by Ellen Datlow
“You’re Haddie Ragnar.”
“I am.”
“I’m Ellie Templeton.”
“You don’t need a formal introduction to ask for fresh towels or a roll of toilet paper.”
Ellie stepped fully into the room. “I think we might know each other?”
The other woman inclined her head, waiting for an explanation.
“When I was a girl, I came here.”
“Okay.”
Ellie blurted the story out in the rush of a few minutes. Then she was quiet for a beat before saying, “It was you, wasn’t it? You were the girl? At the Witch’s Cauldron?”
“It was.” She took a deep drag and blew out a cloud of smoke that ghosted around her. “I was.”
“I’m sorry… I can’t tell you how happy I am… You don’t know how sick I’ve felt…” She suddenly seemed unable to pin words together.
“Sick? Hmm.” Haddie danced her cigarette around in the air as if to trace out an explanation with the smoke. “Way I remember it, it happened a little differently, though.”
Ellie took another step forward. “Can I buy you a coffee?”
“Grill’s closed through the winter.” Haddie reached into her cardigan and pulled out a flask and set it on the table and indicated Ellie should take a seat. “So this’ll have to do.”
* * *
Ellie ran away. She ran back through the fog, back through the woods, past the ruins, and eventually into the yard of their vacation rental, where her parents loaded their suitcases into the trunk of the car.
She had left the girl behind. An island girl. Haddie. That was her name.
Ellie had slapped her and the girl lost her footing and slipped and skidded and fell. And now here Ellie was, clinging to her father’s leg as he said, “Was it a fun vacation?”
“Yes. But I’m ready to go home.”
“Me too,” he said, and then reached into the pocket of his jacket and offered her something. “I got you this. A souvenir.” It was one of the gull totems, the wooden carvings she had admired in the shop near the wharf. “So you’ll always remember.”
Ellie took it and her mother said, “Who was that girl you were playing with?”
“Nobody,” Ellie said.
She was already trying to shove the memory deep into a closet of her mind. To forget about the girl. To forget about what happened. It hadn’t seemed real, so she made it unreal.
What she didn’t know then—or all this time later—was that the girl, Haddie, had not fallen into the water. She caught herself. She clung by her fingers to a stone ledge. The waves boomed below her and wetted her shoes. But she was very much alive.
* * *
In the kitchen at the inn, Haddie brought down another coffee mug from the cupboard—and poured the flask into it. “You can’t trust memory. Life’s taught me that much.” In her version of that morning, they had paused their game in the ruins—and Ellie had taken off her blindfold as the two of them explored—and from there they walked out onto the Witch’s Cauldron. Haddie slipped and fell, but it was the wind that did it. “Not you, Ellie. Not that I recall.”
“I should have tried to help you.”
“It’s hard to blame a child,” Haddie said and toasted the flask. “Besides. I’m still here.”
Ellie cupped both hands around the mug and brought it to her mouth. The liquor was spicy and lit a candle-flame in her stomach. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that.”
There was a flicker of a smile. “If you can call it living. But there’s always a spring that follows winter. A fat time after the thin time. That’s what keeps me going. That’s what keeps us all going.” She wore earrings, Ellie noticed, carved in the shapes of gull heads. They swung and dangled as she spoke as if riding invisible currents of air.
“Health to follow sickness?” Ellie said, and Haddie nodded and said, “Let’s hope.”
Ellie almost told her that she had been carrying this wound around with her ever since then, that she became a crime reporter because of Haddie, became a person obsessed with investigating secrets and dark impulses. And for her entire career, it’s been a necessary comfort to take the microscope away from herself and analyze other horrors.
But she didn’t say any of this. Because she had always been more of a writer than a talker. “There was a body,” she said instead.
“What’s that about a body?”
“Multiple bodies, actually. They wash up. On the coast of Maine. Sometimes it’s just a leg. Sometimes an arm.”
“Okay.”
“A few days ago, there was a hand. Looked like a shark had chewed it up and spit it out. It had something in its palm.” She reached into her jacket pocket and removed the gull totem she had received so many years ago from her father. When she set it on the table, there was a clunk that made its weight seem heavier than it was. “It was a gull totem. Just like this one. The one my father gave me as a souvenir when we visited.”
“So that’s why you’re really here, then?”
“I studied the tide charts.”
“What’s your theory? An old sad lady with cancer is chucking people in the drink?” She let out a wheezy laugh.
“No. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know much, do you? Maybe you should have been a fiction writer instead? Then you can bend the truth however you want it.”
“There was a party last night,” she said.
Haddie barely had any eyebrows left. They were more like faint feathers. But she raised them now. “What’s that?”
“You went to a party last night? What was it for?”
“How do you know about a party?”
“Your mother told me,” Ellie lied.
Haddie studied her a long few seconds before dropping the spent butt of her cigarette into the mug. “That old bat is losing her mind. She’ll be telling people her social security number and bank account next.”
“What was it for? The party?”
“Solstice of course. The most important holiday of the year.”
* * *
Ellie parked in the weed-choked driveway. She had driven past the overgrown lot twice, but now she was certain this was it, the vacation home where she had stayed as a child. The windows were gone and gulls swooped in and out. The cedar shingles had fallen off in places like old teeth. A tree grew through the roof.
She felt strangely light and warm—and not just from the whiskey— when she stepped out of the car. A smile teased the edges of her lips.
Her feet barely seemed to tap the ground before springing her forward. She had been unburdened. She peered through the front door and glass-fanged windows. She sat on the porch but felt as though maybe there was no real reason for her to be here anymore. The plain gray light of day washed away her sense of urgency. What mystery was she even trying to solve anymore? Was it her own guilt, now allayed, or the severed hand on the beach that had brought her here? Any deadline she had in her mind seemed to be dissolving by the second.
Then she pulled a book from her backpack to review, and that old feeling soaked into her again. The nerve-shredding anxiety she had experienced on the beach when she saw the totem clutched in the sea-rotten hand. Early Tales of Gull Island, the cover read. She thumbed through its pages, learning about how settlers crashed a boat against these shores one brutal winter. And here they were stranded for several dark, cold months as squall after squall rolled in off the ocean, battering them. Their provisions ran out and the fish wouldn’t bite and so they ate one of their own. A woman they had brought over as a servant. Their camp overlooked the Witch’s Cauldron, and that is where they threw her bones when they finished with her.
It was said that she still haunts the island, that the cauldron became an extension of her, like a terrible gaping throat. And it’s in the winter—when the wind sharpened with ice, when the shadows lengthened and the island was at its most desperate—that her spirit grew especially tempestuous. The ocean won’t give the islanders fish or l
obster or scallops if they don’t give back to it.
The hag can only be sated when fed. She gave to the island and now the island must give to her. The solstice was a platter upon which sacrifice must be served.
Ellie closed the book with a thump. Her legs were numbing in the cold and she thought to stretch them in a hike through the woods. Beneath the trees all sound hushed. She could see the crowns of the pine and hemlock trees shaking with the wind, but she felt protected here. The light was dim and her footsteps hushed by the needles carpeting the ground.
After two hundred yards of clambering over logs and kicking through dried tangles of ferns, she came upon the ruins. They were roofless. The stone walls had crumbled unevenly, but still patterned out a clear collection of dwellings with sunken foundations. There was a staircase that rose to nowhere and another that descended into the dark. She moved among the buildings and discovered a round stone recession, what she assumed to be a well, but when she looked into its shadow-thick bottom she gasped at the sight of two black eyes gleaming back at her.
Her vision took a moment to adjust—and then the doe solidified below. It had fallen down and broken its rear leg. When the deer tried to stand, the joint bent wrongly. A cry sounded, a rasping whine like metal drawn across a file. There was corn and hay strewn about— both below and above—and around the same time Ellie recognized this was a baited trap, she heard a crackling in the woods behind her.
Someone was coming.
She ducked and slunk over to the stairs she had spotted earlier, hurrying down into the shadows herself, where her nose twitched from the mildew. There were ciphers etched into the stone here. Scars of the past. Glyphs that told a story she didn’t quite understand, but seemed to indicate a story of solstice and sacrifice.
A minute later the light shuttered as someone passed by overhead. She only caught a flash, but that was enough to recognize the big body of Thatcher.
She could hear his heavy footsteps approach the deer, and she crept up a few paces and peered over the lip of the foundation and watched him unspool a rope and knot it swiftly into a kind of noose. He lowered it down and then yanked up. The deer’s hooves clacked and skittered against the stone when he fished it out—and then stilled it with a jab of his filet knife. There was a soft mewl, and then silence.
After a minute, he hefted the deer onto his shoulder and started through the brush, toward the treeline, where the forest gave way to the basalt cliffs and the ocean beyond.
She snuck after him, staying low. Blood oozed down his back when he stood at the edge of the Witch’s Cauldron. He didn’t fling the deer carcass so much as let it slip off his shoulder and into the roiling surf.
* * *
The clouds were thickening and dropped thick flakes that the windshield wipers sloshed arcs through. Her car came around the bend, and the road sloped down toward the harbor, where she saw— as big as a building—the docked ferry.
A ferry that shouldn’t be here. She said as much when she parked out front and hurried up the steps of the inn and found the old woman seated at the front desk. “There’s a Nor’easter coming,” she said. “Captain decided it wasn’t worth the trip.”
“I put my daughter on board that ferry. It was supposed to take her to the mainland. My husband was waiting for her.”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with me.”
“My daughter would have come here. She would have asked about me. She would have gone to our room.”
“What daughter?”
“The daughter I had with me. Right here. When I checked in with you.”
“You never checked in with no daughter.”
“I did,” Ellie said at a shout. “I—what are you even talking about? You’re not making sense.”
“You’re not making sense. I remember it like it was yesterday, because it was.”
“She was right here.”
“You were right here. But not with any daughter. No, miss.”
Ellie knew she needed to stay calm, to think rationally, to remember what Haddie said earlier about her mother’s mind fraying at the edges. The old woman had probably just forgotten. Ellie herself had lost—seemingly—the memory of what happened to her as a child, so couldn’t this woman conceivably lose what happened to her yesterday?
“Where’s your daughter? Where’s Haddie?”
“Oh, now it’s my daughter you want, is it?”
“Where is she?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
The old woman’s voice grew severe. Her lips peeled back to reveal a gray, uneven line of teeth. “You tourists. You come here and you think you can tell us what’s what. I’ve seen it my whole life. You come here and you use us. You use the island. You wring all the pleasure from it like a wine-sopped dishrag. Then you leave.” Her eyes went someplace faraway and her voice grew sad and thoughtful. “But we need you to come back.”
She focused her eyes on Ellie again and flicked her hand dismissively, as if to say away with you. “Because we use you just as you use us. We’ll keep using you. Without you, the island starves.”
* * *
Her phone wouldn’t work. She punched her thumb at the cracked screen and a few shards stuck to her. She tried voice commands. She tried powering on and off. It wasn’t just the signal—spotty yesterday, gone today, maybe interrupted by the rising storm—it was the phone itself, broken after being dropped. Dropped by her daughter. Her daughter had been here. Her daughter was here.
She checked every room in the inn, with the old woman pacing her and berating her. She ran down to the ferry and—as it sloshed in its moorings—walked its empty deck and checked its cabin. There was no one to be seen in the harbor and no lights on in any of the windows when she walked along the quay and pounded on doors.
She tried the back door to the library and the wind ripped the knob out of her hand. She rushed inside. Hundreds of pages stirred at once as the wind bullied its way through the shelves. Origami gulls—hung from fishing line—wobbled from the ceiling.
She left and jogged the rest of the way to the inn. Along the shore, waves crashed like thunder. The wind carried sharp drops of sleet in it and knocked the trees into a frenzy. At the inn, she found the old woman gone and the phone behind the front desk dead. From her purse she dug out her prescription bottle and shook it with a rattle. Only three pills left. She took them all.
* * *
Night fell. The storm worsened. Silver stripes of snow collected in the cracks of rocks, the bark of trees. Ellie stood at the lip of the Witch’s Cauldron, because this time she would be the one who waited, not the one lured. There was more than once that she doubted herself—with the night pressing in all around her and the pills fizzing in her veins—wondering whether her mind was broken, if her memories were as confused as the swirling dark. Who knew what was real anymore? Maybe she didn’t have a daughter. Maybe she didn’t have a husband or a career either. Maybe she had been the one who had fallen into the Witch’s Cauldron all those years ago.
But then a figure came out of the woods. A shadow bleeding out of the shadows. Wearing a bone-white gull mask.
Ellie’s whole body shook, soaked and chilled, her teeth chattering so hard she felt they might crack. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…” she said, and the figure paused at her voice and tipped her head and yanked at a rope.
And out of the trees followed her daughter, Lyra. Her wrists bound and her mouth gagged. Her hair was a damp, seaweedy mop. Any tears she shed were lost to the sleet melting down her face.
Ellie stepped forward and said, “Please.” In that one word trying to say, She didn’t do anything, and, I’m the reason we’re here, and, Stop acting like a crazy person all at once.
Haddie pulled off her mask. Her eyes were black hollows. Her skin looked so insubstantial it might have been painted over bone. She told Ellie the rest of their story then. About how, so many years ago, after she fell, she managed to curl up on a ledge, but found herself trapped, unable to
climb out of the cauldron. It was a day later that someone found her. Half-dead from hypothermia. “Maybe you think I deserved it. Because I brought you here. Because I tried to make you fall. But I didn’t have a choice. She made me.” With the utterance of that word—she—Haddie gestured toward the cauldron. The hag haunted her, just as she haunted them all, demanding to be fed.
“I know you think that’s true,” Ellie said. “But it’s not.”
The waves crashed so hard the stone below them vibrated.
“You think I’m terrible. But after I fell, you left me. You left me to die. You’re no better.”
Ellie risked getting closer, and closer still, small steps as she reached out her arms pleadingly. “It’s like you said. We were just girls.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you before. But maybe I want to hurt you now.”
“This isn’t real. You don’t have to—”
“Did you not see us? Did you not take a look at the people who live here? We’re sick. The island is starving. If we don’t—”
Before she could finish, Ellie lunged and grabbed hold of her daughter. She yanked at one of the girl’s arms, while Haddie snatched at the other, with Lyra screaming between them.
Near the edge of the cliff, Haddie lost her grip, but recovered by staggering forward, dropping Ellie with a tackle. “She’s hungry!”
Ellie fought for control—and swung around—and their entangled momentum carried them toward the chasm. They threw jabs, ripped at each other’s hair, rolled over, and then over again, and over once more. And here—at the edge of the cauldron—Haddie slid over.
For a second she seemed gone. Lost to the seething bowl of whitewater. But when Ellie leaned forward, she saw the woman dangling, her arm curled around a knob of rock.
She didn’t help before, but she would now. She would save Haddie, and somehow they would put the past and this night behind them. “Come on.” She reached for Haddie, seizing her wrist. “Take hold of me. I’ve got you.”