by F. G. Cottam
Carrick was not the sort of man to stray. But if he was, he thought of the three women going on McIntyre’s expedition to No Hope Island, Alice Lang would be the most interesting candidate in whose company to do any straying.
She wasn’t just physically compelling. There was the tension she represented between the orthodoxy of her psychiatric training and the arbitrary madness of her psychic gift. She must be emotionally and intellectually cleaved, he thought, whenever her gift intervenes. It’s rationality confronted by chaos. Lassiter had told McIntyre; who had told Marsden who had told him, that she regarded this talent of hers almost as an affliction. Thinking about it, he could see why she would.
Now that he did think about it, it occurred to Carrick they were an obvious member light in their array of experts. Ballantyne had been a very bad man, before his attempt to represent himself as just the opposite. Surely they should take a priest with them to the Hebrides. Surely the expedition was crying out for a legitimate man of the cloth. What if what had happened there had been demonic in its origin? In that case a well respected exorcist would round out the team very nicely.
He didn’t seriously think that anything satanic had occurred on the island. Carrick was not a natural believer in conventional religion. He did believe though, that McIntyre and Marsden too had missed a trick in not addressing the theoretical possibility.
It was certainly the speculative area offering the juiciest teasers in the lead up to the expedition itself. Devil worship was something all their readers had heard of and most of them believed went on. Demonic possession had provided the plot of the most notorious horror film in cinema history.
It was too late now, which was a pity. They could have had a lot of fun with it. Evil became contagious when the Devil was involved. Places were contaminated by it. They became damned and haunted and intrinsically bad. Suddenly, the phrase No Hope Island, seemed less a jocular pun than a grave warning above a story in a late edition; a sombre picture of a suitably photo-shopped rock outcrop accompanying it, some goat head bit of granite with anthropomorphic horns. What a wasted opportunity!
If the place was evil, in the absence of a Vatican veteran in a white dog-collar, that would have to be Alice Lang’s territory. With her sensitivity, she would surely be aware of it the moment her feet hit the ground. He’d have to keep an eye on her. It would, though, be a purely professional eye.
Carrick forgot about Alice Lang when his wife walked through the study door a moment later. He was reminded, as he was every time he caught sight of Lily, of the reason he had married her. He was not smug or self-congratulatory. He just considered himself an exceptionally fortunate man.
She gestured at the picture on the computer screen. She said, ‘It was on my camera. The little Lumix you bought me? The camera you bought me for my birthday?’
‘That’s what I bought it for, darling,’ he said. He stood and kissed her on the mouth. ‘I bought it for you to take pictures with.’
‘But I didn’t take this one.’
‘You must have.’
‘I took 20 pictures of Martha’s birthday party.’ Martha was their daughter. They had celebrated her eighth birthday the previous weekend. ‘This is number 21. I was downloading the birthday pictures onto my laptop. And this pops up.’
‘You must’ve taken it.’
Lillian shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of exasperation. She smiled, but the smile was tight. ‘Where did I take it?’ She said.
Carrick glanced down at the screen. It was a good question. The florid carpet and heavy wooden fittings suggested nothing so much as the interior of a Victorian pub. His wife did not frequent pubs. Not alone, with her camera, she didn’t.
‘Who the hell is she?’
The subject of the picture was a tall and striking woman seated behind a pub table gripping a book. She wore a black tailored coat with a double row of gilt buttons. She had pale skin made even paler by the geometric severity of the black bob in which her hair was styled and lipstick that was a vivid red on her unsmiling mouth. She had eyes a brown so dark they almost matched her hair. They were staring into the lens. The stare was frank, disconcerting.
‘Who is she, James?’
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Carrick said.
His new recruits had been on the island for 48 hours. There were eight of them, him commanding them and Brennan still in the communications centre, homesick now and increasingly frustrated with the high tech kit still stubbornly failing to function properly.
Magnetic fields and meteorological conditions had been factored into the design and manufacture of the stuff Brennan was trying to get to work. There was a strong signal, in theory at least, on the digital spectrum. The analogue back-up should have functioned on the FM wavelength. It worked okay in the shipping lanes and aboard the fishing boats trawling Scottish waters and it had for decades. But on the island, Brennan could establish no consistent communication with London at all.
‘You know what I think,’ he said to Napier, after a fruitless morning fiddling with various dials. ‘I think that when the aliens landed here and took all the settlers away, their ship did something weird to the island’s mineral deposits.’
Napier sipped coffee and considered this. ‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know, precisely. But their ship would have been massively powerful. It could have corrupted the island, geologically.’
‘You mean like radioactivity?’
‘Sort of, but not exactly, or we’d be dead, or dying of leukaemia, or developing tumours and going bald and blind. But sort of like that, some sort of sonic discharge.’
‘That’s without question the most stupid theory I’ve ever heard,’ Napier said.
Brennan smiled. The smile was rueful. ‘I know it is,’ he said. ‘But something is blocking our signals. I mean, listen to it, Paul. You ever heard anything quite like it?’
‘Just turn it off,’ Napier said. ‘That little girl crying noise is depressing. And it gives me the creeps.’
‘Just gremlins,’ Brennan said, switching off the power. ‘Or maybe just the one gremlin disguised as a sorrowful child.’
There was a knock on the door. Napier opened it to see Davis, one of the new men, lean and alert, every inch the ex-commando he was. ‘A word, Sir?’
They all called him Sir. He possessed no military rank. And he was not a status conscious man by nature. But he was in charge and he knew the men were more comfortable acknowledging the fact. They were all ex-soldiers and they felt more secure with a command structure. The British army was not a democracy and they liked what they were used to.
Napier sensed a shit-storm approaching. He didn’t know when or from precisely what direction. Blake’s disappearance had been the start of it. Actually, it had begun before then, with the spectral singing and the clay pipe with the elusive owner. The radio failure he was sure was a part of it. He had established no clear pattern to it yet but the storm was on its way and he thought it would hit them sudden and severe. That was his instinct. They needed to maintain their discipline for when it came.
‘What’s up, Davis?’
‘Not exactly sure, Sir. I thought I saw movement up by the crofter’s cottage on the western point.’
‘What sort of movement?’
‘A figure, Sir.’
‘A seal, maybe?’
Davis shook his head. ‘It moved too fast. And it was slight, and clothed.’
Davis; 38 years old, hair worn in a salt and pepper crew cut, shrapnel graze on his let cheek, eyes hard and hazel coloured and pretty much unreadable at that moment. Eyes that had seen quite a lot, Napier thought.
The men had orders not to enter the cottage David Shanks had built. That didn’t really affect the integrity of their perimeter security. There were high points from which anyone approaching the cottage by sea could be clearly seen. They were manned and the new men were vigilant.
There were ten men including Brennan on the island. The expedition personnel
were due to arrive in five days’ time. The vague sense of being spied upon had not left Napier but he no longer entertained the notion that New Hope was covertly occupied by any other people. Something was there, but it wasn’t human. Even if it had been once, it wasn’t human anymore.
He looked around. It was a grey morning, the light limited by louring cloud, the sea a limpid green toiling, almost motionless. The air smelled of rain and salt and wood smoke from the driftwood fire the men kept burning in the camp. It wasn’t particularly cold. They kept the fire burning for good cheer, Napier thought, rather than for warmth. That and perhaps as men had in camps since ancient times, as a means to keep unwelcome spirits at bay. Some things mankind did compelled by instinct, or collective memory.
‘Come on,’ he said to Davis. ‘We’ll take the scenic route.’
They walked around the island, from east to west, at the edge of the water. Napier was tense, expecting his short-wave to crackle into life with a burst of static as one of the two men occupying their observation posts on the high ground spotted movement at the crofter’s cottage and radioed to report it in. But that didn’t happen.
He was aware of the crunch of shingle under his booted feet. He was aware of sluggish waves breaking to his right without rhythm. He was aware of his companion in his combat fatigues, an unreadable look still in his eyes when he glanced at Davis.
He felt a sense of wariness growing with every stride he took. He kept picturing the pale incisor with its skirt of torn gum ripped from the mouth of Blake, left lying on the flagstone floor of the one room hovel to which they were headed. And he had to fight within himself for wariness not to descend on the route into a mood of abject dread.
They saw the roof of the cottage come into view. Its remaining slates glimmered wetly in the greenish light. It seemed to rise before them as they approached, its walls wet with sea spume and its windows ragged, like an absence.
They stopped about 50 feet away.
‘Can you feel it?’ Davis said. He shivered.
‘Feel what?’
‘Come on, Sir. Don’t play dumb with me.’
‘Yeah,’ Napier said. ‘I can feel it.’
And he could. He felt watched. It was a coldly uncomfortable sensation. It was not the vulnerability you felt sometimes in the field. It was not precisely hostile. It was curious and contemptuous and, Napier thought, it was gleeful, as though they were being toyed with. His skin pricked with it and his scalp itched. He could not stay there and endure it.
‘I’m going in,’ he said.
It seemed to take longer than it should have to walk the distance to the half-ajar cottage door. He became aware of the silence, a numb departure from the island norm of screaming gulls and crashing surf. The air felt thick, tangible. He felt almost giddy, breathing it. He thought he heard a snatch of song and it stopped him dead for a moment. It had drifted through the open cottage windows.
He’d imagined it. There was no one in there. His sentries would have spotted their approach. Davis had just imagined what he thought he’d seen earlier. It had been a trick of the light, no more than that. He’d seen for just a fragmentary glimpse the wing of a scavenging bird, perhaps. It had been a frond of sea kelp, borne by the wind.
Except there was no wind, was there? And there were no birds about. Stillness ruled this region of the island. It had the mood about it of approaching death.
‘Don’t, Sir.’
Davis, behind him, spoke as if from a vast distance away, his voice dreamy and disembodied.
Napier pressed on. It was what you did. He remembered Blake’s constant bleating about not being armed. Funny the things you remembered at such moments. Had he ever in his life experienced a moment like this? He didn’t think the weapon existed that could help him just then. Nor did he think he had ever been so frightened. Fear filled his mouth with a coppery taste and foreboding gripped his stomach so it felt as though his entrails churned between strong and playful fingers.
He had reached the cottage door. He pushed it open. The silence was so profound now it felt like a rebuke. He looked around at the bare stone of the walls. He looked at the naked flags on the floor. He saw that a single word had been scrawled in chalk on the flag directly in front of the cold and derelict cottage hearth. The word was Hell.
The scrawl was childish. There was no stub of chalk. The characters were fresh. The work had been done recently. Davis had been right. There was a faint odour in the cottage, but Napier couldn’t identify it. It was corrupt, a hint of something decaying or decayed, but he couldn’t have said what. He dropped to his haunches and spat on the scrawled word and rubbed the chalk away with his sleeve. He didn’t want the others seeing it. He did not want the dismay he felt at seeing it scrawled there shared.
He rose to his feet and walked out into light and space. The air felt fresher and a gull shrieked in the sky and a wave tumbled and he no longer sensed the chilly prick of observation on his skin. He looked at Davis. He managed a smile and a shrug. ‘Nothing,’ he said, thinking, we’re in a lot of trouble here. The badness has not left this place. Over time, it has just grown more bitter and stronger, hasn’t it?
They trudged back without speaking, eyes on the shingle, thoughts unshared. They were about 500 metres from the camp when Davis stopped and turned and looked Napier directly in the eye. ‘Don’t laugh at what I’m about to say,’ he said.
Napier said, ‘I don’t think that’s very likely.’
‘I did a training secondment in Africa about 15 years ago, in the Congo, with the French. There was an atrocity there. There was a ritual killing. A child was killed and mutilated. It was black magic, powerful Ju-Ju.’
Napier licked his lips. They were dry. The chalked word had claimed all the spit he’d had.
‘You know what Ju-Ju is, Sir?’
‘I can imagine.’
‘You could feel it,’ Davis said. He glanced around, at the sea and the sky and the land; a visual inventory of their remote little wilderness ‘I could feel it there and I can feel it here. Do you believe me?’
‘Well,’ Napier said, quietly. ‘I’m not laughing, Davis, that’s for sure.’
For Jesse Kale, New Hope Island was personal. He believed he’d been invited to join the expedition first and foremost because of his skills as a forensic archaeologist. The fact that he was the only archaeologist in Britain who could claim to be a household name was also an important factor. His public profile was such that even if his television series was abruptly cancelled, he figured he had a few more years in him of cutting ribbons outside new supermarket branches and opening garden fetes.
He didn’t think it would come to that. The advertising work he did – for Hercules 4x4s and the Tough-Time watch brand – gave him a pretty good return.
He enjoyed the level of popularity he had achieved. He knew that he had a substantial ego and his series ratings and book and DVD sales and attendant fame gave him a real kick. He didn’t think there was a lot wrong with enjoying and even relishing success so long as you were honest in admitting that it gave you a buzz.
He wasn’t stupid and he was not deluded. He knew that his handsome face and perfect pectoral muscles were of equal importance to his success as any scholarly accomplishment. But that was how the modern world worked. You were a package and you sold yourself as such. You put in the site and library hours, but you also hit the weights room and the tanning salon when required. The right attire was another vital element.
He felt nothing but admiration for the cosmologist, Karl Cooper. He considered that Cooper had provided the template for his own media career. Cooper had proven that the formula worked and Kale had simply worked the Cooper formula in turn. He looked forward greatly to meeting the man who had inspired him. He thought it would be a privilege to work alongside his unwitting mentor on such a high profile project as this one seemed likely to be.
But that was not his reason for agreeing to participate. Nor was he doing it just to further his own reputat
ion. A family secret explained the reason for his agreeing to go on the expedition and it was one his family had closely guarded down the generations.
Kale had a blood link with New Hope Island. He was related, on his mother’s side, to three members of Seamus Ballantyne’s vanished community. They had not been Kales but Morgans – sharing his mother’s maiden name. He had been brought up on the story of the vanishing and the opportunity to try to solve the mystery was one he could not in all conscience resist.
He knew no more about the vanishing than anyone else did. But he knew quite a lot more than most people about the nature of the community and the character of its charismatic leader. He knew something of the faith they had originated and their religious rituals. He knew what the community had been intending to achieve in its isolation. He knew about the polygamous way in which the community had lived and the customs and practices they had originated.
All of this knowledge was secret. Everything would be revealed only when his own skills had been used to crack the mystery of where the people of New Hope Island had gone. He didn’t want the plaudits for solving the New Hope enigma, so much as he sought closure for his family over their lost loved ones.
This was why, to his own mind, the interview he had given Lucy Church had lain so lifeless on the page when it was written up and printed. He’d come out with some garbage he didn’t believe about an improvised storm-weather shelter subsiding and suffocating them all. He’d played lip-service to Jane Chambers’ epidemic theory. He’d been diplomatic about Cooper’s belief that they had been plucked from earth by inquisitive aliens.
He’d kept quiet about what he really thought because discussing it would have told someone as sharp as Lucy Church was that he knew an awful lot about the New Hope community that simply wasn’t in the public domain.
Much as he admired Cooper as a media role model, Kale thought the man’s New Hope speculations a total crock of shit. He was so unconvinced by the possibility of alien contact, he sometimes watched Cooper wondering whether the man’s whole career was not some elaborate double bluff. It was plausible. It was convincing and it was all very stylishly argued. But essentially it was ludicrous, wasn’t it?
