by F. G. Cottam
Madeleine grew into a kind and beautiful child about whom there was always something dreamy and almost ethereal. As she grew up, she developed a fascination for the plateau above the bay and the standing stones that shape its enigmatic circle. Many was the day I would climb the rise to the rear of the bay with my daughter seated on my shoulders, hand in hand with my wife, to enjoy a picnic in the solitude up there.
Madeleine’s other-worldly curiosity was perhaps most pleasingly satisfied in that place. She would gambol and play among the stones in games of hide and seek. She played these with her mother or with me for hours, some days, until she was about six years old.
The most precious time I spent with my daughter was when she was put to bed at night. Then I would tell her a story until she drowsed too sleepily to listen any more. I always made up the stories. She would sometimes request favourites among them I would struggle to recall because they had never been written down. When I got a detail wrong or made an error in chronology, she would always correct it, the way a patient schoolmarm might with a dull-brained child.
The stories are all told. I shall fight nor write nor mourn no more. I am done with life. The will is quite gone in me. I died with Sarah and Madeleine. Three of us, not two, were taken. All of us perished.
Penmarrick knows this. He came to see me at the house. He left an hour ago. He sat there, goading me with his sympathy and sadness, all the more provocative because I suspected they were feelings sincerely felt. My service revolver lay on the table between us, eight soft-point shells in their brass jackets in its steel chamber and I thought about picking it up and pointing it at him and pulling the trigger and watching his skull explode and his life extinguished in a squalid mess of bone fragments and brain matter.
And he read my thoughts and smiled, knowing I would not do it. It would be retribution but it would be murder too and I want only one death on my conscience and that is my own. It will not help to have committed the sin of coldly killing a man, if I am to find my family in whatever afterlife I hope for.
I do not believe the legend of Ghislane. Neither do I believe a druidic incantation first summoned the Singers under the Sea. The druids lay fraudulent claim to all the important Neolithic sites. But the constructions at the sites pre-date the druids by thousands of years. It is reasonable to assume that the rituals for which they were erected do then also.
I think the sea demons pre-date man. I think they are creatures from a prehistoric time before magic and rationality became separate and opposed. Stand in the stone circle on the plateau above the bay and you cannot but get some sense of the remote and imponderable strangeness of the ancient past. Man is a usurper on the earth: rude, disruptive, brash. In some places the old gods must be appeased and the village at the edge of the sea from which I come is one of those places and I think has been since men first crawled out of the slime and stood erect.
I have been wondering who to tell about what has taken place. There is no arbiter of law or justice to whom I can appeal. Penmarrick rules the bay by custom and bloodline and historic right. All of them will follow his lead; even those, like the publican Abraham, who I believe secretly disapprove. My wife and child drowned. Accidents occur at sea. Every coastal community is familiar with those mundane tragedies caused when boats venture on to the water and storms gather and break suddenly and without warning.
Baxter, padre to my company, might be the man to confide in. I do not think he will be able to do anything to undermine or influence the people of the bay and I doubt he could be made to possess the inclination to travel to the place and try. But I do not want to go to my death without sharing the truth with someone.
We have become good friends. He can be as dour and pious a Scot as any clergyman Edinburgh ever gave birth and education to. But he is principled and strong-minded and a brave man and kind and has the virtue, rare I have discovered in the extremes of martial conflict, of consistency.
He might not believe me. Then again he might. The trenches have acquainted him with some brutal truths about the darkness of men’s souls. His theology has schooled him to accept the forces of darkness as real and tangible entities. If he believes in Satan, and I believe he does, he can be persuaded to believe in other demons too.
If he does venture to the west, in Nicholas Penmarrick, Baxter will meet the devil in human guise. Penmarrick has the glamour Milton’s Lucifer possessed. He has charm in abundance and an easy aspect on the eye. There is a careless elegance about him that prevents people from glimpsing his true character. I saw it though this afternoon, when he came to the house. In my grief I saw him stripped of his affectation and his finery; of the aristocratic air he wears like a dab behind the ear of expensive cologne.
I poured myself a cognac from the cabinet sited between the sitting room’s tall west-facing windows. It has a mirrored back and I glanced at his reflection there and the mask had slipped and he sat slumped and debauched-looking. Worse, he looked depraved. I observed as though for the first time the ragged length of his hair and the coarseness of his skin and the fingernails worn talon-length on the crossed hands in his lap and, not at all for the first time, I wondered at what mockery of the calendar his true age would represent.
The sun has slipped in the sky, where it hangs out over the sea. The sea is blue now but will turn orange later and then later still will reflect that dipping orb with the crimson richness of blood.
I am reminded of Madeleine and my last leave, back in the spring, when all she wanted of her father was for me to show her a sunset. She sat in the pretty purple and grey of her St Anselm’s school uniform and implored me to let her be with me to look at the western sky on the beach as day declined into darkness. I hesitated, saying that this phenomenon of nature would only occur at that time of the year, past her bedtime. But in my heart I had relented straight away.
In the event, we watched our sunset from the stone circle, the perfect vantage point, its familiarity made strange and even portentous by the stretching shadows of the monoliths and the ripple of the darkling grass. As gloaming turned to dusk, the heavens shone gloriously, the descending sun touching the water beneath cumulus shaped like some vaulted cathedral of fire. Madeleine gasped at the wonder of it and put her arms around my neck where we sat and hugged and kissed me on the cheek in gratitude.
There are persistent rumours that Haig and his French counterpart have planned a huge assault for the end of the month. I have not been blind to the recent toil of the sappers: tunnelling, laying mines, building underground routes along which our strike troops can approach the German line in cover. Nor, coming back through the support system of trenches on the way to the boat, and my leave, was I blind to the endless convoys of wagons at the railheads with their deadly cargo of shells for the bombardment that will precede the attack.
Any experienced soldier would draw the same conclusion from the scale of the preparations. It is giving nothing away to write about it here. By the time these words are discovered, it will all be history. Will the assault succeed? Personally, I do not think so. There is no want of courage or morale among the men. They are trained and disciplined and committed. When the moment comes, they will go into the fight without a hesitant thought, most of them.
This war is a stalemate, a conflict of attrition. Two years of fighting it has taught me that. It will only end when one side or the other loses hope. Only when hope is extinguished in the fighting hearts of men do they capitulate.
The fight in me is extinguished. My loved ones have perished and with them, my hope. I will be dead soon and pray there is an afterlife. If there is not, I will be grateful for oblivion.
In God’s truth,
Adam Frederick Gleason
Chapter Eleven
It was eight o’clock in the evening and bedtime when the phone began to ring and Olivia saw her mum through the open door pick up the kitchen extension and answer it. Livs was in the sitting room, watching a Little Princess DVD on their epic new wall-mounted flat-scree
n television. It was so big, watching it was almost like being at the cinema. Kind Mr Cooper, who did jobs for nice Richard Penmarrick, had fitted it.
Jack was upstairs. She thought that he was probably chatting on Facebook to Megan Penmarrick. Livs had enjoyed their Club adventure of the previous evening and she thought that Megan was kind and friendly as well as very pretty and she could quite understand why Jack was so taken with her. After their barbecue on the island they had gathered in a circle around the fire and sung ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’, and ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and a couple of other, more grown-up songs everyone but Livs and Jack had known by heart and Megan’s voice when she sang was simply the most beautiful sound Livs had ever heard.
Their mum was on the phone for quite a time. Livs thought this a good thing because it meant she got to watch more of the DVD than she would have otherwise. Their mum was strict about bedtime. Dad was slightly less strict, but still strict-ish. She wondered if it was her daddy on the phone but thought that it couldn’t be because he would still be in America or he would be up in the sky on his return flight. He was not coming home tonight, she knew that. He was going to land in England very late and stay at their house in London which had not yet been rented out. He wasn’t coming back until tomorrow.
She missed her daddy. He had only been gone for one night and they had really had fun with the Club, but Livs still missed him. She missed him when she woke up and he wasn’t there in the morning. And she feared for him too. The spookmeister was there at their old house in London, lurking in the garden, hiding and watching through the absent eyes in its spade-shaped, sacking face. It was frightening and though it was crafty about hiding itself it was real and fierce and angry-looking when you did spot it. It was there for something. Everything had a purpose. They had been taught that in R.E. at school. She hoped the purpose of the spookmeister was not to hurt her daddy.
Their mum said goodbye to the person she had been speaking to on the phone and came into the sitting room. It would have been very bright in there because of the angle of the sun in the sky outside, but Olivia had closed the curtains so that she could see the television screen better. She thought that their mum looked very pale. She thought she looked so pale that something must be wrong and she thought that Daddy’s aeroplane had crashed and thought, It can’t have, please, it just can’t have crashed.
Their mum picked up the remote and switched the Little Princess DVD off. Then she glanced around and opened the curtains and the room became light with sunshine. ‘Please go and fetch your brother, Livs.’
‘Has something happened to Daddy?’
‘No, of course it hasn’t. Please go and fetch your brother.’
In the sunlight through the big windows their mum’s face was so pale there were tiny blue veins underneath it visible at her temples that Livs had never seen before. Her lips were pale and her eyes were wide and had no expression in them at all.
She came back down the stairs with Jack. He had been on Facebook and he had been talking to Megan. He was nice and not grumpy when she knocked and entered his new room and gave him the message. She thought this might be because of the look on her own face, still shocked at the horrible thought that something awful had happened to their dad.
They sat on the sofa together and their mum knelt in front of them. She looked at them both for a moment before speaking. Then she said, ‘There will not be a trial at court now as a consequence of the attack on you, Jack. You will not have to go through that. The case is closed.’
‘You mean they’ve got away with it.’
‘I don’t mean that at all. They cannot now get away with it. They are dead.’
Jack frowned. ‘How did they die?’
Livs, who felt suddenly cold, thought it best to say nothing. What she wanted to do was to run away and hide or, better still, simply disappear.
‘They died in accidents.’
‘How?’
Livs thought that she knew. Actually, she did not think there was any doubt.
‘They died accidentally,’ their mum repeated. ‘I am not going to go into the details. You need to know, but that’s all you need to know. There will be no trial, but they have not got away with anything. They have lost everything. They have lost their lives.’
‘I wanted them to be punished,’ Jack said. ‘I never wanted them dead.’ He stood. ‘I was angry at first. Once I realised I was going to get completely better, the anger sort of went. Mostly I wanted them locked up so they couldn’t hurt anyone else. I think they had done bad things before and would likely do them again if they weren’t locked up. That’s all.’ He turned and went back to the stairs and his room and Livs assumed the chat he was having on the internet with Megan Penmarrick.
‘It’s my fault, Mum.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I know how they died.’
‘Hush.’
‘They burned, didn’t they?’
Lillian Greer had been pale already. After her daughter had spoken those words, her facial skin turned translucent; waxy and blue-hued with the blood beating coldly under its surface.
‘How can you possibly know that?’
‘I made a wish on the island last night, Mum. A fire had been lit by Mr Teal. I smelled the fish grilling over the fire on their skewers as I was making it. I wished harm to come to the nasty boys who had hurt Jack.’
James dozed fitfully after finishing what Adam Gleason had written and then concealed and left for providence. They called it shell shock, didn’t they? Or they called it neurasthenia. That was his first thought. Battle trauma had tilted the balance of the valiant infantry captain’s mind, made him paranoid and delusional. He would have to show this last testament to the Gleason scholar Michael Carney. It would add greatly to the store of knowledge about the soldier-poet, because as an insight into his state of mind it was nothing less than revelatory.
He had suffered the delusion that his wife and child had been deliberately killed in a pagan ritual. He had returned to the front suicidal as a consequence. He had certainly died only days after committing what he had to paper. He had kept his threat or promise never to write another poem. Had a German bullet killed him? Or had it been one from the handgun he so vividly described being tempted to use on an ancestor of Richard Penmarrick, over cognac in the sitting room on a sunny afternoon at Topper’s Reach?
There was more than one problem with this theory. But the most obvious was Gleason’s rationality. He had described his routine inspection of the weapon Davies had discharged in the manner of a practical man who remained a punctilious soldier. People did not generally act with such conscientiousness and professionalism when their minds were damaged. Sending the private for an unscheduled tea break and standing in for him while he did so signalled more than compassion and good leadership. It was the act, wasn’t it, of an officer who was coldly and completely sane.
James was in the Jaguar, driving on the route from Heathrow to Bermondsey, when his mobile, on the passenger seat next to him, began to ring. He took his eyes off the road and glanced at the display thinking that it was after 11 p.m. and surely too late for Lee Marsden, whom he did not feel like talking to at all. At first he did not recognise the number. Then he realised that the first five digits were the area code for West Cornwall. The unfamiliar number must be his own, their own, the number of the landline at the house into which they had recently moved. He had not yet had time to learn it by heart. Seeing it made him feel more anxious, he felt, than he should have.
The caller did not leave a message. He pulled into the first lay-by he came to and rang back. Lillian answered immediately.
‘How did it go?’
‘Badly. It could not have gone worse, I don’t think. It was actually a disaster.’
‘It doesn’t matter. In the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter.’
James was silent. If it mattered so little, why had she called?
‘Alec McCabe rang me earlier. The boys who attacke
d Jack died last night, James. They burned to death in their beds.’
‘Some sort of gang retribution?’
‘Their families are blaming witchcraft. The forensic people could find no reason for the cause or timing of the fires. They burned ferociously but were self-contained.’
‘An accelerant must have been used. It’s murder, gang crime.’
‘Olivia thinks that she is responsible. She was given a wish to make at her Club meet on Monday evening. Something she calls the spookmeister granted her wish, she says. She is quite insistent. There was a carving of this spookmeister on the door of the hut on the island. She says she saw one in the garden of the London house. She says that your brother saw it too and it spooked him.
‘After she had gone to bed I asked Jack about the carving. Megan Penmarrick told him that they should not be named. It is bad luck to name them. But they do have a name, she said. They are called Harbingers.’
‘How is Olivia now?’
‘She is sleeping. Things are happening here I don’t like, James. I think we have made a mistake in coming here.’
‘You don’t believe it, do you, about Olivia’s wish?’
‘I know my daughter and she is not telling lies. Last night I went to the church, James. I saw an act of desecration there. Then I saw Angela Heart. She took me back to her lovely home and in her pretty garden gave me an explanation for why there is no organised religion practised in the bay and not a word of it rang true.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, darling.’
‘You remember what we saw on the beach, James?’
‘Of course I do, vividly.’
‘It was magic, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what it was.’
‘It was magic,’ Lillian said. ‘And magic exacts a price.’
‘Lock the doors and windows tonight.’
‘I’m sorry it didn’t go well, darling, in Colorado.’
‘Remember to lock the doors and windows, Lily, before you turn in.’ He ended the call and stored the number in his phone’s memory.