The Lighthouse Witches

by C. J. Cooke

  Her face crumpled, her eyes filling with tears and a sob escaping her mouth. For a moment the perfected mask of teenage haughtiness fell, and her hurt was laid nakedly before me—just for a second, she was my little girl again, reeling from the fact that I had struck her. That I had crossed a line I had promised never, ever to cross.

  I reached for her arm, but she pulled away from me, her hand still clutching her face.

  I turned and ran into the kitchen, searching the tiny icebox of the fridge for ice. Nothing. I grabbed a rag and held it under the cold tap, then returned to the living room.

  But Saffy had gone.

  The front door gaped open like a wound.

  SAPPHIRE, 1998

  I

  Sapphire stumbles blindly across the road away from the Longing.

  It’s early, the sky like polished silver, the ocean sinewy and muscular, crackling as it reaches the stones at the edge of the causeway. She turns, out of breath from anger and wading, and looks back at the bothy. What a shithole. No KFC or McDonald’s on the whole bloody island. And the lighthouse—she’s always loved the idea of lighthouses, the romance of a building designed to throw light out across the ocean to keep ships safe and draw them home. But this one is creepy. It’s tall and white with big sections of flaked paint, and the windows are smashed. It doesn’t even work as a lighthouse. It’s just a big phallic eyesore.

  The cool salty air has taken the sting away from where her mum slapped her. She narrows her eyes and watches the bothy, wishing she could set it alight with her mind. What kind of mother hits their kid like that? And after dragging them all up here, too, to the arse-end of nowhere, right in the middle of Saffy’s exams. Saffy loves her school back in York. She loves her friends and her boyfriend, Jack, who she’s been seeing for six months.

  She hates her mum. She wishes she would just die and let Saffy be adopted by someone normal. Maybe her biological dad will come back and he’ll have a nice wife and some other kids and Saffy will have an actual normal life. Not one that involves living on boats and sometimes even in tents, and now a bothy on an island. A life with boundaries and bedtimes and clothes that don’t come from charity shops.

  Lately, she’s been thinking about her stepdad, Sean. How much she misses him. Things were normal when he was alive, and they were happy. Even her mum was different. She wasn’t as thin as she is now, but more importantly she was kind of calm. Now she has this weird, nervous energy. Skittish as a river bird. And dazed, as if she’s half asleep or permanently daydreaming. Sean was the one who made everything wonderful. He was like sunshine, bringing out the colors in everyone he met.

  When Liv had told her that Sean had been injured in a car accident, Saffy had asked, “Is he going to die?” because this was her worst fear. And when Liv said yes, it was likely that he would, Saffy had promised herself that she would be there when he did. It was what she’d held on to, the promise that she’d hold his hand, that the last thing he’d see was her there with him. She couldn’t change the fact that he wasn’t her real dad, but she could be there for him when he died.

  But Liv insisted that Saffy go home with her uncle Liam, and nothing Saffy said or did persuaded her otherwise. Saffy wailed and pleaded, but still Liam took her firmly by the hand and drove her home. Not even an hour had passed before the phone rang with the news that Sean had passed.

  If Sean had been her real dad, her mum would have let her stay. She’s sure of it. But because he wasn’t, she was told to leave, and therefore the precious chance to hold his hand as he slipped into the next world was ripped from her forever. He died without knowing how much she cared. She will never, ever forgive her mother for that.

  A sob forms in her throat as she stumbles on blindly toward the clutch of trees across the road, hugging the grimoire to her chest.

  II

  She slips inside the cool of the forest, noticing the mineral smell that has replaced the saltiness of the bay. Things grow in the forest, she thinks, but die on the beach. The forest floor feels soft underfoot, quilted by pine needles and leaf litter, the view above her a watercolor of greens and blues. Within a minute she’s feeling better, now that she’s hidden away from everyone.

  She weaves her way through the barcode of trunks, her anger lessening as she spies squirrels zipping into the branches. She finds a river, and beside it is an animal, crouched down. As though it’s waiting for something. The copper fur and long white tail tells her it’s a fox. She’s never seen a fox, not in real life. She approaches carefully, not wanting it to dart off. Only when she’s within touching distance does she realize that the fox is dead. Someone or something has cut it open.

  Creatures squirm inside it.

  She backs away, rubbing her hands on her jeans as though the very air around the dead animal might be infected. She turns in the opposite direction and finds an old wooden hut, hidden in a far corner of the wood. It’s like it’s been waiting for her. Inside it’s dry and small, maybe an old hut used by a forest ranger or something. There are cobwebs and dried leaves in corners, an old mug stain on a wooden bench. She sets the old grimoire down and arranges herself in a reading position, the small of her back pressed against the wall, knees to her chest.

  Outside, it begins to rain, a heavy shower that bends the branches on the tree closest to the hut. The rain drums against the roof and the ground outside crackles and hisses, but no water comes inside her hut. A feeling of panic arises—what if the door has jammed? What if she’s trapped? She gets up, checks that she can open the door. On finding that she can, she closes it with relief behind her.

  Then she returns to her book.

  The GRIMOIRE of Patrick Roberts

  I ought to start at the beginning, right at that first meeting.

  My father moved us all to the north when we were very young—I was just turned eleven, my brother was nine, and my mother was pregnant with our sister—and I remember how suspicious people were of us, as though our forlorn and scabby arrival into the town marked some kind of siege. It took a while for people to be friendly, but I remember one family, the Hyndmans, going out of their way to make us feel welcome and help us find our feet. They’d moved there the year before and conveyed how they’d experienced a similar reception. “They’re strange around here,” the wife said. Finwell, she was called, and the husband was called Hamish. Hamish and my father formed a strong bond, he helped my father find work, and when my mother gave birth to my sister—a stillborn—Finwell spent a lot of time at our house, bringing meals and consoling my mother, who was devastated. She named the little girl Elizabeth, after my grandmother. I remember holding her little hand. She was perfect, my mother kept saying. There was no visible reason at all why my sister should have died a day before she was due to be born, but of course such things happened and still happen. I don’t believe my mother was ever the same after that.

  Finwell’s daughters helped out, too. Jenny and Amy. Jenny was thirteen, a long dark plait like a muscle down her back, a face like stone, and a hard way about her. Amy was a few months older than me and preferred playing with me rather than helping her mother with preparing food and cleaning our house. She was a feral-looking child, like something raised by wolves—she was small and scrawny with a mane of crow-black hair that never seemed to be brushed and stuck out in all directions, usually snagged with berries and leaves as though she’d been dragged through a bush. She had piercing moss-green eyes that shone out of her face like a mystic. Her skin was pale as fresh milk and her front teeth had grown in at weird angles. She was usually laughing at something or other, baring all her angled teeth. When I think of her as a child, I see her mid-cackle, her head thrown all the way back, her two scrawny legs like twigs. Somehow she always had muddy knees—her mother made a point of complaining about it every time she set eyes on her—and her clothes were perpetually ripped and stained.

  We lived our lives by magic. I was prone to noseblee
ds, and my mother would often gather her friends to hold a ceremony to stop them. The stream where we gathered our water was a fairy stream, and if you drank it and told a lie, you risked your tongue swelling until it filled your mouth. A sheep’s skull smeared with blood and tar could show you the way to treasure if you threw it on the ground without fear of the demons that stood near, wanting to hide the treasure from your grasp. Few of us could do this—to not fear the beings that existed beyond the veil was difficult.

  Most of us used the methods of magic as tools, but some were gifted and used their gifts to help others. Amy’s mother was gifted. A midwife renowned for preventing death in childbirth, she also had a reputation for being able to transfer the pains of childbirth from the laboring woman to her spouse, if so desired. Although this was never proven, I was aware of her being paid more than any other midwife in the village for her services, with mothers not only surviving childbirth whilst in Finwell’s care, but in raptures about it.

  We lived in dangerous times. The events of North Berwick many years before were now legendary, the story of how hundreds of witches had raised a storm against King James VI while he and his wife sailed from Norway to Leith, known by all of us. It was witches we were threatened with as children by our parents if we didn’t go to bed. Witches would enchant us, boil our innards or shoot us with a fairy dart, and hand us over to the Devil.

  The punishments meted out to the witches of North Berwick were recounted from generation to generation. Agnes Sampson, an elderly woman and a healer from Haddington, was the ringleader. She’d been kept in a scold’s bridle, a fearful instrument wrought of iron that enclosed the head. Four sharp blades penetrated the mouth of the witch to keep her quiet, and doubtless to ruin her tongue for a long time thereafter. In Agnes’ case, the bridle was chained to the wall of her cell, and therefore Agnes was forced to endure countless days unable to speak, eat, or sleep, enduring the humiliation of opening her bowels or bladder without being able to attend to herself, and doubtless in a terrible amount of pain without a moment’s relief.

  After spending days thus, she confessed to raising the storm in partnership with the Devil, though I always thought that if I’d had to suffer days on end in a cell wearing such a monstrous instrument, I’d have confessed to being Satan himself. No mercy was bestowed for Agnes’ confession, however—she was swiftly garroted and burned at the stake.

  At first, the people were glad of King James VI and his mission to rid the world of witches. Thank God for his witch finders, to protect us all from such wickedness! They well knew the unseen world was all around them, hidden behind a veil but every bit as potent as the summer sun. They knew that magic came in two forms—the good kind, which was used by healers, and the wicked kind, which belonged to Satan.

  It turned out that Amy had inherited her mother’s gifts of healing, aided by stones with symbols on them that she said came from the distant north. I recognized the symbols. Finwell had put them all over their house—on door handles, whetstones, shoes, the bottoms of barrels. I’d asked Amy why anyone would go to the trouble of drawing on the bottom of a barrel. “How’s anyone supposed to see it?” I said. She gave me a withering look. “It is not for decoration, Patrick.” And that was all she said.

  The stones bore those same symbols, like constellations, arrows, and sometimes like pitchforks, carefully and impressively etched into them by hand. The stones were runes from Iceland, passed down by Amy’s great-great-grandmother. The pictures were magical staves, or symbols. They conveyed messages to some kind of spirit realm and, if used by the right person, had the power to make things happen, good and bad.

  I had not put much faith in them. Until I’d seen how they worked.

  Amy and I had gathered some fish to keep as pets. Amy had poured them into a bucket and named them.

  “They shall have babies,” she said.

  “And then we will sell them?” I said. She looked at me as though I’d gone mad. “No. Then I will name their babies. We’ll be the king and queen of the fish colony.”

  But the next morning all the fish were floating at the top of the bucket. Amy was really upset. She started slapping herself. I told her to stop.

  “They’re just fish, Amy,” I said. “We can fetch more.”

  “But I killed them,” she cried. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Later that day, she asked me to go to the woods with her. I watched as she hefted the bucket full of dead fish all the way into the forest, then lit a small fire in a clearing. She was agitated, her face still red and puffy from crying. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a large white stone with a red symbol on it. A rune.

  “This one is rebirth,” she said, and I looked over the series of crosses and arrows grooved in the stone. The stone was quartz, she said, and was as old as the earth.

  “What’s the red from?” I asked, pointing at the stave carved deep into the stone.

  “Birth blood,” she said, sniffing. “For hundreds of years, each woman in my family has given of her blood each time she’s birthed a child.”

  I wiped my hands on my shirt.

  Then she set the stone in the middle of the flames.

  She made me hold hands with her over the fire, and we had to sit awkwardly so we wouldn’t get burned. She closed her eyes and said some words in a language I didn’t recognize. I remember the wind picked up and I felt dizzy, but nothing happened. Except, of course, all the fish came alive.

  “Look! Look!” Amy shrieked, bouncing up and down and pointing at the bucket. “It worked!”

  I tell no lie—those fish had been floating before and now they were all swimming around. I made her pour one out into her palm to show me, and it flopped around, its tiny mouth gasping until she plopped it back in.

  I was stunned, but above all, I was happy for her.

  I wasn’t yet wise enough to be terrified.

  LUNA, 2021

  I

  Luna swims to the surface of sleep and lurches upright with a gasp.

  She had the dream again. The one about her mother killing her.

  This time her mother made her sit in the lantern room of the Longing, the sky outside dark and sequined with stars. On the ground, a silky plum-dark liquid swirled around her feet.

  “Hold still,” her mother said, and she squeezed her knees together as she had a hundred times before, when her mother braided her hair and ordered her to sit still. Only this time, her mother wasn’t braiding her hair. She was smashing Luna’s head with a hammer. The liquid on the ground was her blood.

  The tapping sound of the hammer continues, seeping into her conscious thoughts. She realizes she didn’t dream that part at all—it’s coming from the front door.

  She gets up awkwardly, cradling her stomach with a hand as she moves one leg at a time over the side of the bed, the roundness of it fitting neatly into her palm. Up until twenty weeks she’d had no bump at all, no proof of her cargo. She fretted about it, mostly because her pregnancy app depicted a cartoon of a woman with a neat round melon and all she’d developed was a kind of spare tire around her waistline that sagged over her jeans. Somewhere around week twenty-four her belly had seemed to erupt. Now she can’t go an hour without peeing and could eat beefsteak tomatoes until the cows come home. She eats them like apples, letting the sweet red juice run down the sides of her mouth, seeds corralling in her cleavage.

  The knocking continues. She pulls the door open to find Margaret standing there, their neighbor from the flat upstairs. Margaret’s in her seventies and generally aggrieved about something or other. Today is no exception.

  “I really do think I’m a very patient neighbor, but this really takes both the cake and the biscuit!”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Luna’s eyes fall on the object that Margaret is holding in front of her like evidence of some sort. It’s a limpet shell.

  “I have no objection to you running a b
usiness from home,” Margaret says, “and when Ethan said he wanted to clean his tools in the front garden, did I quibble? Not a word did you hear from me. But when you decide to fill your bin until it explodes all over the street, I really must speak out. I could have twisted my ankle!”

  “I don’t know what you’re . . .” Luna steps forward, following the sweep of Margaret’s hand to the wheelie bin left out on the curb. Someone has dumped another two bags of rubbish inside, leaving the lid flipped open. The top bag has ripped, revealing hundreds of shells that spew over the garden path: cockles, whelks, periwinkles, barnacles, and even what she used to call smacked lugs, the purple and black ear-shape of mussel shells. Someone’s shell collection, perhaps, or a homeschool project.

  Margaret follows her to the bin, where she stoops down, trying to pick up one of the burst bags to stuff it back into the bin.

  “I can’t for the life of me work out why you’d gather so many shells,” Margaret says, aggrieved. “Nor why you’d put them in the general waste.”

  “I didn’t.” Luna says it with a sigh. Her head throbs and it’s suddenly difficult to breathe.

  “Ethan must have done it,” Margaret decides, folding her arms.

  “Ethan’s not here.”

  “Not here? Well, where is he?”

  Luna turns and places her hands on the old woman’s shoulders. “I’ll clean it up,” she says with a forced smile.

  “But . . . but . . .”

  Before Margaret can think of another stream of questions Luna has headed back inside, locking the door behind her.

  II

  Light from the window washes the surfaces of Luna’s flat: a Pilates reformer, her sewing table, the life-sized orthopedic skeleton she bought Ethan as a gift when he started his physiology course, her handmade necklaces of leather and driftwood hanging from an ironing board. The plan was to sell the necklaces on Etsy and buy baby things with the extra cash, but the orders haven’t exactly been flooding in. Ethan has taken on extra Pilates classes to cover their rent, but he failed his last physiology exams. On the coffee table—an old milk crate they plucked out of a Dumpster—there’s a stack of textbooks borrowed from the library for Monday’s re-sit.