by F. G. Cottam
Ballantyne thought he knew what it was that would break the spell tormenting him and manipulating Rachel’s tortured soul. And that was sacrifice. He had learned something of the customs of the countries he had traded with. He had spoken with their shamans and their holy men and their mystics and their priests and they all insisted sacrifice was the key to power and prosperity.
He knew it from Allbache and Dahomey and half a dozen other kingdoms he had traded with in Africa. He would pay for the power in blood to eradicate forever the dark magic contaminating his own Kingdom of Belief.
At first, Degrelle told his silent audience, he sacrificed only the dying. Then, he sacrificed the old. And when that did not work, he sacrificed the sick, if they ailed to an extent where it did not look like they would fully recover.
All of this was done in secret. None of the people from the mainland with whom the island’s commerce was conducted ever found out about it. But it did not work. Still Ballantyne was tormented by the spectre of the child he had loved and lost and grieved for so bitterly.
He built a special place, his Temple of Darkness, a church without windows in which the sacrificial ceremonies could be staged with elaborate ritual. He recruited boys from among his community to carry out the sacrifices for him.
These were accomplished with cleavers, said Samuel Trent, who was one the boys instructed to accomplish this bloody task. There were robes and incantations. Candles spluttered and incense wafted pungently. But Trent said it was no different really in method from the slaughter of a goat.
The sacrifices never entirely stopped. They decreased in number when they were seen even by the leader of the settlement to have no effect in freeing him from his torment. But by that time they were a part of what New Hope saw as its own religious orthodoxy. And so they continued, one a month, the sacrificial victim chosen by the drawing of lots.
‘He was a fucking lunatic,’ Walker said, when Degrelle had finished. ‘Sorry about the language, Father.’
‘I’ve heard worse,’ Degrelle said, smiling faintly.
‘He was a butcher,’ Alice said.
‘Thank God you didn’t enter the church when we went to the settlement,’ Lassiter said to her. ‘It was a charnel house.’
‘A Temple of Darkness,’ Jane said, ‘in a Kingdom of Belief. What are you going to do, Father? Are you going to sanctify the building?’
‘If there is anything demonic on the island, that will be its home,’ Degrelle said. ‘I will perform the rite of exorcism there in the morning.’
‘Weather permitting,’ Lucy said.
‘The weather won’t enter into it,’ Degrelle said. ‘I will brave the tempest or the deluge, my dear. It is what the Cardinal sent me here to do.’
‘You’re nervous about it, aren’t you, Father?’ Napier said.
Dregrelle said, ‘I’m fortunate in that I’ve never for one moment doubted my faith. But I don’t think I’ve ever faced a test as formidable as this. The island has been drenched in innocent blood. It has been a bastion of sinful pride and blasphemy. For two centuries, it has been contaminated with evil. It is a wicked place.’
‘I’m nervous just about tonight,’ Davis said. ‘That storm sounds pretty fierce. And it’s strengthening.’
‘You’re not as nervous as Cooper’s going to be, alone in that abandoned settlement,’ Lucy said.
‘He isn’t alone,’ Degrelle said. ‘Some living affront to God lurks in the church without windows. Something spewed from hell is harboured in that stone insult to Christian faith. He has that creature in the settlement for company.’
Lassiter said, ‘Does anyone really think Karl Cooper is still alive?’
‘I don’t,’ Alice said.
Walker said, ‘I should think that settles it, then,’ and he barked a laugh that sounded to Napier uncomfortably close to hysteria.
There wasn’t much drinking or much conversation after Degrelle had said his piece. He stated that he intended to set off for the settlement to perform his sacrament at dawn. Then he left for his room and his vigil of prayer and whatever scant ration of sleep that heavyweight penitent allowed himself.
Napier felt pretty tired on his own account. He was close to sleep himself when he heard a soft knocking through the thud and crush of wind outside, against his door.
It was Lucy. She closed the door behind her and shed her clothes still walking and slipped into the single bunk beside him. She felt deliciously warm.
‘What’s this?’
‘I suppose you could call it a down-payment on the bill for saving my life.’
‘I’m really sorry I said that.’
‘I know you are. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.’
He reached his arms around her and held her tightly to him. He kissed her.
When the kiss broke she said, ‘I’m going with Degrelle in the morning. It’s my job. If something happens, I need to be there to see it.’
‘Above and beyond, I’d say.’
‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Just hold me, Paul.’
They held each other at the start, flesh on flesh, entangled together. At the finish, they fell asleep that way.
Lassiter and Alice lay in her bed together, awake. She said, ‘I’m worried about what will happen to you, Patrick, if anything happens to me.’
After a moment he said, ‘What about the others?’
‘Jane and Lucy are coping. So is Napier, remarkably. His man Walker is on the verge of cracking up, though. And we have a priest in denial about the loss of his faith.’
‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ Lassiter said. ‘I haven’t left your side since hearing about the warning in the cottage and I won’t, now. If anything happens to you, I’ll already be dead.’
Shortly after he said that, she fell asleep. And Lassiter suddenly remembered the young professor from Liverpool with the arcane job title he’d refused to help because he could not let Alice come here on her own. He didn’t feel at all confident about his ability to protect her. They were all of them clueless here, all of them miles out of their depth. They were helpless, no more any of them really he feared, than prey.
He wondered had the Keeper of Artefacts had any success in his search for the lost document compiled aboard the Andromeda. He very much doubted now that he would ever get the chance to have that question answered.
Chapter Thirteen
Waves broke white and wrathful over the bow. The craft bucketed under their weight and immensity. The stink of Diesel rose through the smart of brine. ‘My father captained one of these,’ McIntyre said, roaring into the tempest to be heard. To Fortescue, he seemed almost exultant, ‘modest upbringing, mine. Self-made wealth, my lad, it’s the only sort worth having.’ He cackled like a pirate happily freed from the moorings of sanity.
Wind moaned and shrilled through the rust stained superstructure. Their toiling engine made the steel deck thrum under his feet. Philip Fortescue lifted his head and the sky was bruise coloured and tumultuous above him when he raised his eyes to blink at it through the deluge it spat down.
They hadn’t been able to hire a boat. They’d arrived at Mallaig too late for that. Instead, McIntyre had bought an old trawler from a man they’d met in a pub on the harbour. It didn’t seem at the time the most watertight of arrangements to Fortescue, but he had to concede, however grudgingly, that it was the quickest way in the circumstances to get them to the island.
McIntyre said the tub they were aboard was the same class of vessel his father had worked out of Aberdeen, fishing for mackerel. Fortescue’s educated guess was that she was about sixty or seventy years past her prime. But McIntyre’s logic was that a working boat was the safest bet to get them where they were going in the conditions confronting them. On land, it had seemed a more convincing argument.
They had started their voyage in calm weather. The harbour had been tranquil and the open sea beyond it an emerald waste disturbed only by the odd whitecap. They had set a deliberate course for
the island and therefore, for the storm raging around it. Now they were cresting rises that sent them careening down into canyons of black water. And McIntyre seemed to be enjoying it. He was evidently one of those infuriating men enlivened by a dangerous challenge.
The swell gleamed and glimmered in the yellow spread cast by the bow light. Fortescue was reminded of the Dylan Thomas poem; the one about singing in chains. He was almost delirious with fear. He supposed elemental was the word, but he hadn’t known the elements were anywhere near as vast and delinquent as this.
It was a failure of imagination, he knew, because his job, over the years, had offered him an abundance of clues. Vessel foundered was a familiar phrase to him. So was, all hands lost. In mitigation, theory and practice were an unplumbed distance apart. He did not think that you could imagine the violence of the sea in an Atlantic storm. You really had to witness this phenomenon first hand.
The boat pitched, McIntyre cackling dementedly as he wrestled with the wheel against the rudder and forced their course.
Fortescue puked over the side. He’d already parted with the expensive meal his host had provided him with at the Hotel on the loch. Anything else he was retching up was bile. It was close to midnight and they were making about 14 knots according to his mad, elderly skipper and it was the longest waking day of his life.
The previous day had earlier qualified as the longest day of his life, but its title had been dismayingly short lived. An abandoned mine shaft at the Elsinore Pit outside Barnsley was uncomfortable and testing. Being on a boat in a storm as severe as this was infinitely greater an ordeal.
He looked at the water, uneasy in the knowledge that it was a thousand fathoms deep. It was a dark and silent graveyard down there, littered with hulks like the one he was aboard. He puked again and closed his eyes but with his eyes closed, he felt if possible, even worse. There was that anodyne phrase, wasn’t there? I’m out of my comfort zone. Beyond that, though, there was the abyss of uncertainty he felt he teetered above. I’m not out of my comfort zone, he thought. I’m totally out of my depth.
Sour-throated and with no saliva, he croaked out the words of the ritual to himself. He had learned them by heart. They needed to be recited with vigour and commitment. That was what Horan’s journal had implied. Merely incanting the phonetic sounds and phrases would not do it. Strength and concentration were required to evoke the necessary magic. They had been qualities beyond the sorcerer, remorseful over what he had unleashed, as he lay lapsing in and out of consciousness, dying in the slave hold of the Andromeda.
Should he survive this crossing and reach New Hope, Fortescue would recite the words he had memorised there himself, enact the ritual and so save Jane Chambers the bother. There would be no real need then to pass the journal on to her at all.
He would give it to her anyway. He had no wish to cross the ghost of Jacob Parr. Parr had not sounded particularly nice when Edith had described him and Horan’s description was of a sly and self-serving man treacherous and entirely without principle.
So why had he helped? Edith had thought that he did so only reluctantly. Someone or something had scared his truculent spirit into obliging. That suggested there were good as well as malevolent forces at work. Of course there were. It was a battle, wasn’t it? It was a conflict that had been going on since the dawn of recorded time. Fortescue didn’t really want to pursue that line of thought too far, though. Not aboard a boat in a storm, he didn’t. Events seemed fatalistic enough as it was.
McIntyre was singing. He was singing a fucking sea shanty. Was there no mercy? Fortescue could half-hear the bellowed verses in odd lines not snatched away by the gale. He recognised the tune. It was The Wild Goose. It was a song Kate Rusby sang on the album, Sleepless.
He did not honestly have any great optimism that he would survive this crossing, never mind this whole experience. He was acting only out of a rash promise made over the phone to a sobbing adolescent girl. If he did by some fluke make it, he resolved there and then that he would never listen to music of that sort again. It was too maudlin, altogether too mournful and sad. From now on, for Phil Fortescue, it was going to be Metallica. Iron Maiden, if he was in a particularly wistful mood.
There was a radio aboard the trawler, a powerful old analogue transmitter with a range that enabled it to pick up almost anything. The aerial reached above the wheelhouse but the set itself was in the galley below, where the charts and distress flares and other bits and pieces of important nautical kit were kept.
Soaked through, shivering and sick to the bone, he went down to try to divert himself from the physical fact of the storm by trying to make contact with the expedition base. It was his third attempt to do so. Dregs of cocoa lay staining an enamel mug on the table bearing the transmitter. He had parted company with the mug’s contents over the gunwale about an hour earlier. He retched sourly at the memory and sat with a grimace in front of the set.
There was traffic, but it was all from the mainland. Unsurprisingly, theirs seemed to be the only boat out in the area. He turned the tuning dial and got onto the wavelength he wanted and listened intently to the silence. There was a low scratch of static. And then the static clarified into what resembled, more than anything, a childlike wail. It was a disconsolate moan of infant grief.
Then as he listened, it changed in character. It turned slyly into a whisper. He shivered. It was a spooky sound. If you were fanciful, it sounded like words, the phrase no hope repeated like a mantra over and over again. It was not something he could endure down there in the gloom of the galley on his own.
A colossal wave broached then and the boat shuddered along its length with the impact and lurched so that he had to grab the table to keep from being flung to the cabin floor. The enamel mug clattered away into a corner and he heard the rivets of the old hull groan and ping in the roar of the wind. Sea water from the swamped deck above deluged down the steps of the companionway and he feared with sudden and overwhelming dread they were simply going to wallow engulfed and sink.
Under him, he sensed the craft slowly righting herself. He felt her level off and rise as the weight of water on the deck diminished, sloughing away. Moments earlier he had been pondering on fate. Fate might think it funny to store a keeper of marine artefacts forever aboard a rusting vessel on the ocean floor. It might seem fitting, somehow. It was a comfortless thought, one that brought fresh terror clutching at his cold, wet skin.
Horan’s journal was down there, in a shallow draw designed for charts built into the table at which he sat, snugly housed now in a waterproof case designed to carry a laptop in. With an incredulous shake of his head, he remembered his daydream of helping Jane Chambers clarify its arcane 18th century phraseology. He had indulged in that particular fantasy before he had read very much of it. He had not known when he’d done so of the unholy danger its pages would tell him she faced.
Not for the first time, he wondered would they even get there in time. Assuming the old trawler didn’t succumb to the storm and sink, assuming they could safely berth her in the raging surf around the bleak rock they were destined for, would there be anyone left alive when they got there to save? He remembered how bereft young Edie Chambers had sounded over the phone to him. He thought the death of her mother now a blow from which it would be impossible for the girl ever to fully recover.
He switched off the transmitter. This wouldn’t do. He needed to find some fortitude from somewhere within himself. He would steel himself and swallow back the bile and make his lunatic shipmate something hot and fortifying to drink.
When he did so, he discovered McIntyre’s mood had grown more sombre. There was no song bellowing forth from him now. He was watchful and tense, his hands caressing the wheel as he coaxed their elderly craft through the cavorting seas. Every plate and stanchion of her seemed to groan, as she shuddered through the turmoil of the waves. Despite this, the wheelhouse seemed to Fortescue almost a cosy refuge from the havoc of the elements outside. Within it, they could
watch the storm welter and rage, dry behind the decades of scratches dulling its toughened Perspex windows.
‘I like young men,’ McGuire said, sipping the cocoa his companion had made him.
‘Is this really the moment for a confession of that sort?’
‘I don’t mean sexually, you bloody idiot. I like the energy of young men, when they have something about them that reminds me of myself when I was young.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Recently, my judgement has been impaired, in that particular area. I’m telling you, professor, because should we survive this experience, I would very much like for you to regard me as your friend. I am a good friend, loyal and generous, as I hope you will live to discover.’
‘I’m not much like you, Mr McIntyre.’
‘Perhaps you’re not. But you possess great courage and that’s a quality I admire in a man.’
‘Do I?’
‘You do.’
‘I don’t feel particularly brave.’
‘Really courageous men never do, I don’t think. Only the stupid are truly fearless. The rest of us struggle to overcome our instinct to shirk or to flee.’
‘I’m familiar with that struggle.’
‘Yet you’re here.’
Fortescue shrugged. The queasiness had left him. He thought that he might have found his sea legs, suddenly. He felt grateful for the reprieve. ‘I’ve surprised myself, really,’ he said. ‘I’m not greatly suited to this sort of task.’
‘No one is,’ McIntyre said, looking at him.
Fortescue could only nod in agreement.
‘Should we become friends, I would vastly prefer you call me by my Christian name.’
‘Alexander?’
‘Alex to you,’ McIntyre said.
‘In that case,’ Fortescue said, ‘you’d better call me Phil.’