by C. J. Cooke
“Bloody hell,” Saffy said, looking around. “This place is rank.”
I shushed her, but couldn’t help agreeing internally.
I’d never been inside a lighthouse before. I’d expected floor levels, an enclosed staircase. The Longing, however, was a grim, granite cone. A rickety staircase was pinned loosely against the wall, spiraling Hitchcock-style to the lantern room at the very top. The place reeked of damp and rotting fish. I wondered why we were standing in an inch of black liquid, until Isla explained that one of the lower windows was broken, and over time seawater had poured inside and pooled on the floor.
“I gather you’ll need something to pump it out before you start,” she said.
“Mr. Roberts is turning it into a writing studio, is that right?” I asked, and Isla nodded.
“He’s not published,” she added. “Just a hobby. I wouldn’t be expecting him to produce The Iliad or anything like that. He bought it last year and didn’t seem to know what to do with it. Next thing I know, he’s asking me about getting a painter in to prettify it, make it into a writing studio.” She gave a shrill laugh. “Whoever heard of such a thing? Surely all you need to write is a pen and paper.”
“Maybe the views will inspire him,” I offered.
“Aye. Inspire him to go off sailing, more like.”
We were shrouded in darkness. Clover was clutching on to her toy giraffe, whimpering to go home. Bats flitted overhead. Moonlight trickled in from the small upper windows, revealing the height of the place.
“It’s a hundred and forty-nine feet tall,” Isla said, swinging her torchlight to the very top. “A hundred and thirty-eight steps to the lantern room. Braw views up there. I can show you when it’s light.” Her torchlight rested on patches of paint that had crumbled off, revealing raw stone. About halfway up someone had graffitied a section of the wall in garish shades of lime green and black.
“There was a break-in,” Isla said darkly. “Outsiders, you see. We get them here a lot more now, since the rental properties on the east side opened up. And the Neolithic museum, that’s new. You should take your girls.”
Isla reassured us that break-ins like this were rare, that tourists—or “outsiders”—didn’t frequent the place often. Lòn Haven’s population was predominantly grassroots, with sixty or so archaeologists from “the University” working at the Neolithic sites. Some of the younger population had inherited crofts that they didn’t want to live in, so they’d started renting them out. The older population objected strongly both to the younger islanders moving away (“All of them want to live in Edinburgh or London,” Isla recalled with a sneer) and, as a result, drawing “outsiders” to the island to rent out the crofts.
Break-in aside, I was intrigued by the Longing. As an artist, two of my favorite things were shadows and curved angles, and this place had both in spades. The shadows seemed alive, like the wings of a giant bird stirred by our presence. It was creepy, yes, but also elegant—I loved how the staircase whirled upward in increasingly narrower circles within the cylinder of the structure, how the lack of right angles gave every small edge extra significance, how the architecture drew my gaze upward.
“Has the lighthouse ever been submerged?” I asked. I could hear wind pummeling the stone walls, the loud suck and slap of the waves close by.
“We get our fair share of storms,” Isla said, and I could tell she was choosing her words carefully so as not to put me off. “But the Longing has been standing for a hundred years amidst all that Mother Nature and the sea gods have to throw at her, and I daresay she’ll stand a hundred more.” A pause. “So long as you keep rowan on the door, you’ll be fine.”
It was as she said this that I felt a wave of déjà vu pass over me. Saffy, Luna, and Isla were beginning to head toward the door to leave, but the feeling of familiarity was so strong that I paused, as though someone had spoken and I was trying to understand what they’d said.
“Liv?” Saffy said from behind. I turned all the way around, moved by absolute certainty that something was in the corner by the stairs, just underneath it, as though I’d left it there.
“Everything all right?” Isla said as I sloshed through the oily water to the staircase. Her torchlight fell upon something floating on the black water ahead of me. The slender white limb of a baby’s corpse.
Luna gave a scream that bounced off the surfaces of the lighthouse.
“What is it?” Isla said, rushing forward.
Luna was still shrieking, clawing at me and crying, “No! No!” She turned to rush out, and I grabbed her, reaching down with my free hand to scoop the little body out of the filthy water.
It wasn’t a baby. It was only a doll, one of those naked newborn dolls that Clover liked to play with.
As I looked down into the grotesque face of that doll, its eyes blacked out with felt tip, adrenaline flashed through my body. I had known it was a doll. I had known it was there before I saw it, and that we’d mistake it for a dead child. Like a memory.
But that was ridiculous. I had never been there before.
IV
The next morning, I woke at sunrise, disoriented and stiff. I gave a start at the scene squared off by the musty bedroom window, a gray wave reaching above rock like a ghostly hand. Wind whistled through the cracked windowpane, and an albatross sat on the windowsill, eyeing me boldly. When it stretched its wings and lifted into the sky, a lighthouse appeared on the outcrop. I reminded myself: I was in Scotland, on a tiny island on the eastern shore of the Highlands. I was here to paint a mural inside that lighthouse.
I got up, made coffee, and tried to work out how to turn on the TV. There was no aerial attached so we couldn’t get a single channel. In the TV cabinet was a VCR player but no videotapes. We’d left York in such haste that I’d only packed the bare essentials—a few outfits, a handful of toys for the girls, and definitely no videotapes. I gave up and sat down with the paper Isla had given me spread across the kitchen table. The mural for the lighthouse.
What was it? A crop circle? Some kind of zodiac?
It would have made a pretty tattoo for someone, but as a mural for the inside of a building as big as the Longing it was . . . unusual. I had expected something that told a story—a nautical scene, perhaps. A galleon with white sails full of wind, a sky transitioning from day to starry night, and heaving seas with whales and cephalopods lurking in the dark depths—something of that nature would look fabulous in the lighthouse, logistics notwithstanding. But this . . . it was like a physics equation, dry and strange.
I traced the symbols with my index finger to tease out a pattern. Two triangles, one upside down, overlapping at the narrowest point, and a smaller triangle overlapping the two larger ones, with a rectangular frame. That was the base of the diagram, and from that central design lines, arrows and other shapes fanned outward in all directions over the rectangle. Some of them were like the lines of a family tree, others like the right-angled spokes of a spider diagram. Some of the lines were crossed with three shorter lines, others were Cs and backward Cs, and others looked like swastikas.
Swastikas?
Bloody hell. Was I working for a Nazi?
Some of the symbols floated within the rectangle frame alongside the triangles. They looked older in style, and I wondered if they might be Egyptian hieroglyphs. How the hell was I going to paint something like this on the inside of a lighthouse? I tried to imagine how this would even be physically possible. The walls of the Longing were sectioned by the staircase, so the mural would be carved up by the stairs and I’d have to take enormous care to ensure it matched up. Also, there was the small matter of the curved walls. The sketch had been drawn by hand, but evidently rulers and protractors had been used, given how straight the lines were. To achieve such straightness in a curved building was going to be a logistical nightmare.
I went to check on Saffy in the small loft bedroom to ask her
opinion about the symbols at the fringes of the diagram. She’d taken an interest in mythological symbols for a school project and the last time we’d had an actual conversation, she was showing me a painting she’d done of the Eye of Horus, explaining excitedly about how it was meant to protect against evil.
But the bed was empty, her boots and coat gone from the hallway. My heart thumped in my throat. Where was she?
“Morning, Mummy,” Luna said from the stairwell, her brown hair askew and limp with grease.
“Have you seen your sister?” I asked her.
“She’s still asleep in your bed.”
“No, not Clover. Have you seen Saffy?”
Luna yawned and shook her head.
I kissed the top of her head. “Stay inside, please.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find Saffy.”
I walked quickly outside to the Longing. A wave slapped against the rocks and sprayed me with foamy tide as I tugged the heavy door open and stepped inside. The smell of the place hit me, and I covered my mouth and nostrils with a hand as I looked around.
“Saffy?” I called.
At the very top of the staircase, I spotted someone in the lantern room. A child, with long white-blonde hair. A girl, I thought. A flash of a pale shoulder told me she had no top on, and she was small—about five years old. It was dangerous for her to be up there.
“Saffy!” I shouted. “Are you up there?”
No answer. I took to the stairs, running as quickly as I could and cursing myself for being so unfit. By the time I reached the top my heart was beating so hard in my throat I thought I might be sick. I forced myself to look down all the way to the bottom. I don’t have a problem with heights, but all that stood between me and breaking my neck on concrete was a rusty banister. I took the next flight to the lantern room, determined to order Saffy downstairs.
Light poured into the lantern room through dozens of honeycomb windowpanes. It offered views of the whole west side of the island, as far as the towering white hills that marked the boundary between the desolate west and the more populated east, jagged as a spine. But it was empty.
“Hello?” I said. “Anyone here?”
I looked around in case another flight of stairs might appear, or a doorway to another room in which a child might be hiding. In the center of the room was an old metal frame upon which I imagined a Fresnel lens had once thrown a bright beam of light across the North Atlantic. The plaster was crumbling, and those patches that did remain were covered in graffiti.
I spotted a handle on one of the windows, and a chill ran up my spine. A flash of a frightened child reaching for that handle darted through my mind. I wrapped my hand tentatively around it and pushed. The window swung easily open, the hiss of the sea and the groaning wind rushing in. Below, the roof of the bothy and the mossy rocks of the island rested in the sunlight. On the left side of the island a blonde-haired figure sat on the rocks, her feet dangling in the water.
Saffy.
I made my way back down the stairs as fast as I could and ran out to where she sat. She’d drawn a fresh Celtic squiggle on the back of her neck in biro—a preparatory tattoo, she liked to say. In her hand was an old book that I guessed she’d taken from the bothy. Clutched in her other hand was an old skeleton key. The bothy was full of clutter—books, ornaments, dried sea urchins, shark jaws pinned to the wall, for God’s sake—and Saffy was a scavenger, always had been. Even when she was a toddler I’d discover odd things sequestered beneath her bed—bottle tops, cutlery, weeds she’d plucked from the front garden. I’d learn that she gathered such things with no plan to play with them, no purpose at all, other than the act of taking and hiding, of holding a secret.
She had her headphones on, a heavy beat bleeding out the sides. Even when I managed to get her to make eye contact she didn’t take them off. Frustrated, I reached down and yanked them off her head.
“What are you doing?” she screamed. “Give those back!”
Immediately I regretted it. She snatched them back.
“Did you see a little girl?” I said. “In the lighthouse?”
She screwed her face up. “What?”
“I saw a girl in the lantern room. Did you see her?”
“I have literally no idea what you’re talking about . . .”
“Fine. Look, I need your help with something.”
“I’m busy,” she said, putting her headphones back on and opening up her book. “Isn’t that what you always say?” she added. “ ‘Sorry, kids. Mum’s busy.’ ”
I ignored the dig. “It’s about a symbol. I could do with your help. Saffy.”
For about a minute, she did nothing, and I waited. Eventually she said, “What symbol?”
I told her it was back in the bothy as I started to walk away. She slowly rose to her feet, tucked the book under her arm, and followed behind, the hems of her jeans trailing in the rock pools.
V
By the time she arrived in the kitchen I’d put on a kettle and poured us both a cup of tea. She was still holding the small book and sat at the table, absorbed by its pages.
“What are you reading?”
“It’s a grimoire.”
“A what?”
I handed her a cup, careful to avoid the book she’d placed on the table in front of her. It looked old, the paper yellowed and delicate.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“On the bookshelf in the living room. It’s a book of spells. Some of the writing looks like it’s Icelandic. And there’s some stuff about witches.”
“Witches?”
“Yeah. There were witch hunts in Scotland as well as England. Worst witch hunts in Europe, apparently. Did you know that?”
I shook my head. Right then I was more concerned about how she was handling Mr. Roberts’ book. “Be careful with that, Saff,” I said. “It might be valuable.”
“Hardly,” she scoffed. “Why would anyone leave it lying around in this place if it was valuable?”
“Look, it’s not yours, OK?”
I handed her a cup and spread the drawing of the mural in front of her.
“That is a swastika, isn’t it?” I said, pointing at one of the symbols.
She stared at it and sat down. I relished the closeness of her. It had been weeks since she’d sat with me like this, and although she was sullen and reluctant, she was still here.
“What is this?” she said, turning to me. “Is this what they want you to paint inside the Longing?”
I nodded, and she laughed.
“They’re taking the piss a bit.”
“A bit, yeah.”
She looked again at the symbol. “Yes. That is indeed a swastika.”
I felt my heart sink. “I can’t paint bloody Nazi symbols,” I muttered, though I had no choice. I needed the money.
“Well, the swastika is a Nazi symbol,” Saffy said. “It’s also a Hindu symbol. And a Buddhist symbol. And Roman, and ancient Greek.” She laced her fingers and lifted her blue eyes to mine. “You want me to go on?”
I was puzzled. “So . . . he’s not a Nazi, then.”
“Who’s not a Nazi?”
“Mr. Roberts. The man who wants me to paint the Longing.”
She shrugged. “Maybe he is. All I’m saying is that the swastika’s been around since three thousand BCE. So has this symbol.” She pointed at the overlapping triangles.
“It has?”
“It’s a variation on the Borromean rings, or the Holy Trinity. You can’t remove one without removing the other. It’s a sign of infinity.”
“What about this one?” I asked, pointing at the one that looked like an Egyptian hieroglyph.
“Ah,” she said. “I could tell you what that one means, but it’ll cost you.”
I stared at her. �
��How much?”
“Twenty quid.”
Twenty quid could buy a week’s worth of groceries for the four of us. She held out her hand, expectant.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll go to a library.”
“Maybe you should think before you judge everyone to be a Nazi, Liv.”
The “Liv” stung, just as she’d intended. “Maybe I should.”
At that, she tucked her book under her armpit and got up sharply to leave, knocking her tea across the table and all over the mural.
“Saffy!” I yelled. “Look what you’ve done!” I lunged forward to snatch the mural away, but the tea had covered the page. All I could do was hold it up, allowing the tea to slide off so that it wouldn’t soak through.
“It’s just a fucking piece of paper!” she shouted.
“Just a piece of paper?” I said, desperately flapping the sheet to get the liquid off. “This is the only copy of the mural I’ve got!”
“Well, just ask for another one,” she said, hurling her cup into the sink with a clatter. “Last I checked, a piece of paper was pretty easy to come by. Or are we really that poor?”
I reeled at her comment, at how unapologetic she was. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I think you should ask yourself the same question,” she said, turning and squaring up to me. She was already four inches taller than me. “Dragging all of us in the middle of the night to the back of beyond. You think that’s good parenting?”
I knew what was buried inside that horrible question, the torrent of accusations folded within it. “Maybe it isn’t good parenting,” I said, trying not to show how much her words stung. “But when you have kids, you can show us all how much of a better mother you are than me . . .”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve certainly kept the bar low.”
Before I knew what I was doing I lifted a hand and slapped her hard across the face, a loud crack ringing through the air. She clasped a hand to her cheek, staring at me with wild horror.
“I’m sorry,” I said, reeling from what I’d done. “Saffy. I’m so, so sorry.”