After the tour Blake let me off the leash for an hour to get some photographs in – I was allowed to go anywhere, as long as I didn’t stray further up the slope towards the cliffs. He sent the teenage girl along as a chaperone. She carried the bag when I was shooting, held the reflector for me, and didn’t say much until we were out of sight of the cottages. I was busy changing a lens when she crept up next to me and said, almost in my ear, ‘They’re on the other side of the island.’
I stopped and looked at her. Her face was very pale. Her eyes were watery and cold blue, like a swimming-pool.
‘The pigs. You wanted to know about the pigs. And I was just saying, they’re over there.’ She rolled her eyes in the direction of the cliff face, nodding up there, as if she’d have liked to point but thought she might get caught doing it. ‘Over there. All the way across the other side. But no one’s going to, like, just let you go over there or anything.’
I lowered the camera. ‘Why? What’s over there?’
‘I can’t tell you that. We’re not supposed to talk to you about it. Blake’s going to tell you.’
I studied her. She had lank blonde hair pushed behind her ears and was so pale and thin it was pitiful, with spidery fingers and her feet like a skeleton’s, blistered and sore, crammed into pink jelly sandals. ‘And who are you?’
She grinned and wiped her hand on her shorts and held it out to me. ‘I’m Sovereign. Yeah, I know, Sovereign. It’s what my parents called me. Because I was, like, so valuable to the community when I arrived. Apparently.’
‘You were born here?’
‘Yeah, and this place is so not what I’m about. The day I turn eighteen I’m total history.’ She made her hand into a plane and glided it out into the air, off towards the mainland. ‘Bye-bye, toot toot, train – you won’t see me for dust. Only four months now.’
‘Who are your parents?’
‘The Garricks. You met them. The ones with the sticks up their butts?’
‘Yes. I met them.’
‘I know what you’re thinking – like, geriatric ward, yeah?’ She grinned, showing a missing canine in her left jaw. No medical treatment, my mind flashed. ‘They waited until they were thirty-eight before they had me, totally ancient. How gross is that? But that’s how it is round here. Bunch of retards.’ She stopped smiling and took a few moments to look at me, jiggling her legs a bit, chewing her thumbnail. ‘You know, you don’t look anything like a journalist.’ She took her thumb out of her mouth. ‘Anyone ever tell you that? I watch a lot of TV and I know what a journalist should look like and the first thing I thought when I saw you was, uh, like no way, he rully doesn’t look like a journalist.’
I glanced down at my battered shorts, my big stained hands and sandals all dirty and fucked from walking everywhere. I had to smile. She was right – in spite of the psychology degree, the cushy detached house and the job, somehow I never had got the Merseyside docker out of my bones. I only did it once over the summer, helping my old man out, but it was in my family and stuck inside me like DNA. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I look like a docker.’
‘Yeah, you do. You look like a docker.’
I snapped on the lens cap and studied her carefully. ‘Sovereign,’ I said, ‘what goes on here? What happens in the church? What rituals was it made for?’
She laughed. ‘I know what you’re thinking. I know about the video. I told you: we see TV.’
‘Then what is it? The thing on the beach. Who is it?’
‘That depends on who you ask. One person says one thing, someone else says something else.’
‘What about you? What do you say?’
‘I say we’re not Satanists. Nothing happens in the church except the usual shit. Prayer meetings, tambourines, Mum and Dad making total muppets of themselves. It’s, like, so boring it’s not true. And cold. Mum’s stopped making me go, except on Sundays.’
‘What about the locks on the doors? Those are some serious locks. Makes it look like they want to stop someone getting out.’
Sovereign blinked, confused. Then her expression cleared and she gave a short laugh. ‘Duh, Joe!’ She tapped her temple, as if to say, ‘How stupid are you?’ ‘Not out! In. They’re not trying to stop anyone getting out. They’re trying to stop something getting in.’
‘You’re not going to answer any of the questions I want answered. You don’t want to talk about your rituals or the rumours going round. Or about why everyone is so antsy about whatever’s at the top of that cliff. Instead you’re giving me a pretty good press release on how well the PHM is taking care of Cuagach Eilean.’ I leaned across the table and helped myself to another shot of Blake’s gin. It was late – nearly midnight – and we’d come back to his cottage after the evening meal in the refectory. We sat at the kitchen table near the window that faced the cliff. It was dark outside, and all we could see in the glass were our reflections – our faces lit from underneath by the small table lamp. Sovereign had given me clues: I needed Blake to give me the truth.
‘And you know what?’ I said, pushing back the bottle and settling in my chair, nursing the drink. ‘It crosses my mind that this has only happened to me once before. Almost ten years ago. The Eigg revolution.’
Blake rested his head sideways on his thumb, a cigar burning between two outstretched fingers, and looked at me levelly. ‘Yeah. And?’
‘I was one of the journalists who broke the story. Got them the publicity they needed.’
Blake nodded silently, waiting for me to continue. I smiled at him. ‘Malachi Dove’s money bought this island, right? You moved here with him, but he’s not here now – and no one wants to talk about him. So, I’m going to make a little leap of faith here, Blake, and call me forward, but I’m going to suggest you’ve got me out here on false pretences.’ I pointed my finger at him, smiling slyly over the top of it. ‘See, I don’t think I’m going to hear much about Satanism. Or the video. What I think is that Malachi left you all here to go wherever it is he’s gone – and you’re insecure about that. You want to raise the money to buy Cuagach from him. You’re not going to make it from selling those crosses so you’ve got to appeal for donations. You want me to do for Cuagach what I did for Eigg.’
‘You’re a sharp one, Joe.’
‘Yes, Blake.’ I downed the gin, put the glass neatly on the table in front of him and met his eyes. ‘I am.’
There was a long silence. I wanted him to squirm a bit. After a long time he cleared his throat and lowered his eyes, tapping his cigar in the ashtray and shifting uncomfortably in the seat. ‘We’re cold out of luck here, Joe. Things have not been good.’
‘It’s OK.’ I sighed. ‘It’s straightforward. You give me the story I want – that’s the Satanism one – and I’ll attach a sob message to it, get one of the nationals to run it as a feature and before you know it you’ll have the nation crying with you. Is Dove ready to sell?’
‘No. But if we can raise the legal fees and prove he’s insane we can get him into something like the Court of Protection, here or in England. Get a judicial factor appointed, then we’ve got power of attorney and we can buy the island. We won’t cheat him – we’ll give him what he paid for it.’
‘Insane?’ I bent to light a cigarette, screwing up my eyes. ‘On what grounds?’
‘On the grounds he’s practising Satanism on Cuagach Eilean.’
I paused. The lighter faltered and went out. I raised my eyes to Blake. He looked back at me steadily.
‘I said on the grounds that he’s practising Satanism on our—’
‘I heard you.’ I flicked on the lighter again, lit the cigarette and raised my head. ‘He’s still on Cuagach? Is that what you’re telling me? He hasn’t gone back to the States? London?’
Blake pushed back his chair with a loud, scraping noise. ‘You’d better come through, Joe.’ He beckoned me with his cigar. ‘Come through here.’
We went into the corridor at the back of the house.
‘I was one of Malachi’s first disciples,’ he said. ‘Me and Benjamin Garrick and Susan, his wife. This cottage was the first place we built on Cuagach and this was our meeting room. I haven’t had the heart to change it.’
He unlocked a heavy, planked door, switched on the light and let me into a small annexe to the house. It was built in the same stone as the rest of the cottage, with a small mullioned window, but it was cold and unswept – unlived in, the carpet thin and patchy. The walls were decorated with 1970s Malachi Dove tour posters and I walked slowly round the room, studying them: Dove on stage, a spotlight creating a halo behind him, a studio portrait of him, his chin resting on hands, looking into the camera with a frank, intimate expression. Another showed him laid out on his back, eyes closed, hands on his chest, like he was in his coffin. I peered at the picture carefully. He was bloated and old without his glasses. Under the photo were printed the words: ‘When God calls me I will go to His side.’
‘What’s he doing?’ I said. ‘What is this?’
‘He’s praying. This position, on his back, was the only way he could concentrate. Still does, for all I know.’
I squatted down to sort through a stack of framed photos leaning against the wall. More pictures of Malachi Dove, but this time they all seemed to have been taken on the island. One showed him with a young Blake and the Garricks, arms linked and smiling into the camera. Behind them the cottages were all freshly painted. Mrs Garrick was ringleted in a piecrust-collar Laura Ashley dress. Only Malachi seemed wrong. He looked tired and flabby, his eyes distant behind his glasses. He wore a kaftan to disguise his weight gain, and there was something tight and shiny about his face, like maybe he’d had a lift.
‘He looks ill.’
‘He was agitated. He was suing a journalist in London. He was very depressed by it.’
‘A journalist?’ I didn’t look up. Didn’t want him to read my mind. I closed the stack of photos. ‘When was this?’
‘Nineteen eighty-six. But he never followed it up. Events stopped him.’
‘These are the events you’re going to tell me about?’
Blake leaned over and pulled from the stack of photos a gilt-framed one showing Dove with his arm round a woman in a drawstring Greek-style blouse. ‘His wife,’ said Blake, tapping the glass. ‘Asunción. A good Christian girl.’
Oh, Asunción, I thought. Light of my life. So you married her. A reward for all those old ladies’ arses she had to stick her hand up.
‘They prayed for a child. But when it happened Malachi’s faith collapsed.’
I raised my eyebrows. Blake shrugged. ‘Yeah – I know. We didn’t expect it, but Malachi was weaker than any of us thought. When Asunción went into labour you could tell by the way she was breathing there was a problem. It was right here, in this room, it happened.’ He pushed the frame back into the pile and straightened, brushing off his hands. ‘Malachi prayed that night. He prayed hard with the other disciples to find strength. We sat at that kitchen table, where you and I were sitting just now, the three of us talking to him, holding his hands…Holding his hands, but trying, in our own ways, Joe, to hold his heart. Even with God’s love we couldn’t persuade him to keep his vows. After twenty-four hours he put Asunción into the boat and took her to a hospital on the mainland.’
‘Even though that was against what the Psychogenics stood for?’
‘Even though that was against everything we stood for.’ He gazed down at the floor, his arms out a bit at his sides, and then, like he was disappointed not to see Asunción and Malachi’s ghosts marked out on the carpet, he dropped his hands and looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes. ‘Believe me, Joe.’ He touched his heart with his little finger. ‘It didn’t make me happy, what came next.’
‘Why? What came next?’
‘At first we didn’t see him. Not for weeks. When he did come back he was alone – torn apart. The boy was just torn apart. Came in and sat at that table and poured his heart out to me: how badly he felt to have broken his vow, how it had been too late anyway – the Lord had called the tiny baby to His side, stillborn it was, and Asunción was refusing to come back to the island. She didn’t want anything to do with the Positive Living Centre or the PHM, and after what happened maybe you couldn’t blame her.’ He stopped then, his finger tapping his forehead and his eyes lowered, like he was too choked to continue.
‘But he’s still here? In the village?’
Blake shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, in a tight voice. ‘He couldn’t stay in the community, not after that. He was too – too ashamed of his weakness.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But the island was his home, of course.’
‘So he stayed?’
‘He found himself an old miners’ barracks over by the slate mine. Three miles away. On the south tip of Cuagach. The side facing the sea. Sometimes a shop in Bellanoch does supply runs for him, but he doesn’t speak to them or even see them. He’s completely isolated.’ Blake went to the curtain, drawing it back and opening the window. He leaned out, looking up at the cliff face, his breath clouding the air. It was silent and hollow out there, and mist was beginning to come down, shifting across the cold stars above. ‘We’ve carried on his teaching, but we haven’t seen him in the village for twenty years. Twenty years he’s been out there. Twenty years on his own.’
I came to stand next to him, opening the other window and ducking to stick my nose out, staring up to where the cliff rose hard into the night. I tried to picture the island stretching out between here and the south tip – miles of uninhabited land, poking into the sea like a finger. So, Malachi, you live with the pigs, I thought. And do you cut them up too?
‘What’s he getting up to over there, then, Blake?’ I murmured. ‘What did the tourist photograph that day?’
When Blake answered his voice was so low that I had to strain to hear. ‘Something has gone very wrong for Malachi. Things are happening at that end of Cuagach I try not to think about too hard.’
There was a full moon that night, and the air was so crystalline, so salty and cool that, lying in my bed in the cottage next to the firth, I could have been in my tomb. I stayed awake listening to the wind picking up outside, thinking of the trees on the slopes above, leaning and bending in the wind, about all the secret places their movements revealed. Malachi Dove, alive and only three miles away. I kept coming back in my mind to the path I’d been walking up when Blake had stopped me –Where does that go, then, Blake? Where does that path go? When at last I gave up trying to sleep and slid out of bed the display on my mobile phone read 02:47.
I hauled on my filthy old army shorts, grabbed my rucksack, and crept down the stairs. The house was silent. The smell of our drinking session still hung in the kitchen and the two half-empty glasses stood on the table. At the back door there was a heavy torch on the worktop, a Post-it taped above it – Blake reminding himself to check the batteries. I took the torch and stepped out into the starry night, closing the door carefully behind me.
Outside it was cold. The cottages were frosty and shuttered-looking in the moonlight. The only light was an old-fashioned harbour lamp on the jetty, twinkling through the trees, and beyond it, high in the sky above the silver-capped firth, clouds were gathering in a shape like sprawling seaweed, one tendril snaking out to the island, the other angling down above the Craignish Peninsula where the bungalow was, like they were trying to connect the two landmasses. I pictured Lexie, curled up on the bed, her yellow pyjama top bunched up a bit to show her long back, her face pleated against the pillow. Sorry, Lex, my love, I thought, pulling out my mobile, checking it for a signal. Nothing. When we first met it wouldn’t have mattered that I’d left her on her own – she’d have been out with her friends or in bed with a bottle of wine, watching all the shite TV I hated. But everything was different now. The way she talked about my job, these nights away were like me putting fingers into an open wound. Still, I thought, pushing the phone back into my pocket, someone has to do it. I hitched up the rucksack, and was about to set off along the path when a faint sound made me pause.
What the—?
I turned and stared at the dark, ragged shape of the cliff, darker than the sky. The sound had come from that direction. It had been so brief, so momentary and faint, I thought I must’ve dreamed it. You’re hearing things, Oakesy, old mate. But then it came again – clearer this time, sending a neat finger of fear down my back. It was thin and lonely, very, very distant, and I knew instinctively it wasn’t human. Instead – and I got this instant picture of the rotting meat under the sewage pipe – it sounded like a animal squealing. Or howling.
Pigs.
I looped my fingers into the rucksack straps and turned my face to the sky, standing still for a long time and straining to listen. But minutes passed and the sound didn’t come again. The cliff face stood hard and silent, only the occasional toss and buffet of the trees disturbing it. At length, when it felt like I’d waited for ever, I hitched the rucksack up again and, casting occasional glances at the cliff, set off along the path, the torch shining on the ground ahead.
I turned on to the narrow lane that wound up into the woods, the memory of the one lousy family holiday I’d ever had coming back to me – a caravan in Wales – the brilliant treachery of being out at night as a kid, the pancake-grey luminescence of the road. Who’d have thought Tarmac could look so pale in the darkness? About a hundred yards past the maintenance shed the Tarmac gave way to earth and I was into the woods, climbing now. Up and up for a good ten minutes into the dark woods and for ages all I could hear were my footsteps and the thump of my heart. Then, dead sudden, the trees opened, the moon came out, and I was in a clearing.
I stopped. A wire fence stood in front of me, rising up against the stars. Tall. At least nine feet of it. Like something from a zoo. I stared at it for a long time. A zoo or Jurassic Park. In the middle of it, directly in the path, was a tall gate. It had a heavy-duty padlock, and even before I went forward and rattled it I knew it wasn’t going to open. I stood for a few moments, shining my torch to left and right along the fence, to where it stretched uninterrupted into the darkness. Then I pressed the torch into a hole in the wire and shone the beam through it to where the path continued on, identical to the path I stood on, winding away, higher and higher into the trees.
‘OK,’ I muttered, thinking of the maintenance shed I’d passed the previous morning. ‘This, dear Father in heaven, is why you invented wire-cutters.’ ‘Wait!’
I’d found the cutters in the shed and was half-way back to the gate when I heard the voice. I halted in my tracks, heart sinking.
‘I said wait! What do you think you’re doing?’
I turned, shoving the cutters into my pocket. Blake was running up the path behind me, flushed and puffing, an expression of outrage on his face. ‘What in – in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’m having a look round.’
‘No! You do not just “have a look round” on Cuagach. It’s against the rules.’ He caught up to me, and stood, breathing hard and shaking his head. He was wearing a sports jacket over a long purple T-shirt, his naked feet shoved hurriedly into unlaced trainers. ‘You can’t leave the community. Do you understand?’ He switched on a pen torch and shone it into my face, then on to my rucksack, then up the path. ‘Where were you going?’
‘Over there,’ I said amiably. ‘Was just on my way to speak to Dove.’
‘No, no, no, Joe!’ He snatched at my sleeve, holding it between thumb and forefinger to stop me moving. ‘Oh, no. You can’t just go and speak to him. It’s not a good idea. Not a good idea at all.’
I stared at the hand on my sleeve. ‘Well, you know,’ I said slowly, the instinct to thump him twitching briefly in my chest, ‘maybe you’re right – maybe it isn’t a great idea. But I’m going to do it anyway.’ I pulled my arm out of his grip and began to walk away.
‘No!’ he cried, starting to run again. I was going fast but he managed to insert himself on the path in front of me, holding out his arms and trotting backwards, trying to prevent me going any further. ‘Over my dead body.’
I stopped and looked down at his scrawny legs, his weird, squashed skull. He weighed about half what I did. I shook my head, amused. ‘You’re not really saying you want to fight me?’
‘Don’t laugh at me,’ he said savagely. ‘Don’t you dare laugh, boy. If I can’t fight you then the others will. They’d be here in minutes.’
‘Well, that sounds like a deal-breaker. It sounds like you don’t want me to do your publicity after all.’
He paused and bit his lip. We regarded each other in silence, and after a few moments, without speaking, I pushed past him and continued up the path. At first I thought he was going to let me go. Then I heard his footsteps behind, running to catch up. I stopped.
‘OK,’ he said, panting hard. ‘OK. I’ll take you. But this path ends at the gorge, and that’s where we stop.’
‘Yes. It’s impassable, totally impassable – especially with a storm coming.’ Almost on cue the moon went behind a cloud, dropping us into darkness. ‘See?’ he said, switching on the torch and shining it on his own face, so he looked like a Hallowe’en pumpkin. ‘I told you. There’s a storm coming.’
‘What can we see from the gorge?’
He shot his eyes up to the sky to where the tendrils of cloud were splitting like mercury, running away in fragments across the moon. ‘If this moon holds,’ he said, shadows flitting across his face, ‘you’ll see everything. Everything you need to see.’
I continued on to the gate while Blake went back to the cottage for the keys. When he came trotting back he was dressed in jeans and a turtleneck, a pair of binoculars slung round his neck. You could tell he was still pissed off with me. He unlocked the gates without a word and for a while we walked in moody silence, through the gates and up the path, cresting the cliff in the darkness, the only sound our footsteps and the wind stirring the branches around us. Clouds flitted across the moon, sending huge animal-sized shadows scuttling out of the trees, across the path under our feet, and disappearing back into the woods. Blake switched on his torch, and after about ten minutes so did I, occasionally turning the beam and shining it into the trees when the wind shook a branch or snapped a twig.
The further we went, the more anxious Blake got. He walked with his neck very stiff, his eyes scanning the woods at either side, occasionally looking over his shoulder, like he was checking nothing was making its way up the path behind us.
‘Hey,’ I said, when we’d been walking for more than half an hour. My voice sounded very loud. ‘Are you nervous?’
‘No,’ he said, in a whisper, not looking at me, keeping his eyes on the woods. ‘No. Why would I be?’
‘Because of what’s on the video.’
He glanced at me. ‘That video is all a big misunderstanding.’
‘A misunderstanding? I’ve seen it. There’s some weird fucking creature on it, walking through these fucking forests. What kind of misunderstanding is that?’
At first he didn’t answer. We kept walking and I was about to ask him again when he stopped, switched off his torch and looked up at me. ‘Listen,’ he whispered, standing very close. I could smell something bitter on his breath – like his fear was coming out as ketones. ‘Let’s get this straight. It was Malachi on the video.’
He held a finger up to quieten me. ‘Yes. Malachi himself. Doing – I don’t know, but doing something that means nothing to us, but everything to him.’
‘What? In some fucking pantomime-cow costume with a—?’
‘The idea—’ he interrupted, casting glances up and down the path. ‘The idea that you can – can conjure Beelzebub, or Pan or Satan, is garbage. You know that and so do I. It was Malachi in the video.’
‘Except not everyone agrees with you. Do they?’
‘Please,’ he hissed. ‘Keep your voice down.’
‘Why are the Garricks so scared?’ I whispered. ‘Susan’s crapping herself, thinking I’m going to start something, tempt something. Now, Blake, you might think it’s Malachi on the video – but they don’t. They think he’s brought Satan to Cuagach, don’t they?’ I raised the torch briefly and shone it off into the tree-trunks, the beam distorting and making strange shapes and shadows. ‘They think—’
‘Sssssh!’
‘They think there’s something unhuman out there.’
‘It was a big decision inviting you on to the island,’ Blake put a hand on my torch and pulled the beam gently away from the trees. ‘Some people are very superstitious – Benjamin and Susan and some others. They think that the less said about what is happening on Cuagach the better – that to talk about it to anyone outside could be…provocative.’
‘Yeah. I got that bit.’
‘Believe me, Joe.’ He pushed his face close to mine. ‘Believe me, there have been times today when I have questioned ever getting you involved. Now,’ he switched on his torch again and aimed it down the path, ‘let’s get this over with.’
He began walking again, a bit faster now, like he wanted to put distance between himself and the words ‘Beelzebub’, ‘Pan’, ‘Satan’, like they’d hang there in the branches behind us – proof he’d uttered them.
I went after him down the silvery path, and had caught up and was about to speak again when I registered something pale and small sitting in the centre of the path ahead.
‘What the—’ I came to a halt and quickly swung the torch beam on it. It was small and hunched, stood about two feet high and wasn’t moving. It had a shape like a very small human with its back to us. ‘What the fuck, Blake?’ I murmured, approaching carefully. I walked past it, turned and shone the beam into its face. ‘A gargoyle?’
‘Yes,’ he muttered impatiently. ‘They’re supposed to—’
‘I know what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to ward off the…’ I let the sentence trail off and turned to look along the path ahead. It continued for a few yards, then was swallowed by the trees. Somewhere beyond it lay the gorge and Dove’s house.
‘I see,’ I said, turning back to the gargoyle. It had weird glass eyes, like the voodoo dolls in Louisiana. ‘It’s blocking the path. The Garricks put it there. It’s to stop the devil coming along this path, isn’t it?’
‘Leave it,’ Blake whispered. ‘We need to keep going. We’re nearly there.’
He started off again, leaving me standing staring at the gargoyle, picturing Susan or Benjamin coming up here, positioning it to face the south, blocking the path. Christ, I thought, shooting a look into the dark trees, Dove had done a cracking job of convincing someone in the community the devil was real. Good enough to get them so scared they’d turned their church into a fortress in case they ever had to take shelter there.
I clicked off the torch and headed off after Blake, imagining the gargoyle’s eyes watching my retreating back. The path descended for a while, the land on either side of it rising steadily, until I was walking in a narrow ravine. Then the path ahead opened dramatically to show the sky and the moon, swollen and drenching everything in its icy light, Blake standing in front of it, waiting for me. I came down the last few steps and stopped next to him, staring at Cuagach spread out below us.
‘Jeee-sus,’ I breathed. ‘Jesus.’
We were standing on a long ledge about twenty foot from the top of an escarpment. The land dropped straight from our vantage-point about a hundred feet to what had the look of a very wide, dry riverbed studded with boulders as big as houses. About a third of a mile away it rose up again, marked by a distant line of trees. The gorge between the two slopes was as barren as a desert, unmarked by any shrub or tree, as otherworldly and lonely as a distant planet. Scattered among the boulders were odd brown shapes, reflecting an occasional glitter as clouds scudded across the moon. It took ages for me to understand what I was looking at.
‘Barrels? Drums?’ I said. ‘Is that what they are?’
‘This land was a chemical dump before we came here.’
I shot a few photos, then looked left and right along the ledge we stood on – at the ghostly squatting forms. ‘More gargoyles.’ They were planted at intervals of ten feet, all facing bravely across the gorge, their glass eyes glittering expectantly. Behind the ledge we stood on, the upper part of the escarpment formed a wall, and along its length ten-foot-tall letters had been sprayed in red paint that had dripped.
Get thee behind me, Satan. Get thee behind me, Satan. Get thee behind me, Satan.
‘Jesus,’ I said faintly, pulling out my camera, staring at the letters. ‘Jesus fucking Christ. Someone here is really scared.’ I squatted and fired off a few shots. Then I stood and faced across the gorge. The letters were so big they were difficult to understand this close up – they weren’t designed to be read from the place we stood. They’d only be clear from a distance. Like if you were to stand in the tree-line on the other side of the gorge.
‘That’s it,’ I said, staring at the trees. ‘He lives over there, doesn’t he? That’s why you’ve got all this – this shit lying around up here.’ I went to the edge of the gorge and squinted down into the darkness. ‘Can we get down there? I want to go nearer.’
‘No. The only way to get to Malachi’s side of the island is in the boat and – don’t lean over, please.’ He plucked at my shirt, trying to pull me back. ‘Joe – please – this is very dangerous. If you went down there you wouldn’t make it back alive. And anyway—’
I turned. ‘Anyway what?’
He hesitated. His face in the moonlight was pale. He knew he’d said too much. ‘Nothing. It’s very dangerous. Very dangerous.’
‘No.’ I straightened and looked at him, a bit amused. ‘No. You weren’t going to say that. What were you going to say?’
‘Yes, you were.’
‘No,’ he said firmly.
I sighed. ‘Well, if you’re not going to tell me I’ll have to find out for myself.’ I started off along the ledge, dodging the gargoyles, shining the torch at the edge, trying to find a place to clamber down the escarpment.
‘Stop!’
I looked back at him. ‘Only if you tell me what you were going to say.’
He paused, biting his lip, his eyes lowered, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. ‘A non-harassment order,’ he muttered, not meeting my eye.
‘What? What was that?’
‘I said a non-harassment order. Malachi took out a non-harassment order on us. He went to court for it.’
‘He went to court?’ I echoed. ‘Oh, Blake,’ I leaned a bit closer to him, giving him a faint smile, suddenly enjoying this, ‘what did you do to deserve that?’
‘Nothing. Malachi is very unwell. We’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘So why’d he get a restraining order on you?’
‘Because he is insane! Insane. We’ve done nothing wrong!’ He paused, breathing heavily, wiping his face like it was difficult to control himself. He ripped his binoculars off his head, thrusting them out to me. ‘There. Look. His place is a fortress.’
I let the camera dangle on my chest and lifted the binoculars, focusing, moving them through a kaleidoscope of landscapes: the side of a boulder, a pile of rusting drums, the yellow flash of a hazardous-substance label. The opposite escarpment was of a darker rock: it looked geologically totally different from the land we stood on – blacker and more compact. I raised the binoculars and found a consistent line at the point where the trees started and, above it, a faint impressionistic cross-hatched pattern.
‘What’s that? Another fence? He’s got a fence just like you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And when did he put up that little beauty?’
‘Two years ago. Can you see the video cameras? They’re trained on us now, Joe.’
I moved the binoculars slowly. The fence ran the length of the top of the escarpment, and mounted in front of it, like H. G. Wells’s tripods, were at least forty video cameras, all pointing out across the moonlit gorge, glinting at us like silent, unblinking eyes.
‘If he picks us up on those video cameras then we’re in breach of the order and we’ll never get power of attorney.’
‘This is your Gaza Strip wall? This is where it all happens?’ I was about to drop the binoculars when they swept past something I couldn’t put a name to. I quickly moved them back, the cross-hatching of the fence blurring with the movement, and—
‘Blake? Blake, this is fucking weird shit.’
I was looking at a pair of eyes. Smeared and hollow. Below them a snout. A pig’s head. Mounted on top of the fence. When I moved the binoculars to the right I found another – the same pushed-in features, the same hatch-like eyes, lolling tongue. I dropped the binoculars and stared out at the tree-line. Now I could see them – faint blobs of light, one after the other on top of the fence, lined up like heads on medieval battlements, one every ten feet or so just like the gargoyles on this side – stretching away into the distance. ‘Where the fuck have they come from?’
‘I told you – Malachi’s very sick. He wants us to be scared.’
‘And if I asked Benjamin Garrick, what would he say?’
Blake let his gaze drift out across the gorge. There was something resigned about his voice when he spoke. ‘If you asked Benjamin he would say that Pan put them there. He would say that Pan can tear a living pig apart with his bare hands.’