Brodmaw Bay (43 page)

Little Madeleine Gleason was nowhere to be seen. She had vanished. He walked to the spot where he had sighted her, next to one of the stones. And he saw that the ground beneath its interior facet had been scuffed. He smiled at the smudge of disturbed earth. He did not think Madeleine possessed the weight on her feet to inflict it. He walked the circle, inside the stones but close to the perimeter, so that he could look at the base of each. All had been marked in the same curious, subtle manner.

He looked around. There was no one on the plateau with him. When he looked downwards to the village, there were no cars moving in the streets, no people visible. The bay was otherwise engaged. He got down on his knees before one of the disturbances and probed it with his fingers. He felt metal and pulled from the earth a key. It was brass and long-shafted with large, old-fashioned teeth.

He dug three times before successive stones and came up with a key at each. They had been ceremonially buried, he concluded, one before each of the stones in the circle. They were all identical. And he thought he knew what it was they would lock. He put all but one of them back. That, he put in his pocket. Silently, he thanked the dead girl for detaining him. He did not think he would catch sight of her again. She had done what she could.

He thought he knew now why she had killed Robert O’Brien. It had been to stop him hampering their move to the bay. Lillian had described him as a spoiled and immature man and he had not given up willingly on his romantic ambition. Saving the Greers had not been Madeleine’s first consideration. The little girl’s ghost had led them to what and to where she had because she wanted revenge.

James was minded to give it to her. He drove the car into a copse of trees by the side of the descending road where he thought it would have a good chance of remaining concealed. He took the petrol can from its boot and put it on the ground beside him. For perhaps the twentieth time during the course of the day, he rang his wife’s mobile number and for the twentieth time her mobile failed to ring. Wherever she was, she was out of range of a signal.

He looked down the hill, getting his bearings. He saw that he could approach the place he wanted to, concealed for most of the route by a dry-stone wall. He would have to crouch, but that was all right. When he got closer to his destination, the building itself would conceal him. He would get to the rear of it without its vigilant sentinel seeing him from her cottage window.

The church looked no more inviting from the back than it had from the front. He ducked under the broken door into the gloom within, unscrewing the cap from his petrol can, and began to slosh the contents over the sacks slumped against the pews. He glanced at the tabernacle, wondering what fresh abomination lay inside. He had the feeling that the desecration here was a frequent duty industriously and enthusiastically accomplished.

One of the sacks rippled. James only caught the movement out of the corner of his right eye and the eye was still bloodshot and slightly blurred from the blow to his temple in the crash. He did not imagine it, though. The things kept in the sacks, the stored and sleeping Harbingers, were stirring under the assault of the accelerant he had soaked them with.

There was another ripple and a mewling sound and one of the sacks fell from its pew as the thing confined inside it sensed the danger and struggled to unfold its limbs and escape. But the sacks were tightly sewn, weren’t they? The Harbingers, whatever their function in the rituals here, were not allowed to roam free. This blasphemous congregation left the church only on special occasions. That was his intuition. Angela Heart had been telling the truth. This was a dangerous place. More than the decrepit state of the building fabric made it so.

As if to prove the point, a mandible, something more like the sectioned limb of an insect than a human finger, pushed through the thick burlap confining its owner and scrabbled about, seeking greater purchase. James walked backwards away from the spreading puddle of fuel under his feet and took out the book of matches he had bought at the newsagent’s concession back at the hospital.

‘No.’

‘Angela,’ he said, without turning. ‘You’re just in time.’ He struck a match, used it to ignite the tips of the rest of them and, as the book flared intensely into orange and yellow life, dropped it on to the church floor.

He walked out of the church, ducking carefully under the canted door in its arch, already able to feel the blossoming heat from the fire he had set in the nave, aware of the screeching sounds coming from the burning sacks as the things within them rattled and perished.

It would sober them, this act of destruction, he thought. It would rob them of their power to menace. It would show the people of the bay that they were not invulnerable to harm. The conflagration would alert the county fire brigade. He would tell Penmarrick that the police were already on their way. Then he would flee with his family back to London and safety and forget about the insanity that reigned in this blighted place.

Ben Tamworth and Martin Sharp were standing in the churchyard. He could hear heat shatter diamonds of stained glass in the windows behind where he stood. There was a taste of burning, bitter and loathsome in the throat. He was obliged to spit on the ground. Angela Heart brushed past him, their shoulders touching, and he smelled smoke on her clothing mingled with the sweet, expensive perfume on her skin. The concussion had really heightened his senses.

Another man, more flamboyant, older, was walking down the path from the gate towards Tamworth and Sharp. It was the scholar, Michael Carney. James thought, giddily, that he had something in his jacket pocket Carney would probably find very interesting to read. Then an intuition told him that Carney knew it all already, that none of it would be a revelation to him. He helped sustain the convenient fiction that the Gleason women had died years later than they had, as victims of the Spanish flu.

Angela Heart leaned forward and whispered something to Ben Tamworth. He separated himself from the group and approached James.

‘Nasty blow you’ve taken to the head.’

‘Not quite as nasty as it could have been.’

‘You were lucky.’

‘You think so?’

‘You can come with us voluntarily, under your own steam, Mr Greer. Or I can drag you. I really don’t give a fuck either way.’

He walked. They walked together. They were a cluster of people out for a stroll, he thought, unless you looked closely. Do that and you would see the scorch marks on his own clothing and notice that Angela Heart’s disdainful features were slightly blackened by soot and that there was blood seeping from under a dressing on the side of his own head and that the faces of Sharp and Tamworth, flanking him, contained a dark sort of fury.

People passed them, going the other way. It seemed that the whole village was climbing out of the bay up towards the hills. They straggled in ones and twos and bigger groups, in packs and snaking single-file but all going more or less in the same direction. James thought that they were headed for the plateau and its stone circle. He saw that few if any of them spared a glance for the blazing church. The pillar of smoke would be seen for miles. And people elsewhere would take it for a farmer clearing a field of its hedgerows or simply burning deadfall.

None of the people passing him engaged him with their eyes. Even those who passed quite close did not look directly at him. They gazed upwards. Mostly their expressions were neutral. He saw something akin to rapture, though, on the faces of a few. He looked for his wife and his children, of course. But he did so in vain. They were nowhere to be seen on his short route through the streets.

They rounded a corner and he was confronted by two lines of masked pallbearers carrying a sort of throne on their shoulders. The masks worn by the men were carved from wood and studded with shells. The shells erupted from the flat surface of the masks in whorls and swellings like the protrusions of some disfiguring nautical disease.

Richard Penmarrick slouched on the throne. He wore rings on his fingers and a crab-shaped pendant cast in bronze around his neck. He was dressed in a priestly cassock of black and some white substance daubed on his face gave him the pallor of death. He grinned. His teeth were large and yellow in his head against his painted complexion.

‘The children have had a lovely time of it today,’ he said. ‘But it is time to put childish things away, Mr Greer. The party is very much over, now. The ceremony begins. We experience a grave and serious moment.’ The bearers gripped the rails of their burden and shuffled past James and his party, on up the hill to the stones.

They took him to the Leeward Tavern. When they got him inside Ben Tamworth clubbed him without warning on the injured side of his head with the heel of his right palm before they tied him to a straight-backed chair. His temple had started to bleed fairly freely again under its sodden dressing but he did not feel likely to lose consciousness when Tamworth hit him and neither did the impact make him feel sick. He was better, he thought. He was on the mend. He had a fighting chance.

It was only a few minutes later, after they had left him, that he was overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness. He had spent too long groping amid the standing stones and too long subsequently creeping down to the church intent on remaining unseen. He had assumed the church central to whatever they did because Angela Heart had guarded it so alertly. He had been taken in by his own reaction to Lily’s sinister representation of it in the book. He had made a misjudgement. It had cost him time. It was now after eight o’clock. And his failed strategy had cost him his liberty too.

They had put him in the saloon. He had a view through the picture window of the sea with the descending sun above it in a sky filling from the horizon up with tumbling mountains of cumulus cloud. They were colossal, dizzying even at this distance in their scale.

‘There’s going to be a storm,’ a voice from behind him said. He recognised it. It was the first voice James had ever heard in the bay and it belonged to Charlie Abraham.

‘All the people up at the plateau are going to get soaked.’

‘Very likely, but they’d consider that a tolerable state of affairs.’

‘Where are my wife and children?’

Behind him, he heard Abraham lift the bar partition and squeeze himself something potent into a glass from one of the optics. ‘I think you know where they are.’

‘And is that a tolerable state of affairs?’

But Charlie Abraham chose not to answer him.

James had remembered something. He had remembered what Adam Gleason had written in his last testament about the Abraham who must have been Charlie’s great-grandfather, if James had got his chronology right.

The landlord of the Leeward in those days had been unenthusiastic about the bay’s grisly rituals. James thought that antipathy might be generational. If it was, it was something he could work on. There was nothing else he could work on. The bonds tying him had been too tightly secured. Perhaps Abraham had been left here guarding him because he wasn’t one of those who climbed to the plateau rapturous. He wouldn’t be too disappointed to miss their gathering amid the stones. He might, like his ancestor, be a reluctant believer. It was just possible he might actually not believe at all.

Someone breezed into the bar. There was no other word for it. They opened the door and the breeze followed them and James, with his heightened senses, smelled on it the metallic, electric smell of the storm swelling the sky, with cloud becoming bruise-coloured now in his view out over the sea.

It was Megan Penmarrick. Well, he thought, the pub was child-friendly, as had been so warmly demonstrated to them on the evening of their welcoming party. The Leeward was a place that catered to the whole community. Nobody was excluded. She walked around and in front of where he sat, partially silhouetted by the violent colour of the sky behind her, still beautiful and poised, with her arms folded across her chest and her slender weight rested on one hip.

‘I want you to know something,’ she said.

To Charlie Abraham, James said, ‘How can a child be complicit in this?’

Abraham did not reply.

James heard again the squeak of pressure against the optic spring as a glass was pushed up beneath it. ‘Easy on the anaesthetic, Charlie,’ he said.

Megan Penmarrick approached him and unfolded her arms and slapped him surprisingly hard across the face. ‘Listen to me,’ she said.

James was too shocked to reply.

‘I’ll be a worthy successor to your wife. Lillian Greer inspired me and I’m grateful. I will always be grateful. But I know that I am worthy. I will shine as she did. My father says I will eclipse her.’

‘What does your mother say, Megan?’

‘My mother tends to say what my father tells her to.’