to give up, but now didn’t seem a realistic time. She opened her kitchen door and went back outside to sit and smoke and contemplate in her snug parka under her table umbrella in the rain.
She thought about the Ghost of Elizabeth Burrows. She remembered her fusty elegance and her papery voice and the way the words had left her unmoving mouth. Like ventriloquism but without a dummy to complete the trick, she’d thought at the time. She wondered what kind of effort it took for someone dead to deliver a warning to someone living. What unknowable forces were at work to enable that?
She remembered then something Phil had told her Shaddeh had confided in Thomas Horan when boasting of his prowess as a magician. I can make puppets of those who take their own lives, the dying sorcerer had said. And the ship’s physician had remembered that claim and written it down in the journal he had kept on what was to be his last ever voyage aboard the slave vessel Andromeda.
Shaddeh had regretted what his dying spells and curses would eventually unleash on New Hope Island decades later. He’d been sorry, but too enfeebled to reverse what he’d set in motion. Or so Thomas Horan had written. And Shaddeh had died in the fervid stink of a ship’s hold and been buried without ceremony at sea.
Ruthie shivered. She knew that Georgia Tremlett at Manchester University had called the slave-sorcerer the greatest African magician of his time. Perhaps two centuries of rest had now revived him. He’d been very powerful. Perhaps he’d made a puppet of Elizabeth Burrows, who’d taken her own life by hanging herself in her room at a Liverpool University hall of residence. Perhaps their warning about the bracelet of teeth had really come from its original owner, regretful about his dubious accomplishments and trying to make amends or pay some kind of penance to the living.
Ruthie didn’t really want to know. She did know she never wanted another encounter with Lizzie, however well meaning it was. She didn’t think she would ever forget the ghost’s stiff fingers or forlorn touch of lost pride in how beautiful she no longer was. She would never forget her voice and would always remember the faint whiff of her odour corrupting the Guest House air.
Could anything be worse? An encounter with Rachel Ballantyne would be worse, of course. Rachel’s return after her death from diphtheria had been Shaddeh’s curse inflicted upon her father. But she’d stuck around after her father’s demise and after 200 years on New Hope spent mostly in solitude, had grown powerfully malevolent in her own right, according to a legend Ruthie had personal cause to believe entirely convincing.
Felix Baxter’s New Hope questions to Edie had mostly centred on Rachel, at least according to Phil. And Edie thought he’d been given a recent shock. He’d made a point of insisting not a single man or woman among all the people who’d worked on the New Hope Experience had ever seen or heard the island’s resident wraith.
That didn’t mean their boss hadn’t.
Ruthie wondered what Baxter had been doing in Liverpool. He could have been viewing commercial properties; potential nightclubs or leisure centres or car showrooms or just office blocks to add to his bulging portfolio. Except doing that wouldn’t do anything to provoke little Rachel into making a guest appearance.
What, then, would?
She stubbed out her cigarette and exhaled at the clouds now visible in outline in the lightening sky and lowered her head to look at her watch, and remembered with a frown the first time she’d met Phil, outside the Spice Island pub on Portsmouth Harbour in the days when he’d carried the Breguet in his bag that had once belonged to Seamus Ballantyne.
That was it, she thought. That’s where Baxter had been last weekend. Enlightenment came to her with the clarity of dawn breaking. He’d been to the museum where Phil had once worked and from where Phil had recently taken a bracelet of teeth. He’d rummaged through a trunk of her father’s belongings and little Rachel had taken exception to that. Somehow she’d allowed him a baleful glimpse of herself, despite physically residing hundreds of isolating miles away.
If she could do that, she was very powerful indeed. If she could do that, why hadn’t she shown herself in a similar way to the equally rummaging Phil? Maybe she’s on the side of the angels, Ruthie murmured under her breath to herself. And then she shivered again, because even that was a pretty disconcerting thought.
Derek Johnson had become a bit proprietorial about the New Hope Experience complex. It was his
team’s responsibility to check the place out and to do so at regular intervals. But meeting and warming to its architect and the unnerving ordeal they’d shared when the lights had gone out had made his interest somehow personal. It wasn’t that he’d become infatuated with Helena Davenport or even that he had a crush on her. He was almost ludicrously happily married. But he liked and admired her and she’d inspired a sort of loyalty in him that compelled him to try to protect her proud creation as best he could from any threat.
This didn’t mean that he felt any real fondness for her Island building. On the contrary, it had given him good cause to think it a distinctly unpleasant place. Duty was duty, however. You didn’t fulfill it by taking shortcuts or turning a convenient blind eye. There’d been a recent death on the island he categorized as highly suspicious, unwilling to collude in the convenient belief that Greg Cody had strolled screaming into the sea.
He went to give the complex its routine tour at noon on Friday. He took king of the dubious barbecue wisecracks Dave Carter with him. Dave wanted another look at the generator, still mystified as to how it could have cut out and then reactivated without a bit of deliberate tinkering. And Johnson was honestly glad of the company. He tried to tell himself that there was nothing intrinsically sinister about the building, that all sizeable buildings were a bit unnerving empty and that it was just a consequence of viewing The Shining there late at night. He was unconvinced, though. Horror movies had never scared him before.
Plus, the complex had no history. The Overlook Hotel in The Shining had been corrupted by its own past, contaminated by the evil deeds done there. But that was grasping at straws as a line of argument, he knew. The chief had given the island all those quaint place names. On a clear day, from anywhere on the island, you could see Kingdom Heights. Their base was at Shanks’s Reach. Where they were headed on the quads wasn’t far from Ballantyne Cove. But the labels didn’t charm Johnson as they were intended to. They just reminded him that New Hope’s history was bloody and mysterious.
It didn’t matter that the complex was a new build. It didn’t matter that its creator was clever and striking and charmingly human. That it was up for a slew of awards was immaterial, if it wasn’t outright ironic. All that mattered was where it was sited.
‘Location’s everything,’ Johnson said to himself. In so doing he was parroting what they always said on those junk property shows a period nursing a fractured ankle had taught him were popular on daytime television, in programmes where it was a mantra and a truism both. New Hope was a corrupt place and the complex had caught a dose of its sickly contagion. Baxter paid his wages. But it was for Helena’s sake he hoped the sickness wasn’t terminal.
At least the weather was tolerable. On calm days it made sense to travel from their compound to the complex in a clockwise semicircle from one end of the island to the other along its shore. In fine weather, the ground there was the least treacherous on New Hope; shingle giving way at low tide to hard-packed sand. Even that seemed sort of symbolic in his current mood to Johnson. The island was safest at its extremities; venture inland and the hazards began to accumulate.
He looked at Dave Carter, riding grinning straddling his quad to his right. The bikes were routine to Johnson’s boys but to Carter, probably still a bit of a novelty. He was enjoying the ride. Why shouldn’t he? The day was bright, the views breathtaking and they were being handsomely paid for doing not very much more than just being there. What wasn’t to like? Johnson resolved to try to ignore his nagging doubts and gloomy presentiments and live a bit more in a moment just then innocent and sunny. He’d have to do that. He’d crack up otherwise and start hearing and seeing things that simply weren’t there.
They arrived at the complex. The main entrance was locked, which meant that the power was on. They were in the lobby when Carter said, ‘I’m going to go and check the genny anyway, since that’s what I’m here for.’ He turned on his heels and was gone.
Johnson felt for a moment an absurd surge of disappointment. He was being ridiculous; he stood six-four in his socks and weighed 18 stone and not an ounce of it was flab. He’d been a fixture in the second-row of the Met’s first rugby 15. It was how he’d got the ankle injury that had taught him all about daytime TV while he recovered from it wearing a cast. He was no one’s idea of a pushover, least of all his own. He’d tour the place, take in the bars and restaurants, the cinema and recreation rooms, the master suites, including the one Helena had occupied.
He got through all this grinding his teeth as he told himself it was just a routine inspection. His big mistake, he realized too late, was leaving the visit to Helena’s suite till last on his to-do list. It meant that by the time he swatted the passkey through the lock on what had been her door he’d fulfilled every other obligation. That made this the pinnacle or climax, didn’t it? That made it a hurdle, the final one to overcome and therefore the biggest, in his mind. He should have done this first, he thought, opening the door on trepidation mutating into fear.
There was a smell. It was faint, but undeniable, sweetish and rank and not the ghost of some expensive perfume with which its recent guest had adorned herself there. And as he entered the suite, he sensed that the smell strengthened in the direction of the bathroom. He looked around the sitting room. He felt disembodied in a curious way, exiled from the real, so that the panorama through the picture window looked more a vibrant painting, pellucid and still, rather than the real world trembling with exterior life.
There was something old about the smell. Decay wasn’t the whole of it. It hinted at an antique time, was the odour of life lived centuries ago; linen and camphor, carbolic and tallow, dirty skin clothed in rags soiled and musty.
‘My imagination,’ he said out loud, ‘has to be.’ But to his own ears his voice sounded tremulous, dry with the terror making his heart thump audibly in his chest. ‘Get a grip,’ he said, disgusted with his cowardice. He forced himself to walk towards the bathroom, towards the source of the smell, to where it grew rank and fetid with its own potency, turning from an odour as he reached the open bathroom door, into a ripe stench.
A single word had been written on the bathroom mirror. It had been scrawled there in soap and grime. It read:
EVAEL
A hand touched Johnson’s shoulder lightly. He jumped and twisted in one fearful reflex and it was Carter, staring now at the soapy message and growing pale as he did so.
‘You left the door open, mate. Had to see the place, didn’t I, your and Helena’s passion pad?’ He nodded his head at the writing. ‘What the fuck’s that?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Someone can’t spell evil. And what’s that stink?’
‘It isn’t misspelled, Dave. It’s ‘leave,’ spelled backwards. What I mean is I’ve no idea how it got there.’
‘You think it’s a warning for us?’ Dave Carter was a Welshman, from Cardiff. It wasn’t usually obvious, but shock or distress had caused his accent to thicken suddenly. Suddenly he sounded almost caricature welsh.
‘I don’t see what else it can be,’ Johnson said.
‘But no one can get in here, it’s impossible,’ Carter said, ‘and that smell is like something dead.’
‘I think we’re about to start earning our pay,’ Johnson said.
Carter licked his lips. His eyes had grown in his head, the pupils shrunk to pinpricks with fear and alertness. He said, ‘Seriously, Deggsy, what are we going to do?’
‘We’re going to open all the windows and air the place,’ Johnson said. ‘I’m going to find some bathroom cleaner and a cloth and wipe the mirror down. Then we’re going to get out of here and have a serious talk. Is the generator okay?’
‘It’s running as sweet as.’
‘We have to decide whether to tell the others about this. I don’t want any panic, but we’re the two blokes in charge, we’re not alone here, Cody’s death was no accident and the island isn’t safe.’
‘Is that a warning, or a threat?’
Carter asked, nodding at the mirror again.
Johnson looked at the grimy, waxy scrawl. ‘I think it’s intended to be both,’ he said.
Chapter Nine
Doctor Georgia Tremlett had worked something out that Friday morning she thought might be of interest to Professor Fortescue, should he feel compelled to return to New Hope Island. She thought she had discovered a flaw or weakness in the mythical monster sometimes termed The Being that Hungers in the Darkness. It had surprised her, this conclusion. Then the insistent logic of it made it seem obvious and therefore something she felt she should actually have come to suspect much sooner than she had.
There was some mitigation for this uncharacteristic lapse in her intellectual alertness. She had been sleep-deprived by the details she had read in the Horan journal, as much a confession, she thought, as a description of the surgeon’s final voyage aboard the Andromeda. She’d found it brutal and shocking and quite haunting, all told.
And when she could sleep, she’d been troubled by bad dreams. She’d dreamed of the slave vessel’s first-mate Jacob Parr, flogged for drunkenness in Horan’s bloody account, his back sliced to ribbons by the tongues of the lash, his life saved only by the cold sea water with which Horan had bathed his wounds to combat shock and septic infection.
Parr sang a song in these dream visitations Georgia Tremlett was enduring. The song was always the same and was one of course from the era in which he’d lived. It was entitled, The Recruited Collier. It was odd hearing Parr sing it, for though his voice was tuneful enough, the words of the song were a woman’s, her sweetheart drunkenly lulled into joining the army, brutalized into a stranger to her by the incessant cruelty of the battles he subsequently fought. It was a sensitive and melancholy song.
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