by F. G. Cottam
There was a silence between them. Outside, the wind withered. Spume scattered on the Perspex shield sheltering them from the elements.
‘Do you think they’re dead?’
‘If they are,’ McIntyre said, ‘I’ve killed them. You reach a level of power and influence and people become pawns you can shift about in whatever capricious game you decide to play. They become pieces you manipulate at will, nothing more. It’s taken this experience to open my eyes to that reality. So I hope with all my heart they’re not dead. I’ll get us through this voyage, I promise you that. Beyond that, I can only pray and beseech and beg we are in time.’
‘Actually pray, you mean? Do you believe in God?’
‘At this precise moment, Phil, it seems expedient to do so.’
There was no sign at all of the four man sentry patrol Napier had detailed before they closed down the compound for the night. When he went outside they had gone. It was as though they had never been there.
He went to rouse Davis. He wanted to know had there been any talk of slipping away, taking their own chances, among his men. It seemed unlikely to him. Given the ferocity of the gale that still battered the island, it seemed an outlandish prospect. They couldn’t have got off New Hope and they were surely no more secure anywhere on it than here, where there were solid structures and at least the illusion of safety in numbers.
Davis looked sheepish. ‘There has been a bit of speculative planning,’ he said. ‘By that I mean last resort talk. A couple of the boys have suggested fitting out the rigid inflatable we found and scarpering in that.’
‘We put sand in the outboard’s petrol tank,’ Napier said.
‘No. We didn’t. You instructed one of the lads to do it but we took an independent line on that one, Paul. We’re none of us any longer obliged to obey your orders. This isn’t the army and in the circumstances, sabotaging our only viable means of escape seemed a bit foolhardy.’
‘Not foolhardy,’ Napier said, ‘completely bloody stupid. It was a bad decision and you were wise to ignore it. The boat wasn’t holed?’
‘It was left intact.’
‘Do you think they’ve taken it?’
Davis looked around. The wind was buffeting them both even in the substantial shelter of the unpacked crates of gear. The rain was a deluge needling into them at 45 degrees, the rubberised fabric of the ponchos both men wore snapping and rippling wetly. ‘No, I don’t,’ he said. ‘I suspect they’ve gone the way of Carrick and Kale. I hope I’m wrong, but that’s what I honestly think. We need a fucking miracle, Paul.’
Napier said, ‘We’ve got a priest. Let’s hope he can provide us with one.’
Davis said, ‘He doesn’t look up to it. Not to me, he doesn’t.’
‘We’ll know soon enough.’
‘I don’t believe for a second he can make any difference to what’s happening here,’ Davis said. ‘I don’t think he does either.’
‘The French had faith in him in Africa.’
Davis shrugged.
And Napier sounded to his own ears like he was down to clutching at straws. They had no idea really of what it was they were up against. All they knew was that they were disappearing. Something was taking them one by one. They were confronted by something monstrous and cunning and it was devouring them.
Davis had been with him that day when he’d discovered the malicious scrawl of graffiti on the hearth of the cottage that had once been home to the crofter, Shanks. They had both sensed the evil, palpable, almost paralysing in the dread it inflicted on a man. It had been nothing earthly. The approach to the cottage door had been a wade through a morass of clutching fear.
Davis said, ‘Last night, when the ladies described Shanks speaking through that shapely psychic of ours, they said he called the magic Ju Ju, like in Africa. But this is different from what I saw there, back then. The tribesmen in that village were just dabbling.’
‘You told me they sacrificed a child.’
‘They did. It was malicious enough, but I don’t think they properly knew what they were doing. They knew some of the customs, but they were posturing. It was mischief. They could no more conjure real magic than I could. But there’s real magic here and I believe what came out of the psychic’s mouth when she sat in that rocking chair. It really was Shanks warning us through her and I get the feeling he was a bloke who’d been around the block.’
‘He was far more chap than bloke, to be fair to him. But you’re right. He had been around the block. And then some.’
‘It was him. And he knew what he was talking about and he was speaking the truth. It’s real and ancient and evil and it’s here.’
Napier shuddered. ‘We should get out of the cold and rain,’ he said. He smiled, mirthlessly. ‘We’ll catch our deaths.’
‘It’s funny, in a way.’ Davis said.
‘What is?’
‘The timing,’ Davis said, wincing up at the sky, through the rain. ‘I read about the way you went to pieces, after that third Helmand tour. The tabloids made a meal of you. The detail was pretty lurid; the degradation. Was it all true?’
‘Pretty much true, yes, I suppose. I don’t think they could have exaggerated it, really. Not from what I remember of it, anyway. Why do you bring it up now? Why do you think it funny?’
‘It’s just the timing, like I say, Paul. It’s more ironic, actually, than funny. You’ve put yourself back together. When you walked into the cottage the other day, I knew that there was no one I would rather serve alongside. You’ve recovered completely. You’ve got back your courage and nerve. It must have been hard to do and now it’s all for nothing.’
Napier nodded. He would accept the compliment, which he knew was sincerely meant. In other circumstances, he would have reprimanded Davis for defeatist talk. But to do so would be to patronise the man.And it would be hypocritical. They were in full agreement, weren’t they? Neither of them believed they had a hope in hell.
All but one of them went in the end, a bedraggled wet procession of enfeebled faith and helplessness, Degrelle’s sacramental trinkets dulled under the grey sky, without the sparkle Napier thought they should have worn to look as though they were going to work their ceremonial magic.
They marched in silence over the sodden ground; the three women hand in hand and pale, each to their separate thoughts despite this physical show of solidarity shared between them. The wind and driving rain obliged anyone wishing to speak to bellow out their words. But nobody said anything. It wasn’t worth the effort. There was nothing further for any of them of any consequence left to say.
Walker stayed behind. He had volunteered to keep on trying with the radio. Napier considered him remaining back at the compound the lesser of two evils. He was close to cracking up. Exposure to an experience of the settlement was the last thing his frayed nerves needed. It was the last thing any of them needed, but accompanying Degrelle seemed more tolerable an option for the rest than waiting back at the compound only to discover later that he’d failed.
The thing consuming them was becoming greedier. The more it fed, the more its appetite grew. There had been a longish interval between Blake and Carrick. But between Carrick and Kale there had been only a day. Napier did not expect to find anything of Karl Cooper when they got to the settlement. Unless he found what Cooper had derided as a bit of tooth enamel.
Four men had gone in the night. That amounted to six in less than 24 hours. If Degrelle’s exorcism failed, and it would, how long did the rest of them have left? How long before the last of them perished? If they patched the boat, they could not survive a crossing in this weather. It would capsize in the heaving seas.
Even if the weather improved, they wouldn’t be safe aboard the craft. He had heard what had happened to its original passengers and crew. None had survived whatever had attacked them. All had died, screaming. Not a single body had washed up, not a single item of personal kit even, not as much as a life-jacket or hairbrush, wallet or water bottle.
; They were enduring the same experience as the original New Hope settlers. It was evident to Napier that they were as helpless to prevent it now as the community here had been then. They were one by one disappearing, weren’t they? They were only an added chapter. Not even that, because there were so few of them. They were a footnote to the story of the vanishing, nothing more.
They were there. They had reached New Hope’s dismal hamlet of old stone and human atrocity. And something atrocious and old and not remotely human, Napier thought. It wasn’t going to work, this. He knew with a deflated feeling in his gut that it would not. Whatever protagonist they faced, it was more than some poor unwilling victim of demonic possession. This was not just a reluctant sort of malice. There was a gleeful, capering relish to what it did.
Degrelle suggested they wait in the tannery for him. It was a sturdy building and at least a shelter from the scouring wind and dry. He was grateful they had chosen to accompany him there and said as much. But what he had been sent to do there, he had to try to accomplish on his own.
It was hard to avoid the conclusion that this was goodbye. It was difficult to sustain eye contact with the man. He smoked a last cigarette before his departure from them. His faith considered that one a tolerable vice. He looked white-faced and filled with a fateful sort of trepidation. He was there only because he had been ordered to go, a soldier of God obeying a command. There was no bluster about him now. Napier felt afraid for him, knowing that they all did in that desolate moment.
They watched him walk through the rain across the granite and scrub of the ground. He walked stiffly, his polished brogues splashing through odd puddles on their stolid progress. He wore no ceremonial vestments, but for a purple stole. It flapped in the wind and he held it still with his free hand. In the other he carried the small leather case containing his chalice and hosts and his holy water and prayer book. He didn’t need this last item, Napier didn’t think. He would know the liturgy by heart. But his sort of priest did not go into battle without every item of his armour strapped securely into place.
Napier sneaked a look at Alice Lang. Lucy and Jane’s account of her cottage transformation had been both vivid and chilling. What vestiges remained about the place of David Shanks had physically inhabited her to serve them a warning. And the warning had been grave and unequivocal. They had not the means to fight against this skulking monster conjured by dark magic. He had tried and failed to do it. Their only hope lay in fleeing the island. And they had not the means to engineer escape.
They heard the scream about 20 minutes later. It seemed longer to them of course, enduring their vigil in the tannery, beneath the dripping beams of its skeletal roof. But it was not any more in actuality than that. It sounded very loud and sudden. It carried hoarsely despite the wind that withered through the ruins surrounding them.
‘I’ll go,’ Lucy said.
‘I will,’ Napier said.
‘No, Paul. You won’t. You’ll do your job and try to protect the group from harm. And if you die doing it, Davis will take over. And Patrick is going to keep his promise and stay with Alice. So I’ll go.’
‘Don’t do it, Lucy,’ Jane said.
‘He might be alive, in need of help.’
‘He won’t be.’
‘If it’s taken him, it will have gone,’ Lucy said. ‘That’s what it does. It’s good at hiding itself. How many has it taken? None of us has seen it.’
‘That’s true,’ Jane said.
‘Unless Degrelle was right,’ Alice said, ‘and the temple is its home.’
Lucy walked out of the tannery doorway. She turned once, about ten yards distant and smiled and shrugged and then continued on her way. Napier remembered she had been exactly like this in war. She was brave and fatalistic and achingly beautiful.
It was by far the longest walk of Lucy’s life. She had blundered into a minefield in Helmand Province once and been chucked an item a bit like a javelin to try to prod her way out of it with. That had been bad, but this was worse. To mix metaphors as poor James Carrick had specialised in doing, there had been light then at the end of the tunnel. Here there did not seem to be as much as a hint of it.
If she was going to die, and she was certain she was, she decided she might as well get death over with. It was lousy timing that she had met a man as attractive as Paul Napier was in these bleakly hopeless circumstances, but since he was going to die too, maybe they’d share a romantic afterlife. That was a pleasant thought it was just a shame she had no faith in.
It was the way he had stilled the flapping stole on the way to perform his rite that had done it. At that moment the pity she felt for the vain, flawed cleric had almost been overwhelming. She had to make sure that he was not there, inside, alive and in need of help or just the solace of a hand to hold.
He might have suffered a heart attack or a stroke. He was not a man who took good care of his health. He’d been as frightened as any of them. He had probably been taken. The scream had sounded chillingly final. But Lucy had to know. He might be enduring his final moments of life, prone and shivering in there in the gloom. If he was, she would offer what warmth and consolation she could to him.
The windowless church was even darker than she’d anticipated it would be, when she stepped through its arched doorway. She thought there was a slight odour of stale blood. They would not have been able to sluice it all away after their sacrificial slaughter. Some of the gore would have seeped between the flagstones of the floor and congealed there in the cracks.
But it was probably her imagination more than her sense of smell, suggesting blood. Organic matter didn’t linger for centuries, did it? Should she live to see her again, she would have to ask Jane Chambers about that.
There was no sign of Degrelle. She listened for the laboured harshness of his breathing, but all was silence. She could see no slumped body. She searched for the lustre of his spilled chalice and the scattered paleness of his communion hosts on the floor. She swallowed, knowing that all semblance of the priest had gone. He was vanished, wasn’t he? He was consumed.
There was movement ahead of her there; a kind of denser darkness than the prevailing gloom, roiling and flexing and as her eyes adjusted, huge in its malevolent size. She saw that it was crouched so that the building could accommodate its limbs. It smiled and she saw its teeth glimmer. It spoke, or rather crooned and there was a wet intimacy to the words and they were of a language strange and unbearable to hear.
To her disgust, she discovered she could understand what it was saying.
So few, it said, after so long a wait. I cannot draw out the suffering as I did before. I am impatient with appetite. When there were more I could make them dread me. Their agony was in the waiting. My last morsel was their king. I took him as he waited still for the hope that never came. His screams were music and his death leisurely. I was sated. Now I hunger and thirst and so yours will be quick.
She had to buy time. She discovered suddenly and overwhelmingly that she was nowhere near as resigned as she’d thought she’d been, only moments earlier, to the prospect of dying. She was far too young. She had far too much too much living still unlived to do.
It wasn’t the trivial stuff. It wasn’t the cigarettes she hadn’t yet smoked or the cocktails she hadn’t drunk or the parties she hadn’t yet stayed outrageously late at. It wasn’t the newsroom gossip or the prominent by-lines or the secrets confided by starry interview subjects lulled into indiscretion. It was the words forming memorable sentences in the books she hadn’t written and perhaps the children she had not yet given birth to. She had never been in love before. And now she realised she was, ardently so.
And there was the manner of the dying. She looked at the great creature slouched and drooling, gaining awful detail as her eyes adjusted. She saw its scales and the hair bristle from its leathery hide and she could not help but think she was worth more than this squalid outcome. She’d lived an industrious and compassionate life. It was shortly to be extinguished in a
way that was not just undignified, but grotesque.
‘Shanks got away from you. The man who built the cottage escaped you, didn’t he?’
It paused. She could hear it thinking. She could hear the clatter of its mind, remembering.
The magician, it said. He cheated me. So I pursued him. And when I finally discovered him I ate his soul and led him to the void.
With a spasmodic shift it reached a mandible for her and she banged her head hard on a wall she’d been unaware of, right behind where she stood. Instinct had backed her against it when the dark thing first spoke to her in that loathsome voice.
She felt her lips prised apart, her mouth opened forcibly by some thorny and hurtful intrusion as something rooted deep in her was wrenched from her gum in a tearful blossoming of pain. The intrusion withdrew. She probed with her tongue. There was an absence in her teeth, a gap and a socket welling with warm, fresh blood. She heard the monster before her simper then, with glee.
The limb that had reached for her recoiled and the thing in the darkness mewled and shifted and slouched forward to take her and Lucy sank to her knees with her jaw throbbing and her mouth welling and leaking and someone blundered past her in what felt against her face like the brush of an oilskin coat and she heard something being recited loudly, urgently.
Everything seemed somehow muffled. Even the throb of pain from her gum felt dull. She was concussed, she thought, spitting blood. She turned her head and in the doorway saw Alexander McIntyre framed in a halo of light. He was wearing a pea coat and rubber boots and there was a woollen watch cap pulled down low over his head of white hair.
He had on his wind-burned face an anxious look she had never seen before. This was not an impression from life, was it? It was the chemical confusion of a failing brain. She wasn’t just concussed. Her paper’s proprietor did not do fancy dress. It wasn’t plausible at all. What an absurd image on which to exit her short existence. Lucy knew with a resigned certainty that she must just then have slipped away from life.
Words were expelled in a guttural grunt that was almost percussive in its aggression and rhythm and she thought that the voice sounded righteous and furious too. The tongue being spoken in seemed strange and ancient. And the dark thing screamed and cowered at what was being said to it. It moaned and sank into itself and its withering hide erupted and bled in stinking rivulets onto the flagstone floor.