by F. G. Cottam
‘What time will you go there?’
She smiled at him. ‘The weather seems pretty benign today. We’ll take the scenic route along the coast. We’ll set off at about nine o’clock. We’ll probably be there by about a quarter to ten.’
‘Don’t you know enough already about David Shanks? He lived a miserable life and you’ve witnessed his miserable death. What more can there be?’
‘If I knew that, Patrick, I wouldn’t have to go. But I do have to go and you know very well I do.’
July 27th 1794
Jacob Parr considers that he owes me his life. This is an accurate summation of the one salient fact linking us. He is a liar and a drunk, thoroughly disreputable and beyond hope of any improvement in character.
I have studied the effects of alcohol on men when taken copiously and it generally makes them listless and morose. But Parr is not like that. I think the key to him is that he is quite contented with his grubby habits and flawed aspect. He will not improve because he does not wish in the slightest to escape his own squalid nature.
He enjoys his life. Therefore he believes he owes me a debt of gratitude for saving it. This makes him not just beholden but loyal to me. He is a man in whom, despite his dissolute habits, it would be safe for me to confide.
Today he confided in me. It is his daily task to give the slaves in the hold the dribbled water ration that is just enough to keep them alive as the ship reaches the warmer latitudes and they sweat and roast beneath us. Though it is forbidden, he swaps the odd word of banter and encouragement with those of them who speak a little English, he told me.
Among those with whom he has briefly exchanged words, is the tattooed lizard man I noticed coming aboard. Today Parr told me that this strange and exotic individual wishes to speak to me. He has learned somehow of the position I hold aboard the ship. He knows that I am a doctor. He told Parr that he too is a healer of sorts. It is almost impossible to imagine having any commonality with him. But he insists to Parr that what he wishes to speak to me about is a matter of the gravest importance.
July 29th 1794
I have spoken to the Albacheian healer who calls himself Shaddeh. He has asked me to intercede on his behalf with Captain Ballantyne. He says he is capable of sorcery. He says that if he is not unchained and taken from the hold and treated as our honoured guest, he will visit great dread and anguish upon the captain.
He whispered these words to me. I crouched to hear him. His fellow slaves beside and beneath and above where he lay, heard none of it. They slumbered open-eyed as if in a hypnotic trance while he spoke. They were like that when I went to him at the appointed time. I heard them stir only when our talk concluded, as I reached the top of the companionway.
‘If you are capable of sorcery, then free yourself.’
‘I cannot,’ he said. ‘I cannot use the magic in that way.’
‘I do not believe in magic.’
‘That is your privilege. I am not so fortunate.’
‘So magic is a curse?’
‘It is a burden,’ he said. ‘But we have no time for your games of white reason. If the captain does not free me, his daughter will die.’
‘He has no daughter.’
‘But he will have. And she will die. And then the sight of her will haunt him but she will not be the same because the demon will inhabit her.’
I rose to go. ‘I will listen to no more of this blasphemous nonsense,’ I said. ‘Free yourself if you are capable of magic. Mouth the spell that will melt your bonds like sugar over the flame.’
His laughter followed me as I climbed up to the hatch. It was a rusty, gleeful chuckle. I might not believe in his magic. But he does, I am certain.
August 4th 1794
He knows nothing of how or where he came to be born. He was found naked beside a stream one dawn by a hunting party as an infant child. In a bag sewn from snakeskin beside him were two bracelets of human teeth drilled through with silver chains.
He says he carried these adornments until adulthood, when he had earned the right to wear them. He says that they were given to Captain Ballantyne by his Dahomey captors in return for a small keg of rum.
The tribal elders taught him magic. He was gifted at it from the beginning, he says. I asked him what was the worst he could inflict on Captain Ballantyne and he treated me to that gleeful, rusty chuckle of his. It is a sound that can turn the blood in a Christian’s veins to ice.
‘I can inflict the loss of his daughter and bring her back in a way that will make him implore his God to take her from him again.’
‘The captain is a rational man. Such a threat would be meaningless to him.’
‘Yet I will carry it out. Tell him.’
‘That would not be wise.’
‘Tell him.’
‘What else can you do?’
‘I can achieve many things. I can heal. I can kill. I can make puppets afterwards of those who choose to take their own lives. I can breathe life into the being that hungers in the darkness. Few can bring it. Fewer still can make it go away again. I can do these things.’
‘You speak in riddles.’
‘Your language has no words, doctor, for what I have been taught to accomplish.’
August 10th 1794
Ballantyne knows about the threats made by the Albacheian sorcerer Shaddeh. Jacob Parr must have told him. Parr must have eavesdropped on our conversations and passed the content of them on to the captain. Thus does he seek to ingratiate himself with the martinet ruler of our little wood and canvas kingdom; thus does he seek to wheedle favour from the man who had him flogged twice half to death.
I do not understand Parr’s motive at all. But the consequence has been grave and bloody and immediate. Shaddeh was freed from his shackles at eight bells and hauled up onto the main deck and tied there to a chair. The captain announced the nature of his claims before the assembled crew.
And then he challenged the sorcerer if he could, to conjure some magic. Sailors are superstitious and there was a moment of uneasiness so strong it was almost tangible there under the fierce sunshine on the scrubbed deck. Shaddeh looked sinister and slight in his scaly skin, with his pointed teeth bared in a crimson snarl. But of course nothing happened and trepidation turned to scorn and then to ridicule as the crewmen began to laugh and jeer at him.
I noticed that the ship’s cook had gained the deck. I had never seen him before anywhere aboard but in the galley. He handed Ballantyne something that flashed in the sun and with a sudden sinking in the pit of my stomach I saw that it was a meat cleaver. In a couple of strides the captain stood before the sorcerer and with two swift downward strokes performed the mutilation that deprived him of his hands.
He made no sound. Even when the bucket of molten tar was bought to cauterise the bloody stumps, Shaddeh made no sound at all. The captain turned to the assembled crew. They stood and watched in silence as he waved the dripping cleaver. To Parr, he said, ‘Take the offal. Nail it below were the slaves can get the best view of it. Show them how the threats of a savage are received aboard the Andromeda.’
Shaddeh was taken below. I took to my cabin numbed by what I had seen. The savage on the deck was not the man tied by ropes to a chair. I pray this is a side of his nature my cousin Rebecca will never be shown by Ballantyne. He is not a civilised man. He is bestial in his fury. Yet he is more terrifying than any beast because he has absolute power aboard the ship. The men fear and respect and even revere him. Parr’s treacherous treatment of me is the living proof of that.
I fear for Rebecca. The sorcerer could do nothing to protect himself from the gruesome wrath of our captain. But I cannot help suspecting there is substance to the threats he makes. I fear for Rebecca and I fear for the daughter to whom she has not yet given birth.
I fear for the Albacheian too. I fancy the captain has more sport planned for this new and unexpected adversary. That can be the only reason he was not thrown over the side. Further pain and humiliation is planned for him
I am sure.
His useful life is at an end. No one would employ a slave incapable of work. Ballantyne has turned him into a living contradiction. He will see I think an amusing irony in what he has accomplished.
Kale enjoyed driving the Land Rover open topped cross-country to the patch of peat bog he considered the ideal location for a mass grave. The storm of the night before had given way to blue sky and bright sunshine. The smell of the sea was so strong on the westerly wind that he could taste brine in the back of his throat. There was no radio in the vehicle and if there had been he knew there would be no reception. He hummed a medley of his favourite songs as he drove.
He felt quite buoyant. The visit to the settlement of the previous day had shaken and depressed him. He did not believe in ghosts; not really he didn’t. But he believed that certain places carried a residual trace of the bad things that had occurred there. The New Hope settlement was just such a spot. He didn’t need Alice Lang’s psychic talent to sense that something awful had occurred in that bleak, abandoned hamlet.
Now though, he felt good. He was doing something practical. His private theory about James Carrick was that the man had gone off to be by himself and got into difficulty when the storm descended. Carrick was terribly out of shape and had looked pretty sick even aboard the chopper. He was a man totally out of his depth in an environment as rugged as this.
Kale knew he would feel delighted and relieved if he stumbled on the lost man and thus found a use for the thermos and foil blanket Lassiter had suggested he bring. But he thought a night exposed to the wind and rain of a tempest in the Hebrides would kill stronger men than Carrick. Disoriented and having lost heart, he would have succumbed to hypothermia or been dragged by a rogue wave into the heaving seas to drown. More than twelve hours had passed since his disappearance. They were looking for a body.
He was looking for lots of bodies. He was confident even though aerial photography of the island had never shown anything anomalous. Mass graves often showed up in thermal imaging from above. That was because decomposition generated heat. But the heat of a peat bog grave was determined by the dense matter surrounding the corpses so the aerial studies didn’t work. He was quite excited at the prospect the day offered. Peat was an excellent preservative and any corpses he found would be ripe with clues as to the manner of their deaths.
He liked the other members of the expedition. He liked all the women and he liked Patrick Lassiter and for an older guy, he thought Paul Napier really rather cute. Degrelle was a bit of an enigma to him; a dramatic presence who added a bit of colour even if he wasn’t strictly relevant to what they were doing on the island.
The only really serious disappointment was Karl Cooper. Cooper had been rude to Jane Chambers the previous evening, boorish where Kale had expected urbane charm. Jane had provoked him a bit. But really there had been no excuse for his churlish, snarling responses to what she said. And the sneering threat he’d made to Napier had exposed him as someone not just self-important, but vindictive and snobbish too.
Maybe Lucy Church would write a warts-and-all Karl Cooper expose. But she wouldn’t, would she, if what Cooper had said about his relationship with McIntyre was true. Even if she did write it, it would never get into print. That was a shame. Because when the British public became disillusioned with Cooper, there was a younger, fitter, more charismatic presenter ready and eager to step into his celebrated shoes. And the name of that rising star was Jesse Kale.
He was there. He felt the texture of the ground change and the steering wheel shudder slightly in his grip as the heavy tread of the Land Rover tyres bit and churned at the yielding terrain. He switched off the ignition and climbed out. For a moment; only for a moment, Kale felt tiny and insignificant under the vaulted sky, in that wilderness of granite with its great waste of surrounding ocean. Then he gathered himself and unloaded his site kit and got the digger down the ramp and onto the soft, secretive earth.
He first took photographs of the virgin site. Should he be successful in finding something, these contour shots would demonstrate just how clever and intuitive he’d been because there was really nothing to signify anything unusual beneath the surface.
He marked out the area he wanted to excavate with tape running between evenly positioned stakes. The stakes were made of wood and penetrated only a few inches deep so would not compromise the site or hit and damage anything significant. Next he described what he had done so far into the Dictaphone he always carried. And then he used the digger to carefully strip the top layer of turf from an area of around fifty square feet.
The work was routine and repetitious and he thoroughly enjoyed losing himself in the completion of it. He prided himself on causing no unnecessary damage or upheaval to a site. He worked fastidiously and was scrupulously neat and always methodical. He scented the rich aroma of peat growing stronger as the turf was lifted in strips that were then carefully rolled at the edge of what would become eventually a dig.
He looked up because he noticed that the birds were no longer singing. The area around the peat bog had grown totally quiet. It had also grown very still. Wind had been a feature of the island since his arrival. Now it had died down completely. He thought this unusual for the Hebrides. He blinked and looked at his wristwatch and saw that two hours had elapsed since his arrival there.
He thought sombrely for a moment about those ancestors of his own who might lie beneath this black earth. He thought about the bleak obedience of their lives and about the bloody deaths they might have endured because of Ballantyne’s cruel and barbaric system of belief.
He would discover the truth. It was the real reason he had come. There would be a measurable benefit to his unravelling the enigma of the vanishing. There was far more to it for him that the kudos and notoriety the other expedition members sought.
His fame and his sexuality had become obstacles in his relationship with his family and with his father in particular. Daniel Kale was an austere and academically inclined man uncomfortably with both his son’s celebrity and his predilection for other men. When Kale solved the mystery of how their New Hope ancestors had died, his dad would see him in a completely different way. He would be grateful and impressed. The achievement would warm his cold heart, wouldn’t it? It would thaw their frozen feelings for one another.
After three hours of deliberate and dogged work on the site, he decided he would eat some lunch. His stomach was growling emptily. The temptation was to work on in a state of excitement, but he had to resist that. Frenetic was fine for those hit feature films in which Harrison Ford had made his occupation glamorous. It did not do for real life. Haste was amateurish and made you miss or overlook significant clues. He went and sat back in the Land Rover and took the sandwiches he had prepared in the compound galley that morning out of the glove compartment.
He poured a cup of Earl Grey tea from the flask he had brought for himself, rather than the one he had filled with Bovril and boiling water in the hope he should come across James Carrick. He sipped tea and bit into a sandwich filled with strong Scottish Cheddar and wished that he had a radio to listen to. It was impossible to sing, even difficult to hum, through a mouthful of bread and cheese.
The sun was strong overhead. Heat was drowsy through the windscreen. He thought he might snatch a short nap before continuing, once he had finished his lunch. He had turned in late the previous evening. They all had. He had done so after several more beers than he would normally consume. He did not feel exactly hungover. He felt good and positive. But he also felt a little bit sleepy and thought that a twenty minute power nap would give him an energy and alertness that was currently slightly lacking in him.
He woke up suddenly and completely disorientated. It had grown gloomy outside. The Land Rover’s roof was up; he could hear rain pattering gently on the canvas. It had become chilly and overcast and there was somebody sitting beside him. There was a strong smell of loam and something else he thought might be camphor or fish oil.
; The person beside him was a little girl, ragged in a shawl, wind-bedraggled and smiling. Her teeth were a snarled jumble and her eyes no more than empty sockets, when he looked. She said, ‘I like games, Mr Kale. Will you play with me?’
Her voice sounded deep, dragged up reluctantly, from depths so small and ragged and frail a creature could not remotely begin to possess. Kale felt his crotch grow suddenly warm as he lost control of his bladder and pissed himself in terror.
August 17th 1794
Our sorcerer is dying. His wounds have turned gangrenous and he has not much longer to suffer the indignity his life has become. The whole ship knows it. The crew see the fact of the fatal infection as their captain’s vindication. Fate favours us and God is on our side and there is nothing evil or corrupt about the trade we prosper in. The weather grows more clement every day. We approach the West Indies where we will barter those that still live among our cargo for sugar and molasses and tobacco.
I have asked the captain for permission to talk to Shaddeh one last time. I am convinced he believes profoundly in his talent for magic. This has made me very curious about his history and character.I wish to know what formed and informed the man dying in the hold. Sometimes he is in the grip of delirium, like an opium eater, Parr jokes, with his rotten-toothed grin. But sometimes he is sensible to what is said to him.
To my astonishment, the captain has said yes to my request. I do not know why he has relented in this way. He has shown not an ounce of regret or remorse at what he did to the man. His reasoning is that he reacted to a personal threat. The Albacheian attempted to blackmail him. His response was swift and severe but fully justified. Parr would have told other members of the crew about the threats emanating from the hold. Such stories spread rapidly aboard a ship. Had he not acted, the captain would have seemed weak and indecisive.