He said, ‘There’s plenty of room on the island. The last thing my visitors will wish to do is despoil or intrude. They’re going to be here to celebrate the solitude and they won’t just appreciate the wilderness environment, they’ll revere it.’
‘Jet skis and zip wires don’t exactly celebrate solitude.’
‘We mean Rachel no harm. I think her tormented spirit provides one of the island’s most potent and enduring myths. It’s one we’ll respectfully celebrate.’
Edie said, ‘You’re going to turn Rachel Ballantyne into a tourist attraction?’
Baxter smiled. He’d quite recovered himself. He poured pricey wine from their open bottle, topping up their glasses. He said, ‘I’m in the business of maximizing opportunities, transforming negatives into positives.’
She remembered one of his celebrated platitudes. Failure of nerve is a dream’s only obstacle to becoming reality. And she remembered her recent visit to Patsy Lassiter’s house and Patsy’s recounting of his meeting with Rachel in the sepulchre under the old Colony settlement. She sought peace. She hankered after final rest. She wouldn’t welcome the intrusive babble and jostle of curious company, however well meant.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Baxter said, ‘or at any rate, I think I do.’ He was smiling now, but his whole demeanour had darkened. ‘You’re thinking I’m misguided or foolhardy, but that’s because you’re not seeing things from my perspective. Aren’t you impressed by this complex?’
‘There’s a cracked pane in the glass fronting one of the VIP suites. How did it get there?’
‘It might have been faultily fitted and subject to too much tension.’ He shrugged, ‘I’m no engineer, but it’ll be replaced during the coming week. What’s your overall impression of the build?’
‘I think it’s brilliantly done,’ she said. ‘It couldn’t be more in sympathy with its surroundings. Helena Davenport’s a genius.’
‘Didn’t you have a good time today?’
‘I honestly had a blast.’
‘Wasn’t last night fun?
His maintenance crew and security boys had hosted a barbecue outside their compound, on the beach. The pale bulk of the Shanks cottage had seemed less sinister than serene in its isolation there, somewhere she knew Patsy Lassiter had found a refuge from the torment of his grief. There’d been karaoke and then a Scots electrician had plucked at a ukulele singing sea shanties in a lovely tenor voice as they sat in the warmth drinking beer around the roasting pit until midnight.
‘Yes,’ Edie said, ‘last night was a lot of fun.’
Baxter sighed and nodded. He folded his arms across his chest tightly and bit his lip. He said, ‘What you have to realize, Edith, is that it’s far too late to stop now.’
The final bit of business after lunch didn’t involve Edie. Baxter needed an hour with Dave Carter to go through the items on a maintenance roster and approve a couple of budgetary and procedural proposals. He suggested Edie take a quad, chaperoned of course, for a last blast of sunset adrenaline before the chopper arrived to take them away.
It was her chance and she knew it was and she took it, as the bike ticked cooling beneath her, Derek Johnson in the saddle to her right, Shanks’ Cove picturesque before them and the quiet charged as the sun descended in the sudden absence of engine noise.
‘What happened to Greg Cody?’
Johnson didn’t return her gaze. He sat bareheaded, toying with the buckle of his helmet as the sea breeze teased the tresses of his thick black hair. He said, ‘I had the biggest teen crush on your mum. She was intrepid as well as beautiful. I remember her roaming around that plague pit in her TV series with the bacillus still active in the teeth and bones of the victims.’
‘Your point?’
‘You’re her daughter. So I knew you’d ask one of us that question if you got the chance, just as you know we’re none of us permitted to comment on the matter.’
‘I didn’t know, Derek. I suspected it and know now.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Let me ask you another question. Do you think New Hope a hazardous place?’
Johnson did look at her then. He glanced briefly and twitched a smile and put his helmet back on, twisting his head to look at the sky in the direction of the mainland to the east and their rear. He said, ‘Your ride will be here in less than an hour, Edie. I only wish to God I was hitching a lift on that helicopter and out of here with you.’
He didn’t say anything else. He gunned the motor of his quad, its belligerent roar making further conversation between them impossible.
Phil Fortescue had a week’s work scheduled at Portsmouth Harbour. They’d booked him into his hotel from Sunday. He’d come back to stay with Ruthie for the following weekend on Friday. That was the plan, anyway.
She drove him in the Fiat to the ferry terminal at Fishbourne on Sunday evening and said goodbye to him and got back into the car intending to drive it back to Ventnor and park it and forget about it there. Phil wouldn’t need it in Pompey and she didn’t really have any great need to drive on the island. February wasn’t a month for sightseeing and she wanted to get back on schedule with her word-count. She only remembered the bracelet of teeth in the boot when it began to speak to her.
It was dark and the road was quiet and the only noise was the rumble of the car’s engine. When she heard the sibilant hiss of something over that, she thought at first it must be the radio. She glanced down and saw that the radio was switched off. Then she realized that the noise was coming from behind her and it registered as a human voice, accented and cold and slightly girlish. It was too faint to make out individual words, but there was something insistent and urgent about it that made her pull up and switch off the ignition and get out and open up the boot.
She hadn’t seen another car travelling either way. The sky was overcast, no moon or stars, so there wasn’t much light. There was enough, though, to enable her to see the cloth bag containing the strung teeth ripple and recoil with movement. This had happened to Lizzie Burrows, who in death had commented on the resemblance she’d shared with Ruthie in life. And the experience had driven Lizzie to suicide. Ruthie, however, didn’t think she was going mad. She might resemble how Lizzie had looked physically, but there was one significant difference between them. She had a healthy and proven belief in magic.
That didn’t mean she was complacent or unafraid. She picked up the bag and weighed its unstill burden in her hand with a shudder through her of cold revulsion. From inside the bag, the teeth shifted and shaped chattering and the mouth formed there whispered something. Instinct made her want to drop the cloth envelope rippling with uncanny animation against her palm and fingers. She willfully resisted doing so. She had to hold it close to her ear to make out the sense of what was being uttered.
‘Not here,’ it simpered. ‘Take me to the wood.’
Brightstone Forest was the nearest wood to where they were. It was sometimes rumoured to be a place of enchantment. It was dense and secluded and at 8 o’clock on a winter night there would be no one at all there up to any good. Ruthie didn’t think parking up and wandering into the forest in the dark remotely an attractive or sensible idea. But if that was what was required of her, she’d do it. She felt afraid. Of course she did. But she needed to hear what it was the sorcerer had to say.
She put the bag back into the boot for the drive along the coast road to the forest. It was too loathsome an object to bear putting into her pocket or even on the passenger seat next to her. Driving on a night as dark as this, when you were unaccustomed to night driving, was sufficient of a challenge without occult distractions.
When she got to where she was going, she pulled off the road and retrieved the cloth bag. She wished, holding it, that the bracelet would keep still until they reached a quiet spot at the forest’s heart. The task was difficult enough without the teeth grinding and squirming in the way that they were. At least the bracelet’s voice stayed silent, as she crunched over dead leaves
and wind snapped twigs and tried to avoid tripping over fallen branches, picking a path between the trunks of skeletal trees hair-trigger sensitive to any noise not natural to this ancient, secluded place.
‘Here,’ whispered the bag, eventually. Ruthie stopped. She unzipped her coat and squatted on her haunches and emptied the bag onto the loam; white against black, a pale, glistening mouth shaping itself in a hellish circle, words emanating from it more strongly here, audible, disembodied and like a solemn mockery of life.
‘The Being bred,’ the bracelet told her, ‘its progeny far stronger for being born here than its progenitor was on the strength only of my summoning. This is how the magic functions. The incantation I gave the good doctor will not destroy this creature now. Its power is immense. Its hunger is insatiable, its spite depthless.’
‘Can it be stopped?’
‘There is but the one way in which it can. You must discover that for yourself.’
‘You can’t help?’
‘I cannot interfere.’
‘Can you tell me anything?’
‘It waits, now. It lurks, learning. When its moment comes, it will sense that. It is mighty already. And it is cunning.’
Ruthie shivered.
The bracelet chuckled, or seemed to. Shaddeh said, ‘Your professor is right to believe in fate. We cannot escape our destiny, any more than we can live beyond our allotted span.’
‘You seem to have managed.’
Shaddeh chuckled again and the teeth whispered and chinked with his dead mirth. It was a horrible sound in the silence of the night wood. ‘That is not of my choice. My torment now is my punishment for what I began then.’
‘We risk our lives to sort out your mess and you get rest?’
‘I will be given rest only if it is your destiny to succeed. That is why I cannot interfere.’
‘In fiction, in situations like this, you’d at least give us some clues.’
‘Your professor was given his clues when he spoke to the scholar now intent on proving herself a fool.’
‘You mean Doctor Tremlett?’
‘He has his answer if he can but recall what was said to him and determine to do what the knowledge enables him to. He should confide what he’s learned in his friend.’
‘Patsy Lassiter?’
Shaddeh chuckled again; ‘The only friend he has left living.’
‘His other friends were claimed by New Hope. They all of them died there. You shouldn’t take pride in that.’
‘Not pride, Ruthie Gillespie. Not even consolation. Talk to one another, as allies in all your destinies. Plot carefully and then go back there and end this, finally.’
He knew her name. He knew all their names. It sounded like a game to him. The great game, she thought, wondering where she’d heard that phrase, to what it alluded. Maybe just to this. She said, ‘You can shed no more light?’
There was a sigh from the lipless, gleaming oval shaping itself on the loam, an exhalation of breath she knew was impossible but heard distinctly nevertheless. ‘I have brought only darkness,’ the sorcerer said. The mouth of teeth sagged and collapsed with a bony tinkle and Ruthie knew it would speak to her no more.
She got out of the forest without mishap. A few burrs clung to her coat, but that was okay, it wasn’t the indignity of falling flat on her face, or giving into panic and running screaming into a tree. She put the bag once again containing the bracelet back into the boot of the car. She drove home and called Phil in his hotel room and told him what had happened, what had been said to her.
‘You’re very brave, Ruthie, and I’m none the wiser.’
‘You need to think really carefully about what Doctor Tremlett said to you. Go over and over it in your mind. Maybe speak to her again?’
‘I’ve left about five messages. She’s not picking up her calls.’
Ruthie coughed. It wasn’t her perennial smokers’ cough, she was deliberately clearing her throat. She required clarity. She said, ‘I married someone in my mid-20s. It was a disaster. On paper it lasted five years, in reality a lot less. One day I’ll tell you about it. But if I seem touchy sometimes about honesty and betrayal, that’s the reason, what happened to me then. It’s not you, I trust you. I couldn’t love you if I didn’t and I do, I love you, Phil.’
‘And I love you,’ he said.
‘Shaddeh was wrong about one thing, mistaken to call Patsy your only friend. I’m your friend. I’m your friend too.’
‘And I’m yours, Ruthie,’ he said.
‘Now I’m going to have a drink,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have a large drink all alone. Is that really terrible?’
‘Not when you’ve earned it,’ he said. ‘And you have.’
Chapter Eleven
Patrick Lassiter thought it was the small stuff, the incidentals, the shifting colours of the sky, its brightness and shade, the smell of grass, dust-motes in sunbeams through glass, the rich resonance of a chord struck plangently in a familiar song still with the power to stir your heart. He’d missed all that stuff, the minutia of human feeling, since his wife’s death. With Alice gone, he’d had no reason to log in his consciousness the detailed intricacies of everyday life. He’d lived by rote, functioned mostly on autopilot.
Helena’s presence had brought that home to him. She’d left, reluctantly, just after lunch. He felt her absence keenly now, having known her altogether for less than 24 hours. In one way it seemed ridiculous, like a schoolboy infatuation had taken hold of him. In another way it seemed entirely natural, exactly what he’d needed and truthfully, heaven sent. He’d endured his share of personal torment but as Sunday afternoon matured and mellowed into evening, he felt like the luckiest man in existence. He was blessed. He’d been invited back into the warmth and the light. He was fully among the living again.
She’d told him about the events on New Hope, the dark eclipse and following collision in her suite, the toughened glass cracked by impact. She’d told him about the inexplicable failure of the generator powering the complex. And she’d told him about the tooth in its rotting encirclement of torn gum she’d found in the sink of her otherwise spotless bathroom. He’d listened without comment, lying beside her, because they hadn’t made it to dinner time before she’d taken his hand firmly in hers and led him up to bed.
‘Our dinner will burn,’ he said, laughing, pulled after her up the stairs.
‘No, it won’t,’ she said, ‘I turned your oven down a minute ago on the way back from the loo.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Forward planning,’ she said.
She told him about the sense of being watched she’d experienced on the island and of Derek Johnson’s sharing the same instinct. She told him that Johnson believed the animosity aimed towards them by their elusive observer had been cranked up a notch.
‘I’m sure Greg Cody would agree,’ Lassiter said, ‘If he was still around to do so.’
‘I became really scared on the island. Derek was an absolute lifesaver, especially when the weather closed in. But when the lights went out, he was as scared as I was. The island’s such an isolated place. Half the time it isn’t even in radio contact with the rest of the world. More than half the time.’
‘Felix Baxter promotes the fact as part of the island’s charm.’
‘Felix Baxter is full of shit,’ Helena said.
‘With you on that,’ Lassiter said.
She smiled and kissed his shoulder. ‘How tired are you?’
‘Not tired enough.’
‘Good.’
Later, because he had to, he told her about the presence on the island he was no longer confident had been destroyed. It had consumed half their number on the expedition in ’10. They’d thought it gone, eradicated. Everything happening now suggested it wasn’t.
‘Will you go back there, Patrick?’
‘I might not have a choice.’
‘Don’t you dare come into my life only to leave it by losing yours. Don’t you dare.’<
br />
He thought there was some debate about who had actually come into whose life, because he thought it was Helena had done that rather than him. But he took the point.
‘I’m quite resilient,’ he said, ‘hard to get rid of.’
‘Good.’
Now, he shook himself out of his reverie because his phone was ringing. It was Phil Fortescue.
‘Professor,’ he said.
‘You sound knackered.’
‘I’ve every right.’
There was a pause while Fortescue processed this information. He said, ‘Congratulations, not before time.’
‘What can I do you for?’
Fortescue told him about what Ruthie had heard earlier that night. He said, ‘I can’t think of anything Georgia Tremlett told me that gave me a single clue about ending the nightmare that sorcerer dreamed up. Every word rang alarm bells. There was no cavalry coming over the hill in anything she said.’
‘Call her back.’
‘I’ve tried. She’s dropping her calls. Why would she do that?’
Lassiter was tired and love-struck. The pondering was unusually hard for him, but after a moment, he got there. He said, ‘She’s on her way to New Hope Island after academic glory armed with Horan’s journal and everything you’ve told her. She’s got to do it before the Baxter circus trundles into town, so she’s not wasted any time.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Contrary to popular opinion, I do possess a sense of humour, Phil. But New Hope’s not a fit subject for wise cracks.’
After Phil’s call he thought about the promise he’d made and felt honour-bound to keep to Rachel Ballantyne. He reckoned he’d worked out a way to provide her with rest. It didn’t require magic, but he didn’t think he could achieve the end she sought alone. It would be a collective effort that might jeopardize their lives. Sometimes though, you just had to do what was right, regardless of the consequences.
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