The Poisoned Island (31 page)

An Englishman stepped into his field of view, one he had seen before down at the beach. The prince felt an immediate and quite stupid relief. If an Englishman was here, it meant the ship was, too.

“Please, sir, please . . . the ship . . . I want to go to the ship.”

The Englishman smiled.

“You speak my language well, savage. How on earth did that come about? And what of this?”

He held up the pouch that had been at the prince’s side. He spoke slowly and deliberately so the prince would understand.

“Is there any more?”

The prince shook his head.

“Are you sure, boy?”

“No. It is all gone.”

“Gone where?”

“With my friends.”

“Who are your friends?”

The prince shook his head at that.

“Let me go first. I will tell you. Let me go.”

The Englishman laughed. He took a strange box with a cloth in it, which was the machine the English used to make fire. He struck it four times, and on the fifth time the cloth ignited, and he held it near the wood, and the prince understood.

“No!”

“Who are your friends?”

“I . . . no . . . Jeremiah.”

“Jeremiah?”

“Yes, Jeremiah.”

“How many others?”

“Others. Jeremiah.”

The Englishman said a word the prince did not understand, a hard word. He looked at the fire in his hand as if wondering what to do next. The prince felt a screaming in his mind, but then a leaf of the tree stroked his face and he felt a kind of peace steal into his chest. He heard a girl laugh. Where was she?

The Englishman said the same strange word again, and dropped the charcloth onto the sticks. They caught alight immediately and the fire jumped towards the prince, and suddenly there was smoke all around him, and then the first flame touched his leg, pain flashed through him, and he screamed. The fire jumped up towards the tree, and more flames touched his skin and he started to burn.

But then four or five branches of the tree dipped down towards the flames and caught fire, and a creamy smoke rose from them and encircled the trunk and the burning prince. The smoke poured into his nose and eyes and ears and mouth, and when it touched his brain the world exploded with light and he danced his way into the infinite while, back on Earth, his body burned.

Jeremiah Critchley is burning. He burns with desire and he burns with fear. It is all he can do to keep from running down to the river and throwing himself into the stream, letting himself die and be washed out into the estuary, clean and gone and safe. But instead he cowers like a frightened animal inside this sparse room, his back against his sea chest, a chair propped against the door to stop it being opened, fear grasping at the edges of his mind. And always: the rampant desire for one more, just one more dose of the wondrous leaf.

He had taken shelter in his boardinghouse, the Pear Tree in Wapping, two days ago. The chair has been in place against the door since then. Jeremiah Critchley is not a cowardly man. To many of those who know him he is something like a god, a great blond-haired, blue-eyed Viking hero of enormous strength and boundless courage, the first to leap into battle, the last man standing, the leader when those who are paid to lead have abandoned the fight. If any of his former shipmates
could see him now—soft, shivering, foul-smelling, and tearful—they would assume he had a pusillanimous womanly twin, a pale shadow of the real Jeremiah.

There is a knocking at the door, and he hears the muffled sound of Mrs. Vermiloe, the landlady, thumping around on the landing. He’d charmed her from the first minute of his arrival, flashing his white teeth and flirting with her, making her giggle and blush even though the sight of this fat, ugly, and old coquette made his face hurt. “A room with a lock is what I need, my dear,” he’d said to her, and she’d protested, saying locked rooms weren’t allowed, ever since that business with John Williams last year, and she wasn’t having rooms she couldn’t get into, not her. He’d smiled even more widely and looked even more deeply into her pale, rheumy eyes and she’d giggled like some witch’s doll of a girl and had given him this room with the lock. So he could take the leaf and not be disturbed.

He’d indulged himself too much since their return. He knows that now. He’d made cup after cup of the stuff, plunging each time into that same light-filled pool of feeling which he’d swam in that first time up on the
marae
in Otaheite, that poor dupe of an island boy beside him. His hands had shaken the first time he’d prepared the leaf himself, after weeks and weeks of waiting on the return voyage. So many times he’d been tempted, so often he’d wondered about finding some corner of the ship where nobody went and taking some of the tea. But there was no such corner, on the
Solander
or on any ship. He’d issued dark warnings to the other five about not taking the tea while they were on board, so they would not be discovered and be forced to share what leaf they had. The young savage who’d supplied them had never appeared on the beach the day they left Otaheite. They only had what he’d
given them. They must conserve it. Yet there he was, struggling with his own compulsion, the voyage home stretching out into a grim eternity.

But they’d done it. They’d made it back to London undiscovered. And oh, that first taste of the leaf, alone in this room, had been wondrous indeed: as intense, perhaps even more so, than that first time on the
marae
. He’d fallen back on his bed and into the same blissful sleep, and he’d bathed in the light and swum in the infinite just as before.

Three more times he’d taken the tea in the first two days. Three more plunges into that delightful pool, although the last time he’d felt something else in the sleep, something swimming in the purple dark beneath the pool of light, something aware and watchful and hungry. But by the time he awoke he’d forgotten it. And then he’d told himself to pause, to rest. He was disciplined, was Jeremiah Critchley. He knew when to stop, when to take a rest. He’d wondered how the other five were feeling, what their experiences had been, what they’d seen in their own visions (and whether they’d felt that thing lurking in the dark).

Then the note had come: attendance required at the Narwhal in Rotherhithe. There he’d learned of the deaths of Ransome, Attlee, and Arnott, and a purple-black shadow had fallen over the enjoyment of the leaf. Three of those who’d returned with the leaf were dead. The connection was obvious, and terrifying, and incomprehensible. Only six men knew of what they’d done on Otaheite, and what they’d brought back with them, and now three of them were dead. Leaving him, Colby Potter, and Elijah Frost.

So, he made the obvious assumption, and wondered if Potter and Frost would be after him next.

He’d taken the leaf again on his return from the Narwhal,
and this time the vision had been truly terrifying: Potter and Frost chasing him through an oak wood, accompanied by a woman with bare shoulders and a tattooed tree down her arm, the two men laughing and shouting as they hunted for Jeremiah, who ran and ran, the wet leaves smacking into his arms like a forest of wet clothes. He’d plunged into a river, and the two men had grabbed him and pulled him out. He was unable to resist, because he was suddenly small, as small as a ten-year-old child. Shouting triumphantly, they carried him to the strange woman, who bent over him smiling, opening her mouth, showing her sharp teeth, which closed on the skin of his throat . . .

Then, nothing.

He woke from that dream covered in his body’s own expulsions, an awful mixture of sweat, blood, piss, and shit. His fingers had dug great pits into his stomach and chest as he’d clawed at himself. Fear rumbled within him like boulders rolled down a hill.

He’d decided to make his way over to Ratcliffe. If Potter and Frost were behind the killings, he was not going to wait for them to come to him like some frightened woman. Day before yesterday, that had been—a fine day for a stroll. He’d cleaned himself up and, with some struggle, had resisted taking the tea again. He’d felt clearheaded and strong as he walked up New Gravel Lane, despite the searing memory of the night’s visions. He’d stopped in at a tavern for a plate of food—by God, he was ravenous—and a pint of ale. A redheaded girl with flaming eyes had sat down with him and had taken no time at all to offer herself to him. Women had been offering themselves to Jeremiah since he was thirteen, but for the second time that day he had refused to indulge himself.

He had left the tavern and turned onto the Ratcliffe Highway,
walking its full length until he reached Ratcliffe itself. Frost had told him how to find the boardinghouse before they’d left the ship. He’d told Jeremiah to come and visit when he could, and they’d shaken hands and exchanged hearty goodbyes, the hunger for the leaf in their eyes but still a good dose of fellowship in their chests. The five of them had been firm in their friendship: Critchley, Potter, Frost, Attlee, and Arnott. Ransome was another case, a damned idiot hanger-on who was only part of this little group because he’d stumbled on Attlee and Arnott on the island when the two of them had been waiting to meet Critchley, and had refused to leave them. He’d worked out they were up to something, and had become so insistent and annoying that they would have had to murder him to keep him away, and that would have attracted all the wrong kind of attention. Critchley, despite himself, had decided to let the fat idiot into their little secret.

So had Potter and Frost turned on their old friend Critchley? And had it been the leaf that turned them?

At the boardinghouse in Ratcliffe he’d encountered another woman, older than the redhead in the tavern but younger, firmer, and altogether more prepossessing than Mrs. Vermiloe. She’d been mopping the floor of the hallway when he arrived. She wouldn’t let him in while the wet floor dried, although Jeremiah knew this was just a ruse to keep him talking to her for a while, for he saw that same sly smile in her eyes when she caught sight of him, that little spark of hunger which he’d seen so many times before. She laughed and blushed and swirled her hips while they talked, and as much as offered herself to him there and then, though with considerably more wit and discretion than the redheaded girl in the tavern. He was careful to leave the option open, not so much because he desired her but more because he wanted
her to like him and help him and women could turn from giggling admirers to spitting cats in a heartbeat.

He asked where he could find Potter and Frost, and she’d said upstairs, though she didn’t know if they were in, she never heard a squeak out of them night or day, they were the easiest boarders she’d ever had. He’d thanked her and given her half a wink to acknowledge her offer and to leave open his acceptance, and he’d headed up the stairs. He wasn’t scared of confronting his two former friends. Even on his own he was more than their match. But when he entered the room, fear did barge back into his life, a fear as bright and resounding as the terror he’d felt during last night’s vision, its teeth sharp and unceasing.

Frost and Potter were dead on their beds, their faces both in a terrible grimace. Their throats told a savage story, the blood thick and purple on them, a stench already beginning to swell in the space, flies buzzing in anger and hunger. He heard a girl laugh from somewhere in the house, and it was chillingly incongruous, the cold ghost of another world where such violence was an object of mirth.

But most bizarre of all was the sight of Craven—poor, despicable Craven—facedown, his neck purple from the ligature which still twined itself around the top of his shoulders, like a sleeping snake. Craven’s position was in keeping with his name and reputation, but what was more disturbing to Jeremiah was the fact that Craven was there at all. And even while the fear gurgled through him Jeremiah found himself walking over to Frost’s and Potter’s disturbed sea chests, already ransacked but now to be ransacked again, for even in the extremity of surprise and horror Jeremiah Critchley still hoped to find any remnants of leaf among the dead men’s belongings. There were none.

Then he ran out of that place, past the landlady who shouted in anger and disappointment and asked what he thought he was up to. He ran through Ratcliffe, back down the Highway, back down New Gravel Lane, and then into the warren of streets which contained the Pear Tree. He ran through the door and up to his room, and he locked it and he put the chair against it. And there he’d stayed, watching the door, through evening and yesterday and last night and up to this morning and now. Men had come to the door, knocking on it with increasing exasperation and shouting his name, but he’d ignored them. He was the last one alive. They would believe him the killer.

He hasn’t given in to the need to take the leaf since his return, because he fears what he might see. The blood on the walls of the Ratcliffe boardinghouse has already made its own shapes in his mind: here a crow, there a dog, here a ship, and there an incarnadine tree splattered on the white wall of the room above the opened throat of his friend Colby Potter. He fears knowing what the leaf might do to those shapes in his mind, how they might themselves start to swim in the dark beneath the light, and he wonders if he might not go mad.