Hearthstone Cottage

by Frazer Lee

  * * *

  The fog that had lifted on Mike’s descent to the path became first drizzle, then heavy rain for the final leg of his return journey to the cottage. Following the path around the loch, he felt relieved to see a curl of smoke rising from the cottage’s main chimney stack. The rain was mercifully easing off, too. He pressed on, eager to warm his bones by the hearth.

  He pushed the gate open, a slick coating of rain cold against the skin of his hand, and trudged up the path to the front door. It was open, and he kicked off his boots in the lean-to before peeling off his sodden jacket. He carried it with him into the cottage, where the air was pleasantly warm.

  “You look soggy; what took you so long?” Helen said.

  Not much of a greeting after all he had been through. But then again, she couldn’t know, could she?

  “Lost my way in the bloody fog,” Mike answered, hanging his damp jacket on the back of the chair nearest the fireplace. He crossed to the hearth and warmed his hands, which looked pink from the rain and the chill that had accompanied it.

  Helen joined him by the fire. “Didn’t shoot anything?”

  No, but I almost got shot myself, Mike thought grimly.

  Seeing Helen’s impassive expression, he just shrugged and shook his head.

  “Where’s Alex?”

  “He’s outside with Kay. Surprised you didn’t see them on your way in. They’re picking some herbs to have with the grouse.” Helen shot Mike a teasing smile. “He was a bit luckier than you with the hunting, it seems.”

  “Don’t rub it in. I’m bloody knackered.”

  “Aww, has your fragile masculinity been crushed by the failure to hunt and gather?” Helen made babying noises and ruffled his wet hair. He felt like a truant being scolded by his school ma’am. He absentmindedly looked at Helen’s stomach, no doubt warm and cozy beneath her sweater. New life was gestating inside. Mike blinked away unwelcome memories of the trio of puppies gnawing away at Oscar’s stomach cavity. He could almost hear them chewing. Where moments ago he had felt comforted by the warmth of the fire, he was now growing sick from it. His mouth was dry, and he felt suddenly very dizzy. It had been hours since he’d had anything to eat or drink.

  “You all right?” Helen asked. “You look pale.”

  “Just a bit dehydrated, I think.”

  “I’ll get you some water. Unless you want a tea? With sugar? I’ll get that.”

  Mike almost told her that he wanted something stronger, but she would only disapprove. Instead, he sat down beside the fire and cradled his throbbing head in his hands, succumbing to Helen’s mothering of him. She always could make condescension appear to be an act of kindness.

  Mike shrank back into his seat, watching the flames throw vivid little orange sparks up into the chimney. The fire was drawing well, but the wind was picking up outside with the rain and Mike felt a backdraft down the chimney as it jostled with the flames – water, air, and fire battling for supremacy. He glanced up at the mantelpiece and saw the black scrying mirror sitting there in pride of place. It was a black, lidless eye, silently observing the room and everything in it. He shuddered, recalling his nightmare and the unsettling reflections he had seen – or dreamt he had seen – in the obsidian glass. Then Mike’s heart skipped a beat when he heard a whining sound.

  It sounded disquietingly familiar, like the last dying, pleading breath of a wounded animal. He glanced around, looking for the source, expecting to see Oscar on the rug next to him, or worse yet the stag they had left at the roadside after their accident.

  Sudden pressure on his shoulder made him jolt in surprise.

  “Careful! You’ll make me spill it.”

  It was Helen with his tea. Mike heard the whining sound becoming a hiss and realized it was just one of the logs sizzling on the fire. He took the steaming mug from Helen gratefully and blew on the surface of the liquid to cool it a little before taking a sip. It was hot and sweet, and thirst quenching – though in truth it could do with a nip of the village hooch in it. Perhaps he’d sneak a slosh or two of MacGregor’s Death Juice in there when Helen was occupied elsewhere.

  “You’re welcome,” she said, towering over him.

  “Oh, s-sorry, I mean, thanks,” Mike stuttered.

  “You sure you’re okay? You don’t seem with it. What I mean is, you seem less with it than usual.”

  “Cheers,” Mike said before taking another sip of tea. It burned his lips slightly, but he didn’t care. It was bringing him back to life. Antioxidants, milk, and plenty of sugar – not bad medicine, after all. “Did Alex say anything? About the shoot?”

  “Only that you were trigger-happy and scared away all the birds. Honestly, Mike, you are a klutz sometimes.”

  Mike swallowed, and the burning sensation moved to the back of his throat. “No, I mean, did he say anything about how we got separated?”

  “The fog was awful, he said. Those old blokes from the village were looking for you for ages, apparently.”

  “A right couple of old bastards, them,” Mike said and nodded.

  Mike heard Alex’s and Kay’s voices as they entered the kitchen. They must have come in through the conservatory door. He cringed, hearing them kissing wetly. Kay’s whispers and giggles made it clear to Mike what had taken them so long. He looked up at Helen and saw she was blushing slightly. She stood over him, her stomach level with his eyeline. The distance between them felt suddenly vast, and awkward.

  Helen cleared her throat and automatically smoothed down her sweater. “No need to send out a search party, after all,” she exclaimed into the kitchen. “The wanderer has returned.”

  Mike heard more whispering and further giggling from Kay.

  “Ah, the Famous Grouse-Less,” Alex teased as he strode into the living room. “What happened to you, man? We were looking for you for bloody ages.”

  “Well, you didn’t try very hard,” Mike muttered.

  “Try telling that to Jamie and Eddie,” Alex retorted. “They were cursing your name, taking up so much of their precious shooting time.”

  Eddie? Mike flinched. It seemed Alex had well and truly bonded with his co-conspirators.

  “Come off it, mate, they were having just as much fun as you were, trying to put the wind up me in the fog.”

  “What’s that, old son?”

  “Don’t ‘old son’ me. You know full well what I’m talking about. Would have thought you of all people would know how dangerous it is to point a gun at someone in the fog, even if you were only having me on.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Alex began.

  Kay wandered in from the conservatory. “The bird is well and truly in the oven,” she announced. Then, as though sensing the animosity in the room, she asked, “What’s happening?”

  Mike saw Alex open his mouth to speak but got in there before him. “Oh, I’m just asking your boyfriend here why he thought it was funny to turn a grouse shoot into a game of hunt-the-Mike.”

  Alex turned to face Kay. “He’s having one of his paranoid stoner delusional episodes,” he said. “Just ignore him.”

  Helen looked confused and slightly embarrassed. “What happened up there?” she asked.

  Mike’s mind raced. He wanted to say more, to tell her about the dead dog and the terrifying woman killing the triplets. Her knife thrusting in and out, making more holes for maggots. More souls, she had said. The memory of her voice made his head squirm. He wanted to explain how the stone circle had appeared restored and real somehow. Most of all, he needed to unpack his fear at having a shotgun – an actual bloody shotgun, and a loaded one for all he knew – pointed right at him. But the more he tried to find the words to express it all, the quicker they eluded him.

  “Were you…smoking while you were out?” Helen asked, not even bothering to disguise the disapproving tone of her voice.

  “No. No, I wasn
’t,” Mike said.

  His blood was boiling. That was all it was about with Helen. That was all it was ever about with her. Control. She had come on holiday, fully aware she might be pregnant, and had waited until they were all cozied up in the cottage before dropping the bloody incendiary bomb on him. On his life. She didn’t want him to have any fun. If she could have him folding nappies before they even headed home, she would, and Mike was convinced of that.

  He looked into the eyes of each of his friends, and for an instant, he didn’t recognize any of them. Mike saw a trio of people with whom he had nothing in common anymore. Students who just wanted to play at mortgages and baby-boomer, flat-pack cots now that they had graduated. He felt that somehow each of them had mislaid their sense of fun on the motorway hard shoulder on their way to the cottage.

  Or perhaps they had changed long before then, and he hadn’t realized until now.

  Their faces were just pictures in a yearbook, staring at him and judging him. Always bloody well judging him. They had done it all last term, and they were doing it now. The living room felt smaller under their collective gaze. Well, Mike was damned if he was going to be feeling smaller too. In a rush of anger he threw his tea into the fire, mug and all, and stormed out of the room. He stomped upstairs and dug into his bag until he found his stash tin. He checked that his papers and lighter were still tucked inside, then headed back downstairs. Pushing past Alex and Kay, he found the conservatory door was still ajar. As he pushed it open, he heard the crossness in Helen’s voice, tinged with something bordering on concern.

  “Where are you going?” she called after him.

  “For a motherfucking smoke,” Mike replied triumphantly.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mike allowed his anger to lead him around to the rear of the cottage. He paced back and forth through the puddles that had formed near Meggie’s parked car. His brain was burning with fury. Seeing the shelter of the woodpile, he walked over to it and leaned against the pile of logs there, fuming. He folded his arms around himself, as though containing his anger. Truth was, he already felt a bit embarrassed about his outburst. He knew he would have to eat a sizeable portion of humble pie in order to make good with Helen, and then some. She was unforgiving of him at the best of times, and, due in no small measure to the crappy day he had endured, she had just seen him at his probable worst.

  And now, to make matters worse, in her eyes at least, he was smoking.

  Deep down, he knew the real reason why he was feeling so on edge. It was a textbook case of weed withdrawal. What Helen didn’t understand was that he needed oblivion sometimes in the exact same way she needed control. Perhaps that was what had made them a couple in the first place. Opposites attract, and all that. Mike sighed, wondering how their postgrad downtime could turn into such hard work. He pried the lid of his stash tin open and luxuriated in the enticing vapor of its contents. He had just begun rolling a fat blunt when he felt a few droplets of rain on his forehead and hands.

  Damn it.

  It was starting to rain again.

  Mike glanced over to the outbuilding where Meggie kept her studio. The light was on, so she must be inside, working. He didn’t really feel like company – not at all, in point of fact – but he wondered if she might join him for a smoke. It would beat standing out in the rain, trying to keep a soggy spliff alight. Worth a try. He placed his half-built jay back inside the tin and closed the lid. As he sauntered up to the window of the studio, he took a peek inside. Empty. Maybe Meggie was taking a break, or perhaps she had left the light on without thinking about it.

  Not very environmentally friendly of you, Meggie, thought Mike with a smirk.

  He ducked inside, glad to be out of the rain, which began to fall heavier against the window as soon as he was inside.

  He could now smoke, and think, in peace. Placing his stash tin on the desk, Mike glanced idly at the unfinished sketches and watercolors littering the workspace. He sat down in Meggie’s chair and continued rolling his spliff. The chair creaked slightly as he made himself comfortable, as if alerting the studio to his presence as an interloper. Joint built, he twisted the tip and tapped it lightly against the side of the desk in his own, time-honored, ritual. Mike swept away the tobacco remnants from the desk with the flat of his hand, then sparked up.

  The first hit was always the best, he found, and he could feel the tightness in his shoulders dissipating slightly as he exhaled a beautiful plume of gray smoke. It smelled glorious, even better than the scent of a hot meal after a cold day out of doors. Mike chuckled to himself. He knew that in a way, this joint was like comfort food to him. But he also knew it would be swiftly followed by an attack of the munchies. That would be awkward because it would mean going back into the cottage. But at least then he would have his soft shield of smoker’s fug around him. Especially if he smoked another straight after this one.

  He was lost in the relaxing rhythm of these gently unfolding thoughts when he heard a shuffling sound from inside the room. It had come from over by the shelves. In his burgeoning haze, he wondered if it might be a mouse or a rat. He glanced at the floor around him and saw only discarded sheets of paper and pencil shavings lying there. He settled back into his seat and took another deep drag from the blunt.

  The sound came again. The same shuffling but this time accompanied by a strange rattling noise. He stood up on instinct, the joint still held between his forefinger and thumb, and walked over to the shelves from where the sound had come. The shuffling continued sporadically, and it didn’t take long for him to figure out that its source was the small cardboard box that Meggie had placed on the shelf – the one containing the injured bird.

  Seeing the lid of the box move upward suddenly, Mike took a step back. He glanced over his shoulder to see – or, rather, hoping to see – Meggie returning to her studio. But he was on his own. The rattling came again. The bird was stirring; there was no mistaking that. He couldn’t just leave it. What if it had gotten tangled up in there somehow? He held the joint between his lips and took the base of the box in one hand and the lid in the other. Slowly lifting it open so as not to startle the bird, Mike saw its black feathers moving. Once the lid was off, he could see the black orb of the bird’s eye regarding him twitchily.

  “It’s okay, little buddy,” Mike said, exhaling smoke.

  The smoke billowed around the bird, panicking it. Mike placed his hand over the box to try to keep the bird from falling out, but that only seemed to make it more afraid. He felt the scrape of a claw against the palm of his already wounded hand. Worried that it might use its beak on him next, Mike decided there was only one thing for it.

  He reached into the box and clamped his hand around the agitated bird, firmly yet gently as he wanted to avoid applying too much pressure to the bird’s healing wing. He could feel the warmth of the creature against his skin. It was impossibly light and its feathers so delicately soft that he wondered how such a thing could live in the Scottish wilds at all. The bird’s eye regarded him silently, reminding Mike of the dark, polished surface of the scrying mirror above the hearth inside the cottage. He wondered what that little black eye had seen in the bird’s short life so far. Other than Meggie, perhaps he was the only human the bird had seen this close. It was a curious thought, and it made Mike feel more like an alien creature than even the bird was to him. He felt the bird moving against his grip, straining to free itself. It was trying to fly – that was it. Maybe it was healed and just wanted to fly free. He decided to move back to the desk. If he let it go and it fell, at least it would be on the desk and would not fall to the floor.

  After brushing aside some scraps of sketching paper, Mike sat down. The chair creaked in alarm again. His eyes were stinging a little now from the smoke, and he was eager to let go of the feathered bundle so he could remove the joint from his mouth. He rolled the delicate cargo over so the back of his hand was against the desk, then slowly
and deliberately loosened his grip until the bird was lying on its back in his palm. He plucked the joint from his lips with his free hand and placed it carefully on the edge of the desk so it wouldn’t go out.

  The bird shuddered and kicked out with its claws before partially unfurling its wings.

  “Go on, it’s all right,” Mike encouraged. “See if you can stand before you fly again.”

  The bird moved its head from side to side, looking comically like it was attempting to do some sit-ups in the palm of Mike’s hand. Then that shuffling noise came again. Mike was confused. The bird was out of its box now, so how was that sound continuing?

  He realized too late that it was coming from inside the bird’s body.

  It opened its wings, and its little black eyes pulsed with panic. The bird’s stomach opened, leaking blood as a violent, black swarm of flies burst from out of it. Their hideous buzzing wings brushed against Mike’s face as they flew into his eyes and hair. He flailed at them with his hands, almost knocking himself backward off the chair. Turning with the swarm, he saw the flies jostling against each other as they flew toward the open door.

  In a moment, they were gone.

  But in their place he saw another shadow. This time it looked like someone walking past the window. He heard footsteps. Someone was coming.

  He looked down at the bird, which twitched its last and then lay still. He scooped it up, not knowing what else to do other than to get it back inside its box. The bird was a hollow weight now, a vessel of bloodied black feathers. It felt lighter in death than it had in life, and the sensation made Mike feel a little nauseous. He stuffed it back inside the box, blood staining the shredded paper deep red. With trembling fingers, he wrestled the lid back into place. He got up from the desk and crossed to the shelves where he replaced the box.