Read Online The Penal Colony by Richard Herley - Free Book Online Page B

Houlihan, then Tompkins, then gone over to Peto,
and so had never even been invited to join the Community or given
Franks a chance to kick him out. Barratt and Tompkins were dead
now, the first murdered by Peto and the second beaten to death by
his own men. Since the present state had been established Martinson
had shown no interest in telling others what to do, though he was
regularly employed by Peto as a bodyguard or to discharge missions,
such as the present one, which contained an element of danger. To
that end Martinson maintained in his hut an alarming array of
weapons: most fearsome, perhaps, was a captured Village crossbow,
one of several built for Franks by Randal Thaine.
    This morning the crossbow had remained
behind. Obie’s brief was simply to try to establish that it was
indeed Houlihan who had taken Billy.
    “See anything?” he asked Martinson.
    “No. We’re going to have to go down.”
    Obie agreed. “Jez,” he said, accepting the
binoculars from Martinson and handing them to Brookes, “you wait
here. If we aren’t come back by noon, go and tell Alex. Right?”
    “Sure thing, Obie.”
    They passed unchallenged among the upper
tombs; Obie even paused to talk to a former towner who had fallen
out with Peto and moved. At the helicopter pad, though, they were
stopped, disarmed, and questioned by three of Houlihan’s retinue,
and only then were they admitted to the tower.
    The double oak doors at the main entrance
were set at the top of a low flight of reinforced concrete steps.
Painted bright green, the woodwork was now flaking, the bare
patches weathering to silvery grey. Inside the threshold was a
storm lobby, and beyond this lay the large ground-floor room which
had been the communications centre. Two doors led off to the
kitchen and mess; an iron staircase gave access to the upper
floors. Under the staircase, an open hatchway led down to the
cellar.
    “Wait here,” said McGrath, one of the guards.
“I’ll get Himself.”
    Obie had not been inside the lighthouse for
three months, not since the grazing agreement had been reached.
Nothing much seemed to have changed.
    None of the windows, set deep in the
thickness of the walls, had more than half a pane of double glazing
left, and the steel shutters had gone. There was nothing to keep
out the ferocious northerly and westerly gales of winter: the
cellar, its drainage blocked, was almost permanently flooded with
black bilge. The smell, together with the universal stink of stale
fulmar oil, pervaded the whole building. Obie would have known
where he was with his eyes closed.
    The lighthouse also smelled of burnt wood;
the white-painted interior walls had been scorched and blackened by
a series of both accidental and wanton fires. Houlihan’s personal
apartments, though, were said to be relatively habitable. He
occupied the two floors above this one.
    “Yes?” said Feely, appearing on the
staircase.
    “We want to talk to Houlihan,” Obie said.
    “Well you can’t.”
    Feely was one of the few lighthousers who
shaved, using a cutthroat razor which he honed on his belt. Like
Martinson, and Houlihan himself, he was a founder member, a child
killer who had almost been too old for Category Z. What remained of
his hair was grey. He had lost his dentures last year, so that he
could no longer eat raw meat and had become virtually dependent on
cooking. That meant he was dependent on Houlihan, since Franks
wouldn’t have him in the Village, Peto hated his guts, and wild men
seldom had the means or opportunity to cook their food. Feely had
been a professor or something on the mainland. He was clever. He
was also a homosexual by preference. Obie despised him.
    “It’s important,” Obie said.
    “If Peto wants to talk, he can come himself.
Whatever you’ve got to say, you can say to me.”
    Obie glanced at Martinson, who gave a slight
shrug.
    “It’s just,” Obie began, “it’s just that
Alex’s billy has