Hearthstone Cottage

by Frazer Lee

  “Helen, please,” he protested.

  She now had such a tight grip on him that he was finding it difficult to breathe. Mike tried to brace himself by shoving his hands beneath the pillows, but the pull of Helen’s body was simply too great for him to overcome. His lower vertebrae made a hideous cracking sound, and he felt a hot sting of agony in the small of his back.

  All the while, Helen’s laughter became shriller. It sounded like the laughter of the phantom child that had awoken him. Mike bit down on his lower lip, hoping against hope that he was still asleep – and that this was just another of his horrific nightmares. But as Helen licked the blood from his lip, laughing horribly, he feared he was not going to wake up from this one.

  Then the pressure eased, and Mike was able to breathe again. The rhythm of Helen’s body subsided, giving way to a pleasant rocking motion.

  “Fuck me,” she sighed. “That’s what you want to do, isn’t it, Mikey? That’s all you ever really want to do.” But disturbingly the voice was no longer Helen’s.

  He saw another flash of red and recoiled, thinking there was more blood on the pillow. But then he saw locks of red hair. He was not sleeping with Helen. It was Meggie who now cleaved to him as he thrusted into her on top of the bedsheets. She looked up at him with twinkling eyes. Mimicking Helen’s voice, she whispered, “We can try again, Mikey.”

  Mike held her wrists down on the bed and tried to pull away from her. But her legs were still clamped around his back.

  “Let me go, witch,” he gasped.

  Meggie burst out laughing. The sound, a cruel mockery of his discomfort, made him wince. His arousal had diminished, leaving only a sense of confusion, and despair. He gritted his teeth and barked his frustration into the pillow. Then he felt Meggie begin to struggle beneath him. Her legs fell away, relieving the pressure from his spine. He pushed down on her wrists and lifted his upper body from hers.

  “Where’s Helen?” he shouted at her. “What have you done with her?”

  The struggling form beneath him spat something that sounded like his name.

  “Get off me,” Meggie said, her voice sounding weird now. “Get off me!”

  He let go of one of her wrists, feeling ashamed of his anger. She thrashed out with her free hand and scratched him across the face.

  “What did you—” he began and then realized his mistake.

  The terrified, angry face looking up at him was not Meggie’s or Helen’s.

  It was Kay’s.

  “Oh my god,” Mike said, jolting back from her. He scrambled back across the bed and saw now that it was Alex and Kay’s bed, not his. “Oh my god, I’m sorry, so sorry.”

  He tumbled off the mattress and stood up. He was still partly clothed, at least. But how had he come to be in the wrong room? He held a hand up to Kay, hoping she would give him a moment to try to explain himself. But he didn’t even know where to begin. Sleepwalking, that was it. He had been sleepwalking again. Kay screamed something unintelligible at him, and he began backing away from the confusion of sound and fury, still holding a placatory hand up in the air.

  The bedroom door opened, and Mike backed into whoever had entered the room. For a split second, he imagined he might feel the barrel of a shotgun in the small of his back again, like he had during the hunt in the fog—

  I know what you did.

  He knew that it was Alex even before his friend grabbed his shoulder, spun him around and punched him square in the face. Mike’s nose cracked and erupted with blood. Everything went fuzzy. The room tilted and became the hallway, and then he was spiraling head over heels down the stairs.

  He came to a rest on the hard floor and heard the echo of a distant thud.

  Mike blacked out.

  * * *

  The sound of a door slamming roused Mike from a fitfully deep sleep.

  He tried to sit up but felt his head spinning and had to lie back down again. He felt the lumpy and unyielding surface of the sofa at his back. Exploring his extremities with a shaky hand, he felt another lump forming around his eye. It wasn’t a dream after all. Alex really had punched him in the face.

  Mike felt his lower back twinge painfully, and he reached down with his other hand to apply some pressure to it in a vain attempt to stop the agonizing throbbing. Touching the site of the pain brought with it flashes of memory. He remembered Helen’s face, then Meggie’s, and finally Kay’s. But most of all – most upsetting of all – he remembered his friend Kay’s screams. He glanced over to the foot of the stairs where he had been sent sprawling by Alex. The aftereffect of his friend’s understandable rage was now spreading to every nerve ending in his face and spine. Mike coughed and felt a painful tightening beneath his ribcage on the left-hand side of his body.

  Tears came to his eyes from the effort it took to sit up. From somewhere achingly far away he heard a car door slam, and then another. A muffled voice called out, unmistakably Scottish, and unmistakably Alex’s. Mike leaned forward, gasping in pain as he did so. Several empty liquor bottles lay on their sides on the coffee table right next to him, though he couldn’t recall drinking any the night before. The dry, wormy taste in his mouth told him otherwise, and he pushed the bottles away from him in disgust.

  He stood and lurched forward too quickly, and too soon. Losing his balance, he almost toppled over the coffee table. The little cloth bundle still lay on the hearth where he’d placed it the night before. A protrusion of infant bone through the flimsy wrapping made his stomach flip.

  Mike bolted for the doorway.

  Feeling hemmed in by the confined space by the front door, Mike swayed a little as he searched out his boots. He heard a car engine revving up outside, and, neglecting to locate his footwear, he unlatched the front door and heaved it open. He lurched outside and daylight hit him, cold and muted by thick gray clouds that hung heavy over the landscape. He shivered, realizing he had only his t-shirt and jeans on. His socks were already wet from the damp earth beneath his feet, and he struggled to remain upright as he staggered down the path that led from the front of the house to the lane. Edward and Jamie’s Land Rover was parked a little way beyond the front gate. As he skidded down the path, he saw Jamie bundle a piece of luggage into the rear of the vehicle. He heard the old man mutter something and guessed that there were passengers in the back.

  “Hey! Hey, wait!” Mike gasped as he reached the gate.

  “Let’s go.” Alex must have been sitting in the back of the Land Rover with the luggage.

  Mike dashed through the gate, socks now encrusted with wet mud, and reached for the canvas flap at the rear of the Land Rover. His fingers just brushed it, knocking it aside, and he saw the occupants of the vehicle huddled together at the partition between the driver’s cab and the luggage area. Kay had her arm around Helen, whose face was obscured by her hair. But Mike knew, even without seeing her face, that Helen was crying.

  “Hey! Wait!” Mike protested.

  He saw Helen recoil at the sound of his voice and fell silent at the way she had burrowed herself further into Kay’s arms. He couldn’t bear that she could ever feel threatened by him. Kay didn’t look at him either, but he could see fury and disgust etched in her eyes as she glared at the floor of the Land Rover.

  Sitting opposite them, Alex signaled the driver by banging the flat of his hand against the grille separating the cab from the passengers. Edward was behind the wheel, and, as Jamie clambered into the passenger seat beside him, Mike heard the gunning of the engine. The rear wheels started to spin, not quite gaining purchase on the wet ground. Mike had one hand on the tailgate of the vehicle, his other hand waving frantically to try to attract Alex’s attention. Even if Helen and Kay were blanking him, perhaps his old friend would give him a moment to explain what had happened the night before.

  “Just a minute, mate, please – I can explain—”

  The engine roared, a
nd Mike felt himself being pulled violently forward by the Land Rover. The spinning wheels kicked up mud and sludge. Worse still, clumps of loose turf and stones pelted against Mike’s body until he felt as though he were being paint-balled. The Land Rover skidded to one side slightly, wrenching Mike’s wrist at a torturous angle, and he was forced to let go.

  His sudden disconnection from the vehicle, and its passengers, sent him sprawling backward into the mud. When the Land Rover roared away with a cloud of exhaust fumes swirling, mist-like all around him, Mike felt the mud spatter his t-shirt and his face.

  He sat, plunging his bare hands into the sodden earth to steady himself, and watched the Land Rover speeding away down the bumpy lane. The red taillights of the Land Rover became angry pinpricks of light as it drove Helen and his friends farther away from the cottage. They had actually left without him. Without a word. The pain in Mike’s throbbing thumb and twisted wrist had nothing on the hurt he was feeling inside.

  That Jamie had been loading Helen’s luggage into the Land Rover meant that she must have been expecting at least an overnight stay at the hospital. Rather than speak to him and settle their differences, they had chosen to run out on him. He couldn’t quite believe it.

  Mike dragged himself out of the mud and began to feel a nagging doubt. Had he seen more luggage in the Land Rover before it had sped away? He couldn’t be completely sure if Alex’s and Kay’s bags had been packed in there too. He trudged back up the path and decided to take a look. It would help to know if he was on his own or if they were coming back.

  He peeled off his ruined socks as he crossed the threshold, and padded inside. Leaving wet, muddy footprints on the crofter’s stone floor, Mike grabbed the handrail of the stairwell for support and forced his bruised and aching body up to the first floor. He sloped along the passageway and leaned against the wall at one point for support when his legs almost gave way beneath him. He rounded the doorway into Alex and Kay’s room, where he had inexplicably found himself an unwelcome visitor the night before, and saw to his dismay that his suspicions were correct.

  The room had been cleared of Alex’s and Kay’s belongings. The wardrobe door was wide open, with nothing left hanging inside. The chest of drawers was partially opened too, revealing dark empty spaces where their clothes should have been. Their luggage had gone with them. Mike imagined how they must have waited for him to fall asleep before quickly packing up to leave. Perhaps they arranged it with Jamie and Edward even before his latest sleepwalking incident. Helen blamed him for everything; that much was clear. And his friends along with her. Their postgraduation party had ended with none of his friends willing to look him in the face, nor willing to speak to him, nor hear him out.

  Fuck.

  A single cold tear trickled down Mike’s cheek. He felt numb and alone, standing on the threshold of one empty room, with his back to a host of other equally empty rooms. Glancing upward, he saw the Haelu runes hanging there—

  Health, wealth, happiness. And what was the other one? Blessings. That’s a fucking joke. Blessings.

  —and allowed his feet to carry him away and down onto the first step. He sat at the top of the stairs and put his spinning head into his hands. His flesh wound throbbed as the stress he was feeling surged through him in a rush of blood.

  Mike stared into his hands, his vision blurred by yet more bitter tears, and he sat like that for quite some time in quiet despair, until, prompted by the sight of the Haelu charms, he realized something.

  He had not seen Meggie with the others in the Land Rover.

  She must still be at the cottage.

  Wiping his eyes with the back of his damaged hand, he struggled to his feet.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The cottage was unoccupied. Meggie had to be outside, somewhere.

  Mike ran out through the conservatory and rushed around the side of the cottage, past the woodpile and to the outbuilding. The lights were on in the studio. Something moved in the window and Mike’s heart skipped a beat. But what he had mistaken for Meggie was the shadow of a cloud formation moving across the window. He turned and looked up at the sky. The clouds were rolling over their peaks at a frightening speed. A storm was brewing over the mountains. The wind picked up from across the loch, a cold warning that lashed across his face, stinging his cheeks. He turned away from the chilly blast of the oncoming storm and headed inside the studio.

  “Meggie? You in here?”

  He knew she wasn’t, but he had to say something. Had to hear a human sound, even if it was only his and his alone.

  “Talking to myself again,” he heard himself mutter. “First sign of madness, that.”

  He slouched over to Meggie’s work desk, sat down in her chair. He picked up a tube of acrylic paint, then, seeing that it was a blood-red color, put it straight back down again. A couple of paint brushes lay abandoned on top of the desk. They had been swabbed on some old newspaper pages that lay crumpled and blotched with paint beneath them. The red-stained sheet bore the headline ‘TRAGIC HIGHLAND CAR ACCIDENT’, and Mike wondered if Helen had made the news.

  Of course she hasn’t, he told himself, that newspaper looks months old.

  He lifted the paper and found another front page beneath it. This one was even older, the edges of the paper spotted with rusty stains. It proclaimed, ‘KINTAIL DAM PROJECT CONFIRMED, WILL CREATE 800 NEW JOBS’. His father’s legacy, and Alex’s. Mike’s fragmented nightmare came back to him, his father standing stag-like in the shadows—

  SO PROUD OF YOU, SON.

  —while Helen bled out. The shuffling cloth-thing snapping its tiny bony fingers at his ankles—

  Thunder rumbled overhead, so loud and so impossibly close that Mike saw the desk tremble.

  He stood bolt upright, startled by the noise and the movement, and knocked Meggie’s chair over behind him. He was about to right it again when he saw the painting that Meggie had been working on, standing on the easel near to the window. He supposed the light must have been good over there, ideal for a painter’s colors, on a clear day. Not like today. The sky was boiling black with clouds so thick and so pregnant with rain that they looked more like smoke than vapor.

  Forgetting the toppled chair, Mike walked over to the painting to get a better look. The storm clouds outside had cast a dirty shadow over Meggie’s meticulously rendered scene. Mike hugged himself, feeling cold at the sight of it. She had almost completed the painting, with only a couple of patches still needing brushwork. The painting depicted the Spindle Stones, beneath a turbulent sky not so dissimilar to the one that was churning outside the windows.

  Another rumble of thunder followed by an earsplitting crack sounded from above the studio roof. The electric lights flickered, making it look like the lightning in the painting was real. Mike peered closer at the painting and, more specifically, the figure standing at its center. The old crone, the exact same one he had seen – or hallucinated – at the stone circle was depicted there. She loomed over her sacrificial altar, Meggie’s delicate brushwork accentuating the strange carvings in its stone surface. The woman held a sharp dagger aloft, a spike of lightning reflecting from its sharpened silver tip. Mike felt cold seeping into his bones, and the hairs on his body stood on end in response to the electricity in the air, conjured no doubt by the immense storm gathering outside.

  Lying prone atop the stone altar was a little cloth-wrapped bundle.

  The lights flickered again, then burned incredibly bright, and as they did so, Mike noticed a detail his eyes hadn’t picked out before. The woman’s hair was poking out from beneath her cowl, wherein her dark eyes glowered. The wisps of hair were sunset red, like Meggie’s.

  The light bulbs popped in a sizzle of heat and went out.

  He heard a child’s laughter.

  Hard rain began to fall.

  * * *

  Mike rushed outside, afraid to be alone any long
er in the darkened studio. His feet slid on the uneven surface of the courtyard, and he had to reach for the pole supporting the washing line to steady himself. Lightning flashed over the mountains, turning them into a jagged black gash on the skyline. He blinked against the sudden barrage of lightning flashes, their afterimages describing the distended grin of some immense jack-o’-lantern. He thought he was still seeing things when a slight figure moved down by the waterside. He held the flat of his hand over his eyes to shield them from another flurry of lightning flashes. The figure moved, her hair flapping in the fierce wind.

  “Meggie!”

  If she could hear his voice above the noise of the rising storm, she didn’t show any sign. Mike left the studio door banging in the wind. Bracing himself against the lashing onslaught, he moved as fast as he could alongside the cottage to the gate. He had to grip the little wooden gate with both hands to wrench it open, such was the force of the storm. Meggie had reached the far end of the jetty, her hair a fiery halo around her head. She had her back to him. Mike pushed through the opening between the gateposts and let go of the gate. It banged in the wind behind him, beating a tattoo as he struggled across the lane and down the slope leading to the lochside.

  “Meggie!”

  Unbelievably, given the weather conditions, she appeared to be untying the little fishing boat from its mooring on the jetty. A blinding flash of lightning lit up the entire surface of the loch, turning its black waters to silvery white for just a moment.

  “Meggie! Wait!” Mike shouted above the deafening tumult of thunder and hammering rain.

  The storm had traversed the peaks of the highest mountains and was sliding down across the landscape, its deepening shadows unfurling like the tentacles of some mythical, maritime beast. Meggie either couldn’t hear, or didn’t care to listen to him. Mike saw her drop the unfastened rope before she climbed over the lip of the jetty and down into the waiting boat. He saw the outlines of the oars as she lifted them, then the bobbing of the boat on the water when she used the oars to push away across the loch’s surface.