The Colony (39 page)

Spite made flesh, McIntyre thought.

‘They’ll perish there if it isn’t put an end to. All of them.’

McIntyre didn’t reply. He was thinking of the scream Napier had reported hearing from Blake before failing to find Blake’s body. He was thinking about the joke he had made at the missing man’s expense.

‘What do you need?’ he said to Fortescue.

‘Is there still no radio contact with New Hope?’

‘There’s been no communication whatsoever since lunchtime yesterday.’

‘Think it will be re-established?’

‘I’m sceptical we’ll restore it anytime soon.’

‘Then I want you to charter me a helicopter.’

‘There’s an Atlantic storm in the vicinity of New Hope. It may last for a couple of days. The weather is still deteriorating there as we speak. Nothing is flying in that airspace.’

‘Charter me a boat, then. I have to get to the island.’

‘Can you handle a boat? Can you navigate?’

‘Theoretically, I can. I work at a maritime museum.’

‘We’ll take my plane from here to Mallaig and charter a vessel there. We may encounter some reluctance from the boat hire people, but we’ll get something if I pay over the odds. The Scots are passionately fond of money and I say that from personal experience. Though the coast guard will strongly advise against our going out, they can’t physically stop us, whatever the weather.’

‘You’re coming with me?’

‘I’m an experienced sailor from a seafaring family. I did my national service as a navigation officer aboard a battle cruiser and I’ve messed about in boats since I was a young child. Captains Pugwash and Birdseye have more legitimate seagoing expertise than you possess, young man. And those people are my responsibility. I sent them to New Hope Island.’

Degrelle told his little congregation what the Cardinal had told him. It was what Samuel Trent had imparted in the confessional after his escape in an open boat from New Hope Island in 1823. He had fled a full two years before the vanishing of the settlement. But strange and brutal things were going on there and the boy had played his murderous part in those events.

Ballantyne’s daughter Rachel died of diphtheria at the age of eight in 1804. She had been loved and she was mourned. But she did not stay restful in her grave. She returned to haunt the captain on New Hope. Her ragged apparition terrified the community and drove their spiritual leader half-mad with despair.

He would see her. And then he would not see her for weeks. He would foster in himself the half-dared hope that she had gone forever. And then one day he would feel a chill and lift his gaze and see her watching him from the heights or wake to see her standing inches above the floor at the foot of his bed, staring at him with the eyes that were only empty sockets now.

He knew the source of the magic that had rekindled her and contaminated her spirit with evil. He remembered his sadistic treatment of the sorcerer aboard the slave ship he had commanded in his former, sinful life. He knew that this was the man’s revenge for the punitive mutilation that had ended his existence.

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.

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.