Helena said, ‘Why do you think we’re particularly vulnerable?’
‘We’re part of the infrastructure. You’re superfluous. It seems to have attacked Georgia Tremlett very soon after her arrival. It will probably think it can do the same to you without really upsetting the apple cart, if you get my drift.’
‘I get your drift,’ Edie said.
‘It’s impatient,’ Hurst said, ‘and it’s very hungry.’
‘And it has two tried and tested ways of getting in here,’ Helena said, glancing at the window, shivering.
‘We’ll move at first-light,’ Lassiter said. ‘It’s impractical to try to do anything in darkness. We’ll just be blundering.’
‘And we’ll be picked-off,’ Helena said.
‘Ever the optimist,’ Edie said.
‘Pots and kettles,’ Helena said.
Fortescue said, ‘Now-now, ladies.’
Hurst said, ‘Do you actually have a plan? Please tell me you’ve not come all this way completely clueless about all this.’
‘You tell them, Ruthie,’ Edith said. ‘It’ll sound more plausible, coming from a Goth.’
But neither of their visitors laughed. Neither of them even cracked a smile, listening. Lassiter was reminded that Hurst had seen what he had only a couple of hours earlier. The memory would be indelible.
When Ruthie had finished, Johnson said, ‘I’ve felt her presence on the island for weeks, Rachel Ballantyne, watching us. She’s been here. She left a warning scrawled on the bathroom mirror where Helena stayed the last time she was at the complex. She told us to leave.’
‘Which suggests she’s on your side,’ Fortescue said.
‘Unless she’s now just really pissed off at you for ignoring her advice,’ Edith said.
‘Oh, for the optimism of youth,’ Helena said.
Edith said, ‘The big difference between you and me, Helena, is that I’ve been up close and personal with Rachel Ballantyne. I’ve shared a cellar with her. I’ve had her speak to me. I’ve endured the sight and sound and the stench of her. She’s not young, she’s ancient and she’s unpredictable, tricky and more dangerous than you can possibly imagine. I’m here willingly. My mouth is my way of dealing with the fear.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Helena said.
‘Yeah, well, so am I,’ Edith said.
‘We’re staying, by the way,’ Hurst said. ‘The guns might not protect us, but at least we’ve got them.’
Lassiter said, ‘Guns plural?’
‘There’s a range where the guests can shoot clays,’ Johnson said. ‘The hardware proper’s yet to arrive, but we had the one gun for a try-out back when the range was first completed. I’d forgotten about it the way you do when kit’s locked away out of sight. Then I remembered it.’
‘We’ve got two guns and plenty of ammo,’ Hurst said.
‘And we’ve got you,’ Ruthie said, ‘and we’re grateful.’
‘We should all try and get some rest,’ Lassiter said, ‘big day and all that.’
Something woke Felix Baxter in his penthouse flat in Manchester in the small hours. For a second he thought it might be an intruder, but his sixth-sense told him no one was sharing the space he owned with him and he owned no pets. He was the only living presence there. He was sure of it.
It was singing. It was coming from his sitting room. It was the folk song, In My Liverpool Home. He listened a lot to the radio housed in the Bang and Olufsen hi fi expensively situated there. Mostly he listened to talk radio. Sometimes he listened to the local station, Piccadilly Radio. Sometimes he listened to Smooth, so he was used to hearing Michael Buble and Caro Emerald, not a cappella versions of regional folk ditties. They just didn’t figure on Smooth’s always blandly aspirational playlist.
He got out of bed, irritated. He took his dressing gown off the hook on the bedroom door and put it on. Fear didn’t really hit him until he opened the door and the coarseness of the singing became apparent. It sounded uneven and spontaneous and perversely, the very opposite of live. And then abruptly and completely, it stopped.
A figure sat stiffly in moonlight diffuse through the curtains. It sat on his sofa in a black wool coat with a double row of glimmering gilt buttons. Even seated, he could see that she’d been a tall woman in life. Her thick black hair was bobbed and her features were striking under its precise fringe. She reminded him a bit of Ruthie Gillespie, an author his son had read a lot as an adolescent, her author photo alluring on the inside cover of her books. As far as he knew, Ms. Gillespie was in good health. This woman, dully alert, was also emphatically dead.
Baxter felt frightened, but he felt something worse than fear. Wretchedness washed like poison through his guts. He clutched at his stomach and his breath came in shuddering jerks. He thought he might fall to his knees. He couldn’t look at her, and he couldn’t look away. Then she spoke to him.
‘Better people than you’ll ever be may perish because of you. If they fail, my indignity will go on. Should that likelihood occur then I promise you, you’ll be seeing more of me. Your son will likely get the odd visit too.’
The sound of her voice did something loathsome to his skin, raising it in frills and curlicues of terror down his arms and across his chest and back, contouring his flesh in shock and revulsion under his dressing gown, where he shivered. His balls had contracted and shrunk, like they were trying to climb up into his body. Words formed sentences emanating out of her without the movement of her mouth, precisely shaped by lipstick. He couldn’t control his breathing well enough to scream.
She stood. The movement was abrupt, her stiff tendons cracking, her lifeless energy releasing a cold, musty odour into the room. She lifted a sudden arm and touched his face with the back of her hand and he felt the ragged neglect on his cheek of her fingernails.
‘This is only our introduction,’ she said. ‘My name in life was Lizzie Burrows.’
She dropped her arm and turned away from him and lurched out of the room, her walk the gait of someone hampered, but not properly inhibited by death.
Chapter Fifteen
At the Experience complex, they ate their Sunday morning breakfast waiting impatiently for it to get light. When it did the sky was opaque under a cold and persistent drizzle. Lassiter was mindful that the weather was due to deteriorate after midday. They were all breakfasting together, in the smaller of the two restaurants housed there. Quite an eccentric sort of breakfast; Aunt Bessie’s Yorkshire puddings figured prominently under steaming puddles of Bisto gravy next to glittering piles of Bird’s Eye peas in dishes improvised from freezer cabinets. As he ate, fairly heartily for a recovering alcoholic, he couldn’t help but notice the looks Johnson and Hurst kept swapping.
He waited until they’d finished eating and then said, ‘You two boys are up to something.’
They looked at one another. It was Johnson who answered him. He said, ‘Sig Sauer didn’t become the world’s biggest manufacturer of handguns for no reason, Commander. That’s what Ricky’s carrying. I’m armed with a fuck off pump-action twelve-bore. We’re pretty seriously tooled up.’
‘And your point is?’
‘We’re thinking of a more direct approach than the one you lot have outlined. We think it holes up in the windowless church. That’s where it took Georgia Tremlett. If it’s there it’s cornered. It’s a static target.’
‘Only relatively static,’ Lassiter said. ‘It will know the ground. And you said it’s very quick.’
‘The church interior’s a shooting gallery, and nothing’s quick enough to outrun a bullet,’ Hurst said.
There was no point arguing against this. It was true so far as it went and the man clearly spoke from personal experience.
Fortescue coughed to clear his throat. He said, ‘One of the theories Dr. Tremlett aired with me was that this creature didn’t originate on earth. There’s a strong case for saying it’s an alien life form. If it is, we don’t know what effect bullets will have on it, if any.’
‘I
t’s made of organic matter, wherever it comes from,’ Hurst said. ‘It’s flesh and bone and hair. It eats and shits and breaths and it will bleed, believe me.’
‘I don’t think it’s necessarily that simple,’ Ruthie said.
‘I don’t either,’ Edie said.
Hurst turned to Ruthie. He said, ‘With respect, love, you’re predisposed to believe in hocus pocus. No offence, but just look at you.’
‘That thing was able to clamber up the sheer façade of this building and crack a pane of unbreakable glass. It also had the nous to disable a generator. Don’t underestimate it, boys,’ Helena said.
‘I’m going outside for a cigarette,’ Ruthie said, getting up. ‘Who knows? I might cast a spell or mutter an incantation or two while I’m there. Excuse me.’
They all watched her walk out of the room.
‘Not saying she isn’t easy on the eye,’ Hurst said.
‘She’s also spoken-for,’ Fortescue said.
Lassiter said, ‘How set on doing this are you two?’
‘We discussed it on the way over here last night,’ Johnson said. ‘We’ve slept on it. We’ve been seriously fucked about with on the island, Helena can tell you that.’
‘She has.’
‘It’s worth trying. I don’t care whether that thing’s from Mars or Pluto, it’s flesh and blood. It’s a bloody big target and it’ll take a bullet.’
‘We aim for it to take several,’ Hurst said.
‘When do you plan to do it?’
‘I reckon it’s mostly nocturnal,’ Hurst said. ‘Most of the deadliest predators are. If we’re lucky we’ll catch it asleep or at least drowsy or unawares.’
‘You won’t,’ Helena said. She turned to Johnson, ‘Don’t do this, Derek.’
Johnson smiled, slightly sheepishly. He stood and said, ‘What did they always used to say in those terrible ‘80’s revenge thrillers? It’s payback time.’ He reached into a pocket and pulled out a short-wave radio and slid it across the table to Lassiter. He said, ‘If we have any luck, I’ll call it in.’
‘Call it in either way,’ Lassiter said.
‘You’ve got it, Commander.’
Fortescue went outside a couple of minutes after Hurst and Johnson had left. Ruthie was pacing the cobbles of the colony’s old harbour a hundred metres distant. He walked over to her. She was smoking and he could see the stamped-on butt of one she’d already smoked on the rain-slicked stone.
‘Filthy habit,’ she said, exhaling smoke through her nose.
‘We’re none of us perfect.’
‘You shouldn’t make excuses for me.’
‘I love you,’ he said.
She smiled an effortful smile. She said, ‘I’ve got a really bad feeling about all this.’
‘How did you leave it with your fan club?’
‘No hard feelings,’ she said. ‘They got on their quad bikes and we all gave each other the thumbs-up. They’re gutsy, the pair of them, incredibly so. And if we see either of them again I’ll be extremely surprised. I’ll also be delighted and relieved.’
‘I’ve got a lot of faith in Patsy Lassiter,’ Fortescue said.
Ruthie took a final pull on her cigarette and dropped the butt to the cobbles and ground it out under her boot. She exhaled and Fortescue observed how the smoke clung in the rain and the cold, only dispersing as if reluctantly. ‘I have too,’ she said. ‘But what Edie said about Rachel Ballantyne last night is true. She’s volatile. She’s unpredictable.’
‘You were the one called the council of war, Ruthie.’
‘I haven’t forgotten.’
‘Have you changed your mind?’
‘If anything happens to you, or Patsy, or Edith or now Helena Davenport, I’ll be responsible. We’re only here because of my stupid theory.’
‘And because Shaddeh told you there isn’t much time. And because he sent Lizzie Burrows to remind you of that and she’ll get no rest if we don’t end this and will keep on confronting you until you’re driven out of your mind by it.’
‘I nearly didn’t tell you about what happened on Wednesday night. It makes me very selfish, doesn’t it, cajoling you all into coming here.’
‘You’re not selfish at all. Lizzie Burrows is unendurable. I couldn’t have let you come and not come with you. Patsy was coming back anyway, to keep a promise. Edie and Helena are here to help him do that. Aren’t you frightened here for yourself?’
‘It’s on the list,’ she said. ‘It’s just not at the top anymore.’
He closed the distance between them and hugged her. The rain was strengthening and on the thick gloss of her hair it had gathered like dew. ‘Come back inside,’ he said. ‘You’ll catch your death out here.’
They didn’t approach the colony settlement on their quads. The engine noise would have given them away. They rode anti-clockwise along the coast to a point about equidistant between the Experience complex and their own compound and then parked the bikes above the tideline and went inland on foot, climbing upwards steadily, saying nothing because silence was essential and because everything about this business had already been said.
The going was heavy. The ground was getting softer and more slippery in the strengthening rain where the terrain wasn’t just exposed rock. The perimeter wall of the settlement, when it came into sight, concealed what lay behind it. But that worked both ways because it also concealed their approach. With half a mile left to cover they switched off their shortwaves in case they squawked into life and delivered their quarry a warning. Then they split up, approaching their destination from points hundreds of metres apart, crouching, stealthy and careful.
There was only the one way in. Or there was, Hurst thought, unless you could vault an eight-foot wall in the effortless way he’d seen the creature do the previous evening. He found he was actually looking forward to this. Getting a shot off the previous night had been impossible at the distance. He’d doubted at first after seeing the creature that a bullet would penetrate its hide.
But at close-range the pistol he carried was a devastating weapon for its size, a slick and rapid and reliable tool of execution. He’d pump the full mag into the thing and the target was too big to miss. Johnson would do the same. His shotgun slugs were their artillery. They’d get no medals, but this was about retribution more than it was about chasing glory. He’d been pretty indifferent to Dave Carter but he’d liked Alan Newton and Greg Cody had become a close friend.
He thought of his hocus pocus crack made at the expense of the sexy Goth woman earlier in the morning. You cultivated that look and you took the flak for it, was his take on the matter. He wasn’t incredulous or even cynical about the presence they called Rachel Ballantyne being on the island. New Hope had a haunted, watchful feel and he’d seen nothing human possessing the speed and scale of the quarry they were hoping to confront. It was otherworldly; but he’d put his faith in a full mag of hollow-point bullets before he’d put it in magic. Spells generally worked best in Harry Potter movies. Pulling a trigger was a simpler matter of cause and predictable effect.
Johnson felt better than he’d felt in weeks. He had faith in his formidable ally, faith in their firepower and was finally doing something positive after all the enervating time spent fearful and clueless on New Hope since Greg Cody’s disappearance. More than that, he’d felt toyed-with on occasions. He knew that Helena Davenport had been grateful for his big and burly presence during her stay at the complex, but he’d felt humiliated even then by his helplessness to do anything practical about the ordeal they’d shared.
Now he was doing something. He was part of a decisive and efficient two-man team self-tasked with a mission that might very well set him up for life. The creature Ricky Hurst had described to him was like nothing in the known world. It wouldn’t just be a trophy when they took it down, it would be a scientific sensation. There’d likely be a book deal in it and there’d certainly be a movie. He could spoil the missus rotten and guarantee the kids’ financial future
s. That meant a great dealt to him. Actually, it meant everything.
He’d pondered a lot on fate and destiny on the island. New Hope was the sort of bleak, isolating place that encouraged that sort of thinking. During his wireless conversations with the Commander at New Scotland Yard, he’d wondered about giving up his police career. He’d questioned the wisdom of it. There was a period after resigning when you could get back in and it hadn’t yet elapsed and he’d thought about that. Now it wouldn’t be necessary. Not if they succeeded when they reached the windowless church, it wouldn’t.
‘If it’s where they think it is, it’s a trap,’ Lassiter said.
‘Then go after them and persuade them of that,’ Edie said, ‘before it’s too late’.
It was forty minutes after the departure of Johnson and Hurst.
‘It’s already too late, because they won’t be deterred,’ Helena said. ‘It’s what strike troops do. They strike. It’s Hurst’s background and training. You go in hard and fast and heavy and without warning.’
‘Helena Davenport, military tactician,’ Edith said.
Nobody responded to that.
They were all familiar with Lassiter’s theory that it hid in one of the places he’d discovered during his island exile. Probably not the sepulchre to which Rachel Ballantyne had lured him, if Ruthie’s supposition was true and the creature deliberately avoided her. That was one of Rachel’s places and where he thought he’d most probably find her now, unless she found him first.
Lassiter thought the Being’s lair was likelier the storm shelter in the heights he’d stumbled upon. It was cavernous and he’d had the impression he was the first human being to enter its granite seclusion since the time of the Kingdom of Belief. When the tempest had raged, the believers had taken refuge there, their cold and imperious leader among them. In more recent times, it had become home to something else.
This latest chapter in the New Hope saga began as it would end, with Rachel Ballantyne. They could do nothing until Lassiter tried to strike his bargain with her. Rachel was capricious and unforgiving, sometimes wicked, sometimes possessed of the snarling, deliberate evil of something only conjured at its origin to be demonic.
The Colony Trilogy Page 71