Part 26 (1/2)

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 s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 s.h.i.+p 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.