The Garricks, it seemed, had a small following. They had convinced at least fifteen other members of the community that Pan was living on Pig Island, under Malachi’s control. Or worse, not under it. Blake knew I wasn’t going to be put off so the next morning he took me over to their cottage to speak to them. The storm he’d promised had arrived: overnight the island had been caught in a grey squall that sat like a cartoon cloud above it, circling it in grey mists and humid rains. When we set off at eleven, it seemed like the village had disappeared, only the dim orange glow of electric lights on in the cottages coming through the mist.
The Garricks lived at the end of the path that led down to the jetty. Once, their cottage had been painted peppermint green, but now it was faded almost to white, patched in places with grey filler and wet with condensed mist. It was the only cottage with a television set and the aerial rose, spidery, into the mist above the roof. We sat in the well-lit kitchen, with its cheerful gingham blinds, drinking steaming mugs of coffee and eating Susan’s home-made brownies. Sovereign sat on the arm of the sofa in the adjacent room. She didn’t speak but I was conscious of her watching me, an amused, knowing smile on her face. She was wearing a black Avril Lavigne T-shirt and a buckled, pleated mini-skirt. Her long thin legs kept jiggling up and down, like she was dancing to a tune in her head.
I settled back and opened my notepad. ‘The only way I can help you is if you tell me everything,’ I said. ‘We’re going to talk about Malachi – and you’re all going to tell me what you know.’
Susan Garrick flushed a very bright red. She looked from me to Blake and back again. ‘I don’t like this, Blake,’ she said. ‘I don’t like this attitude. What happened to our agreement of March 2005?’
‘Susan, there wasn’t an agreement,’ he said levelly. ‘You said you wouldn’t talk about it to outsiders, but I didn’t make that promise. I’m acting in the interests of the whole community.’
‘Well, I can’t help it,’ she said, running her hands over her arms where goosebumps had risen up. ‘I can’t help thinking that if Malachi knows we’ve talked about it he’ll send that – that thing over here again. I’m not happy about provoking him.’
‘Mr Oakes,’ Benjamin said to me, ‘do we have to do this? All we want is for you to tell our story. To tell how difficult it’s been on Cuagach – but how devoted we are to it. We just want Malachi off the island so we can go over there and exorcize whatever it is he’s tempted into living there.’
‘Benjamin, Susan,’ Blake put down his coffee and leaned across the table, taking their hands in his, ‘Susan, Benjamin, this is important. Joe has told me that he won’t do the story unless we talk about it.’
Susan stared at me. ‘Is that true?’
‘It’s important to get the readers’ interest,’ I said, Joe-diplomat wise. ‘They need to be drawn into a story.’
She looked at her husband, who shook his head and shrugged. ‘Blake always does get his own way,’ she said sullenly, dabbing at the few brownie crumbs on her plate. ‘It’s always been the same.’ She turned her eyes to him. Her parrot-blue shirt made her face look old. ‘If I speak, Blake, please try not to undermine me. I know you only do it because you’re scared, but it wounds me.’
‘I won’t undermine you, Susan. Just tell yourself that if the public knows about Malachi’s madness it can only strengthen our case.’
‘But that’s just it,’ she said, appealing to me. ‘He’s not mad. He’s evil. He’s dabbling in things that no Christian should be in involved in and everyone, even Blake, knows it.’
‘Dabbling?’ I said. ‘What’s he dabbling in?’
She fixed me with her pale green eyes. ‘Where there is light, Mr Oakes, there is darkness in equal measure. Let me put it simply: this is no madness. Malachi has learned how to summon the biforme.’
‘Half man, half beast.’ She lowered her voice and leaned a bit closer to me, searching my face accusingly. ‘Why? Don’t you think it’s possible? Where do you think those mine shafts in the south lead to?’
I opened my mouth to answer. Then I closed it. Basic hack rule: never express doubt or ridicule. When someone says they’ve seen Elvis’s face in the roof insulation, don’t laugh. ‘Mrs Garrick,’ I said carefully, uncapping my pen and writing ‘biforme’ on the pad. I could feel Sovereign in the other room eyeing me, waiting to hear what I’d say. ‘Blake suggests that the – the biforme on the video is Malachi himself. Disguised, maybe. He thinks that—’
‘I know what Blake thinks,’ she said crossly, ‘but he hasn’t seen that monster. And I have.’
‘You’ve seen it?’
‘Ah,’ she said, pleased with herself. ‘You see? I told you to take me seriously.’ Smiling now, she got up and went to a drawer in the painted dresser that stood against the wall, returning to the table with a sheaf of papers. ‘Almost three years ago, long before that wretched video came out.’ She placed the papers in front of me. ‘It was late. Everyone was already in bed and it was my turn to get the laundry from the kitchen. I was walking down that path over there…’ She leaned forward and pointed out of the window in the direction of the refectory. The mist outside was rolling in thin spirals. ‘…when I had a feeling…’ She hesitated. ‘I had this dreadful feeling that I was…’ She put her hand to the back of her neck, like she was reliving the moment. Grey shadows of raindrops on the window dribbled down her face like tears.
‘Yes?’ I murmured. ‘You had a feeling that you were…?’
She coughed and shook her head. ‘That I was being watched. All the hairs went up here – you know – on the back of my neck and I looked up and I saw it. Sitting in a tree, like a lion or something.’
‘OK,’ I said levelly. I put down my pen and picked up the top sheet, unfolded it and flattened it on the table. ‘And this is…’ I was looking at a charcoal drawing, slightly smudged and creased in places, but kind of skilfully drawn. Most of the paper was filled with sketched leaves, but a few branches showed through, and on one of these a carefully sketched human foot gripped the branch with the prehensile strength of a monkey. Squashed in next to it was a buttock and…Oh, Christ, I wanted to smile…a tail. Dangling down at least two feet below the branch.
‘Can you see how it was sitting?’ She lowered herself to a squat next to my chair, holding on to the table for balance. In the other room Sovereign blew air out of her nose, disgusted by her ma. ‘See? Like this.’ Susan lifted her blouse so that I could see her haunches in the brown leggings pressed down against the hiking boots and tweedy socks she wore. ‘I could see all of this part.’ She drew a vague circle round her foot and buttocks. ‘From here to here. I couldn’t see here – where the tail joined to the body – because it was hidden in the trees, but I could see the tail itself.’
‘How long was it in the tree?’ I picked up the next sheet. The same image, a slightly different scale.
‘Not long after I screamed. It scuttled away.’
‘We searched the whole of this side of the island,’ said Benjamin. ‘Couldn’t find it. And, believe me, we looked.’
I riffled through the sheets, seeing the same image over and over again. ‘The feet are human.’
‘Yes – and all of it’s got skin like a human, even the tail. Quite brown – you know, a sort of leathery brown. I saw it close enough to know.’
‘It’s latex. A clever costume,’ said Blake. ‘Malachi must have his reasons.’
‘Well,’ Susan said, straightening and putting her hands on the table, leaning forward to look Blake in the eye, ‘answer me this, Blake. If it was a costume how did he make the tail move?’
‘It moved?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean, it moved?’
‘It twitched.’ She used her hand to imitate a muscular flick. I thought immediately of a snake or a shark. ‘You know, like a cat does.’
I dragged my eyes away from her hand and looked at Blake, waiting for an explanation. ‘Look,’ he said, impatiently, ‘you can write it any way you like – it doesn’t really matter what’s going on over there. Just make sure that the message is clear. Malachi is behaving intolerably. He’s insane. With enough contributions we can turn this island over to the people who care about it.’
‘I want to know what else Susan’s seen. You know about the pigs’ heads on the fence?’
‘Everyone’s seen those,’ said Benjamin. ‘But there’s more.’ He turned in the chair to look to where Sovereign had been sitting in silence. ‘Tell Mr Oakes what happened to you.’
But Sovereign wasn’t paying attention to her father. She was smiling at me in that disconcerting, knowing way, like she was laughing at me, her feet in their pink plastic sandals tapping away distractedly. Benjamin turned and followed her gaze, as if it was a solid entity stretching across the room, and when his eyes landed on me his expression changed. ‘Sovereign!’ he said sharply, making her jump. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘What?’ she said, blinking like she’d been asleep. ‘What?’
‘Tell Mr Oakes what you caught in the trap. The trap.’
Her face cleared. She smiled at me. ‘After Mum saw – well, you know, after she saw all that weird stuff, I was like, my God, this is so cool, so I made this – this, like, trap thing.’ She nodded out of the window. ‘Out there in his forest. Because I’d, like, never seen Malachi, right? Only in photos, y’know? So I’m, like, I’ve really got to get to the bottom of this, see what this dude’s up to, and so I went over there and dug a hole and I had it all covered up like some jungle thing – kind of cool, actually – and I left it for a few days. Then I went back.’
‘Shall we show him what you found, Sovereign?’ said Susan, getting to her feet and pulling a fleece from a peg on the door. She had changed since I first arrived in her kitchen: she had a victorious air to her, like she knew she was close to winning the argument. ‘Shall we go to the freezers and show him?’
We took umbrellas. They didn’t do much good – the rain was like a mist, atomized like we were standing near a jungle waterfall. It got into everything – our ears, our eyes. In the short walk to the refectory we were all covered with a fine dew.
‘I’m so into photography,’ Sovereign told me, as we walked. ‘I’m the girl for you if you ever need someone to carry your bags, hand you lenses and shit. When I did the trap I had this totally wicked idea. I made this, like, tripwire thingy? Hooked it up to a camera – stuck the camera in the tree above the trap, so that if anything went into it I’d get a photo.’
‘But Malachi ripped it down,’ said Blake, as we stepped inside the refectory. ‘He found it, didn’t he?’
‘Something ripped it down,’ Benjamin said. ‘We don’t know it was Malachi. We haven’t established who or what did it.’
‘You should have seen that camera, Joe,’ Sovereign said, shaking out her umbrella. ‘I bet you’ve never seen a system like it. You’d be like, wow, this is so flare.’ She led us through the refectory, where the trestle tables all stood, disinfected and shining, past the kitchen where the two men who always served dinner were moving around, rattling pans and plates, and into a side room. She switched on the light. Inside, three large chest freezers hummed quietly, and she rested her hand on one, looking at me, with a slight smile. ‘This was what was in the trap. It totally does my head that there’s a photo of it falling in on that camera he snatched.’
She lifted the freezer lid and a stale cloud of cold air floated up. We all gathered round. A pig lay on its side, half covered with drifts of flaky white ice. ‘A pig,’ she said, smiling at me with a glint in her eye. ‘My very own pig. Do you like it?’
‘Show Mr Oakes the other side,’ said Benjamin. ‘Come on – turn it over.’
She sighed and dug her hands into the ice, trying to get a grip on the huge creature. ‘Well, help me, then.’
We all gathered round, plunging our hands in and rolling it on to its back. Its trotters stood up in the air, a frozen mixture of mud and grass caught in the clefts of its hoofs.
‘On its side,’ said Benjamin, and we hefted it up again, dropping it down with a crash, sending a fine spray of ice out of the freezer.
I peered at it, fumbling out my camera. In the centre of its flank, branded neatly into its flesh with something hot, was the symbol beloved of witches and soi-disant Satanists the world over: a pentagram. I rolled off a few shots of it.
‘Blake,’ I said, snapping on the lens cover when I was finished, ‘the next thing is for me to get over there. I want to speak to Malachi.’
‘It can’t be done. The boat can’t run in this weather. You’d be asking me to commit suicide.’
‘You’re not going over there at all.’ Susan’s big face was twitching with anger. ‘By boat or otherwise. You know everything you need to know for your story. You must not, absolutely not, go over there and disturb him. It’s the most dangerous thing you could do.’