The Colony (41 page)

They were enduring the same experience as the original New Hope settlers. It was evident to Napier that they were as helpless to prevent it now as the community here had been then. They were one by one disappearing, weren’t they? They were only an added chapter. Not even that, because there were so few of them. They were a footnote to the story of the vanishing, nothing more.

They were there. They had reached New Hope’s dismal hamlet of old stone and human atrocity. And something atrocious and old and not remotely human, Napier thought. It wasn’t going to work, this. He knew with a deflated feeling in his gut that it would not. Whatever protagonist they faced, it was more than some poor unwilling victim of demonic possession. This was not just a reluctant sort of malice. There was a gleeful, capering relish to what it did.

Degrelle suggested they wait in the tannery for him. It was a sturdy building and at least a shelter from the scouring wind and dry. He was grateful they had chosen to accompany him there and said as much. But what he had been sent to do there, he had to try to accomplish on his own.

It was hard to avoid the conclusion that this was goodbye. It was difficult to sustain eye contact with the man. He smoked a last cigarette before his departure from them. His faith considered that one a tolerable vice. He looked white-faced and filled with a fateful sort of trepidation. He was there only because he had been ordered to go, a soldier of God obeying a command. There was no bluster about him now. Napier felt afraid for him, knowing that they all did in that desolate moment.

They watched him walk through the rain across the granite and scrub of the ground. He walked stiffly, his polished brogues splashing through odd puddles on their stolid progress. He wore no ceremonial vestments, but for a purple stole. It flapped in the wind and he held it still with his free hand. In the other he carried the small leather case containing his chalice and hosts and his holy water and prayer book. He didn’t need this last item, Napier didn’t think. He would know the liturgy by heart. But his sort of priest did not go into battle without every item of his armour strapped securely into place.

Napier sneaked a look at Alice Lang. Lucy and Jane’s account of her cottage transformation had been both vivid and chilling. What vestiges remained about the place of David Shanks had physically inhabited her to serve them a warning. And the warning had been grave and unequivocal. They had not the means to fight against this skulking monster conjured by dark magic. He had tried and failed to do it. Their only hope lay in fleeing the island. And they had not the means to engineer escape.

They heard the scream about 20 minutes later. It seemed longer to them of course, enduring their vigil in the tannery, beneath the dripping beams of its skeletal roof. But it was not any more in actuality than that. It sounded very loud and sudden. It carried hoarsely despite the wind that withered through the ruins surrounding them.

‘I’ll go,’ Lucy said.

‘I will,’ Napier said.

‘No, Paul. You won’t. You’ll do your job and try to protect the group from harm. And if you die doing it, Davis will take over. And Patrick is going to keep his promise and stay with Alice. So I’ll go.’

‘Don’t do it, Lucy,’ Jane said.

‘He might be alive, in need of help.’

‘He won’t be.’

‘If it’s taken him, it will have gone,’ Lucy said. ‘That’s what it does. It’s good at hiding itself. How many has it taken? None of us has seen it.’

‘That’s true,’ Jane said.

‘Unless Degrelle was right,’ Alice said, ‘and the temple is its home.’

Lucy walked out of the tannery doorway. She turned once, about ten yards distant and smiled and shrugged and then continued on her way. Napier remembered she had been exactly like this in war. She was brave and fatalistic and achingly beautiful.

It was by far the longest walk of Lucy’s life. She had blundered into a minefield in Helmand Province once and been chucked an item a bit like a javelin to try to prod her way out of it with. That had been bad, but this was worse. To mix metaphors as poor James Carrick had specialised in doing, there had been light then at the end of the tunnel. Here there did not seem to be as much as a hint of it.

If she was going to die, and she was certain she was, she decided she might as well get death over with. It was lousy timing that she had met a man as attractive as Paul Napier was in these bleakly hopeless circumstances, but since he was going to die too, maybe they’d share a romantic afterlife. That was a pleasant thought it was just a shame she had no faith in.

It was the way he had stilled the flapping stole on the way to perform his rite that had done it. At that moment the pity she felt for the vain, flawed cleric had almost been overwhelming. She had to make sure that he was not there, inside, alive and in need of help or just the solace of a hand to hold.

He might have suffered a heart attack or a stroke. He was not a man who took good care of his health. He’d been as frightened as any of them. He had probably been taken. The scream had sounded chillingly final. But Lucy had to know. He might be enduring his final moments of life, prone and shivering in there in the gloom. If he was, she would offer what warmth and consolation she could to him.

The windowless church was even darker than she’d anticipated it would be, when she stepped through its arched doorway. She thought there was a slight odour of stale blood. They would not have been able to sluice it all away after their sacrificial slaughter. Some of the gore would have seeped between the flagstones of the floor and congealed there in the cracks.

But it was probably her imagination more than her sense of smell, suggesting blood. Organic matter didn’t linger for centuries, did it? Should she live to see her again, she would have to ask Jane Chambers about that.

There was no sign of Degrelle. She listened for the laboured harshness of his breathing, but all was silence. She could see no slumped body. She searched for the lustre of his spilled chalice and the scattered paleness of his communion hosts on the floor. She swallowed, knowing that all semblance of the priest had gone. He was vanished, wasn’t he? He was consumed.

There was movement ahead of her there; a kind of denser darkness than the prevailing gloom, roiling and flexing and as her eyes adjusted, huge in its malevolent size. She saw that it was crouched so that the building could accommodate its limbs. It smiled and she saw its teeth glimmer. It spoke, or rather crooned and there was a wet intimacy to the words and they were of a language strange and unbearable to hear.

To her disgust, she discovered she could understand what it was saying.

So few, it said, after so long a wait. I cannot draw out the suffering as I did before. I am impatient with appetite. When there were more I could make them dread me. Their agony was in the waiting. My last morsel was their king. I took him as he waited still for the hope that never came. His screams were music and his death leisurely. I was sated. Now I hunger and thirst and so yours will be quick.

She had to buy time. She discovered suddenly and overwhelmingly that she was nowhere near as resigned as she’d thought she’d been, only moments earlier, to the prospect of dying. She was far too young. She had far too much too much living still unlived to do.

It wasn’t the trivial stuff. It wasn’t the cigarettes she hadn’t yet smoked or the cocktails she hadn’t drunk or the parties she hadn’t yet stayed outrageously late at. It wasn’t the newsroom gossip or the prominent by-lines or the secrets confided by starry interview subjects lulled into indiscretion. It was the words forming memorable sentences in the books she hadn’t written and perhaps the children she had not yet given birth to. She had never been in love before. And now she realised she was, ardently so.

And there was the manner of the dying. She looked at the great creature slouched and drooling, gaining awful detail as her eyes adjusted. She saw its scales and the hair bristle from its leathery hide and she could not help but think she was worth more than this squalid outcome. She’d lived an industrious and compassionate life. It was shortly to be extinguished in a way that was not just undignified, but grotesque.

‘Shanks got away from you. The man who built the cottage escaped you, didn’t he?’

It paused. She could hear it thinking. She could hear the clatter of its mind, remembering.

The magician, it said. He cheated me. So I pursued him. And when I finally discovered him I ate his soul and led him to the void.

With a spasmodic shift it reached a mandible for her and she banged her head hard on a wall she’d been unaware of, right behind where she stood. Instinct had backed her against it when the dark thing first spoke to her in that loathsome voice.

She felt her lips prised apart, her mouth opened forcibly by some thorny and hurtful intrusion as something rooted deep in her was wrenched from her gum in a tearful blossoming of pain. The intrusion withdrew. She probed with her tongue. There was an absence in her teeth, a gap and a socket welling with warm, fresh blood. She heard the monster before her simper then, with glee.

The limb that had reached for her recoiled and the thing in the darkness mewled and shifted and slouched forward to take her and Lucy sank to her knees with her jaw throbbing and her mouth welling and leaking and someone blundered past her in what felt against her face like the brush of an oilskin coat and she heard something being recited loudly, urgently.

Everything seemed somehow muffled. Even the throb of pain from her gum felt dull. She was concussed, she thought, spitting blood. She turned her head and in the doorway saw Alexander McIntyre framed in a halo of light. He was wearing a pea coat and rubber boots and there was a woollen watch cap pulled down low over his head of white hair.

He had on his wind-burned face an anxious look she had never seen before. This was not an impression from life, was it? It was the chemical confusion of a failing brain. She wasn’t just concussed. Her paper’s proprietor did not do fancy dress. It wasn’t plausible at all. What an absurd image on which to exit her short existence. Lucy knew with a resigned certainty that she must just then have slipped away from life.

Words were expelled in a guttural grunt that was almost percussive in its aggression and rhythm and she thought that the voice sounded righteous and furious too. The tongue being spoken in seemed strange and ancient. And the dark thing screamed and cowered at what was being said to it. It moaned and sank into itself and its withering hide erupted and bled in stinking rivulets onto the flagstone floor.

She fought unconsciousness. She tried to look at the man speaking. In the gloom she thought that he looked tall and slender in a yellow overall like the sort trawler men wore aboard their boats. His red-blond hair was long, plastered in wet tresses down to his shoulders. He seemed altogether too slight and un-exotic to be capable of the language exploding harshly out of him. The words and phrases sang and reverberated. They chimed and struck like hammer blows.

He held a book in his hand. He gesticulated with it. As he recited, he flaunted the volume he held before the stricken, writhing beast. He flayed the air with his speech and the creature shrank and whimpered before this relentless assault of sound.

She wasn’t dead. She might not even be dying. But she could make no sense at all of what was happening. Her head hurt and she could feel blood trickling and gluey in her hair. She could taste blood, leaking in her mouth. Her torn gum throbbed with the raw insult of pain. She closed her eyes and let oblivion claim her. At that moment, it seemed the easiest and least complicated thing for her to do.

They beached the trawler on the eastern shore, not far from the experts’ compound. McIntyre was not lying about his seagoing heritage or exaggerating in the slightest his own skill at the wheel of a boat. He got them ashore in the surf without the riveted iron hull of the old craft breaking up underneath them. They were obliged by the trawler’s draught to wade through three or four feet of brine but the wind was behind them, propelling them towards land and their destination.

Walker told them where the others had gone and why. They came in pursuit on the quad bikes, roaring over the wet ground, Fortescue with Horan’s journal under his sweater against his chest.

Later, when Forescue had explained about the ritual, Lassiter thought he understood why the ghost of Jacob Parr had been so insistent that the journal be delivered personally. The written words had a talismanic power. They were the reason the trawler was able to get to the island without being attacked in the way that the rigid inflatable boat had been. The journal had been aboard the vessel and the words of the ritual, written at its conclusion, laid down there on the page, had protected them from harm.

It was only a theory. It came to him weeks after their departure from the island. He shared it with Paul Napier, his best man, at his wedding six months after the events on New Hope. He confided his theory moments before passing on Paul’s request to Alice that her bouquet be thrown accurately in the direction of Lucy Church.

Alice lost her psychic gift after Fortescue’s intervention. She plucked the journal from Jane’s incurious hands, where Fortescue had placed it. And Lassiter thought that her mind would be assaulted by images from the time of Ballantyne’s gruesome command of the slave ship Andromeda. It wasn’t, though. She had been right it seemed, in her conviction concerning the purpose of her gift. It was only ever endowed to help solve the mystery of what had happened to the vanished population of New Hope.

A police investigation into the disappearances of Cooper and the rest proved totally inconclusive; only serving to exonerate those that remained of any suspicion of involvement. Extracts from Horan’s journal were published with much fanfare in the Chronicle and, after concerted press and public lobbying the Vatican bowed to the pressure and released what details it had of Ballantyne’s practice on New Hope of human sacrifice.

But people have not really bought into the black magic explanation of events on the island. Conspiracy theorists still cling to the alien abduction argument. They reason that the disappearance of Karl Cooper lends conclusive weight to this explanation. They think he finally achieved his long-held ambition to make contact with the inhabitants of another galaxy.