by F. G. Cottam
I do not take issue with this rationale. I keep my own counsel. I wish to speak once more with the sorcerer before death deprives me forever of his secrets. I could pick holes all day in the captain’s argument.I could grow bored listing its contradictions. I will say nothing, though, because I want to know more about the man from the dark interior of the continent forbidden us by its natives. I hope to have my curiosity at least partially satisfied.
August 18th 1794
‘Does life end with death?’ I asked him.
‘That is not a question I can answer. We have very different ideas about what constitutes a death, Doctor Horan.’
‘Where did you learn our language?’
‘Mostly I learned it from a priest.’
‘I did not know our priests were allowed beyond your country’s borders.’
‘He was a priest intent on sainthood, I think. He certainly achieved martyrdom.’
His joke provoked in him a rasping chuckle that became a short coughing fit. His fetid breath filled the cramped space we occupied, he in his chains, me hunched beside him, his brothers in bondage enduring the hypnotic sleep he still seemed able to inflict on them at will. The stink of his rotting flesh was fearful. Flies were soporific around him. They had no cause for urgency around their supine human meal.
‘You are a man of considerable intellect, I think. Yet you persist in this stubborn belief in magic. It is a contradiction.’
‘Your captain delivered me into bondage. He stole from me. He has maimed and murdered me. Yet if I could I would lift the curses I have placed on him. But I cannot. I have neither the time nor the strength. His daughter will perish a child and she will return to him a demon and the being that hungers in the darkness is born now and will seek out and find him eventually.’
‘You are convinced,’ I said.
‘I know, Doctor Horan. I have recited the spells. I have incanted the rituals.’
His voice was a whisper. He was weak and seemed very close now to the conclusion of his life.
‘What is this being that hungers in darkness?’
‘It is a feeling given form. It is spite made flesh. It will seek out your captain and find and devour him.’
‘Can it be stopped?’
‘Not by me. Not now. I am too weak.’
‘You believe in what you are saying. You are convinced of it.’
‘As will you be, Doctor, should you remain in your captain’s service.’
There was no point in arguing against his malevolent faith. It was obdurately held and his life was ebbing away. I asked him about the country in which he had lived before his capture. I asked him about its customs and values and laws. He answered patiently and in detail and I think that doing so diverted him from his physical suffering for the hour we spent together there. Then he told me something he said it might be vital for me to know. He asked did I have pen and paper and I produced paper and a pencil stub and he made me write this item of information down.
He died a short time later. I was only certain that he had expired when his spell cast on them weakened with his passing and his shackled neighbours began to stir and waken around him with confused shivers and groans.
I went to fetch Parr then, to send him for the key that would release my dead acquaintance from his chains. I would sacrifice a bed-sheet as a winding shroud, I decided, so that he would not suffer the humiliation of going naked into the sea. He had suffered more indignities than a noble man should endure in his time on earth.
Thus did the strangest association of my own short life, conclude. In doing so it left me with a strong and willing conviction. I would never serve again aboard a vessel plying that desperate trade. I would quit the company’s service as soon as we reached Liverpool. I would take no share of the bounty either. I would not have the blood of Shaddeh on my conscience or my hands.
They reached the cottage a little later than Alice had suggested to Lassiter they would. Jane thought this was partially because of the weather. The effect it had on the coastal stretches of the island was quite startling. The sea was transformed into an emerald tumble of whitecaps and the shingle was a glittering, multi-coloured display of stone. Kelp gleamed wetly at the tide line and the horizon was vast. It was beautiful, magical seeming rather than downcast and threatening as the settlement had been the previous grey and poisonous seeming afternoon.
Their lateness in arriving was also a consequence of how well the three of them got on. Lucy treated them on the route to a sort of stream of consciousness portrait of the men on the expedition. Alice and Jane found themselves frequently having to stop to wipe tears of mirth from their eyes.
This was partially hysteria, Jane knew. They had been collectively unnerved at the settlement. They’d been alarmed and upset afterwards by the disappearance of Carrick. They remained concerned about him, none of them more so than Lucy, who was his colleague. And they were not exactly looking forward to the psychic experience to come at the crofter’s cottage.
But they were only human, when all said and done. And Lucy’s verbal portraits were mercilessly funny. It was therapeutic. Perhaps it was not therapeutic in quite the manner he’d meant when the handsome Sergeant Paul Napier had cautioned them to discipline themselves the previous night. It would do, however, in the circumstances. And Napier was Lucy’s business, if Jane was any judge at all of the rules of attraction.
She liked Napier and she liked Patrick Lassiter. She thought Alice and the ex-policeman very well suited. They were stronger as a couple than they were as individuals. Lassiter was intelligent and capable and suggested a selfless sort of strength and courage would come to the fore in his character and behaviour in a crisis. But she thought that without Alice in his life, he would probably revert to the man who had been forced to resign from his job. It took her to make him dependable. He lacked the self-regard to want to do it on his own.
She hadn’t bought Cooper’s public apology. That hadn’t been made because he had insulted her. He was only sorry he had allowed the mask to slip. His apology had been prompted only by the constant, craven requirement to be liked by other people that determined his public persona.
Kale was Kale; all pectoral muscles and telegenic smile and pony tail. But Jane was genuinely puzzled by the demeanour of the priest. Lucy had made him out in the Chronicle to be a belligerent champion of his faith. On the island, so far, he’d seemed subdued; as though he’d come there for a fight for which he no longer had the stomach.
The cottage looked almost picturesque in the sunshine, against the shimmering backdrop of the sea. They had all three the previous evening heard Napier talk about his experiences there. But its whitewashed walls looked sturdily normal and surprisingly few of its roof slates were missing.
It didn’t seem sinister in the ominous way the buildings in the empty settlement did. It looked like it could be spruced up and made habitable again in no time. Give it some chintzy curtains and a brightly painted new door and it would appear quite cosy, Jane thought. Then she remembered the story of David Shanks, the tough recluse obliged to flee the home he’d built, so fearful he never returned to it.
They went in.
Its interior was not the wholesome refuge suggested by seeing the cottage from the outside. Its stone flagged floor was stark and the windows allowed in less light than Jane thought plausible given how bright a day it was. It was chilly in there too. The hearth was cold with neglect and the two surviving armchairs sagged bleakly angled towards the centre of the single room in which they stood.
She looked at Alice, who looked pale. Alice returned the look and then said to both of them, ‘I’ve always thought of this so-called gift of mine as an unwelcome intrusion into my life. I came here because I thought it might find some useful application in solving the mystery. If murder was committed here, I’d like closure for the victims. But I can’t dictate what happens when I see things. If it’s upsetting for you, I’m sorry. I’m sincerely grateful to you two for coming.’
Alice smiled. She was so pale that her skin seemed almost translucent in the feeble cottage light. Jane thought her incredibly brave. She could feel her own heart thumping in her chest. The goose-bumps were crawling across her skin the way they had that day at the school when she had been told about Edie and the folk song. That seemed a hundred years ago and this was infinitely worse.
‘I’m going to sit in Shanks’ chair,’ Alice said.
Lucy said, ‘There are two chairs.’
‘Only one of them is a rocking chair,’ Alice said. ‘That was the one he favoured.’
There was no point asking her how she knew this. She saw things. It was obvious to Jane from the certainty in her voice that the cottage was already painting pictures from its past on the psychic’s mind. It occurred to her that Alice Lang did not own her gift. When it came, it possessed her.
Alice walked across the room and sat in the chair. She placed her hands palms down on the arm rests, in patches where the varnish had worn away, as the original occupant of the cottage must have done. She closed her eyes and rocked deliberately and slowly back and forth. Her mouth was set and there was a single vertical furrow of concentration creasing her brow. She doesn’t do Botox, Jane thought, giddily. Good for her. Then again, she doesn’t have a TV career to try to sustain.
Her breathing seemed to deepen and regulate to something approaching the way people breathe when asleep. Her eyes opened abruptly. The lids snapped back and her gaze focussed firmly on nothing at all. Alice Lang had pale blue eyes but by some trick of light and colouration in the cottage, to Jane they now appeared a flinty shade of gray. Her whole face looked different. The angles were sharper and the mouth stretched into a hard sneer, the previously full lips suddenly thin and bloodless. The hands gripping the arm rests of the chair were gnarled, tipped with tortoiseshell nails, the index and second finger of the right hand burnished to a dark brown by nicotine.
Lucy visibly jumped beside her when the psychic spoke and Jane thought she might scream. The voice did not belong to Alice. It was deep and male and marked by a clipped enunciation far more common in the first half of the previous century.
‘Get off the island,’ it said. ‘You’ve very little time. Ballantyne’s gal is abroad. You wouldn’t wish to encounter that little bitch.’
‘What happened to Blake?’ Lucy said. ‘Where’s Carrick?’
‘You have no time to tarry asking questions, dear.’
‘Where are they?’
‘Consumed,’ Shanks said. ‘Like the queer.’
Jane said, ‘By Ballantyne’s girl?’
Laughter greeted the question. A bark of mirth from the officer’s mess in about 1917, Jane thought, wondering with growing dread would Alice ever make it back to them. There was an aroma in the cottage now; a cocktail of smells. It was a mingling of brilliantine and paraffin and wet wool and coal soot. There was too a hint of harsh tobacco. She wondered whether they any longer occupied the present in that place.
‘You know nothing, do you?’ Shanks said. ‘You women have come here knowing absolutely nothing. There is bad magic here, powerful Ju Ju. You should have stayed away.’
Lucy said, ‘Did you bring it here?’
‘Don’t be impertinent. And don’t be bloody stupid. There is a monster here. It grows all the time in strength. It cannot be stopped or appeased. Take it from one who tried and failed to stop it. Escape while you still have the chance.’
Lucy said, ‘Why have we not seen it?’
Shanks chuckled, drily. ‘You’ll see it, if you stay. Mark my words, young lady. When that moment comes, I fancy it will be the last thing you do see.’
‘You survived it.’
He chuckled again. ‘After a fashion,’ he said.
‘How did you manage it?’
‘You ask a lot of questions. All of them are immaterial. You are wasting time you do not have to spend on what is not relevant to the peril you face. Have you no inkling of how blighted this place is? Have you no sense of dread here? Are you so bloody stupid?’
‘What kind of monster?’ Jane said. ‘Are you talking metaphorically?’
Shanks sighed and the sound was the soughing of wind through a stiff, autumnal wood and Jane was aware that they were listening to the voice of a man long dead, hauled back into being only to warn them of the mortal danger they were in. She felt embarrassed at the question she had just asked of him. She swallowed, emptily, with the shock of what was being said to them. Her hands clenched whitely into fists. The monster of which he spoke to them was real, wasn’t it?
‘It is hell’s work,’ Shanks said, wearily. ‘It is an abomination. It is alert and cunning and hungry. Leave now, please, while there remains what little opportunity you have.’
His last sentence diminished in volume, trailing off as though Shanks was escaping himself. Alice’s eyes closed and her features regained themselves. Jane and Lucy watched while she slumbered for a few minutes and the sounds of the exterior world returned to where they were.
They became aware of the crash of surf and the shrieking of gulls in the sky above. The short-wave Lassiter had insisted they bring squawked once, uselessly in Lucy’s hand. They let Alice rest for a while, until the wait became intolerable to their fraught nerves and then they shook her awake and half-carried her out into the glaring light of the day. Jane looked back at the cottage from the beach already believing what she knew had just taken place impossible.
‘What happened?’
‘You turned into him,’ Lucy said, ‘into Shanks, like a medium. He spoke through you.’ She was struggling with shaking fingers to light a cigarette.
‘That’s never happened before,’ Alice said. ‘I’m not a medium. I just see things from the past.’
‘Maybe Shanks didn’t want you to see those things,’ Jane said. ‘They might have been unbearable to watch.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He warned there’s a monster on the island,’ Lucy said. ‘It killed Blake and James Carrick.’ She had her Zippo in her hand. She tried to ignite it and it squirted out of her grip onto the ground. ‘Fuck.’
‘And Jesse Kale,’ Jane said. ‘Shanks didn’t mention him by name, but it was Kale I think he was talking about.’
‘I saw Kale only at breakfast,’ Alice said. ‘We all did, talking to Patrick Lassiter.’
‘We need to get back to the compound,’ Jane said. ‘Shanks didn’t come back just now to amuse himself. We’re none of us safe here.’
August 30th 1794
Our captain has asked of me a favour. In doing so, he has explained to my why he allowed my request to talk to the dying sorcerer one final time. He wishes me to remain silent on the subject of the voyage when I speak to my cousin Rebecca on our return to Liverpool. He knows of course that we are close. He says that the specifics of our brutal passage are not fitting for the ears of a well-born lady.
He knows her well. She embodies his own theory that it is curiosity above all that causes intelligent people to become knowledgeable. She reads the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. More accurate to say she devours it. She has advanced ideas. And she is always intrigued to learn about experiences beyond those she has enjoyed for herself. She will ask me about the voyage. That much is certain. But I will not tell her about her husband’s foul crime. I would not have done so anyway.
He summoned me to dinner at his table in his cabin last night. And it was a summons for I would not have acquiesced to a mere invitation. Our relationship has cooled to a degree that would prevent it from ever regaining the warmth it once had. He begged for my discretion in the matter of the sorcerer’s death. And then when I had sworn to that, he confided in me an ambition beyond his professional obligations.
He and Rebecca are to try for a child. My cousin is almost 25 and therefore rather mature to be giving serious consideration to this course. The bearing and birth of a child are difficult once a woman is past the age of about 2
0. The process often gives rise to medical complications during the pregnancy and older mothers seldom produce sufficient milk. Yet I feel they will be successful. The Albacheian’s revenge cannot occur unless they are. They will have a child together, Ballantyne and Rebecca and I would wager all I own that the child will be a girl.
When I did not react in the obvious manner and raise a toast to their success in this ambition to further their family, Ballantyne did it himself, filling my glass from a fresh bottle in order to do so, full of apparent good cheer and optimism. Yet there was a hollow ring to his words in announcing the toast. He was a little like a poor actor unconvincing in a heroic role.
I felt sorry for him, then. My pity was truly roused. He is undeserving of it. But it was evoked nevertheless.
I find myself increasingly convinced that the Albacheian sorcerer possessed precisely the powers he claimed he did. I believe he cast the spells and I believe what he prophesied will come to pass. I believe it because he repented of his actions at the end of his life and then gave me the ritual that will undo the worst of what his magic will inflict. He did this in sorrow and fear and remorse on the reeking planks of what we both knew was his deathbed. He was beyond empty posturing. I saw the terror in his eyes at the thought of the train he has set in motion.
Before I left the captain’s table, I reminded him of what Parr had overheard eavesdropping in the hold and subsequently spoken to him of. I reminded him of the threat made of the being that hungers in the darkness. A denser darkness than the night, I reminded him; more solid than the air and far bigger than a man.
He laughed it off, as I knew he would, but the humour did not reach his eyes.
‘Should events in your future life ever cause you to recall those words, Captain, contact me,’ I told him. ‘I might be able to help you and by God, if I am able to I will.’
He just nodded. He did not speak, my promise signalling the conclusion of the last proper conversation I ever hope to have to have with the man. But he knows, in his heart. The bluster has quite gone from him. There is a word for men with the demeanour Captain Seamus Ballantyne now has and that word, is haunted.
