"Pig Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hayder Mo)

6

I crossed the clipped lawn in silence and set off along a small path that passed the backs of the cottages. Everything was neat and ordered — wheelie-bins lined up neatly against walls, a large recycling bin with flies circling its opening, and a shed where a ride-on mower sat with its bonnet folded open, piles of yellow gas tanks stacked beyond it. Nothing odd there. The path left the cottages, entered the trees. I could feel in the back of my legs that the land had begun to climb slightly.

Over the years I'd done a lot of work in the States, trailing evangelists, watching mad-haired women in housecoats draw UFOs in trailerpark dust — and that morning on Pig Island I was suddenly reminded of a wood I'd visited on that long trip. It was in Louisiana, just outside Baton Rouge, and I was interested because the local residents had had the shits put up them by someone sneaking into the wood at night and decorating all the trees for a half a square mile with tiny, ruby-eyed voodoo dolls. I only found out later that a killer had been operating in those woods at the same time. A killer of children. No one ever worked out for sure if the dolls were connected with the murders, or if they were completely coincidental, but they stuck with me. From then on I couldn't go into woods anywhere on the planet without remembering the red points of light reflected in their eyes, and wondering if the killer had put them there — or if he'd been watching me that day as I walked around. It all came back to me now, like a shiver: the whisper of Spanish moss and live oak, the faint twang of a stringed instrument.

I hesitated, feeling the hair go up on the back of my neck, and turned slightly to look back. Only a few yards below me Blake had appeared silently on the path. His hand was up in a friendly wave.

'Hi, Joe. Hi. Good to see you.' He flashed me his ratty, lopsided smile. 'Do you recall, Joe, I asked you to wait on the green?' He laughed. 'Didn't I ask you to wait? Didn't I?'

I wanted to grin back, laugh, maybe slap him on the back like a buddy and say, 'Yeah, but you didn't really expect me to wait, did you? You set a test like that, what do you expect?' and that was nearly what I did. But the professional came back at me: Don't bollix it up, Oakesy, old mate.

'I thought you'd forgotten.'

He wagged his finger. 'You'll find we're very friendly, very friendly folk here at the Psychogenic Healing Ministries, Joe, but please believe that we have rules for your own protection.' He raised his eyebrows and flashed me another smile. 'We do it because we care, Joe. We want you to enjoy your time here, not regret it. Now, won't you join me for lunch?'

He led me back towards the cottages, his hands outstretched to show me the community — like he was trying to sell it to me. 'We'd like to get to know you,' he said, grinning over his shoulder, as we came back to the green and crossed it. He slipped down a path that led along the side of the breezeblock building, still speaking over his shoulder. 'We'd like you to stay with us and to get to know us. We want you to feel you're part of our family.' At the head of the path he paused, holding out his hand with a theatrical flourish. 'This way,' he said, with a wink — as if to say, 'I just know you're going to LOVE this!'

I stepped forward and turned the corner and saw, arranged at two trestle tables, thirty faces gleaming up at me. Dove's followers. One or two of them half rose from their seats, grinning broadly, not sure what the etiquette was — and from somewhere at the back someone applauded timidly. The tables were loaded down with food; a breeze moved among it, lifting festively coloured napkins and tablecloths, ruffling blouses and rocking the massive enthusiastic sign strung above their heads: 'WELCOME TO CUAGACHEILEAN!!!!'

'Joe,' Blake said, holding out his hand to indicate the diners, 'Joe Oakes. Meet the Psychogenic Healing Ministries. Welcome to our family!'

It was probably only then that I really believed no one on Pig Island had linked me to Joe Finn of twenty years ago, the great nemesis of Malachi Dove.

Everyone knows the story about Aleister Crowley, right? The one about when the 'Great Beast' Crowley tried to raise Pan? Well, it's dead simple. It goes like this: Crowley's disciples locked him and his son, McAleister, in a room at the top of a Parisian hotel, promising that under no circumstances would they re-enter the room until morning, whatever noises they heard. They waited downstairs, huddled together and wrapped in blankets because the hotel had gone inexplicably cold. All night they listened in horror as the ritual upstairs unfolded in a series of bangs, shouts and splintering of wood. Usual shite. At last, at daybreak, when silence had fallen, they ventured cautiously upstairs to find the door locked, the room silent. When they broke down the door they saw Crowley's ritual had been a success. His son McAleister lay dead at one side of the room and on the other crouched Crowley, naked, bloodied and gibbering. He needed four months in a lunatic asylum before he could speak again.

Well, it's famous, as stories go. Only problem is, it didn't happen. It's just a myth, just part of Crowley's impulse for self-promotion and showmanship. That's what Satanists are, in general — a bunch of theatrical types whose main aim, IMHO, is to get a crafty shag. So what was I expecting of the Psychogenic Healing Ministries? I can't remember exactly — but probably the usual shite: Gothic robes, altar rites, chanting in the trees at sundown. What I didn't expect were these ordinary, mostly middle-class people, dressed, on the whole, like they were off for a spot of shopping on a Saturday afternoon.

'You see, Joe, we're quite normal,' said Blake, showing me to my seat. 'We're not going to eat you!'

'No,' laughed one of the other diners. 'Or try to convert you!'

And that was supposed to be the first impression I got — normality and sunny wholesomeness through and through, from the gingham tablecloth to the homey food: thick-crusted quiches sprinkled with chives, misshapen pork pies, large institutional metal bowls of potato salad. There was even wine in cloudy-looking carafes placed at intervals down the table, and everywhere I looked I saw pleasant-faced people grinning back at me, sticking out their hands and saying, 'Hi, Joe!' But no matter what they did, I couldn't help it, that REM song kept chuntering away through the old grey matter: 'Shiny happy people'. Something a bit sinister about anyone that happy… 'Shiny happy people'. And the fucking sunshine, too. Sunshine in a bottle. That was what they wanted me to think.

What they were doing was staging this totally elaborate game of musical chairs. My neighbour kept changing every ten minutes. Everyone who sat next to me did this dead intense PR job on the community, working their nuts off to tell me about how much hard work went into maintaining the Positive Living Centre, how much love and honest brain-power had gone into Cuagach Eilean.

'Everything's done with total, like, sensitivity to the environment — we recycle, don't use pesticides or herbicides, we celebrate what Gaia and the Lord give us through Cuagach Eilean. We want to repay them in some small way. Those trees over there? The tall ones? Planted by us.'

'The more we love the soil the more it repays us. We grow all our own fruit and vegetables. If I say it myself, when it comes to size and taste our vegetables can give Findhorn's a run for their money.'

'See the refectory building? I made the windows. I was a carpenter by trade before I came here, through God's grace. It's all timber from renewable sources — some of it from Cuagach herself. I'm working on new doors for the cottages now.'

There was a tall African guy in a dashiki, who told me he'd arrived in England as a missionary to spread the word of the Lord to the British: 'This proud nation that has forgotten God.' (Get that? A Nigerian bringing Christianity to us — what a turn of the tables is that?) But no one had mentioned Dove's name yet, which I thought was kind of odd. I waited long enough so that when I spoke it'd sound like normal curiosity. Then I said, 'What happened to your founder, Malachi Dove? I don't see him here.'

The missionary was smiling at me, and when I said the name his smile got a little fixed, his eyes a little distant. But he didn't stop beaming. 'He's gone,' he said, with a fake cheerfulness. 'He left years ago. He lost his way.'

'Suicide,' I said. 'Story goes he had a thing about suicide.'

He didn't blink. The smile got tighter, wider. 'He's gone,' he repeated. 'Long time now. Lost his way.'

'Thank you for asking about Malachi.' Blake was suddenly at my side. He put a hand on my elbow to turn me away from the missionary. 'Our founder, Malachi, the messenger. We hold his name dear, though many have forgotten it.'

'I did some homework and seems like he topped himself.' I looked across the table at the bloodless faces of the women eating, one of them methodically working a piece of gristle out of her teeth with a broken fingernail. 'Can't think why. On this Paradise.'

'No, no, no.' He flashed me that cookie-cutter smile — the one the missionary had just wheeled out for me. 'Our founder is not yet with the Lord.'

I paused. Now this was interesting. 'He's alive?'

'Oh, yes.'

'Then where the hell-' I stopped. 'Then where is he?'

'He's — he's gone. Gone, a long time ago.'

'Where? New Mexico?'

Silence.

'London?'

'Gone,' he repeated, the smile fixed, a veil coming down behind his eyes. 'Thank you, Joe, for your interest. In God's good time I will tell you all you wish to know about Malachi Dove. All in God's good time.'

While the sun crossed the zenith and the shadows of the trees on the cliffs moved like the hands on a clock, I met at least half of the community: big-chested men in denim smocks and Birkenstocks, who put their heads sympathetically on one side when they spoke; an elderly ex-professor of theology in wire-framed glasses, who had located the fresh-water well they used and created the pumping system that fed the community; serious-faced girl students in flowery skirts, who could talk intensely for hours about the theory behind the Psychogenic Healing Ministries.

I've got a trick, a way of nodding and keeping up the small-talk while another part of me detaches and floats free. I was smiling and nodding but inside I was off, unravelling what Blake had said: Malachi not dead. Was that why I still had my peace of mind? How had he just slipped off the radar like that? If he'd started up another ministry somewhere else I'd have known about it. I thought of all the places he could have gone, the connections he had. He was from London. Weird if he'd been living in the same town as me for the last twenty years.

Whatever had happened to their founder it wasn't on the minds of the Psychogenic Healing Ministries members. Once you tuned into it, it was as plain as anything. There was something else happening here. There was a division. Trouble in Paradise.

At the far end of the table a group of about eight people sat morosely, not making the effort to come and introduce themselves. I noticed them whispering nervously among themselves, and some couldn't resist glancing over their shoulders up at the cliff when they thought I wasn't watching. Blake saw I'd clocked them. He took his glass, patted my arm, and said, 'Come on. Let me introduce you to the Garricks. It'll have to happen sooner or later.'

Benjamin Garrick, the centre's treasurer, was a tall, pinched-looking man with a severe haircut and a buttoned-up grey shirt. His wife, who sat to his right, was big-boned, man-faced, dressed in a kingfisher blue kaftan and headscarf, gingerish ringlets peeking from the headscarf. They nodded, they greeted me, but I wasn't welcome. You could just tell. Susan Garrick especially would've liked to see me dead. She sat stiffly, pointedly averting her eyes, while her husband gave me stilted details of the community's financial situation, saying nothing, until about five minutes into the conversation she lowered her fork and sniffed the air. 'It's a southerly,' she said, the ringlets shivering and bouncing. 'We shouldn't have come out here if there was a southerly due.'

'Not now,' muttered a nearby woman in a battered straw boater.

Benjamin Garrick dropped his face, and subtly covered his mouth with his napkin, murmuring under his breath, 'Darling, let Blake deal with that.'

But she'd started something. Out of the corner of my eye I could see other women making faces and wrinkling their noses, one or two turning so their backs faced the cliff. I put down my fork and sniffed the air. There it was — the smell of something rotten. Dying vegetation? Or the community's septic tank? It was unmistakable — the smell that is the purest distillation of sickness and death. I thought about the rotting meat clotted behind the outlet pipe.

At the tables one or two of the women had pushed away their plates, others sat with unhappy expressions, trying to eat their potato salad. One pulled out a handkerchief and covered her nose.

'Hey,' said Blake, leaning over to them, using his knife to indicate their plates. He continued chewing, giving them a meaningful nod. They hesitated, and after a few seconds, wan expressions on their faces, bravely picked up their forks and pushed some food into their mouths, looking down at their plates as they chewed.

'What can you smell?' I said, leaning past Garrick so I could see his wife.

She shook her head and pinched her nose, glancing at Blake and muttering, 'Nothing, absolutely nothing,' under her breath.

'What is it?' I asked again, my eyes straying up to the clifftop where the sun was so strong it cut out the shapes of individual leaves, like cacti in the desert. 'Tell me.'

'All in good time,' Blake said, flashing me his reassuring smile. He lifted a carafe. 'More wine? We want you to enjoy yourself.'

'What's at the top of the cliff?' I said. 'I'll enjoy myself more if you tell me what you're all staring at.'

'You see?' Susan Garrick said abruptly, pushing back her chair and standing, her eyes locked on Blake. 'I told you he'd interfere. That's what journalists do. He's just going to tempt the-'

'That's enough, Susan,' said Blake. 'Hold your counsel.'

Benjamin put a hand on his wife's arm, drew her back to her seat. Slowly she subsided into the chair, staring red-faced at Blake as if she hated him more than anything in the world.

'Now,' Blake said with a smile, taking my arm and raising me kind of forcefully to my feet, 'come along, Joe. Let's show you the rest of our Paradise.'