The Colony (36 page)

There was no point asking her how she knew this. She saw things. It was obvious to Jane from the certainty in her voice that the cottage was already painting pictures from its past on the psychic’s mind. It occurred to her that Alice Lang did not own her gift. When it came, it possessed her.

Alice walked across the room and sat in the chair. She placed her hands palms down on the arm rests, in patches where the varnish had worn away, as the original occupant of the cottage must have done. She closed her eyes and rocked deliberately and slowly back and forth. Her mouth was set and there was a single vertical furrow of concentration creasing her brow. She doesn’t do Botox, Jane thought, giddily. Good for her. Then again, she doesn’t have a TV career to try to sustain.

Her breathing seemed to deepen and regulate to something approaching the way people breathe when asleep. Her eyes opened abruptly. The lids snapped back and her gaze focussed firmly on nothing at all. Alice Lang had pale blue eyes but by some trick of light and colouration in the cottage, to Jane they now appeared a flinty shade of gray. Her whole face looked different. The angles were sharper and the mouth stretched into a hard sneer, the previously full lips suddenly thin and bloodless. The hands gripping the arm rests of the chair were gnarled, tipped with tortoiseshell nails, the index and second finger of the right hand burnished to a dark brown by nicotine.

Lucy visibly jumped beside her when the psychic spoke and Jane thought she might scream. The voice did not belong to Alice. It was deep and male and marked by a clipped enunciation far more common in the first half of the previous century.

‘Get off the island,’ it said. ‘You’ve very little time. Ballantyne’s gal is abroad. You wouldn’t wish to encounter that little bitch.’

‘What happened to Blake?’ Lucy said. ‘Where’s Carrick?’

‘You have no time to tarry asking questions, dear.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Consumed,’ Shanks said. ‘Like the queer.’

Jane said, ‘By Ballantyne’s girl?’

Laughter greeted the question. A bark of mirth from the officer’s mess in about 1917, Jane thought, wondering with growing dread would Alice ever make it back to them. There was an aroma in the cottage now; a cocktail of smells. It was a mingling of brilliantine and paraffin and wet wool and coal soot. There was too a hint of harsh tobacco. She wondered whether they any longer occupied the present in that place.

‘You know nothing, do you?’ Shanks said. ‘You women have come here knowing absolutely nothing. There is bad magic here, powerful Ju Ju. You should have stayed away.’

Lucy said, ‘Did you bring it here?’

‘Don’t be impertinent. And don’t be bloody stupid. There is a monster here. It grows all the time in strength. It cannot be stopped or appeased. Take it from one who tried and failed to stop it. Escape while you still have the chance.’

Lucy said, ‘Why have we not seen it?’

Shanks chuckled, drily. ‘You’ll see it, if you stay. Mark my words, young lady. When that moment comes, I fancy it will be the last thing you do see.’

‘You survived it.’

He chuckled again. ‘After a fashion,’ he said.

‘How did you manage it?’

‘You ask a lot of questions. All of them are immaterial. You are wasting time you do not have to spend on what is not relevant to the peril you face. Have you no inkling of how blighted this place is? Have you no sense of dread here? Are you so bloody stupid?’

‘What kind of monster?’ Jane said. ‘Are you talking metaphorically?’

Shanks sighed and the sound was the soughing of wind through a stiff, autumnal wood and Jane was aware that they were listening to the voice of a man long dead, hauled back into being only to warn them of the mortal danger they were in. She felt embarrassed at the question she had just asked of him. She swallowed, emptily, with the shock of what was being said to them. Her hands clenched whitely into fists. The monster of which he spoke to them was real, wasn’t it?

‘It is hell’s work,’ Shanks said, wearily. ‘It is an abomination. It is alert and cunning and hungry. Leave now, please, while there remains what little opportunity you have.’

His last sentence diminished in volume, trailing off as though Shanks was escaping himself. Alice’s eyes closed and her features regained themselves. Jane and Lucy watched while she slumbered for a few minutes and the sounds of the exterior world returned to where they were.

They became aware of the crash of surf and the shrieking of gulls in the sky above. The short-wave Lassiter had insisted they bring squawked once, uselessly in Lucy’s hand. They let Alice rest for a while, until the wait became intolerable to their fraught nerves and then they shook her awake and half-carried her out into the glaring light of the day. Jane looked back at the cottage from the beach already believing what she knew had just taken place impossible.

‘What happened?’

‘You turned into him,’ Lucy said, ‘into Shanks, like a medium. He spoke through you.’ She was struggling with shaking fingers to light a cigarette.

‘That’s never happened before,’ Alice said. ‘I’m not a medium. I just see things from the past.’

‘Maybe Shanks didn’t want you to see those things,’ Jane said. ‘They might have been unbearable to watch.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He warned there’s a monster on the island,’ Lucy said. ‘It killed Blake and James Carrick.’ She had her Zippo in her hand. She tried to ignite it and it squirted out of her grip onto the ground. ‘Fuck.’

‘And Jesse Kale,’ Jane said. ‘Shanks didn’t mention him by name, but it was Kale I think he was talking about.’

‘I saw Kale only at breakfast,’ Alice said. ‘We all did, talking to Patrick Lassiter.’

‘We need to get back to the compound,’ Jane said. ‘Shanks didn’t come back just now to amuse himself. We’re none of us safe here.’

August 30th 1794

Our captain has asked of me a favour. In doing so, he has explained to my why he allowed my request to talk to the dying sorcerer one final time. He wishes me to remain silent on the subject of the voyage when I speak to my cousin Rebecca on our return to Liverpool. He knows of course that we are close. He says that the specifics of our brutal passage are not fitting for the ears of a well-born lady.

He knows her well. She embodies his own theory that it is curiosity above all that causes intelligent people to become knowledgeable. She reads the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. More accurate to say she devours it. She has advanced ideas. And she is always intrigued to learn about experiences beyond those she has enjoyed for herself. She will ask me about the voyage. That much is certain. But I will not tell her about her husband’s foul crime. I would not have done so anyway.

He summoned me to dinner at his table in his cabin last night. And it was a summons for I would not have acquiesced to a mere invitation. Our relationship has cooled to a degree that would prevent it from ever regaining the warmth it once had. He begged for my discretion in the matter of the sorcerer’s death. And then when I had sworn to that, he confided in me an ambition beyond his professional obligations.

He and Rebecca are to try for a child. My cousin is almost 25 and therefore rather mature to be giving serious consideration to this course. The bearing and birth of a child are difficult once a woman is past the age of about 20. The process often gives rise to medical complications during the pregnancy and older mothers seldom produce sufficient milk. Yet I feel they will be successful. The Albacheian’s revenge cannot occur unless they are. They will have a child together, Ballantyne and Rebecca and I would wager all I own that the child will be a girl.

When I did not react in the obvious manner and raise a toast to their success in this ambition to further their family, Ballantyne did it himself, filling my glass from a fresh bottle in order to do so, full of apparent good cheer and optimism. Yet there was a hollow ring to his words in announcing the toast. He was a little like a poor actor unconvincing in a heroic role.

I felt sorry for him, then. My pity was truly roused. He is undeserving of it. But it was evoked nevertheless.

I find myself increasingly convinced that the Albacheian sorcerer possessed precisely the powers he claimed he did. I believe he cast the spells and I believe what he prophesied will come to pass. I believe it because he repented of his actions at the end of his life and then gave me the ritual that will undo the worst of what his magic will inflict. He did this in sorrow and fear and remorse on the reeking planks of what we both knew was his deathbed. He was beyond empty posturing. I saw the terror in his eyes at the thought of the train he has set in motion.

Before I left the captain’s table, I reminded him of what Parr had overheard eavesdropping in the hold and subsequently spoken to him of. I reminded him of the threat made of the being that hungers in the darkness. A denser darkness than the night, I reminded him; more solid than the air and far bigger than a man.

He laughed it off, as I knew he would, but the humour did not reach his eyes.

‘Should events in your future life ever cause you to recall those words, Captain, contact me,’ I told him. ‘I might be able to help you and by God, if I am able to I will.’

He just nodded. He did not speak, my promise signalling the conclusion of the last proper conversation I ever hope to have to have with the man. But he knows, in his heart. The bluster has quite gone from him. There is a word for men with the demeanour Captain Seamus Ballantyne now has and that word, is haunted.

Below are the words that must be incanted when the ritual is performed. I write them phonetically, as the Lutherans wrote the bible liturgy once they had renounced Latin. It is an inexact science, this. But it is as close as I can get in my mother tongue to the sounds as told to me by the Albecheian. I hope never to have to recite them. Magic undermines everything my vocation and schooling have encouraged me to think is true. And I am not brave. Were I called upon to confront the being that hungers in the darkness, I think my courage might in that moment fail me.

Written in Truth,

Thomas Arthur Horan

Fortescue closed the journal. He did not share Horan’s vacillating faith concerning the subject of magic. He had encountered Ballantyne’s sea chest and its unquiet contents and he had encountered the ghost of Elizabeth Burrows and when he had read the Albecheian’s boast; I can make puppets afterwards of those who choose to take their own lives he had almost jumped out of his own skin in fright and recognition.

Kaddeh had accomplished what he’d threatened. In a sense, he was still doing it, because nothing he started had stopped or gone away.

Ballantyne’s bird had not arrived. He’d remembered Horan’s offer of help. Something had reminded him of it on New Hope Island and he’d begged for the ritual and for whatever reason, Horan hadn’t sent it. Unless he had and the bird had been shot down for the pot or ended up feeding a hungry sea eagle on its fraught route through the Hebridean skies.

That was what had likely happened. Horan had sent the words of the ritual, bound to the leg of the carrier pigeon and the missive had never reached its intended destination. And he had not been able to go himself because by that time he was living the clandestine lie of another man’s life in Barnsley.

Fortescue looked at his watch. It was 8.40am. On New Hope, Jesse Kale was loading a Land Rover on what was to be the last morning of his mortal life. Patrick Lassiter was leading a search party in the fruitless hunt for a missing senior journalist. Alice Lang was lacing on her hiking boots for the walk along the shingle that would take her and her two companions to the cottage built by the crofter, David Shanks. In his room in the expedition compound, a Belgian priest was on his knees, praying. The Keeper of Artefacts knew none of those things.

He called Edith Chambers’ school and explained who he was and waited for 15 minutes for her to be summoned to the phone.

She said, ‘You’ve taken your time.’

‘That’s gratitude.’

‘Was Jacob Parr telling the truth?’

‘For once in his life, yes, he was.’

‘So you found Horan’s account?’

‘I did.’

‘And it contains important information for my mum?’

‘It contains vital information, for all of them, Edith.’

The other end of the line was quiet. Then Edith said, ‘Their lives are at risk, aren’t they? They’re going to go the way of the New Hope settlers, if they haven’t already. Have you heard the news?’

‘Not this morning. I’ve been reading. What news?’

‘Radio contact with the island had been lost, apparently. There’s no internet either. The newspaper is saying it’s nothing to worry about and probably just because of a bad storm last night. But if they’re in trouble and they’ve got no radio they can’t send a mayday signal.’

‘You’ve thought this through.’

‘Course I bloody have. My mum’s on New Hope Island.’

‘What do you intend to do?’

‘The question is, what do you intend to do, Doctor Fortescue? I’m a kid, remember? You’re the one with the information they need.’ She hung up.

‘Ungrateful little cow,’ Fortescue said, to the burr of the dialling tone. But that wasn’t what he felt. What he felt was that he couldn’t really fault her logic. She was perky and intelligent but at 14, she was a child. It was why he had agreed to help her in the first place. He could do things she couldn’t. Right now, he didn’t know what to do. But the first part of any plan of action had to be calling into work to say he wouldn’t be there that day. He had other, more pressing obligations than research and cataloguing.

The phone rang before his hand could reach it.

‘It’s Edie Chambers.’

‘Hi, Edith.’

‘Please call me Edie.’

‘Okay.’

‘Look, I think you’ve done brilliantly. I think you’re really clever and kind. Amazingly so, actually, it’s just that I’ve been frantic about my mum.’

There was a snuffle on the line. Edith began to cry.

‘I’ll do anything I can, Edie,’ Fortescue heard himself say. ‘I’ll do everything I possibly can, I promise. I won’t rest until I’ve seen your mum and given her the message.’