by F. G. Cottam
Jack dusted his hands together to get the sand off them and went over to his mum. He put an arm around her, surprised, as he always found himself these days, that he had reached her height and would soon be taller than she was even when she wore heels. He hugged and kissed her on the cheek and she smiled, returning his embrace.
‘What’s the matter, Mum?’
‘I’ve remembered something, that’s all. I’ve remembered something I should never have allowed myself to forget.’
‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’
She looked past him, her eyes flicking this way and that, uneasy to Jack, now, as well as unhappy. This was worrying. For the first time, he had the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach prompted by the realisation that they were among strangers and a long way from the place he had always thought of as home.
When his mum spoke, her voice was not much more than a whisper. ‘When I made my mistake with Robert O’Brien, I resolved that I would never lie to my son, Jack. And I won’t. But I don’t know if this is something I should tell you because I don’t yet really know what it means.’
‘Just tell me, Mum. We’ll worry afterwards about what it means.’
She gestured with a tilt of her head at the flapping, glistening hill of seaweed-draped wood that now towered above the beach. ‘That thing brought it back. I remember painting it. I painted it among the other images that ended up illustrating that children’s book your dad found in the hospital. That kelp and driftwood pyre brought it back to me.’
‘They didn’t use that one?’
‘No. They did not. I’d assumed I’d done the illustrations from photographs. Evidently they were done from memory.’
‘You mean you think you’ve been here before?’
She smiled. ‘When I came here with your dad? When Uncle Mark looked after you?’
‘Uncle Mark, the toxic avenger,’ Jack said. But the joke did not put the smile he had expected it to on his mum’s face.
‘The first words Richard Penmarrick said to me were welcome home.’
‘Jesus. Sorry, I mean heck.’
She looked at him. The look was serious. ‘We had an illustration tutor at St Martin’s that term, at the time I’ve isolated as the one when I must have completed that project. She was only there for the one term. She was very glamorous and always wore black clothes and red lipstick. I’d forgotten about her, too. Maybe I’d been encouraged in some way to forget. But I’m fairly sure now that she was Angela Heart.’
Jack could not reply to this remark. He would have done, but he saw that Richard Penmarrick was strolling along the beach towards them and Richard would have heard whatever Jack said and his instinct told him that would not be at all wise.
He had not worked out the implications of what his mum had just told him and did not know whether he was really capable of doing so. But it seemed ominous and wrong. It suggested the decision to go to Brodmaw Bay had not actually been theirs at all. They had not really chosen it. It was more as though it had chosen them. If that was the case, an awful lot of trouble had been gone to. You couldn’t help but wonder why. He felt an urgent need just to do something positive and useful. He said, ‘I’m going to find Olivia.’
Jack passed Richard Penmarrick with a curt nod and started to walk towards the centre of the island, but had covered only a few metres of sand when his sister emerged with a group of Mount year sevens from the bushes beyond. She looked much smaller than them, which she was. She was at the centre of the group, but to her brother looked separate and apart. It wasn’t just that she didn’t share the uniform. She was pale and apparently lost in her own thoughts, twisting a plait of grass between her fingers.
Livs did not look like she was having a very good time and it occurred to him that, actually, none of them was. He heard the band behind him strike up a tune, gathered near the edge of the water when he twisted and looked, facing it in a neat, three-tier formation, as though performing for the sea itself, which he thought bloody odd. Everything was odd, wasn’t it? It wasn’t even a question. It was a statement of fact.
He saw Megan Penmarrick over to his right, by the driftwood and seaweed monstrosity they had built, standing next to Ricky Sharp. They both had their arms folded across their chests and were openly staring at him with expressions that were neither friendly nor cheerful. He shrugged to himself and went and gave his sister a hug and she said, ‘We’re not locked on, Jack. We’re just not. I think we really, really need our dad.’
He took Livs by the hand and led her back to where their mum stood. Richard Penmarrick was standing next to her, smiling, looking at the band, listening to the shrill music pouring forth from their shiny brass horns and clashing cymbals and the discordant triangle someone kept striking out of time with the rhythm of the rest.
Their mum said, ‘In whose honour is the band performing?’
The smile did not leave Penmarrick’s lips. He spoke through it. Jack thought that he looked very smug. He said, ‘We honour the old gods.’
‘You mean the Singers under the Sea.’
‘If you know, Lillian, then why do you ask?’
‘My husband researched the legend before we came here. I did not realise that the old religion was still practised.’
‘This is a venerable part of the country. Our traditions go back even to ancient times and we value them.’
‘Who are the Singers?’
‘Spirits, evoked originally to protect us and help us prosper.’
‘Have you ever seen one?’
He laughed at that. ‘I don’t think seeing the Singers a very practical ambition, my dear. I have heard them and that is quite enough.’
‘You can see the Harbingers, though, can’t you?’ Olivia said. ‘I’ve seen them myself.’
Penmarrick frowned. He rocked in his boots. ‘You can,’ he said, ‘though it is not considered particularly desirable to do so. Seeing them does not bring good luck.’
‘Do we need good luck, me and my family?’ Lillian said.
He looked at her, she thought, frankly, for the first time since they had met. She suspected that the time for transparency had come. It was why she had posed the question. He glanced at her children, flanking her. He said, ‘My dear, I think you need a miracle.’
Jack looked back to the glistening bonfire. There was an effigy now at its peak. The figure of a man in a grey suit and a clerical collar had been tied up there to a plank of wood protruding at a slight angle. The angle undermined the figure, giving it a slightly comical aspect. It was as though he leaned drunk and about to fall. The head above the white collar was a mockery of a person, made of a stuffed pillowcase with crudely painted features and its hair a bunched crop of greying straw.
James was finally picked up by a minicab outside the hospital at 3.30 p.m. He was back with his car in less than thirty minutes and it took him less than twenty minutes to change the wheel using the spare and the hand-jack from the Jaguar’s boot. His tank was almost full, but he was gratified to see the four- gallon can of petrol he always kept there. He was good with mechanical things, precise and efficient. He found himself tightening the final wheel nut wishing everything in life was as straightforward and simply dealt with as machinery.
The traffic had increased in his absence from the road. It was always heavier as late afternoon stretched into evening. He crested the rise that brought the bay into sight at 6.30 p.m. There was still plenty of light. He braked sharply as he passed the stone circle on its plateau to his left only because he saw a small and ragged apparition there attired in purple and grey.
There was a reason she was there. She did not appear at random, did she? He switched off the engine and got out of the car. He could smell the salt of the sea so strongly it was almost like sluicing his throat and nostrils with brine. The scent of it assaulted him. He thought this probably the effect of the concussion. He felt febrile, vulnerable in the high, buffeting breeze. The grass seemed impossibly green under his feet when he gained
the plateau and the looming stones screamed dumb questions about themselves to which time had forgotten the answer.
Little Madeleine Gleason was nowhere to be seen. She had vanished. He walked to the spot where he had sighted her, next to one of the stones. And he saw that the ground beneath its interior facet had been scuffed. He smiled at the smudge of disturbed earth. He did not think Madeleine possessed the weight on her feet to inflict it. He walked the circle, inside the stones but close to the perimeter, so that he could look at the base of each. All had been marked in the same curious, subtle manner.
He looked around. There was no one on the plateau with him. When he looked downwards to the village, there were no cars moving in the streets, no people visible. The bay was otherwise engaged. He got down on his knees before one of the disturbances and probed it with his fingers. He felt metal and pulled from the earth a key. It was brass and long-shafted with large, old-fashioned teeth.
He dug three times before successive stones and came up with a key at each. They had been ceremonially buried, he concluded, one before each of the stones in the circle. They were all identical. And he thought he knew what it was they would lock. He put all but one of them back. That, he put in his pocket. Silently, he thanked the dead girl for detaining him. He did not think he would catch sight of her again. She had done what she could.
He thought he knew now why she had killed Robert O’Brien. It had been to stop him hampering their move to the bay. Lillian had described him as a spoiled and immature man and he had not given up willingly on his romantic ambition. Saving the Greers had not been Madeleine’s first consideration. The little girl’s ghost had led them to what and to where she had because she wanted revenge.
James was minded to give it to her. He drove the car into a copse of trees by the side of the descending road where he thought it would have a good chance of remaining concealed. He took the petrol can from its boot and put it on the ground beside him. For perhaps the twentieth time during the course of the day, he rang his wife’s mobile number and for the twentieth time her mobile failed to ring. Wherever she was, she was out of range of a signal.
He looked down the hill, getting his bearings. He saw that he could approach the place he wanted to, concealed for most of the route by a dry-stone wall. He would have to crouch, but that was all right. When he got closer to his destination, the building itself would conceal him. He would get to the rear of it without its vigilant sentinel seeing him from her cottage window.
The church looked no more inviting from the back than it had from the front. He ducked under the broken door into the gloom within, unscrewing the cap from his petrol can, and began to slosh the contents over the sacks slumped against the pews. He glanced at the tabernacle, wondering what fresh abomination lay inside. He had the feeling that the desecration here was a frequent duty industriously and enthusiastically accomplished.
One of the sacks rippled. James only caught the movement out of the corner of his right eye and the eye was still bloodshot and slightly blurred from the blow to his temple in the crash. He did not imagine it, though. The things kept in the sacks, the stored and sleeping Harbingers, were stirring under the assault of the accelerant he had soaked them with.
There was another ripple and a mewling sound and one of the sacks fell from its pew as the thing confined inside it sensed the danger and struggled to unfold its limbs and escape. But the sacks were tightly sewn, weren’t they? The Harbingers, whatever their function in the rituals here, were not allowed to roam free. This blasphemous congregation left the church only on special occasions. That was his intuition. Angela Heart had been telling the truth. This was a dangerous place. More than the decrepit state of the building fabric made it so.
As if to prove the point, a mandible, something more like the sectioned limb of an insect than a human finger, pushed through the thick burlap confining its owner and scrabbled about, seeking greater purchase. James walked backwards away from the spreading puddle of fuel under his feet and took out the book of matches he had bought at the newsagent’s concession back at the hospital.
‘No.’
‘Angela,’ he said, without turning. ‘You’re just in time.’ He struck a match, used it to ignite the tips of the rest of them and, as the book flared intensely into orange and yellow life, dropped it on to the church floor.
He walked out of the church, ducking carefully under the canted door in its arch, already able to feel the blossoming heat from the fire he had set in the nave, aware of the screeching sounds coming from the burning sacks as the things within them rattled and perished.
It would sober them, this act of destruction, he thought. It would rob them of their power to menace. It would show the people of the bay that they were not invulnerable to harm. The conflagration would alert the county fire brigade. He would tell Penmarrick that the police were already on their way. Then he would flee with his family back to London and safety and forget about the insanity that reigned in this blighted place.
Ben Tamworth and Martin Sharp were standing in the churchyard. He could hear heat shatter diamonds of stained glass in the windows behind where he stood. There was a taste of burning, bitter and loathsome in the throat. He was obliged to spit on the ground. Angela Heart brushed past him, their shoulders touching, and he smelled smoke on her clothing mingled with the sweet, expensive perfume on her skin. The concussion had really heightened his senses.
Another man, more flamboyant, older, was walking down the path from the gate towards Tamworth and Sharp. It was the scholar, Michael Carney. James thought, giddily, that he had something in his jacket pocket Carney would probably find very interesting to read. Then an intuition told him that Carney knew it all already, that none of it would be a revelation to him. He helped sustain the convenient fiction that the Gleason women had died years later than they had, as victims of the Spanish flu.
Angela Heart leaned forward and whispered something to Ben Tamworth. He separated himself from the group and approached James.
‘Nasty blow you’ve taken to the head.’
‘Not quite as nasty as it could have been.’
‘You were lucky.’
‘You think so?’
‘You can come with us voluntarily, under your own steam, Mr Greer. Or I can drag you. I really don’t give a fuck either way.’
He walked. They walked together. They were a cluster of people out for a stroll, he thought, unless you looked closely. Do that and you would see the scorch marks on his own clothing and notice that Angela Heart’s disdainful features were slightly blackened by soot and that there was blood seeping from under a dressing on the side of his own head and that the faces of Sharp and Tamworth, flanking him, contained a dark sort of fury.
People passed them, going the other way. It seemed that the whole village was climbing out of the bay up towards the hills. They straggled in ones and twos and bigger groups, in packs and snaking single-file but all going more or less in the same direction. James thought that they were headed for the plateau and its stone circle. He saw that few if any of them spared a glance for the blazing church. The pillar of smoke would be seen for miles. And people elsewhere would take it for a farmer clearing a field of its hedgerows or simply burning deadfall.
None of the people passing him engaged him with their eyes. Even those who passed quite close did not look directly at him. They gazed upwards. Mostly their expressions were neutral. He saw something akin to rapture, though, on the faces of a few. He looked for his wife and his children, of course. But he did so in vain. They were nowhere to be seen on his short route through the streets.
They rounded a corner and he was confronted by two lines of masked pallbearers carrying a sort of throne on their shoulders. The masks worn by the men were carved from wood and studded with shells. The shells erupted from the flat surface of the masks in whorls and swellings like the protrusions of some disfiguring nautical disease.
Richard Penmarrick slouched on the throne. He wore rings on hi
s fingers and a crab-shaped pendant cast in bronze around his neck. He was dressed in a priestly cassock of black and some white substance daubed on his face gave him the pallor of death. He grinned. His teeth were large and yellow in his head against his painted complexion.
‘The children have had a lovely time of it today,’ he said. ‘But it is time to put childish things away, Mr Greer. The party is very much over, now. The ceremony begins. We experience a grave and serious moment.’ The bearers gripped the rails of their burden and shuffled past James and his party, on up the hill to the stones.
They took him to the Leeward Tavern. When they got him inside Ben Tamworth clubbed him without warning on the injured side of his head with the heel of his right palm before they tied him to a straight-backed chair. His temple had started to bleed fairly freely again under its sodden dressing but he did not feel likely to lose consciousness when Tamworth hit him and neither did the impact make him feel sick. He was better, he thought. He was on the mend. He had a fighting chance.
It was only a few minutes later, after they had left him, that he was overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness. He had spent too long groping amid the standing stones and too long subsequently creeping down to the church intent on remaining unseen. He had assumed the church central to whatever they did because Angela Heart had guarded it so alertly. He had been taken in by his own reaction to Lily’s sinister representation of it in the book. He had made a misjudgement. It had cost him time. It was now after eight o’clock. And his failed strategy had cost him his liberty too.
They had put him in the saloon. He had a view through the picture window of the sea with the descending sun above it in a sky filling from the horizon up with tumbling mountains of cumulus cloud. They were colossal, dizzying even at this distance in their scale.