Pig Island (8 page)

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.“

“The gorge?”

“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
.”

“Malachi?”

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 any-way—’

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?”

“Nothing.”

“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.