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 fo
rehead 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.'
'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.