The Colony

by F. G. Cottam

Blake envied them their sense of purpose. They were half a dozen men literally doing something constructive. He led a team of five. They comprised the Seasick Four and the ex-sergeant-major Paul Napier, a war hero whose nerve had deserted him three years ago in Afghanistan.

  He had some sympathy for Napier. He’d heard about the circumstances of the action which has robbed the SM of his nerve and didn’t think he knew of anyone sane who’d have emerged from the incident without trauma. But practically speaking, he was saddled with four overweight, clueless stiffs and a man still a victim of battle shock. And there was something about the island that made him think he’d need far more formidable back-up than McIntyre’s organisation had provided him with.

  Quad bikes would have been a start, he thought to himself. The terrain was ideal for them. They would have raised the collective morale of his little force. Treat men with respect – give them the tools for the job – and their ability and willingness to do it increases exponentially. Aboard a quad bike, given that crucial extra mobility, he would by now, he thought, have indentified the interloper he was pretty sure was lurking clandestinely on the island and had been since before his team’s arrival.

  He wasn’t given to fanciful thinking. He had a trained mind and had done the courses and was schooled to reason in a focussed and disciplined way. He didn’t think some folk-singing phantom haunted New Hope in the way that poor, damaged Napier seemed to. But he had the strong feeling of being watched and over the course of his career had been in enough hostile places to suspect that the scrutiny wasn’t friendly.

  Someone was there who wasn’t supposed to be. He’d have bet a month’s salary on that. The reason for their presence there, he was less sure about. He didn’t think it was a journalist covertly waiting to steal the New Hope scoop from under the noses of McIntyre’s people. There would be no scoop until the experts arrived and their arrival was still more than a week away. Even then, there was no guarantee of a story. The Island might sustain its well earned reputation for mystery. The experts might reveal absolutely nothing new at all. And anyway journalists weren’t hostile. They were always curious and could be a bloody nuisance, but they didn’t generally give off the raw malevolence he’d personally sensed from whoever covertly studied him on New Hope.

  Blake would find that person. It was his duty to his employer to do so and professional pride would insist that he succeed in finding, confronting and exposing them. A weapon would be useful, he thought. Even a side-arm, a Sig-Sauer pistol or a bog standard Browning automatic would be both a comfort and a useful tool.

  He’d begin his search in earnest once the construction guys had built the camp and departed. Their presence, their diversionary industry, was too loud and intrusive to allow him to stalk and nail the island’s trespasser.

  He’d do it when they’d gone. He would not, could not involve the Seasick Four in the mission. They’d likely turn a pursuit into a pantomime. The real question was whether he would involve Napier. He hadn’t yet decided about that. Napier was eminently well-qualified, but could he deal with hostile action? Would involving him be remedial for the man and useful for him, or would Napier, nerve shot, prove a hopeless liability?

  Blake grinned wryly to himself and remembered the singing Napier had imagined at dusk on their first evening there as they walked the perimeter together. Just as he was fostering a bit of camaraderie, the ex-paratrooper had gone all weird on him. Fuck it, he thought, with a quad bike pang. No wheels and no weapon, but the island is small and I’m pretty handy with a knife. The feeling of being watched was irritating, like an itch you couldn’t scratch. It was persistent and it bothered him.

  You think you’re sly and clever but I’ll track and find you, you fucker, Blake thought. And when I catch you, you won’t fucking know what’s hit you.

  In a weird way, he felt that whoever was skulking around the place was actually doing him a favour. The pursuit would provide him with a bit of focus and excitement. The piss-poor quality of the people under his command was something that could get to him and affect his own morale. Having a mission, a specific task within his remit would help raise his own spirits and sustain his concentration and discipline.

  The construction team foreman had barely looked at him when he introduced himself and shook hands prior to the necessary ritual of checking their documentation. The contempt had been almost palpable. A Heckler and Koch semi-automatic strapped across his chest would have made all the difference in the world where that was concerned. Civilian life was not the army, a fact that brought fresh indignities with it all the time. But he still possessed his lethal army skills and a growing inkling that in this windswept and barren patch of bird shit and bog, he would yet get the opportunity to use them.

  McIntyre told Karl Cooper what Lassiter had told him about his Liverpool experience over dinner at his home. He said that he’d sent Lassiter to examine some items that had belonged to Seamus Ballantyne. He said that among those items had been a pocket watch. The watch, when recovered from a locked sea chest, was ticking strongly and showing the correct time. This was despite it having been stored there undisturbed for several years. Lassiter further claimed that the watch had spent better than a decade in the mid-twentieth century in the possession of the crofter David Shanks.

  Cooper was recently familiar with the name of Shanks. McIntyre had shown him the film shot on New Hope Island in the 1930s. He hadn’t really said much about it at the time of the showing. He’d grown pale watching it. The footage didn’t make for comfortable viewing. His only comment at the time had been that he thought the film probably genuine. It was too disturbing to be faked.

  The meal the two men had just shared had been genuinely convivial. McIntyre enjoyed Cooper’s company as well as his expertise and insights. In some ways he thought of Karl almost as a surrogate son, so close was the conviction they shared about the existence of intelligent life beyond earth’s boundaries. He felt affection as well as admiration for this young man, with his crystalline intellect and unforced charisma. Cooper had prospered despite a modest upbringing. It was an achievement they had in common.

  He had uncorked a bottle of brandy, laid down when Napoleon Bonaparte still ruled France and its First Empire, before Cooper chose to comment. It was an extravagant gesture but one McIntyre felt his respect and fondness for his guest justified. Besides, they were on the brink of an historic discovery. He thought of the picture in his school history book of Napoleon in Egypt contemplating the secret of the Sphinx.

  They were seated by now on the sun terrace of his house, enjoying the views out over London from the top of Highgate Hill and smoking McIntyre’s cigars as evening embraced the world.

  ‘And you’re concerned by what you’ve told me?’

  ‘I am, Karl. Very.’

  ‘Lassiter’s a drunk. That’s the impression you’ve given me of him.’

  ‘He’s an alcoholic. There’s a difference. I wouldn’t employ a drunk. He wouldn’t work under the influence. He’s too fastidious for that. And he’s exceptionally good at what he does. I believe the experience he endured in that museum in Liverpool to have been genuine.’

  ‘All experiences are subject to interpretation.’

  ‘I know that. I was happy to believe David Shanks brought his apparition with him to New Hope Island. I couldn’t see that black magic or paranormal phenomena of any kind had anything to do with the fate of the original community. I could think of only one plausible explanation for the vanishing.’

  ‘There is only one plausible explanation,’ Cooper said, reaching to tap ash from the tip of his cigar. ‘We both know that.’

  ‘Shanks dabbled in magic,’ McIntyre said. ‘At least, there’s compelling circumstantial evidence to suggest he did so and that he later lived to regret it.’

  ‘Thus the unwelcome subject of his home movie,’ Cooper said, ‘New Hope’s spectral little squatter.’

  ‘A 200 year old watch, apparently winding and setting itself in a locked chest
in a museum basement is a separate matter, however, for which I can think of no explanation which offers any comfort at all.’

  ‘Swiss precision,’ Cooper said.

  McIntyre smiled, despite himself. ‘Very droll,’ he said.

  ‘You have only Lassiter’s word, about the watch.’

  ‘Which I’ve just told you, I trust.’

  ‘He could have made the story up to make his work on your behalf seem more important than it really is.’

  ‘The experience scared him,’ McIntyre said. ‘He wasn’t trying to impress me in recounting it.’

  ‘Kinetic energy,’ Cooper said, after a pause. ‘There must have been a tremendous release of kinetic energy when the alien spacecraft landed and its occupants made contact. That could affect something as complex as a watch mechanism. It might generate power in the watch movement for centuries.’

  ‘Except that the watch never went to New Hope Island,’ McIntyre said. ‘It was left behind in Liverpool in the possession of Rebecca Browning. It’s not a relic of the New Hope community, Karl, but a souvenir of Ballantyne’s seafaring life. All of the stuff in the chest pre-dates the New Hope experience. None of it ever went near the island.’

  Cooper was quiet for a moment smoking, contemplating, absorbing this information and its implications. He sipped from his glass. Then he said, ‘Shanks stole the watch, right?’

  ‘He stole something. The watch had far greater intrinsic value than anything else in the chest. Lassiter quite reasonably concluded it was the artefact stolen.’

  ‘So for more than a decade, that pocket watch was in the possession of a black magician. Its mechanical mischief, if Lassiter’s to be believed, is more likely than anything to be a consequence of that fact. Like that apparition he captured with his cine-camera, it’s to do with Shanks and his demonic dabbling and not the Island at all. It has nothing to do with the disappearance of the community. It has nothing even to do really with Seamus Ballantyne.’

  ‘Damn David Shanks,’ McIntyre said. ‘That man didn’t just try to settle on New Hope, Karl. He contaminated the place.’

  ‘We’re talking about a revenant apparition.’

  ‘And a delinquent timepiece,’ McIntyre said.

  ‘For which I keep reminding you, we only have Lassiter’s word. Keep things in proportion. It doesn’t amount to a curse. You have people on the Island, right?’

  ‘A small security team has been there for a week. An ex-Royal Marine captain by the name of Blake is in charge. One of the chaps with him was awarded the Military Cross during his third tour of duty with the Parachute Regiment in Afghanistan.’

  ‘Good men then, reliable, presumably vigilant, well-qualified. Have they reported anything out of the ordinary?’

  ‘They’ve reported nothing whatsoever.’

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘There’s a construction crew there too as of this morning,’ McIntyre said, ‘building the living quarters you and the others will occupy. I suppose if New Hope was afflicted by ghostly goings on, someone would have radioed in to comment on it or complain.’

  ‘But no one has.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘There are no ghosts, Alex. There was never anything magical or paranormal there. Not in the time of the settlement. There was no mass suicide induced by mass hysteria. There was no fatal epidemic of disease and the people didn’t embark from the island aboard a fleet of boats for pastures new without leaving a note. They were taken. They were chosen and taken by benign and curious visitors to our world and when I get there I promise you I’ll uncover the proof of that.’

  ‘And you still believe they left a calling card?’

  ‘Somewhere on the island, I’m convinced they did,’ Cooper said. ‘And when I find that, you’ll have your world exclusive. And I’ll have my first solid step on the route to establishing formal contact. It’ll be a moment for the world to gather breath.’

  ‘It’ll put both our names in the history books.’

  The two men were poised, about to clink glasses in a toast to that happy thought, when the phone at McIntyre’s elbow rang. He picked up he receiver and listened for a while and then grunted one unintelligible word and replaced it.

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘That was Carrick, the paper’s features editor. One of our team of experts has rendered himself indisposed.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Simon Hawsley-Smith, the spiritual medium.’

  ‘No great loss,’ Cooper said.

  ‘We need to be seen to cover every eventuality, Karl. We need to be authoritative and scrupulous and professional. This is the definitive investigation into perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery of modern times.’

  ‘So long as you don’t lose our forensic archaeologist,’ Cooper said. ‘The ground there is going to yield some interesting secrets. He’ll be more than useful. He’s indispensable.’

  ‘Lassiter knows a psychic,’ McIntyre said.

  ‘You put too much store in Lassiter, Alex.’

  ‘She’s genuine, he says, highly gifted, if reluctant.’

  ‘If she’s genuine then it’s no surprise she’s reluctant,’ Cooper said. ‘A dialogue with the dead can’t be a comfortable encounter.’ He emptied the contents of his glass into his mouth and gulped appreciatively. ‘Think she can be persuaded?’

  McIntyre shrugged. ‘Everyone has their price, is my experience. ‘

  ‘Me included?’

  ‘You’re the exception that proves the rule, Karl. I’ll call Lassiter in the morning,’ he said.

  Lucy Church was getting ready for bed when the call came from Carrick. Features wasn’t hard news and personal disinclination prevented him from doing late nights habitually so she knew that something pretty serious must be up for him still to be working.

  ‘We’re an expert short,’ he said. ‘Our medium has just suffered a stroke that’s likely to prove fatal. That’s the prognosis, anyway.’

  ‘You’d have thought he’d have known,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Very bloody funny, not. He’s an expert in communicating with the other side, not a clairvoyant. He never claimed to be able to see the future.’

  ‘If he was destined to make it so soon to the other side himself, you’d have thought one of his contacts there would have told him how welcome he was shortly going to be. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Jesus, Lucy. You’re all heart.’

  ‘So the interview I had planned with him for tomorrow is off, then,’ Lucy said.

  ‘I should think that’s fairly bloody obvious,’ Carrick said. ‘Why else would I call you up so late at night?’

  ‘Well, James, I didn’t think it was because I was in trouble for that last piece. All the interesting observations I had to make about Karl Cooper were subbed out of what I wrote. I don’t honestly know why you made me bother. We could’ve just run one of the puff pieces his PR people generate. It would have saved my time and effort and been a great deal better for my journalistic credibility.’ She closed her eyes. A phrase such as that last one was a contradiction in terms to a man like Carrick and she well knew it.

  ‘You called him a narcissistic womaniser.’

  ‘I didn’t. I let him condemn himself. He’s boastful and supercilious. I don’t think I’ve met a vainer man.’

  ‘He’s also a personal friend of our proprietor.’

  ‘He denied that. So he’s a liar, too.’

  ‘Really took to him, didn’t you?’

  Lucy didn’t reply. Carrick said, ‘If we’d printed the profile you wrote, you’d probably be out of a job. You certainly wouldn’t still be going on the New Hope Island expedition.’

  ‘Cooper would’ve thrown his toys out of the pram?’

  ‘Not Cooper, McIntyre. Bigger pram, ergo, bigger toys.’

  ‘They’re that close?’

  ‘They are. Like father and son. Don’t know what the common bond is, but something links them. Anyway, you should be thanking me. You’re still onboard.’
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  ‘Any word yet on who’s coming with me?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You’re kidding, James.’

  ‘I wouldn’t joke about being dispatched to the Hebrides. Not when I’ve got tickets for the Lords Test and Clapton at the Albert Hall.’

  ‘When was the last time you actually wrote anything?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Carrick said. ‘The word has come from above. Ours is not to reason why.’

  Or write the truth, Lucy thought. She could not remember the last piece she had read under James Carrick’s by-line. He was far more noted these days for sitting on the sofa as a regular guest on breakfast television, dishing out succulent morsels of celebrity gossip. She said, ‘Too early, I suppose, for a replacement medium to have been approached?’

  ‘Communing with the dead isn’t football, love. You don’t have an array of substitutes warming up on the touchline.’

  ‘It’ll be someone with a degree of notoriety, though,’ Lucy said, who was sorry for Simon Hawsley-Smith but not sorry that the following day’s interview with him had been cancelled. Or that he wouldn’t be coming to the Island. She had flicked through his books and watched his show-reel twice and considered him completely bogus.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Carrick said. ‘We’ve already got the housewives’ choice in Karl Cooper. We have the only archaeologist in the country who could legitimately claim to be a household name. We have Doctor Eye-Candy, the hit series-fronting virologist.’

  ‘I was very impressed with Jane Chambers,’ Lucy said. ‘She sounded a damn sight more credible than Cooper, with his little green men.’

  ‘When are you doing the archaeologist?’

  ‘Day after tomorrow,’ Lucy said. The archaeologist was actually a forensic archaeologist and his name was Jesse Kale and he was a burly, bearded Canadian who was a fixture on the History Channel. Lucy had rather gone off him after seeing him front an ad on telly for an absurdly macho brand of four-wheel drive. Then again, most television academics had their paws in any pot they could find. The public was fickle, fame precarious and life expectancy so long that everyone needed a pension plan. Jesse Kale was what, 38? He looked like the sort of bloke who might well live forever.