He was staring down at the sea, choppy gray waves capped with white, rolling in on a clean sandy beach and crashing over rocks that guarded the coastline of a bleak, inhospitable island.
And then he was falling down to the ground beneath. He landed without impact, his body cushioned by pads of soft heather and bracken. Above him a pale sun glared down at him, its white light hurting his eyes. He squeezed them shut and when he opened them again he was staring up at a circular dish filled with electric lights.
He was lying on an operating table, a sharp antiseptic smell filling his nostrils. And he was seven years old again, at his most vulnerable, in hospital for a tonsillectomy, while about him white-clad figures stood watching him, their faces obscured by white masks, but their eyes earnest and threatening. A scalpel hovered in front of his own eyes, then with a swift downwards slash cut a line in his flesh from sternum to pelvis. Hands reached inside him, searching out vital organs. He could feel soft fingers caressing his liver, his spleen, his lungs, his heart.
He could hear a voice, whispering, the sound too muted to be clear, and then many voices, the sounds merging into one long sonorous drone. Finally silence.
Then ‘Take him back.’ Sharp, clipped. An order.
‘Will he return?’ A softer voice, almost female, but not quite.
‘He has no choice. Take the girl.’
And the light was switched off.
In the car Sian relaxed in the seat and leaned back on the headrest, closing her eyes. This was the worst ever. She couldn’t remember ever being this frightened. What ever the creatures were, elementals as Carter had said, or something else entirely, they had awoken in her a deep-seated, almost primeval fear. Somewhere, lodged in her trace memory, was the image of them, dark and scuttling, hiding in shadows, crawling into the light. They were at once foreign yet familiar.
She froze as she heard a soft whispering, like tissue paper tearing. She looked down at her chest. Something was moving underneath her clothes. With trembling fingers she undid the buttons and opened her shirt.
In the expanse of flesh between her bra and the waistband of her skirt, five lumps, no bigger than quails’ eggs, were moving under her skin. And, as she watched, the skin itself was turning gray, translucent, as the lumps moved actively beneath it. Panic surged through her and she prodded one with her finger. At her touch the skin split and a black antennal head forced its way through the bloody hole.
She screamed, but the sound was blocked by a horde of scrabbling creatures chasing the daylight glimpsed through her open mouth. They crawled up her throat, over her tongue, scrambling over her teeth and hanging from her lower lip before dropping to her chest. Within seconds the car was filled with the things as they exploded from every orifice — from her mouth, her ears, forcing their way down her nostrils, crawling out from her anus and, in a cruel mockery of childbirth, pouring from her vagina, ripping through the sheer material of her pan ties.
She struggled and in her panic the small gold cross and chain she wore was torn from her neck.
She reached for the door handle, but as her fingers connected with it the central locking mechanism activated and sealed her into the car. She looked round frantically, hoping to catch a glimpse of Carter through the bushes surrounding the car. ‘Come back!’ her mind screamed. ‘For pity’s sake, Robert, please come back.’ And then she slumped back into the seat as, inch by inch, the beetles devoured her.
He opened his eyes and he was back in the dining room. His body was soaked in sweat, his hair plastered to his scalp. He shook his head, trying to shake away the cobwebs that were draped over his thoughts. Gradually the cobwebs thinned and dispersed as rational thought reestablished itself.
Take the girl. The voice echoed in his thoughts, distant and inhuman. He pushed himself to his feet and raced from the house.
The car was where he had left it. He ran across to it and yanked the door handle.
Locked.
Locked and empty.
Of Sian Davies there was no trace at all.
‘Oh Christ!’ he said, and leaned against the car, his legs weak and trembling. He let his body slide down the metallic paintwork until he was crouching, almost slouching, on the ground. He was going to vomit; he could feel the bile rising in his throat. He retched, and his cell phone began to ring.
He fumbled for the talk button. ‘Yes?’ he choked back what ever was lodged in his throat.
‘It’s Crozier. I told you to report back.’ The impatience, the reprimand, was deliberate.
‘We only spoke a moment ago,’ Carter said, trying to gather his thoughts, wondering how he was going to explain what had happened to Sian.
‘It’s been over four hours, Carter. What the hell’s going on there?’
Carter took the phone away from his ear and stared at it as if it were some strange, alien artifact. Four hours! ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said shakily. ‘I need help.’
‘Details?’ Crozier’s clipped tones were legendary in the Department. He never used politeness when efficiency could do the job in half the time.
Carter was still trying to come to terms with the lost memory of the past four hours but a verbal battle with Crozier was always guaranteed to sharpen his brain. ‘Debrief me later. Just get a team out here as soon as you can.’
There was a slight pause on the other end of the line, and Carter knew he was weighing taking decisive action with a familiar rebuke that would be something like ‘I give the orders around here.’
Carter had to admire Crozier when he said, ‘Very well. Will you be around to brief them?’ Performing his job was more important than point scoring; at least he could give the man grudging respect for that.
‘Yes,’ Robert Carter said wearily. He suddenly felt exhausted, more tired than he had ever felt in his life. ‘I’ll be here.’ He switched off the phone and hugged his knees, lowered his head and closed his eyes.
He was in the same position when the cleanup team arrived an hour later.
CHAPTER THREE
If there was a bleaker, more godforsaken part of the world than Kulsay Island, John Harrison had yet to visit it. Lying three miles off the east coast of Scotland and subject to a ferocious battering by the North Sea, the island was a hard, desolate place, hunched and compact and resolutely self-contained.
As he flew the helicopter in from the mainland he could see the band of empty crofters’ cottages on the south of the island, decaying and rotten, their gray slate roofs gaping with holes, the stone walls, moss covered and crumbling, a testament to the harsh, ripping winds that blew in from the sea, and to the years of neglect. They were falling apart, tumbling down, as if the wretched landscape of the island was reclaiming them as its own. In a field to the right of the cottages were handfuls of scraggy sheep. They looked thin and unkempt, their fleeces matted and tangled, caked with mud. They had defied the odds (and the gods) to survive at all, but Harrison imagined that it was a cruel, grinding existence, trying to find ready grazing in such harsh and unforgiving circumstances.
He was heading to the north end of the island. A group of people had been stranded here as some sort of initiative course. No one had heard anything from the island in two days and the company the group worked for, Waincraft Software, was in a state of panic. The owners of the island had been contacted and Harrison had been dispatched by them to investigate, and if necessary, airlift the group off.