10

If Finn had been there he’d have listened to Angeline spilling all the details and he’d’ve told me I was the meister. He’d say I’d finessed her, dolly-walked her into my trap. Funny that, I thought, as I sat, my chin resting on my hand, listening to her. Funny how I don’t feel better about it.

Almost the very moment Malachi comes back from the mainland the deliverances start. Once a month he takes Angeline out into the breeding shed. There’re always crucifixes and glasses of water waiting on the table and a pig in the rusting crate, squealing and hammering at the floor with its hoofs, making the crate rock and creak. Malachi uses the ritual he wrote for the PHM, muttering intercessory prayers and quoting the biblical rank of demons: thrones, dominions, principalities, powers and spirits. He makes her kneel on the concrete floor, bare knees, head bowed. She has to stay there for the ninety minutes it takes to complete.

Afterwards, when he lets her go, she runs straight back to the house and stands in the bath, the shower on full to drown the noises that are coming from the shed: the squeals, the boom of the pig colliding with the shed’s corrugated-iron walls. She never sees what happens to the pigs, but she can guess from the evidence left in the morning. He puts down food and while they’re eating he attacks them with the ball-pein hammer. Probably between the eyes because she remembers him saying that is the place a pig is most vulnerable. Then he slits them open and squats next to their opened ribs, inspecting their organs for black spots, for signs that the demons have been transferred. He usually waits a day or two to clear up after himself. Then he fills up buckets with gore and flesh, carries them to the cliffs and tips them into the sea. The heads he saves. She doesn’t know what plans he’s got for the heads. Maybe he doesn’t even know himself.

For the first time in her life she thinks about escape. The only world she’s ever known is the three square miles of forest on the south end of Cuagach. She’s been to the gorge enough times and stared at it baking under the sun with its barrels and rusty streaks of chemicals leaching into the land. Crossing it would be like crossing to hell, and it’s never entered her mind to break the boundaries her parents set. But now fear and desperation are pushing her to take unthinkable chances.

She crosses one afternoon in late August. She moves carefully between the chemical drums, stopping every now and then to check he isn’t watching from the escarpment behind. The baked brown rock of the north side gets larger and larger by the hour. When at last she comes to the village it’s so green she gets a fantasy she can drink the leaves. Dusk, and rooks are gathering in the trees above, dark clots of them, heads cocked on the side to peer beadily down at her. She moves trance-like along the path that leads to the community, and when she gets there she stops and stares down at it. It seems unreal, like a mirage in the desert, like something from the television – with its neat lawns and tidy, painted houses, a few lights coming on in the windows now that night is falling. Someone, a woman in a lavender headscarf, comes out of one of the houses and crosses the green. Angeline turns and drags herself clumsily up to the first branches of a tree, her heart beating hard. She wedges herself into the V of a branch, the bark digging into her feet, and watches.

The woman passes only a few feet below and enters a long, low building through sliding glass doors. A light comes on inside, and silence falls for a long time. Angeline’s pulse is racing in her ears. This is the first human being she’s seen who wasn’t on television or loading supplies on to the jetty in the distance. She’s thinking of slithering out of the tree and creeping to the building when the light goes off and the woman comes out of the building. She’s carrying a metal bowl on top of a pile of folded tea-towels and as she turns up the path she pauses and comes to a halt.

For a moment she seems to be looking at the bowl, as if there’s something in it she didn’t expect, because her eyes are turned down, her mouth closed tight. Then, with a sideways twitch of her jaw, she slowly, very slowly, raises her eyes to the tree. Angeline holds her breath. Their eyes haven’t met, but she knows she’s been seen. There’s a long, long pause, and although her heart is thudding she has a moment of hope. She pictures the woman putting down the bowl and holding out her hands. She pictures being led into the village, people coming out of their houses to greet her. She imagines a family kitchen, a fire, a meal on the table, and for the first time since Asunción left the island she can feel hope twitch in her chest.

But, of course, that’s not what happens. What happens instead is that Susan Garrick drops the bowl. There’s a pause as it rolls off the path and into the trees. It comes to a stop in the leaves and then Susan begins to cry. It’s a cry of pure fear – of terror. It goes into Angeline’s chest and stays there, winding into her heart as Susan swings round on the path. She hesitates as if she’s not quite sure how to do this, then stumbles forward towards the houses, crying and shouting. Angeline is frozen, just for a second, then she drops out of the tree, as quickly as possible, the bark ripping into her leg. She turns and melts into the trees, back the way she came. It’s the last time she’ll go to the village until the night she follows Malachi and sees him put the explosives in the chapel.

Back at the cottage Malachi is in his study, the light on, a bottle at his elbow. Angeline slips in silently through the back door and goes to the bathroom to drink water and wash the dried blood and dirt from her body. She’s finished bathing and is climbing, shivering, into bed when a commotion starts outside the house, sending her instinctively scuttling to the top of the staircase. Someone’s knocking on the door. Downstairs Malachi shoots out of the study in alarm.

‘Go to your room,’ he hisses. ‘Don’t move until I come for you.’

She scrambles back into her room, her heart thudding. Downstairs she hears him throw open the door. There’s a moment’s silence. Then, in such a strange voice she wonders if he’s going to cry, he says, ‘Benjamin. Benjamin – why are you here? I don’t want you here.’

Malachi?’

‘Yes. I am Malachi. Why are you here?’

There’s a few moments’ silence. She knows who Benjamin is: Benjamin Garrick, she’s seen his picture, and now she imagines the men staring at each other, thinking of the years that have passed. When Benjamin speaks again it’s in an urgent whisper, as if he’s afraid of something. ‘Malachi? What has happened to you?’

‘What has happened? Nothing’s happened.’

‘Malachi, terrible things are being said. Terrible things are being suggested about what you are doing up here. Something evil has been seen in these woods.’

‘Something evil? What does that mean, something evil?’

‘The thing all Christians fear, Malachi, man’s ancient enemy: a Pan, Malachi, a Dionysus, a Satan. Half beast, half man. A biforme.’

‘I told you never to come here, Benjamin. Don’t come here and tell me this babble. Get away now. Before I use my axe.’

Maybe he raises the axe to show how serious he is, because Benjamin staggers away from the door in shock. Angeline hears a barrel being knocked over, the sound of feet shuffling in the soil, then the front door slamming shut and Malachi’s laboured, furious breathing in the living room. She leaps to the window, presses her nose to the pane and sees, from above, a man’s head. The moon is close to the horizon, but there’s enough light to make out the pale circle of skin showing through his thinning hair. He’s wearing a dark green jacket and wellingtons and she stares at him in fascination as he moves his hands up and down in a strange spasmodic gesture. He turns in a complete circle, once, twice, as if he doesn’t know what to do – whether to knock again, or run. Then he stops.

Only a few yards away, outside the fence, lies a pig. Angeline hasn’t noticed it before but from the odd angle of its head she guesses it’s one of Malachi’s sacrifices, not cleaned up yet from the deliverance on Sunday. She can’t imagine what tools he’s used for the slaughter, but he’s split the animal into slices. When the insides came out he must have kicked them around in the dust because they are lying all over the place, already going a dark, hard red colour like dead liver.

Benjamin becomes very still, breathing quite hard, his shoulders going up and down. He takes a few steps forward, his hand up to his mouth, and peers down at the creature through the cloud of midges that have gathered above it. He mutters something, swishing the flies away. Hastily he holds his hands together in prayer, whispering feverishly, pointing to the heavens. She sees the creature through his eyes: she sees that its injuries look the work of a demon. It could be Faust’s ripped-apart corpse. Asunción read Faust to her once, sitting at the edge of the bed, whispering the words because the book was a secret between them and they’d never mention the devil in Malachi’s company.

The front door flies open behind him and Malachi steps out. Benjamin wheels round, a look of terror on his face: ‘Malachi – please – what is this? What abomination is living on Cuag—’ He falters. Malachi’s standing a few feet from the door, the axe held above his head, the moonlight glancing off it. ‘Malachi,’ he stutters, all the colour going from his face. ‘Malachi, please, I beg of youwhat has happened to you? Who have you fallen into league with?’

‘Get away from my house.’ Malachi takes a step forward. ‘Do you hear? Get away and never come back.’

Benjamin looks at the axe. He looks back at the pig and raises his hands cautiously. ‘I’m going,’ he mutters, backing away. ‘I’m going. But, Malachi, I beg you, you may have turned your heart against God but it’s not too late. He who has flung head-long from the heights of heaven the reprobate dragon has not forgotten you and He—’

‘Get away!’ He takes another step forward, raises the axe a little higher, and at that Benjamin turns and staggers head first in the direction of the gorge, half stumbling and tripping over the fence. Malachi doesn’t move. He stands in silence staring after him, at the point he’s disappeared. The axe trembles in his hands.

Angeline shrinks against the wall, her head in her hands, all Benjamin’s words coming back to her: abomination – a Pan, a Dionysus. Satan. The same words Malachi uses in the monthly rituals. Something lodges under her ribs – something thick she can’t cough up or swallow. For the first time in her life she wonders whether Malachi may be right about her.

‘And after that they kept coming,’ she murmured. She was stony-faced, staring at the light blinking on the recorder. I didn’t remember it, but now I could see she must have cried some time in the last half an hour because her eyes were red and puffy and she kept pressing a knuckle to her nose to stop it running. ‘I – um, I found a tree to watch them from. They were like tourists.’

‘Tourists?’ I was still imagining the shock when Susan Garrick dropped the metal bowl. I could almost hear it. ‘Trying to see you?’

‘They’d even bring cameras. It was before Dad put up the fence. Benjamin – he came back and sprinkled holy water along the bottom of the escarpment.’ She broke off and thought about this for a while, her muddy brown eyes moving from side to side like she was seeing it happen again. ‘And that girl – the one you were with – she tried to trap me. Made a hole in the ground.’

‘The one I was with?’

‘Yes,’ she said, her voice level. ‘Don’t you remember? “Malachi, you old bonehead. Show us your strap-on tail.”’

I stared at her. Sovereign. I remembered the way I’d stalked along the fence, desperate to get a shot of Angeline in the grass. Something pinched at me now. Something that must have been pity or shame or something. ‘They wanted to kill you. They had plans.’

She shrugged, like this wasn’t a surprise. She chewed a little more on her thumbnail. Her coat hung open and I could see under the football shirt that she was thinner than I remembered, sort of starved-looking. Lexie said she looked like she was on drugs. ‘When they read what you write about me,’ she said, nodding at the tape player, ‘you know, in the papers, do you think people will still be scared of me?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’ I pressed pause on the machine and checked how long we’d been talking. Forty minutes. ‘But it won’t be yet. I can’t go to the papers with this. Not until they find him.’

We were silent for a while, holding each other’s eyes. And then, like we were both thinking the same thing, we turned and looked at the window. The curtains were still open, and outside the orange streetlight was flickering like it was going to short out any second.

‘What do you think?’ I murmured. ‘Angeline? Do you think he’s going to kill himself?’

She didn’t turn back to me. She kept her eyes on the streetlight. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’ll kill himself. But you’re right. I think he’s got something else to do first.’