There was no way of knowing how she’d react. All he had was the precedent of their single prior meeting, when she’d been sad and gentle and sorry, she’d said, for his loss. He wondered had she plucked from his mind the folk songs dutifully learned after he’d been warned it was her not exactly endearing habit. He wondered how well she knew his mind generally if she was capable of roaming around in it and doing that.
Was she becoming more human, more tranquil in spirit, a softer, wiser presence than she’d originally been when she’d snarled back into life and goaded her grieving father with her antic tricks? Lassiter thought it possible that she was. It was equally possible such a supposition was no more than wishful thinking. Doctor Tremlett had suggested that her power was a profoundly out of kilter affront to nature. Could Rachel really have mellowed?
Lassiter said, ‘I’m going to go to the place you found first, Phil, the cellar where they stored the whisky they distilled. You and Edie saw her there the last time, so she knows where it is. I’ll wait an hour. If she doesn’t come, I’ll go up to the settlement and climb down into the sepulchre.’ He tried not to shudder at the prospect of doing so.
Helena asked, ‘While we just sit tight?’
They were in the bar. That had been Ruthie’s suggestion. Bars were convivial places and this one had yet to be christened. None of them had actually cracked a bottle yet, but Helena looked to her the sort of woman who could let her hair down if the occasion prompted it. Edie was partial to the odd beer. It wasn’t totally out of the question.
The décor was inflicting mixed feelings on Ruthie. The place was awash with nauticalia. There were brass ship’s clocks and barometers and fishing nets and lobster pots and framed navigation charts and it was all very reminiscent of the Spyglass Inn and as such a poignant reminder of how far she was from home and the safety of her cottage and the simple joys of her daily routine. She didn’t fear for herself, so much as she feared for Phil. She thought their courage made brave men vulnerable. It had probably already done for Johnson and his tough looking, lippy mate. It made her fear for Patsy, too.
Lassiter said, ‘I think sitting tight the most sensible option, with Ruthie maybe nipping out for the odd cigarette break.’
‘Don’t be an enabler Patsy,’ Ruthie said. ‘Criticise me, call me a self-destructive moron.’
‘There’s a time for cold-turkey,’ Lassiter said. ‘This really isn’t it.’
Ruthie smiled at that. They all did. They were feeling the tension. Everyone was wondering about the gung-ho drama at the settlement. Edie was keeping her ears alert to the triumphant roar of returning quad bikes. Phil Fortescue, not a religious man, had said a sincere prayer for the wellbeing of their comrades. Helena, pessimistic about their chances, was close to grieving already for brave, foolish Derek Johnson.
‘The irony of a drunk, sitting out a vigil surrounded by casks of vintage whisky, isn’t totally lost on me,’ Lassiter said, pulling on his cagoule.
They each of them hugged him in turn, Helena lastly. She said, ‘Come back safe.’
‘I’ve already told you,’ he said, ‘I’m hard to get rid of.’
They were there. They had reached the breach in the perimeter wall, the place where the great wooden gate of which there was now no longer any trace left had once proven a mighty obstacle, oaken and iron-braced. They slipped into the gap, Hurst to the left and Johnson to the right, their weapons drawn now, their strategy to approach their destination through the buildings of the settlement separately, but to reach and enter it at the same time. They didn’t need caution with the firepower they now possessed. Speed and aggression were the keys. They needed to be fast and totally emphatic, as one in what they did together.
The settlement was dismal in the chill and persistent rain. Its hovels had a sagged, defeated look. The bigger buildings were solemn, wind-scarred, close to featureless in their grim dilapidation. It was silent, no wind to croon through slate fractures and stony crevices, no birds in the vacant, porous leaden sky.
They reached the windowless church. The door was open a chink, a ribbon of darkness between wood and masonry. A smell wafted out, sour and feral. Johnson looked at Hurst, looking back at him, both of them panting now, wide-eyed, wired with adrenaline, itchy for action, craving the moment, ardent for its drama and decisiveness, desperate really to bring this weird business to its bloody conclusion.
They burst through the door, weapons cocked and raised, aware of the gloom and the stench, scouring the featureless walls in front of them and to either side, the pillar flanking the door to his right catching Derek Johnson’s peripheral vision at its blurred outer extremity, there where he knew there was no pillar.
‘Mother of God,’ he said.
It was behind and above them. It had straddled the door and bent from the waist with its back pressed flat against the church roof. Johnson raised his gun and peered up so his eyes could confirm this and something swung with whooshing speed and a clubbing blow broadsided him and sent him hurtling into Hurst, both of them shunted fast, their heads colliding with an audible smack, the last thing he remembered a rough violation of his mouth with searing force, plucking out a tooth. Mercifully, after that, for the rest of the horror that followed, unconsciousness claimed him.
Chapter Sixteen
Ruthie outlined her alternative plan as soon as Lassiter had left them. There was no deliberate disloyalty or deceit in this. She did not think she could have deterred him from doing what he intended to in his own meticulous, deliberate way. On the face of it, his was a reasonable plan. Her approach was more intuitive. His might work, but if it didn’t, there was too much at stake not to have an alternative strategy. And time was too short for that alternative to wait, the moment to attempt it was straight away.
She cleared her throat and asked for everyone’s attention. She told Edie and Helena about her experience in Brightstone Forest with Shaddeh’s bracelet of teeth. When she’d finished telling them, she said, ‘What I’m about to tell you might just sound like my ego talking.’
‘Then we’d all better make sure we’re comfortably seated,’ Edie said.
‘Hear her out, Edith,’ Helena said, ‘people with inflated egos don’t generally describe themselves as morons.’
‘You’re definitely not a moron,’ Fortescue said.
‘Thanks for that, Phil.’
‘Get on with it,’ Edith said.
Ruthie had brought her overnight bag into the bar with her. She opened it and took two items out. The first of these was a child’s cotton nightdress. She unfolded it carefully. It was more than just traditional. It was positively old-fashioned, pink, with buttons up the back and bright butterflies embroidered onto its bodice at the front. It was about the right size for a small and slender 10 year-old. The second item was a silver backed bristle hairbrush.
‘You’re fucking joking,’ Edith said.
‘This child, the child still in her, has endured 200 years of cold neglect. I think she sees everything that goes on here. She asked Patsy to put her to rest. It’s what she wants. He thinks he knows how to do it. I’d like to show her a bit of kindness first. I’d like her to go to her rest with a bit of dignity.’
‘You’re mad,’ Edith said. ‘I’ve seen her. She’s terrifying.’
‘I know that,’ Ruthie said. ‘And I need to prepare myself. She might not come, but if she does, I need to be composed enough to go through with this. I want you all to go and wait somewhere safe.’
‘Nowhere here’s safe,’ Edie said.
‘The generators are housed forty feet underground,’ Helena said, ignoring her. ‘I reckon that’s the safest place.’
Fortescue said, ‘Why you, Ruthie?’
‘Shaddeh spoke to me. He wouldn’t speak to both of us, he chose me. I think I’m fated to play a decisive part in what happens here. We want Rachel to do something for us, so we should show her a proper kindness for doing it. We should help her find rest just out of common compassion. We shouldn’
t go looking to bargain with her over that.’
Fortescue gestured at the nightgown, the hairbrush. ‘Why this?’
‘In her position, at the age she was, it’s what I’d have liked,’ Ruthie said.
Edith said, ‘You’ve no idea what you’re letting yourself in for. She’s a fucking nightmare. Rachel Ballantyne’s all your nightmares rolled into one. You won’t get through this charade, if she shows up. And that will only provoke her.’
‘Thanks for your vote of confidence, Edith.’
‘You’re young and all, Edie,’ Helena said, ‘but just now you’re being a right royal pain in the arse.’
Edith began to sob at that. ‘I’m scared,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, Ruthie.’
Fortescue strode across to Edie and held her in his arms. He looked over her head to Ruthie. He held Ruthie’s eyes and then smiled and winked at her. ‘Come on, kiddo,’ he said to his stepdaughter. ‘Helena’s going to take us somewhere safe.’
He knew it wasn’t safe. And he knew Helena knew bloody well it wasn’t either, because the generator had previously been tampered with. She’d told Patsy and Patsy had told him. But no one had told Edie and it was Edie who needed to feel secure. He knew, as Helena did, that nowhere here was safe.
He didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay with Ruthie and try to protect her knowing Edie was being comforted forty feet beneath the ground by Helena, a brave and proper grown-up who knew the complex like the back of her hand. But he believed fate had always played a part in their experiences there on New Hope Island and through the bracelet of teeth, it was true the sorcerer Shaddeh had chosen to speak only in the end to Ruthie.
He wanted to stay and protect her but he trusted her instinct and his intuition told him strongly that what she was doing was right. He’d seen Rachel Ballantyne and still recalled the sick feeling of dismay the short encounter then had left him with. He did not know whether Ruthie would get through this ordeal for which she’d singled herself out, but he knew what she wanted most from him just then was to trust her to try.
After an hour wasted in the whisky cellar, Lassiter headed for the heights and the colony settlement. He’d seen none of Johnson’s people thus far and none of the maintenance crew either. He had a hunch they were sitting tight in their compound. Derek Johnson was the leader of the whole group now. They’d be nervous and feeling vulnerable and the worsening weather gave them a natural excuse to just bunker down and await his return. Lassiter was convinced by now that wait was a futile one.
He felt very differently from the way he’d felt the last time he’d been on the island. Then he’d been coping with loss, struggling with grief and trying not to become overwhelmed by despair. On a day-to-day basis he’d not felt afraid for his life. He’d thought the island a hazardous place, but had felt his life of such little value he’d been indifferent to the danger. It wasn’t like that now. Meeting Helena Davenport, being with her, had changed him. Now he was afraid and he was fearful too for her. He climbed towards the colony settlement through the strengthening wind and rain in a state of heightened alertness. He was, suddenly, a man with an awful lot to lose.
He kept expecting to see a ragged figure at the edge of his vision, a forlorn little wretch whose feet didn’t quite touch the ground as she moved over it, the rags she wore weirdly untouched by the downpour, her hair a chaotic halo of yellow knots, her face disquietingly incomplete. Rachel was as likely to scare you to death for a lark as she was to extend any courtesy, but he honestly felt her to be the only hope they had and was becoming anxious at the fact that she hadn’t so far appeared. If she felt indifferent to their presence, it naturally followed she’d be indifferent to their fate.
He reached the settlement’s perimeter wall. He walked to the breach and entered it. He had no sense, among the dripping hovels, that anything living shared the moment with him there. But he knew that this was a place that confounded the senses and betrayed reason in perverse and habitual ways. The buildings clustered around him were both haunted and cursed. This was somewhere you trusted only at your peril. He squeezed rainwater out of his eyebrows with a thumb and blinked and headed for Ballantyne’s windowless church.
Lassiter pushed open the heavy door on silence and emptiness. All was still. There was a sour, secreted stink and under that, there was the coppery odour of blood. The sense of recent, murderous violence in that dark space all but screamed at him. He had no need of his dead wife’s psychic gift to hear and see it. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he searched the floor, he saw that no scrap of physical evidence now remained to hint at what had happened there. He had the shortwave he’d been given at breakfast in his breast pocket. But he felt certain that Johnson and his ally in this hunt were beyond ever calling him on it now.
He would go to the sepulchre. There was no avoiding doing that. He’d told the others that if they didn’t get this done by Sunday evening, they’d have failed. He’d concluded that the Being got stronger with every death it accomplished, every victim it devoured. Rachel was their only slim hope of defeating it, if Ruthie was right about the magic. And Lassiter thought she was. He’d great respect for Ruthie’s intuition. In the past, it had been his saviour.
She’d called herself a moron but Ruthie was clever and resourceful. All of them had their qualities and he feared now none of them would survive to see the morning. Bright, unfulfilled lives would be brutally extinguished. Even objectively, it was a genuine pity and a poignant loss. He pulled open the church door and trudged through the deluge to New Hope’s secret little necropolis. Unaware of doing so, he hummed The Recruited Collier as he walked.
Ruthie was unaware of the presence until the tickle of decay smarted in her nostrils. When it did, she felt that the temperature of the room had dropped several degrees. It had done so without her noticing but suddenly, it felt cold. Slowly and deliberately, she turned to the source of the smell. A little girl floated a foot off the ground at the far end of the bar. Even from forty feet away, she was ragged, bedraggled, frail looking. She had sightless eyes. They were staring blindly at the nightdress. Ruthie had found a hanger for it and it hung from a shelf above the bar where glasses could be reached by bar staff taking orders as they faced their customers. Ruthie had willed this moment, sort of. She now very much wished she had helped herself to a strong and fortifying drink in preparation for it.
Except that there was no preparation adequate to it. Ruthie knew all at once that Rachel Ballantyne wasn’t some revenant apparition you could rub your eyes and blink away. Rachel’s presence was a malaise that had her cast all at once into a mood of wretched despondency. She was a figure in three dimensions unimpeded by gravity. She was animate without the requirement of what humans recognized without conscious thought as life.
There was all that and, above all, there was the raw fear her appearance provoked. If anything, Ruthie thought Edie Chambers had undersold the fear. She wondered how much death Rachel had inflicted in the two centuries since rudely being denied her own. She had no way of knowing. Her instinct insisted quite a lot. She sensed the unruly terror of Rachel’s wrath and it made her tremble inside her clothes.
‘You were here once before,’ a papery voice whispered. ‘You’re the storyteller.’
Ruthie nodded. She was too nervous to trust herself to speak. She’d try to speak in a moment when she’d found more self-possession. Rachel Ballantyne floated and drifted before her unmoored, a shiftless, uncertain proposition. Apparently she was capricious and could be gleefully cruel. She charged the air itself there appallingly with risk. Ruthie needed a moment to compose herself in the face of this catalogue of sensory assaults. She felt at the mercy of a cyclone oddly still, at the static centre of a petrified storm.
‘I would like to be told a story,’ Rachel said. ‘I would like that very much.’
‘Would you like also to wear the nightgown?’
‘That would greatly please me also, but I cannot, for I am grievous soiled,’ Rachel Ballantyne sai
d. ‘I am grimy with filth, sore unworthy of such finery.’
She sounded so abjectly sad that Ruthie was lost for a response. Then she heard words spoken from behind her, clearly and strongly and shot through with sympathy.
‘I’ll wash your hands and feet for you if you’ll permit me, Rachel. Let’s go to somewhere more practical for that task. And then you can put on your new nightgown and have your hair brushed properly and hear the story Ruthie has for you.’
It was Edie. It was Edie fucking Chambers, bold and nerveless and judging from the slight smile on Rachel’s smudged features and the girlish twist of pleasure at her waist, saying all the right things.
She followed them to one of the suites. Edie washed her hands and feet and Ruthie swapped her fetid rags for the new nightdress. They did most of it with averted eyes, swallowing panic and bile, fighting terror, quelling revulsion, martialing the awful pity they both felt and making that drive them to complete their tasks. And then with her role fulfilled, Edie took her bucket of putrid water and black suds floating above it and left them to continue with their unfinished business.
Rachel sat cross-legged on the suite’s king-sized bed. She might have been slightly above it, her scrawny rear not quite touching the counterpane, but Ruthie spared herself that uncertain detail. She sat behind Rachel and brushed her hair, ignoring the lice that seethed on her scalp, teasing at the knots, soothing out the tangles, making smooth tresses, or attempting to, of what had been a long time brittle and dead.
She chose her story carefully. She allowed no anachronisms. It had to be a tale a girl of 10 at the end of the 18th century would understand and more importantly, enjoy. Years earlier she’d invented Princess Avalon, friend to the Goblin King and the Witch of the North, owner of a sword and sometimes wearer of armour, protector of an invisible boy present only in his shadow, rider of a magical horse that could fly. It was whimsical stuff, but Avalon was bold and spirited and her audience of one seemed to like it well enough.
The Colony Trilogy Page 72