Free The Colony by F.G. Cottam

Hope, and he had no fucking idea what that might be except for its apparent fidelity to a period theme, he would have no choice but to work out for his lonely old self.
    Was he scared? Yes and no.
    He was not unaware of the wider imperatives of the world. He knew about hype and sensationalism and the urge for publicity and vindication that would fuel a media mogul such as Alexander McIntyre in pursuing a project such as this. The stakes were vast. He had worked briefly as a bodyguard for a major Hollywood player and seen up close what megalomania could do to distort the values and perceptions of a man at the centre of things and addicted to remaining there.
    What if New Hope Island produced nothing of interest? What if the wind scoured topology surrendered no new clues as to what had happened to its vanished inhabitants? Would McIntyre tolerate that? Could he endure such a crushing anti-climax to his expedition? Probably not, was the answer. He would fabricate things, wouldn’t he? He would conjure and invent them to provide a world hungry for sensation with what it craved most from his investigation of the great unsolved enigma.
    That was possibly what he, Napier, had experienced. It was just conceivable. It was more plausible physically than any other explanation he could think of. McIntyre hoped for revelations but in their absence had a stock of special effects to fool the world into believing along with him in some paranormal phenomena, something terrifying and malevolent involving ghosts and their attendant paraphernalia. He hoped something real would manifest itself. If it did not, these tricks would be used and interpreted as hard evidence of something other-worldly. They would insure he would not face ridicule.
    Old folk songs mordantly sung at sunset by singers who weren’t there and clay pipes smoked by phantoms were probably only the start of things. There would be wraiths in moonlight, the weeping of infants carried on a midnight wind. There would be the creak of spectral vessels approaching the shore. It would scare the shit out of the assembled experts and their contagious fear would afflict the readers of McIntyre’s paper as they shuddered, reading it over their bowls of muesli or aboard their commuter trains on the way to work.
    It was the most plausible explanation. It was quite a seductive theory. He had experienced only the tentative rehearsals for the bogus haunting to come. McIntyre had employed a crack team of special effects people and they were already secretly occupying the island, perfecting their smaller turns and preparing the larger set-pieces for when the show properly began.
    It was always tempting to believe what was rational. The human mind was too tidy for ready acceptance of the inexplicable. What was inexplicable generally became unpredictable and from there it was a very short step indeed to uncontrollable. People liked to be in control. It was a lot safer than the alternative. And they liked to be able to determine events for themselves. Surprises, once a person achieved adulthood, were almost always of the unpleasant variety.
    But despite agreeing intellectually with all of this, Napier did not really buy the plausible explanation for the mysterious oddities he had heard and smelled and seen and touched since arriving on New Hope Island. In his past, before he lost his self-respect and his professional status in the world, he had been a highly trained and formidable soldier; an expert at tracking and concealment, someone who could live covertly in hostile terrain for as long as a mission took to successfully complete.
    Blake and the Seasick Four were the only other human beings on the island. If it had any other mortal inhabitants, he would have detected the evidence of their presence by now. He would have sensed their spoor, even if they hid themselves, in the manner of the predator he used to be. He was certain of this, even if it was not a terribly comfortable conclusion to have