The Colony (26 page)

‘You were right, Walker,’ Napier said. ‘None of them made it.’

‘It came at them too fast,’ Davis said, ‘and in darkness.’

‘They saw it though,’ Walker said.

‘Unless they just felt it,’ Napier said, ‘whatever the fuck it was.’

No man is an island. That was Napier’s belief, unless maybe if your name was Seamus Ballantyne. Except that Ballantyne and his entire community had come to a sticky end, hadn’t they? No man is an island; it was the reason he had shared this experience with Davis and Walker. He hadn’t been able to face it alone.

Earlier, he had shown them the gruesome relic retrieved from the crofter’s cottage after Blake’s disappearance. They were good men. He needed allies in this, whatever this transpired eventually to be. He even told them about The Recruited Collier and the clay pipe he’d discovered, still warm, what seemed about a century ago, but was only a fortnight past. Neither of them laughed. It transpired that Walker was a Kate Rusby fan himself. He’d seen her at the Cambridge Folk Festival two years on the trot, he confessed.

They were silent together after listening to the sound of the crew and passengers aboard the rigid inflatable perish in the night. Napier knew it had not been the sound of men in the water, drowning. He had heard that once after a NATO training fuck-up in heavy fog off the coast of Norway and awful as it had been, this was worse. Something predatory had got them, something hungry and formidable in water too cold for sharks.

He reached for the whisky bottle. Troy, the construction ganger had left it for him as a parting gift and he was grateful for it now as he poured a slug into each of the mugs of tea the three of them had. It took the dry edge off the powdered milk. It delivered much needed warmth to the belly. It was wholly against the rules laid down by the people paying them but Napier was of the belief that the game had changed to the point where entirely new rules were required. In the material absence of a superior, he felt wholly justified in framing them.

To Napier, Walker said, ‘Davis told me about that stuff he saw in the Congo, Sir. Wasn’t talking behind your back. He told me he’d told you too.’

‘And I told him about that morning at the cottage,’ Davis said. ‘The point is all the lads have sensed it, Sir. The island isn’t right. It’s wrong in a powerful way. It’s corrupt in a way that’s much worse than Africa was.’

‘Worse in what sense, Davis?’

‘Bigger. More powerful. It’s concentrated near the crofter’s cottage. But it’s everywhere on the rock.’

‘It was offshore when it got those blokes,’ Walker said, nodding at the camera.

Napier was silent for a long moment. Then he said to Davis, ‘What’s the mood?’

‘It’s pretty sombre, Sir. The lads are spooked. They’re game enough but none of us is armed and even if we were, you can’t fight shadows.’

‘You can look at the positives,’ Walker said. ‘We’ve taken no casualties. Our unit is intact. We have food and fuel and shelter. We’re being paid.’

‘We’re doing our job,’ Davis said. He laughed, without humour. He gestured at the camera, ‘When someone’s not doing it for us.’

Napier said, looking at Davis, ‘Your word, corrupt, strikes me as the right one to describe this place. But Walker’s right too. We’ve taken no casualties. We’ve retained our unit strength and capability. The integrity of our camp remains uncompromised. I’m as unnerved as anyone on the island. But we’ll be at full expedition strength here in less than 24 hours. The island will be crawling with new personnel. Now is not the time to request evacuation, boys.’

‘Agreed,’ Davis said, nodding.

‘Walker?’

‘I’m like all the lads, Sir. I shit bricks at night here, but I trust your judgement. We all do. We know what you did in Afghanistan. The bottom line is you lead and we’ll follow.’

It was difficult not to look at the camera, not to think about the murky anguish of the night screams it had recorded. Napier had lost his nerve in Afghanistan. He knew that, just as he knew that to some extent at least, he had recovered it since. He thought it would be tested here, again, in this awful place. The experts and their various bits of pricey paraphernalia would arrive in the morning. And his private belief was that they would make no difference to the threat they faced at all.

McIntyre brooded in his library after the departure of his last guest. He sipped brandy and pondered on the events he had personally sent careening into motion.

Latest figures showed the circulation of the paper had now risen 40 per cent since the announcement that the expedition was scheduled to begin. Ad revenues were up 60 per cent. Pagination had increased by 30 per cent. They had gone from running two to four editions on the newsstand every day. New Hope Island had captured, or recaptured, the imagination of the world.

Cooper and Kale’s most recent books had re-entered the non-fiction chart’s top ten. The BBC was re-running Jane Chambers’ series about the Black Death and gaining higher ratings in doing so than for the original broadcast. Lucy Church was a shoo-in already for Feature Writer of the Year at the National Newspaper Awards. And in the face of all this achievement, McIntyre felt none of the triumph he had anticipated he would. Instead, he felt hollow and even slightly afraid. These were new and unwelcome sensations and he thought that he knew what had engendered them in him.

It was doubt. He was beginning to doubt his own theory as to the nature of the New Hope vanishing. He still believed that aliens had visited the earth. The evidence for that was, to his mind, irrefutable. But ever since Lassiter’s discovery of the cine film shot on New Hope by David Shanks, the case to be made for activity there beyond the rational had been steadily stacking up.

He could no longer dismiss the spectre on the film as something Shanks had conjured in his own amateur dabbling with magic. Lassiter’s experience in the basement of the Maritime Museum in Liverpool contradicted that theory. There was something malevolent and unnatural about the contents of the sea chest and the chest had belonged to Seamus Ballantyne.

And there was the way that Shanks’s wraith was attired, wasn’t there? The spectre had been dressed in clothing from the time not of the crofter, but of the settlement. It was a detail that could not be glossed over or blithely ignored.

The slave-ship master had brought something evil with him to New Hope Island. It had festered and grown and destroyed his community. This unearthly affliction had been spiteful and destructive. It had not arrived from another galaxy, aboard a spacecraft armed only with enlightened intent.

The events bringing McIntyre around to this belief did not stop with Lassiter’s ordeal at the museum. His respect for the ex-detective was growing all the time, but there was other, compelling evidence. It came from the war hero, Sergeant Paul Napier, and it suggested that what Ballantyne had introduced still capered darkly on New Hope.

McIntyre had made light to Lassiter of Blake’s disappearance. He could not so easily dismiss the empty boat Napier and his people had just found. No one was yet admitting to having organised this attempted spoiler, but someone would have to, soon. There would be high profile broadcast journalists among the missing. They would be familiar faces on the nation’s television screens and they could not simply cease to exist without shock and comment and somewhere, without grief. They were dead. McIntyre, a man who had always trusted his profitable instinct, felt a cold certainty about that.

Napier had told him about the sound recording on the camera. Speaking over the weird pitch of the radio static, the war hero had sounded measured and calm and phlegmatic. And McIntyre had asked him what he thought was going on there. And through that banshee wash of sound, Napier had said, ‘I think the Island is haunted, Mr McIntyre. I think there are spirits living here. They are not abstract. They take physical shape. They conceal themselves, but we sense their presence around us. They are angry and malicious and they wish us terrible harm.’

Earlier in the evening, he had spoken to the psychic Alice Lang. He had asked her was she really convinced of the authenticity of her gift. Was it not just the power of her intellect, channelled through a gift for intuition? She had smiled and said she wished it were simply that. Her life would be less complicated if it was. He had pressed, asking her how she could authenticate such a vague and insubstantial talent.

She had told him about the suicide of David Shanks, slipping gratefully into the abyss, watched by a gleeful figure bigger than a man and far darker than the night surrounding it. And he believed her, because he knew that she was confiding what was for her, a grotesquely reluctant truth.

He sipped the last of his brandy. It was either very late or very early and he knew that he ought to go to bed. His mood was gloomy and his disappointment growing and there was something else; something like trepidation, a strong and urgent conviction that even now, at this eleventh hour, he could and should call the whole thing off.

But he could not do that. That would be inconceivable. The sense of betrayal felt by the readership would be something from which the paper would never recover. Neither would his own global reputation as a newsman. He was committed to this. They all were. Projects planned on this scale developed their own momentum and the New Hope expedition was now an unstoppable juggernaut of hype and expectation.

He rose, wearily, to go to bed. He glanced at his desk and the spacecraft modelled for him by the NASA rocket men at such outrageous expense. They looked in the jaundiced light like children’s toys. Things will seem better in the morning, he said to himself, knowing in his heart, it was a lie.

Degrelle knelt on the waxed wooden parquet of his cell floor wearing the hair shirt in which he habitually slept. The shirt was the nightly penance paid for his vanity, which he knew was his great weakness and sin. He faced the simple wooden crucifix hung from a nail on his wall. He focussed on the bronze figure of Christ writhing in his death agony nailed there under his crown of brutal thorns. And he prayed for all of them.

He prayed for Alice Lang, whose gift he considered an endowment of the Devil. He believed that this second-sight of hers was authentic. But its real purpose was to prevent her from entertaining faith in the only power beyond the physical world embodying goodness and purity and nobility of purpose. He had spoken to her at McIntyre’s party and considered her in great peril. He thought that the island could cost the psychiatrist her sanity. He knew from experience that Satan relished such ironic jokes.

He prayed for the Catamite Jesse Kale and the worshipper of false idols, Karl Cooper. He beseeched God on behalf of Patrick Lassiter, a moral man with a strong intellect and a strength-sapping weakness for drink. He prayed for Jane Chambers, a rational woman who believed that the only cure for any malaise was concocted in a laboratory. He feared that New Hope Island would confound and contradict her and erode the foundations of her already fragile sense of worth.

He said a special prayer for Lucy Church. He did so because it was his experience that the most buoyant seeming are sometimes the first to sink when the storm is delivered. He liked her. Of all of them, he thought her the warmest and kindest character; the one among them possessing the most of what gave God’s chosen species their distinguishing humanity. Finally, he prayed for Carrick, who had looked to him at the party like a soul already lost.

When he had muttered the last of his improvised liturgy and kissed the rosary clutched between his fingers he rose on knees numbed by his weight and sat on his truckle bed and pondered on what he knew about New Hope Island and what he had learned in his conversation with the Cardinal when the Cardinal had called and pressed him with all of his temporal authority to join the expedition.

Ballantyne had experienced his moment of epiphany in the autumn of 1799. By that time Wilberforce and the other abolitionists had already been campaigning again slavery for some years. But the slave trade would not be abolished by Great Britain until an act of Parliament was passed outlawing it in 1807. And slavery itself would persist in most of the British Empire until it was finally banned in 1833.

Even after that, ownership of slaves persisted in most of what was regarded as the civilised world. It flourished in America, the cradle of democracy and national champion of the notion of individual liberty, until the 1860s and the Civil War.

The idea that Ballantyne had been an evil man redeemed was a modern conceit, a bit of crude historical revisionism. In his lifetime, he would have been regarded as a successful and prosperous sea captain, not some tyrannical sadist. His later conversion to a faith of his own devising would have seemed the scandalous part.

Through modern eyes he was the practitioner of a barbaric business who tried to pay for his crimes against humanity by establishing a community based on basic Christian principles. He forswore the comforts his ill-gotten wealth had accrued. He sacrificed his status and so lost his wife and well-placed friends. And he chose deliberate exile for himself and his followers in a harsh island wilderness.

Most right-thinking people of his own time would have considered Ballantyne converted mad, bad or the victim of a cruel delusion. He was a demagogue and his followers no more than vulnerable fools.

He preached to his growing Liverpool congregation until 1810. That was the year the New Hope Island settlement was established. So he must, Degrelle concluded, have been thinking about it for a decade. He had leadership and maritime skills and the planning must have been meticulous, because the community prospered. It did not just exist on a meagre subsistence level. It did sufficiently well to produce the surplus to trade.

The vanishing was discovered in the early spring of 1825. A trader called Matthew McCloud had been buying the island’s whisky. He docked to pick up his regular order of a dozen oak barrels of the stuff and discovered to his bewilderment that the New Hope settlers had all disappeared. Lichen grown over the cold peat in the grates of their fires suggested to McCloud that they had been gone about six weeks.