Hearthstone Cottage

by Frazer Lee

  Mike battled the full fury of the storm, and, willing his last reserves of strength into his limbs, he ran down to the jetty. The wind dropped for a few seconds, then returned with renewed force, making waves lap madly at the end of the jetty. Cold water coated his face in icy little droplets. But he barely felt them, chilled now by what he was seeing, rather than the unforgiving kiss of nature.

  Meggie had taken the boat halfway out across the loch.

  She had abandoned the oars and was kneeling inside the boat, which rose and fell with the undulating surface of the water as it churned in the high winds. She was in danger of losing the oars, but Mike saw that she was intent on something else entirely.

  He recognized the solid shapes of the weights from the kitchen’s weighing scales as she transferred them to Alex’s keep-net. She then took a length of rope and fastened it to the net’s binding. Meggie let the net rest for a moment, propped up against the narrowest wooden seat of the boat. She seemed to be gazing out across the water, at the bankside nearest the road. Mike followed her line of sight and saw a familiar dark shape looming there. It was a stag, its antlers standing proud against the backdrop of tumultuous gray skies and wind-bludgeoned trees. Mike watched as the stag, which seemed to be casually observing Meggie from the lochside, lowered its head to the water to take a drink. Mike could see the pink of its tongue lapping up the dark waters that sloshed up and over the bank and across the beast’s darkly shining hooves. Mike could no longer discern where the stag’s black hooves ended and where the dark waters of the loch began.

  Another stag, its features distorted by the movement of the water, was reflected on the breaking black mirror of the loch’s surface. It was as though the two were joined, inseparable twins to one another. Its thirst slaked, the first stag lifted its head once again, and Mike felt the gaze of its unfathomable eyes pierce into his brain and twist the breath from his body.

  Gasping for air, Mike stumbled back and tore his gaze from that of the animal.

  He now saw that Meggie had stood up in the boat, which teetered dangerously, rocking from side to side. Mike was about to shout a warning to her when he noticed she was holding the net filled with weights over the side of the little wooden vessel.

  No, he thought, don’t.

  And the futility of that thought crushed any hope left in him, heavy as the rain that was flattening the grass beside the loch, drowning it.

  Meggie let the weights drop into the water. The uncoiling rope followed them, snaking eagerly beneath the surface and into the depths. She stood proud for a second, the funeral pyre of her flaming red hair lifted by the wind. Then the other end of the rope pulled taut where she had tied it around her ankles.

  Her feet were pulled from under her, upending her body.

  Mike heard the sickening crack of her skull as it hit the side of the boat, and then she disappeared from view beneath the black waters. A trace of bubbles was the only sign that she had been there at all. When they too became lost to the undulating water, Mike saw only the empty space in the boat where she had been standing just moments before. Thunder roared in the sky over the loch, and lightning flashed. Heavy droplets of rain pricked at the surface of the loch, carving it into gooseflesh with each tiny impact.

  Mike sprinted across the last remaining rain-soaked planks of the jetty, feeling them buckle and give way slightly beneath his feet. Roaring with the thunder, he drew all the breath that he could into his lungs.

  And dived into the loch.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The pressure of the water around Mike was all too strong.

  His limbs protested at the strain it demanded of them to push his body deeper into the blackness of the loch. But he couldn’t give up now. He had already let Helen down, and he was determined not to fail Meggie. Bubbles spiraled around him, and it chilled him to the bone to think that each tiny bubble contained Meggie’s breath. If he didn’t catch up to her – and even then, he would somehow have to remove the rope from around her ankles – then the bubbles swirling past him might be her last signs of life.

  It was so impenetrably dark, and so deep now, that Mike only had the bubbles to go on. He had to trust that following them down would lead him to Meggie. The urge to open his mouth and let in water was almost overwhelming, if only for the chance it would afford him to scream at the fatigue spreading through his body and the frustration of not being able to see more than a few inches ahead.

  Then, a ray of hope came in the form of yellowy tendrils of light that snaked from above and down into the depths. The clouds must have broken in the sky far above the surface of the water. Mike’s heart pounded when he saw what he hoped was Meggie’s dark shape sinking deeper below him. He saw a starburst of silt erupt around the impact of a smaller object and realized that it must be the net, weighed down by the weights. It had hit the bottom of the loch first.

  Mike focused on the now dissipating cloud of silt and pushed himself deeper. Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the helpful tendrils of light from above were gone.

  Plunged into isolating darkness once more, Mike had to trust his trajectory and hope that it would lead him to the spot where the netted weights had fallen. A few more agonizing seconds, and Mike felt sure he would run out of air. His every instinct was telling him to resurface, to fill his lungs with air and try again. But Mike knew in his heart that his body would be too tired to attempt another dive, and even if he could, it might be too late for Meggie.

  He stretched his fingertips out to their maximum reach in front of him, and then, with dazzling clarity, the tendrils of light returned, illuminating the lochbed in a preternatural glow. What he had mistaken for a crack in the clouds was the lightning that had come with the storm. It must be raging on directly over the loch, and the elemental threat of it had now become an advantage for Mike as another luminescent shaft of light revealed Meggie to him. She was lying in a fetal position on the lochbed, gently curled up in a shimmer of silt as though she was sleeping and wrapped in a blanket.

  The bubbles had ceased rising, and this simple, incontrovertible fact propelled Mike on toward Meggie’s prone body for all his life was worth.

  Contact.

  His fingers found her wrists, and he lifted her from the lochbed so that he could see her face, hoping to rouse her. Meggie’s eyes were wide open, pupils dilated and fixed in a catatonic stare that froze the blood in his veins. She looked so still and so innocent somehow that it broke his heart just to look upon her. Then he remembered the rope tied to her ankles and swam along the length of her body so that he could untangle it.

  Meggie had tied the knot tight, and no doubt the force of the weights had pulled it even tighter. He cursed his clumsy fingers as they slipped from the smooth surface of the rope. The silt that clouded his vision was making his task all the more difficult too. Mike redoubled his efforts. Come what may, he had to return Meggie’s body to the surface. He couldn’t leave her at the bottom of the loch with only shadows for company—

  The shadows.

  They had seemed to rise up all around him, looming darker than ever in the deep. He recalled how, in the dark visions he had glimpsed in the scrying mirror, the shapes in the loch had seemed like a row of black teeth with its bed forming the jawline. But now they seemed to be taking on sharper and more distinct outlines as they closed in around him.

  Ignoring the encroaching darkness as best he could, Mike untangled the last length of rope from around Meggie’s ankles. The rope snaked free, a pale tentacle undulating on the undercurrent of the loch.

  Mike wasted no time, feeling his lungs bursting from the need for oxygen. Mouth-to-mouth might revive Meggie, but he wouldn’t be able to try it until they were both above water. He hoisted Meggie’s arm around his neck and pulled her upward. His toes were against the soft silt. He looked upward and saw sparks of lightning breaking the surface of the loch, which looked impossibly far
away. Bending his knees, he pushed against the lochbed, but something held him down.

  Startled, he saw Meggie staring at him, her mouth slightly open and a trail of bubbles leaking from her pale lips. He felt her arm tighten around his waist. Her free hand clutched on to the rope that was still attached to the weights. She was holding him fast. He kicked and struggled, water seeping between his teeth – briny, cold and foul.

  He kicked and thrashed, hearing the sound of his own terror in his ears. She meant to drown him. Oh god, she really did. Mike screamed, a terrified, liquid scream of agony, as he curled his hands into fists and pummeled against Meggie’s shoulders. She did not budge, her grip clamshell tight around his body. His vision swam, a confusion of dark water, slimy fronds and lochbed detritus, and his world seemed to topple and tilt around him.

  Tumbling sideways through the water, he saw the loch inverted before his panic-stricken eyes. The bed was above his head now, an indistinct ceiling, with the fathoms of cold black water a hideously unforgiving abyss beneath his feet. Tumbling ever on, his body spiraled with Meggie’s until their feet touched the bottom of the loch again.

  The water fell upward like rain.

  Meggie’s eyes, black as coals, bore into him.

  And she let him go.

  Mike took one step back across the lochbed, then another. It felt more solid to him. His lungs were at breaking point and he opened his mouth to scream.

  And breathed.

  Air.

  There was oxygen.

  He coughed and heaved at the sudden, impossible and icy rush of it in his airways. His eyes swam with tears where there had, only a moment ago, been loch water for as far as they could see. He looked up, and his sense of perspective was utterly shattered. The loch waters had retreated and hung suspended above his head, forming a frothy night sky. He looked down and saw that the lochbed had become dry and firm. Furtive movement at the periphery of his vision revealed its source to be grasses and shrubs, sprouting in the shadows where only water weeds had held dominion, until now. The liquid sky above his head flashed with lightning, describing the sharp outlines of the shadows that had seemed so threatening underwater.

  Mike saw now that the shadows were the roofs and walls of cottages and other buildings. There was an entire ruined village on the lochbed. Some of the structures even had intact windows, the glass reflecting the flashes of lightning so that Mike could make better geometric sense of them. He saw the remains of a shopfront, with the pockmarked steeple of a church teetering high behind it. A tall, thin structure was revealed to him by a further watery lightning flash, and Mike saw with wonderment that it was a lamppost.

  A lamppost at the bottom of the loch. He could scarcely believe it.

  He felt pressure at his hand, then. Looking down, dumbfounded, he saw Meggie’s fingers curl around his.

  “Welcome to the village,” she said.

  Her voice sounded muffled and drowned. Hearing it, Mike wondered if he too had drowned and gone to hell.

  “The true village,” she continued.

  “No,” Mike spluttered, “the village is up the road. We went there. We all did.”

  She smiled horribly. “To put up posters of my dead dog, you mean?”

  Mike tried to find the words. He was standing at the bottom of a loch, in the middle of a drowned village, with the water churning above him in the sky.

  He had no words.

  “That village is not the true village,” Meggie went on. “Your father brokered the deal that drowned this little place, to make way for the Kintail dam project. The locals agreed to rebuild, in return for money. You’ve seen for yourself how they’ve paid the price. Their community is clinging to the edge of nothingness. All the children left, leaving the old ones to die alone. Do you know how that feels, Mike? To die alone?”

  Mike swallowed, tasting something hideously salty at the back of his throat.

  “I don’t suppose you do,” she said.

  Meggie’s voice was having a seismic effect on his body, the oily ebb and flow of her tone making him feel seasick.

  “You might, yet, though,” Meggie said. “The sins of the father and all that.…”

  He saw them then, the shapes emerging from the ruins of the village. They each moved with a strange gait, like they were treading water. As the procession of shapes ambled toward him, Mike’s sanity began to unravel. He felt terror pierce his heart to see how many they were, and how dark. The old witch from the stone circle was their vangaurd. She loomed behind Meggie, a dark sentry with her robes flowing as though she were underwater.

  Mike glanced up at the loch-water sky and felt something snap in his psyche.

  I guess we all are, he thought madly, underwater.

  Then he heard the shrill chime of child’s laughter, hollow ice bells breaking, and saw a small child emerge from behind the old woman’s skirts. The thing – Mike thought the word ‘child’ would be too much of a kindness – stepped through Meggie’s body as though she were a ghost. The thing’s head was the last part of it to emerge from Meggie’s belly, and as it did so, it left its shadow behind. Meggie’s belly pulsated sickly, left pregnant with the darkness deposited there by the child-thing. As it took its place in front of Meggie, it looked straight at Mike. Its face was impenetrably dark, but he saw a flash of teeth and the reflection of something darker still in its eyes. The small creature chuckled – a mournful sound that made Mike want to weep for the world’s ending.

  He heard the same dreadful sound echoed in Meggie’s throat, and then that of the old witch.

  There they stood before him, forming a chilling triptych. Mike saw that Meggie’s eyes were black too, inexorably linking the three of them together. Meggie grinned at him, all teeth, as if sharing his realization. Ever since he had arrived at Hearthstone Cottage, he had heard the child’s laughter—

  The Maiden, Meggie’s voice said inside his head.

  —and he had seen the terrifying old woman at the Spindle Stones—

  The Crone. Hey, now, you’re really getting it.

  —and now he was seeing Meggie, pregnant with the dark inside of her—

  The Mother. Oh, well done, Mikey!

  Mike heard a sound like glass breaking in reverse. Like the world un-making itself.

  We three as one, inseparable in sisterhood, insufferable to men and the world of men.

  The black figures of the villagers – led by Meggie and the child-thing, and followed by the dark presence of the old woman – closed in around him, with no footfalls to be heard on the lochbed save for the faintest wet, dragging sound. Timbers of the ruined village’s buildings creaked on the dark horizon like the hulls of ancient shipwrecks. The tenuous physical forms encircling him began to solidify, making a circle around him.

  Mike struggled to breathe, feeling pressure against the chambers of his heart. The pressure spread through his veins, gathering at his temples in an agonizing throb. He threw back his head to scream and heard the sound again, of glass shattering in reverse. The sound grew to a fury in his ears. He clamped his teeth together and shut his eyes tight against the conflagration of noise and pain.

  Something shredded at his hair and flesh.

  It was as though he were being dragged through a tangle of thorns and out into—

  Mike gasped and tried not to fall back.

  He reached out for something, anything, to hold on to, and his fingers found purchase on a ledge in front of him. He opened his eyes to see the deep black vortex of the scrying mirror. The ledge he was holding on to with both hands was the mantelpiece. He was back inside the cottage and somehow outside of it at the same time.

  Meggie lay at the center of the obsidian vortex, dead, or dying, he didn’t know which—

  Oh, I’m both, Mikey. I’m dead and dying, dream and dreaming.

  —and her body was as pale as the time
he had seen it—

  Imagined it?

  —seen it in the loch when he and Alex had taken the boat out for their fishing trip. Her eyes were lifeless orbs, reminding him of those of the fish he had gutted. He wondered if her horribly distended belly writhed with maggots, too—

  Oh but it does, Mikey. Do you want to see?

  He really did not. Didn’t want to look and didn’t want to hear her voice inside his head anymore. But even if he closed his eyes he knew he would still be able to see her there, at the center of the dark. And even if he smashed the mirror and gouged at his eardrums, he knew he would still hear her. Meggie’s body moved, as if carried along by some invisible wave, her limbs rearranging themselves and settling once again.

  I have been here all along, Mikey. Waiting for you to return to me. To us.

  Mike gagged, overcome by nausea. Meggie’s soughing voice and the spiraling black of the mirror were making him feel seasick to his core. He gripped the mantelpiece tighter, his knuckles turning white and his palms coated in a sickly film of cold sweat.

  You know I’m dead, don’t you?

  Mike fought the urge to vomit.

  Poor Mikey. I’ve always been here. My time at the cottage has taught me so much. The veil is so very thin at Hearthstone Cottage. It can see into your soul. See you for who you really are. And if you let it, it will show you.

  Mike’s vision was filled with the black vista of the mirror. He choked down bile, wishing to be released from its gaze. But it held him fast.

  Hearthstone Cottage is populated by dreams for some, and nightmares for others. Tell me. How have you been sleeping, Mikey?

  The teasing tone in Meggie’s voice wormed into Mike’s inner ear. He pushed against the mantelpiece with all his might.

  She likes you, the wee child. So does the old woman. And you know I do, Mikey. But there are other spirits lingering here. Some are not so kind. You will meet them all.