The Colony Part 26

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 th.o.r.n.y 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 m.u.f.fled. 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 a.s.sault 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.

Epilogue.

They beached the trawler on the eastern sh.o.r.e, 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 ash.o.r.e 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, La.s.siter 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 pa.s.sing 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 La.s.siter thought that her mind would be a.s.saulted 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.

Websites reinforcing this fallacy have been set up in honour of Cooper and Kale. They are viewed as fitting amba.s.sadors for earth on other planets, heroes who will one day return to a triumphant reception from a world grateful for their diplomatic efforts on humanity's behalf.

Were a poll to be taken in the average British pub, most of those casting votes would confidently agree that aliens were involved in both sets of New Hope disappearances. It just seems, to most people, more plausible than the darker and disturbing alternative. Human nature is optimistic. It seeks a happy ending. That's why we're attracted to the light.

Lillian Carrick moved in with the Chronicle's editor, Marsden, three months after the island survivors limped into the port of Mallaig aboard McIntyre's elderly tub of a fishing boat.

Stories of a whirlwind romance convinced none of the staff on the paper. Eventually the widow Carrick confessed that their affair had been going on for four years and she'd been on the verge of demanding a divorce. A lawyer had already been consulted by the time of her husband's reluctant departure for New Hope.

McIntyre failed to see the funny side of this revelation. He sacked his editor. The Chronicle did not champion Victorian values in the manner of some of its more sanctimonious rival t.i.tles. But its proprietor, Karl Cooper apart, regarded himself as a shrewd judge of character. He had liked James Carrick and considered him a decent man deserving of a better domestic epitaph than the one allowed him by his faithless wife.

Those who survived the New Hope expedition are reluctant to discuss it and consistently vague on the detail. Philip Fortescue has attained a degree of academic notoriety for being the man who discovered the journal written by Thomas Horan. He's become a popular talking head on more serious-minded TV programmes whenever maritime history or customs are discussed. Jane Chambers jokes that when they go out to dinner, her boyfriend is recognised in restaurants almost as often as she is.

Edith Chambers already calls him her wicked step-dad. Fortescue is young enough to understand that this is doubly a compliment. He is considering a job at the Greenwich Museum that would put him in closer proximity to Jane and her pushy, infuriating, adorable daughter. A pragmatic man most of the time, he would also like to put a few substantial miles between himself and the sea chest stored in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the place where he currently works. It's just a bit too close to him for comfort.

He could keep in touch with his roots. He still has the babe magnet car his brother sold him, when necessary, to get him back and forth to Liverpool.

He drove it over the Pennines to Barnsley a few weeks after returning from his sea voyage to New Hope. He had a promise to keep to an amateur historian there and remains a man always insistent on keeping his word.

He was not surprised at all to discover that the synopsis written by Emma Foot was thorough, well-organised and suggested her account of mining in the locality at the time of the Industrial Revolution would turn out to be an impressive piece of scholarship. He made a few suggestions. He further promised to look at the first draft of the book as soon as she's completed it.

He has only the vaguest recollection of what happened in the windowless church. He cannot recall anything in detail about the appearance of the creature he confronted. He had faithfully learned the words of the ritual. He had prepared to recite them and he remembers feeling as much indignant, when he entered the darkness, as he was afraid. He was steeled for the confrontation.

But when he began to speak, his voice possessed a power and fluency not quite his own. And his body dictated movement to him over which he felt he had little if any control at all. It was as though his steps and gesticulations were somehow ch.o.r.eographed. There was a weird absence of self-will in this performance, almost suggestive of puppetry.

He chooses not to dwell on it, but suspects he was given crucial help from somewhere or more accurately, given help from someone, obliged to wait two remorseful centuries to be given the chance to offer it.

None of the survivors would ever return. The ritual invoked seemed to have the effect that Thomas Horan's sorcerer had said it would, on the demon he brought into being and described as spite made flesh. But nothing was done about the spectre David Shanks shot with his cine camera there in 1934.

Everyone who has seen it thinks the film is genuine. None of them doubts that the child is a ghoulish doppelganger of long-dead Rachel Ballantyne. No one can explain the spectre in any other, convincing way. The resemblance probably grows less acute as the years pa.s.s and take their physical toll on this restless apparition. But she is a baleful spirit and her antic ways would make the island an unnerving place on which to try to settle.

Wind howls through the empty New Hope settlement, even in the most innocent summer weather. The church without windows remains an unhappy construction. It was built in desperation for a bleak and b.l.o.o.d.y purpose. Around it, anguish seems to seep through the very stones of the dwellings that once housed the vanished community. It is a place as if in mourning for its own tormented pa.s.sing. It seems not quite capable of peaceful repose. It is, somehow, unstill.

There is also the question of the crofter David Shanks. Or more pertinently, the vexed question of the place he built and for a short time, lived in. Pa.s.sing boats have reported seeing lights on at night in the vicinity of his cottage. The island has no known inhabitants. The lights could be fishermen's lanterns except that the surf is too high on the stretch of beach near the cottage for the casting of lines to be practical there. And what promise of a catch would tempt an angler to so remote and inhospitable a location?

Alexander McIntyre believes the island is ent.i.tled to keep its remaining mysteries unsolved. This is the view too of Paul Napier, who now heads up McIntyre's security team. Chief Inspector Patrick La.s.siter, invited by the Met to rejoin the force as part of its cold case review section, heartily agrees.

Lives were lost on the New Hope Island expedition and lives were rediscovered. For some it was a tragedy and for others a sort of rebirth. It was an experience that forged friendships and fostered romance and taught people much they did not know about themselves. Some lost everything and some benefitted immeasurably from their partic.i.p.ation. But none of those who lived through it all would ever dream of going back there.

end.