by F. G. Cottam
She was afraid. She was frightened of the presence that had squatted observing David Shanks in his last moments on the cliff top at Moher in County Clare. Denser than the night, too large and far too still to be human, it had watched gleefully as Shanks bid a careless farewell to his long and bedraggled life. In some way it had coaxed and encouraged him. Or had it just filled him with such morbid dread that the plunge to the rocky waters below represented a sort of escape for him?
Denser than night, she thought, far bigger than a man. Had it followed him there from the Hebrides? Was it some vile thing he had conjured through a baleful spell and been unable to govern properly? Did it slouch around the island, living still, guarding its domain? She didn’t know. She would not have answers until an artefact was put into her hands to which her unasked-for gift could respond.
Alice valued her life. She valued its possibilities with the flawed, clever ex-detective she now realised she had probably loved without realising it for several years. Only when she’d come to in his flat, in his arms, had her feelings for him finally become obvious to her.
She thought that they were a good match. They had both suffered sufficient loneliness to appreciate one another’s company fully. They could compensate for one another’s weaknesses because they possessed such contrasting strengths. Their shared future was one in which neither of them would ever take the other for granted. They had each endured too much solitary unhappiness to allow that to happen.
She didn’t want to place Patrick Lassiter in danger and she suspected that the island to which they were going remained a hazardous destination. But she had to go. It was what she had been given her gift for. It was her destiny to take part in the expedition. And he had to go because in helping solve the mystery of what had been done there he would find some sort of purpose. When that happened, she believed he would discover the thirst slowly killing him was finally and utterly quenched.
He had not taken a drink since returning from Liverpool. She had not smoked since their lunchtime kiss on her garden patio of the previous day. She still had the cravings and she suspected that Patrick did, too. But Alice looked forward to the time when the only addiction they would surrender to was the one they shared for each other.
The rifle felt good on Napier’s shoulder. The weight of it felt familiar and comfortable there. Its action was almost antique to a man familiar with the SA80 semi-automatic assault item supplied as standard to every infantry unit of the British army. But the SA80 had proven to be a dismally unreliable weapon. Bits fell off it. It jammed when it came into contact with sand. It jammed sometimes when it didn’t come into contact with sand. It was inaccurate and overheated far too easily.
The weapon on his shoulder used a small calibre bullet. You would have to shoot for the vital organs or the head to have success in stopping any human target in its tracks. But Napier was an excellent shot.
Anyway, he did not expect to have to use the rifle in anger. Blake had not been bumped off by heavies or become the reluctant focus of an abduction plot. A fire-fight with paid goons was the last experience he expected to have to endure. The rifle felt good in a symbolic way. Troy had suggested he keep it, for the duration. It represented the respect the construction guys had for him and he was starting slowly to rekindle for himself.
He had found something. He had lied to McIntyre about that. He had been obliged to do so because the thing he had found would have panicked the others, or spooked them, he thought. He could not discuss it on an open frequency with Brennan beside him struggling to keep the signal from breaking up. The time would come to talk about what he had found, but it had not arrived yet.
He felt a bit sorry for the Seasick Four. They were on the quay now, in the harbour, waiting for the fishing smack to take them to the mainland as the coastguard chopper lapped the island’s coastline looking for a body Napier was confident would never be found.
It wasn’t their fault. They were what you got when the training was inadequate and the pay piss-poor. One of them, Malone, had actually, to Napier’s mind, shown a degree of promise. With the right experience and a bit of patience, he could possibly have made the grade. But the blokes on their way to replace the guys on the quay were of a different order entirely. And there were eight of them – their strength effectively doubled – at Napier’s own estimate of what was needed to effectively secure the perimeter of New Hope from any media rivals of McIntyre’s hoping to steal the story.
The irony of the situation was not lost on him. Blake’s disappearance had turned him from a loser into a winner literally overnight. That was something to ponder on, but the time for pondering on it wasn’t now, because there were much more urgent things to think about.
The fishing boat had hove into sight. In another hour or so, the seasick four would have departed the island for good. Troy and his men were scheduled to fly back to the mainland later in the afternoon, their work accomplished and the weather benign enough today for their flight. They would leave Brennan behind because the radio hardware wasn’t functioning without severe and so far unexplained glitches. His own replacement crew would be here tomorrow morning.
It meant that Brennan would be all he had for company – and backup – for about 16 hours, some of them dark. They had a rifle apiece. Brennan was temperamentally sound and really, would they be any worse off? The Seasick Four were almost completely ineffective. Troy’s men weren’t stupid, but neither were they trained in areas like unarmed combat and covert surveillance. Besides, Napier had no intention of allowing either himself or Brennan to stray into what he regarded as the danger zone, at the other end of the island, in the vicinity of the cottage built by the crofter, David Shanks.
That was where he had found the object in his pocket. That was where he had found the bloody relic that told him for sure that Captain Bollocks was no more and that what they were dealing with on the island was more than back-up special effects orchestrated by Alexander McIntyre.
It had lain in a tiny skid mark of blood and saliva on the stone floor of the Shanks cottage and he had seen it straight away. He had covered it with a boot until the others vacated the cottage and began their search of the surrounding land and the shoreline a hundred metres away. He had bent at the knee and swiftly plucked it from the floor and concealed it. It was a single tooth, an incisor, and it had belonged to Blake until it had been plucked from his head with sufficient brutal force to leave a circle of torn gum around its root.
What possessed hands that could do that to a man? Napier didn’t know. What possessed the inclination to do it? Again, he had no ready answer. He’d seen the debris of men blown to pieces by roadside explosives and artillery assaults. He’d never in his whole military experience seen anything like that, though.
To him it seemed mostly like a contemptuous act of mutilation. Like a clue, too, left behind to signal the Captain’s fate. And lastly, like a trophy, left rather than taken because it was there on display in the cottage for any passing visitor to contemplate and enjoy.
He remembered that the New Hope Island community had vanished leaving nothing human behind. Not a hair, nor even a fingernail, ran the story he had been hearing on and off since his own schooldays. But then he couldn’t now be dealing with whatever had accounted for the New Hope Island settlers, could he? Nothing lived for almost 200 years. Nothing human, anyway, he thought, shivering in the blast of wind from the bay as the fishing boat chugged landward and the Seasick Four awaited their exit from the scene.
He wasn’t looking forward to the evening to come. He liked Brennan well enough and he thought that in the substantial environs of the newly constructed project compound, they would be safe. But Brennan was a communications hardware expert and would again fiddle with that analogue transmitter, trying to find a usable frequency in the absence of the digital spectrum they couldn’t pick up at all.
It was his job. He was a perfectionist. The project staff needed reliable and cogent communication with the command centre in Londo
n. That was a given. Brennan would only be doing what he was tasked to. But it would mean listening again to that awful noise as he roamed the airwaves. Napier had heard it the previous night as they struggled to contact McIntyre’s people to report Blake’s disappearance. Brennan described it as a squall of interference. It had sounded to Napier like nothing so much as a child crying. And she had sounded long dead and utterly inconsolable.
Edith had lied to her mother about her contact with Jacob Parr. He did not confine his visits to her dreams. And she was afraid of him. She didn’t think that he meant her any harm. She didn’t even think that he’d chosen to seek her out. But she knew that he was a ghost and she thought it was quite natural for children to be afraid of ghosts and at 14, as grown up as she was, she knew that by anyone’s definition she was still a child.
She hadn’t lied to her mother out of spite, or because she enjoyed deception. She’d done so to spare her mother any more worry in her life. She wasn’t supposed to know about her mother’s affair with the cute telly astronomer Karl Cooper. But she did know about it. She’d read the story printed about it after it ended in The Daily Mail. The other girls at school had known about it and had teased her over it. Her father had known and had made a few sarcastic remarks about it based on that old saying that people who played with fire could generally expect to get burned.
Edith had pretended to her mother that she didn’t know. But she’d noticed the change in her mum at the time of the break up. She’d been aware of the sadness and disappointment her mum had felt. There were no burn marks, her smart-arsed father had been wrong about that. There were bruises, though. They didn’t show. Her mum wore them on the inside. Edith thought that they were deep and painful and that her brave mum deserved to have them heal over time and in secrecy.
Her mum had enough on her plate, in the weeks and months after her break-up with Karl Cooper, without her daughter adding to her problems by complaining about a troublesome ghost called Jacob Parr.
Parr was scary. How could he not be? He was from another time. He knew that he was dead. He’d returned reluctantly, apparently compelled to do so. Whatever had forced Jacob Parr to summon himself into ghostly life and visit her, Edith thought the really frightening aspect of the whole business. Someone or something had done it. It scared Jacob Parr, whatever it was, and he was dead and you would have thought the dead had nothing to be afraid of.
She didn’t even want to think about that, really. Parr himself was uncomfortable discussing it. He made it obvious he’d come against his own wishes. He was churlish and sometimes seemed barely in control of a mean temper. But he’d been told to come to her and he’d obeyed and he was frightened of whoever had done the ordering and so was Edith, who thought you had to be something very sinister and serious indeed to scare the life out of a ghost.
She’d told her mother Parr was kind. And he could be. But he was a creature of moods. Most of the time, he was melancholy and wistful. Sometimes he was boring, regretting aloud the way he’d frittered away his last years before the drink had killed him. Edith’s personal opinion was that it was a bit late in the day to moan about that now. Get a life, she was tempted to say, listening to him go on. But he’d had a life, hadn’t he, and he had completely wasted it.
Once, he showed her his scars. They were furrows ploughed into the flesh of his scrawny back by the leather knots, he said, of the lash. He’d been lashed on two occasions. Brine had been thrown over his bleeding back in bucketfuls to clean the wounds. The salt from the seawater had stung more than the flogging, he said. But he’d been caught drunk on smuggled grog and Captain Ballantyne had been a master, he said, who knew no shred of mercy before the mast.
He only ever came to her when she was alone. For this reason, she didn’t know if any of the other girls at the school could have even seen him. She knew he was real and not a figment of her imagination. The song had proven that. He had enjoyed singing in his lifetime. He enjoyed it still. He had enjoyed teaching her to sing and play The Recruited Collier.
He’d learned the words of the song himself by listening to others sing it, he told her when he came to her on the evening of the day of her mother’s visit to the school. But he could have read the lyric written, so he could, he said. Reading had been a rare accomplishment in his lifetime, among men of his lowly station. But he’d been taught to read aboard the Andromeda by the ship’s surgeon, Mr Horan.
Horan liked me to sing, he recalled, softly, seated at the end of Edith’s bed in his sailor’s whites and his frayed blue coat. She saw that the pewter buckles on his shoes had tarnished with neglect and that his pigtail was starting to free itself in fine strands from the tar into which it had been dipped, which was now dry and crumbling. She could smell an odour, sweet and cloying on his breath, she assumed was grog.
And she knew again that these were details she could not have dreamed or made up. The man had lived and was dead and something fearful had summoned him to her.
Mr Horan did not like the screams in the night from the slave hold, he said. They distressed him. And so he would ask me to sing and to play the accordion to drown out the sound. And in gratitude for this service done him, he kindly taught me to read.
Horan the surgeon was a generous and sensitive soul, Parr said. He was too soft-hearted altogether for the cruel trade the ship he served on plied. Most of the men could ignore it. It tormented him. Life was hard and life at sea even harder. The pay on the slave vessels was good and it was steady. Best to take your wages and watch where your eyes and ears strayed and pay as little heed as was possible to the occupants of the hold on the leg of the voyage from Africa to the West Indies, or to the coast of America. Such was the strategy of sensible men.
But Thomas Horan seemed incapable of doing that. Parr did not know whether it was conscience or curiosity. Something impelled him to communicate with members of their human cargo. They did not benefit from his medical skills. Ballantyne would have forbidden it and it would have contravened the company rules. But Horan spoke to them. They stirred his interest and his compassion in their bleak and fearful plight.
It was because of Mr Horan, Parr explained that night, that he had come to Edith. Horan had kept a journal aboard the Andromeda. He had done so in secret. It was Edith’s job to seek this journal out, should it still exist. And when she had discovered it, she should give it to her mother to read. It was vital that her mother read Horan’s journal.
‘Does it contain answers my mother needs about New Hope?’
‘I do not know what it contains,’ Parr said. ‘I never so much as saw it.I know nothing more than what I have been told to tell you. You must seek the journal out and show it to your mother. That’s as much as I can say.’
‘How do you know about the journal, if it was written in secret?’
‘I have been told.’
‘Told by Thomas Horan?’
‘Horan is long dead.’
‘So are you.’
‘But Horan rests in peace,’ Parr said, with a chuckle.
And you don’t, Edith thought, because you’ve been sent to see me, by someone who scares you, someone party to Horan’s secret, someone who has the power to make a ghost do things against its own stubborn will.
She saw that Jacob Parr was smiling. And she knew that she was seeing her spectre for the last time. He’d fulfilled his obligation. He had passed the message on. The message about the physician Thomas Horan’s journal had been the whole point of her haunting. It was all to do with Captain Ballantyne and New Hope Island and the expedition her mother was shortly to join.
She wondered would she fall asleep that night and awaken in the morning unable to remember the song he’d taught her, like in a fairytale. She didn’t think that she would, any more than she would forget about him. He smiled at her, a last show of his rotten teeth before rising soundlessly from where he sat and walking out of the door, closing it softly behind him.
She wondered how she could possibly find the secret jo
urnal containing the information her mum required. She didn’t even begin to know where to look. She was allowed an hour a day on the computer and thought that an internet search was the obvious thing. But she was unlikely to find it on Google, was she, if it had remained a secret for nearly 200 years?
She could ask their history teacher, Mrs Atkinson. She was always banging on about sources, wasn’t she? She was always saying that the sources were so much more interesting and reliable than the text books were. She should have a decent idea about where those sources were most likely to be stored and found.
Edith thought it a very tall order for a 14 year old. She would have to make a list. She knew that there was a Maritime Museum in Greenwich in London but didn’t think that 14 year olds would very likely be given the run of the library there. She thought that Thomas Horan might have living relatives who had inherited his stuff. But she thought it unlikely they would welcome enquiries prompted by the ghost of one their ancestor’s shipmates.
The thing was, she had a feeling that this was a matter of great importance and urgency. She had to find a way to accomplish it. She just had to. She was totally the wrong person for the job but it was vital and there was no time at all to waste.
Chapter Six
Karl Cooper was uncomfortable about two aspects of the forthcoming expedition and neither was a matter he was really in a position to do anything about.
He was slightly anxious about being obliged to share the spotlight with Jesse Kale. He would need Kale. The forensic archaeologist could use his skills to identify the landing site of the spacecraft that had taken the community away from New Hope and to another galaxy.
The site would have been exposed to a level of heat and mass that would have left physical traces. It was all very well for a cosmologist to speculate on the theory; but the fact would, in the first instance, be down to Kale. He would be the one to find the concrete proof of extra-terrestrial interference. He would point to the evidence. Cooper had to find a way of preventing Kale from taking the glory at that juncture, too.