I believe all this happened as described in Fortescue’s source, an account clandestinely kept by Thomas Horan, the ship’s physician aboard the Andromeda. This source seems to me impeccable. Horan was first cousin to Ballantyne’s wife. I’ve established the blood tie genealogically myself since the account came into my possession.
Horan describes how Shaddeh’s wounds became infected back in the fetid squalor of the slave hold, where he began to lose his life to septicaemia. Before he died he doubly cursed the Andromeda’s master. He said that Ballantyne would father a daughter who would die young before returning to life to torment him. But it is the second, greater affliction that is of interest to me. He also told Horan that he would unleash a creature his Albacheian tribe believed in as, the Being that Hungers in the Darkness. This monster would be birthed at Shaddeh’s occult bidding, would mature and grow and gain appetite and eventually would consume Captain Ballantyne.
Fortescue believes that all this came to pass. He believes the creature was eventually born on New Hope and consumed Ballantyne’s community there, perishing one by one in their terror and isolation. He believes it because so many also vanished on the recent expedition in ’10 mounted by Alexander McIntyre in attempting to finally solve the New Hope Enigma. That expedition claimed the lives of the forensic archaeologist Jesse Kale and the cosmologist Karl Cooper and the flamboyant Belgian Jesuit Priest, Monsignor Degrelle. They died. Or at least, all trace of them disappeared, a fate shared by a senior staffer on McIntyre’s flagship newspaper title there only to write about their attempt to solve the original mystery.
Horan writes towards the end of his account about Shaddeh’s remorse concerning the harrowing train his dark magic had set in motion. That was almost immediate, but the sorcerer was too weak by then to try to reverse what he’d done. Instead he had Horan write down words phonetically that used in a ritual would destroy the Being. It provides the journal’s footnote.
Fortescue claims that he performed this ritual in ’10 in the New Hope Island Colony’s settlement church and that he thus duly killed the creature. And this is the bit I have most trouble believing. Without Shaddeh’s intervention, I don’t think that could have been done. And Shaddeh had been dead by ’10 for just over 200 years. He claims that the journalist Lucy Church witnessed this confrontation. Conveniently for Fortescue, she perished on New Hope 18 months ago and so cannot contradict his account.
Mythologically this creature is Grendel. Or it is the Wendigo or it is Bigfoot or the Abominable Snowman. It was described on their walls by cave dwellers of the Neolithic period. It seems to be as old as time, or at least as old as is humanity. The Albacheians believed it born arachnid, but capable of learning over time through sly study to become humanoid. In all the stories and depictions it is however much bigger than a mortal man.
If it is still living on New Hope, this creature shelters in places there lost to history. I think it was there in Ballantyne’s time and that its bones, if I’m extremely lucky, are the most of it after two centuries left to be recovered and subject to forensic analysis and DNA testing to determine whether it is indeed some fearsome undiscovered species.
Fortescue really believes there is a monster on the island. And this isn’t the same sort of monster rumoured to inhabit the peaty depths of Loch Ness. Nessie has become domesticated, a folkloric Highland mascot almost, only because it is a creature that doesn’t exist. The thing Professor Fortescue thinks secretly inhabits New Hope Island is the Being that Hungers in the Darkness and its appetite is said to be insatiable. This monster devours people. It was arachnid when he says he saw it, calloused, rough, huge and able to violate the mind with what passes for its thoughts. It’s a shape-shifter. It’s an abomination. And I think his belief it still lives will compel him shortly to go back there.
Felix Baxter finished reading these notes thinking that hysteria and meddling and scare stories about monsters were not at all conducive to the middle-class family values he was trying to promote as integral to the New Hope Experience package. He preferred Ballantyne’s community abducted by benign visitors from a distant galaxy. It played better than having them consumed by a creature that had terrified mankind since before the Stone Age, summoned into existence by a vengeful magician. The latter story wouldn’t play at all well with his affluent New Age punters.
Then there was the Colony’s founder himself. Baxter didn’t want Seamus Ballantyne the martinet commander of a floating dungeon, meting out barbaric punishments to those of his human cargo who offended him. He wanted the version of Seamus who had seen the light, sincerely repented and established a model community somewhere remote, beautiful and still unspoiled. He preferred the spiritual visionary to the demagogue butcher. The former had more cultural mileage and made much better business sense.
He couldn’t legally prevent Professor Fortescue visiting New Hope. He’d leased the land on which he’d built his visitor complex and attractions and the compound built for the service and maintenance staff. The old Colony settlement was a World Heritage Site. But anyone had free access to the rest of the place and that included him.
How he reacted depended on whether Doctor Tremlett was right in her prediction concerning Fortescue’s impending trip. If she were wrong, he’d do nothing. If Fortescue arrived without fanfare, Baxter would just have him quietly and discretely monitored while he wasted his time and energy looking for something so outlandishly unreal as he apparently intended to.
But he might seek publicity. Baxter vaguely remembered the TV series he’d fronted about superstition and the sea. It had been five or six years since then, but the ratings had been respectable and the maritime professor might hanker once more for the media spotlight. Sometime people did. If he did that with this New Hope monster quest, he’d meet with an accident. The accident might prove fatal and it might not. But it would certainly incapacitate him and put an abrupt stop to his publicity seeking antics.
Felix Baxter knew people who knew people. Years earlier, the mother of his son had left him for a Premiership footballer. He’d felt humiliated by that. But matters concluded satisfactorily when a subsequent hit and run collision wrecked the player’s right knee. The offending car had never been recovered, the offending driver never been identified and therefore no one ever charged. And that had taken one untraceable phone call and afterwards the anonymous delivery of a sports bag filled with well-laundered cash. When you knew people who knew people you could get things quietly done for you. And Baxter did.
Ruthie Gillespie sat outside the Spyglass Inn at Ventnor on Wednesday evening, sipping at a glass of white wine and hugging herself against the night chill off the adjacent sea inside her parka. It was off-season and there were few customers inside the pub. She was the only person seated outside, there so she could smoke as she drank and ruminated on the novel she was writing.
New Hope kept interfering with her efforts to plot her story. Reality kept intruding into her thoughts. She’d heard a brief mention in a radio bulletin the previous morning about the two men missing at sea off the island. She knew that in the story of Beowulf, the monster Grendel was sometimes called the Sea Hag. It was Ruthie’s belief that Shaddeh’s Being that Hungers could definitely swim.
The Grendel comparison had been made by Professor Tremlett when Phil had gone to see her at the beginning of the previous week. She’d gone to New Hope, inspired to do so by what she’d read in Horan’s journal, or so Patsy Lassiter had suspected and told Phil. And he’d been right, because half an hour before leaving for the pub, Ruthie had read about, ‘Concerns there for the missing woman’s welfare,’ scrolling though the BBC News site on her phone.
There’d been a file picture of her taken years earlier on a field trip to somewhere remote and exotic, a plain woman precisely made-up decked out like a female version of Indiana Jones in a scuffed leather jacket and a bandana and a photogenically battered fedora hat. Ruthie had never met Georgia Tremlett, but felt a pang of sympathy for her, looking at tha
t picture. Women who saw their lives as the starring role in an unfolding drama were made vulnerable by the delusion and Ruthie recognized Georgia straight away as one of those.
She scrabbled out her cigarette in the ashtray on her table and lit another straight away with a familiar stab of guilt and swallowed wine and looked up, aware that she now had company there. A stiff figure sat alone at a corner table, moonlight catching the double-row of gilt buttons on her coat, making them glimmer.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Ruthie said to herself, exhaling smoke. It was her Southport friend, her Guest House confidant. It was Lizzie Burrows, dead for close-on 50 years, far from home, unlikely to be travelling light. She wished Phil was there with her, but if he had been, she wouldn’t have been sloshing back the white and practically chain-smoking, exiled from the pub’s interior by her anti-social habit. She’d have been doing something more acceptable altogether. Not quite baking bread, but along those domestic wholesome lines, possibly wearing a Cath Kidston pinnie.
She got up and walked across and joined the dead student at her table. Maybe there were compensations to an early death, she thought. Elizabeth Burrows hadn’t aged a day since her demise. At least not superficially, she hadn’t. The detail, though, didn’t bear close scrutiny. Her black bob was thick but utterly lustreless with absence of life. Her features were static and dusty and dull and when the ghost spoke, she still resembled a bad attempt at the ventriloquist’s clever art. Her speech wasn’t clever, it was unnerving and grotesque.
‘You’re smarter than you look, Ruthie. You’ve worked out what it is you need to do.’
‘What did Shaddeh say to you, to make you despair so completely?’
‘He’s penitent now. He was still boastful then. And your maritime professor has rightful access to the contents of Ballantyne’s chest. I stole from it and was punished accordingly.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He bragged about his accomplishments. He told me about Rachel. He had Rachel visit me in my dreams. I thought my mind was conjuring it all. I thought I was going mad.’
‘Patsy Lassiter thought as much, said it was why you killed yourself.’
Lizzie Burrows’ head shifted with a click and her dead eyes fixed on Ruthie, who jumped and thought she might scream; ‘He’s strong, Lassiter. He’s going to need to be strong. All of you are.’
Ruthie swallowed. ‘So we’re going back there?’
‘I’d smile, but the sight would appall you, Ruthie. Hasn’t that penny dropped yet? No one escapes their destiny, no one.’
‘What’s in it for you?’
Lizzie did smile at that. She blinked lazily through the rhyme gummy around her vacant pupils and her lifeless lips stretched to expose her teeth. She said, ‘I took pride in how I looked. Not unlike you, I was once quite beautiful. What’s in it for me is an end to this indignity.’
‘Shaddeh has promised you that?’
‘There isn’t much time. Not for you, there isn’t. The challenge grows more formidable by the day.’
‘If I don’t do it, I expect I’ll be seeing more of you.’
‘It was why you saw me in the first place. It was why the master spoke through the bracelet only to you. It’s why I’ve been sent now. It was always you because it’s you who’ve worked out what it is that needs to be done.’
‘And if I don’t do it –‘
‘Yes. And I doubt that gets any easier, Ruthie.’
‘Will we succeed, Elizabeth?’
‘I’m not the owner of a crystal ball. The dead own no possessions. I don’t have the answer. If I could, I’d pray for you.’
Ruthie smoked and waited for words both necessary and almost unendurable to hear.
Lizzie said, ‘Leave, now. I’ll have to walk away from here and the sight of that is something I’d rather spare you. Do what is expected of you, Ruthie, if you want this to be our goodbye.’
Ruthie left Lizzie Burrow’s vacant table and walked home on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else unfamiliar with such matters as balance and direction and bearing a body’s weight in motion. Her skin felt tender under the rough touch of her clothing as though a rash blistered there or she’d been badly burned. It was just after 9 o’clock in the evening.
She got to her cottage door and struggled for a couple of minutes to try to get the key between her convulsing fingers into the lock. Her breath shuddered, shaking her. She dropped her key twice and groped around on the ground for it in the darkness fighting all the while the strong urge to weep.
She got in eventually and switched on the light. Everything there possessed a familiarity that seemed entirely fraudulent. Her things wore the still aspect of stage props. Her furniture and hung pictures seemed poised and expectant, as though awaiting the entrance of the actors, prepared for a performance that would never come.
She walked to the kitchen without taking off her coat and opened the freezer compartment of her fridge and took out the vodka bottle and tried to unscrew its lid. But the bottle was slippery with cold and her fingers disobedient and the bottle slipped from her grip and smashed loudly on the stone flagged floor. The smell of liquor rose and glass shards crunched under her boots as she flapped uncertainly at space, wheeling about, lost for what to do next.
Ruthie counted very deliberately to ten. Then she took off her coat and hung it on a kitchen peg, the glass fragments now embedded in the soles and heels of her boots squealing and crunching with each step. She fetched a brush and pan from the cupboard where they were stored and squatted down and swept up the pieces of the broken vodka bottle. She ran a cloth under the hot tap and washed the wet floor until the smell had gone from the stone.
But the strong vodka odour was still in her lungs and her nose making her heave and she barely made it to the loo off her kitchen before vomiting mightily into the pan. White wine and pistachio nuts welled up sourly from her stomach into her mouth and she retched until emptied and then spat and rinsed out nut gravel and gargled at the sink, eyes smarting, gasping for breath.
When her home finally began to resemble that properly again, she slumped into an armchair in her sitting room shaking and stared at the stars through a window with its curtain still un-pulled against the night. Eventually her heart rate slowed to something closer to normal. Eventually, the rawness became less painful prickling her skin. She very deliberately avoided thinking at all about the sight and sound and loathsome scent of what had in life, half a century since, been a young woman named Lizzie Burrows.
It was one thing in Merseyside. It was a bad experience in a charming place you might never willingly visit again. It was something quite different and much worse on your own doorstep. There it was despoiling, a violation. And it undermined everything she had and valued. She didn’t honestly know how many such encounters she could undergo and remain sane. Not many, she didn’t think. Anticipation would become dread and the dread would be permanent, with no respite from it.
Ruthie had to try to put a stop to it. She knew she had no alternative. These present circumstances were intolerable. She’d had to fight just now not to break down completely. She had to do whatever it was she could to bring these visitations to an end. And she believed, as had been stressed to her, that there was now very little time in which to act before it became too late.
Eventually, after two hours of trying to regain some semblance of composure, she called Edie Chambers. She said, ‘I know you were on New Hope with Felix Baxter over the weekend. Phil told me. How did he seem to you?’
‘Are you okay, Ruthie?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t sound it.’
‘Don’t worry about me. Tell me about Baxter.’
‘He was jumpy. He did a pretty good job of hiding it, but he was nervous and he wasn’t the only one. A couple of his people there struck me as seriously spooked.’
‘Three people have gone missing there since you got back.’
‘I know, and all totally explicable, an accident at
sea and an academic out of her depth in the wilderness. You’d honestly wonder what it’s going to take.’
‘I’m not going to let that happen, Edie. I’m going back there. I think I know what needs to be done.’
Edith was silent. Then she said, ‘Phil won’t let you go alone. He’ll insist on going with you. So you’ll be putting him in danger and doing it deliberately.’
Ruthie closed her eyes. She said, ‘It’s not Phil I need there. It’s Patsy Lassiter. If I’m right, he’s the key to this. It’s Patsy has to come.’
‘Are you really okay, Ruthie? You don’t sound much like yourself.’
‘I’m fine,’ Ruthie said.
‘I like you,’ Edie said, ‘I’m the one who got you and my stepdad together in the first place, but Phil and Patsy are all I’ve got left in the way of family. You risk their lives and I’ll never, ever forgive you.’
‘Phil and Patsy are grown-ups, Edie,’ Ruthie said, closing her eyes tightly, concentrating so her voice wouldn’t wobble into a sob. ‘They make up their own minds about what they do or don’t do.’
‘Fuck you,’ Edith said, after a pause, terminating the call.
She called back ten minutes later. She was crying. They both were. She sniffed and said, ‘Bring me up to speed, Ruthie. Tell me what you think’s got to happen on New Hope.’
So Ruthie did.
Chapter Fourteen
They convened at Ruthie Gillespie’s cottage at Ventnor on Wight on the Saturday. Phil Fortescue had been there since the previous evening. Patrick Lassiter arrived with Helena Davenport. She was his guest for the weekend and had an interest both in New Hope and now in him. They’d adjourned to a table in a quiet corner of the Spyglass at 11am when Edith Chambers surprised them. Phil and Patsy rose and hugged her in turn. She was introduced to Helena.
To Ruthie, Edie said, ‘A gatecrasher’s probably the last thing you think you need but I’ll have something to say about this plot you’ve dreamed up, and I‘ve every right to say it.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 69