The Colony (38 page)

It was dangerous intellectually to try to second-guess the motives of a sophisticated alien civilization. But Cooper did it anyway. There were few cosmologists, he thought, with his natural empathetic understanding of why the visitors came and what they wanted from humbler and simpler cultures than their own.

He figured that they had probably returned to New Hope to see if life on earth was viable and sustainable for them. They would not want to colonise the planet. Their ambition would be more enlightened than that. They would want to see if it was possible to co-exist with human beings.

He was in the settlement. And Jesse Kale was right, it was creepy. Its emptiness was not so much mournful as threatening, somehow. It was bleak and silent and so still that his eyes kept catching phantom movement that couldn’t really be there at the very edge of his peripheral vision. He heard what sounded like a furtive, girlish chuckle and shook his head and smiled. Just a breeze teasing a route through loosened roof-slates.

The tooth was a clue. The church at the centre of the settlement was another. It had been built in the shape it had because to Ballantyne’s community, the visitors must have seemed God-like. They could perform what would have been perceived by the people of the early 19th century as miracles. They were deities. So the dwelling built for them would naturally resemble a place of worship. Logic insisted upon it.

But it had no windows. There was not another church in Christendom that shared this curious characteristic. At first, Cooper had thought this might be because the visitors were too sensitive to sunlight to tolerate exposure during the day. Then he developed another theory more suited to the notion that they kept coming back.

It was the hangar in which they kept their ship. Their ship was the source of the radiation. And if he was right, the church was not only windowless but lead-lined under the plaster that concealed its stone composition within.

He had brought with him the tools to test this theory. He had a hammer and chisel and a drill and a honeycomb cube of little samples boxes. He would take a lead core away for proper analysis. Later, he would get Kale to help him excavate the church floor. He had an excited hunch that the visitors had left something down there; stored and quite possibly intended both as a clue and a gift for whoever had the insight to discover it.

He paused on the threshold of the church, outside the dark arched maw of its entrance, thinking that he was perhaps on the brink of greatness. In some significant ways he knew that he was a flawed individual. He was far from perfect, a long way from the finished article. But he’d worked bloody hard and been very determined and come a long way since the Wigan terrace of a youth dreading what new shame the bailiff’s knock would deliver this time to his poor mother.

He went in. The building’s interior was completely dark. He knew that some light must be allowed in there, spreading from the doorway now behind him. Light travelled. That was a basic law of physics. But it seemed pitch black, nevertheless. He thought that what ambient light there was would enable him to see once his eyes had adjusted after the exposed brightness of the afternoon outside.

There were no pews. There were no pictures or hangings, he remembered, and there was no altar up ahead of him in the single vaulted chamber formed by the walls and the roof. There was something, though. There was movement. As his eyes adjusted, he could make out a shape, denser than the surrounding darkness. There was something solid in the gloom. It shifted and he thought confusedly that what he was seeing made no sense. He could just make out the dimensions of the figure when it moved and it was huge.

Then it spoke to him. And what it said made his bowels void and he stood amid the rising smell of his own shit too petrified to move and it laughed gleefully. And the wreckage of his mind exposed a last living thought and it was the stolen quote he’d given Lucy Church in describing the universe: Not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

The first person Napier saw on returning to the compound was Lucy. She was standing outside, smoking in the windbreak formed by the crates of gear unloaded from the chopper that had carried their cargo to the island. Most of the stuff was still waiting to be unpacked. He saw the boxes containing the mobile gym equipment belonging to their forensic archaeologist, his name stencilled on their sides.

‘Kale’s gone,’ he said. He hadn’t meant to say it. It just came out. Was there any point in secrecy? No, there wasn’t, the body count was too high. Except that there were no bodies to count.

Lucy just nodded. He thought that in other circumstances she would have looked really lovely, with her dark hair blowing about her face the way it was. It was why she was standing in her makeshift shelter. The weather was deteriorating again.

‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.’

‘David Shanks spoke to us through Alice this morning,’ she said. ‘He warned us to get away, said there’s something on the island we have to escape. He said we can’t fight it. You’ll hear about it at the meeting in a few minutes. Will you break the news about Kale?’

‘No point trying to conceal it. Any luck with the radio?’

‘None. Your guys are trying to get a signal in shifts. That feedback’s driving them mad.’

‘That feedback isn’t feedback,’ Napier said. ‘We’re being toyed with. It’s been going on since the day I got here. But it’s taken a vindictive turn.’ He looked upwards, at the cloud thickening in rapid scuds across a sullen sky. ‘Even if we had a boat, we couldn’t risk the crossing. Not with night coming and another storm on the way.’ He smiled.

‘What’s funny?’

‘When it started, I thought maybe McIntyre had a covert special effects team here in case you lot didn’t produce the necessary fireworks. What an innocent theory that seems now.’

‘Get me out of this, Paul, and I’ll buy you a very big drink.’

‘If I get you out of this Lucy, I expect you to sleep with me.’

‘Now you sound like Karl Cooper.’

‘Sorry. That was a bad joke.’

‘He hasn’t come back from the settlement yet, by the way. Arrogant fucker, excuse my French.’

‘I’ve noticed how fluent your French is.’

‘Another bad habit,’ she said, flicking away the butt of her cigarette. ‘Shall we go inside?’

He didn’t think they were going to get out of it. He didn’t think she did, either. Her nonchalance was put on. It was an act. But it was a courageous act. He admired her. And he couldn’t honestly remember being more attracted to a woman.

Chairs had been arranged around the main table in the galley. Some of them were unoccupied. When Napier and Lucy sat, he thought that the chairs remaining empty looked very empty indeed.

He’d asked Davis and Walker among his own men to attend. The others there were Lassiter, Jane, Alice and Degrelle. They comprised a forlorn little group. In his absence, it made Napier realise just what a charismatic man Kale had been. He’d possessed energy and presence and Napier felt guilty about him. He’d been the one who’d advised them all the previous night to counter the crisis by resorting to their skills. He thought of the good cheer and positivity Kale had radiated over breakfast and pictured the grisly relic left of him in the Land Rover’s empty interior.

Jane Chambers spoke first. She told the group about that morning’s events at the cottage. The chief sceptic about the paranormal among them wasn’t present. Cooper was still apparently searching for evidence of little green men from another galaxy amid the ruins of the settlement. But Napier thought that even Cooper would have been disconcerted by Jane’s account of what had occurred.

She spoke with the absolute conviction that Shanks had come and communicated with them. He had done so churlishly and perhaps even a little reluctantly. But it had been his voice and his warning to them could not have been more explicit or grave. They were in mortal danger. They were not asked to leave. They were implored to escape.

When Jane had finished speaking Napier looked at Lassiter and Lassiter raised an eyebrow in assent and he told them about his trip aboard the quad bike to check on Kale at the peat bog and the gruesome evidence he’d discovered there.

None of it looked like news to the ex-detective. But then Lassiter’s conviction that Kale should have returned sooner was what had prompted Napier to go looking for their archaeologist in the first place.

There was a silence after Napier had finished speaking. He began his account thinking that it would conclude with general dismay and possibly a bit of panic and the need to talk one or two of his listeners down.

That didn’t happen, though. There was no one present who any longer believed they were confronted by imaginary fears. They were all genuinely scared. There was no discord. There was only the need for a coherent strategy to try to save their lives.

There was silence in the galley in the aftermath of his story. Outside the wind howled, growing in strength, buffeting the fabric of their shelter, making the titanium struts shaping it and the steel cabling keeping its shape taut, groan and sing with the effort. Rain hammered relentless on the roof.

Davis said, ‘Where’s Karl Cooper?’

Lassiter looked at his watch. He said, ‘He should have returned from the settlement an hour ago. He’s on his own. That was made clear to him before he set off. No one’s going out there after him in this.’

‘He could shelter in the tannery or the distillery,’ Alice said. ‘He might be better doing that than trying to walk back here in this weather.’

‘I wouldn’t fancy a night up there alone,’ Davis said. ‘Even before what we’ve just been told, I wouldn’t have fancied it.’

‘Ignorance is bliss,’ Walker said.

‘He won’t be alone,’ Jane said. ‘The little green men will have invited him to supper.’

Nobody laughed at the joke.

Degrelle cleared his throat with a rumbling cough. He said, ‘There is something I need to tell you all about the island and what happened here. It may not effect matters materially, but it informs what I intend to do tomorrow. I would prefer to do what I intend to in an atmosphere of hope and belief rather than general incredulity and scepticism. So I will tell you what I know.’

He smiled. It looked an effort for him to do so. ‘Let us take a short break before I begin,’ he said. ‘And I think a drink might be a sensible preparation for what I have to say.’

Napier looked at Alice, who looked sharply at Lassiter. He smiled at her and shook his head slowly and Napier felt relieved. He thought the ex-policeman his wisest and most resourceful ally in all this and so the last thing he wanted was to see him back on the bottle.

Professor Philip Fortescue was better looking than McIntyre expected him to be. He had a portentous job-title and a sing-song Liverpuddlian lilt to his voice that grated a bit on the phone. But in the flesh he was tall and fine-featured with wavy strawberry-blond hair he wore quite long. He was shy and hid rather behind the armour of his gold framed spectacles. But he was not a timid. He was fired up and determined.

‘Start at the beginning, Professor. Tell me all of it.’

‘You know the sea chest stuff.I don’t think there’s all that much time. We can’t sit around chatting.’

‘You’ve just endured a five hour drive. You need to eat something. I’ll order some food and a pot of coffee. You can’t run on empty, as our American friends are so rightly fond of saying.’

‘I don’t have any American friends.’

‘But you do know what I mean.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Persuade me of the provenance of the Horan journal and if you do I’ll read it and if I’m convinced by what it contains, I will help you in any way I can. I don’t see how I can say much fairer than that.’

Fortescue told him about Edith Chambers’ first phone call and Jacob Parr and the short account of the Great Affliction he had found. He told him about the Barnsley Nightingale and Lassiter’s name-change hunch and Emma Foot and his ordeal in the Elsinore Pit and the failure of Ballantyne’s bird to arrive. Then McIntyre read the journal as his guest first paused for breath and then ate ravenously.

He read with mixed emotions. The New Hope Island vanishing had fascinated him since childhood. He had abandoned his earlier, cherished belief in alien intervention without feeling as much disappointment as he would have expected to. Ever since viewing the film Shanks had shot and Lassiter had cleverly tracked down, he had suspected, at least subconsciously, that the mystery had in reality a much darker explanation.

He had not thought, though, that it would be as sinister as the Horan journal implied it was. He had thought the apparition Cooper had called a revenant just some poor restless spirit, an infant wretch unaware she had died of cholera or typhoid. The journal suggested it was something demonic, brought back in the shape of Ballantyne’s dead daughter to taunt him.

The fact that it was still there when Shanks had settled on New Hope was disturbing. The idea that it might still be there now, though, was terrifying. Seeing it in two dimensions on a screen in a viewing room was bad enough when you were cradling a large glass of single malt whisky. Having it creep up while you slept and wake you with its antic laughter was the stuff of nightmares.

While the spectre of his dead daughter had been taunting Ballantyne, his community had been slowly and deliberately consumed. They had called it the Great Affliction and it had invaded their Kingdom of Belief. But it had also been the being that hungers in the darkness; something born of virulent magic a continent distant to pursue and destroy in a vengeful spree and the vanishing had been the consequence.

McIntyre finished reading and closed the journal. He was no longer in any doubt about what had happened to the community on New Hope Island. He now felt that he knew conclusively. And the knowledge gave him no satisfaction at all. He felt sick and empty with dread at what he’d sent people into.

‘The thing is it’s still there, Mr McIntyre,’ Fortescue said. ‘Horan is emphatic on that because the sorcerer stressed the point with such certainty and solemnity. He regretted unleashing it, even as he lay dying. Unless the ritual is enacted that counters it, unless those words are recited that stops it, it just carries on. That’s what it was born for. That’s all it knows.’