Authors: Lin Anderson
Chapter 30
The yacht had gone. Rhona scanned north to Holoman Bay but it too was empty.
'Looks like Maley's left.'
Spike disagreed. 'Maley won't leave without the drugs.'
Rhona suspected he was right. She pulled away from the side of the narrow road and headed towards Brochel. They had taken the turning down towards Holoman Island, just to make sure the yacht hadn't moved along the coast when the storm died down. With no sign of it yet, the chances were it had crossed to Skye.
After she persuaded Spike to go upstairs and get some sleep, Rhona told Mrs MacMurdo the truth about their American visitor.
'That explains why he was nosing about here last month, asking all those questions. He showed me that symbol.'
'ReAlba?'
Mrs MacMurdo nodded. 'Then you turned up and showed me the same thing and. . . I'm afraid I lied and said I'd never seen it before. I'm sorry.'
Rhona patted her arm. 'It doesn't matter. The main thing is, we have Spike back.'
'And Esther?'
'He says she's gone back to Maley,' Rhona said.
'What about the bairn?'
Rhona shook her head. She didn't know. That was one part of the story Maley hadn't told her.
‘I’ll take care of the baby,' Mrs MacMurdo said firmly, 'at least until we know.' She looked at Rhona. 'What will happen to Donald?'
Spike's confession had been genuine, Rhona was sure of that. Whether he was right and it was his fault that his father was dead, was another matter. They'd struggled and his father had gone overboard. When he didn't reappear Spike had panicked, diving in himself, searching madly under and around the boat, but there was no sign of a body. He had stayed until daylight, submerging again and again until he gave up, exhausted.
'If his father attacked him and Spike tried to defend himself, he doesn't have anything to worry about,' Rhona said, hoping it was true.
Spike was staring through the windscreen, deep in thought. Rhona noticed his wrinkled skin was so thin, it was almost translucent.
'Spike?'
He turned.
'There's an American I think you should meet.' Rhona carried on talking despite his evident desperation. 'His name is Andre Frith. He knew your father.'
'No fucking way,' Spike said. 'I'll take you to the lab, then I'm off. That's what we agreed.'
Rhona knew if she persisted he would be out the car and away and she would never see him again.
'You're right, that's what we agreed,' Rhona said quietly, knowing she had already betrayed him.
When the mail had left the island that morning, it carried with it enough DNA from the sleeping boy to establish whether the body parts they'd found were his father's. By tomorrow morning, Chrissy would have the sample along with the entire story.
All Rhona had to do now was keep Spike with her until she found out the truth.
Spike lapsed into silence until they were minutes from Brochel, then he told Rhona to turn down a dirt track and made her hide the car among some trees.
The wind had dropped and the stillness had brought the mist creeping in from the sea again, drifting about them in long milky strands. Spike walked on ahead and Rhona concentrated on keeping his back in view. When she dropped too far behind, Spike stopped and waited, and Rhona was absurdly grateful each time his slight figure loomed out of the mist in front of her.
'It would have been easier by boat,' he said on the third occasion this happened.
'Does the lab have a direct link to the sea?'
'Of course,' Spike said. "That's how my father brought in what he needed.'
'And what did he need?'
Droplets of moisture hung from his hair making Rhona want to reach out and sweep them away.
'You know what my father was.'
She had stopped to catch her breath and Spike seemed in no hurry to move on. Rhona wondered briefly if he was lost, but quickly dismissed the thought. Everything she'd seen suggested Spike could move about this island like a deer, the landscape as familiar as a scent.
'ReAlba was his life,' he said bitterly. 'He would talk of the Coming, how soon it would be. How the Men of the West would triumph.'
'What did he mean?'
'How the fuck should I know?' His face was twisted and bitter. 'All I know is that it didn't include anyone who wasn't a direct descendant of the clan.'
He stood up.
‘The next bit's hard,' he said. 'But there's a tunnel from the loch over there.'
Rhona glanced in the direction of his pointing hand. If there was a loch ahead, she certainly hadn't spotted it.
'It's in a corrie,' he told her, 'You'll see it in a minute.
Loch na Minha
- Loch of the Woman.'
The loch was peat-coloured, an oval mirror reflecting the hill that surrounded it
They walked past the blackhouse where, Spike told her, he'd stayed with Esther. He wouldn't go inside but Rhona did, smelling the sweet heather beds and the fragrant scent of a peat fire. A bright splash of colour caught her eye. Outside again, she handed Spike the woollen baby hat she'd retrieved from the corner. He thrust it into his pocket without speaking.
With each step they seemed to be moving further and further from the sea as they traversed the lochside to the steeper wall of the corrie.
'We have to climb from here.' Spike must have seen her worried look, because he added, ‘There's a crevasse, big enough to scramble up. After that, it's easy.'
Easy? Rhona had heard that word before.
Spike took her hand and led her to a break in the rockface and she saw that he was right. The fissure was three feet wide. It climbed in giant stepping-stones up the face of the rock. Spike went first and pulled her up after him.
At the top, the corrie wall was dotted with caves like a forgotten shore. Spike led Rhona to an opening, then stooped and disappeared into the darkness.
Rhona had lost all sense of direction. The tunnel wound like a snake through the hill, at times branching off in more than one direction, but Spike was always waiting for her at the crossroads.
'Legend says the loch was once salt water. A waterhorse came through this tunnel from the sea and devoured a young girl. Her father, mad with grief, hunted the monster and tried to kill it, but when he found it, it was made of jelly.'
Spike stood back to let Rhona pass through the metal door.
The tunnel had reached its end.
Rhona heard the switch and from semi-darkness her eyes were blasted into light; light that sprang like the sun from the metal tables and glass cabinets arranged neatly under the arched stone roof.
Rhona had heard about such structures, had even crawled down Maeshowe's long low tunnel in Orkney and emerged in its great amphitheatre, but nothing had prepared her for this.
'It amused my father to use an ancient burial chamber to manipulate life,' Spike told her.
Their eyes were becoming accustomed to the light, and the gleaming emptiness told them the truth. They had found the lab, but whatever MacAulay had been working on was gone.
'The bastards have taken it.'
'Who has taken it, Spike? Who knew about the lab?'
He sat down heavily, leaning his arms on a lab table. Rhona could read in his face what the last twenty-four hours had been for the boy. And he was a boy, despite the pinched face of an old man.
She went over and rested her arm about his shoulders.
'Do you know what your father was planning?'
He looked past her, at the wall.
The map sat behind a perspex screen. Orange, yellow brown and black shadings identified the racial predominance of each of the American states. Black, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Asian, Jew. White superiority under threat.
To the right a smaller map, a group of islands, jewels in the western sea. Skye, Raasay; their racial story in coloured detail; Gael and incomer.
'Spike, was your father going to do something here?'
'I thought if he was dead, it would all end,' he said. 'But it hasn't, has it?'
'Is there any way out of here except by the tunnel?'
He nodded at a duplicate metal door on the other side of the domed structure.
‘There's a cave where the boat comes in.'
Rhona pulled him to his feet
'Go and see if we still have a boat.'
Spike opened the door and Rhona heard the low boom of crashing waves.
'I won't be long,' he shouted.
But Rhona was already too busy to hear. There was an office area at the back of the dome, cut off from the lab by a glass screen. The quickest way to find out what MacAulay had been working on would be to check his records. Much as she disliked the character Spike called father, there was no doubt the man was a meticulous scientist. If he had been playing genetic wargames, the information could still be here somewhere.
She lifted a pile of files from a cabinet and made for the desk. The wall in front of her was a patchwork of newspaper cuttings and extracts from scientific articles that made her skin crawl. They were grouped in chronological order, covering the last five years. The most recent was a UK cutting about a call for American public health officials to prepare for the possibility of a terrorist attack using biological weapons.
Genetic modification by those with access to sophisticated laboratory facilities could lead to the development of GM pathogens with enhanced resistance to antibiotics or, in theory, genetically targeted to affect selected ethnic groups
.
It looked as though the columnist had been reading MacAulay's mail.
The rest of the articles were in a similar vein. Right-wing bombers in the US, the Japanese poison gas episode, the nail bomb in London.
The man revelled in disasters.
Rhona opened the first file. Lists of names, some with amounts of money beside them under the headings 'Donation' or 'Prepayment'. Some were for a couple of hundred dollars, others were in the thousands. There was no mention of what the money was for. The next two files were the same. Lists of people or lists of equipment. No mention of ReAlba, no mention of what had been going on here.
Rhona went back to the cabinet and pushed her way through the files, scrabbling with sheets of paper that were no more unusual than her own office paperwork.
She needed the lab-books. They would tell her what the hell had been going on.
It was no use. There was a mountain of things to figure out here and it wasn't her responsibility to do it. What she had to do was tell the authorities where the lab was and get off the island and go home. Even Phillips would be her friend when she told him what she'd found.
Rhona left the glass enclosure.
The insistent booming noise in the lab had intensified. It made her feel giddy. She began to feel as if she was on a fairground ride that would not stop. As she reached out and steadied herself against a metal table, her eyes were drawn upwards. The domed ceiling shivered with echoes.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
She staggered to a sink, the sharp acid taste of vomit in her throat.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The noise was no longer outside her. It was inside her brain.
She clasped the table edge, her balance going. Her body felt light, so light. If she let go, she knew she would float.
Spike's voice broke the spell.
'Hey, are you alright?'
He had closed the seaward door and the deep resonant sound was gone. Rhona pulled her eyes from the ceiling and found she was holding tightly to the table edge.
‘That noise. It was inside my head,' she said slowly, trying to understand. 'I thought I was floating upwards,' Rhona could hardly believe what she was saying.
‘I'm sorry, I should have closed the door,' Spike explained. "The mound is built like an acoustic theatre. It manipulates sound, especially low continuous sound like chanting or . . .'
‘The sound of the sea,' she finished for him. It was weird, like . . .'
'Like a religious experience?' Spike gave a grim laugh. 'My father knew the right fucking place to play God.'
The engine hummed into life. Spike untied the rope and manoeuvred them out of the cave, towards daylight. When they were well away from the cliff, Rhona tried her mobile, but there was no signal. If she wanted to make a call, she would probably have to get to a land line.
'The nearest is at Brochel, if the line isn't down from the storm,' Spike told her.
So they headed north, with Druim an Aonaich hanging over them, cutting the sun. Spike stayed parallel to the coast, keeping clear of the choppy waters at the cliff edge. Even then, they could feel the great pull of the undertow, as wave fought wave, to and from the rockface. When they reached Screapadal, Spike pointed towards the ruins of the village.
'That's where I fought with my father. I thought he would swim ashore and walk back to the cottage but he didn't.'