The Colony

by F. G. Cottam

  He’d managed to work out the title of the book from the letters displayed on the cover at the angle at which she held it. Her fingers concealed some of the title, but he liked anagrams and had cracked the visible pattern of letters the way you crack a code. The book was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

  He stood and stretched out, aware of the size of his growing paunch, probably more aware of it than usual, he thought, surrounded as he was by alpha-males in quite sickeningly athletic shape.

  The security guys, led by the traumatised war hero whose name he could not now remember, were probably fit because it was in their job description. Given television’s twin obsession with youth and good looks, it was probably in Kale and Cooper’s job descriptions too.

  But the ex-copper, Lassiter, had opted to explore the island by jogging around its perimeter as soon as they’d finished their tour of the compound. He was sinewy and hard looking. And even the priest, though he smoked too much, carried no flab on that huge frame under the black suit he wore. He looked like an old-fashioned heavy, but heavy in the right places, like one of Al Capone’s bodyguards in a black and white archive shot.

  Carrick had his kit with him. He’d packed with gloomy resignation but also with the best of intentions. His running shoes and shorts were now on the bottom shelf of the steel locker in the corner of his room.

  Wisest, though, he thought, to take Davis up on his offer of orientation before going for a run. Davis had cautioned them about the boggy ground at the centre of the island. He had warned that blanket fogs descended with total suddenness and very swiftly. Better to know the ground rather than to blunder through it blind and winded during a run. Runs were meant to be beneficial. They weren’t meant to kill or cripple you or strand you neck deep in a quagmire.

  He decided he would instead go and look at the comms room hardware. He was quite adept with technology. He was an early adapter who liked gizmos and understood most gadgetry intuitively.

  It was why he had been secretly amused at the random picture Lily had taken with her new digital camera without knowing she was even taking it. He thought it genuinely endearing, his wife’s technological ineptitude. The best relationships were built on contrasts. He was soft and paunchy. His wife had a svelte figure honed daily during merciless workouts at her health club.

  He saw none of his fellow expedition members on the short route from the accommodation block to the communication centre. He saw none of the security personnel either. He knew that they guarded the perimeter of the camp rather than its individual buildings. Theft and vandalism weren’t their problem, journalists from rival media organisations were. He assumed they spent most of their shifts with binoculars vigilantly trained on the eastern approaches to the island, from which direction interlopers would naturally attempt to arrive.

  He assumed some or all of their experts were by now at the settlement. That was the location most likely to offer any really compelling evidence of what had happened to the New Hope community. They wouldn’t uncover anything today. This was going to be a marathon rather than a sprint and anyway if they were there, he knew that Lucy would be with them. She’d bonded with Jane. Alice clearly liked and trusted her. And if he was any judge, Karl Cooper had her in his sights as his next potential conquest.

  Lucy would witness any immediate breakthrough, in the unlikely event that one came. And they would need to come back to the comms centre anyway to relay anything significant to the outside world, so his going there now did not constitute complacency or negligence. He would have a look at the radio equipment brought to New Hope and rigged up at McIntyre’s expense. He would familiarise himself with the hardware and he would master it.

  He might use it to seek a reaction from Marsden or McIntyre himself as to the merits of the piece he had just filed. He could probably get through on the long-wave transmitter and get the other end to patch him through to Marsden’s office. That would display initiative and demonstrate how quickly and well he was adapting to hostile circumstances in the field. It would prove he could thrive beyond what they probably thought of as his comfort zone of Ivy restaurant table and breakfast telly sofa.

  It was dark in the communications room. Everything bar the long-range transmitter was switched off. That was on, emitting a greenish glow from the display that showed the frequency wavelength and signal strength. The volume pot had been turned right down and the only noise the set generated was a hum from the interior circuit boards or perhaps the fan keeping its internal workings cool.

  What was odd was that the wavelength kept changing. Different sets of numbers kept appearing on the display. They rolled around as if at random, almost whimsically, Carrick thought. The signal strength vacillated wildly. He knew enough about the mechanics of analogue radio engineering to know that the set was not behaving conventionally. He wondered whether some rogue magnetic field or freak incidence of atmospheric pressure might be responsible.

  Crank up the volume. That was the first step to getting through to London. He had to transmit on a stable frequency free of static or vacillation if he wanted to enable a cogent verbal dialogue with expedition HQ in London.

  He twisted the volume pot a quarter turn and a childlike moan ululated out from the single speaker. It shocked him so much that he jumped. His hand recoiled. It sounded human and disconsolate, pain and abandonment given a voice that was almost unbearable to hear.

  The hairs rose on the back of Carrick’s arms and he shivered and the noise from the speaker continued to amplify. There was a forlorn emptiness to the sound, as though it echoed out of some dark abyss of the soul. It was wretched and distressing. How was it getting louder? As he thought about covering his ears with his hands to escape it, it abruptly stopped.

  In the sudden, vacant silence, he heard someone behind him. He was aware of a presence in the gloomy confines of the room, to his rear. He thought that perhaps the person was seated in a canvas chair, one of two of them that flanked the door through which he had entered. He could feel the scrutiny, unmistakeable, of being observed. It made the skin of his back and shoulders crawl and he could make no sense of it because he had shut the door firmly on coming in and it had closed with an audible click and he had not heard it open again.

  ‘No hope.’

  The two words sighed out of the speaker. It was the same voice as before but gleeful, now, rather than wretched sounding. Static didn’t form words, did it? Radio interference did not articulate thoughts. A chill ran through Carrick, who reached for the set’s volume pot again and then, before his fingers reached it, turned because the sensation of sharing the room had become so strong he could no longer ignore it.

  She was seated in one of the chairs flanking the door, as he’d thought someone was, watching him. Her expression was not quite neutral. Her paperback book was nowhere to be seen. Her clothing looked a bit threadbare, her buttoned coat tawdrier in life than in the photograph his wife indignantly denied having ever taken. Her hair didn’t quite have its photographic lustre. It looked dull and unwashed and there was no light in her eyes at all.

  She was tall, when she stood. His last cogent thought was that if nothing else, he’d been right about that.

  Cooper thought the emotion not dissimilar to that created by seeing Stonehenge up close for the first time. You became so familiar with a place through photographs, that you thought you knew it intimately. But real intimacy requires physical proximity and the atmosphere of the New Hope settlement was totally different in reality from that suggested by the pictures of it he had studied over the years.

  The pictures naturally took the dwellings as their subject. So they completely failed to convey the isolation in which the settlement had existed. The one-room settlers’ homes seemed tiny and pitiful in the vastness of the landscape; under the dizzying sky and with the sea restlessly stretching away at the margins of the land beneath their feet.

  Most of the encircling wall was still intact. It was a dry stone construction and Cooper thought the most i
mpressive feat of building the community had achieved. It was about eight feet high and at least two feet thick. The wooden gate had gone; perhaps rotted away, perhaps salvaged or taken away to be chopped up and burned as fuel through vicious winters by the crofter David Shanks. But the posts were still there and they were strong and substantial, chiselled square and then dug deep in the earth to render the gateway secure.

  The roofs of the dwellings had been constructed from timber and straw and so were long gone. The slate roof of the distillery remained. The tannery and the weaving shed had been made of wood and were therefore in poor repair. Their little church had lost its spire and its timber door to time and the salt wind, though the iron hinges that had bound the wood still remained.

  Cooper shook his head. Authorities on comparative religion had commented often over the years as to the most singular feature of the church, which was that it had been built entirely windowless. Some said this was a symbolic metaphor for the blind faith onto which the New Hope community had insisted its members hold. Cooper did not have an opinion about that. But he thought that collective worship inside somewhere so dark must have been a sinister experience, particularly in severe weather with the wind howling through the eves and the rain drumming percussively above.

  Perhaps they had worshipped by candlelight. Draughts would have caught the feeble flames and made them flicker in the gloom as they listened to their spiritual leader, the gaunt tallow-lit silhouette before them filling them with foreboding as he recited sermons fuelled by fire and brimstone in a voice made strong by years of barking maritime commands to scurrying tars aboard his ship.

  He looked at Kale and the ex-cop, Lassiter and the shapely psychic and the priest, who was looking at the church with a frown of what seemed to be puzzled dismay. He risked a glance at Jane Chambers, who was wearing an expression he couldn’t read. Lucy Church smoked. He could see them all because no one had ventured off on their own. It was too unnerving, at first. The instinct, and he felt it strongly himself, was to stay in a protective huddle.

  This was not a happy place. It didn’t take Alice Lang’s alleged gift of second sight to discern that. It was bleak and ruined and this high up the wind withered and sang through the abandoned buildings shrilly. It felt remote and lonely and somehow hopeless. He saw the security guy, Napier and walked across to him assuming that this was more familiar ground to him than for any of the rest of them, just because it was so surprisingly strange in life.

  ‘Come here often?’ he said, feeling the urge on this forbidding spot to attempt to lighten the tone. He spoke quietly, not wanting the rest of them to overhear him.

  ‘Never, until now,’ Napier said. ‘We were under strict instructions not to contaminate the site. This is the first time I’ve been up here.’

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  Napier shrugged. ‘You’re the expert, Mr Cooper. You’d have more idea than I would. It’s why you’re here, after all.’

  ‘Karl, please. And I’m asking you. I watched you, watching us, when we disembarked. You strike me as a man who doesn’t miss much. I already know what Jane and Kale and Degrelle think.’

  ‘And Ms Lang?’

  Cooper raised his eyes skywards and then levelled them again and smiled. ‘I’m not a great believer in psychic phenomena. Nothing has ever gone bump in my night. I’ll take your first impressions over hers, Sergeant Napier.’

  Napier exhaled a slow breath. He nodded towards the cluster of dwellings. ‘They were prepared to live in hovels,’ he said. ‘But they lavished all that stone and toil on building an eight foot wall. That’s not a boundary, Karl, it’s a fortification. I don’t know what happened to the New Hope community and I wouldn’t even want to try to guess, because I don’t feel I’m remotely qualified to do so. But they were scared of something, I’ll tell you that. I think it’s safe to say that something was going bump in their night. They were scared of that something and they were trying to keep it out.’

  He waited for Emma Foot to peddle off before climbing over the gate. The gate was iron and about twelve feet high and it looked a tricky climb and he knew he would be painfully conspicuous to any passer-by while engaged in the act of scaling it. But there were no passers-by. It was a derelict site and remote-seeming despite its relative proximity to the town of Barnsley. It was accessed by road, but that was a by-road he thought owed its continuing existence to tradition, rather than need. No one came there and it did not look like anyone had for years.

  Regardless of all this, getting over the gate looked an easier proposition than getting over the fence. That was only half the height of the gate, but offered little in the way of obvious hand and foot holds and was topped by a coil of rusted barbed wire. Fortescue could not remember whether he was due a tetanus booster jab. He was absolutely sure, though, that he didn’t want to find out whether he was or he wasn’t the hard way.

  He was not, in truth, a very physical person. He could negotiate kerbs and other natural hazards when he walked around and he had passed his driving test at the second attempt but he would have been the first to admit that he was not action hero material. The gate was a formidable obstacle for him and beyond that, he could see the blocked-up south shaft, under a gaunt and frankly daunting tower of cold-riveted cast iron that had once housed a pulley.

  If the gate was formidable, the shaft itself was terrifying. They had sunk it to a depth of only fifteen metres, but there was an iron plate welded over the entrance he would have to get through and old industrial sites were not playgrounds. They were full of hazards that were heavy and jagged and filthy and sharp.

  The thing was that he really felt he had no choice. He was honour bound to help Edith Chambers. He had made her a promise and did not make them lightly or ever knowingly break one.

  Then there was his curiosity. A fascination with the maritime past had made him a nautical historian. He thought he might be on the brink of discovering an important document that would shed light on a murky trade. It wasn’t just a document, it was a source. It was a first-hand account that would likely prove as genuinely compelling as any memoir he had ever read.

  Finally, there was fate. He really did believe he was fulfilling a duty made inevitably on the memorable day he tried to inventory the contents of Seamus Ballantyne’s sea chest. If that moment had not occurred, he would never have come to believe in ghosts. But it had and he did. And he trusted that the ghost indirectly responsible for luring him to this place, had done so for a reason both important and urgent.

  He was resigned to getting dirty. He thought that he might emerge from this experience bruised and grazed and would quite likely sustain the odd cut. Philip Fortecue tried not to think about the possibility of becoming trapped. The risk was there. Obviously it was. He was venturing underground and had told no one where he intended to go or what he intended to do. But there was no point dwelling on that, was there?

  It took him forever, in his own mind, to clamber over the gate. He hadn’t climbed since childhood and had not done all that much of it then. His arms seemed much less strong now and his body seemed to weigh much more so that he could not haul himself up with his hands as he had as a kid. He had to find secure purchase for his feet to ascend. It was like climbing a ladder with no rungs and it was hard.

  He got stuck at the top. One of his belt loops snagged on the tip of one of the gate’s vertical bars and it took him ages to free himself; anxious moments in which he thought a police car might hove into view and a couple of patrolling officers park up and observe his ridiculous plight with amused expressions through their windscreen. But the patrol car didn’t come and eventually he shrugged himself loose and over, scrambling and then falling the last few feet onto a carpet of coal dust still gleaming on the ground, crystalline after the morning’s rain.

  There was a gap where the iron hatch met the lip of the shaft. Soil erosion or subsidence had created it. He looked through it and saw beneath him iron rungs hammered into the shaft wall descendin
g into blackness and remembered that he didn’t have a torch or a rope or a whistle to signal alarm or anything else that even a schoolboy would have equipped himself with for a mission as hazardous as this.

  His eyes would adjust, he thought, squirming through the gap feet-first, holding the cold and slippery edge of the hatch and committing the weight of his legs to one of the rungs. His eyes would adjust, because they would have to. He’d be blind down there otherwise and would find nothing.

  Good sense or his instinct for self-preservation caused him to pause when he reached the bottom of the shaft. Before him would be what they called the gallery. And beyond that, was the tunnel which would dead-end at the point where the tunnel’s access to the seam had become exhausted. Gallery was a grand sounding name, but it was a space not tall enough for a man to stand upright in. And the tunnel would be very narrow. Men had hacked at the seam on their backs, prone rather than upright.

  There was a reason for this. The smaller the dimensions of the tunnel, the less the risk of collapse, ran the theory. So at least Emma Foot had told him in his crash-course on early 19th century mining practice on the way to the Elsinore Pit.

  He waited for his eyes to adjust. It was late afternoon. There was still plenty of light in the sky above the shaft. He just had to wait to become aware of the bit of it that penetrated this far through the gap he had squeezed through above him.

  There was no water down there. At least, there was none around where he stood. He couldn’t hear it dripping. There were no puddles. This was both good and bad. A dry atmosphere was encouraging for the survival of a document written on paper or parchment. But drainage meant sink holes or subsidence to enable any rain water penetrating the shaft to escape, which was very bad if he happened to blunder somewhere where there was no longer solid ground beneath his feet.